He was (is) a lovely man. I had to lean in to hear what he was saying. So I did. Our conversation continued and he apologized for his speech. No apology necessary, but he had identified that it was hard for me to hear (loud place aside), he was also a little ‘croakey’. He explained that he had had cancer. Cancer of the throat. Three times. He was diagnosed in 2017.

I spotted this car parked near a Farmers Market - I walked on, wondering about the owner and what their story was. Returning a few hours later, I saw a couple of cars stopped at a junction. They weren’t moving and as I got closer saw an elderly man using his feet to propel him and his wheelchair backwards across this small, pot hole riven junction … up a small incline.

I got my skills very early in life and never looked back. A lot of people in my line of work are ex-military, but I was trained and worked as a civilian all of my life. It's funny when I was at school all the advice I got was about getting a ‘good’ job with a ‘reputable company’. What they meant was ‘large’.

“They come for three months - they stay for four years - and I welcome that. That’s how we learn. They see us up close and personal and we see them. A lot of countries that they come from have very different governments, with different rules. We get to learn about each without the filter of what they are told. I wouldn’t say that when they leave we fully understand each other’s cultures, but we are surely better off than we would have been if we hadn't.

In a recent newsletter, I referenced a book; Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead which unbeknownst to me was written by a friend of a friend. Turns out the two friends used to swap Grateful Dead stories and on reading my post this story came to mind. When I read the story, it seemed a perfect addition to my Travels Without Charley series - so please read on and enjoy the first 'guest post' in the series.

One favourite was about a concerned father and his 16 year old son.

"Me? I'm from England ... you’ve heard of the 'Garden of England'?“

“I have - Kent right?”

“That’s the one - and every garden needs a compost heap - that’s the town I'm from, so my girlfriend and I sold everything we had, bought a couple of tickets and here we are.”

'Real Stories | Real People' is a new occasional series that will start to appear on this blog in the not too distant future. But that's not the point of the newsletter. The point was first to share the story of Richard Montañez. The second was to ask you to think about success. What is it. And more importantly - is it uner your control. It isn't as clear cut as you might think.

"In Italy I was a photographer. In Rome." “A pretty place to photograph.” "Well, not so much, my job was a police photographer. When someone died, I took the photographs. I was very busy. Ten years .. every day … click click click … more death. Depressing. Soul ‘killing’’. I couldn’t make a life out of death." So different city, different country, different job? "Yes. But same girl!" "She said to me one day that she is coming here.