Nudging Fate In The Right Direction

Roy Carter
4 min readJun 24, 2023

(My dream came true…then ended in the same day!)

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When I was young I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do when I left school.

I only knew that I’d love to be a professional football (soccer) player.

I played for the school team and was selected to play for Plymouth schoolboys, where people had progressed from there to go on to play for major league teams and even to represent their country playing for England.

I remember receiving the letter telling me I’d been selected and I was just fizzing with joy and excitement. I could see my whole future panned out in front of me. Fame, fortune, doing something I loved. The whole shebang.

Then, that very same day, my Dad came home from work (he was in the army) and told us he was being posted to Catterick in North Yorkshire and that we’d all be moving there in just a few weeks.

What! That was the other end of the country!

And just like that, the same day my dream came true it was taken away from me in an instant.

To say I was totally gutted would have been the understatement of the century.

So we moved up to Yorkshire, where I was again picked to play for the school team. However, then one day fate again took a hand.

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Roy Carter

Founder of www.LettersFromASmallisland.com monthly newsletter sent from my home on Magnetic Island — ‘A Quaint Little Drinking Island With A Fishing Problem! ‘