Sometimes in life you just have that moment where a thought hits you like a lightning bolt and it's power changes everything.
For years I had led that life, doing all the right things - education, career, marriage, children - but the end result was a fairly positive existence but one where you live paycheck to paycheck, indebted to "the man" for your ongoing employment.
At 43 I made a change. It was only a subtle one - starting a side hustle in a post-pandemic climate, but as it gathered momentum it had a major affect on my life.
Suddenly I was still working, but every week the additional money was coming in from doing very little, meaning I suddenly had new freedoms, new power, new life.
That probably sounds quite dramatic, but to a fast-becoming middle aged man it meant I could do things - buy that car, get that new wardrobe, invest in me. The family benefitted too, but what it really did was set me off on a new adventure.
For you to understand that I have to take you back to a pre-side hustle era when I stumbled across an innocent 19 year old virgin on an Internet site.
Initially the conversation was pretty standard. She was a hard-working black girl from a random state in America and I was a white guy in the UK who had hardly gone without. We were like chalk and cheese, or as Stevie Wonder may have sung, like ebony and ivory.
As we exchanged messages they became more explicit until we both admitted we had fantasised about each other. That kind of opened the floodgates of our curiosity towards each other.
Fast forward to more recent times and I'm now in a vast American airport on an apparent "business trip" yet this "business" isn't as corporate as all imagine.
