Within a few years of graduation my life ahead looked fairly settled. I was in relatively secure, full-time employment with promotion prospects, I’d bought a house, had learned to drive – a necessity when I met a girl from Lancashire -  so I was fully occupied with the business of getting on with life. I only took the trouble to pursue professional qualification when my line manager suggested it, my life was quite comfortably settled so I hadn’t seen the need to pursue it. But the lure of greater things beckoned and I returned to the commercial world as a fully qualified chartered surveyor after ten years in the relatively sheltered environment of local authority. Despite the unsettling experience of a first move that lasted only four days, I soon settled in at another practice in the building boom at the tail end of the 1980’s and set about making my mark on the industry, in an environment that was far more volatile than I was accustomed to. Fortunately I’d had time to establish myself in the new business before the construction industry crash in the early 1990’s and I escaped the round of redundancies amidst the severe recession that followed. Fortunate for me, as I’d recently married and was now the father of an infant girl, but it was feeling like a pretty rocky path