Some events tear your life apart. Others you choose. And then there are the ones that slip quietly into your life without any dramatic entrance, rearranging things when you’re not looking.
I spent last weekend with some old friends: housemates and fellow students from the 1970s, a couple of whom I hadn’t seen since that time. A half-century is a long stretch, but perhaps just the distance you need before you can make sense of how people shape your life.
I’ve come to think that life-changing events take three forms.
The first are the ones you have no control over: war, disease, accidents, bereavement, near-death experiences. They are traumatic; they shake us violently. Yet even there, in time, new beginnings can take root, though they’re impossible to imagine when you’re in the wreckage.
The second kind are born of decision: quitting a job, giving up drinking, moving to a new city. We step into these choices with a sense of agency and hope.
And then there are the life-changing events of the third kind.
They insinuate their way silently into the everyday: a brief encounter, a single remark, a passing moment. They rarely feel important at the time, but years later you realise that was a hinge my life swung on.
This is the story of two such moments.
I hadn’t seen Pete since 1976, but I recognised him immediately as he walked down the road towards us: long hair now white instead of black, but unmistakably Pete. He took a little longer to place me. His first words were: “What the fuck happened to your hair?” It was a fair question.
Pete was a few years older than me and on a different course at Middlesex Poly, but we lived in the same North London squat. There were six of us and we took turns to cook, except I had never cooked before. Pete was reassuring and got me to help him make a veggie curry. When it was my turn, he guided me through it: “chop an onion… no, not like that, like this”. He ended up as the head cook on a ship; in a kitchen he knew his stuff.
Thanks to him, I gradually gained the confidence and skill to cook for others. That first autumn away from home I made some not bad meals, and a few truly bad ones. There was the stir-fried frozen Chinese rabbit, which might have been edible had the packet explained that you needed to thaw it first. Then there was the roast chicken. In those days chickens came with a plastic bag of giblets shoved inside. I learned this only when the kitchen started smelling of burning plastic.
I now cook almost every day. It’s something I enjoy; it relaxes me. But the real gift Pete gave me wasn’t just practical skills. It was a way of thinking: it was the why of cooking. He told me how satisfying it felt to cook for people, to see them enjoy something you’d made. The why was about giving people something. That idea stayed with me. Yes, it changed my life. And seeing Pete again, nearly fifty years on, finally gave me the chance to thank him.
Pete taught me that small acts can open lifelong passions. But sometimes it isn’t even an act, just an overheard sentence.
It’s 1977, and I’m living in a shared house in Crouch End with Dave, Jackie and a few others. Same system as before: we take turns cooking and washing up. One evening Jackie was on washing-up duty. Dave had cooked - always a messy affair - and Jackie muttered about how much she hated the task.
In the middle of the chatter, I overheard Dave tell her that if she focused on the washing up, became one with it, she could turn it into a sort of meditation. He was making the case that living in the moment could make washing dishes calming, even virtuous.
It was very clear that Jackie was far less interested in living in the moment and more interested in living in a house with a dishwasher. (Dishwasher! We didn’t even have a fridge.) And yet… something in his words struck a chord with me.
I wash up every morning now. It’s a habit that has become a ritual: quiet, grounding, a good way to start the day. A tiny practice of attention. What began as a throwaway comment in a student kitchen became an anchor.
Was that a life-changing event? Yes, in the sense that it changed the texture of my days, and maybe even the shape of my inner life just a little.
These two moments—one simple act of patience, one overheard remark—taught me something I’ve never forgotten: stay open. Stay attentive. Not just to the big things, but to the fleeting ones. Because you never know when a moment will change, if not the course of your life, then the practices and everyday textures that make it a joy to live.
I looked around at my friends towards the end of the day, and realised that with each of them I could remember a similar story that nudged me in a new direction, that made me think differently, that gave me some kind of personal insight.
Meeting these friends again, sharing old stories with them, reminded me that it isn’t just the moments that shape us, but the people who carry us through them. These quiet hinges of life often arrive in the hands of others, through their words and their friendship.
We spend so much of life waiting for the grand turning point, the big decision, the dramatic change. But the real pivots often happen in the small talk, in shared kitchens, in the everyday, in friendship. Only later do we trace the pattern and see the point of change.
I seldom write memoir—there are others on Substack who do it far better, writers like Margaret Bennett and Paul Besley. But this weekend reminded me of one of the rewards of reflection: not nostalgia, but illumination. Reunions and reflections matter because they remind us of the people who influenced us quietly, in ways we only understand years later. Looking back is not about lingering in the past, but about recognising how the everyday, and the friendships that sustained it, made us who we are.
Normal service will be resumed shortly when I return to writing about the history of music in Soho. In the meantime thanks to those who made the weekend such a wonderful experience.
Loved reading that piece Mike. Still hate washing up!
Wonderful words, Mike. Thank you for the nod.