Christmas 1996. The night is freezing outside the window. Everyone is asleep. I unwrapped a shiny CDROM and loaded it up on the tray of my PC. I patiently went through the installation instructions and was ready to go. The Game screen comes up on the monitor and a strangely haunting theme tune emerges. For someone fed up with a diet of fighting/ strategy and sport games there is a slight flicker of hope. The blurb talks about a globe trotting adventurer very much in the spirit of Indiana Jones.

In our journey to find stories associated with words, dear reader, we come to the 7th letter of the alphabet, G.

The letter has many sounds in different languages. There is the ‘soft’ g of gypsy and giant to the hard ‘g’ of game, gamut and gargoyle in English. In French it takes an even softer sound as in rouge and beige. In some Spanish dialects it takes on the ‘h’ as in Cartagena.

There has been only one pursuit in my life that keeps me excited, energised and enthused. It is to be excellent.

Long before I contemplated the meaning of the word excellent, I just wanted to be.

At what? People ask me. I find this question perplexing. As if we should restrict our aspirations of being excellent to a single thing, to a solitary pursuit. This feels too limiting. To be excellent is a vocation, a lifestyle. It is what makes me happy.