Lessons from a friend with a tragic flaw

Character is destiny, according to Heraclitus, and that becomes increasingly clear as you get older and chart the ups and downs of your friends.

Take the fate of one of my oldest acquaintances, who I’ll call ‘Philip’. Up until his mid-forties, Philip had a pretty spectacular career as a journalist and broadcaster. He won awards, and was invited to speak at international conferences. His personal life was equally successful. He married a beautiful, intelligent woman and had two lovely children.

But Philip has a tragic flaw: he’s hopeless with money. In all the time I’ve known him, I don’t think he’s ever paid a tax bill on time. He’s VAT-registered, and has been for 15 years, but when I asked him how he paid his quarterly VAT bills he gave me a puzzled look and admitted he didn’t know what I was talking about. That could be because whenever he receives a letter from HMRC he shoves it in a drawer where it sits alongside hundreds of others, all of them unopened.