Today would have been my dad’s 89th birthday. Like most people on such occasions it often leads to a number of reflections on times past. He died nearly twenty years ago now and as I settle into retirement and my own children graduate and start their own careers it got my thinking just how much of life is governed by the randomness of when you were born. On reflection there is no doubt I have been incredibly fortunate.

To start with the obvious to be born in and around the the start of the last century (my grandparents) would often be a stroke of very bad fortune. For example, possibly leading to being on the front line during the First World War or being heavily involved in some capacity in the Second World War.

Even for those not directly called into combat back then it must have been incredibly hard. My paternal grandfather for example was a coal miner during the period of the Second World War who the country relied on just to keep the lights on.

By the middle of the last century the immediate threat of war had at least been removed but the breadth of opportunities that eventually came to my generation simply weren’t available to my fathers. Certainly not to people from traditional working class Midlands towns anyway. During a recent clear out I found my dad’s school report from 1950.

Now days a form position of fourth out of thirty nine would mark a young person down as almost certainly attending university. Back then only about four per cent of eighteen year olds did go on to university though. This resulted in my dad going to work in a car factory to help with costs in the family home before eventually being caught up in the savage deindustrialisation and mass unemployment that ravaged the country in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Time marches on of course. BBC News recently published an article entitled entitled ‘Am I Part Of The Luckiest Generation In History?’ written by Evan Davies who, like myself, was born in the 1960s. The three key points being that we had access to not only free university education and the opportunity to join company enhanced final salary pension schemes but have also benefited from an ever more buoyant property market over the years.

Whether you agreed with the article or not the simple randomness of being born in 1960 rather than 1900 is the difference between potentially being exposed to a brutal war or almost a life of luxury in comparison. While also giving you access to an array of opportunities that didn’t exist for those who made an appearance in the 1930s. Certainly something to ponder when run of the mill annoyances cause a blight on your day.