Magical mistakes

I'm reading the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries at the moment.

I have just got to the bit where the Pythons are filming the second series and they go off to Devon to film some scenes in and around Torquay.

Palin describes how, in May 1970, they check in to the Gleneagles Hotel just outside Torquay. While at first the hotel seems a bit more colourful and clean than others, it is the treatment given to their group by the proprietor, a Mr Sinclair, that appals them so much that they decide to leave the next day and move to a different hotel.

This is, of course, the incident that also prompted John Cleese the write Fawlty Towers and I expect that as soon as you read the words "Torquay" & "Hotel" in the same sentence, you were way ahead of me, so well known is the story.

What made me think however, reading that encounter from Michael Palin's perspective, is how fragile some of life's success can be? Who, for example, chose that hotel in first place and what if it had been full? What if they had decided to film in Norfolk not Devon? What if it had rained and they couldn't film? One of the finest (if not the finest) comedy series may never had been written.

All irrelevant in the end as they did go there etc but life throws opportunities at you all the time, the trick is, as John Cleese did, to see the chances that it gives you .