Cathy has breakfast TV on while we get ready, so I only hear it in passing.

The other morning I heard a young woman with a shaved head, she’d been given a diagnosis of terminal cancer.

The interviewer asked her what she was going to do with the time she had left.

She said her love was photography, so she wanted to do as much of that as possible.

The interviewer wanted a more exciting answer, so he asked about her bucket list.

She got really excited, she said she wanted to learn to take photographs professionally, she wanted to learn how to use computers in her photography, her real dream was to go on a film-shoot and learn about lenses, and lighting, and editing.

As she spoke, she was so full of life and enthusiasm, and you just hoped she got a chance to do some of that.

Then I thought, hang on, she’s just described my life, her bucket list is what I do.

She dreams of doing the things I’ve been doing for a job.

Having ideas, photographing or filming them, trying different designs, different edits, different film-techniques, different music, different voices.

And yet I hear people who do the same job as me complain about it as if it was a hardship, as if their work intrudes on their life.

They can’t wait to leave work at 6 o’clock every night, they complain if they have to work weekends, complain they’re not paid enough, grumble as if they’re slaves on a galley.

What they constantly moan about is what that girl dreams about.

I noticed the different attitude to work because I was trained in New York.

In New York, work is treated much more like sport, it’s hard and tough and you want to win, you get bruised, but you get bruised in sport.

That’s the American attitude to work, it’s tough, but it’s sport.

The English attitude to work is more like prison, you’re locked up for 8 hours a day sacrificing your freedom, the only motivation is money and it’s never enough for the hours they steal from you.  Which is why we are so miserable about having to work.

My wife is Singapore-Chinese, and her attitude to work is that it’s freedom, it’s opportunity, she loves it.

She’s an art director, and would much rather be doing that than watching TV, or shopping, or wasting time (as she sees it).

A few years back we were in Mumbai where they have the biggest slum in the world, an entire square mile, I wanted to visit it to see what I could learn.

So we got a retired university professor to show us around.

People were crammed together in Dickensian living conditions everywhere, they were working, doing laundry, recycling tin-cans, recycling rubber tyres.

Everyone was packed together and everyone was working, but they were also smiling, some were smiling at us.

That was a strange thing to me, I asked the professor why they didn’t feel belligerent towards us because they lived in slums while we didn’t.

She said we were looking at it wrongly, these people had no knowledge of (or interest in) our world.

These people had all come from out in the country where everyone was starving, no food, no water, no electricity, no sanitation, no proper shelter.

By moving to Mumbai they had all those things, and the (to us) little they earned even allowed them to send some money or food or clothing back to their relatives.

We saw it as slums, they saw it as opportunity. That’s why they were smiling.

And, just like the young woman’s bucket list, I saw that the facts don’t change, all that changes is the perspective we see them from.

Nothing is fixed, everything is relative

Years back, I saw some graffiti on a wall in Camden Town that stayed with me.

OUR DREAMS ARE YOUR NIGHTMARES.