LIFE IS STRANGE: After my tale last week of a poor emaciated cat that had visited my garden recently, on a grander scale, I realise that there are much worse things going on in the world to people. This was brought home to me by an incident at the train station the same day Scruffy the cat died.

A 25-year-old woman, very drunk and swigging from a large bottle of brandy she was soon to tell me she had stolen, was waiting on the platform at the same train station as me.

I was waiting to come home, the young lady, however, was waiting for the train to pull in, so she could ask disembarking passengers to give her cigarettes.

She was unlucky, so offered to sell me a bottle of whisky she had in her backpack, reassuring me it had never been opened.

She told me she had just come out of prison and her five-year-old child was in care. She had resigned herself to sleeping rough because there is nowhere she wanted to go.

She then became angry at me, and asked me what I knew about life anyway! "Bet you never had a child out of wedlock? You and your perfect life. You and your perfect jacket."

When I got up to get my train, she shook my hand and wished me well.

I guess we all have to make choices in life. Decisions we make can be right or wrong and it's sometimes pure luck if we choose the right path. But some of us are just good at making the best job of whatever cards we have been dealt.

My son, who never met his father emigrates to New Zealand in September, and my perfect jacket is from a secondhand shop.