Nigel Holland - The 50 List – A Father’s Heartfelt Message to his Daughter - Anything Is Possible

She knows she’s being teased and pulls her ‘Dad, I’m being teased’ face. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘you started it. What do you expect? But I can sort of fly,’ I say, pointing to another item I’ve already added. ‘Indoor skydiving. That’s pretty much like flying.’

‘What, you can fly?’ She looks impressed now. ‘What, with no strings or anything?’

‘With no strings or anything. The air holds you up.’ I try to explain how it works, but I’m not sure she quite gets it. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘What else? Think – what would you like to do, if you could do a challenge yourself?’

‘Fly a kite,’ she says, decisively. ‘I’d like to fly a kite – a big pink one. Hey, but Dad?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got a brilliant one for you. Dye your hair pink!’

She is bright eyed with excitement at this unexpected brainwave. Perhaps a little too bright eyed for my liking.

‘Okaaayyy,’ I say slowly. ‘That can go under “maybe”.’

Ellie shakes her head. ‘You can’t do maybes. You have to definitely promise.’

I try to regroup. How on earth am I going to get out of this one? The plan is to do all this stuff to inspire others, her included; not to look like a complete idiot, for a bet.

‘I can’t promise definitely,’ I say. ‘I might not have time to fit them all in, might I?’

‘But if you do …’

‘Then how about I put it on my “reserve list”?’ I suggest. I have my clients to think about, after all. I write ‘reserve list’ on the bottom, followed by ‘Dye hair pink’. Which her expression seems to suggest might have mollified her. ‘Anything else?’ I ask, trying to redirect her thoughts a bit. Which is probably tempting fate, but never mind.

‘What about a puzzle?’ she suggests.

‘A jigsaw puzzle?’

‘Yes. A jigsaw puzzle.’

‘You know what, Ellie?’ I say, already picking up my pencil. ‘That is an excellent idea. Assuming you’ll help me, of course.’ I wiggle my fingers, which are probably cursing me already for the torture I am about to inflict on them.

‘Course I’ll help you,’ she says. ‘I’m brilliant at puzzles.’

‘OK,’ I say, adding it. ‘How many pieces should we go for?’

‘Five thousand,’ she says, without a flicker of hesitation. ‘That won’t be too hard for your fingers, will it, Dad?’

‘Piece of cake,’ I tell my daughter. And at that point I believe it.

Mad. Just as Ellie has already said.

Number of challenges still to be completed: 50.

Number of times I have wondered what I’ve let myself in for: Already too numerous to count.

Now I’m up and running with this thing, there’s no backing out. No, I know I’m not exactly running yet – my plan is so far little more than a sketched-out idea – but having come up with it, I realize that committing to all these challenges is beginning to feel more and more like a challenge in itself. It’s one thing telling yourself you’re going to be able to achieve all of them, but quite another when you tell everyone else you are as well. Another still when the person you most want to do it for is one of the people dearest to you in the world.

As it turns out, I have been somewhat beaten off the blocks anyway, in terms of challenges, because only two weeks after formulating the plan, and my subsequent optimistic conversation with Ellie, I had another one lobbed into my lap. And it was a big one. A particularly big one for a man of my age. After 13 happy years working as a web developer, I was made redundant from my job.

Sitting in the room that was once my study but has now been re-christened my ‘office’, in recognition of this new and exciting life stage, I think of Tommy Cooper and I smile. ‘Just like that’ – wasn’t that his tag line? I was made redundant, just like that. At least that’s the way it feels to me, though perhaps I should have seen it coming. Yet at the same time, I can’t stop thinking about the timing of everything. Perhaps fate’s played a part in all this happening when it has, because now nothing stands in the way of my doing what I’ve set out to do. I am all out of excuses. I have time on my hands. I also have a new item to add to my list of challenges: ‘Make my business work.’ Which is handy, because the zero gravity flight that it has now taken the place of was way too expensive to even begin to contemplate, and even more so for a guy with a family and a mortgage, but – crucially, and suddenly – without a job.

But it was definitely a job I’m going to miss. Though in recent years, after my firm was taken over by an American company, morale was low, stress was high and business was a bit shaky, the timing of the redundancy, in one sense, couldn’t have been worse. During the last few months I was working for a really great manager, and though mostly from home – which was isolating, as I felt cut off from the office gossip – I felt energized about work in a way I hadn’t in a long time, and I’m sad that it’s all come to an end.

There was also the big question to face: how on earth would I pay the mortgage? But, though the simple option would be to take my skills and go and find another job with them, I had, and still have, a nagging sense that I should be taking the plunge and going it alone. Now or never. And I’m definitely less keen on never.

Which leaves me with now – do or die. Which is exciting yet scary.

So sending off my entry form for the Silverstone half marathon seems a little less daunting as a consequence. Though on the one hand it feels like one of the most difficult of all the challenges – 13 miles, and in a wheelchair: I am going to need to train and then some – when I compare it to the career cliff face I’ve just been forced to jump from (hoping to fly, obviously, rather than fall flat on my face) it feels suddenly more in the realms of the ‘actually achievable’: a solid thing, something I have control over.

As I sit at my desk filling in the online application form, I get a picture in my head of my beloved parents. Sadly, I don’t have many pictures of them together. I have old, individual ones, taken with primitive cameras, black, white and sepia, and fluffy-edged with age. But nothing recent. Not many that show how much they loved one another. If I could change one thing in my life it would be that they could be here to see me do this. You never lose that feeling, I think, whatever your age.

* * *

According to family folklore, which is generally the most dubious kind, I always liked making an entrance. There must be some truth in it, though, because the story goes that when I first looked like arriving, on 8 December 1962, my mother was busy serving dinner to no fewer than 12 guests.

To my perhaps unimaginative male eye, this seems quite a daring thing to be doing at any time, but particularly when you are 40 weeks pregnant. What became of the dinner guests and their dinners I don’t know. All I do know is that I appeared several hours later, making landfall at Shrub Hill Hospital in Worcester, which was where my father had hastily relocated us. It’s also said – more family folklore, this time probably 100 per cent reliable – that I was encouraged on my way by the irresistible smell of roast beef.

I was the third of three boys (which perhaps explains my mother’s cool head in the face of a dozen hungry dinner guests), my brothers Mark and Gary then being six and four respectively. But I didn’t keep my privileged position for very long. No sooner had I turned two than my world was disrupted – by the arrival of my baby sister, Nicola.