It’s my birthday today. I never look at a birthday as celebrating getting another year older but instead I celebrate the day I was born.

That way I don’t feel the reality that I’m actually getting older!

Birthdays always make me reflect on my life. I feel very lucky.

Lucky to have an amazing wife and family, a roof over my head and food in my belly.

My life’s been full of crossroads and as I look back my thoughts about them have changed.

Those things that I thought were fantastic opportunities that I’d missed out on, turned out to be blessings in disguise, guiding me towards where I am today, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be!

True friendship is important to me.

I have a small circle of good friends and I’m quite strict about who I let in my friends group.

Life is too short to have people who seek conflict, trouble and bring constant negativity.

I have surrounded myself with nice people so there’s never any problems.

If there ever is, then we are all there for each other and handle it amicably.

After all It’s nice to be nice!

Some friends I had twenty years ago don’t fit in to my life anymore and I don’t fit into theirs and that’s fine, we’ve all changed and have different lives now.

If we were the same people today as we were 20 years ago then, to my mind, we’ve wasted 20 years!

I hope I continue to grow as a better human being and I don’t think you can do that without having to leave some people behind, not out of any malice but we are all on different journeys and at different levels.

If we are meant to come into each others lives again then we will when the time is right.

It’s funny that as I work on ‘The Crooner’’, people I met some years ago in Las Vegas have now come back into my life.

We’ve all changed but we have that past connection and our friendships are reignited on this new level plane. Life’s like that!

So this birthday I’m very grateful for my best friend of all, my Val who is always by my side, my family and the close friends I have.

I’m grateful to those who have come into my life to teach me lessons.

We learn something from every individual we meet and I love how people ‘pop up’ to teach us things just when we need them, whether we realise it at the time or not.

I’m grateful for all I have and for having the opportunities to work for the things that I love.

So, I’m happy and content this birthday and grateful for far too many things to list but I will say I’m very grateful to you for reading my column each week.

Knowing that you’re here with me as you read this, helps to make my birthday complete. Thank you.

See you next week!

Check out more from Wayne on the website: www.allabouttrafford.co.uk.