..but I’ve certainly found a few ways around the knee-jerk good-lucking that used to be my automatic statement. In the last few weeks quite a few of my friends have had doctor appointments, job interviews and the like and it’s been relatively easy each time to tailor a phrase to the occasion. “Have a great interview”, “Hope it goes well at the doctor” and so on – maybe not fantastically empowering, but certainly more so than implying that our lives are down to the buffers (which I originally wrote as “buggers”) of fate and chance.