Do we ever really change?

'That was then,' people say, 'but I'm different now, I've changed.'  But do we ever really change?
Our life continues , we get older, we meet different people, we do different jobs, or the same job for a long time, hopefully getting better at it. Many of us become parents, thereby taking on responsibilities for the lives of others. Mortgages, cars, in-laws - the outward signs of  having grown up.
Though we do undoubtedly take on these indicators of a life maturing, our basic character remains unchanged. Often this is most obvious in situations which are unfamiliar to us. For instance, on our own in a strange place, at a job interview, at a party where we know no one, the fear that you might have felt as a small child when you couldn't spot your parents for a short while, returns, and the distress you experience and the fear you feel is, more or less, the same.

So what about our personalities and our own specific characteristics? My eldest son used to play football on a Sunday morning for several years. In my son's team was a boy whose father I knew - we had been at primary school together. On the touch line, in some god forsaken place, on a freezing cold Sunday morning, with a mountain of work waiting for me at home, I saw, acted out in front of me the same madly competitive behaviour of my old school friend, who was now about forty, as I had seen over thirty years earlier at any sporting event or PE lesson in which he was involved.  

Roars came from him, sometimes of praise, but mainly of disapproval, along the lines of, 'E's nowt! He's a rate pansy. What have you let 'im get the better of you for, you dickhead?' These comments directed to his own son.  There were more similar statements, some directed at the referee, a hapless bloke who had come out to referee the match for the princely sum of five pounds. The referee is a sitting duck for the wrath of parents who imagine their children being scouted by Manchester United and a place in the champions League. My 'friend' was right there, in the very thick of it.

Infuriated by one incident when his son didn't get the benefit of the doubt in a tackle, a free kick being awarded to the opposition, I thought my ersatz classmate might have a heart attack, right there on the pitch on which he was remonstrating. Mouth wide open and yelling, face bright red, arms wheeling round, he reminded me of the day his relay team came second at sports day, aged eleven. One child in his team had fallen down, and had slowed them down. The child bravely carried on, but was not fast enough.With knees ripped to shreds,tears pouring down his face, my classmate shouted his head of at him until a teacher puled him away. That day at the football match, it felt as if that relay race, three decades ago, could have been yesterday and the intervening thirty years were as a blink of an eye.

This is, of course, only one instance, but it seems to me that our basic character is formed at an early age, whether that is through nature or nurture, remains a mystery.  Once formed, it stays with us; maybe hidden at times, but it's there and it will emerge.