If you can’t do something well, then just enjoy doing it badly

It was clear from his recent Telegraph obituary that Sir John Cotterell was an all-round good egg. Soldier, farmer, public servant, he listed “stuffing hanging baskets” among his hobbies in Who’s Who and played a leading role in the campaign to save the 13th century Mappa Mundi from being sold at auction.

But among all these achievements, it was a sentence towards the end of the obituary that caught my eye. He was, his obituarist wrote (with a dash of the sprightly malice that is the pinch of salt in the obituary pudding), “an unaccomplished point-topoint jockey in his youth”.

If we hadn’t already grasped that Sir John was a man of considerable moral and physical courage, this throwaway line confirmed it. The hazards of being an unaccomplished point-topoint jockey include death, life-changing injury, extensive bruising, abject humiliation and the ribald mockery of your loved ones.

You might think a lack of accomplishment was nothing to celebrate, but these days I find myself increasingly drawn to the pleasures of doing things not very well.

Perhaps this late-onset embrace of mediocrity is a reaction to the austere principles of my youth. By the age of 16, I had edited out of my life anything that I wasn’t quite good at: maths, science, any kind of sport – even playing a musical instrument, at which I was adequate, but not outstanding – were briskly rejected.

By the time the cull was complete, languages were the only remaining feature in my denuded intellectual landscape.

Luckily for me, language involves reading, and reading nurtures intellectual curiosity and at last I found my way back, by circuitous routes, to the subjects I had dismissed when I was younger. I was right when I told myself at 16 that I would never understand any mathematics more sophisticated than a quadratic equation, never master Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 31 and always think of string theory in terms of the stuff you tie up sweet peas with. But eventually it occurred to me that these worlds might not be lost forever.

If you harbour a tendency when young to believe that life is too short to do things badly, it comes as an amazing liberation to realise in middle age that on the contrary, imperfect understanding, amateurish performance (as long as you don’t inflict it on anyone but yourself), even mild physical hazard can be sources of wonder and delight.

The secret is not to mind looking silly – something it has taken me decades to learn. Still, better late than never. I don’t suppose I’ll ever eradicate my mental image of the Higgs boson as a little scuttling thing, a bit like a woodlouse, but I am delighted that there are people half my age clever and patient enough to explain it to me. Again. And again.

It is not just the intellectual life that can unexpectedly blossom in middle age. My own unaccomplished relationship with horses was recently transformed when my instructor, patiently observing my grim struggle with some elementary manoeuvre, mildly remarked, “It’s supposed to be a pleasure, you know.”

I had always thought that pleasure would come with expertise, but in that instant I realised that the expertise was beyond me, so I’d better learn to enjoy the equine equivalent of the nursery slopes.

Fail better: it’s not just better than nothing. It’s something.