What was your favourite toy when you were young? Mine was a bucket of bricks. Those plastic bricks with the bumps on the top that let you click them together and build whatever your imagination let you. I used to have one great box of these bricks and used to build everything from houses to spaceships, from robots to car parks for my toy cars, and every day would be an opportunity to break down yesterday's creation and start a new one all over.



As I grew older, I used to be given box sets of bricks that were designed for a specific purpose. The picture on the front, and the instructions, showed you how to use all the special bricks included to create a single structure. I used to build it once, and then throw all the bricks into the bucket and use them within other projects. I remember my parents up in arms at the very idea that this special, and very expensive, box set should be hurled in with the ordinary bricks. But to me as a child, they were all just bricks, and the real fun wasn't in following instructions, it was in creating my own, imagining an idea and forging it into reality through patience, trial and error, and several collapsed attempts due to bad planning or weak foundations.

I think in life we're all a bit like that. Very few of us like the idea of being given a box set for life, complete with an instruction manual and a finished product picture. We're all given a bucket of bricks to start with, and we collect more as we go along, but really, it's up to each of us to work out what we're going to build. We're all just making it up as we go along really.

And we all learn the lessons too - that if you don't plan well, then things rarely turn out how you imagined they would - sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it doesn't work out. We all find out that having a good solid structure in place, whether that's our family, our friends or simply our beliefs, everything else seems to hold together that little bit better, and lasts that bit longer.

It's also easy to forget that we can take those bricks apart at any time, and start again. Sometimes we all find that we have to do that. Sometimes life forces the bricks apart, and structure we took for granted begin collapsing. But it's at those times we need to remind ourselves that we still have all our bricks - that's our blessing. We're all builders at heart.

Some of us learn the best lesson of all - that sharing our buckets means building bigger, stronger and more durable structures that we can be proud of.

And one day, all our bricks will be taken apart and return to the big bucket of life. They're funny things, those bricks. So simple, and yet, so educational. Instructions not included.