QUOTE : <b>68. Cheerfulness In Adversity<br /><br />The Royal Marine Commandos, with whom I worked a lot in my military days, have the phrase ‘Cheerfulness in Adversity’ as one of their founding principles - and it is a great one to live by.<br /><br />It is easy to be cheerful when everything is going like a song, but the real time to be cheerful is when everything is going dead wrong!</b><br /><br />I remember in the North African desert once, when we were training with the French Foreign Legionnaires, that we had a particularly unpleasant night. The corporals took shifts to ensure that we were woken up every 15 minutes until down. <br /><br />They would burst in and throw our kit all around and out of the windows, turn the beds upside down, empty the lockers into the desert sand, only to do it all over again as soon as we had tidied up. It was a real ball-breaker of a night.<br /><br />But I will never forget one of the recruits, Bobby. At 4:30 a.m., during our darkest, most exhausting hour, when the corporals were in full swing and we had been up all night in the face of this mindless, sleep-defying beasting, Bobby looked at us, smiled and said: ‘Breakfast is comin’!’<br /><br />There was something about the way he said it, with a wry grin as he set about retrieving his pile of kit from the rafters of the barrack block, that lifted all our spirits like nothing you could imagine.<br /><br />From then on, whenever something has got really tough, I say to myself: ‘Don’t worry- breakfast is comin’!’ And it always makes me smile.<br /><br />You see, Bobby knew that when it gets hard we all have two responses to choose from: to moan, or to put our heads down, smile and get on with it.