My Hero by Foo Fighters

It's a widely accepted rule of friendship - by which I mean real friendship, the through-thick-and-thin kind - that the two friends have to respect each other. The person I respect more than any other, and look up to as an example of a life well lived, is my best friend Caroline, and this song always makes me think of her.

There goes my hero

He’s ordinary

Of course, when you're a kid, you think a hero is someone with quasi-mystical powers, someone who saves the damsel in distress and remains calmly composed and unemotional when the grateful citizens thank him.

Don’t the best of them bleed it out

While the rest of them peter out

But as you grow up, you realise that the people who are most deserving of your admiration are just as human and flawed as you are. The praise they so richly deserve is not because of their extraordinary abilities or attributes, but because, with the same resources as you and I, they overcome adversity and manage to keep their dignity intact. This world can be a horrible place, and for my friend Caroline, that certainly seemed to be true for a very long time. No-one had any faith that she would succeed, everyone had written her off. It's not just a matter of "if they could see her now"; the thing that impresses and inspires me most about her is not the successes, it's the success story, and all the struggle therein.