be brave...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been called cynical. Cynical, negative and pessimistic. For a time, I was called it so often that I almost believed it myself and began to build my sense of self around it. 

The cynic. 

To be honest, I’m not sure that this has ever really been the case. It certainly is true that, as a younger man, I would throw stones and would criticise without feeling the need to offer up anything constructive. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in going through that phase. It’s also true that, when feeling frustrated or powerless at work (annoyingly often), I would sometimes deliberately seek to tear people down in a way that was ultimately self-destructive…. But I was young and stupid and I don’t work there anymore (which is probably just as well: some people choose never to forget the person you were fifteen years ago, even if you’ve long since changed). 

I think it probably boils down to this: I like to ask questions. These days, it’s usually to genuinely try to understand something because I’m curious. The problem is that lots of people don’t like to be asked questions; they don’t like to be challenged by someone because, if you don’t know the answers or you aren’t very secure in your opinion, it can feel as though you’re being criticised. No one likes to be criticised, right? I try not to be threatening about it, but nobody’s perfect and I’m probably not the finished article even now. 

I think my MS has changed me, actually. Or maybe it’s just revealed another side to my personality. Nobody knows what causes MS, nobody knows if it will progress for me or what my outcome will be. There’s very little that I can do to change any of these things. I’m not really one for serenity prayers, but I do think that this has taught me acceptance. To paraphrase Kipling, to meet with Triumph and Disaster and to treat those two imposters just the same. I’m calmer, more relaxed and better able to approach life on an even-keel (whilst also remaining perfectly capable of frothing in indignation watching the news. Nobody is perfect. My wife is doubtless scoffing as she reads this). 

What’s the point in being pessimistic? I’m well aware what MS might do to me and I know all too well what it’s already done. I simply don’t see how dwelling on either of those things does me any good at all. MS pages on Facebook seem full of people wrapped up in their own invisible pain and suffering. I don’t doubt that they suffer, but I simply don’t understand the attitude because I try never to allow myself to think like that. Perhaps that’s easy for me to say, but I hope it’s a philosophy that will stay with me, whatever happens. “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of my favourite poems; my interpretation of it is that you should never waste time regretting the path you didn’t take. 

They say that a pessimist is never disappointed. I think they’re always disappointed. Besides, I’m a runner, and as Kipling also said:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, 
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, 
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! 

Well, I can definitely do that. Maybe not as fast as I use to be able to do it… but I can still do it.

it's the only thing that there's just too little of...

I've been thinking a lot about anger this week.

Well, to be honest, I've been angry quite a lot this week.  I was angry as a teenager, but I think I've actually grown up to be quite even-tempered.  It might sometimes appear to be otherwise, but I loathe conflict and will go well out of my way to avoid it.

But this week has nearly broken me.  I'm angry and ashamed at the state of my own country.  It's bad enough that a majority of people voted in the referendum to leave the EU, but what's happened since then has been just awful. Most depressing has been the rise of racism and the plummeting descent of national debate into the gutter.  This hasn't come completely out of the blue, and we had a taste of this in the last General Election, but watching people hurling abuse and hatred and suspicion at refugees and also at the people who dare to show them an ounce of compassion has been depressing in the extreme.  52% of voters in the referendum voted to leave the EU, but that doesn't make the other 48% traitors or remove their right to speak up.

Ugh. I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it.

But, you know what?  This is no good.

John Lydon famously said that "Anger is an energy", and maybe it is, but it's not a positive energy.  One of the best pieces of advice I've ever received is to try to worry about the things that you can control.  I find this incredibly helpful when thinking about my health in particular, but maybe that's something I might be wise to try and apply here too.  I can't change the result of the referendum.  I tried debating with people who were thinking of voting leave, and essentially nothing that I said was ever going to change their minds.  I was wasting my time. I'm not sure that anything I say now is likely to change anything either.  It might upset and annoy me that people feel this way, and I find it very hard to understand, but getting angry about it doesn't help anyone... and it definitely doesn't help me, because it just makes me feel impotent.

Buddha apparently said "holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die".

I think maybe he's right.

Why don't we try just being kind to people? I'm not asking you to be reasonable in the face of someone idiot racist calling you a traitorous bremoaner, but you can just be a little nicer to the people around you... whether that be at home, at work, on the bus or wherever.  I'm going to give it a try.  It can't hurt, can it?  I want to try and do something positive, because I'm sick and tired of all the anger and all the negativity. I can be in control of that.

...although, it's so hard because they are *such* arseholes.

belligerent ghouls...

As I was clearing up some paperwork in the kitchen last night, I stumbled across an issue of the glossy magazine my old school occasionally sends out to its former pupils. In spite of myself, I can’t help but have a quick flick through, even though I know that it’s only going to annoy me.

I am, you understand, a product of that hoary old British tradition: the public school. Even though I left the place some twenty-three years ago – more than half my lifetime - it apparently still has the power to make me feel nervous and uncomfortable. I look at those pictures of happy, privileged children and I feel a surge of self-loathing and resentment.  I realise this says more about me than about my alma mater.

I don’t come from a particularly wealthy background: my dad was a doctor working for the NHS in General Practice and my mother was a nurse who had become the full-time mother to three boys. Clearly, we were better off than some, but in order to afford a fee-paying school for their children, my parents made sacrifices (many of which I've only really begun to appreciate as I've got older). Where my fellow pupils were heading off to Florida in the summer holidays, if we went anywhere at all, we usually went to stay with my grandparents in Devon (where my father’s father used to run a pub in the Plymouth naval docks). It probably also helped that I sat some exams and was awarded a scholarship which meant that we got a discount on fees and I got my name in capital letters in the school directory.

I attended the school at the tail end of a long period of under-investment and the buildings were in various states of disrepair. In addition, academic standards were low, perhaps because the school accepted anyone who had the money to pay the fees and didn’t apply any minimum criteria. Scholastic achievement was generally considered poor form and, with hindsight, I’m not sure that the teaching was up to much either. I spent five years there, and the only time I’ve been back since was to attend a friend’s wedding. I don’t like to talk about it very much and I am perfectly happy if no one ever finds out that I attended a school anything like it.

You’d imagine that must be because I had a terrible time, but that simply isn’t true. For better or for worse, that school played an absolutely critical role in making me the person that I am today. My very best friends are all – almost without exception – people that I met there. So why do I have such a violent dislike of the place? Because I hate people’s preconceptions of public schools and I hate it when they are applied to me; I hate it when I run into some of the people I used to go to school with and when they prove that many of those preconceptions are rooted in reality (We barely spoke at school and certainly haven't seen each other in more than twenty years.  Tell me: am I likely to want to be your friend on Facebook?). I hate the faux-nostalgia for the place that people seem to have. If those were the best years of your life, then actually I think I feel sorry for you.  As I flick through the magazine, it is filled with pictures and reports from reunion events: 40 years; 25 years; 1 year…. Pictures of people wearing the old school tie with brackets after their name in the caption detailing the house and years they attended. (C 87-92). They are in networking clubs in London, Dubai, Hong Kong; they are at golf tournaments and fundraisers (the school, which currently charges fees in excess of £10,000 a term*, has charitable status). They are in government….. It represents a world that I want nothing to do with and I’m a little embarrassed to have ever been a part of, even through no choice of my own**.

I met some amazing people at the school, people I’m proud to call my friends, but I tend to think of us as survivors rather than alumni.

* This is a **lot** more than they charged when I was a pupil.  They charged enough then, but this seems ridiculous and doesn't even include things like uniforms.  It's a better school now, I'm sure.... but holy cow, that's a lot of money.

** I should be absolutely clear, if it needs saying, that my parents were only doing what they thought was best.  You don't send a seven year old child away to board lightly.  At least, I hope they didn't.

and a rock feels no pain....

For many years, I have been mostly self-sufficient at work: responsible for my own work but for nobody else's.  The only deadlines I really had to worry about were for my own deliverables, and as I've always been confident in my ability to hit those timescales, I've never been especially worried about building detailed plans or anything like that.

That's all changed.  In my new role, I''ve now taken direct line management for the first time in more than a decade.  Oh, I've done lots of mentoring over that time, both formal and informal, and over the last couple of years I have actually spent a lot of my time working to help other people with their development, but in terms of actually being the person responsible for day-to-day line management, accountable for performance contracts and for representing people at consistency forum... well, that's a whole different ball game, isn't it?

I've now got my own team, four people who report into me.  At some point in January, that's going to grow to perhaps be as big as fourteen people.  I've got a lot to deliver, and because I won't be able to do it by myself, I'm going to have to manage my team so that we can hit all of those deadlines together.

To a large extent, I can blag my own work; I can walk into a meeting and deliver a convincing update about where I am and what I've been doing.  The only person I am maybe selling short when I do that is me.  You can't do this when you manage people.  I learned this when I first managed a team all those years ago: you can't take shortcuts with this stuff and you have a responsibility to do the best you can by these people.  It's time consuming and it can be both very demanding and very rewarding.

I had my first few one to one meetings with my team today, and the size of the task and how much work it is going to take is really starting to dawn on me.  These are real people with real ambitions and with real problems, both at work and in their personal lives.  It's going to take a lot of my time and energy to do this properly and to make sure that we get things done.  No, not just that we get things done, that we get them done right.

Jerry Seinfeld always used to say that the one golden rule of his show was that (unlike on Friends) there should be "no hugging, no learning".  I completely agree, but a couple of months into this new role and working with a new team outside of IT, and I'm afraid to say that I'm already changing: I'm open and I'm honest and I'm supportive and I'm generally in danger of becoming positively cuddly.

But I'm an emotionally remote, self-sufficient island, dangnabbit!  An island never cries.

You know what?  I'm really looking forward to the challenge.

staring at the sea, staring at the sand...

"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile: Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier"

The opening line, of course, from "L'Etranger" by Albert Camus. Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. Now that's indifference on an epic scale. Shocking, numbing indifference. How could anyone feel like that about something so earth-shattering?  The death of your own mother, for goodness sake.

Those lines popped into my head this afternoon when I heard about the death of an old lady. Oh, not Thatcher.... there's more than enough being written about her already without me chipping in. No. I'm talking about a lady who lived just a little down the street from us. I barely knew her.  She seemed a bit of a miserable old cow, to be honest. Badly dressed and with the most shocking dyed orange comb-over.  In fact, in the ten years I've been living here, I don't believe we've ever so much as exchanged a single word. I used to say "hello" to her politely every time I saw her, but she never once replied or smiled or even acknowledged my existence, so a cheery hello soon became a smile, then a nod and eventually nothing at all. I just wrote her off as a sour old cow with a terrible hair-do whose face would probably crack if she ever smiled.

It turns out that she died. Some time ago. How do we know this? Certainly not because I missed her and cared enough to pop round to make sure she was okay.... but because apparently the cleaners came to her house today with their overalls and their masks to clean her up.

Yeah.  That.  I'm not sure shake'n'vac is quite going to cut it for a job like that.

I didn't know this woman at all, but I couldn't stop thinking about her this afternoon. How sad to die on your own and how sad that no one noticed.  I'm not hypocritical enough to deny my own indifference here - I didn't know this woman in life and I won't miss her now she's dead - but surely you're not human if you don't feel a twinge of humanity at the thought of someone dying alone like that.

She won't care now, of course. She's dead and the dead don't care. It happens to all of us sooner or later, I'm told... whether you die unnoticed in your own house, in a hotel room at the Ritz or freezing cold on the street.

It's all the same. We all die.  If we're really lucky, someone will care.

Here's Camus again:

"Je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde"

The gentle indifference of the world.  Look around you: it's everywhere.

black mirror....

 no hugging, no learning....

Between about 1999 and 2002, right around the time of the dot com boom, I had the immense good fortune to be working on putting together a major website for the company where I work.  Normally pretty conservative and slow-moving, the company was pumping extraordinary amounts of cash into getting this thing off the ground.  They didn't even really know what this thing was or what it should do, but that didn't stop them throwing millions of pounds at the idea, whatever it might turn out to be.  It seems ridiculous now, but for a while they genuinely seemed to think that they would make more money from content than they would from product, in spite of the fact that they were a retailer and already had a thriving million pound catalogue business up and running.... but it was a crazy time.

I worked on the technology team, and to help us on the journey, we employed a hip consultancy that specialised in online.  At this point, no one really knew what they were doing, and these guys brought young, bright kids fresh out of college over from the USA to try and convince everyone - including themselves - that they were really on top of the game.  I went down to their London offices for two or three days every week, and there was so much money floating around that they had free vending machines and had massage therapists working out of their meeting rooms at lunchtimes.  We had scooter races through the office too, with official lap times and everything.

For someone like me, who had spent the first couple of years of my career working in the bowels of a traditional IT department, these were exciting, momentous times.   Even back in Nottingham, we were in a different building to everyone else, based in the town centre; although we didn't quite have scooter races and free massages, it was about as far removed from the traditional company culture as it was possible to be.

We worked stupidly long hours, including working several sessions all the way through the night and back out the other side, but we had enormous fun and I made some great friends.  In fact, I think it's fair to say that I don't think I've ever enjoyed work as much, before or since.

It was great.  Sometimes I still miss it and often think that I'll never feel like that at work again.

I mention this because, a few years later and in a different role in another part of the business, a colleague mentioned to me - in passing - that she used to have one meeting a week in that building in the town centre where we had worked.  I think without realising that I used to work there, she told me how she went there every Wednesday evening for a couple of hours to work on a particular project.  She used to dread it, she told me, because the people who were working there were unbearable.

Unbearable?

Yes.  Completely insufferable.  Totally wrapped up in themselves and convinced that they were the bees knees.  Awful people.  Smug; arrogant; obnoxious.

To be honest, this was a bit of a shock.... but I also have enough self-awareness to realise that what she was saying was probably true.  I was wrapped up in what we were doing at the time, but I also remember those people who used to come into our building once a week.  I don't remember going out of my way to make them feel unwelcome or anything like that, and nor would I describe any of us as being particularly obnoxious or full of ourselves.... but they just seemed so unimportant to me; irrelevant and I paid them no attention.  It seems they received that message loud and clear: we felt we were the bees-knees and they were not.

Every time I see the girl that told me that story - and I saw her today - I am reminded of how we must have made her feel.  Sure: we didn't mean to make them feel unwelcome, nor did we want to come across as smug and obnoxious.... but to her, we did.

That was a happy time for me, but I think it's good to be reminded from time-to-time what other people might see when they look at you.  It doesn't make me feel proud.

They used to have a mantra for the main characters on Seinfeld that there should be "no hugging, no learning."  This meant few happy endings, with each episode instead far more likely to end up with a richly deserved comeuppance.

I try and bear that in mind both personally and professionally.

I'm not suggesting we need to go as far up the sliding scale of sitcoms as Friends (all hugging and learning).....but is there some middle ground we can agree to occupy?  Some hugging, some learning?

Frasier, perhaps? Black Books? Or should I just accept that if my career is a sitcom, there's only one possible choice?

Yeah.  That.

Oh you're my wife now.....