upside your head...

Throughout my adult life, I have often been accused of being cynical.

I actually don't really agree with this assessment at all, but I've probably only got myself to blame.  I prize critical thinking very highly indeed, and I'm also blessed with an almost complete inability *not* to say what's actually on my mind.  On the rare occasions that I have been able to keep my mouth shut and my opinions to myself, I have sadly been unable to keep exactly what I'm thinking from being easily readable on my face.

I admire this quality in other people, but I have to say that it hasn't been particularly good for my career.

Anyway.  Safe to say that I don't think I'm generally seen by people as a glass-half-full kind of a guy.

Until recently.

I was speaking to someone that I've known for more than a decade the other day, and he was genuinely taken aback when I suggested that I was a cynic.  He seemed to think that I was pretty much the case-study of an optimist.

I'm sorry...what?

Well, how else did I explain my attitude to life since my diagnosis with MS and the fact that I started running marathons?

Now I was taken aback.  I've been called lots of things over the years, but I don't think anyone has ever accused me of optimism before.

Well, it's been a little over three weeks since I ran the hottest London Marathon ever.  Since then, I've been managing a dodgy ankle, a black toenail (incredibly the first one in my running career!), a strained glute muscle, a sore knee, a possible inguinal hernia and a nasty lingering cough.

Oh, and MS.

This coming Sunday, I'm going to be running the Liverpool Marathon on what is apparently forecast to be the hottest day of the year.

If that isn't optimism, I'm not sure what is.

Well, what's the worst thing that can happen?

Wait.. don't tell me.

cut the kids in half...

There's a guy at our running club - there's probably one at every running club - who is a bit of a character.  Not in a bad way, Roy's just a really interesting chap.  He's probably in his mid-50s, but he's probably fitter than everyone else there and is certainly capable of running as fast, if not faster, than everyone else there.  He clearly loves running, and sometimes comes to a club run after he's done a much longer run on his own.

It's not the running that keeps him coming to the club though, it's the social interaction: he will talk to anyone; he will run with anyone.... at whatever pace they're running.  He's especially encouraging of slower runners who are pushing themselves towards a target, giving them a bit of impetus to keep building up their mileage by running alongside them.  In his spare time, he volunteers at local events and brings lot of the free samples he picks up with him to running club.  I was running with him the other week when he asked me if I liked Worcester Sauce.  Um, yes.  Why?  Well, because he had some samples with him and wanted to give them to me.  Er.  Perhaps later?  Honestly, he tried to palm a couple of sachets of Worcester Sauce on me in the middle of a run.

He decided he wanted to run with me today.  As always, I turned up for the Monday run not quite feeling it.  I generally run there from home - just under a mile - and usually feel tired and not especially up for a run.  I usually push through this, of course, but that doesn't mean that I want to run like the hounds of hell are behind me.  Running with Roy, of course, because he seems to be more machine than man, means that even when he's running with you, he's actually running a step or two in front of you and you find your overall pace lifted.  I ran 6.5 miles this evening at an average pace of 7.53 minutes per mile.  Pretty quick for me (especially given a slow first mile to the starting line).

The pace was only the half of it though.  It turns out that Roy is a huge fan of Game of Thrones.  He's not read the books, but he's been loving the tv show, and tonight is the finale to season 4 and he was keen to talk about it.  We were running pretty hard, so I wasn't really holding my end up with more than the odd word here and there, but to be honest, Roy was mostly interested in talking.  The problem is that he cannot remember the names of any of the characters; literally the only person whose name he can remember is the Hound.  We were running together for 40 minutes or so, and he barely let up, only pausing in his monologue as he groped for someone's name.  My entire contribution to the conversation went something like:

"Tywin.  Harrenhal.  Arya.  Sansa. Bran.  Littlefinger.  The Viper.  Jamie. Roose Bolton.  Who?  Oh, you mean Gendry?  Last seen being put in a boat by Ser Davos. Yeah.  He's the guy missing the ends of his fingers.... Stannis. The Mountain....."  And so on.

Honestly.  You try running at that pace and trying to remember the names of every bloody character in Westeros.

Talk about a holistic workout.  I'm knackered.

In addition, tonight's run was stamp number 47 on my running club card.  The aim is to get to 50 inside 52 weeks to get a loyalty award.  Last year, I got a Garmin GPS watch.  This year the carrot on offer is £100 towards a pair of trainers.  I should hit the magic number in the run on the day I get back from Glastonbury.  I've been injured quite a lot over the last year, and I don't really need the £100 voucher, so I'm quite proud to have hit the magic number.  Stupid and stubborn, but proud all the same.

But, y'know.... I never said my compulsion was rational, did I?

Valar morghulis.  All men must die.

no tears goodbye....

My old idiot boss left the business last week.  It was announced he was leaving on Tuesday and he slipped quietly out of the building on Thursday.  It was common knowledge that he was going weeks before that, of course because it's a well-known fact that one is able to keep something like that to themselves.  He'd been with the business for almost exactly two years, and I think it's fair to say that he wasn't well liked.

He made my life miserable.  Ironically, it was directly after I won an award at work that I was offered the opportunity to work in what was about to become his team.  Even more ironically, it was my intervention a month or so after that that directly led to his recruitment as my boss.  In my wisdom,  I flagged to the IT Director that one of his major programmes of work was seriously lacking in leadership and was in desperate need of a senior, steadying hand if we were to have a chance of delivering anything.  The good news is that they acted; the bad news is that they recruited this clown.

It's apparently obvious to everyone how much happier I am in my current job.  I moved at the end of August, and almost immediately things began to get better for me after eighteen months of frustration and anger.  I actually can't bring myself to read my posts on here from that time because I know that my frustration is writ large, prompting some of you kind souls to attempt an intervention: just leave.   It's not worth it.  Sometimes, it seems, you don't realise how poisonous the air you have been breathing is until you stop breathing it.  For me, a change really was as good as a rest.

Idiot boss didn't leave my life entirely and was still nominally the IT lead on the project I was working on, but the reality is that he quickly became an irrelevancy to me.  As my personal distance on him grew, I was able to gain a bit of perspective on my time working for him and to let a lot of that anger go.  I was still angry, but mostly my anger was directed towards a department that was too weak and too stupid to do anything about him even though the feedback was coming in loud and clear from his team, his suppliers and his customers and the projects he was responsible for were leaking millions of pounds.  His first manager didn't have the courage to face into it, and his second manager just worked around him and sidelined him.  Pathetic.  At one point, the worst manager I have ever had in my whole career was made responsible for talent management.  I can remember sitting over a coffee explaining to one young girl who worked for him that no, it wasn't her fault and there probably wasn't more she could be doing and that she should not beat herself up or question her own competence.  Sometimes you need to accept that your problem is not your own performance but that you have an idiot for a boss.  It's still a problem, but it's an entirely different problem.  I have the experience to realise that, and I was still angry and frustrated.  Heaven knows how she must have felt.

Anyway.  He's gone.

He's been a dead-man walking since Christmas: irrelevant and sidelined on all his projects.  After an unopened Christmas card remained on his keyboard at one of his desks (he had two) for three months, I actually just moved his stuff and sat one of my new team there.  He didn't notice until he came up to empty his desk drawers.  It reflects poorly on the organisation, I think, that they allowed him to poison projects for a full two years before quietly getting rid.  We'll be giving him a reference, obviously, and apparently we're paying him to the end of May.

Unexpectedly, when I saw him mooching around the building on Thursday last week, I actually had a flash of empathy.  He's an incompetent idiot, but apparently he was told as early as February to hand in his notice, and he's been kept kicking around the business since then, apparently unable to just go on gardening leave or something like that.  What would you do in similar circumstances? He's just moved to a much bigger house, and at the age of 52, he's got one child of one month old and another under two.  He's obviously pitching the whole thing as his decision, but this is hardly an ideal time for such an upheaval.  Apparently, before he left, he was even advertising for a lodger in the company classifieds to move in with his new family (monday to friday only, preferably female).  He was a destructive, unsympathetic idiot, but apparently I'm not cruel enough not to feel for him a little.

Well, perhaps just a tiny amount.....

I was invited to his leaving drinks (he'd instructed someone else to organise them, of course).  I declined.  I also resisted the temptation to go and write "valar morghulis" in his leaving card.  That's because I'm the BIGGER MAN.

where there's music and there's people who are young and alive....

A whole lot of shit is going to be written about the life and death of Peaches Geldof over the next few days and her face is going to be used to sell even more papers than it did during her tragically short lifetime.... let's hope that, amidst the feeding frenzy and rubber-necking, we don't forget the basic human tragedy of a 25 year old woman dying and leaving behind a husband, two young sons and a grieving family.

My boss came into work on Monday morning and was glassy-eyed, tearful and overcome with grief.  It turned out that she had just found out that a good friend of hers had been found dead on Sunday at the bottom of a flight of stairs in her home.  She wasn't yet thirty years old.  It seems such a tragically banal way to die; something that could happen to any one of us any day.  What can you say?  What platitudes are going to bring back someone so irretrievably gone?

We tried to send my boss home, but she didn't want to be alone and, to steal the phrase from The Smiths, she wanted to see people and she wanted to see life.

Life is precious and fragile and so easily snuffed out.  Now is not the time for tired, cynical quips.

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”