Father, dear father

Dad

This week I drove down to Ascot to see my parents. My father shuffles more than walks nowadays; his deafness, once a ‘strategic tool’ according to my mother, now frustrates him; his irritation index is high and irritation arrives quicker than it once did. I have a number of feelings when I see him these days and I discussed them with my brother when we had some time together. It seems a good time to collect these thoughts, not least because of the Anthony Hopkins film “The Father” tenderly making us consider our relationships.

In the afternoon, I was talking to my mother and dad interrupted a couple of times. It reminded me of a child wanting attention when ‘the adults’ are talking. My mother was showing me a book, about life in West Ham, which she has had for the best part of fifty years. He recognised it, and decided he would like to read it, after she said she had given it to me. I could only think of children being possessive over the toys. 

In the beautiful ‘Seven Ages’ speech that Shakespeare’s Jaques gives, he notes the transformation to “second childishness”. It is one of my favourites, but unfortunately, I don’t know it well enough to quote at will. I looked it up. Apposite. I thought about how my father is transitioning through the sixth age. 

“The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloons, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side: his youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness…”

He is front of my mind because at 85, we know that we may not have many more West Ham seasons and England cricket collapses to discuss. When I think of him, those sporting connections come first to mind, but I have started to think about the impact he has had on my life; the interests to which he introduced me and the people, too. No loving son wishes their father’s passing, but equally no loving relative wants to wish a longer life on someone that they love, when they suspect that person is both unhappy, and perhaps fearful of further deterioration in their physical health. And so, I find myself thinking about eulogies.

I have a great schoolfriend, who lived a little further up the road to me. This summer she returned to her house that I used to visit, where her parents still lived, because her father was dying. She lost him a few weeks ago. Like my father, he was in his mid-80s. Two years ago, one of my greatest friends returned to the UK from Australia, because her father was dying. Before she returned home, I was attending her mother’s funeral. She had followed her husband in a matter of weeks. This past week, another of my oldest friends has returned to the UK, also from Australia, because her father has had a fall, and is increasingly unwell. All of us know we have been fortunate to have a relationship with our fathers that has lasted so long, and that in each case, our fathers knew our children well. 

I know from my work with Cruse, the grief counselling charity, that the important thing is for the bereaved to speak about the person that they have loved and have recently lost. This week, my brother and I shared our thoughts about our father, our respective relationships with him and also our observations about his health. A physical decline is apparent, but it is the mental health that is difficult to work through. He may be depressed, never mind angry and frustrated, but much of it is going unsaid. I thought of Cat Stevens’s song ‘Father and Son’ and these opening words

It’s not time to make a change
Just relax, take it easy
You’re still young, that’s your fault
There’s so much you have to know
Find a girl, settle down
If you want you can marry
Look at me, I am old, but I’m happy

I was once like you are now
And I know that it’s not easy
To be calm when you’ve found
Something going on
But take your time, think a lot
Think of everything you’ve got
For you will still be here tomorrow
But your dreams may not

And that line “I am old, but I’m happy”, and I just hope that is true for him, but I wonder, and I suspect not. I can tell him that I am finally getting better at taking my own time, that these days I do “think a lot”, and I will cling on to my dreams. He has always talked about death as the moment “when the great umpire in the sky raises his finger”, and I think he will not be unhappy to be given out.

This, though, is not for him, but for me. I wanted to think about our relationship. Becoming immersed in psychoanalytic thinking has predictably meant I have reconsidered our relationship. I think it is possible that there is something Oedipal about the life I have pursued. It did not strike me until very recently, but I have probably unconsciously competed with him. I think about my three children to his two, sending them to private schools, compared with the comprehensive education Neil and I had, delighting in the material wealth my career provided, and going into the same industry and needing to achieve bigger roles, my memberships to MCC and the Stock Exchange before his, these might all have been unconscious drives to ‘replace’ him within the family hierarchy. 

Whatever the truth of that, I wanted to think about the many positive things he has given me. My children are all adults now; my youngest has just received her degree award from Manchester, and I think I am also thinking about how effectively I have parented, compared with my old man. More unconscious competition.

Like the majority of boys, my father was my first hero. I recall watching him shave (he preferred electric) in the mornings and willing the years to pass so that I had to shave like him. From the moment that my parents moved to Essex, before I was two, I understood that he commuted and came home relatively late, and somehow, I thought that meant he had an important job, compared with those whose fathers worked locally. When he was forty, my brother and I were allowed to attend his birthday party. I recall one of the women partying there, telling me that if I grew up to be the “charming man” that my father was, that I could be proud of the man I would have become. On the few occasions that I have been descrbed as ‘charming’, it has been particularly pleasing to me. 

He had his own heroes. One was his uncle Denis, who was a war time test pilot, and represented all of the traditional virtue to which my father aspired. His own hopes for joining the RAF were curtailed by a failed medical. His sporting heroes must have been many, but I can recall only Denis Compton being talked of with true reverence. Compton, oddly, was rather non-conformist, a bit of swash and buckle, and my father was a respecter of tradition and of convention, so there was an inconsistency in his admiration for the Compton style, but perhaps that was the point. For my generation, it would be the same as a boyhood lover of convention and tradition preferring Ian Botham to any other sporting god. 

I wanted to be him, and so I asked my mother what had made her fall in love with him (yes, I know that has Oedipal undertones!) She told me that it was his voice, and so I used to listen carefully to his turns of phrase, his diction, how he enunciated, and I thought about the tone and timbre of his voice. One thing he did give me was a love of sport. An early adulthood car accident had robbed him of the sight of one eye and limited his own sporting potential and successes. He poured his enthusiasm into his sons. 

That manifested itself in him investing his time in our developing talents. Appalled by the quality and lack of refereeing for junior football matches, he passed the exam and became a referee so that he could step in whenever there was the risk of the game not being ‘properly’ reffed. He became the ‘manager’ of my brother’s junior team, Danbury Boys FC, and for me he came to every athletics meeting, when I was briefly a promising sprinter, so he could bang the starting blocks into the track. He found me a coach (one of our neighbours) and then bought me a much smarter set of blocks, and some smart spikes. Sadly, I was a late developer physically and about the age of 14 all my peers grew taller and stronger than me and I was no longer winning races. 

As my brother’s cricketing prowess became obvious to everyone, dad drove around the country to see as many of his representative games as he could. When Neil had made it as a professional and moved to Somerset, and played his winters in Cape Town, dad switched to attending my non-league football games. Even at the low level I played, I was more of a journeyman than a star. I played with a former Scotland international, two sons of one of England’s greatest internationals, and a large handful of players with football league experience. Consequently, there was no guarantee that I would make the XI on matchday and I spent more than my fair share of time on the bench, but still he would travel far and wide across East Anglia, east London and the south midlands, knowing I might not start.

His oldest and best friend was my godfather, and he invited him to watch me play once. Fortunately, I had a good game and scored a hat-trick in a FA Vase match for Maldon against Thetford. I felt very connected to dad then, but even more so when I left Witham Town for Finchley. I knew he had grown up in Finchley, which had once been a big amateur club, but it never occurred to me that he would have an association with it. We got a little tearful when I made my debut at Summers Lane, and he told me about watching games there with his much-loved and missed father.

Dad has never really been one for emoting, although as he has aged, he can get quite choked, often when his grandchildren are around him. The only time I saw him cry as we grew up was when he learned of his father’s death whilst we were on holiday in Jersey. I think I decided then that I should only cry if it was as important as the death of a loved one. I have got better at handling my own emotions since then, but dad and I have never been very good at sharing the really personal stuff, and so, as he passes through the sixth age, I wonder how well I know him. I know that I want my own children to know me better than I feel I know him.

What I do know is he taught me values and integrity. He was a whistle blower in a unit trust pricing scandal at a time when his career was prospering in fund management. Not very long afterwards the country was reeling from recession, Britain was “the sick man of Europe”, and the FT30 index made new lows. He was made redundant. Obviously, I was not there at the time but it seems probable that it was spiteful and targeted. To my parents’ huge credit, I do not recall noticing it (I was 10) and neither Neil nor I missed out on any love, school uniforms, sports kit or Christmas presents. I am sure it affected him deeply, though, and once he returned to the City, as a broker, it may have affected the way he was with others. 

I started on the stock market floor in 1982 and he was keen to introduce me to all his many contacts. He encouraged me to be polite and liked to hint that any one of these people may be useful to me. It was after all, a time when who you knew still seemed more important than what you knew. Has it changed? I found it difficult. I thought many of these people were insincere and took advantage of his goodwill. My attitude was much less trusting, which may have harmed my career, but might have been a re-run of his early scepticism, a scepticism that had led to him spotting the malfeasance. 

He is an ardent royalist. He is also proud of being English. I stress English. He is suspicious of the Scots (especially Andy Murray and his mother, or any Scotsman who gets a job in football commentary like Andy Gray or Ally McCoist!), and more so of the Irish, irrespective of which side of the border. He seems less contemptuous of the Welsh, (perhaps because of the glory of Gareth Edwards and the rugby greats of my childhood and of Tony Lewis moving from the cricket field to the urbane presenter of sports programmes on Radio 4). 

I have thought of it much more of his English identity in the post-Brexit years. None of my generation can truly understand what it must have been like to have been a boy as the war unfolded. He was approaching his fifth birthday as the Blitz destroyed London and nine when the war finally ended. Getting beyond the idea that Germans and Italians were the enemy must take some recalibrating mentally. How the Cold War affected his generation too, is something we have never properly discussed. But the idea that people not English-born are somehow hostile and a not-to-be trusted threat, is something I have not had to consider in the way he did. Our politics have separated, where once we were very much aligned, but I know I think too little about how his views were formed.

What he did do, was introduce me to politics itself, for which I am grateful. He told me about being a Young Conservative and inspired by the pleasure of his descriptions, I did the same. A different time and a different organisation, but it helped me to take a stance that required me to critically analyse what was happening in the world around me. He was angry about the decline in Britain’s status in the ‘70’s, he loathed the unions and was convinced by Thatcher from the outset. The Tories left me, or me them, after the Major sleaze era, but I still appreciate that my introduction to politics, which was a one-eyed Conservative view, introduced me to a lifelong interest. I now get to share it, and debate at length with my children, and I think it has been a great gift. 

Another introduction he made to me was jazz music. Watching the wonderful “High Society” together one afternoon, he lit up as Satchmo and Bing got going. “Listen to this” he instructed, as Bing moved into the second verse, and I can hear it now, and whatever jazz I hear, I think of this moment and of him.

“Take some skins,
Jazz begins,
Take a bass
Steady pace,
Take a box,
One that rocks,
Take a blue horn New Orleans-born.
Take a stick
With a lick,
Take a bone,
Dixie-grown,
Take a spot,
Cool and hot,
Now you has jazz jazz, jazz, jazz, jazz.”

He loves Basie, but Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck are the artists I recall hearing the most. There are many gifts a father can give a child, but a passion for things outside the family, or the workplace, are amongst the greatest. He has given me sport and music. Apart from theatre, there are few things that mean as much to me outside my own children. He loves newspapers, even today. We share this passion. Good journalism is such a wonderful thing. He would read papers and the occasional magazine, but we had few books at home. I wanted to impress him, and asked him what he would recommend that I should read. He selected “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. They did not appeal to me as much as I expected, but I read them feverishly because I wanted to talk to him about them. 

As a father myself, I can think about what I want from my relationship with my children. What would I want them to say of me? I think I would hope they would say they knew that I loved them and that I gave them good advice. As I see my father shrinking physically, becoming someone different from the man I once wanted to be, I do think that he loves me and that he has given me good advice. I used to pester him with wanting to know what he wanted me to do or to be, because I wanted to impress him. Profoundly, he said, “be happy”. I took years to understand that message. Perhaps, I have only just understood it. Years of aspiring for sporting accomplishments, professional success, material wealth, but really none of that was going to change what he thinks of me; but seeing me low upsets him and seeing me contented, helps his contentment. And that is exactly how it is for me with my three. 

We have, perhaps, a few more seasons watching the Hammers and a few more summers with visits to Lord’s, so I may get time to tell him what he has done for me and to tap into his ninth decade wisdom, but this has poured out of me because I have a sense that time is shortening, and that for all the love we share, too much between us is unsaid. As a pair, we become inarticulate when we need to express emotion, despite both loving words. Men like me, are so fortunate to still have parents alive and not trapped by dementia. And today, it felt like a good day to write it down. 

On Harry Met Sally

Is Harry met Sally the finest film ever? It is over thirty years since I first saw it, so I was ready to be disappointed and to learn that it did not deserve its place in my mental film ranking league table. Its misfortune is to be categorised as a ‘romcom’; a term which inspires thoughts of frivolity and shallowness. Sure, you may think it is not as profound and intense as many other contenders, but think about this from my perspective. The protagonist is called Burns. It opens with Louis Armstrong. It ends with more Burns, as the loving couple debate Auld Lang Syne’s meaning, and it turns to Casablanca, the finest black and white film ever, to catalyse the opening of the friendship and to give momentum to what finally gets consummated as an affair. 

As Harry reminds her, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is “the best last line of a movie ever”, as he contemplates Bogart. Nora Ephron then proceeds to write some of the best movie lines ever, that are not last lines of movies. To remind the audience of someone else’s peerless film-making, is about as immodest a way to introduce the perfection of the film one is watching, as can be contemplated, and might be thought a little presumptuous, but it enhances rather than spoils. This is not shallow.

Currently one can enjoy the line by line perfection on i-player. From the moment Harry invites Sally to tell the story of her life to give colour to the prospective eighteen-hour journey by car to New York, and we get introduced to her pedantry in the restaurant ordering specifics, it does not drop a beat. How many guys can come back from a “empirically, you are attractive” line. One of the greatest uncomplimentary compliments in all of movieland. 

It takes about ten minutes before Harry introduces the theme of men and women being incapable of a platonic friendship, perfectly matched with Satchmo singing “you say either, and I say either”. Little wonder that five years after the first encounter, Sally is able to tell Harry “you look like a normal person, but actually…” 

The joy of seeing it so many years after the first viewing is knowing there are great lines to appreciate but not remembering them all. “Grab him. Someone else is married to your husband” and “even though we were happy it was just an illusion”. “What’s the statute of limitations on an apology?” which leads to the unforgettable exchange, “Great, a woman friend. You know you may be the first attractive woman I have not wanted to sleep with in my entire life/That’s wonderful, Harry”. Little wonder that Harry believes “I can say anything to her”, but Sally will soon be telling him, “you are an affront to all women and I am a woman”. 

We are almost three quarters of an hour in before we get the iconic fake orgasm scene and “I’ll have what she’s having” and the pace has not dropped once. As Marie continues to agonise over her affair with the husband everyone agrees will never leave his wife, we wait for Harry and Sally to recognise that their inseparability over many years is because they are not the incompatibles they believe themselves to be. The things a man will do to be heard are beautifully encapsulated in his singing to her voicemail “Call Me”, only to break through her latest defence and then be told “I am not your consolation prize”. 

Finally, the truth dawns on him one New Year. After having slept with her as she recovers from the shock of learning that her one time serious boyfriend is finally going to marry, and to marry a girl he has only known a short time who works in his office, and believing that his assertion that men and women cannot be platonic friends and that their sex has ruined his one contrary piece of evidence to his hypothesis, he races to meet her and gives one of the great romantic speeches about why a man loves a woman. Watch it; it’s amazing and I had forgotten how good it is. 

I doubt the smile left my face during the course of the whole film and the marriage of the music choices with the scenery and the dialogue just kept shouting ‘perfection’ to me. Critics think it is sexist and that Rob Reiner’s direction plays up to Ephron’s dialogue in emphasising a male dominance largely represented by Harry’s references to the ‘high-maintenance and low-maintenance’ woman contrast. I am not so sure, and for all Harry’s cock-suredness in the opening decade that the film covers, it is him who marries first and then cannot handle his wife’s infidelity, the subsequent divorce and who applies all the classic avoidance, fear of rejection strategies. 

Meg Ryan’s Sally is not passive and far from helpless. The running gag about her need to be utterly precise when ordering everything from her burger to a salad is funny because we can imagine the staff bemused by the customer’s specificity (can you hear your friends saying ‘so anal’ about such behaviour), but actually it is a statement of assertive control. As he tells him “Well, I just want it the way I want it”. Her confidence in what she likes and needs may be one reason he avoids turning the friendship into something sexual. So, I don’t think it is a film that panders to male views and demeans female behaviours. 

Megan Garber, in an article published in The Atlantic, had interviewed Ephron, who was quick to defend Harry from being callous. As Garber wrote the film “is ultimately the story of Harry’s arc: The question it asks, in the end, is not whether women and men can be friends, but whether a guy who hates almost everyone can open himself up to a single someone. That he proves able to evolve suggests an absolution.” Less about relationships and more about one flawed guy’s attempt at a truly loving relationship. As we are all flawed to some extent, I think it is this element that appeals to me.

The other feature of the film is the passage of time. Not much changes for Sally bar a couple of hair styles, but what happens in the film is that time sees changes of environment – homes and jobs, of other friendships, of marriages and divorces that affect one, and through it all, important friendships navigate a path. Some end up in bed, some at the altar, but all are going to change us in some way or other. So, I laughed at the fake orgasm, and I waited for Harry to turn his candour into the magnificent declaration of love at the end, but I realised that the film affected me because it too is like a great friend. Constant, changing, but mostly, capable of changing me. Of course, it plays out with “It Had to Be You” being crooned perfectly. Because, at least to me, it is a little bit of perfection. 

On The Third Man and Classic movies

I knew the music, of course. The extraordinary zither based theme. I knew the author of the novel, but I am slightly ashamed to admit that I had only ever read The Honorary Consul, of Graham Greene’s marvellous collection. BBC4’s i-player collection allowed me to finally introduce myself to ‘The Third Man’. Every scene is a work of art says critic Mark Kermode. The BFI voters think is the greatest British film. What was all the fuss about?

Once one gets past the unreality of some of the filming, especially scenes in cars, and puts aside one’s credulity, to understand Calloway’s determination and the compromises and daily morality tests of a broken post-war city, it gets rather good. 

Deducing whether Anna (protagonist Harry Lime’s lover) is ‘good’ or complicit in her lover’s antics, possible crimes, or perhaps his death is one challenge. Understanding the motive for Lime luring an old but somewhat remote friend, Martins, to a war-torn city is another. 

Controlling one’s mental gymnastics over the fact that at this point Russians are still allies and information is shared with them, as well as the French, as profiteering and crime might be part of wider conspiracies and espionage requires a certain vigilance.

All the while, the protagonist is not appearing. We don’t know if he is a victim, (after all we have seen his funeral) or something much more sinister. The film’s brilliant introduction to him, some way into the film, requires no words, merely an attentive cat and some smart brogues. Has a character ever been better introduced into a film? 

Amid the black and white cinematography we touch (almost) the heavens, as Lime takes a ride on The Great Wheel, but mostly contemplate a more hellish existence as the action plays out in the sewer system. The direction surely wanted to play with Greene’s Catholicism. Martins actually reminds Lime “you used to be a Catholic”. Faith is always tested, but this film wants to note how often it is found wanting. All cities have light and dark, rich and poor. One thinks of Bill Sykes and Fagin keeping their ill-gotten riches amongst the dirt and detritus of a different city. 

Calloway, marvellously played by Trevor Howard, is enigmatic and may not be an especially ‘good’ man, or just someone compromised by experience. The real hero is his trusty Sergeant, Paine, who inevitably is killed. Being virtuous is not always rewarded seems to be the message, or perhaps a warning. Good vs evil is played out ambiguously throughout the film, as people spy and inform on others, but intervene to protect vulnerable characters at significant moments. We are all conflicted, it tells us.

I could not help but think of the apparent corruption at the heart of those in power in this day and age. Lime thinks his corrupt activities and his penicillin appropriation and adulteration are something he does because if he does not, then someone else will. He suggests that there is something inevitable about it all and he is merely taking a share, because he is an intelligent opportunist. I look at the current Health Secretary and wonder if his conduct is simply because he sees his peers lining their own pockets and feels he is only taking his share, which any other appointee to the role would do too? 

The other theme is how we learn that someone we once admired, may have not been all we thought we saw, and how coping with that destruction of an idealised figure can be so painful. Martins really struggles to accept Lime’s culpability and dishonesty. By contrast, Anna knows her lover for what he is, but because he is keeping her from being sent to the mercy of the Russians with a brilliant forged ID, she is obligated. Compromise, for her, was long ago embraced. 

Further, circumstance can damage all of our moral stances. Martins is initially a naïve but valiant and valuable friend, but he comes to realise that betrayals and deceits are currencies with which one can trade in a corrupt world. He thinks that he is absolved by placing Anna’s safety above the actions he is going to take to trap Lime.

The film helps us deal with moral confusion and moral defeat, so much so that when (out of shot) Martins shoots his old friend dead, we find ourselves thinking that it is virtuous and right. Throughout the film Anna has told us that Lime is better off dead, even when it starts to become clear to her that his first funeral was a charade. Martins may, after all, be doing Lime a favour.

Apparently Greene himself said that the film was better than the story, which he claimed was written to be seen rather than read. Whatever the truth of that, I intend to read it, and a few more Greene stories before this year is much older. And we may be able to go out to eat and have a pint now, but I intend to see a few more ‘classic movies’ too.

On: Opinions

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Do you like to opine? I like to opine. Anne Frank said “People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.” Opinions are tricky things. Generally, one might argue that they are good things. After all, a person short of opinions is either dull, or uninformed, or both. So, it is fine to have one, but most people, me included, feel it’s important to make other people share the ones we have. And sharing is a good thing, is it not? We are social animals, and whether we are sharing food, wine, music, conversation or love, we are the better for sharing. But sharing opinions is not quite so straightforward. It is often less agreeable. 

I wonder why that is? Why we have an opinion, but feel a want to see others adopt it? Are we not confident enough in our own opinions that we need affirmations and confirmation from others? Is it uncomfortable to sit with an opinion and accept it is not shared? This is not an exploration of ‘cancel culture’, although I can see the links, but just some consideration of opinions. When I was younger, indeed, it may still be the case, I admired opinion holders, especially if they helped me form my own opinions. I wanted to be that person, erudite,  witty, informed, and that generous. But now, I am less sure. I find myself checking my own opinions and wondering about the reception they might get. 

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Self-censorship may not necessarily be a bad thing. Psychoanalytically we use ego to censor the id. The ego socialises the drives that emerge from the unconscious. We feel compelled to do or say something but the ego intervenes to make sure our conduct is socially acceptable. For the satisfactory functioning of society that seems to me to be a good thing. Ths, though, takes us into the territory of ‘free speech’. Does freedom allow one to offend another? Should it? Free speech is a thornier issue and I am not really interested in trying to justify what one should be free to say, but trying to justify where some limitations might apply. I am aware that having an opinion, and wanting to express it, is related to this issue though. 

Dictionary definitions include, that an opinion is ‘a belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof’. So, opinions can be held irrespective of their factual merit. In the same way that one can argue that it is fine to disagree with what someone else says but feel the need to defend to the death the right to say it, so the liberal in me feels that deciding which opinions are not for sharing is uncomfortably authoritarian. And yet, I impose constraints on myself when deciding whether my opinions could or should be shared. I like Harlan Ellison’s view, “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” 

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Opinions are intangible; invisible, yet they can inflame another person and sometimes cause harm. It is rare for them not to affect relationships. Why? If we cannot touch them and they cannot be seen, how can we afford them so much value? And though we cannot see or touch them, we know they are all around us. Hearing someone else’s opinion can affect our view of that person, even if it is as banal as being ‘a cat or a dog person’, or which season of the year one prefers, or what way round one tops a scone with the jam and the cream. We know opinions are not supported by proofs and yet we associate absolutism to other people’s opinions. The joy of opinions should be the ability to alter them. 

The twittersphere is a place to encounter opinion. This can be good; it can be educational but because of the likelihood of being offended, I retreat to the like-minded. I find that my twitter engagement is as much about what I choose not to engage with, as it is about the people I like to follow, whose opinions I like. This is not a particularly healthy thing, and I know it. Suddenly I am in my own ‘echo chamber’ and not celebrating the diversity of opinion which might make me retest my own views. 

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Parenting throws up some huge issues over opinions. Few parents have not felt the sense that their own parents may not entirely agree with how they parent their offspring, and been especially sensitive to the opinions of in-laws. As the children develop, should one pass on one’s opinions, or strain to encourage offspring to form their own, however unpalatable? I find it difficult to discuss opinions with my father. We know we disagree on some things, and we may both think that is not a bad thing, but we know it is easier to avoid subjects than to enjoy our different opinions. It limits our conversation and that is disappointing. However, my parents did encourage me to learn and to think for myself. To me, that seems to be a virtue, yet I know I worry that any one of my children may express their own opinions and in this over-censorious modern world find themselves lambasted for it, or in some cases, worse. I believe the expression is a ‘pile-on’. 

There is something important about generational differences of opinion. Much of it is about appreciating context. I like to test myself with thinking about historical events and seeing if I think my opinions would have been different if I had been living at that time. I can recall what I thought about Blair and the Iraq war decision, and I can think about my views on Thatcher and the miners, but would I have backed Churchill in the 30’s, or welcomed the Appeasement strategy that was very much in vogue? How would I have regarded Gandhi’s campaign? I admired Mandela, but I knew him as an eloquent advocate and not a terrorist/violent activist. Would I have supported Roy Jenkins’s more liberal attitude to homosexuality in the late 60’s. I would like to think so, but I know that my instincts are conservative with a small ‘c’. 

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Today, I went on a very enjoyable walk with two old friends and ex-colleagues. We have experience of running business units and departments in investment banks and of sharp end trading experience in the ’87 crash and the Global Financial Crisis. Trading floor experience and daily sifting of ‘market opinion’ means we each have plenty to say on most issues. We can cover football; policing; Bob Dylan singer v poet; housing policies; ski infrastructure investment; John Coltrane’s ‘Love Supreme’; transgender politics; modern journalism; Tony Blair; tattoos; vinyl vs digital; Phil Foden’s exquisite skills; mindfulness, in a few hours, as we did, and manage not to offend one another. It does not mean we share each other’s opinions on all these topics.

What worries me, and I don’t think worry is overstating this, is an apparent intolerance of opinions. Growing up I was vaguely aware that there was a skill in debating an opinion and persuading someone of the merits of one’s own opinion. It may be this that has become the issue. Everything is reduced to binary outcomes these days, to winners and losers, to in-groups and out-groups. We would rather decry another opinion than listen to it, because we have assumed a marriage between our (group-held) opinions and our identity. My twitter follower list tells me how guilty I am of this, myself. The partisanship of US politics, which seems to me to undermine the virtues of democratic debate, is more cause for concern than celebration. At least, that is my opinion; you of course, may disagree!

“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.” – Marcus Aurelius

On: That interview

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I didn’t watch it. Did you? I have spent some of this morning noting the volume of social media and traditional media coverage of the Sussexes and Oprah, and wondering what it all means. Specifically, what does my disinterest mean? Some of my friends, and people for whom I have a high regard, seems to be particularly animated. Am I weird? Dissociating? Un-empathetic?

I have not met the Duke or the Duchess. I know little about them. He had a huge trauma in his childhood, seems to have had occasionally questionable fancy dress selections, seen some military action, which must play havoc with the mind, and married a girl from overseas. She was an actress and seems to hold and often to want to share, strong opinions. They have a child and are expecting another to be born in the summer.  

Watching another family, even from afar, is always fascinating and a bit of an education. It affords us the opportunity to compare it with our own. Her Majesty’s family appear to be somewhat dysfunctional. That does not make them exceptional. I am not anti-monarchist. I have come, over many years to like being in a country ‘ruled’ by a monarch. Her Majesty seems to me to be the personification of ‘duty’. Very easy to admire. Her daughter seems to have a similar sense of that short word. It is less clear to me what the male children personify, but it seems likely that it is less honourable and distinguished.

But, I do not know them. And like most people that I don’t know, I am not interested in reading about them or watching their lives on a television screen. I am no republican, but I would welcome a bit less monarchism. I am not sure about the deference to tens of people from one family. 

It is possible to take a stance about the way that Harry, the ‘spare heir’, has decided to split. Psychoanalysts have a good understanding of splitting. Melanie Klein studied splitting especially closely. Throughout life we deal with frustrations and disappointments, none more so and so frequently than in infancy. These frustrations can feel so intolerable that we split people into very good and very bad. Our world is binary. We denigrate some people absolutely and entirely in order to make a virtue of those around us. People who do not gratify us are pure evil; people who meet our needs are pure and perfect. It seems that Piers Morgan may be exercising some splitting currently. The clips from his TV show today are illuminating. 

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Looking at the responses to the interview brings up another concept familiar to psychotherapy. Projection.  Projection is unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don’t like about yourself and attributing them to someone else. A common example is a cheating spouse who suspects their partner is being unfaithful. I was, probably still am, frequently guilty of projection. I recall how often I used to talk about how I disliked attention-seeking people who showed off, or were what I called “arrogant”, especially at work. What I came to realise was my contempt for them was born of envy. I wanted the attention they had. Expecting attention, was my own in-built arrogance. I wonder what the many comments I have read today, few of which compliment either of the Sussexes, might reveal about the commentators’ own projections. 

I think more about why the British revere this family so much. We have had a lot of media coverage about how Brits are plucky, and independent. The Prime Minister thought it might explain our reluctance to follow guidelines for virus control, as compliantly as our European cousins. Yet, the attitudes to this one family suggest that Brits are keener to be subjects, and to display reverence and followership, rather than independence and autonomy. I admit to finding that bemusing. Then, I wonder what it says about me. Do I have an anti-establishment attitude, perhaps built on an infant response to my parents’ displays of authority? 

An uglier version of the ‘excitement’ about the interview is that it introduces issues of white supremacy, of bloodstock ‘dilution’, of racism and colonialism. It may be that none of that happened, but the media finds it productive and commercial to conflate the role of one young woman joining the monarch’s family into its current ‘culture wars’ hobby horse. I am not sure. The Sussexes have never really interested me. Charles Moore, one-time Telegraph editor describes them as “self-absorbed and irrelevant”, but seems to be part of a tribe making them relevant by expressing his own view. 

I am not sure about “self-absorbed” but I can agree on “irrelevant”, but the widespread interest in them does interest me, not least because I wonder if I am out of step. I do believe that the responses of the public and the commentariat tell us more about these individuals, their own feelings, past traumas, and the power of in-group and out-group psychology, than it does about Oprah’s high-profile guests. But it would not be the first time I did not ‘get it’ and missed something powerful, anthropological, social, political and psychological going on. Which I need to analyse! Anyway, I did not see it, will not see it, and was much more impressed by the Hammers winning 2-0 versus Leeds United. 

On reimagining the joy of dinner parties

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A small handful of events and thoughts came together for me early this week. As a result, I have found myself trawling my memory bank and remembering the pleasure of the dinner party. In no particular order, those events and thoughts were, the publication of obituaries to Jim Haynes; the 2021 Burns Night; reading an excellent article about touch and mental health by Eleanor Morgan and my weekly peer through the metaphorical window to the FT’s fantasy dinner party. 

Haynes was an extraordinary man. He made a life in Edinburgh and Paris after arriving with the USAF and founded the Traverse Theatre. He was very involved in folk and drama and organised the two ‘Wet Dream Film Festivals’ in 1970/71, in Amsterdam. The obituaries cover his counter-culture contributions and his peripatetic life. If you do not recognise his name – enjoy the read. He did settle, though, and made Paris his home and earned a fresh reputation – this time as the father and godfather of social networking. 

Pre-internet Haynes was convinced of the merits of human connectivity. Talk to a stranger. Whilst teaching Media Studies and Sexual Politics at the University of Paris, he made it his habit to have an open house style dinner party every Sunday. He led the way in connecting strangers, long before we outsourced it all to Silicon Valley. 

As a BBC tribute noted “Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list. No questions asked. Just put a donation in an envelope when you arrive. There would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities – locals, immigrants, travellers – milled around the small, open-plan space. A pot of hearty food bubbled on the hob and servings would be dished out on to a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle.”

In Morgan’s piece about touch and the therapeutic benefit of a hug I was thinking about how my own life as a London singleton, but also that of many of my friends, has been affected by lockdown. Social connectivity is important. It is the antidote to the polarisation that is created and manipulated by unscrupulous social and political leaders. It gets harder to hate someone with whom you have shared ten minutes conversation, heard their story and exchanged a handshake or a hug.

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But why did I think particularly, of a dinner party? After all, they tend to be fairly modest in scale and can have a slightly snobbish class tone about them. In Steve McQueen’s recently shown brilliant series of ‘Small Axe’ films, the partying is bigger and embraces the notion of the open door and meeting strangers. Perhaps I should be thinking more about larger gatherings. But the intimacy is part of the joy. At a large party, it is possible to not really get to know anyone. At a dinner party, it is quite difficult to avoid an interaction with anyone. And I think I like that. Maybe it is just that if we are going to have another ‘Roaring Twenties’ decadent party period, I know mine will be of the more subdued style, befitting a man uncomfortably aware how much closer he is to his sixties than to when he turned fifty. 

Obviously, it is easy to be wistful now, but dinner parties are special events. Friendships are forged, romances are started, relationships are developed and intimate life events get shared as the alcohol flows. I love the greetings – invariably an embrace, a proper hug. I love the conversation, often quite shallow as the guests decide what is right for the company and then increasingly deeper dives into particular issues or themes. I love how the genders usually split pre-food, perhaps a kind of social confidence-build, but also giving some space to the boy-girl table plan. Loving the food goes without saying, although the best dinner parties are about the company. 

The wines are important. I am quite an oenophile and in my pretentious youth I went on tasting courses and built a half-decent cellar. I became focused on wine and food pairing. I am not sure, these days, that it made a difference to the guests’ enjoyment, but I liked making the effort. When I am the guest, though, I am often as impressed by the volume of the wines and the generosity of the host, as I am by the refinement of the vintages and the pairings. 

So, as I thought about Haynes, and about social occasions and touch, I was preparing for a Burns Night without company. There are few occasions in my calendar that demand company and hearty food and free flowing alcohol quite like a Burns Night. 2021 was rather different. It did allow me, though to slip back in time to previous years. Whilst my family was growing up I tended to avoid formal Burns Night occasions. As I am a Burns but not a Scot, my wife and I started to host a southerner’s ‘alternative Burns Night’ with our local friends. The Selkirk Grace and Ode to a Haggis were recited and everyone was dressed in tartans. One especially fine year a friend had revealed that he played the bagpipes and so he piped in the haggis in our north Essex home. 

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I thought about some of the other memorable dinner parties that I have enjoyed. I maintain that the company is what one recalls, more than the food and the wine. I remember being invited to a small west London flat for one evening and being sat next to an attractive blonde woman. She became my eldest’s godmother and has been one of my loveliest and most important friendships over the last thirty-plus years. 

When I first started work most of my peers were older than me, as they were graduates and I was an A level school leaver. I was impressed by their alcohol consumption, their smoking, their wit and their yuppie appetite for hard work and success. One, who became my best friend, had spent a year in France as part of his degree. He hosted great parties. His cooking had great panache. I could not conceive how one could cook such tasty food without needing a cookbook to follow. But the French-living inspiration and plenty of garlic meant his was an example I wanted to follow. I later spent a brief period as his lodger. It cost me just an occasional turn as sous-chef and one case of wine. The best value accommodation London has ever given. 

Sometimes it is not new people that one gets to know but new foods. I went to a dinner party hosted by the parents of a girl in my eldest’s prep school class. It was a very generous thought to bring some of the parents together. Amongst the vegetables that were served was okra, commonly known as lady’s fingers, in England. New to me. Fortunately, I liked it, but I was totally absorbed by what the right etiquette would be if I did not like it. 

I have broad tastes in food, for which I am thankful, but one thing I cannot abide is parsnips – a legacy of being force-fed one school lunchtime, I think. I recall going to one dinner party of newish school parents and being served cream of parsnip soup. Valiantly I finished it. Unfortunately, I did so well my hostess insisted I had a second bowl. I am sure I missed out on an evening of good conversation as I was focusing all my mental energy on making sure I would not throw up. 

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I had the good fortune, or perhaps it was wisdom, to marry a woman who is a superb cook. We hosted a number of dinners in our homes, but she surprised me on my 40th. I was shepherded off to the golf course by a friend so that children, wife and some friends transformed our home, so that the drawing room could accommodate three rows of tables, whilst she produced an incredible meal for tens of guests. We drank Yquem with the fois gras and with our pudding. I think we had lamb with a red burgundy for the main course, but it is a bit of a blur. What I do recall is the intense pleasure of sharing food and conversation with so many good friends. Of evenings or times that I would like to replicate in my life, that ranks high.

Some dinner parties start uneasily and end up feeling like the relationship has moved from colleague or acquaintance to friendship in just a couple of hours. One of my team at my last employer hosted a dinner party after I had successfully recruited someone to join us. The three couples chatted easily, helped because his wife has a business and a degree in Art History. The man I had recruited to our sales team was a linguist and a deep thinker on all issues political, economic and social. He was also keenly aware of his Jewish heritage and faith came up conversationally, as did lots of witticisms. The evening was to welcome him and for my host to have me, as his boss, in a social environment. It could have been quite stilted, but I recall conversation flowing around the table easily and very much enjoying it, helped by the host’s great generosity with the wine selection.

Another dinner party was hosted by a boss of mine who had recruited me to join his managerial team. Once again it could have been quite a strained occasion as work environment hierarchies are often difficult to drop outside of the office. We got on, but where we had things in common, such as football, we had differences. (I have always found it challenging to converse with a Gooner!). What I recall from this evening was him and his wife being exceptionally generous, but also that he cooked. It was an opportunity to reveal the ‘real him’, the man outside the office suit, and that takes some doing. Opening up one’s home, one’s marriage and oneself is a huge act of trust and a show of a potential vulnerability. I think about that whenever I am being treated to dinner in someone’s home.

We knew one couple when I lived out in the sticks, who had moved even further out to south Suffolk and bought an amazing pile of a property. They were putting it through a remarkable and expensive rebuild and transformation. Let’s call them the ‘D’s’. In their previous home, we had enjoyed great and noisy dinner parties. Being further out meant, I think, their need to entertain, to be surrounded by friends, was sharpened. When I look back at dinner parties that were memorable, I often find myself in their beautifully refurbished dining room, having emerged from a rebuilt and stocked cellar and having the most fabulous evenings. 

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Another I remember was a New Year’s Eve Murder Mystery dinner party. We were expected to have read up on our characters and to come ‘in role’ and suitably attired to convey the character we were in. I invariably say I don’t like fancy dress or acting, yet I have enjoyed every party that has required some character transformation. This brings me to some closing thoughts as I start to imagine dinner parties I will have in future. The FT publishes a ‘Fantasy Dinner Party’ description and guest list selected by one of its writers each week. I find myself enjoying this imaginary dining as much as I love their long running ‘real’ series of “Lunch with the FT” interviews. It is a classic ‘dinner party game’ really. Just like picking one’s Desert Island Discs – it can provide hours of contentious debate and amused reaction. 

I am going to close with a description of my guest list. My aim is noisy conversation and a willingness to engage with what we need to all enjoy our lives better in C21. I like opinionated women to share my food and wine with, and so I want Margaret Thatcher to opine about “no such thing as society” and get her to debate it with James Baldwin, the most eloquent of guests and Martin Luther King, the most resolute. My love is people. What makes them tick? Why do we respond as we do? Psychology and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I want an actor to explain about adopting character and a novelist to explain how one designs it. I admire so many actors, but I choose Kristen Scott Thomas, the subject of a long standing crush. 

Designing characters is a toss-up between Tolstoy and Dickens and I have gone home-grown because I want to ask about the east London he knew, compared with the same postcodes today, where I live. To complete I think we need someone who understood that life is multi-streamed, that we have many interests, not just a work role, what he called a ‘hinterland’. He is Dennis Healey, a man whose piano-playing on a Parkinson episode and whose books completely transformed my understanding of a man, when I had seen him as just a ‘failed’ Chancellor supporting ‘failed left wing politics’ and begging the IMF on our country’s behalf. I came to see him as an internationalist, a brilliant musician and of course, quite a war hero. It was a good lesson – we do not have to share opinions with people to be able to admire them. He can play us some music at the end of the conversations. Perhaps I will share the report of the dinner soon. 

Old fashioned or new fashioned, dinner parties are a joy and I look forward to hosting some and being invited to others, once we tame the virus. 

Pandemic Christmas – film choices and blessings

Swinley Forest

Facebook sent me one of those ‘A Year Ago…’ reminders and prompts this morning. In it I am travelling in the US, taking a train to Princeton. I took a photograph of a bust of Einstein when I had the privilege of being a guest in the library at the Institute for Advanced Study. It is sobering to think about our pre-pandemic freedoms, and to think about the power of ideas and the importance of study and education. In less than a year, attitudes to travel and to broadening the mind and to the joy of ideas have all been profoundly affected. 

So, Christmas is over. Our government is celebrating a trade deal which is unlikely to get much scrutiny from Parliament. The predictable jingoism is evident in all the usual newspapers but generally, as the country looks at rising hospitalisations, deaths and thinks about a ‘new variant’, the pandemic is uppermost in minds. The pre-Christmas introduction of a new level of restriction on movement, tier 4, and the post-Christmas widening of the areas to which it applies, leaves a certain feeling of heaviness.

I have never been very observant when it comes to faith and I am a very rare attender of churches. I am sure that Christmas was largely unaffected for those who think more about Jesus’s birth than about shopping and present-giving and heavy food and alcohol consumption. For many others, though, it has been a difficult time. Plans were forced to be changed in the very last few days and it led to many more having to spend Christmas alone. For many, 2020 will be recalled as a sad Christmas. 

I was incredibly blessed. The changes meant that two of my children, who were planning to leave London to spend Christmas with their partners’ families in Sussex and Yorkshire, became tied to London. My son, was staying with me. I had intended to spend Christmas alone, but instead I had company and we made sure we cooked a good lunch and consumed some lovely wines. I would not have shopped at Borough Market for my Christmas lunch or broken open an old case of Grand-Puy  Ducasse, had his plans not altered. 

Before the tier 4 restrictions I was able to travel to Ascot to see my parents and to catch up with my brother. Mindful of the best guidance we went for a walk through the forest nearby and discussed our relationship after I had highlighted to him the pleasures of a podcast called I wish I was an only child! Many of my London based friends are European and have either not been able to get home or took the decision that it would be more prudent to not travel. One made it to eastern Europe because both of her parents had contracted COVID. Mercifully they appear to have seen it off, despite other health conditions such as cancer, but the mother had a time in intensive care. To see the strain in my friend’s face was to see a reflection of a much wider-spread traumatic response to the events of the year now closing. 

However, 2020 may have given us something as it took others away. If I started the year thinking about travel and horizons, ideas and study, I am ending it thinking about how the journeys have been made but differently. I am not the only person who has (re)discovered an enthusiasm for walking. I know my home city better than at any time in my fifty plus years and it has yielded up many pleasant surprises. Walking encourages thinking. Walking in company encourages conversation.

And so, I think we have started to re-examine the world around us and even more so, the worlds within us. As we converse we talk about how the events of the year have affected us. How they have made us feel. I find a willingness to share thoughts and experiences that might have not been there before because conversations have time to develop depth. Travelling differently includes travelling within our minds and our imaginations. The heartening evidence that book buying has surged this year is how many have used the time productively or to find the necessary escapism. 

I think these sorts of feelings might have led to my film selections over the festive season. My father introduced me to Singin’ in the Rain to marvel at the dance scenes and because he identified as a ‘legs man’ and he assured me that Cyd Charisse, represented the apogee of feminine leggy beauty. This year I watched it with my son, who had yet to see it. Ultimately, for all the awesome choreography and great numbers, it is about a girl who is not dazzled by the film star and woos him with her selflessness to ‘save’ his and his co-star’s careers. 

We watched Grease too, another joyful celebration of girl who wins the guy and does not allow herself to be knocked by mean teasing and bullying, but transforms herself to eclipse all around her. Just as my father introduced me to many films, so this period allowed me to introduce my son to some. He had never seen the peerless Linklater pair of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Happily, he now shares my high opinion of them. In a way, they combine the themes of this year for me. Although the films are about physical travel – they meet in Vienna and in Paris – they are about walking, talking, philosophising and truly getting to know someone, through listening and reading non-verbal signals. As with Grease and Singin’, they are about good things coming to those who wait. 

For those spending Christmas alone, Julie Delpy’s character, Celine had the timeless advice “even being alone it’s better than sitting next to your lover and feeling lonely”.That may sound rather downbeat but she is seeking connection, which she ultimately finds with Jesse. He is very good on what we have been asked to do this year, namely, slow down and perhaps reorient our perspective, “you realize that most of the people that you meet are trying to get somewhere better, they’re trying to make a little more cash, trying to get a little more respect, have more people admire them. It’s just exhausting”

Before Sunrise/Sunset: A-to-Z Conversation Guide -- Vulture
Hawke and Delpy

We also watched Oliver, Rogue One and Star Wars too but they don’t fit my point so well! 2021 offers uncertainty, but so does any year. What the pandemic has done is shorted time horizons. Live in the now. It’s the message of Jesse and Celine – jump off a train and walk around a city with a stranger. Fall in love. Years later, miss a plane and appreciate the depths of the person one is with. Be responsive. Be spontaneous. Worry less about the months and years ahead. Life is fragile and precious – the pandemic is taking people from us and altering plans. Adapt. Appreciate. I think 2020 has been good for me. Even as I met a friend in the street today, and he noted how rapidly the virus is spreading around Tower Hamlets, where we live, and the death of a friend of his last month, we had some blessings to count. 

Explaining Humans: A Christmas List ‘must’

A ‘must have’ present

Explaining Humans is a book written by Dr. Camilla Pang. It is a book written by the niece of a friend and former colleague of mine, which is what drew my attention to it. To the unscientific, like me, it would have been low on any Christmas list because it is about science. That said, I am fascinated by people, what they do and why they do it. This offers a perspective on the people around oneself, that has definitely gone under-appreciated (the perspective, not the book) until now. It needs no plug from me because it has just won the Royal Society Science Book Prize 

However, I have bought it, read it, and in a modest way would like to ‘plug it’. Buy this for yourself first, and then buy copies for other members of your family and for several of your friends. You will be warmly thanked. The author has Autism Spectrum Disorder. I nearly wrote ‘suffers’, which would have been patronising and unsuitable. Indeed, she talks about her superpower, and refers to those with Asperger’s as ‘Aspies’ like it is an elite, or exclusive St. James club. She has also been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and with ADHD. 

Finding people complex and preferring the consistency of scientific theory, she wanted a ‘manual’ to help her understand the mysteries of the people around her as she grew up. Her mother explained that such a thing did not exist. In the end, she created her own. This is it, and it is extraordinarily uplifting as well as insightful. It is a unique book born out of a unique approach. Some elements are written memoir-style. The self-deprecating humour is quite charming, especially when one senses the mockery she often came up against. Above all, though, it is a celebration of science and a gentle re-introduction to the layman, like me, who found the sciences demanding, or downright impenetrable at school. 

To my joy at the time, and to my disappointment subsequently, I gave up Chemistry and Biology as soon as my school permitted. I only studied for my Physics ‘O’ level because “you have to have at least one science”. Camilla Pang is a biochemist! She specialises in, amongst other things, bioinformatics. Not my usual chosen reading matter. However, her unique perspective(s) on humanity and her articulation of how science held her hand as she engaged with humanity, which she found demanding or downright impenetrable, made me want to learn. 

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In eleven chatty chapters she introduces us to how we might behave, think and operate better, so that we inspire more mutual confidence and satisfaction as we pick our way through the various social minefields. Chapters like “how to feel the fear”, and “how not to follow the crowd” and “how to have empathy” read like a trite ‘self-help’ book, but this is so different, as she lays out the way she came to understand “how to”, because she applied something that she had discerned from her science research, to the human model. 

A fortnight after putting down the book I found it easy to recall many of the lessons she gently teaches. Why we are like proteins was the amusing starting point. The ‘supercomputer’ in our heads. The lessons of how light refracts for dealing with fear, has already helped me when giving advice to someone who was overwhelmed with their current circumstances. I was a little blown away by wave theory and Stephen Hawking, to say nothing of how incredulous I was to be reading something sub-titled “quantum physics, network theory and goal setting”. There is a lovely, and very unexpected segue from Game Theory to politeness and etiquette, but the non-chemist in me will long recall “how to connect with others” being understood by appreciating chemical bonds. And after all, we are all matter, so it kind of makes sense, even to me.

This is what I took away: It fails to show the richness of the learning, or the detail of the science, but hopefully will convey the joy I got from reading and understanding, and that buying a copy would be a great investment. Millie, as we learn to call her, starts by demystifying artificial intelligence within the first ten pages. She explains how relevant classification is, and that we all (need to) do it. However, algorithmic thinking, which is what it begets, is not necessarily a good thing. Her own brain is an ardent classifier, but the processing is literal. There is a lovely anecdote about her mother giving her a shopping request – “can you get five apples, and if they have eggs, get a dozen”. Outcome: the shop did stock eggs, so she brought home a dozen apples. 

She describes her epiphany, when she thought she could understand the people around her. She was watching a football match and seeing it not as “twenty-two men kicking a ball around a field”, but as a “human behaviour experiment”. She thought that the players were like proteins. “Just like people, there is no one protein type”. She explains the many different kinds and “a dizzying array of functions that keep the body moving and protect us from danger”. She talks about form and structure in the way that human beings “perform contrasting social functions in group settings”. This was right up the alley of the psychologist and psychoanalyst in me. 

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It turns out that proteins “are surprisingly similar to people in their behaviour and evolutionary development”. Suddenly I am reading and largely understanding gene sequencing and DNA. She describes proteins having different personalities like us humans, and that how those come together is about protein teamwork. She compares bee colonies and modern human workplaces. “There is no gathering of people, animals or molecules whose behaviour cannot be explained by some form of hierarchy and set of relationships”

This jumps to Jungian notions of personality, which are the foundations of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. That introduces us to receptor and adaptor proteins and to kinase proteins (enzymes). One of the modules I studied for my Business Psychology degree was on Motivation. Millie elegantly introduces kinase proteins as the ‘motivators’ of biochemistry. She also refers to them as the ‘attention seekers’. Suddenly I could see my adult life relationships in terms of proteins. From there we learn about nuclear proteins, “the captain”. I loved this; “a ‘nuclear’ person won’t always, or often be the centre of attention. But everyone acknowledges them as the boss. And their word is usually final.” 

It gets better and better. The chapter on light and fear made quite an impact on me. Fear is something we all have, and we all need, but we know it can be debilitating and paralysing. She explains synaesthesia – when unconnected senses come together, such as ‘seeing a sound’ or ‘tasting a smell’. For Millie, it was the ability to ‘feel’ colours. I recall prisms and light refraction from my early Physics classes. It was much less well explained than in this book.

When light passes from one substance to another it changes speed. White light is too painful to look at directly, but slowed by water or glass it refracts into the familiar primary colours of the rainbow. For her, this was the revelation needed to think about seeing fears as colours, and not one dazzling, overwhelming thing. She explains how light waves, like radio waves, sound and microwaves are all around us but are the only ones we can see because its waves “oscillate and undulate dependent on their energetic differences”. The higher the frequency of light the more it will bend when contacting something of higher density (air, glass, water). Red is the longest and bends least and violet the shortest, bending most; hence the consistent ‘decking’ of colours in a rainbow. She explains how being one’s own prism is how to cope with fear(s), and how she manages ADHD panics. The recommendation: Make yourself the densest possible prism. 

If anyone had ever told me I would enjoy reading about quantum mechanics, I would still be pouring scorn at them now. However, one of the best chapters in the book is how quantum mechanics – and I had to be reminded that it is the study of subatomic particles – is relevant to life planning and goal setting. As she writes “should our emphasis be on the present or on the future?” I think of all the psychology experiments of eating a sweet now, or being rewarded with two later, if one can defer the pleasure and exhibit control. This chapter introduces Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (and she still hadn’t lost me!). Studying how waves move through space and time (quantum mechanics) presents, we learn, the “classic Heisenberg problem”. Either pinpoint the way the wave is moving, or its position at a certain moment in time. Both, simultaneously, cannot be done.

To conclude this and to illustrate how beautifully written this book is, I have to quote the end of this chapter. She takes us there via ‘network effects’ and Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. I think it is both profound, and wonderful. It ought to help a great many people. “So, if you worry that you haven’t made enough progress in your life, or don’t know what comes next, allow science to reassure you. Those fears are natural. And the anxiety is helpful, acting as a lens through which to stimulate any number of differential paths. I have always seen it as my supercomputer, allowing me to make links and see possibilities that others cannot. People have told me not to be silly, or that I’m off my trolley, but I wouldn’t want to live without my anxiety and the ability it provides to scan the landscape, as well as the momentum it creates to learn more”

Reading the book will provide the reader with loads more incremental learning. He/she will, like me, suddenly be more conversant with thermodynamics, harmonic motion, molecular dynamics, probability, game theory, deep learning, memory and chemical bonds. I will not have done it justice here. However, let’s celebrate intellect. Let’s celebrate neurodiversity. Let’s celebrate differences between people. Let’s not see our uniqueness as humans to be a reason to divide us into groups. And, in Dr.Pang’s case, let’s celebrate ‘’experts’. I, for one, have not had enough of them.

Does your work have meaning? Is it meaningful?

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Does your work have meaning? Is it meaningful? And do you think those two things are the same, or different? Who remembers Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO, claiming his firm did “God’s work”? Does your work embrace something spiritual? I ask, because I am starting the literature review for my university dissertation and I am looking at doing some research that fits into the fields of Employee Engagement and/or the Meaningfulness of Work. This is likely to be the first in a series of pleas to help me get that work done, by filling in a survey that once it has Ethics Approval, will appear on my LinkedIn account. 

It is a subject that is important to me because I am not sure that work ever had much meaning for me. It had a purpose, definitely, and I was very motivated to be as good at it as I could be, and to be rewarded for doing it. I am not convinced that is the same as either meaning, or meaningfulness. In the last ten years of my career in the City, I had a number of managerial roles. I wonder what answers I would have got in those insufferable semi-annual reviews, if I had explored meaning with my teams, instead of pointless KPIs, and unsubtle applications of verbal carrots and sticks. 

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I am a fan of Alain de Botton’s ‘School of Life’. In a recent promotional email, they suggested that the two ingredients that make up a fulfilled life are love and work. Freud is said to have remarked that “love and work are the cornerstones of humanness”. Unless, the School suggests, we have a found a vocation – a form of work that is both enjoyable and meaningful – our existence will be directionless and hollow. But does attention to one of these ingredients diminish the other? I remember looking at my sales teams and wondering about their sense of meaning. 

Individually, most of them shared my view of us as hamsters on an ever-spinning wheel, going nowhere, but unwilling to get off because meaningless work still met the needs we had, which was usually a mortgage and school fees. So that, as I understood it, gave people purpose (be diligent, don’t get sacked), but was a long way from meaning. This year has seen many of us standing in our doorways clapping NHS workers. We have talked about ‘’heroes’ amongst essential, but often low-paid workers. Perhaps we are all being asked to recalibrate meaning of work. 

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The academic literature on Employee Engagement and on Motivation is lengthy and deep. Meaning at Work and meaningfulness is a younger field, perhaps a quarter of a century, and offers more scope for new and innovative research. One researcher wrote that “the meaning of work literature is still experiencing its adolescence” (Rosso et al, 2010). Is it important? In a paper published in the Journal of Career Assessment in 2012, Steger et al asserted that “meaningful work is a good predictor of desirable work attitudes like job satisfaction and a better predictor of absenteeism from work than job satisfaction.” It seems that if you want people to be happy at their job and show up, it’s more important that they find meaning in it, than that they enjoy it.

I am interested in seeing if there are gender differences to meaning at work; if the age cohort is important, and what the correlation is, if any, between earnings and meaningfulness. Perhaps meaning will have been impacted or enhanced by the pandemic-induced WFH culture? I recently spent time with a former boss of mine and we found ourselves talking about how little meaning our roles had had, albeit using slightly different language. What was interesting to me, with a research hat on, was that we had had big roles, some status, insofar as status is conferred by a title, and we were very highly paid. 

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What is meaning, then? And meaningfulness? All research refers back to Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor who wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning” in 1946. He went on to found logotherapy – a meaning-centred school of psychotherapy. He wrote that “I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche.” That said, I have found no evidence of anyone paraphrasing Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am”, with “I work, therefore I am”. 

Consider, are work hours growing? Is work a greater share of our lives? Has the pandemic further eroded work boundaries? Does that mean it is more or less meaningful? What happens to colleagues with different views on the meaning of work? Do we need to organise so that more like-minded people work together, or seek diversity? 

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In 2010 Rosso et al published ‘On the Meaning of Work’. The importance of the subject and the paper was “it moves beyond hedonic perspectives of work behaviour to deeper considerations of purpose and significance….and eudemonic aspects of wellbeing”. (Eudemonia is an Aristotelian philosophy that a ‘full’ life is governed by reason). They found the distinction between meaning and meaningfulness: Meaning describes a type of meaning which is attributable to work, whereas meaningfulness was characterised by the amount of significance attached to it. This built upon the work of Pratt and Ashforth (2003), who had suggested meaning may not confer meaningfulness, and that ‘significance’ was the determinant of meaningfulness.

Other research has built on Rosso et al’s work that Meaning has four sources: the self, others, the work context and spirituality. Given that “a person’s self-concept is malleable”, literature exploring the self as a source of meaning is further sub-divided into values, motivations and beliefs about work. I think the example of the Timpson business would be valuable for research given its strong commitment to employing people who have criminal records and are rebuilding their lives. 

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This is important. Values may be the most irreconcilable issue with work. Perhaps a deeply politically sensitive teacher would feel they simply could not teach in a private school. Motivations are likely to be divided between extrinsic (pay, titles, status) and intrinsic (self-esteem, doing something worthwhile) and beliefs about work are likely to be more organisational, and relates to how ‘central’ the role is to the worker’s life. In the world of deeper interest in Corporate Social Responsibility and ESG investing, as well as Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB), this is becoming increasingly significant for recruitment. 

Meaningfulness is something that has been studied across what are collectively known as the ‘caring professions’ and also the priesthood. What caring does in terms of psychic attrition (especially things like end of life care) as well as giving a positive boost from caring and helping, are still not well understood, but it may be that low pay in many of these roles is a function of the worker’s desire for meaningfulness in that role, making them vulnerable to exploitation. I am tempted to try and research that. My son’s girlfriend works in mental health nursing, with an autism specialisation. It’s skilled, it’s socially valuable, it clearly is meaningful to her and her colleagues, but is it rewarded appropriately and does the meaningfulness make the workers less demanding in pay negotiation? 

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Theorists propose that people see work as either i) a job (a focus on material outcomes) ii) a career (a focus on organisational structure and progress/status) or iii) a calling (a focus on work fulfilment – the work is an end in itself). Meaning that does not come from the self comes from either i) coworkers ii) leaders iii) groups and communities or iv) family. Combinations probably lead to enhanced meaningfulness, but whether they are additive or multiplicative needs further study. 

In a 2016 MIT Sloan Management Review paper, Bailey and Madden concluded that meaningfulness is personal not institutional, which begs questions of why should firms be bothered by the research. It remains to be tested whether meaningfulness is a constant or fluctuates, but their research noted that meaningfulness is rarely experienced in the moment, but often retrospectively. My work had a significant mentoring element. Although I question how much meaning my work had, I definitely have a sense of meaningfulness when I see ex-colleagues doing well in their careers, or if they call me now to ask for some advice and counsel. 

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However, in 2018 the same authors wrote about the ‘Five Paradoxes’ associated with meaningfulness, the most pertinent one for me given my Burnout experience was “deeply meaningful work can lead to poor outcomes for employee wellbeing” ie it unhealthily intrudes on personal lives. I am sure most of the people I know, and who will read this have a view on meaning at work and on meaningfulness. Many of those views will be cynical, sceptical or simply think it irrelevant – work is simply a contract between employer and employee which exchanges labour for reward. 

I understand that, but in an era where we will live longer, and almost certainly have to work longer, even if we don’t particularly want to, I think this is an important field. I would love to hear some views and I end with a repeat of my earlier plea: When I design my research experiment and get the Ethics approvals, please support me by filling in the survey. Thank you. Burnsie.

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On rediscovering the joys of non-league football

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Three things came together for me last week that made me reconsider and recollect my experiences of non-league football. In the first, a club for which I once played was playing in the FA Cup. In the second, I thought about the ‘Project Big Picture’ which was Rick Parry’s attempt to get a £250m EFL ‘rescue’ and was soon rejected having looked like an inelegant, avaricious Big Six landgrab. In the third, Macclesfield Town FC may rise phoenix-like from the ashes as the rebranded Macclesfield FC.

The FA Cup match was between Braintree and Maldon & Tiptree. I once played for Maldon & Tiptree’s, predecessor club, Maldon Town FC. They merged with Tiptree and play in the First Division North of the Isthmian League (The 8thtier of the pyramid). When I was there they were still working their way out of the Essex Senior League (we were champions in ‘84/5). Maldon & Tiptree won 1-0. It was the third qualifying round of the FA Cup, as far as I ever got in the competition, but they now go on to play Haringey and the winners are into the First Round proper, which means possible Football League club opposition. Last year, Maldon & Tiptree surpassed themselves by going on a cup run and beating Leyton Orient, before Newport County beat them in Round 2. 

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What is the link with ‘Project Big Picture’? Well, the near universal contempt for this ‘solution’ reminded me of the way supporters feel about how ‘the beautiful game’ is at the mercy of commercial demands. Even when I was growing up, most top-level clubs had players who had grown up in the area and the motivation for changing the design of a club’s strip and its transfer policy was not about selling replica shirts in Asia or Africa. I remain a devoted, but wearily philosophical Hammers fan, but I think old fashioned football love tied to where one grew up and with whom one saw their first match is shifting.

It’s ironic because we seem to be in a society, thanks to COVID-19, that for good or ill, is rediscovering localism. The third, thing that came together for me was the announcement that Robert Smethurst had bought the assets of the old Macclesfield Town FC. This club had been expelled from the National League, only months after relegation from League 2, with over £500k of unpaid debts. Smethurst wants to reconnect the club, to be rebranded Macclesfield FC, with the community. Not that it lacked the connection but inspiring local pride and connection is what is required. He said that he wanted “to bring the footballing heartbeat back into the local community”. It will hope to win a place in the North-West Counties League for the next full season and to try and play its way back up the ‘pyramid’, to league status. 

A few weeks ago, my son watched his first non-league game. Below a certain level of club status (I think it is tier 7), one can still watch live football despite the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. He went to witness the glories of North Shields against Hebburn Town and was treated to a contest in bleak north eastern rain. He tweeted some joyous and witty tweets about the match, which ended 3-2 to Shields, and he subsequently told me how much he had enjoyed it. He plans to take in a few clubs in his area (he has relocated after his studies at Newcastle University) and to find a favourite. One club he intends visiting is Blyth Spartans. In 1978 a fourteen-year-old me willed them on as it reached the FA Cup 5thround proper, having beaten Stoke City on its run. 

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When he talked about Blyth and the FA Cup and the joys of the fans’ comments (unpublishable) on the touchline at North Shields and the lack of catering, it took me back to the pleasure I had playing at that level. I had never thought of it from the perspective of the fan. I was always rather bemused when the clubs I played at attracted a following. Although, I did play for Witham Town, and the fans included inmates of the local mental hospital getting some weekend fresh air. I remember one regular who liked to let me know that “you’re ****ing useless, Burns” but would always smile at me and give me a ‘thumbs up’ if we made eye contact. I guess that is connection!

I hope that this may be a moment, however modest, when people start to watch more non-league games again. To express some loyalty for the local team and feel a sense of community. I hope Macclesfield succeeds. My son had also recently introduced me to a podcast about the rebirth of AFC Wimbledon. (GIANT on Spotify) The club has achieved what Macclesfield will hope to emulate, but the point of the podcast is about the fans and ‘community’ as it started a rebirth at the low end of the pyramid. 

The FA Cup is a huge thing for non-league players, especially if it means playing league opposition. It can be a one-off ‘trial’ game to show that you can live in more exalted company. It transforms clubs too, so I will be willing Maldon & Tiptree to at least one more win. My local club in my schooldays was Chelmsford City. In that era there was no automatic relegation from the Football League – it went to a vote. Usually the league voted to retain the same 92 names. In 1971-2 Chelmsford City were knocking on the door having won the Southern League by a couple of points. However, they won it ahead of Hereford United. Wimbledon were barely mid-table. 

As few football fans will not know, 1971-2 was the year that Hereford United reached the fourth round of the FA Cup. To do that they had seen off First Division opponents Newcastle United (Radford’s screamer) in a replay and then took West Ham to a replay before succumbing to a Geoff Hurst hat-trick. Hereford won election at the season’s end to the Football League, replacing Barrow, which failed to be re-elected, despite finishing eight points clear of last placed Crewe Alexandra. Hereford was such an unfashionable football area in the eyes of the newspapers, so the mad scenes of the impassioned local fans having televised FA Cup pitch invasions, helped the subsequent election. Fans. Community. Localism. 

I played at Maldon Town, Witham Town and Finchley (now Wingate & Finchley). Looking back, I can see that those players were important to local fans and I do remember that each club had its ‘regulars’. I recall how excited my father was when I first turned out for Finchley, at its Summers Lane ground, because he had been to watch matches there with his own father when growing up. (Finchley were a big amateur club long before I pulled on a shirt). I don’t think I truly understood the emotional pull for him, or indeed for any non-league regulars, but I do so much more these days, which is why I am so hopeful for those backing Macclesfield’s rebirth. 

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A last pitch  to readers to go to watch your local team. The standard is quite high. Players like Jamie Vardy are great adverts for transforming the non-league potential to ‘making the grade’. For the Hammers, Michael Antonio carries that torch and when I was young it was Cyrille Regis, once of Hayes and subsequently of West Bromwich Albion and England. The best players are former pros slipping down the leagues, but picking up some money and passing on their experience, often whilst finishing coaching awards and attempting to stay in the game and build new managerial careers. I played with Bill Garner (Chelsea), Tommy Coakley (Arsenal, Hibs), Danny Greaves (Cambridge), Alan Moody (Middlesbrough), Tony Hadley (Southend), Alan Brazil (Ipswich, Man Utd, Scotland), George Measures (Cambridge Utd) and Steve Tilson (Southend) amongst others. 

I was really spoiled when I met the Greaves brothers, who played with me at both Maldon and Witham. Danny had a dreadful injury in one game, and subsequently managed the team I was in. At the time, his father was a prime time TV star with the ‘Saint and Greavsie’ show. I didn’t see him play, but my father assures me he was peerless as a finisher. When time allowed he would come to Witham – he helped us get a kit upgrade and insisted we wore red and black stripes as he had at AC Milan – and never interfered, but always offered advice to players that listened. “You’d be ok” he said to me “if you had a football brain”. Damned with faint praise! I was not good enough, but I played with some terrific players and against internationals like Peter Taylor, sometime England manager. 

Go, support, and recover a love for the truly beautiful game, away from the politics of commercial decisions and TV money. I think non-league football is going to be a curious beneficiary of larger clubs going bust and fans needing their connection.