Rafe Spall grieving – and acting a prospective Olivier Award winner
Over the past few days the word grief and the issues of grieving keep presenting themselves to me. In Monday’s FT, Rana Foroohar mentioned shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and acceptance – the ‘seven stages’ in an article on, of all things, asset price bubbles. It followed me, having had the pleasure of watching the inestimable Race Spall, giving a career-defining performance as the grief-stricken Michael, in “Death of England” at the Dorfman. This is remarkable – how do you get Oedipus and Leyton Orient into the same play? Later over the weekend I saw Rosamund Pike, one of my three favourite leading ladies, in “Radioactive” on screen. It is a film with multiple themes and plot lines, but the core of it is her grief, largely for the love of her life, her husband Pierre, but also some unresolved issues over the untimely death of her mother, in Poland, when she was a young girl.
I have been extremely blessed in number of ways in my life. Foremost amongst them is the little that grief has intruded on it. I still have my parents, my sibling and thank heavens, I have not suffered like some close friends of mine, in having to grieve a child. The biggest impact grief has loaded upon me was the death of my beloved nan, but whatever and whoever the mysterious gods might be, they had seen fit to prepare me. They replaced her in the world, with my first daughter within weeks. My father-in-law died in 2008, and I often think that I did a poor job supporting my wife at the time. I recall her pain – “you don’t know what it’s like”, and obviously, I did not, but I realise how fortunate I have been.
Never ending
Partly motivated by this, at the end of 2019, I volunteered to train with Cruse Bereavement Care. This is an extraordinary charity that does amazing work supporting those for whom grief has become overwhelming and inexplicable, and where what support they had has withered, as people think they should have “moved on”, or just feel too uncomfortable to provide the right words and gestures. I learned a good deal.
Cruse teaches its helpline workers good listening skills. Cruse staff typically aim to speak no more than for 20% of a call. Maintaining a ‘supportive silence’ is more important than desperately over-trying to say the ‘right thing’. Those grieving often want no more than to be listened to, especially about the person they have lost. This may not always be easy listening. Death can provoke a good deal of anger, and perhaps as common, a great deal of guilt. This needs ‘working through’ for those in pain, and grief is a pain.
0808 808 1677 Cruse.org.uk
Bereavement volunteers work at ‘enabling’, which helps the bereaved frame all the issues around their loss with their own context and perspective. My companion at the screening of ‘Radioactive’ had lost her father seven years ago. She said the film had brought up feelings for her of the void that could not be filled, and how the inability to fill it was like a physical sensation. And painful.
In “Death of England”, Spall’s character Michael is wrestling with the pain of having been present when his father died and the impotence of not being able to save him. The death becomes an issue for him about identity – what his father represented; was he a good man? And, is Michael filling his considerable shoes, given he has not taken on his father’s floristry business? Some of his father’s views sit uneasily with Michael, especially around race, given he has a black childhood pal, who has become his sister’s lover. He anguishes over his anger, confusion, and his guilt. He displays elements of denial and bargaining but we know he is miles from acceptance, although an intemperate outburst at the funeral proves to be somewhat cathartic.
The best passage, though, is Michael reconciling his dad’s racism and working class pride with the way that he perceives the world looked at them – father and son. His sister, Lisa, has made it to university and acquired “liberal leftie uni mates”. Michael manages to rage and philosophise in this expression of his grief…“Liberals who think a cockney accent is verbal suicide, a council flat destitution and whose greatest marker of success is how far they can live away from us. And you know what, this is going to make you all laugh, it really will, it wasn’t just you Dad hated, Dad hated himself!…I’m no better, Dad hated me cos I’m gutless. Because I would rather have ten pints than stand for soemthing, he wanted me to be better than him. How the hell was I supposed to do that, Dad?
Rosamund Pike being typically brilliant as the brilliant Marie Curie
Rosamund Pike’s Marie Curie is about a proud immigrant to sexist France, who has absolute faith in her science and her attitudes to life. Some of those had been shaped by the traumatic loss of her mother. Curie develops an abiding loathing of hospitals, because they had not saved the person she most loved, and an obsessive drive to utilise scientific discovery for the greater good of humankind. Her grief is contained and internalised. This is quite common, but it is rarely suppressed for long. In her case, though, she fought it with her scientific education as her weapon of choice. It led her into Pierre Curie’s orbit and society, and ultimately into a marriage and loving union.
Having found someone in whom she can park all the love and affections that she has not been able to express to her mother, she is then left bereft when his skull is crushed in an accident with a horse and carriage. Her only relief is work, and she later confides to her brilliant eldest, who also won a Nobel prize, that she was not much of a mother. She takes a lover, but he is the man who worked most closely with Pierre other than herself. She is grabbing physical love, but it looks like it was an affair more motivated by trying to recreate Pierre’s presence, rather than replacing him. The affair does not last.
It is not just film and theatre that has put the process and the idea of grief and grieving in front of me recently. In Tuesday’s newspapers, Britain’s favourite pop star vicar, Reverend Richard Coles, gave an interview about how he was adjusting after the sudden death of his partner, the Rev David Coles, who passed away in December. He explains how grief has so discombobulated him that he can often think his day is over and prepare himself to retire for the night only to discover it is a little after 6pm.
The passage that resonated with me most was, “The hardest part has been looking ahead. “I’ve had to subtract David from the future and that has taken all the future with it,” says Coles. “It’s a bit blank. I think: ‘What the fuck am I going to do? Play the accordion and go to bed at 10 past six, I guess. Of course, it’s not the end of my life. But it feels like it’s over sometimes.” I think that that is one of the most articulate expressions for something that can barely be articulated.
This blog is about my ‘Second Innings’. It is, I hope, quite celebratory and optimistic, but it is about adjusting to life after having lost something. In my case it was a career and a marriage. I was ready to leave both, and am on good terms with ex-colleagues and my ex-wife. My Second Innings is shaping up to be good. However these sorts of losses can be as disturbing and discomforting as the physical loss of someone close. In the past decade my old industry has made more people redundant than it has recruited. Many of my friends have had to adjust to the loss of high profile careers from which they enjoyed what it gave them, both financially and in self esteem.
My generation is one of the few cohorts where divorce statistics are still increasing, both in number and growth rate. Others are adjusting to being empty nesters. These are all emotional hits, and more than one of my female friends has had to cope with the acknowledgement that they will never have the child they had once assumed would be their right and destiny. All these griefs. I am not sure quite why these grief connections suddenly have presented themselves to me in the past week, but I feel sure that it may be important.
To conclude, though, on a happier note. First, whatever one may be grieving, or whomever in your family or social circle is having to deal with grief, know that talking helps and there are listeners, professional, trained volunteers or loving friends or family members. Talking is a remarkable therapy, and talking about loss will help. Second, to be upbeat as a conclusion, I went back to Richard Coles’s article. He is being swept by tides of overwhelming emotion currently and despite his charm and equanimity, he must be overwhelmed and quite broken at times. However, whilst he was at hospital, having to come to terms with his loss, a recently widowed woman gave him some advice: “She said, ‘You’re going to be mad, for a while. People will never be as nice to you again as they are now, so milk it for all you can.’” I hope that anyone reading this, who is grieving, will smile at that and think about how to ‘milk it’.
When your favourite film reviewer, step forward Mr Kermode, tells the members of his Church that a film is “perfect”, I take note. In a subsequent podcast he described it as “Shakespearian”, so now I was in that ‘more-than-intrigued’ mode. But, we all know critics sometimes are more impressed by their own sensibilities and do not always share our tastes. However, when a good friend, whom I met at the National to develop playwriting skills, and has a great sense of dramatic, cinematic and musical taste, tells you to go and watch it, you decide it must be worth seeing. Oh, and it bagged a few Oscars.
I went to see ‘Parasite’. And if you have been humming and hawing about it, and tend to avoid foreign language films, put your prevaricating to one side and get to the cinema. It is excellent. It has menace, but humour. It has satire, but authenticity. It has some modest sex, but is about human psychic connections. It is about class and inequality, but also aspiration and not resentment. Few of the characters are really likeable, but all the performances are excellent. And it keeps itself lodged in your mind, hours and days after watching it. This, I often regard, is the mark of a good film. Memorable, thought-provoking, and a little quirky.
It is the story of the impoverished Kim family, who by means of artifice and opportunism find roles working for the very affluent Park family. The Kim offspring become tutors, the father becomes the chauffeur and the mother becomes installed as housekeeper. Each role that they inherit requires more secrecy, more lies and increasingly dubious means of achieving their goals. Once they have elevated themselves, they find their actions, their past, and their social milieu threatening to haunt them. Protecting what they have becomes overwhelming and their moral sensibilities disappear. I will try not to spoil any more, but the significance of smells, fragrances and odours relative to secretive behaviours is brilliantly done.
I had had a bit of a cultural infusion this weekend because the previous evening I had been at the Young Vic to watch, ‘Nora: A Doll’s House’, which is Stef Smith’s remarkable update and adaptation of Ibsen’s great play. In this play there are three Noras, and two appear one hundred years apart (1919 and 2019) and the other in the late ‘sixties. Three women, but one Nora story. And their spouses and key social interactions are all repeated, albeit adapted by the era in which they appear. Nora, for love we think, has resorted to fraud to sustain her family and her social position. Her husband’s attitude to a worker he manages, triggers a blackmail threat and only the intervention of a long standing but unfamiliar old friend can possibly redeem the situation. Without any more spoiling, after all the original is quite well known, this version casts men, marriage and the patriarchy in a poor light.
The secretive pull of money
And so I found myself thinking about the connections in these two very impressive works of art that I had enjoyed. It struck me that they are all about secrets. Specifically secrets about money. Money contaminates the spirit, infects the soul and ill-managed, can and often does lead to unanticipated, but dire outcomes. Secrets and Lies. Secrets and Money. Money and Lies. What do these combinations beget?
Of course, cinema got there way before and even has a brilliant production called “Secrets and Lies”. This was Mike Leigh’s brilliant mid-90’s riff on identity, when a middle class adopted optometrist decides to find her birth mother and discovers a downwardly mobile white woman attempting to hold together a dysfunctional family. If you had been that optometrist would you have wanted to declare that you had found out about your heritage or would you have been drawn into secrecy?
Secrets and Lies
But we all have secrets, do we not? Many, we keep for altruistic reasons, preferring not to wound others with the truth. It may be as shallow as “yes, you look lovely in that”, or “that meal was wonderful”, to something more profound and uncomfortable, but we filter truth. Filtering it is a good thing. In Freudian terms our ego is managing the drives of the id and often presents them in a much altered, diluted way for modern society’s sensibilities. In some senses we all live a lie.
And I wonder about generational views of secrets. In a world of social media it has become fashionable to mock ‘over sharing’, albeit if the sharing is somewhat carefully curated photographic evidence of a ‘perfect life’. And the same critics of ‘over sharing’ tend to reflect that older generations were burdened by not being able to talk about their experiences. War veterans are obvious examples, but the 1960’s Nora is one such character, as she admits to herself that she did not want to have her three children, but that her opportunities were limited and contraceptive pills were not yet available and abortion was illegal.
In this article I will risk being charged with ‘over sharing’. I wonder about that pre- contraceptive pill, pre-abortion generation of women and what they have trained themselves to keep from revealing i.e. their truths. But are these not just the same drives that persuade Parasite’s Kim family to infiltrate the Park family, as various highly qualified employees? Similarly, Nora’s motives are to keep her family together and to uphold their social standing, whilst her husband recovers from a period of illness and a dearth of income. The secrets are not inherently bad, but somehow the keeping of them is. It leads to lies, to protect secrets, and more and more unpalatable behaviours to protect from the risk of discovery.
We are practised in deluding others, but for no better reasons than we want others to see ‘our best selves’ and in many cases, we indulge in the necessity of deluding ourselves. When I started in the City I was struck by the confidence and style of many people working on the Stock Market floor. I envied them and I wanted some of whatever it was they had. I became attentive to modes of dress – Church’s shoes, double-cuff shirts, silk ties, and to conversational ticks. I could not join in the Henley conversation, or the Oxbridge references, and I realised I needed to learn more about horse racing, but I adapted. I thought about my speech patterns and choices of words. I may not have kept it a secret, but I certainly did not advertise my state comprehensive school education and my lack of university experience.
Talent and deception
The good news is that I was not sociopathic and I did not develop murderous tendencies, but I have always felt some sympathy for Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr.Ripley’, as played so brilliantly by Matt Damon, who wants to inhabit other social worlds, and ultimately chose to inhabit another’s identity. Ripley is a con-artist, but it is love of money and what he thinks it will buy him – status and social acceptance – that motivates his deceptions. They start small, but the secrets become overwhelming and lies are needed to hide the secrets until his solution is murder.
One of literature and film’s great deluders and keepers of secrets is Mr Micawber. In the new David Copperfield film he is brilliantly portrayed by Peter Capaldi. He attempts with his speech and his dress to affect some signs of gentility, but he is always and repeatedly undone. Despite his trappings and affectations he is undone by the smell of poverty. In ‘Parasite’ the inability to escape poverty’s odour is something that becomes a recurrent theme.
Mr Park likes that when Mr Kim drives him he ‘does not cross the line’ of over familiarity, but regrets that his personal fragrance leaks into the back seat and so invades his personal space. His son is the only member of the Park family to be suspicious of the Kims, as they acquire the roles in the household – an apparently unconnected quartet. He comments that they all smell the same. When Mr.Park is trying to describe what he can smell, he notes that it is the sort of smell one notices on the subway and his frivolous wife notes that she has not taken a subway in a very long time.
Result misery
Smell is part of identity, and these films, plays and books all deal with identity and the attempt to shape it and change it. Other wonderful examples include ‘Vanity Fair’, pretty much all of Dickens and ‘Les Miserables’ as Hugo’s hero cannot escape the taint of ‘Prisoner 24601’. We often aspire to create an identity for ourselves and desire to be in ‘better’ society, but it is the thought of having it exposed and of being dropped that creates the miseries of secrets, money and lies. I connect this with the work of psychologists Tversky and Kahneman, much of which is repeated in Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ book, which highlights loss aversion. It is especially sensitive in the realm of material wealth and social status. What we do not have we price more modestly than that which we fear will be taken from us.
I had a particular fear of redundancy once I had started work. When it came, after a 35 year career, it turned out to be a relief. That was only because something much worse had already happened to me. I was dismissed from a role that I enjoyed and thought I did well. The charge was ‘gross misconduct’. I can barely write or repeat that. At the time it seems likely I was suffering from burnout. I certainly kept my sense of work pressure secret, even when my wife told me my behaviour was ‘manic’.
Subsequently, I am certain I had a nervous breakdown. I have only very recently been able to admit that to myself. But it was all tied up with the importance (to me, at the time) of money/status and as I had reinvented myself, it became important to keep secrets. I understand the motivations of the Kims, I feel for Nora and her dilemmas, I know what Ripley felt when he thought that he was secretly despised for not being made of quite the ‘right stuff’. And I had a Micawber determination to make income and expenditure balance – and I was a little luckier than him.
In a world of growing inequality, it is important that writers and film makers keep asking us to see the worth in all strata of society and understand the pressures on people whose pretensions and affectations we are apt to ridicule. I thought about Freud and secrets. In 1866, shame descended upon the Freud family. Joseph Freud, Sigmund’s uncle, was sentenced to ten years in prison for dealing in counterfeit rubles. I imagine it was one of several events that interested his nephew in secrets, and what secrets were revealed by dreams. His writings refer to the ‘veil of secrecy’ and it may be that he realised that repressed memories, the source of anxieties, are in fact secrets from oneself.
Oh, and staying with Freud. Parapraxis or Freudian slips – I kept wanting to write Paradise and not Parasite when discussing the Oscar-winning film. I wonder what that reveals? How many secrets do you keep from your family or your partner? Is money a theme? And, do you have the dream of nakedness in a public space? – it is about being stripped of all affectation and all your secrets. It is absolute revelation. And few people want everything about themselves to be known!
We are all familiar with evaluation – professionally and privately. An evaluation psyche has developed in the digital age. We rank everything from taxi rides, to telecom engineers, to BnB accommodation providers, rail tickets and restaurant booking systems. It provokes a reaction. Is it a good one? An instinctive answer might be that it is somewhere between moderate value for someone else, to a ‘necessary evil’.
Learning and Development (L&D) in the workplace will expand in the next decade. Why? Because the nature of work will change (portfolio careers, more freelancing, extensive remote working, adopting sustainable principles, changes in computing power, development of a knowledge economy that is independent of software processing, and much more), which means organisations need to train employees effectively. Knowing that the training is both effective, productive and represents well spent investment is the domain of evaluation.
Evaluation is challenged by workplace change but paradoxically becomes more, not less relevant, the more difficult the evaluation becomes. Therefore, the main opportunities and challenges in L&D in the next decade in the workplace, are in the future of evaluation. Nielsen et al., (2018) describe a “significant need” for evaluative thinking.
This essay will review what evaluation is, some of the debates around its applicability and value; why it is often more of an afterthought than germane to the whole L&D cycle, and how it will adapt to the new opportunities. It will review some of the many models in place and consider from which perspective should one assess it. Provider, payer or individual participant? It will assert that Evaluation, as a distinct field of expertise in the social sciences, needs to resist attempts at genericisation. A good organisational outcome has a need for a multiplicity of evaluation methods.
Evaluation should be the collection and synthesis of evidence. Russ-Eft and Preskill (2009) note that it should not be “an afterthought”, but a planned activity intended for enhancing knowledge and improving decision making processes. This observation is because traditional learning cycles tend to start with training needs analysis, then concentrate on the delivery of learning and learning transfer. Only subsequent to all of that is Evaluation treated as relevant. This is an unwelcome legacy of government level (HM Treasury, 2003) approaches to human resource development, in the use of the ROAMEF cycle. The acronym stands for Rationale-Objectives-Appraisal-Monitoring-Evaluation-Feedback, and encourages the idea that evaluation is discrete and has no value early in training cycles.
Without evaluation L&D has little to demonstrably benefit an organisation. In a ‘knowledge economy’ the well-worn phrase is that “people are our greatest asset”. They are a wasting asset without L&D interventions. The efficacy of those interventions is articulated by evaluation procedures. Just as the most sophisticated software programme is only as good as the data inputs, so an evaluation programme is only as good as the necessity of what it measures.
A key issue is for what or whom do we evaluate? At the national level for government policy making? At the organisational level? At the work team level, or for the individual participant? Therein lies conflicts. This paper argues for pragmatism and pluralism. There are so many evaluation models, some of which are described below, and all of which come in for some criticism, but most offer at least something of value.
What is evaluation? In the organisational context, Preskill and Torres (1999) defined it as “an ongoing process for investigating and understanding critical organisation issues”. The important word is ‘ongoing’. Evaluations are not always carried out, and when they are done, they are often ineffective and ineffectual. The next ten years needs to see the link broken between learner enjoyment on a learning course, which often is reflected in the evaluation ‘reactionnaire’ he or she is given immediately afterwards, and the analysis of learning transfer, and the organisational benefit relative to its cost of provision.
In short, current Evaluation finds itself preoccupied with the providers’ presentational skills and wit, rather than his/her ability to impart learning that can and will be retained. Evaluations tend to favour the short-term impact over medium term, because it is both easier to collect the data, and requires less resourcing. This is both challenge and opportunity. Good evaluation works on pre-and post-training phases, and gives greater weight to testimonies, interviews, quantitative surveys than reactionnaires.
So, evaluation has value, but must avoid genericising. In a future where work modes are changing and the knowledge economy takes us away from old concepts like Taylorism and efficiency, to enhancing and deploying intellectual capital, how one evaluates interventions will grow in importance. Without evaluation, the success or otherwise of L&D intervention remains unmeasured, and therefore undervalued.
Russ-Eft and Preskill (2005) highlighted that Evaluation is still overly dependent on the Kirkpatrick four levels approach. In a study for the IES, Tamkin et al (2002) concluded that whilst Kirkpatrick, which was first published in 1959, might be a little outdated and has some issues over scales of measurement, that subsequent ‘models’ of evaluation typically rest on its foundations. Amongst their proposals were evaluations of each of these stages: – assessment of training need, learning process, learning outcome, behavioural change, impact on the organisation, organisational outcomes. This is impressive, but resourcing means many organisations have found this advice impractical. It has led to a distillation down to more financial based metrics, especially RoI (return on investment), as exemplified by Russ-Eft and Preskill (2005), but first introduced by Phillips (1994).
What are Kirkpatrick’s four levels? They are reaction; learning; behaviour and results. Reactions are assessed by questionnaires, sometimes called ‘happy sheets’, and learning through performance tests. Behaviours are observed, leading to claims of subjectivity and bias, and results are comparing costs with returns. Issues have emerged regarding causal relationships between each link and the fact that the first three evaluation levels are about the individual, but the fourth in organisational.
Ward et al, (1970) were looking at management training specifically and devised CIRO (Context, Input, Reaction, Outcome) which was the first material shift from Kirkpatrick. It had a much greater focus on the objectives and purpose of the training; data collection was broadened and an appreciation that the strength or otherwise of the external economy would impact training, was understood. Inputs were costings for materials and room hire, but also evolved to consider opportunity costs of not having managers at their desks.
Stufflebeam et al (2003) echoed CIRO with their ‘Educational Evaluation’. Their preferred acronym was CIPP. Here it stands for Context, Input, Process and Product, all to be evaluated independently. Its strength is that it can be used in both formative and summative ways and leads away from the genericisation that some models impose. Gullikson at al., (2019) considered evaluator education, training and competencies using the CIPP model. As they concluded, there is much work to be done “to delineate standards for quality in both education and practice, to identify the inputs and processes most effective for addressing those needs, and to document its ultimate impacts.” An opportunity.
Subsequent models include Context Evaluation (Newby, 1992), which was the first to attempt to avoid a ‘one size fits all’ genericisation difficulty, and Learning Outcomes (Kraiger et al., 1993). Pulley (1994) introduced ‘Responsive Evaluation’, which shifted the onus to organisational ‘decision makers’ to establish what they wanted and how it could be achieved. Preskill and Torres (1999) introduced ‘Evaluative Enquiry’, with a bias toward dialogue and reflection in evaluation, but probably the most significant change or adaptation post-Kirkpatrick was the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1996). This attempted to set co-ordinates for each of financial returns, customer satisfaction feedback and internal processes and values.
Whilst some issues have been resolved with refining evaluation processes, such as there being no clear link between learner reactions and subsequent evidence of behavioural change (Warr et al., 1999), many questions still need better answers. Is learning all about the individual and his or her motivation? Are there environmental impacts? How crucial is line-manager sponsorship? Is goal setting useful or counter-productive? Are there conflicts of interest for the collectors of evaluation data?
Evaluation needs to walk away from the assumption of linear effects. Obviously, some evaluation reflects a need to simply getting it right eg fire service safety drills and handling hazardous materials in chemical plants, but most L&D is about incremental learning and its application in the workplace. A world of input learning, output financial returns, is unhelpfully binary and ill informs us. Outputs will need to become more about how learning begets new learning, and how it inspires the learner, which converts into greater workplace motivation, which reduces costs from longer employee tenure, and fewer employee acquisition costs. The longer employees stay, and the more they interact with fellow learners across the business, the more cross fertilisation of ideas takes place and the stronger workplace networks become.
How that feeds an RoI assessment will be one of the challenges evaluators of the future need to take on. Organisations need to be adaptive in rapidly changing markets, with rapidly changing technologies. The same adaptability will need to apply to L&D programmes. This is why evaluation must take place at all stages of the L&D cycle, from the front-end needs assessments to any organisational RoI calculation.
As the workplace changes and evolves, the (re)training of staff will become critical. Evaluating that training more rigorously than hitherto, will be more of a necessity than a ‘nice to have’. One example is the banking industry. Its traditional infrastructure is potentially undermined by blockchain, its traditional materials, including cash, are threatened by crypto currencies. Its corporate customers may have to adjust to governments equalising tax policies on debt and equity, which would have huge implications for highly profitable investment banking fixed income businesses. Its retail customers are not known to it other than via a mobile phone number, an e-mail address, and an account. Building trust in a world of analogue anonymity is going to require training new generations of bankers or delegating to artificial intelligence. As data protection becomes more sensitive and cyber-crime more innovative, bankers will need to be more regularly assessed by regulators. All of these elements suggest Evaluation will become more significant and probably outsourced to specialists rather than a qualitative feedback collated by in-house HR professionals, and given insufficient data processing post intervention.
What this paper has presented is an assertion that Evaluation represents the main opportunity, whilst acknowledging it has challenges, for L&D over the next decade. It has noted the shifting patterns of work and of worker loyalty. It has considered the weighting accorded to digitally delivered learning content at the expense of trainer-led learning, inevitably for cost considerations. This may be a false economy. It has reviewed a near sixty-year history of models and processes and concluded that pragmatism and pluralism must prevail.
It has noted that evaluation wears different clothes if it is in the halls of government and working at a national level, compared with private industry seeking competitive advantage over a near-peer. Philosophically, the models considered for the Evaluation industry are allied to instructor-led training. In a decade, the majority of training will be via digital provision. It may well be inferior, but it will be dominant. It means that it should be evaluated differently.
This paper has suggested that the future will learn lessons from the consumer society that we currently have. That means that L&D provision and its evaluation will be increasingly bespoke. L&D programmes will be part of every workers’ lifelong learning approach and will mix mandatory training, often regulatory or safety driven, with more creative career development offers. Again, these will require different forms of evaluation.
Evaluation will cease to be a reporting device, but will become more dynamic. It needs to decide if it is a service industry or a field in inquiry. Currently it has a transdisciplinary diversity which may be more of a hindrance in getting it truly valued, than a help. With algorithmic understanding, it will discern not just what has been learned and what proficiencies have been acquired, but also where the learner has shown uncommon skills or independence of mind. This will be critical in a world becoming more familiar with neurodiversity as a positive. Consequently, evaluations will be dynamic and prompt learners to pursue specific, personalised L&D programmes, much as music playlists are curated for consumers today.
The next generation will be about moving beyond ‘testing the learning’. It will evaluate broader outcomes. It will evaluate over extended time periods, with a requirement to capture indirect outcomes such as employee satisfaction, leading to the indirect cost saving over lower staff turnover, and to the unquantifiable benefit of cross-departmental idea fertilisation when teams come together to participate in L&D interventions. Challenging though this will be, it represents enormous opportunity for the subset of L&D that is least well applied and understood today.
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When I embarked on my Second Innings I saw it as, at least initially, as an exchange of financial income for time. My First Innings was well remunerated, but incredibly time constrained. Now, for the time being, I am not earning an income, but I have the riches of time. One of the things that time has given me is the chance to appreciate podcast and podcasters. After I had accepted my redundancy I took a trip to Europe – a sort of geriatric’s interrail trip. Lots of lengthy rail travel and walking alone amid beautiful cities lends itself to listening to music and to the spoken word. It was my introduction to podcasts and was just twenty months or so ago. Now I cannot imagine a week without several regular podcasts informing and entertaining me.
I knew I had time to spend leisurely and that I would not read every time I jumped aboard a train, or dined alone, or settled down to sleep in a hotel room. I had read about the success of a small number of podcasts and was intrigued to see why a couple had won awards. The first of these was ‘Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy‘. I admired Freddie Flintoff as a cricketer, but he had not struck me as especially entertaining or thought-provoking, likewise Robbie Savage, and whilst I knew a little about Matthew Syed, he had yet to become quite the well-known journalist, author and public speaker that he is now.
One of the things that podcasts have done is to launch new careers for participants and to allow others to escape stereotyping. They are a ‘Second Innings’ vehicle. And now Flintoff has developed into an impressive all round broadcaster and Savage is hosting his own shows. Syed is writing brilliantly for child and adult audiences and maintaining a journalistic career, but I suspect is now earning most from a rapid appreciation in the cost of his public speaking bills.
I had listened in, with low expectations. Within a couple of episodes I was hooked. Hilarity prevailed in every release, but always balancing some thoughtful considerations and often a willingness to express controversial or, at the very least, unfashionable ideas. The bar room banter style suited, but is actually unusual. Most podcasts are quite cerebral; of the ones I have followed, I notice a bias to female presenters and to a conversational style that is a couple of steps, at least, removed from blokey banter. Despite that, research from Edison and Nielsen suggests (in the US) that the male/female listenership is weighted 56:44.
Why have they become such a phenomenon? Why does the format work so well? What appeals to me? And what are the industry stats? And what would I recommend? Firstly, what are they? Defined as “a short term audio file”, the term podcast is believed to have been given life by Guardian writer, Ben Hammersley in 2004, who blended I-pod and broadcast to name this new form of entertainment.
Why such a phenomenon? I think this has to do with the format lending intimacy. Almost all podcasts are structured as one to one, or roundtable conversations, just as one might have over the inner table or in the pub. Although I have not met many of the podcasters that I admire, it is certainly true that listening to them has made me feel I ‘know’ them better, and I have a certainty that I would want to share a drink with them. Some of these are surprises to me. One of my first podcast experiences was with newly retired footballer Joey Barton. He called it ‘The Edge‘. Barton’s regular indiscipline in his playing days, and his nomadic career, as well as a ‘bad boy’ back pages caricature, persuaded me that I would loathe him.
Within a couple of episodes I wanted to share a bevy and ask him about his experiences in France, as a non-linguist, and the autodidact within him, as he transformed his thinking by studying Philosophy. His upbringing was tough and he is a tribute to working class people with an attitude to make their own way. He was not the man I had imagined, and I hope he is a huge success as a football manager. Something similar happened to me when I started listening to Alastair Campbell and his daughter, Grace’s ‘Football, Feminism and Everything in Between‘. I was no Campbell fan until I had heard him as a podcast guest describe his mental health and alcoholism battles, and his passion for Burnley FC. I would willingly share a pint with him these days.
I discovered a then relatively little known radio journalist called James O’Brien. He now hosts ‘Full Disclosure‘, which is his second podcast platform. I know he polarises opinion, but I am a fan, but it was his guests that helped me shift some of my unsubstantiated opinions. One episode, with Plan B, had me close to tears as he talked about PRU’s (Pupil Referral Units) that he had been in, and now supported with his own money. Russell Kane was another who talked candidly about educational underachievement and then teaching himself by using word cards and the support of a university student girlfriend. Staying with education and difficult school experiences, was Akala describing his first experience of seeing a knife attack in his neighbourhood, and his Saturday schooling by his community, after a racist teacher at his regular school had demoted him to a ‘remedial’ set.
Each podcast typically has a website where episodes are archived and can be sourced for future listening with ease. Podcasts can be produced by just about anyone wanting to share and communicate with the world. They are not exclusive to Big Name Media, which I think is another reason they resonate so effectively. Listeners, like me, often imagine themselves at the mic. Or perhaps that is just my vanity and fantasy. Apple was in at the start but now competition is hotting up and Spotify has made a big pitch to dominate the podcasting scene. Mercifully, for the consumer, ‘subscribing’ to podcasts is free and delivered efficiently to one’s phone or laptop consistently.
Because podcast websites usually have ways for listeners to leave comments about each episode, and literally enter into a discussion with other listeners, podcasts are like a community of individuals sharing a common interest. Listening is a singular experience, but being a listener is communal, if that makes sense. What else gives them such appeal? And there is huge appeal. Over 250,000 shows have been added in the time since I became a convert, meaning over 800,000 can now be enjoyed, with a library of over 30m episodes. Smartphone usage is what has driven the growth.
Podcasts are exercises in freedom. From a broadcasting clock; from a broadcast network’s schedule; from the content thought-police. Paradoxically modern and old-fashioned, the conversational style may say something about social animals that we are, needing a sense of contact, that we are not getting through the amount of time now being spent staring at screens. Also, in this world’s increasingly focused obsession with ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’, podcasts are remarkable in offering an opportunity to maximise the value of time. How many hours a day does one consume doing a commute, a workout, a dog walk or a household chore, that can be augmented by audio entertainment, the aural stimuli that podcasts offer?
What else? Well, it seems there is evidence that there is some science to it all. A Stuart McGurk GQ article in July 2019, highlighted a Freakonomics podcast that looked at the impact of a podcast neurologically. Using an MRI machine it found that every part of the brain lit up for the listeners (listening to an episode of The Moth). That meant parts of the brain processing sound and language, but also logic and numeracy. A podcast seems to be a literal brain-boost.
I was hardly an early adopter but it seems that there is huge room for growth. If one defines their popularity as the percentage of the population that listens to at least one podcast each month, then South Korea leads the way at 60%. The UK, at 18% is ranked below Sweden, Italy, France and Germany in Europe, and Australia, the US, Canada and Japan, globally. My Second Innings has allowed me time, and I spend much of it walking around my beautiful city, listening to an eclectic conversational mix. If you have time and inclination, the following are amongst my favourites.
Nothing trumps ‘Desert Island Discs‘, especially now it is being beautifully steered by Lauren Laverne. Over my near six decades I have been an occasional rather than frequent Radio 4 listener, but the podcast format suits its programmes. I am now a regular listener to ‘Seriously‘, to ‘In Our Time‘, to ‘A Point of View‘, to ‘All in the Mind‘, to ‘Thinking Allowed‘ and to ‘Great Lives‘. I also dip in, occasionally to ‘Word of Mouth‘ and ‘One to One‘.
I get my news from the FT’s daily output and from ‘The Economist’, which has a great podcast called ‘The Intelligence‘. But current affairs and news has best been fed to me over the past 18 months by the four stars of ‘Brexitcast‘. It is witty and informative, and has been a great career platform for each of the quartet. My culture comes from the FT’s ‘Culture Call‘ and ‘Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review‘. I am also getting educated in classical music by Clemmie Burton-Hill, who hosts the least pretentious and most charming lists of curated music for intriguing guests, who claim to have little understanding of the classical canon. It is a Radio 3 podcast and called ‘Classical Choice‘.
My son introduced me to the Guardian’s ‘Audio Long Reads‘, and I satisfied my need to stay in touch with the world’s of commerce and banking by being amused by the ‘problems’ on ‘Dear HBR’, from Harvard. When I want to believe that I am going to turn ideas into real plays I get inspiration from the Royal Court’s ‘Playwright’s Podcast‘. I like to hear from writers so I go back to Radio 4 for ‘Books and Authors‘, and enjoy Penguin’s ‘The Penguin Podcast‘. Mariella Frostrup was wonderful hosting ‘Books to Live By‘. The boost has been to both my physical and mental health. Now, wanting to catch up with my latest episodes, I find it easiest to go out of doors and start a long walk. I am killing two birds. I know I am blessed to have the time to listen to so much stimulating content, and other lives are more time constrained, but I encourage everyone to acquire the podcast habit.
On Monday night a little after nine pm most things were right in my world. I was in a pub, nursing a very decent pale ale and watching multiple screens displaying my beloved Hammers, who were a goal to the good against London rivals, Arsenal. To say they were playing well, never mind the fabled ‘West Ham way’, would have been stretching truths and the veracity of my descriptive prowess, but they were winning. In a nine minute spell, just as I contemplated another pint to celebrate the win over the local rivals, the team was cut apart. It conceded three goals. As the Hammers anthem reminds me weekly, “fortune’s always hiding”. Yes, I have “looked everywhere”.
For the first, the team’s ‘shape’ was gone and the opposition waltzed through. For the second, a team almost as bereft of confidence as the Hammers, contrived to deliver a world class finish from a previously season-long impotent striker. For the last, the hitherto anonymous, but world-class, Arsenal centre-forward, produced his world-class moment. The appeal of the next pint palled and I walked home to rely on the BBC website for reports of a West Ham revival that I knew was not going to come. I walked home, cold and miserable and contemplating what it means to ‘be a Hammer’.
It means a weekly exercise in being philosophical, mostly a Stoic. The last major competition the Hammers gave me to cheer was almost forty years ago. Even before then, there were few trophies won, and the most famous fixture the club had played may well have been when being defeated 2-0. That happened in the first football match at the old Wembley Stadium, as Bolton Wanderers won 1923’s FA Cup, and the intervention of a horse called ‘Billy’ is what is most remembered. And yet, every season Hammers fans truly believe that glory beckons. I know a number of clubs fans feel the same way, but I wonder how many feel it as passionately as Hammers, with a concomitant lack of reality.
It should all have been so different for me. I could not have been anything but a Hammer. My mother’s family lived near the old Boleyn Ground, in Plaistow. In the year I was born, in 1964, ‘we’ (I have always wondered about the appropriateness of speaking like I was part of the team) won in England. A first for ‘us’. The following year, ‘we’ beat Europe, beating a Munich side at Wembley. And then, as every football fan knows, ‘we’ beat the World, again at Wembley. England were crowned world champions, and Hammers players contributed all four goals, before our greatest captain lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy. I may have been little older than two, but I am sure I was already singing ‘Bubbles’.
As I grew up, a couple of FA Cup wins maintained my faith, albeit I was developing my philosophical skills, when ‘treated’ to three relegations before I had reached my thirtieth birthday. I left school in 1982, and since then, I have had one FA Cup Final to excite me (almost predictably lost, after a last minute intervention of a world class strike from distance, from the opposition’s talismanic midfielder), and ‘celebrated’ the win of something called the Intertoto Cup.
But I am as mad as all the Hammers fans, and I truly think some glory is coming ‘our’ way. Even after the abject display against Arsenal, which followed a toothless performance at Wolves, and a growing campaign against the manager, I think that this might be ‘our year’ for the FA Cup. Why? Heaven only knows. Recent cup campaigns have ended in ignominy against clubs from lower leagues, and we have to go to Gillingham for the start of the 2020 journey next month. I like our manager, but the tolerance of our fans to contemplate the non-delivery of our implausibly high hopes, is ever shortening.
He has been one of the most successful coaches and managers of the past quarter century across Europe, but somehow my team is contriving to make him look clueless. I hope he stays, but my fellow Hammers are probably now favouring his exit. When one looks at clubs below you in the table in the hope that they do not win, instead of looking up at the clubs which you might overtake, the mood is telling. Pre-season hopes of “challenging for Europe” are now focused on avoiding relegation, even though the season is not yet half played.
I think the madness of hope that consumes Hammers fans might be something to do with the East End heritage. From the pride of the industrial, working class background that was truly ‘forged’ in many senses of the word, when the club was formed from Thames Ironworks, to the extraordinary resilience of the Blitz spirit displayed in the 1940’s, Hammers had ‘bouncebackability’ before that ludicrous word gained currency. It’s origin is former Crytal Palace manager, Iain Dowie, but recall that he had made his name as a player when making 60 plus Premier League appearances for, yes, the Hammers. As I read the anguish expressed by the dashing of more Hammers hopes across my twitter feed, I thought of all the many times I have contemplated Hammers’ need to bounce back.
It is a family thing for us. My grandad used to queue patiently during the week for tickets, and my dad took us to games. I remember that wins were rare, even then, and celebrated for their surprise element as much as their quality. My brother has even trained at Chadwell Heath with the first team during his cricket career off seasons, and I have now passed it on this curious association/infliction to my son. As a very young boy he claimed to be a Liverpool fan, like his best school pal, but I taught him better. After all, what pleasures would have been his if he had supported Liverpool?
Being a Hammer means subscribing to a style of play – the ‘West Ham way’, and genuinely believing that ‘the Academy of Football’ has an east London post code. Yet, the record of FA Youth Cup wins is of no note, and the progression of West Ham youngsters to the peak of the game is not exceptional. Good, but not exceptional. I saw Michael Carrick coming through and could see he was a little special; Ferdinand and Lampard too, but I was surprised Joe Cole’s trickery made it all the way to a distinguished international career. Of the most recent Youth Cup winners we have had, the best talents have not progressed and have been sold (Oxford) or loaned out (Samuelson). I hope for the emergence of Johnson, Coventry and Holland and one of the goalkeepers, but the record is poor, with Rice (acquired from Chelsea) and Noble, being the only players to emerge, to be established first teamers, in the past couple of decades.
As for the style of play, it has frequently been dire, one paced, and overly reliant on going long to big centre forwards. Iain Dowie may not have been our most distinguished centre forward but he is evidence that Andy Carroll was not a one-off, whose limited footballing skills dictated our playing style. In fact, from Geoff Hurst to David Cross to Marlon Harewood, our most productive forwards tend to have been muscular, and strong in the air. The Macavennies, Cottees, Goddards and ‘Pop’ Robsons are not as typical as we might like to pretend.
So why the love affair? And it is love; to keep going back for more, believing that the highs will always outweigh the lows, and that some reciprocal appreciation is just about to be delivered. For me, it is the players. Even players who gave their best days to other clubs and were signed as the sun set on their careers, (Stuart Pearce, Liam Brady, Ian Wright, Jimmy Greaves, Teddy Sheringham) gave me joy when doing something productive in a Hammers shirt.
We all have our favourite players, but true fans of any club, especially West Ham’s, appreciate those who were not household names but occasional key contributors. When I was a boy I was willing Johnny Ayris, a winger, who only ever scored twice, and Ade Coker, who scored on debut but played ten times in five years before leaving for North America, to break through. I felt for Peter Grotier, understudying Bobby Ferguson in goal for years. I think there is something about being a Hammer, and wanting the reserves and understudies to come good.
My favourites are easy: Sir Trevor Brooking, who was somehow ‘Sir Trevor’ to me long before he was knighted, and Billy Bonds and Frank Lampard snr. Somehow they represent ‘real’ West Ham to me, but Bonds and Lampard were uncompromising and not as obsessed with any ‘West Ham way’ as the fans have long been. My brother tells me that we saw the great Bobby Moore play, but to my shame I cannot remember him. All film I see of him in a Hammers shirt makes me proud he is our historic talisman, but of his career I recall best, his slip in the game against Poland that ended his international career, and then him playing against us in the 1975 FA Cup Final, representing Fulham. As Bonds and Lampard and Brooking aged, I aligned myself with Alvin Martin. I thought Dean Ashton was going to be our best ever forward until injury on England duty ended that hope, and I loved the energy of Scott Parker. Declan Rice impresses me, but I doubt he will be a career Hammer like Bonds, Brooking, Lampard or Martin.
Less fashionable ‘favourites’ for me were Graham Paddon (what a left foot) and Alan Dickens, who wilted after being sold, having had one season when he truly looked like the ‘new Brooking’. I don’t share the tribal antipathy that many of my fellow Hammers have for those that made their name and went on to prosper elsewhere. On the contrary, I remember admiring Paul Ince tackling in an Arsenal match on the edge of our penalty area and then being near the left touch line when the keeper kicked his subsequent clearance, and winning the header. I was a huge fan.
Ince, had he stayed, would have been the new Bonds, but the game was changing and he made a huge success of his abilities. I loved him overcoming his initial difficulties in Italy, and his warrior like man of the match display when England beat Netherlands on their way to the European Championships semi finals in ’96. Few of my fellow Hammers are Jermain Defoe fans either, as their tribal loyalties cloud football judgements. But, what a player. I saw him turn a Newcastle defence inside out at Upton Park one Saturday, and score a breathtaking and audacious goal. Discovering the ‘next Defoe’ very quickly would bring me and Hammers everywhere, great comfort
The Hammers have employed some great international talents. The East End has long been London’s home for immigrant populations, not that that is what drove footballing talent east, but I have loved witnessing the talents of van Der Elst, di Canio, Tevez, Payet, Lanzini, Anderson and Diop and I despaired that we demonstrated such football unintelligence by not building around Mascherano, who duly demonstrated his world class abilities in every subsequent team that used him. In the first matches I watched, Clyde Best represented some international magic for us.
Hammers invest huge hopes in international stars and are very unforgiving of them. Haller and Fornals are the newest signings and I predict that if they do not settle in east London, that they will have very impressive careers. They look like very gifted players to me, and need to be adopted by the fans, and have a team designed to play to their strengths, not be forced to play a system that drags them out of position. But while Hammers are proud and incredibly loyal to the club, they can be very fickle about individuals and extremely unforgiving. We revere players and mangers, and within a fortnight we castigate the same people. I read the twitter accounts with glee as I watch the same contributors contradict themselves regularly as they shift their loyalties and appreciation. But East End passions are what they are, and they come because Hammers fans want heroes, and despair when heroes fall short.
The bottom line is that there does not seem to be a winning culture at the club. Even our finest managers dealt with relegation, and fortune is truly hiding from us, frequently. In my fifty plus years I can only think of three or four managers I did not want to get the job, or did not like their style and team selections (Macari, Grant, Allardyce). All the others I willed to succeed. Many delivered brief periods of optimism (Redknapp, Pardew, Zola, Bilic) but being a Hammer is as much about abject displays (my low was the Play-Off final in Cardiff against Crystal Palace) as thrilling wins. That may be the West Ham way.
Last thought, and also not quite in keeping with many Hammers’ fans sentiments. I like London Stadium. I get in and out quickly, and I have good sight lines for the games. Upton Park was less comfortable, with dreadful visuals and slow queues to get in to the ground and to reach the seating. My opinion is not wildly shared, but being a Hammer is to know that most other Hammers disagree with you. Even when there are around 60,000 at London Stadium, the thing I note, and love, is the lack of consistency in opinion about our manager, the ground, the team selection, the transfer policy and so much more. Being a Hammer means having strong football (and often other) opinions, and an absurdly unjustified sense of hope. I think that is no bad thing, so I am proud to be a Hammer
The start of ‘a thing’ as “OK Boomer” is used to swat away opinion in New Zealand’s Parliament
I am a boomer. I have a Millenial child and two generation Zers. Recently, thanks to a couple of pieces in newspapers, (the FT and The Observer), I have been introduced to the phrase “ok boomer”. It appears to be a signifier of tension between my generation and those of my children. It was used by the 25 year old politician, Chloe Swarbrick, in the picture above, in a New Zealand debate on climate change.
Last week, as I walked to my university, the phrase and its implications came up again when I listened to Alastair and Grace Campbell’s podcast (‘football, feminism and everything in between’), as they interviewed Julia Gillard, the Welsh-born, former Prime Minister of Australia and also now, a podcast host. She talked about Swarbrick and about her own famous speech in which she took down a political rival for misogyny, patriarchy and patronising behaviours.
This weekend I have spent some time in the company of my youngest, also meeting her boyfriend and being introduced to three of her housemates, so I have had some ‘Zer’ input. I thought I should try to understand this whole generational strife, if that is what it is, as part of trying to be a good parent. My starting point is; surely intergenerational tension is a typical and a good thing? It is not exclusively, a boomer and their offspring, thing. And, is it really ‘a thing’?
Back to the journalism. Sonia Sodha’s Observer piece builds up a case for intergenerational anger. The FT’s equivalent, which was published over a week ago, was by India Ross. Sodha’s starts with the strap “wealthy older people aren’t evil – they just need to be talked into paying their dues”. Interesting; so this is not generational, it only applies to wealthy people in my age cohort. I have had a great deal of fortune in my life, but over a three and a half decade career, which gave me plenty of financial fortune, I was taxed somewhere close to half of my earnings most of the time. I chose to invest in private education and in private medical support. I am not asking to be regarded as some sort of paragon of virtue, but I feel I have paid some ‘dues’.
She helps me by explaining that #OKBoomer has gone viral, with over 730m uses in the past week alone. I think that that means it is “a thing”. She describes it as a “collective face palm from Generation Z”, addressing “the raw deal on housing, the climate crisis and pensions bequeathed to them by their parents and grandparents”. Hmm. It does seem a bit unspecific and like a teenager’s sulky “everything is your fault.” This panders to users of the ‘snowflake’ epithet.
Are boomers solely responsible for climate crisis? What about Henry Ford’s generation, or the Wright Brothers? As for housing; is it more about scarcity of land, ill-designed planning laws and light taxation policies on unearned income? Political parties of more than one hue have contributed to these issues. Is it really a boomer thing?
She may well be right that those born in the 1980s and 90s “might be the first generation in a long time to be worse off than their parents”, but surely it depends on the measurement. This children have greater longevity, brilliant and more widespread communications, faster modes of transport, and computing power that means they can source libraries and encyclopaedias of knowledge on the move. It is different wealth, but definitely not an example of being “worse off”.
India Ross’s FT piece claims that the take up of the phrase to disparage us oldies has led to newspaper editorials castigating the young (I missed all of them) and that offices have threatened to ban the phrase citing ‘age discrimination’. Really? One US radio jock is quoted as saying that boomer is the “N-word of ageism”. Give me strength. Apparently his tweet has now been deleted. I should think so. Nonetheless the article attempts to line people up in the ‘them’ and ‘us’ columns characteristic of modern social and political debates played out in the twittersphere.
It seems that I am betraying my generation if I admire some of what Great Thunberg says, and has achieved, and likewise, Antonia Ocasio-Cortez. Ms Ross is very smart to observe that “the irony of the boomers’ outrage is that it only serves to make them look further out of touch – the joke works better the more aggravated they get.” But are boomers aggravated? My strong suspicion is that most of my cohort are not even aware of the phrase, (perhaps a double irony because we are often, genuinely, ‘out of touch’), still less of Ms Swarbrick, and would be quite amused about our children teasing us.
Is that not what is meant to be? A bit of eye-rolling and sighing when your dad says “but they can’t sing and they’re not even playing their instruments properly”! I remember that. Why was ‘The Young Ones’ funny, and ‘Not the Nine o Clock News’? Partly, because parents found it much less funny. My father hated “Gob on you”, so I laughed all the harder. I am not convinced we are in new territory here.
One of the many advantages of being both a ‘mature’ and a part-time university student is the group of fellow learners which one joins. My classes are Zer and Millenial dominant, with no more than a couple of us boomers. There is no generational tension there though. The pleasure of learning and the frustrations of wading through one’s initial ignorance – these are universal, and fun to share. Then there is the exchange of learning. I learn more from my young fellow students than they do from me, I suspect.
It was the same in the latter days of my career. I was very keen on mentoring, and it was part of the review processes. I lazily assumed that my eldest members of the sales team would not be able to talk about who might have mentored them, and how. I could not have been more wrong. I became aware of a phenomenon of ‘reverse mentoring’ where software and presentational skills and some data mining, which was second nature and second language to our best youngsters, was something they happily, generously and enthusiastically mentored the boomers in.
To be fair to Ms Sodha, her article becomes more balanced and she reminds her younger readers that aligning with OK Boomer indignation “papers over some of the struggles on race, gender and sexual identity that boomers fought so (this) generation would not have to”. She notes that acquiring the “progressive change” Gen Z might seek is not about pointing and complaining, but about listening and creating coalitions of support. She notes that equal marriage in the US, and abortion reform in Ireland, were not a result of hectoring but of “pragmatically framing arguments that chimed with people who came from an altogether different starting point”.
This plea is one our country needs hear to heal the Brexit wound. Brexit is not exclusively generational, although it has clear generational tilt, with the Boomers probably the most conflicted of all generational subsets. Differences of opinion, generational or otherwise, are not bad things, as and of themselves. They are starting points, a request to be heard and to weigh argument wisely and perhaps, if necessary, to compromise.
It explains Jo Swinson’s inability to claim the centre ground, because revoking Article 50 is not listening and compromising, it is imposing the will of one segment of society on another. I may have voted Remain, but I can see why she has not won over all the Remainers. Her appearance on Question Time was a good lesson for voters who want to be appealed to by someone attempting to show national, not partisan leadership. Alas, the choices are all poor.
Nonetheless, tension between generations is a good thing. Fresh perspectives, reinvigorated debates and innovative thinking should all be welcome, and they will almost always come from the young challenging their seniors. Progress comes from fresh approaches, from doing things differently. That invariably happens when convention is challenged, which is usually a function of young challenging old. I raised my children to question me, to have their own views, and I like nothing more than hearing them show me the world as seen through their eyes. Cameron wanted me to ‘hug a hoodie’ , but for now I am focused on hugging my Millenial and Zers. And I am not offended by the phrase ‘ok boomer’; it makes me smile, and makes me think a healthy cycle continues to turn.
“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
A few weeks ago, a very wise, wonderful friend of mine sent me a link for an interview with the great Italian goalkeeper ‘Gigi’ Buffon. She told me not to worry about the interview being in Italian, or the subtitles, but to read the accompanying script. I did. Buffon is one of my football heroes. He combined fierce competitiveness with outstanding achievement, but all the while seemed to love the game and to have an effortless ‘coolness’ about him. Without peer, I thought, despite some extraordinary German and English goalkeeping talent of the same era.
Candid and wise. Gigi.
In the interview, which is styled as a letter to his younger self, Buffon discloses the battles he had with depression and his mental health. I never knew. My adult life has been characterised by what I call ‘depressive episodes’, but I think I have been fortunate to avoid serious depression. I had a wobble a few years ago, and it was career and life changing for me, and so, I tend to be drawn to news coverage of mental health and depression tales, especially when they relate to sportsmen.
As an aside this is one of the best things I have yet read on ‘burnout’. https://www.1843magazine.com/features/minds-turned-to-ash? This passage is especially good…“But in our high-performance society, it’s feelings of inadequacy, not conflict, that bring on depression. The pressure to be the best workers, lovers, parents and consumers possible leaves us vulnerable to feeling empty and exhausted when we fail to live up to these ideals”.
When I wrote my own blog piece about my burnout experience, I was surprised by the reaction, especially the number of people that said it was “brave”. Revealing one’s vulnerabilities is not brave, but it is interesting as it suggests that most people are aware of, but unwilling to share their own vulnerabilities, which is why I share the author’s view that psychoanalysis may be the answer, and why it is the focus for my current work and study. Buffon is not being brave, but he is being honourable and if he helps others, he is definitely being as magnificent as at any time in his illustrious sporting career.
Sport played a huge part in my life. My brother was a talented and successful professional cricketer. He and I were always early fascinated by the very high incidence in suicides for cricketers post career, which seems to be more prevalent than in other sports. Buffon is another one of many examples that mental health is no respecter of one’s status in society, or one’s industry, and that ‘success’, however it is perceived, is no pain relief. It first hit him in his mid-twenties, and he is now in his early forties.
These words will illustrate just how serious it became for him, “In my opinion many times people are really afraid of putting themselves out there. It also means talking to someone, showing your weaknesses but knowing from that weakness you can become much stronger. What I can recommend is to show who you really are. This is the only real cure that first of all makes you accept yourself. I must prove to myself that I deserve the gift of life, because life is a gift that is granted to you and that must be deserved.” He goes on to say that the solution is in finding how to be proud “in your own little way”
I thought about his battle, and my more modest ones, and I wondered what I would say to my 18 year old self, as I left school in 1982. In the first place, I was incredibly naive. I was so green that I was sure I was going to be ‘called up’ for national service because we had gone to war earlier that year. And it frightened me. I had thrown up the chance of a sponsored Midland Bank place at Loughborough University and taken the unambitious option of dropping my third A level, thus cutting off my routes into academia. I got myself a job, and because of my unenthusiastic approach to education, knew in my mind, that I had to make a go of it.
What would I say to that green and impetuous youth? About twenty key thoughts have occurred to me, which I describe below. Some, Buffon-like, are me accepting and showing my weakness(es). Above all, I want to tell that 18 year old to worry less. It is going to be fine. In fact, you are about to have a charmed life, and so try to take time to appreciate it as it happens. The world does not revolve around you, or any individual, which is why it is a place of endless fascination and many delights. First, everyone is busy. Do not expect people to do things for you. Sometimes they will, and it is a great pleasure. Understanding that, come to appreciate the pleasure you will feel when you help someone else, especially if it is unprompted and unsought.
You are going to be blessed in a way that few people that you know are blessed. People leave education and enter the adult world with some ill-defined ambitions or some very specific goals. The majority are cursed with not achieving them. It can eat at their sense of worth. Sometimes it is because the ambition is exceptionally lofty, like a moon landing, or hitting a six at Lord’s, but mostly they are more modest. This does not mean that those people will be unhappy; many people’s goals change, ambitions alter and they find contentment from a path, a direction, a relationship or a calling that has yet to occur to them, or be introduced to them. However, fulfilling an ambition is very satisfying.
Your ambitions are straightforward. Many years later you will smile because they seem rather shallow. You aspire to marry and have a family. If you are blessed with a family you want them to be privately educated, and like so many new parents, to give them “what I did not have”. You need to think more about the many good things you did have, and how to ensure your children get that same love and attention, but you will achieve this. And you want to live in a bigger home than the ones in which you grew up. Materialism has a hold on you, but it is early Thatcherism and ‘on yer bike Tebbitism’, and you are swept up in the tides of the day, and as society becomes more focused on the individual and on consumerism, you are in the right place.
At one point you will have two Mercedes in the drive of a beautiful home with over three acres of grounds. A few years later you will be living in a rented flat with only a ten year old Polo for transport, but you will not have been any happier in the Mercedes years. In fact, it is a time when you struggle to enjoy your many blessings. However, you do have purpose and that is a good thing. Jung felt that those without purpose and meaning in their lives were apt to become neurotic. So, second, be purposeful.
Harness that energy and motivation but do not allow it to become destructive perfectionism. Alas, you will, but you will overcome that too. You think that if you meet your goals, happiness will descend. You are wrong. Happiness is a narcotic – it is a short lived hit, and cannot be truly appreciated without experiencing the down of the withdrawal symptoms. Adopt a Nietzschean stance and do not aspire to be happy, but aspire to have adventure. And that means ridding yourself of your innate conservatism. You will not be comfortable with that and will probably fail, but give it a go.
Third, you will form a quick inferiority complex as you move into the work place. At school you are top tier academically (it’s not a very academic school) and one of the strongest athletes with competence and achievement across many disciplines. You have county representation in a couple of sports. However, the workplace alters your sense of self. Most of your peers are graduates and three or four years older. They seem so smart, so intelligent, so worldly, such fun and more socially and sexually experienced. In addition, you rapidly move through the office phase of what is effectively an apprenticeship and you will have the chance to be on the floor of the stock exchange.
There, you will spot the class divide, in a way for which your Essex comprehensive school has not prepared you. You are intimidated by the public schoolboys who seem to have a presence, an authority and an air that they belong. It is why it will mean so much to offer that education to your children. You feel you do not belong, and watch the dress code and mannerisms like a hawk. Double cuff shirts, cuff links, Church’s brogues. You will be desperate to fit in. Being something of a social chameleon is no bad thing, but do not undervalue yourself. It is destructive and unhelpful.
Fourth, it will take you time to learn it, and some years of discomfort, but you are as good as these peers. You are not better, though, and you need to drop that occasional defensive arrogance towards people that do not share your views or aspirations. Know your worth, but be humble. You will regard your competitiveness as something to burnish and exercise like a muscle. It will not serve you well. Sure, you will earn good money and exciting promotions, but it is the quality of relationships that counts – the people who are friends, years after you have left the place you worked together. It is not a weakness to care about other people with whom you work.
Some time in the future the USA will be led by a black man as its President. His oratory is something you will admire. At a memorial service for a congressman, after he has left office, he will say this..“being a strong man also means being kind, that there’s nothing weak about kindness and compassion. There’s nothing weak about looking out for others. There’s nothing weak about being honorable. You’re not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect.” You need to understand and apply these sentiments.
One thing you will not understand, but you need to know, is that having and keeping one job is not what will serve you best. In your first thirty years you will have only two employers. Later in your career you will have a crisis. You maintain that you were mistreated by your employer, but you definitely did make a mistake. Yes, you had been an exemplar as an employee for three decades, but employers and institutions have no soul. They are not there to be empathetic. They are inanimate and you must not confuse an employment institution with the people that work there. They are two different things. You now believe that it was due to burnout, and the evidence is quite compelling and you subsequently suffered a bit of a breakdown. You need to listen to your body more, it had been warning you.
What you will not know until your City career is over is that it was a consequence of your inability to listen. Your wife warned you that your behaviour was manic, but you persisted. You always felt you could make it to the next period of leave, never understanding that stress is cumulative and that in your deafness you had been taking less and less care of your health. You start your adult life playing semi-professional football and plenty of squash, but your fitness goes before your thirties and you drink too much and have added two stones by your mid forties..
So, let me emphasise: Fifth, listen. More. You do not have all the answers. People are not “always telling (you) what to do”; actually, they care about you and want to help. Your brother, many years later, will tell you that you can be and have been impatient, intolerant and judgmental. It is not insulting. It is an accurate observation. You can temper all these traits. Fortunately, when he says it, you will finally have matured sufficiently to appreciate it, rather than defend yourself against it. Keep listening.
Sixth, posture. At 18 years of age you are blessed with an athletic physique and an active lifestyle. Your early career is going to be spent on the floor of the London Stock Exchange, so you will be on your feet during market hours. Later in your career though, a regulatory and financial and technological revolution is going to turn you into a desk bound, screen watching blob. You will no longer be playing much sport and your work culture will be male dominant and with a pub and bar focus. Your posture will become slovenly. Your wife will tease you about your posture occasionally. You will hate it. Don’t. Or get over it, quickly.
She has your best interests at heart, and she is right. If you do listen you may have fewer of the problems with your back that start to plague you in your late forties and early fifties. It is only when you start doing regular pilates (and I know that right now you think that that is a ‘woman’s thing’, but you are wrong) and yoga, that you will wish you had taken note of her gentle chiding. Learn more about the value of yoga, of suppleness of mind and body and of how to breathe properly.
Seventh, invest in yourself. Right now, you are pleased that you have finished with education, which you only associate with one comprehensive school and a few classrooms. Years later it will become an itch that you need to scratch. When two of your best friends cut short City careers inside two years to take up university places, think a little harder about whether they might have recognised something in themselves, that you are choosing to ignore in yourself. You will take some professional exams successfully, but will spend many years thinking about and rejecting evening study for a degree. When you finally start an undergraduate degree in your fifties, you will discover the joy of learning. And it is a joy.
Eighth, family. Most things in life you will either earn or find. Family comes to you unbidden. In it you will find true love. It will offer a host of other things too, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. Despite your sibling rivalry you will have few, probably no relationship, as lovingly intense as with your brother. You will have the love of two good parents who, mercifully, will still be alive approaching, and into their ninth decades. Not only alive but free from all but a few minor ailments and still in possession of their mental faculties. Few people are so blessed. Above all, you will have the love of three wonderful children. These are riches beyond value.
Ninth, football and cricket. Only games, but few things represent the world to you and you to the world as these sports. They teach you teamwork, respect, competition, fitness, overcoming disappointment, and celebrating highs. Many years from now sportsmen will be much better rewarded financially and will be widely quoted on things beyond the field of play. Your current heroes, Brooking and Gower, will have distinguished second careers. These sports will bring you many great friendships and your brother’s successes will make you a subject of interest that will help your stock market career.
You will play your way into MCC, and score a century for them. You will make centuries for Stock Exchange CC and your title winning Essex League club. You will score in a FA Cup tie. These sports will give you highs that only the birth of your children exceed. Value them, and the time and energy your parents gave to helping you become proficient as a player. However, although they become the sharp end of the entertainment industry, they remain ‘only sports’. When a World Cup winner like Buffon cannot escape depression, or another like Jonny Wilkinson, is plagued by dealing with perfectionism, even having won his World Cup, they need perspective.
Tenth, slow down. You are in a hurry to do everything. To grow up. To prove yourself. To leave home. To own a car, and then a property. Think about a plant. It grows when properly nurtured, but no amount of willing it to grow faster will help it. It will grow in its own sweet time to its own best advantage. Learn to think about that plant.
Eleventh, read. Read voraciously. It is lovely to share how much you have read with fellow bibliophiles. Read for pleasure, but enjoy how it educates. The great characters of good fiction all have something to teach you about the cycle of life, and how to view the world through alternative perspectives. Being able to do that is a great and valuable skill. At the moment you will not see a value in re-reading books, but that will come and you will see that it is not just the characters that offer different perspectives, but that the point of experience you have reached in your own life will affect what, and how you read.
You are about to plough through Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” as a distraction from your commute. It is tough going and at times you will wonder why you are bothering, but decades later you will still recall Raskolnikov, and his mental demons and contempt for the law, before he finds a path to redemption. Books do that to you. Read on, and love them all. Then, pass them on. You love the ownership of books, but share them. They will stimulate the best conversations, and the theory of reciprocity means you will get much more back than you give.
Twelfth, theatre. You love it. Go as often as you can. Drama holds a mirror up to society. It will always inform you, and most of the time it will entertain you. At some point in your future you will try to write plays. Your appreciation for what it takes to build dramatic tension will be defined by your own efforts, but you will always love great dialogue. None is finer than Shakespeare’s. You have studied three of his plays at school. You have many to come. Your favourites are two of those you have yet to see. That makes you lucky.
Always try to see the greatest actors. You are about to pass up the chance to see Ralph Richardson on stage. He will die before you are twenty. You will see all the theatrical knights after that including Gielgud, but you will remember missing Richardson.
A few more. Travel. You are a keen sportsman and so, you avoid winter holidays because you do not want to lose your place in the football teams you will play for. Years later you will love skiing and watch your children show great prowess and wish you had learned at an earlier age. In the summers your cricket commitments mean you avoid holidays too. It will take marriage for you to appreciate down-time, and the joys of seeing and appreciating different places and cultures. Your good financial fortunes will mean you travel well and comfortably. Try not to see the world in a ‘dressed-for-tourism’ way, but get off the beaten track when you can and get uncomfortable with having to use your awful linguistic skills. And then, think about improving those skills.
Smile. You think this is ridiculous but actually the act of smiling is good for your health. It exercises about half of the forty-plus facial muscles. A smile is something that gets returned more than it gets ignored. Sometimes that provokes a greeting and then a conversation. You tend to avoid eye contact. You are quite shy, and you tend to look down more than up. Hold your head up, engage eye contact and smile. It will make your world a better place, and it will be a better place for those around you.
Drink water. I know. You hate it. Decades later you still find it difficult to pour a glass from a tap, and you cannot conceive of people ordering water in pubs and restaurants. It will happen, though. And the water drinkers are right. You need to hydrate. You grew up with eczema, and you have a flaky scalp and ‘dry skin’. You suffer occasional headaches. Given you enjoy alcohol and you will be surprised by how much coffee you and everyone else will drink in future, you need to give your body a chance to balance its fluid intake. Drink more water.
Sleep more. I know that currently you share the view that it is somehow cool and macho to boast about how little sleep you get, and with Maggie running the country on an alleged four hour sleep per night regime it is tempting to see sleep as weak, but … wrong. It literally allows a brain to regenerate. It increases the reproduction of cells that form myelin – the insulating material found on nerve cell projections in both the brain and spinal cord. In the future you will become interested in psychoanalysis. The power and language of dreams will fascinate you. The opportunity for the unconscious to express will intrigue you. What happens when you have too little dream time? It makes it harder for repressed thoughts to be expressed and may, who knows, manifest in more destructive conscious and physical expressions. Sleep more.
Learn about nutrition. It is interesting. You will learn that there is more activity in the gut than in the brain. What you ingest will affect your health and your mood. Nobody will ever tell you what to do – you are not good at taking advice, and you need to get better, and you are stubborn, and you need to soften up – but if you learn enough of the facts and science for yourself, you are likely to do tremendous long term benefit to your health, by eating better.
Many times you will hear the expression, “its not the destination, it is the journey”. It will drive you mad. What does that really mean? To your irritation, you will later discover that it may have more than a ring of truth. It will likely take you decades and you will waste too much time focused on ‘outcomes’, but you will get there. From your late middle-aged perspective it would be great if you can get there sooner; it might allow you to be a little kinder to yourself.
Reputation. Hard won and easily lost. Your dad has given you some good advice about not being ‘pigeon-holed’ and about earning respect. Keep the advice close and repeat it to yourself regularly. Few things will please you more than the comments your peers give to your wife when you have your career crisis thirty years from now. You will see that crisis as a stain on your reputation, but will be left in tears by the compliments she is paid about your values and your integrity.
That brings me to friendships. You need them and you will discover you are extremely lucky with your’s. In your first year in the City you will become friends with a man who will be godfather to one of your children, as you will be to one of his. He will share his home with you when a house purchase falls through, and look after you when you are in a car accident. On your wedding day it is he who will know the right things to say to calm your wife’s nerves as she approaches the aisle.
Nearly forty years on, you are proud to call him a friend. Your two closest friends from your school A level studies will also extend their friendship with you to over forty years. As will your former next door neighbour, and a former Essex Schools U15 cricketer. It speaks volumes for the value of long duration friendships, but also about how people regard you, which you struggle to appreciate. Nurture friendships. Some have a natural life and die, so seek and welcome new ones, but really value people with whom you can share decades of experiences.
New skills. You are glad to be out of school and you have turned your back, for now, on education. As a sportsman you think you are pretty impressive and have little new to learn. You hate not being competent at things and until you develop some maturity it will stop you trying new things. You want to be someone in your adult life, and you will come to see that the people that most impress you are those with the deepest and broadest learning, and those sufficiently open-minded to keep absorbing new ideas, processes and skills.
With that in mind, take up a musical instrument and learn to dance. At 40 you will take up piano for a handful of years, but it is quite late. Try to pick up a guitar sooner. At parties you will notice how a guy who can turn to the piano/keyboards, or perform some magic on drums, or strum a guitar and accompany himself, will draw the attention of the prettiest girls. The man who gets most attention, though, is the one who can dance.
Like most men you avoid dancing and look suspiciously at those with some mastery. You think you have “two left feet”. Why? All small children dance when they hear music; they all have instinctive rhythm. So when and who tells them they cannot do it? When did you decide? Before your wedding you will discuss having dance lessons, but not get them booked. That is a great pity. Your first dance lesson will be in your fifties and glory be! You will enjoy it. Start now, and enjoy parties much more.
Get rid of the chip on your shoulder. Research the world. You are incredibly ignorant. Ahead lies the fall of the Berlin Wall and Mandela’s release in South Africa as the apartheid regime crumbles. You will see the legacy of the genocidal horrors in Cambodia for yourself in a few decades’ time and you will have repeat visits to India. Start researching global poverty, and the treatment of the victims of communism, genocide and apartheid, and appreciate that you have nothing to be chippy about.
Go easy on yourself. Follow Polonius’s advice. The journey, at least for the best part of the next forty years is an interesting one. You may even come to like yourself a little. You might tell Nietzschean fans that even discounting your conservatism, it has been quite a decent adventure…
Gormley’s figures throw perspective and conceptions of what is normal
Last week I visited the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy, with my favourite art historian, my eldest, for company. The week before I had seen the Blake exhibition at the Tate, with different, but equally charming and well-informed art appreciation company. I was glad to have the opportunity to share my impressions with my experts, but the more I get to observe works of art, the more I understand how personal they are.
What struck me about the Gormley exhibition was how the word ‘perspective’ kept coming to the front of my mind. It may be something the artist strives to achieve. Maybe not. I knew little of his work other than ‘The Angel of the North’, which is certainly a work of art that demands perspective. The word kept recurring in my mind as I walked through the rooms.
Perspective is defined as ‘a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something’. It may be no coincidence that I am sensitive to perspective, given several months of my own analysis as part of my psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. Art does convey meaning. Jung developed the idea of the archetype; an image or thought with universal meanings across cultures that could show up in a dream, in literature, in art or in religion. Gormley’s images and sculptures certainly scream meaning. They provoke thought. He is a sculptor who uses his own body as a place rather than an object, and attempts to explore the space of the body as a condition shared by all humanity.
I regard myself as a bit of a philistine when it comes to visual and physical art, but I have changed as I have aged, helped by having an art historian in the family. Even so, I went into this exhibition with low expectations for what I might like, but a good deal of curiosity. It starts provocatively with a small sculpture of a baby outside on the floor of the rather grand courtyard entrance off Piccadilly.
I believe it is supposed to say something about fragility and Gormley has said that “this tiny bit of matter in human form attempts to make us aware of our precarious position in relation to our planetary future”. It was created in 1999, and so pre-empts Greta and XR, by twenty years, with its central theme. When I passed it again on my way out I realised that it fitted with my impressions of the importance of perspective from the exhibits indoors.
Through thirteen rooms and forty years of work I gained a sense of the sculptor’s thinking, and his love of scale and bold materials. All the while I was being interrogated by my psyche about what it made me feel. I kept coming back to psychoanalysis, which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes described as “depth psychology.” The deeper one goes, the more one’s perspective alters. Think of descending to the bottom of a well and how the ground level and the sky represent themselves differently as the perspective alters.
In the first room, his earliest works are displayed. I almost tripped over one, which lies down the middle of the room and in over fifty lead cases laid out in a line, exhibits the growth of an apple from first petal through ripening and ultimately to a mature fruit. Youth and age are different perspectives. Tripping is easy to do given the attention drawn to the work hanging on the walls, which attract the eyes’ attention first.
The oldest piece, a wall drawing, “Exercise Between Blood and Earth” proved to be one of my favourites, and using sliced bread to convey meaning, as in his “Mother’s Pride V”, reminded me that the best artists have a sense of fun, and can be anarchic and subversive in their approaches.
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is perspective, not the truth.” – Marcus Aurelius
Over a week later and I can still see most of the exhibits in my mind’s eye, so it clearly made a strong impression. Describing them all is pointless, but having to negotiate the trapped space around “Clearing VII” which is 8km of aluminium tube that is described as a ‘spatial field’ and a ‘bundle of nothing’ in the second room, is to appreciate art’s physicality. It demonstrates that we do not need to be too deferential and awestruck with art, as we are required to be in some of the great galleries of the world that keep us a respectful distance from what we have come to see.
“Matrix III” is worth the admission alone. A hanging steel ‘cloud’ that disrupts one’s idea of what is ‘cloud like’. How can so much steel be suspended? I felt like I do every time I am at an airport, and still marvel at how planes get off the ground and then stay in the air. It is not all heavy metals and grand statements; a room full of his drawings provokes a good deal of thought, especially the use of his own blood as an ink, but I realised when seeing “Cave” in room 10, that it was ‘perspective’ that was coming back to me as my theme and also, as a series of questions.
“Cave”is described by the RA as “sculpture on an architectural scale”, where “jostling cuboid structures” are arranged above the visitors but where one is encouraged to enter the exhibit by walking through a constricted metal passageway. I came out and said to my daughter, because we had had to crouch to get through and grope in the dark, that it had put me in mind of a WWI movie set for a trenches scene. I have since heard it compared with the movement of a neonate through the birth canal, which is about as Freudian as I can imagine.
Consequently, “Cave” and “Iron Baby” demand thoughts about perspective. My work in my own analysis is about how I see myself and my perception of how others might see me, and if that should matter. If it does, why does it matter to me? According to Freud, the behaviours, perceptions, and decisions we make can be observed consciously by the ego, and are recognized as a given result of cause and effect, but are often driven by the unconscious processes of the mind.
“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water .” – Sigmund Freud
From the Jungian perspective, psychological suffering is a signal that something in us needs some attention, and certain states of anxiety and depression are no exceptions. Jung’s perspective on the concept of humanity is one that reflects an understanding that people are complex. What defines a person will often go down into the depths of the mind deeper than what can easily be explored. A bit like the perspective from the individual descending a well. In my case, it is a mine shaft that appears in a not untypical dream that I sometimes have.
Another great psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, used true self, to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous, authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self. The false self, by contrast, he saw as a defensive façade, which, in extreme cases, could leave its holders lacking spontaneity, feeling dead or empty. One’s perspective, it seems to me, defines whether one is in touch with a true, or a false self. I grew up with an image of who I was, or wanted to be, and failed to nurture my true self. I am far from alone. Sometimes it is called ambition or aspiration; at its most destructive, it is a form of perfectionism, that leads to an inability to ever be satisfied and in many cases to depression.
“The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.” – Sigmund Freud
My earlier visit to the Tate was a complete contrast to the Gormley exhibition, but I now realise that perspective was a link. The two exhibitions could hardly be more contrasting: One is dominated by scale and the range of mainly heavy materials. The other is almost exclusively represented on paper in multiple exhibits per room, because the scale is small. It does not shout its messages any less loudly, but it is eloquent with detail and precision.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.” ― William Blake
One artist is alive, and we can ask him what he thinks and he intended, and is representing. The other is very much dead. On the subject of perspectives, one artist’s work is physical and feels ‘of its time’, even if a forty-year-old wall drawing was amongst my favourites, whereas the other is much more spiritual. Its beauty and messaging seem altogether less bound by time. What both artists have in common is a willingness, indeed a need, to challenge convention. Blake was far from universally admired, indeed exhibiting left him with quite a financial loss, but Gormley seems to have earned financial security, even if he too is subject to vehement criticism.
Blake has been described as art’s original free spirit. He did not see it, the way others did. At times he seemed to be railing against science, and the Age of Reason, and invariably ‘the Establishment’. He would feel at home in modern London, I suspect. Guardian journalist, Laura Cumming had this to say, “In his visions, the devil may be tragic, tortured by interminable regret; and God may be violent, uprooting Adam like a weed from the earth. Horror is not always frightening. One illustration of hell shows a smoking serpent front of stage in a kind of glamorous limelight.” He was a pioneer too, he created the technique of relief etching and certainly invited fresh perspective considerations.
Whilst I was thinking about these exhibitions, about the psyche and about perspective, I went to see the film “Official Secrets”. In its way, it too is about perspective – about moral laws and legal laws; about being true to the self or being true to one’s government and nation. It is very good, and not just because I am a huge Keira fan, but because one perspective is about the smallness of the individual, against the immensity of the State. Perhaps it is related to scientific understanding, like the butterfly’s wing sensitivity and its impact. To me it reminds us not to underestimate our value, not to be overwhelmed by a tyrannical superego, to appreciate and value both ends of the scale spectrum, in both the physical word and in the psychic world.
“If you don’t like a person it’s because they remind you of something you don’t like about yourself.” – Sigmund Freud
Does music touch your soul? Kant thought that music was “beautiful but ultimately trivial”. My experiences suggest that it is far from trivial. On Sunday evening, I attended a fund raising event at Wilton’s Music Hall, in Shadwell. The format was led by an organisation called OneTrackMinds. On its website it makes this claim, “An entertaining cross between Desert Island Discs, The Moth Radio Hour & TED Talks, OneTrackMinds is a live storytelling event which explores the transformative power of music. (my bold) Join a vibrant selection of writers, thinkers and musicians each presenting a thought-provoking story about how music inspires the way we live our lives.” I had been to one of their events before, so knew what to expect, but this was a slightly starrier line up, pulled in by David Suchet, as part of an effort to raise funds for Wilton’s, to improve its acoustics and seating for future patrons.
The format is straightforward. A guest gives a narrative about a piece of music or a song that ‘has changed his/her life’. It is often deeply emotional and frequently amusing. After the story is told, the guest is sat on the stage alone and he or she and the audience all listen to the track. Watching people sat alone on a stage lost in thought and making the emotional connection with an important song is quite voyeuristic, but somehow pleasing. I listened to Mark Dolan celebrate his father and their Kentish Town pub, and the one-time property giant who became a ne’er do well, and pauper, that his father gave a cleaning job to. This man used to vacuum the pub at 7am, fortified by a cigarette and a rum and orange, and by firing up the juke box to listen to Sinatra and ‘My Way’.
He was followed by Tim McInnerny recalling being invited to perform on a Kate Bush video and becoming a great friend of her’s. Katie Melua shared a poignant Joni Mitchell number and Helen Lederer had us swaying in our seats to Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera’. The show was stolen though, by Deborah Frances-White and then by Suchet. Frances-White was not known by me, but I had heard about her ‘Guilty Feminist’ podcast success.
Her story of not being able to have children and then giving up a room in her flat to a Syrian refugee, ‘Steve’ Ali, is apparently well known, but I was captivated by it. Even more captivated by her choice of ‘Hey Jude’. She split the audience, to compete with our ‘Na na na na’s’ and to come together to belt out ‘Hey Jude’. She explained the magic of a song that she believes everyone in the West knows and many can sing, all the way through, being heard for the first time, which she saw when seeing Steve’s reaction. And I started thinking about how music impacts us all. As I walked home I found myself singing some John Miles.
Music was my first love And it’ll be my last Music of the future And music of the past. To live without my music Would be impossible to do In this world of troubles my music pulls me through
My Wilton’s evening was ended by David Suchet recounting his loathing of classical music as his brother, in a shared bedroom, force fed him Tchaikovsky as they were growing up. Suchet had long since left home and at the age of 40 was playing Iago for the Royal Shakespeare Company. As he drove to a performance he was so impressed by a piece of music on the car radio that he had to pull over as he was welling up with tears. In the pre-mobile phone era, he had to knock on a couple of front doors before he was given access to a phone so that he could tell the theatre that his understudy would have to go on.
The piece was the adagio from Mozart’s clarinet concerto. When he was back home in west London he found himself a clarinet teacher and explained that the pleasure of learning and continuing to appreciate Mozart’s genius had truly changed his life. What is more, he found himself playing Salieri in Schaffer’s ‘Amadeus’ at the National for Peter Hall some time later. Hall made him focus on his emotional reaction to the piece to channel the impotent rage that Salieri has when confronted by Mozart’s God-given talent, that is bestowed upon someone he regards as completely unworthy.
His recollection resonated with me because when I was 40, I too suddenly took up learning a musical instrument. In my case it was the piano. Suchet soon progressed to grade 5 on his clarinet, but it took me five years to get working on my grade three piano. I was sure I was ‘unmusical’ but I wanted to find out why. One does not need musicianship to appreciate music. This was before Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory had became well known. My grandmother had taught piano, so I hoped that something would have come down to me through the gene pool.
I also wanted to show my children that there was much merit in regular practise and commitment to something that did not come easily. It reminds me of the contempt my father had watching my brother and me watching episodes of ‘Top of the Pops’ and occasionally harrumphing that “they cannot even play the instruments properly”. In the end the Global Financial Crisis meant my ‘prop desk’ trading role was shut down and I was put ‘at risk’ of redundancy, and fully expected my banking career to be over. It no longer felt appropriate to be paying for lessons, or to commit to practising when my time needed to be spent seeking employment. I abandoned piano, which was a mercy for my family. But Suchet took me back to the pleasure, as well as the frustration of actually making music.
His Iago reference made me think about my favourite playwright. Shakespeare had a special appreciation for the magic that music provides and how it can play on the emotions.
Music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. (Measure for Measure, 4.1.14)
What really struck me on Sunday night, though, was the emotional impact of the music. Given my current studies and interests it is of little surprise to me that I started thinking about how music can open up one’s unconscious. A key to a door usually firmly shut and locked. It was evident in the reaction of the audience to ‘Hey Jude’, especially when they were encouraged to join in. Music stimulates the unconscious. Those moments when you cannot quite explain why something has made you quite so joyful, quite unaccountably lachrymose, or physically hotter or colder. It penetrates one’s intellectual defences. Notwithstanding its ability to disturb, it is often therapeutic. Its power is long understood, hence its use in pagan rituals, shamanic ceremonies and church services.
It is why film music is so powerful, and indeed, so necessary. ‘Jaws’ without that ominous soundtrack? Not really. Films about musicians and about music seem to be very much in vogue of late. Bohemian Rhapsody , Rocket Man, and Blinded by the Light have shown reverence to Queen, Elton John and Springsteen – “Bruce talks to me”. Richard Curtis was brilliant in manipulating the best of the Beatles in his time-disturbed film ‘Yesterday’ – “well, it’s not Coldplay, is it?” However the films that have made the greatest impression on me have been ‘Inna de Hood’ and ‘Amazing Grace’.
The former is paradoxically life-affirming, with its celebration of Jamaican music heritage and the resilience of the islanders, but depressing with an unsparing look at the poverty on the otherwise idyllic island. Neither does it shy away from issues around petty crime and the ostracisation of Rastafari in the past. Listen to Ken Boothe sing his “Everything I Own”, however, and the world becomes a better place. I had to swallow hard many times during the film to cope with the lump in my throat.
For Amazing Grace, no amount of swallowing would do. I was wiping away tears repeatedly. Aretha Franklin recorded an album of gospel classics over two nights in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. On the second night her minister father, CL Frankin, attends. Their’s was not an always harmonious relationship but the mutual respect and love is very moving, as is the awestruck face of Mick Jagger who attended and politely stood at the back. This film captures the two concerts, but had been unseen for decades.
It is her voice soaring one moment, and then in a diminuendo to convey the intimacy of the profound sentiments in the songs, that disturbs one’s emotional foundations. Only one other performer affects me quite so much, just by the sound of her voice, and that is Nina Simone. I was very young when I first heard ‘Strange Fruit’ and had not yet made the connection with what the fruit might be. Obviously it did not take long. This song moves me, haunts me, sometimes repels me and generally affects my mood like no others.
I love theatre, but I tend to find myself telling friends that I prefer dramas to musicals. Then I think of how emotional I become when watching great shows like “Fiddler on the Roof’ and ‘Les Miserables’. I am sure I have not left any performance of either of these shows without being moist-eyed. Even the joy of ‘Mamma Mia’ caught me defenceless. As I was thinking about how music affects me in the theatre, I realised that I had seen four shows in just the past year that had me reaching for my handkerchief. It would surprise me if anyone else was not moved by at least one of ‘Come From Away’, ‘ Girl from the North Country’. ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, and ‘Hamilton’. ‘Come from Away’ an oddly joyful show about the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, was particuarly sensitive for me.
The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.91-7)
Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare I saw and studied, and I find myself thinking of the ‘quality of mercy’ speech first, but the lines above are, I think, are particularly wise and wonderful. My favourite Shakespearian examination of the psyche is Hamlet. I always maintain that generally the play has the finest character of the canon, but that it gives its best lines to Polonius, and not to Hamlet. One exception, though, is the following speech, combining emotion, indignation and music.
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. (Hamlet, 3.2.356-65)
Hamlet takes me back to the Unconscious. Why does music disturb us, pleasantly or otherwise? It seems to me it is one of the keys to the unconscious state. It expresses emotions, especially hurts and joys that we sometimes cannot articulate, and often do not wish to recall and revisit. Not all masters of the Unconscious make the connection with music. Freud, allegedly, passionately disliked music. Some even suggested he was phobic. It has been reported that he would not permit music in the house, even played by his children. He was very moved by literature and sculpture, and “less often of painting”, he noted in 1914.
Music gave him no pleasure because he was unable to explain the effect it had on him. He seems to have been frustrated by his inability to identify what his unconscious was telling him when triggered by music. His own analysis might suggest it was associated with a repressed, traumatic episode and music triggered the awareness of the trauma in his conscious mind, and so he ran from it. Happily it is a tiny minority of people that are not positively affected by music, and some are transported to otherworldly highs.
Jung was more accommodating. He noted that music was about feelings, emotions, passions, irrationality and the soul. In that era it was associated with ‘the feminine mode’ of being. In males it activated what he called the anima. It may be that Jung embraced his feminine traits and Freud was fearful of his own. Such profound differences may be illustrative of their inability to keep working together and to maintain what had been a brilliant and close working relationship. In looking at just these two reactions of two towering intellects, but emotionally complex men, we understand that music can comfort, soothe and please, but also summon demons and anxieties.
Music expresses in sounds what fantasies and visions express in visual images. – CG Jung in a letter to Serge Moreux, 1950
Reik, an early Freud student, was more attuned to the possibilities of music to explore Unconscious. He thought that unconscious material emerged as melody; sometimes when it could not be exposed as articulated thoughts. Am I alone in having a personal, three-note hum that emerges at times of stress or deep concentration, and which I have been told I often use in my sleep? In my own analysis sessions I recalled seeing a ring of fire in a dream. It could have many interpretations and is not necessarily related to Johnny Cash’s great song, but the song does, of course, repeat my surname constantly. Despite Freud’s views, it is noteworthy that neuroscientist Oliver Sacks states that music occupies more areas of the brain than language does. It can sit in either hemisphere, and therefore be part of both ‘thinking fast’ and ‘thinking slow’ as characterised by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman.
The other reason that music has been uppermost in my mind in recent days was due to a conversation with my eldest and her boyfriend. Last Friday, I was coming home latish from dinner with friends, and I arrived to find them finishing a bottle of wine. They were listening to one of her playlists, and as I walked in she asked if I recognised the song. It was a U2 song, and they are one of my favourite bands. She did not mean did I recognise the band or the title but that it was one of ‘our songs’. When I used to drive her back to Oundle School on Sunday evenings, we would often listen to this U2 album and sing along. The song rooted something for us as a shared experience, and generated an emotional impact.
The conversation drifted to Desert Island Discs. I am a long standing fan, and all my children became familiar with it. My eldest’s boyfriend is new to its charms after she had introduced it to him. We started talking about favourite pieces of music, but also the science of selecting, of curating the list. Few people I know, who have heard the programme, do not have a list in mind for when their public recognition reaches a point at which they might be publicly ‘cast away’.
My approach has been to attach a piece of music to one of the people that I love or have loved. If one was alone on a desert island, it ought to be a comfort to be able to think of someone dear. Music can do that. Children love their parents, but also feel that parents represent authority and constraints. Therefore it is very typical that a child’s favourite person is a grandparent. Mine was my nan. She said little, but was very loving and a great provider of Bourneville chocolate. They lived in Plaistow, near West Ham’s ground, and my grandad used to queue for tickets at Upton Park, if we were staying there for the weekend, so my dad could take my brother and I to a game. Consequently I cannot hear ‘Bubbles’ at a West Ham game without thinking of them and I would see them very clearly if I heard it on my desert island.
Choosing for my dad is easy. We had little music in the house, and he had had his love for it as an art form, ruined by his mother forcing him to be a young pianist. If we were not discouraged from music – instruments and lessons – we were not exactly encouraged. But he did introduce me to jazz. He loved Benny Goodman, and I think he had a particular regard for Basie, but what I first loved thanks to him was Dave Brubeck, and especially, ‘Take Five’. It barely opens, and I feel my face stretching into a smile and I immediately think of him.
My mother’s tastes were not that obvious to me, and what record collection we had was quite modest. It did however, contain what would now be described as ‘crooners’. Perry Como, Andy Williams, a little Sinatra and above all, Johnny Matthis. With mum, it is less about the song, about harmonies, or about lyrics, but it is the sound of Matthis’s voice that makes me think of her. Almost any of his recordings would do.
With my eldest I have had many opportunities to ‘share a song’. I told her about how Phil Lynott’s ‘Sarah’ made me cry. When I first heard it, I thought it was about a girlfriend – “When you came into my life, you changed my world” – before learning it was about his daughter. My daughter is not called Sarah, but it became our song. I might choose that, but in her school years, when we first had a flat in London, she introduced me to the Crystal Fighters. Their ‘I love London’, which is anthemic, will always make me think of her.
Right now, though, I would choose Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’. Before they lit up the 2012 Olympics, they were performing at Latitude in Suffolk, and I was there with daughter #1. I did not know their music well, but was stunned by how a very sizeable crowd knew every lyric of the song and many of their other numbers. They closed the show on the Saturday night and it was one of the most magical evenings that we had had together. So for her, it would be Elbow.
Her brother became interested in a wide selection of music, including a good deal of 60’s and 70’s stuff. He played a lot of The Kinks, and it would be easy to include a gem like ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Obviously it makes me think of him, but music is for sharing and that means it is a two-way street. A few years ago he became a big fan of Loyle Carner. He introduced me to his music. Of all the tracks that conjure my boy’s face up in my mind, it would have to be Carner’s ‘Ain’t Nothing Changed’, which opens with the most moody of jazzy, bluesy backing, before introducing gymnastic wordsmithery, that leads with student loans and gets to inner city poverty. “I feel it, but can’t conceal it” is a lyric about anger, but could be about my view that music opens the Unconscious.
My youngest and I are developing our music enthusiasms and commonalities. I think that the music that I choose to think of her will go through a few iterations as she moves through university and adulthood, but right now I think of a recent night out we had together. I persuaded and half-cajoled her into coming to see a show at the Kiln Theatre. We had a fabulous night watching, but more often, absorbing, ‘Blues in the Night’, and as we took the tube home, neither of us could get “my momma done told me” and the opening bars out of our heads. It was a fabulous night, and when I hear ‘Blues in the Night’ now, I see her face.
My brother and I had slightly different music tastes. He was more interested in soul, but had the good taste to buy albums like Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines’. One summer we thought we should each choose a concert to attend, and the other would come along and perhaps enjoy having a broadening of his individual music appreciation. My good fortune was that he selected George Benson at Wembley. I have become a big Benson fan in the many years since, but my favourite, and the track that makes me think of my brother is ‘On Broadway’. As a professional cricketer, he was a performer, albeit not a thespian.
So that is seven tracks. One more for me. It should be easy. I simply cannot do it. I find making associations between music and people, or music and events, quite straightforward, but choosing a single piece to please me alone: Too difficult. I wonder how you curate your DID list?
To conclude; even the unmusical are affected by music. David Suchet and I are much more likely to be in the majority, than the minority, when we admit to welling up at the sound of a particular piece of music. I think that one of the wisdoms that I take with me into my ‘Second Innings’ is that I need more music, where possible, in my life. Just this week, I met a good friend for breakfast and we talked about our music interests and about the curation of Desert Island Disc lists. We had ‘Take Five’, in common, in our lists. Our mutual laughter, and the joy on our faces was the perfect vignette for this blog post.
If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. (Twelfth Night, 1.1.1-7)
“What strange creatures brothers are!” This was attributed to Jane Austen. I had good cause to think about my brother this week as I shall describe, but the intensity and occasional enmity of the fraternal relationship caught most UK newswatchers’ attentions last week, when Jo Johnson resigned from his brother’s new, but imploding, government. The politics of family had had few such newsworthy moments since Ed Miliband usurped the place that his elder brother David regarded as his rightful one, leading the Labour Party.
When I was growing up there was a television series called ‘The Brothers’, from which the image above is taken. I was quite young at the time, and many of the plots about commercial plans and sensitivities in the haulage industry passed me by, but I understood all of the tensions in the sibling relationships. It seemed to be about trucking and haulage, but was really an earthy, British forerunner to soap-dramas highlighting family tensions and politics, which reached an apogee with ‘Dallas’.
The strangeness of brothers, in ‘The Brothers’, was played out by three men who inherited the family business, after their father had died in the arms of his lover. The eldest son is disappointed to discover that the firm, which he expects to become his to control, has been left in equal shares to him and his two brothers, plus his father’s secretary/mistress. I am sure I was intrigued, even at that age, by the plots of the ‘first in line’ son’s senses of entitlement and righteousness. Dallas, of course, attracted viewers for its glamour, but I know I was drawn to the JR-Bobby Ewing tensions and to a lesser extent to the role of third brother, Gary.
In last weekend’s Sunday Times Niall Ferguson, with whom I frequently disagree but aways read, wrote a superb piece on fraternal tensions, using the Johnson episode as his cue to write. He began by reminding readers, that in 2013, after Ed Miliband had trumped his brother’s attempt to become leader of the Labour Party back in 2010, Boris Johnson had mocked the Miliband brothers. “We don’t do things that way. That’s a very left wing thing… only a socialist could do that to his brother, only a socialist could regard familial ties as being so trivial as to shaft his own brother”. Clearly not. Jo Johnson highlighted the need (for him) to put the national interest before familial ties. It was beautifully put as “an unresolvable tension”, but was possibly too, a welcome opportunity to bring his brother down a peg or two. His decision seemed to me to be adequate resolution of the tension.
Brothers cast a shadow even when they die. The motivation to be US President that drove John F Kennedy, and then the candidacy of his brother, Robert Kennedy, is widely acknowledged to have come from the death of older brother, naval aviator, Joseph Kennedy Jr. Somehow, even honouring a brother who has died, becomes associated with competition, recognition and achievement. Brothers are not always in competition, but always aware of one another. They can inspire one another to great achievement, such as is the case with Wilbur and Orville Wright, but most often there is a sense that there is not quite enough space for both, or all, to fulfil individual potential; not enough air to fully inflate the lungs.
Cain murders Abel
Of course, fraternal competition is older than the Bible. In its most insightful story about brothers we encounter two loving brothers in Cain and Abel. However the sense that God viewed Abel’s sacrifice to Him, as a greater sign of his love and worship, so enraged Cain, that he lured his brother to a meeting place to murder him by beating him with a stone. He had been warned. God had told him after seeing his downcast demeanour after the brothers had made their offerings, “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” I know of few things that have the intensity of a fraternal relationship.
It is not all about competition, or about fratricide. My weekend included a long drive up to Leicestershire. I went to watch my brother represent Essex in the over-50s County Championship. It was a 45 over contest against the hot favourites and reigning champions, Yorkshire. Yorkshire demonstrated why they were favourites and champions by reaching a total of 250-2 in their allotted overs. Essex, however, overhauled them by reaching 254-6 in the 45th over. That they did so, was largely due to a chanceless, beautifully-paced innings from my brother. He opened the batting and made a brilliant 107.
I am sure that I have never wished failure on my brother, but I am prepared to admit that I have often wished that he would not be too brilliant. It is an unedifying admission. But as we grew up it was a feature of my life that there was enough space (for me), and enough air for my lungs. The special feeling that hit me on Sunday was the pleasure that I took in his success. I am not sure that I no longer feel a sense of competition, but perhaps I have shed a few of my own insecurities. Instead, I watched each ball with pleasure, marvelling at the control he had of the situation. I felt proud. On the rare occasion he played a rash or loose shot, I winced and found myself admonishing him for ‘playing like me’. I silently implored him to refocus his control, and to win the match. That was his skill, even as a youngster. He had great mental strength, whereas I got into an egotistical one-on-one contest with the bowler, whom I wished to humiliate. Usually it meant I gave my wicket away needlessly.
Actually, when it came to cricket I have only thanks to give my brother. I know that I would never have represented the county (I began at U-15 level) were it not for him having been selected first. He played for the U-11s and missed barely a game, unless he was playing for the South of England, until he turned professional at 16. I certainly would not have had the pleasure of captaining the U-19s, but I never made the deluded error of thinking that I might be good enough to play professionally, because he was so good and had got there first. When your kid brother is better than you, you can explore other ambitions.
We drove each other on, but generally constructively. My brother’s Sunday winning team was captained by Mel Hussain, who was an Essex U-15 team-mate of mine. He has to put up with being known as former England captain, “Nasser’s elder brother”. But he was a really good player, who played first class cricket for three different counties. Their other brother made the boardroom for one of the FTSE100’s largest companies, and may have been the most naturally gifted of the three as a cricketer, and their sister became a prima ballerina. At least I only had one talented sibling to compete with.
Sibling rivalry seems to be particularly significant in motivating sportsmen and women. Whilst my brother’s talent sent me to look for alternative careers, it had the opposite effect on the Charltons and the Nevilles in football, and the Chappells, Hollioakes and Waughs in cricket. When we were growing up, our next door neighbours included two brothers of similar ages to us, and another pair living another three doors down. We formed a gang called ‘The Combination’ and played football and cricket matches every non-rain filled waking hour that I can remember.
Of that sextet, a couple have played international sport, one played professional cricket, but another declined a contract. One played county second XI cricket, and went on to distinguish himself as an award-winning fund manager in the City. The eldest of us became one of the country’s finest academics, now splitting time between Oxford and Princeton. Besting each of our brothers in those games was important, (if it rained it was Monopoly or Cluedo), and then another layer of competition between the three families came into the match outcomes. I am sure that these relationships, in and out of family, contributed to the substantial successes of the six of us.
In Niall Ferguson’s article he considered other examples of the significance of having a brother, whilst bemoaning not having had one of his own. He references theatre. Theatre examines the curiosity of antipathy in a loving fraternal relationship, well. It is done especially so in The Lehman Trilogy, which is worth catching before it has its second run in New York, but my favourite is watching Edmund and Edgar in King Lear. For the sake of the play, one is almost supremely virtuous and the other, a bastard son, is wholly malevolent. Subtle it is not, but Edgar believes Edmund, when he is being duped, simply because he is his brother, and he is confident that they can master their own tensions, but ultimately it is them against the world, even when he is persuaded that means running from his own father. Shakespeare tends to see brothers, legitimate or otherwise as wishful usurpers, as in Hamlet, and in Richard III.
“I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses.” – Edmund, King Lear Act 1 Sc 2
I disagree. Having a brother is a special gift. Mine has been good for me, and yet I can think of few periods of my life when he has not also been a source of (modest) irritation. I realise now, though, that our love is as profound as I have ever felt for anyone that I was not part-responsible for creating. That sense of having part of oneself in one’s children, makes them the thing to be loved above all else, but to share blood, and a gene pool with someone who is also a contemporary and a friend is truly exceptional, humbling, and frequently joyous. I count myself fortunate. I also believe, based on my experiences that though there are many exceptions, most brothers feel the extraordinary power of loving and being loved by their sibling. On Sunday, I felt truly blessed as my brother raised his bat to acknowledge his century. He was always a better cricketer than me, and I managed to delight in it.
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Second Innings 