On Simple Pleasures

Are there any greater pleasures than freshly squeezed orange juice consumed near where the organs are grown?

Free men must live simple lives and have simple pleasures – William Morris

August has been a month of rest for me. In my investment banking career, it was the time when the majority took their annual leave, which had recently become regulation-determined, as a forced fortnight absence. I tended to prefer to be part of the skeleton staff in these periods, to take my rest at other times in the year, often to build my energy or restore it for the annual remuneration or review rounds. Now that my focus is on studying and training my calendar has changed. 

As September starts I share with many that sense of newness, freshness and energy. I know many people who regard this as more of a new beginning than the start of the calendar year. They tend to make their resolutions now, and in many cases, seem better at keeping them than the January crowd. As the nights start to draw in, reflections are considered and plans are made or revised. Fresh beginnings coincide with a new academic year, which is why most of my September resolution friends associate this month with newness. 

One of the things that rested in August, for me, was my face. I went unshaven for most of the month. Yesterday I took myself off to the barber in Cable Street and had a proper clean up. Even before I succumbed to the pleasure of hot towels, I was in reflective mood. A leisurely shave and haircut, other than taking me back to watching “Barber Shop Chronicles” last month, helped my thoughts meander, and my reflections gain significance. 

It is a particularly delicious sensation, at least to me, to have a sharp clean blade, expertly handled, worked across one’s face. The coldness of the steel after the warmth of the towels and the fragrance of the soaps, combine to make one’s sensations particularly acute. The physical sensation is pleasant, but something about the silent concentration of the barber and the prone position one is in, work to allow one’s mind to roam, not unalike the psychoanalyst’s couch. 

Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world – Wilde

I started to think about how much I was enjoying what is a very simple pleasure, and one that is little changed by fashion or technology. As I lay back and relished the sensation, I thought more about the many simple pleasures that had come my way in the past month. As I did, I wondered whether my sense of appreciation is heightened, or whether it was just the consequence of my age, or perhaps it demonstrated some wisdom. I spent some of my August in Europe, traveling by train and ferry. Whilst I was away I remember being struck by a couple of simple pleasures on a day in Barcelona.

The goal to which the Pleasure Principle impels us – of becoming happy – is not attainable; yet we may not – nay, cannot – give up the efforts to come nearer to realisation of it by some means or other – Freud

Simple pleasures are small peaks of pleasurable experience. They are not to be confused with any satisfaction of Freud’s Pleasure Principle. The Pleasure Principle is about satisfying the driving force of the id. About satisfying the primal urges of thirst, hunger, and anger. The id is the most animalistic part of one’s persona. The Pleasure Principle is the requirement for immediate gratification of one’s most basic wants and urges, and when these are not met it results in anxiety and tension. Maturity sees the ego control the anti-social elements of satisfying the id, employing what Freud described as the Reality Principle.

I place flowers in the very first rank of simple pleasures; and I have no very good opinion of the hard, worldly people who take no delight in them. – Mary Mitford

Simple pleasures are not like that. They are incidental and especially satisfying because they are not driven by an urge, but merely enhance whatever one is doing, or thinking, at that time. Mary Mitford’s observations about flowers are charming, but looking at flowers is not a primal urge. My first Barcelona simple pleasure was freshly squeezed orange juice. I am not a great consumer of fruit juices, but I think there are few greater pleasures than freshly squeezed oranges, when one is in a location close to where the oranges are grown. Only ice-cold water after a tough gym session, or at the courtside after a tough tennis or squash match, has such a heady and exceptional sensation. I am including the finest wines, cognacs, and whiskies that I have drunk. As I thought about this and felt the coolness of the after shave applied to my clean face, I realised I had had several instances of simple pleasures over the past few weeks.

On my first Barcelona morning, after I had had a coffee and croissant looking at boats and water at Port Vell, I walked back to my hotel. As I stood at a pedestrian crossing I was joined by a guy in lycra on his very smart looking bike. He had a sort of bandana thing protecting his pate from the sun, but I could see most of his face and I judged that he may be around 70. His body was lean and toned and tanned and he soon pushed off and quickly built up a decent speed. I thought about him and about the whole ‘health is wealth’ mantra. Taking care of one’s physical health and enjoying it are simple pleasures. I realised that he was so fit that his face may have misled me and he was probably even older than seventy. He did make me appreciate the good health I have enjoyed in my first fifty-five years despite long hours, the miseries of commuting and an alcohol consumption that is above what doctors would describe as a ‘recommended intake’. 

Good wet shave. Orange juice. Ice cold drinking water. Health. I thought about what else August had taught me. One was the simple pleasure of browsing. I am as bad as the next man, probably worse, in exhibiting my impatience and in my inability to smell any coffees or roses, but to plough on in a rush to get to my next appointment, or complete my next task. One of the things about taking the Eurostar to Europe is that one is forced to take time because of the instructions to be at St Pancras hours before the train and then to be told that one cannot board until the queue for the earlier trains is absorbed. Fortunately, there is Foyles branch on the concourse. I can think of few greater pleasures than perusing book shelves in the knowledge that time is not an issue.

Books are obviously one of life’s simple pleasures. The need for books can hardly be said to be satisfying the id, but try to imagine a world without books. How maddening and depressing would that be? Amongst my holiday reading was Diane Evans’s “Ordinary People.” There is majesty and anguish in how she paints the pictures of relationship changes amongst two couples. When one couple tries to restore some magic to their relationship on a date night, the husband just cannot understand where the love he once had returned to him by his wife, has gone, and that it may never return. It is brilliantly written. I would imagine over 80% of couples have those ‘does he/she love me, and did he/she ever love me?’ moments. 

…simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. – Jerome K Jerome

On the subject of relationships: Family is a simple pleasure. Obviously family can be the root of any number of strains and stresses too, but it is a love that is so profound that it is rarely well described. When I returned to the UK I had a day in the sun at the Kent coast with my youngest and her boyfriend. Their company, and seeing the affection they have for each other is a great pleasure for a dad. Combined with sea air, pebble beaches, shell fish stalls and ice cream parlours, I realised I was being overloaded with gifts. Time with one’s children is truly special. I am about to get quite intimately involved with other people’s children through an Infant Observation programme as part of my training. To be accepted into someone’s home at such an important, intimate and private time is a privilege as well as a pleasure.

There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal – Freud.

Shortly after my beach trip, my parents moved home after about forty years in the previous address. I drove to the new address and helped them unpack boxes, whilst the removals firm did most of the hard work. At the end of the day, glasses charged with some very acceptable grape juice, my mother’s smile and thanks and farewell hug, filled me up with happiness. I did not feel that I had done much during the day, but being appreciated by people you love is a simple pleasure, and also a very deep and affecting pleasure. What we had done, as well as getting some light tasks completed, was to share something – in this case, time.

I realise that sharing is one of life’s greatest, simple pleasures. Last week I watched the film ‘Inna Da Yard’ about Jamaica, its music and its musicians. As the musicians come together to record there is a scene of them sharing a meal. It is simple; mainly rice and fish, and one can almost inhale the flavours when sat in the cinema. Sharing food, which is near impossible to do without sharing conversation, is one of those simple pleasures that I have come to value as highly as anything. Food preparation, for people you care about, and then its consumption touches us in all sorts of positive and beneficial ways. 

I joined a group of my fellow Birkbeck students at the weekend for a meal in the West End. I had been invited by a friend, but the remaining eight guests were new to me. It was a very international gathering with a couple of tri-lingual guests and mainly bi-lingual guests. My linguistic ineptitude, which I had been very conscious of in Europe earlier in the month became apparent once more. But what struck me was the breadth of ages, skills and upbringings around the table. This was less about food and more about sharing experiences. And it was joyous.

I recently gave lunch to a friend of mine. I met her during my Playwriting Course at the National Theatre. We have reached a point of sharing writing ideas and persuading each other to persevere. I thought about the sharing in our exchanges. I think she is extraordinarily gifted. I love reading her scenes, and that she thinks I am equipped to advise her on improvements. I read them and feel that they rarely need anything, whereas she kindly reads my words and gently edits them and asks good question about the characters’ motivations. This is a really pleasant form of artistic sharing and extremely generous. What we are sharing is advice, although my impression is she needs little. Therefore, the sharing exchange is unbalanced. She is being more generous than me, and accepting someone else’s generosity is a very great, and simple pleasure. 

As I walked home from my haircut and shave I thought about the pleasure of walking. At the weekend I had walked from Wapping to Bloomsbury and back, to attend a lecture at my university. The sun had been out and I had walked along loving and admiring London’s landmarks, The Tower, The Monument, Mansion House, St Paul’s and then cutting down Grays Inn Road and across to Russell Square. As I walked I listened to a podcast, an FT interview with George The Poet. Housing Project to Cambridge, rapping to Royal Wedding, he has had some journey. I loved how I could share in his wordsmith skills as I did something as simply pleasurable as walk through my beautiful city. Great journalism, great broadcasting, great conversation and I knew my mind had been broadened. 

I did not intent this blog piece to sound smug, and I fear it may be starting to do so, but I do think August was important to me for reminding me about simple pleasures. I have pursued and enjoyed some quite materialistic goals in the past and this has been a good and reflective period for me. As I get ready for resuming both my studies and my training, I am excited about seeing many of my student friends and acquaintances, just as returning to school will be exciting many children. In my schooldays, I resented the learning experience, and could not wait to leave education. Now I think that learning may be the greatest, simple pleasure. It can be done at leisure and there is never a time when one does not stop learning.

Identifying and enjoying simple pleasures may be something to do with the current trends in Mindfulness, but it may simply be what happens to a man when he hits his mid-50’s and finally thinks about the pace of his life and acquires a little wisdom. Whatever it is. I hope everyone is getting something out of some simple pleasure today and in the coming weeks and months.

On reading “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

Alarmist or Informative?

This is long, but I think it is important. Please bear with me…

Readers of books often make outlandish claims for the book they have just finished and its author. Some have a vested interest in doing so. I am going to make such a claim. My only interest is to get more people talking about the book’s content and the extraordinary implications of some of its conclusions. In particular, I want my children to understand it, and for them and their Millennial and Gen Z friends to debate the issues with me. The book is Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Art of Surveillance Capitalism”. 

She describes commercial, social and political worlds that are colliding and colluding, and of which I know I have much to learn. I expect my children’s generation to continue to teach me, but also to be surprised by the sinister elements of the digital tools they love to utilise. My claim is that this is the most important and significant book published in this young century to date. Hyperbole? Maybe, but hopefully as many of my circle will read it as possible and be well placed to tell me why my claim is outlandish. 

Zuboff walks us from industrial capitalism to surveillance capitalism. Linking mass production at Ford with mass data harvesting at Google is fascinating. She is great for economic philosophers on the roles of Hayek and Friedman, and how the dominance of their theories facilitated surveillance capitalism. One can imagine, in another timeless universe, sat reading this book in a public space, and being watched by the sagacious duo Huxley and Orwell, who are smiling and nodding at the outcomes this book reveals and anticipates. 

Her conclusions are that surveillance capitalism is to be reckoned as a “profoundly antidemocratic social force.” That really interests me. Wherever one sits on the Brexit debate, the use of comments about the ‘value of our democracy’, ‘sovereignty’, or of ‘unelected representatives’ are likely to come up. If one takes Zuboff at her word we are looking at the wrong miscreants. Forget Cummings, unelected though he is; forget any antipathies one has to the heads of the European polity, and think about surveillance capitalists like Brin, Page, Nadella, Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Hanke, Schmidt et al. Then look at the corporate structures that this elite minority have created with special voting classes. Zero accountability. These seem to represent a contempt for corporate governance. This is rich resource for us all to debate. 

What do Pokemon Go, the Twin Towers atrocity and the ‘war on terror’, tweeting, the Brexit vote, Obama, this week’s news about facial recognition in King’s Cross and Canary Wharf and ‘gramming, have in common? They are inextricably linked by ‘surveillance capitalism’; the network effect of a post-industrial world. Forget ‘if you cannot identify the product, you are the product’ cleverness, this is much more sinister; commercial practices that are much more predatory. They eat at the very essence of individuality and autonomy. Zuboff asserts that we are demonstrating little awareness and concern for the erosion of free will. 

The premise is we search Google and it, in turn, searches us. Only facebook can rival it for the quality of its raw materials supply, something once contemptuously dismissed as ‘data exhaust’. Zuboff talks about the mining of ‘behavioural surplus’ and its value in predictive markets. To a Business Psychology student this is rich material. What the book goes on to say is that much of it is being used in a malign way, despite earliest aspirations of it being a benign service. Former colleagues of mine know my near-abhorrence for metrics, but only because metrics, in my opinion, were usually used to measure the wrong things. In the world of ‘surveillance capitalism’ they measure everything. They move to what Zuboff describes chillingly as ‘totality’. 

“you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know who you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about” – Google’s Eric Schmidt, quoted as far back as 2010.

And why do we do it? Why do we comply? Well, here is an example. This weekend was the 60thanniversary of the release of Miles Davis’s legendary “Kind of Blue” album. To celebrate, Nitin Sawhney, one of my musical heroes, posted a twitter piece with a video of him playing some opening chords. I ‘Iiked’ it, in the social media sense of liking, and I retweeted it, saying that Kind of Blue, Test Match Special and The Sunday Times lay ahead for me that day, and was close to representing ‘peak contentment’. Nitin liked my retweet. And I liked my dopamine hit. And all of this is revealing lots of information about me that I would probably not give up to direct questioning. 

The more data, what Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism’s ‘extraction imperative’, the better the prediction products. She argues we are in a new phase of competitive intensity, moving beyond the rendition of all aspects of human experience into behavioural data to what she calls ‘economies of action’, which are the moves beyond tracking, capturing, analysing and predicting behaviour, to actively shape behaviour at source, which she calls ‘tuning, herding and conditioning’. The ‘like’ button is the greatest tool for extracting raw material for these businesses. I note that later in the book it is revealed that video comment, like my Sawhney tweet, is the most commented on, and shared, content on the web, with a multiplier of 6, compared with other posts, messages and tweets. 

“The rendition of human experience”. This was the core of the work done by Cambridge Analytica, which then led to targeted political ads that ‘tuned’ or manipulated people’s thinking processes. She is excellent on how it worked. It used 87m people’s facebook profiles to map them on to the Big 5 Personality traits, with some psychographic data and a few tweaks of its own. Then it “stirred the inner demons” as one of its former employees described it. Simply by showing voters that a friend had voted in a survey, or ultimately, an election, can increase the likelihood of somebody to vote. If you can find a single issue to drive an emotional response (“inner demon”) and then show an individual that they are part of a larger group of like-minded people, it will soon lead to group psychology taking over. People are more motivated to be part of something than operate alone, and group opinions tend to move toward poles, rather than to moderate the opinion one first held. Zuboff thinks that Cambridge Analytica’s claims were not the fantasy boasts of a publicity hungry CEO, but that funded by a billionaire, this organisation has ‘influenced’ at least fifteen elections worldwide. 

It is interesting how that knowledge affects one’s emotion, since emotional behaviour is what was first harvested to find the right targets. I read about this, having doubted that Cambridge Analytica could really have played a significant role in the Trump and Brexit outcomes, and I started to feel anger building. Yet, what became clear to me was that these techniques, which have clearly been much improved, began long before Trump, and Farage, or Cummings and co. The first adopter of the insights and the targeted campaigning was Obama. Now, I tend to see him in an altogether better light than Trump, so this was a little disconcerting. But I recall 2008 and the ‘hope’ messaging, and I remember being someone who thought he was a good candidate, not least because he had a youthful understanding of the potential of technology. He understood where the world might be going, and that had to be a virtue. Now I have to have a wry smile at my naivety of the time. 

But that is the point of this blog. I want people to read, understand and debate this. They may understand already, but I did not. I really need to understand the implications. Where is this sinister, and where is it what could be a perceived civic good? Is it sinister? Can it be good? An example of good might be the ‘nudge’ unit set up by the Cameron government, based on the work of Thaler and Sunstein. 

Ethical and moral dilemmas start to present themselves. One of the things about my adult life is a sense that as things have occurred I have persistently failed to recognise their significance. Perhaps we are all fated to do so, but I have a sense that, unlike me, many smart people appreciate historically significant events as they occur. I traded through the ‘crash of ‘87’ and I was running bank proprietary capital as the Global Financial Crisis took hold. I was pretty clueless in ’87 and I still remain bemused by CLOs and CDO’s squared, and tracking bank liquidity, despite reading several histories of the events of a decade ago. I worked in Research when the equity market started to obsess with new sophistication, which led to the shift from P/E and yield analyses, to EVA and CROCI and CFROI and any other acronym you could dream up. And I was in management and strategy as the regulatory environment (Mifid II) dramatically altered the prospects for the Equities industry. Unlike those times, I do not want this significant episode in history to pass me by without me doing a better job of gaining an understanding of what is underway.

This is not an attempt at a book review, but I will highlight the features of the book that I hope I will be debating with my family and friends in the coming weeks. The book looks at the way the largest organisations circumvent the law, at the inadequacy of privacy and monopoly regulations (fighting new battles with old weapons) and the sinister hold a few people have over our lives already. They own and reconfigure and sell the ‘Behavioural Surplus’. How these businesses operate, how they lobby to have access to data but somehow can frustrate individuals attempting to see their own data that is held, and what is shared with third parties and why, are things I want to see if people understand better than me.

Private human experience translated into data that can be traded in the marketplace. Personal and hitherto private features of our lives, are now raw materials for the surveillance capital firms, which is why they represent the newest form of capitalism, and the one that is best succeeding industrial capitalism. The products at the end of the manufacturing process are predictions of human behaviours. They have been created after a process of extraction. The more data, the more accurate the predictions. Therefore, these are economies of scale, of scope, of depth and of breadth. So far, so reasonable, but the next phase is behavioural modification and manipulation. This is what Zuboff calls ‘tuning’ and ‘herding’ to drive commercial or political outcomes that are sought. Insidious and unwelcome. Do we know it is happening? Can we stop it? How do we opt out? It began with subliminal messaging used by facebook for the 2012 Mid term elections. And it has become much more refined and comprehensive subsequently. 

The book looks at the work of Zuboff’s some-time Harvard professor, social psychologist, BF Skinner, who invented the term ‘operant conditioning’. She compares him with Alex Pentland, director of Human Dynamics Lab within MIT’s Media lab. He describes a world of ‘Social Physics’. This struck me as really sinister, but been underway for years. He sees society’s “stratification of the population” coded not by groups such as race, gender, income, occupation, but by behaviour patterns that produce behavioural subgroups, and new behaviour demographics that he claims can be 5-10 times more accurate than traditional approaches to predicting disease susceptibility, financial risk, political views and consumer preferences. Some of the material gets a bit ‘heavy’ here, but for those fearing or anticipating an Orwellian and threatening, oppressive world, these are pages worth reading.

“As we go about our lives, we leave behind virtual breadcrumbs – digital records of the people we call, the places we go, the things we eat and the products we buy. These breadcrumbs tell a more accurate story of our lives than anything we choose to reveal about ourselves” – Pentland, MIT

We are the pieces on the chess board, not the players, in this social structure, and that lack of autonomy is destructive. It began with Pokemon Go. I never engaged with it, and thought it was just a silly and pointless game, but it was incubated by Google and came from their mapping activities. It turns out it was a game that masked a social experiment. What became clear was that they could influence how people behaved in the ‘real world’ by giving them rewards and instructions in the digital world. Suddenly by putting a character in a specific location they could drive footfall to that location. That had huge value to retailers and restaurateurs in the area. Suddenly people found themselves outside a pizzeria in pursuit of a digital ‘win’. It drove an ‘offline’ purchase or behaviour. They had been manipulated without being aware of how. It spawned the ‘gamification’ of corporate and commercial behaviours. Think about all the incentive programmes and ratings and rankings with which you are now asked to engage.

Zuboff describes it as ‘life in the hive’, and disturbingly, a hive ‘with no exit’. The control of our lives has led some observers to reference totalitarianism. She rejects that, given that totalitarianism relies on violence and terror to achieve and sustain its aims. She uses her own nomenclature. She defines the system that drives surveillance capitalism as ‘instrumentarianism’. The book gets a little tougher going when comparing the two, and there is rather too much repetition for my liking, but it emphasises her view of the importance of what is being said, and her reasonable fear, that too few people appreciate what is happening and what the consequences might be. To that end, I found myself accepting the repetition rather than being frustrated by authorial padding. When it came to considering the implications of the Google City on the Toronto waterfront I was beginning to appreciate the threat to human independence of thought and deed. As I understand it this is all about taking away agency.

In the West, it is a threat from the private sector, although the degree to which the major players are in bed with the governments is very significant. Partly that is the consequence of 9/11, which had governments desperate for more effective ways to observe the citizenry and in some cases, predict behaviours (of terrorist threat and gatherings). In China, its populace at least understands it is under constant surveillance. But it is being used in alarming ways that might give indications of how we might be ‘tuned’ and ‘herded’, to use the Zuboff terms, in the future. I recall listening to an Economist podcast about China’s use of a social credit scoring system, which began with a 2015 pilot project. It is well covered in this book. 

The aim is to improve citizens’ behaviour. What the citizens do not know though is what contributes to their social credit score, but associating with the ‘wrong’ people can reduce your score, and it can be enhanced by spending time in the company of the ‘right’ people, or by paying the rent early. Both quality and quantity of friendships and associations are rated. The loss of agency is writ large in this system. Alibaba’s Ant Financial was part of the trial and its CEO was quoted as saying that the outcome “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction.” One wonders what the social credit scores would be of the islanders of Hong Kong right now, since one of the aims is to ‘pre-empt instability’. At a more modest level at home, think about telemetrics and car insurance in the west. Disturbing? The spy in the cab. 

Just this weekend three things have caught my eye regarding surveillance capitalism. It may be that I am more sensitive to these issues now, or it may just be that this is just everywhere – the packaging of data and depersonalisation of the public. First, there was a CNBC tweet regarding a piece on the AI Toyota Concept-i car. If you find it, note the advertising claims. It describes it as a “team between the driver and the car”. It has a ‘built-in personality’ called Yui. “The driver is in charge but Yui is built to know you, and keep you safe.” Zuboff comprehensively details the battle over ‘owning the dashboard’ and the partnerships between the surveillance capitalists and the traditional car assemblers. 

Second, a number of the points that Zuboff raises are covered in the weekend’s Sunday Times report on the ambitions for the flotation of the heavily loss-making business WeWork. It looks like a real estate/landlord/service business, but it claims it is a technology business that is, to quote the newspaper, “harvesting a trove of data from members, including tracking workers as they move around”. This data will (allegedly) help it design office layouts. Other uses of the data are not explicit. The privacy of the individual appears to be unconsidered. But the clever thing is that all along the companies that lead this new form of capitalism, and essentially, we are largely talking Microsoft, Google and facebook, can claim not to be selling our data, because what they sell is the data they have collated and inferred by feeding our data into their own machine learning capacities. In one interview of Zuboff that I have subsequently watched, she agreed that the analogy would be selling ‘the gold, not the ore’. 

And third, Manchester City FC is planning to trial facial recognition for ground admission. It is being suggested that the utility is entering the ground more quickly, a bit like a Disney queue-jumping process, only instead of paying cash for the privilege, you have paid in a process of depersonalisation, by yielding up ever more truths about your private self, sometimes unknowingly and certainly without formal consent. Facial recognition is particularly interesting to me since it is claimed it can reveal our emotions in ‘micro-expressions’ that we give away before we can compose our faces as we wish. 

As a prospective psychoanalyst this feels like a window into our unconscious. To understand this, it is worth seeing the Netflix television drama ‘Lie to Me’ starring Tim Roth, which is wholly based on the skill of observing facial micro expressions and other body language clues. If you have not seen it, you are in for quite a treat. There are global, universal facial expressions for things like disgust and anger. If the machines are going to learn our emotions whilst we struggle to reveal or recognise them consciously, even to ourselves, where could this all end? Presumably it would affect psychoanalysis. I wonder if it would ever be part of a new therapy format with cameras trained on the subject as he or she is prompted to ‘free associate’?

Being a parent has taught me that forced compliance is rarely successful when wanting one’s offspring to do something. I very much want to insist that my children read this book, as a warning, and also as a means to help me understand much of what it tells me about the world today. We are at the basement of philosophical principles ie. what is free will, and can we exercise it? How do I make them read it? Behavioural manipulation, anyone? 

On reflecting: How an introduction to psychoanalytic and jungian thinking changed me

Over the past year I have had the very great pleasure of participating in a course called Psychotherapy Today. At the end of the course there is a suggestion that one might write a ‘reflective essay’. For those planning to pursue training in the field, it is encouraged. As I am about to go on holiday, and hopefully, indulge in some thinking and reflecting time, I re-read my essay. I think it conveys just how exploring the mind and perspectives of the mind, can change one. I am profoundly grateful to have been a participant and it has helped me become clearer about what my Second Innings might entail.

Psychotherapy Today: Its significance to me: A Reflective Essay: 2000 words

A reflective essay on Psychotherapy Today. How should one reflect on something that has changed one and one’s perspectives over ten months? My dictionary tells me that reflective is not just about returning an image back from whence it came, but also ‘meditative’. I shall attempt to convey what the course’s significance was to me and reflect what came my way, but also to demonstrate what having meditated on the past several months has done for me. 

Unsurprisingly, I find myself yielding to feelings of sadness. One expects to have to mourn, and to process something, that provided a monthly sense of intellectual and psychic purpose. A small death, a little grieving. Also, profound gratitude. I developed strong feelings of unity with group members, admiration for Wayne Full as our first co-ordinator, and for Ruth Calland’s remarkable light touch facilitation of our group sessions.  I am grateful too, for the awareness that I now see the world with a refreshed vision, which has been a pleasant outcome.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom according to Aristotle. What the course allowed me to consider was that cognitive acts and emotional responses are different, and that one is attempting to think in terms of integration. This became a key theme for me. Speaking about things and not from them, will be common to the majority, and was certainly a truth for me. Now, I think I may be understanding my emotional language. I read a paper co-written by David Bell that referred to bringing psychic materials to consciousness, and it has been a developing sense of understanding of that process that has particularly affected me. 

I look back on the man who started the course in the summer of 2018. In the previous twelve months, I had got divorced and accepted a redundancy package. I found myself telling people that I was “considering psychotherapy training”, but the truth was that I did not really know what it was, or might entail. Inspired by Mike Brearley, who I knew through cricket contacts, I had applied to the Institute of Psychoanalysis’s summer school and its series of ‘Maudsley Lectures’. I had a sense that this might be preparation for clinical training, but the core truth was that I had joined the course with no real sense of where it might lead me. I was more interested in what I might learn about my relationship with myself, which was largely one of intense internalised criticism. I knew I wanted to reorient my relationships with others, and not just because of my fresh acquaintance with the divorce courts. 

As this is a reflection, and meditative, I have decided to review it in a chronological format, but as I sit here now in July 2019, I find my recall is directed to the Titian ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ image that lit up our first seminar, and the seminars that were focused on trauma, on defences, and on narcissism. Whenever we role played, I enjoyed it, and despite my misgivings, I got a particular joy from our work exploring the importance of play.

Our first seminar day in October asked ‘What is a Mind?’ and we had read Hart’s paper on Titian’s ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’. The image is arresting and visceral. It was new to me, but has not left me since. I became fascinated by the themes of exposing previously unexposed layers and of getting through to the rawness of an individual. We also read Margaret Arden’s paper exploring Freud’s interest in literature. At that time, I had found myself thinking, ‘have I found my tribe?’ And this seemed to be a confirmation. The relationships of the arts to psychoanalytic thinking has been one of the great discovered pleasures for me; a means of seeking and understanding meaning. My enthusiasm was fired. It did not diminish at any point in the ensuing months. 

The course moved on to ‘mapping the landscape’, and this helped us consider models of the mind. The case study familiarity had appeal for me. I had no strong sense then that I might want to train, but this was probably a moment when considering it more seriously began. There was therefore a natural segue for me when December introduced us to Observation. The wonderful film of the newborn and its mother predictably had me thinking about my own mother, but also about how my ex-wife and I had parented our three children. My sense of belonging was developing. The relevance of the Meredith-Owen paper (‘On revisiting the opening chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections’) has become very strong for me now that I am in my own analysis. It is a paper that invariably prompts a smile on my face as I read it. 

In January, we gave space for trauma and neuroscience. This was very affecting for me. In my professional career, I had witnessed a suicide, as a young investment banker threw himself to his death in our Canary Wharf building. I realised that I had not considered that event since probably no more than two or three days afterwards. It was repressed. Now it began to have an impact. Annie Pesskin’s seminar was amongst my favourites and I have since enjoyed reading her blog contributions. It was about the time that I began my own blogging, albeit about a wider range of subjects than psychoanalytic theory, but I am working through what my unconscious motivations might have been.

As a sometime asthmatic, and a childhood eczema sufferer I was excited to understand more about the psyche and soma and so February’s ‘body in mind, mind in body’ held my attention. Some of the seminar days proved quite gruelling, and I was aware that sometimes my attention drifted, but that this also had meaning.  No drifting in this month. The prevalence of language around thin and thick skins, and ‘second skins’ has always had meaning for me, without me ever truly understanding what that might be, and this was a very productive and fascinating period of the course. By now I was pursuing options to be in analysis.

It was therefore useful and pertinent that March should be about ‘diving deeper’, as I started to get a greater sense of the analyst/analysand relationship and what informs what, in the relationship. Now that we were over half way I began to understand just how effectively and cleverly the seminar days had been constructed, to move us on and to let us cope with more demanding and intensive material. This had me in a wonderfully receptive and curious minded mode for seminars on Defences. I found this the most satisfying of our monthly sessions, perhaps because it gave all of us some very personal insight. David Gardiner was thought provoking when thinking about defences, not merely as obstacles, but as guides. Intellectualisation and Omnipotence held particular interest for me.

By May, the first sense of endings loomed, not least because our exceptional course co-ordinator had to step down to handle some personal issues. His absence was felt keenly, and his departure prompted a lot of discussion on what impact it had on us all. We were looking at group dynamics at the time, which felt appropriate to dealing with a departing individual. I had the further fortunate coincidence that in my current Birkbeck Business Psychology studies I had just begun a module on Group Processes, and the pioneering work of Henri Tajfel, so this session had a powerful impact for me. 

I think we all found the ability to role play in the May seminar quite liberating, but also informative, in how it affected us. In my group, it had a more profound impact than I think most of us had anticipated. Thinking about race and alternative group classifications that inspire ‘othering’ was sobering. In the realm of psychoanalysis, it was interesting to think about how, these group associations have led to the phrase ‘unconscious biases’ being adopted as common parlance.

As course completion loomed we had a day on sex and sexuality. It proved to be the most challenging for our group. I was not alone in noting that at the end of it I felt as tired as I had done at any point in the course. All of us found exploring the many issues that came up very demanding, but I think many shared my impression that paedophilia absorbed a phenomenal mount of psychic energy. That said, it gave more impetus to the candour of views and experiences shared in our group sessions, which had become the thing to which I most looked forward, and from which I think I drew most satisfaction.

Our closing seminar was on narcissism. Alongside defences, this was the seminar day when I found the use of case studies most interesting and revelatory. The understanding we give to the phrase and meaning of ‘biting the hand that feeds’ was very powerful for me, and was some evidence, I thought of my developing sense of working with imagery and word choice.

And so, it ended. I know I am changed by the experience. I have a curiosity and an appetite to train. I have found myself an extraordinary group of new friends who are remarkable in their responses, in their intellects, and in our diversity. I have had few richer life experiences. I find myself thinking much more deeply about non-verbal communications than ever before, and I find deeper connections in visual art, in playwriting and in all the dialogues that I now have; much more so, I think than would ever have been possible without Psychotherapy Today. The idea of the huge submerged, unseen iceberg image of the unconscious is very much part of how I conduct my personal interactions now.

The course met its aims, for me. I feel I have had comprehensive introduction to psychoanalytic and Jungian psychotherapy. It has reordered my thinking – about society and politics and about the arts. It has stimulated my appetite for more learning. The 

reading demands were broad, but never overwhelming. My reading is constantly drawn to ideas of individuation and integration. Somehow, I feel much more alive. I think I have stirred my unconscious and it is changing me. 

For future joiners of the course, I would say that it is likely to make you want to be in your own analysis and that, for me, that has been a profound and wonderful, stimulating experience, although no analysand would suggest that any of it is an ‘easy’ experience, and quite often is very demanding. I have loved how it has made me reinterpret art and drama, my experiences of which all seem significantly richer. The candour of new friends has accelerated my friendship formation. I feel able to be much more ‘open’ with people I meet after such a generous ten months. 

It has deepened my sense of trust, just at a time when public levels of trust and our political discourse seem to be faced in quite another direction. I feel more able to handle ‘difficult’ conversation subjects, especially with my parents and my sibling. Other people seem to react differently to me too. Perhaps driven by unconscious signalling there are many of my long and short-term acquaintances who now seem to feel the desire to ‘unburden’ themselves to me. 

To repeat, the end of the course is triggering some senses of loss, but overwhelmingly, I feel a sense of gratitude. 

On Moving Home

Home – what is its significance?

“Well, this is a bit weird”. So said my eldest daughter to me and her sister, as they helped me unpack some boxes, as I moved into my new home at the start of this month. The weirdness was due to the fact that the boxes had been tucked away with a storage firm for five years. Moving into an unfurnished flat allowed me to cut my storage costs and to surround myself with the familiar. Although, quite a lot of it proved to be unfamiliar, and much of it had us questioning why we had once felt it needed keeping. She was right; we were having a trip – Dr. Who like – across a time zone, and it was weird.

Most of us are familiar with the fact that moving home is deemed to be one of life’s three great stressors – up there with grieving and getting divorced. I have had the chance to think about the impact of a move, and the importance of having a home, this month. The all-too-little experience that I have had of the volunteering and charity sectors has been concentrated in working for homeless organisations.

One of the most powerful things I have been told by the homeless is that they know that their circumstances are temporary. All aspire to return to a roof over their heads and to rebuilding their lives. I have rarely met a subset of the population with more aspiration, optimism and resilience than the homeless group that shares Christmas in Bermondsey. I have rarely heard anyone articulate the pricelessness of home, when attempting to describe its value, than at the Crisis shelter.

Home is literally the starting point, the foundation and the base for all that might go right in an individual’s world. It is a place to which we retire, to restore energy and to re-arm ourselves against the pressures of the outside world. It is a place where we can put away the attire and manner with which we feel we need to present ourselves to the world, and be our true self. Psychoanalytically, we are getting in touch with our primary carer and returning to a representation of that womb like security and dependence.

It is worth thinking about being without a home. Plainly, most people associate a lack of a home with the luckless individuals begging for some change and sustenance, to take away some of the harshness of street dwelling. But for some, even those with a roof over their heads, they remain homeless because of circumstances, such as refugees. When I was growing up, it was Ugandan Asians departing Idi Amin’s murderous regime, or the plight of what became known as the Vietnamese Boat People. To be homeless is not, paradoxically, always to be without a home. Most of these frightened people coming into Britain were housed, but will have maintained that they were homeless.

Being without a home tends to generate images of drifters and of the poverty-stricken. It is about being unrooted. In nature, to be unrooted, is to be dying, to be in a state of decay. The importance of being rooted, therefore has occupied my thoughts since my latest move. Another way of thinking about having one’s roots untethered, is to be displaced. The definition of a displaced person is one removed from his or her country as a prisoner or as slave labour; a refugee or stateless person. One is not displaced if it is by choice. My Second Innings, which is the background to me making a new home, is a choice. I may feel out of place currently, but not displaced.

What does it mean to ‘make a home’? Homes have emotional associations. We tend to invest them with cinematic reels playing in our minds of what has gone before. Memories, it seems to me, make a home. Perhaps of happy times with our children or when we were children. Perhaps birthday parties. In contrast, there will also be sad times that define a home. Possibly, job losses or the mourning of a family member’s passing. The fact that one copes with emotional highs and lows in a particular place, lends it the definition of ‘home’. For me and my daughters opening boxes, it became the comfort of things I have bought, have photographed, and had framed, and furniture that reminded me of significant moments shared with the family at another location.

We cannot ‘make a home’ instantly, however stylishly it is furnished and decorated. However attractively a property developer displays a ‘show home’, we know it feels spartan and a little forbidding to us. It is not our’s. It is not personalised. It is not home. Homes are unfussy, chaotic and personalised. It was why opening boxes that had been sealed for five years was ‘weird’ for me and my daughters. We re-engaged with personalisation, and it triggered a number of memories. My daughters giggled as a box of soft toys emerged and they could name each toy. And, I shall be renting. Can it be home, without any stake in the ownership? It already feels much more of a home than the furnished accommodation that I have left. What will I need, to enjoy having it as a home?

One thing I need to feel ‘at home’ is a decent shower. After that, somewhere to sit and eat, somewhere to sleep, but always, somewhere to read and to store books. In Anthony Powell’s masterly, but long winded, ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, the tenth novel was ‘Books do Furnish a Room’. The older I get, the more minimalist I persuade myself I am becoming, but not with books. If I enter a bookshop to buy a book, I invariably leave with three.

When the removals firm delivered my boxes from storage, over ten of them contained books and nothing else. My limited shelving capacity is full and I still have five boxes of books that I am reluctantly letting go. If any of my friends fancies popping by for a glass of wine, (something else defeating my storage capacity) and taking a book from my collection drop me a text or message. I am finally appreciating the joy of passing on books I have enjoyed rather than just admiring their dust-collecting spines on a shelf.

The boxes showed me associations with the past, as I contemplate the future. Photographs that had been forgotten. Some cuddly toys, including a bear called Bruno. Only my parents have known me longer than Bruno. He is older than me and sat in my cot. He is a tangible representation of my view of the home being somewhere we all think of as a womb-like retreat.

I was thinking too, of what ‘home’ represents when one has more than one home. I am thinking less of people with multiple addresses, holiday homes, ski chalets and the rest, but of those who leave their home country and establish a home in a new country, but still regard the place of their birth as home. That pull, to and from each home, must be quite tiring. In psychoanalysis, splitting, is the inability to hold opposing thoughts, feelings or beliefs. Those who use splitting, often as a defence mechanism, are often described as ‘black and white’ people, or having ‘all or nothing personalities’. Holding two places to be home, but for different reasons and associations, must be a sort of physical manifestation of splitting.

I have seen a couple of examples of it amongst my friends recently. This weekend I joined one friend for afternoon tea and cake. We met in South Kensington and she took me to Daquise, a Polish restaurant established as far back as 1947. I was introduced to szarlotka, as good an apple desert as I have ever enjoyed, and I regard myself as a tarte tatin authority, and although she left Poland when she was barely out of her teens, she was wistfully talking about Polish cuisine and society. She has lived in London longer than in the country where she was born, but her sense of home struck me as less defined than mine.

In my last job I had brilliant young mentee. Her interests and skills covered everything from neuroscience to music. She was a gifted linguist and an enthusiastic dancer and gym athlete. She was Hong Kong Chinese, and she is a keen contributor to social media. The nature of the protests against islanders being taking for trial in mainland China have become more violent and troublesome. I see her empathising with her Hong Kong community and I sense her powerful pull towards ‘home’. Her splitting is apparent in her messages. She appears to feel more mentally at home in Hong Kong currently, than where she is physically at home.

The flow of people around the world due to circumstance, opportunity, freedoms or to escape persecution, means there are now more people in the world today with a split sense of home, or an impermanent sense of home, than probably any other time in history. I wonder how it affects our collective psyche. The industrial revolution and transport innovation was what largely undermined the sense of community that had prevailed in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It had a dilutive impact on the structure of families. I think something is happening now that contributes to insecurity in our modern society. It is why affluence often equates with a need to ‘wall in’. People feel a need to live in gated housing – shared communal spaces are only shared when they allow the exclusion of the many.

I thought about the home choices I have made since I left the parental home. One of the few ambitions I had when I left school was to live in a home bigger than the one in which I grew up. I would have wanted that affluent man opportunity, to live in an exclusive location. That may just have been the shallow materialist in me, or a sense of a home’s value. I bought a small three storey terraced house in an Essex village in my early 20’s, and after a London purchase fell through, moved into my best pal’s Totteridge home to get educated in calvados, armagnac, and home made curry.

From there I moved into a small mews house in Islington, that was bought for single life, but was shared before I had truly made it my own, when I fell in love with the girl who would become my wife. The arrival of our first baby encouraged a move out of town. It definitely felt like a home, especially when it had a baby in it, but not having bought it together somehow affected our sense of homeliness. Buying somewhere together was important in creating a home for our family.

I made what I now realise was a ‘status driven purchase’. It was implausibly far out for commuting, but was a beautiful large semi with its own outdoor swimming pool, a capacious cellar and six bedrooms. I thought I had made it! This was a home as a means to show off my sense of my own achievement. Hindsight suggests it was bought for the wrong reasons, although we were able to refurbish and decorate it beautifully and I was sorry when we moved on.

Then followed a ‘chocolate box’ six hundred year old charm, that turned out to be depressing because of the tiny leaded light windows and the dominance of exposed dark wood beams. We bought it for the land and because it was a shorter drive to the prep school for my wife, but never really settled. It was our home, but I am not sure we ever felt it was homely. After a brief rental, whilst the builders did a ‘project’ on our dream home, we acquired a large place, hundreds of yards from the nearest neighbour, with woodland. It was a dream, but before we had even finished with the expansion and refurbishment, it was clear that we were living in about one third of it. 

A bruising experience at work and a recognition that all my financial wealth was tied up in one large illiquid North Essex asset, and with our children away at boarding school, gave us an opportunity to consider getting back to town. It was my first ever experience of flat dwelling, at the age of 50. The joys of Shad Thames are many, but for us it was perhaps a little too touristy. A sub-penthouse in St Katharine Docks followed, before I was finding a place to live alone. And now here. What did each mean to me? 

Well, I have done the swimming pool thing, done the tennis court thing, done the gym thing, done the woodland thing. For some time now I have been revelling in smaller spaces. There is no chance now of having to admit I only live in one third of my own home. My homes have all been important, but I confess that they were bought to impress other people, which is, of course, ridiculous. Ridiculous, yes, but I suspect also not uncommon.

I moved from Ingatestone to Islington because a girlfriend thought at that age I should be in London, near her, and living it up. My Manningtree home was bought because of the pool and the cellar, not because it was a sensible financial risk and a manageable commute. The charm of centuries of history turned out to be better to admire, than to live in. Finally, the ‘big house’, which we extended and where we had gardens landscaped and so on. It was home, and I loved watching the children grow up there, but I look back on my pretentiousness and wince.

And now, my parents in their advancing years are also in the throes of moving home. They will leave a home that has been home to them for around forty years. The place where I celebrated A level results and the successful acquisition of my first job in the City. Somewhere that represents home for me, although I think I spent more years at the previous address. They have bought a house near to where my brother now lives in Ascot. Apart from him they have no connection with the area. They are Londoners who have spent almost forty-five years in just three Chelmsford addresses. I hope it will be home to them. I am unlikely ever to have that sense again, that most of us have of visiting our parents and feeling like we are ‘going home’. But I am delighted that they are downsizing and seem excited about the prospect of the move.

So, I look at my new home, smile at Bruno, and the photographs, and realise that although I keep buying books, I have about one third of my collection still unread, and I feel grateful. I am not homeless, not displaced and not unrooted, and keen to see my friends for a glass of something, and possibly to persuade them to take one of my books home with them. But, it is definitely still one of the great stressors of adult life, so I intend this to be home for a wee while yet.

Is Sport stepping up?

Meg Rapinoe

Political discourse is as divisive as I can recall. Modern and current political strategy is about exploiting division. Into the void that was once unity and consensus, sport, and the finest of our sportspeople, appear to be stepping. I wonder if something is going on at an unconscious level. We tend to need heroes, leadership figures, paternal and maternal guides. Once upon a time, the political battlefields might have yielded them up, but that feels unlikely right now, whatever continent one is viewing, with the very honourable exception of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern.

A week or so ago I, like many, was feverishly channel-hopping on my television as my daughters and I tried to get every dramatic turn viewed, in the concurrent showing of an extraordinary Wimbledon Men’s Final, and the surreal Cricket World Cup Final, played a few miles away from Wimbledon in NW8. Sport can take one’s emotional pitch to levels which are, or seem, only just bearable. Every year they happen we seem to be surprised, but they keep happening.

I recall feeling tearful and choking with joy on 2012’s Olympic Super Saturday, and by contrast, at the crushing disappointment of Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss in 1996’s semi-final versus Germany. I tried not to cry along with Andy Murray when he tearfully responded to losing a Wimbledon final by rallying himself with “I am getting closer”. I cannot have been alone in yelping for joy at Johnny Wilkinson’s drop goal success in 2003? I could barely contain myself, watching with my wife and my father at home. This could be a ridiculously long list, so I will stop now, but I doubt anyone, even those professing not to be sports fans, has such a list that is blank.

Sporting achievement is one thing, but I sense something different about the importance of sporting conduct currently. I am not going to make wild assertions that our societies are the sort of broken political states that characterised the 1930’s, but I feel something profound within me about a handful of sportspeople’s recent interviews and speeches. I dare to suggest, helped by the power of modern media, that they resonate in a way that mimics the athletics success of Jesse Owens at The Berlin Games in 1936. That may have been the last century’s best example of sportsmen and women giving the world a sight of respect and dignity when its political leaders had lost their way.

After I had tried to calm down a little after watching the Lord’s denouement, Kane Williamson was interviewed by the world’s press. He evaded leading questions about the fairness of the ‘boundaries scored’ solution to separating the teams, and also the controversy of how Guptill’s throw had struck Stokes’s bat and ‘earned’ England an incremental five runs, when it should have only been four more and would have required Stokes to come off strike, like he was ducking under a Jofra Archer bouncer. His interview is an exercise in stoicism, laced with charm, and wry smiles. I love cricket, but I can think of few times when I have been prouder to have been a cricketer.

At much the same time, Roger Federer was calmly conducting his own runner-up interview. For many years now Federer has exemplified interview charm, conducted with dignity and decorum, but of course, usually as a graceful winner politely complimenting his opponent’s gallant efforts. This time, within weeks of his 38th birthday, he was having to consider questions that he may have preferred not to answer so close to the end of a gruelling contest, whilst processing that he had had a couple of Championship points against the world’s best player, and not converted them.

As Sue Barker talked about a match that would live long in people’s memories, he wryly commented “I will try to forget.” Barely skipping beats, he was agreeing it was a great match, and then was magnanimous enough to say “Novak, congratulations man, that was crazy”. Tennis journalists say that these two giants have little time for one another, but plainly they have immense respect. And that may be the lesson sportspeople want to give politicians, right now.

Another sportsperson who has attracted a good deal of attention lately has been US Women’s football star, Meg Rapinoe. Apart from her outstanding talent, and a distinctive leadership style, she has attracted attention precisely because of her strong views about politics, and specifically about the President. I listened to her speech at the homecoming World Cup winners’ celebration. She started by focusing on a little humour, but quickly articulated the importance of inclusiveness and team spirit. It could have been a genuine love of what she had shared, but it sounded like a witty rebuke to politicians.

She said, “…we’re chilling’. We got tea sipping’. We got celebrations. We have pink hair, and purple hair. We have tattoos and dreadlocks. We got white girls and black girls and everything in between. Straight girls and gay girls”. The crowd lapped it up. Just as ‘lock her up’, ‘take back control’ and ‘send her back’ can motivate chanting and ugliness, so can more inclusive words, better expressed. I thought it was good, but she got better as she drew to her conclusion:

“This is my charge to everyone. We have to be better. We have to love more, hate less. We got to listen more, and talk less. We got to know this is everybody’s responsibility, every single person here. Every single person who is not here. Every single person who doesn’t want to be here. Every single person who agrees and doesn’t agree. It is our responsibility to make this world a better place.” 

And just in case anyone had missed the fact that she was not talking about her team or even wider communities like female athletes and soccer players she went on,

“Yes we’re female athletes but we’re so much more than that. You’re so much more than that. You’re more than a fan. You’re more than someone who just supports sport. You’re more than someone who tunes in every four years. You’re someone who walks these streets every single day. You interact with your community every single day. How do you make your community better? How do you make the people around you better? Your family? Your closest friends? The 10 closest people to you? The 20 closest people to you? The most 100 closest people to you? It’s every single person’s responsibility.There’s been so much contention in these last years. I’ve been a victim of that. I’ve been a perpetrator of that.But it’s time to come together. This conversation is at the next step. We have to collaborate. It’s takes everybody. This is my charge to everybody, ‘Do what you can. Do what you have to do. Step outside of yourself. Be more. Be better. Be bigger than you’ve ever been before.” 

Now, I appreciate that she is something of an acquired taste, but I really like that, and I think those words may last longer than any memories of her playing career, or her (in)famous declaration about whether she would accept an invitation to The White House. After a week feeling full to the brim about the joys of sport and my admiration for our finest sportsmen and women, I settled down to enjoy the contest to be the R&A’s Champion Golfer of 2019; The Open Championship winner. The contest was being played in Northern Ireland.

At the end of a brilliant four days, when the elements decided to properly test the skills of the finest by delivering squally rain on the deciding round, the victor was an Irishman, Shane Lowry – from the South. And he was cheered and applauded and willed to win by all the crowd, 75% of which was from the island of Ireland, whichever side of the border. There was something of destiny and healing in the outcome. Amongst his first declared new ambitions was to play for Europe in the next Ryder Cup, alongside Northern Irishmen and Englishmen. But it was not Irish joy that impressed me, and I will come on to Eoin Morgan below, but the conduct of two very fine English golfers.

Lowry had been in the final pairing for the last round, leading from his friend, the Englishman Tommy Fleetwood. As he held his own game together in the foul conditions, he knew Fleetwood was his only real challenger. Fleetwood had already been a runner-up in one of golf’s four ‘majors’ and when the Irishman dropped a shot at the first, he must have thought he could prevail. It was not to be. Fleetwood was crushed at the end and his interview revealed how much hope he had invested in winning. Shortly after he took to twitter and tweeted, “The Open was a spectacle for sport. Proud to be a part of it. Many congratulations to @ShaneLowryGolf, his family and his team on achieving a dream. Hopefully one day it can be me”. I hope it can, and not just because of his brilliant golfing talent, but because of the humanity in this, as he, like Federer, processed one of those ‘so near, yet…’ moments, that sport tends to provide.

The second English golfer who merits a post Open mention, is Lee Westwood. Westwood has finished in the top 5, eleven times. He has never won it. This year, he came fourth. In the penultimate round, he was playing well and was probably recognising that he was going to be in contention, and that Federer-like, it may not be something that happens many, if any, times in the future. He hit a poor tee shot on the 10th. His ball was embedded in turf beneath a bush. He asked an official if he qualified for ’embedded ball relief’. The official asked if he would play it if the ball was not embedded. It is a critical point. If he would normally play it, he was entitled to relief. However, Westwood had a dilemma. He knew he would not normally attempt to play it. He could have pretended he would have done. Only he knew what he would typically do in such a situation. He could have lied about his intentions, hoping to use the rules to his advantage and preserve a share of the lead. Instead, he admitted he would not normally play a ball in such a position. He gave up the ‘free drop’ he must have been tempted to argue for, took an unplayable lie, took relief back from the bush and made a bogey, and lost the lead. But he respected the game.

Golf may be the sport that most tests a player’s respect for rules. That devil on the shoulder saying ‘nobody can see’ or ‘nobody knows’, but I want to return to the extraordinary events at Lord’s. As New Zealand’s ‘super over’ batting pair collapsed in disappointment and despair, England’s Chris Woakes offered support and commiserations in a gesture of the brotherhood of cricketers. It was an update of the magnificent picture of Andrew Flintoff consoling Brett Lee in the 2005 Ashes contest after England’s absurdly narrow win (also only permitted by an umpiring decision blemish), which itself was something of an update of my all time favourite sporting ‘respect’ photograph, when Bobby Moore and Pele come together at the end of the 1970 World Cup match. Respect your opponent – it is the core of sporting contests – one would hope it will reappear in political contests soon in Westminster and Washington.

The general message I am trying to convey is the tone of respect for integrity of rules and for the opponent. For cricket, it may be a ‘post Sandpaper’ moment, especially as the Aussies are here this summer, but I think it is something more profound. The US women footballers, Federer, Westwood, Djokovic, Fleetwood, Williamson – something feels like an important shift is happening; sport is stepping up.

It is showing the power of teams. Instead of division, we need to harness the ‘teams of rivals’ that Abraham Lincoln understood would be the best route to the best outcomes. It requires inclusiveness. England’s winning World Cup captain, Eoin Morgan, another Irishman who may be at the apogee of his career, was wonderfully eloquent about inclusiveness after the team’s win. Tested about employing ‘the luck of the Irish’, he quickly pointed out to the media that “we had Allah on our side too”, which had been asserted by one of the two Moslem players in his squad, Adil Rashid. I have written before about the challenge of society respecting the great faiths, and how sport can bridge it, when admiring the Liverpool Kop’s chant in support of their star forward, Mo Sarah.

From a personal point of view, all of this is very appealing. My favourite sports were team sports, but the individual sports require possibly greater respect for rules and integrity. Golf: How a ball lies hidden from view under bushes and branches, as exemplified by what I shall always now think of as the ‘Westwood dilemma’. Tennis: at the social and club level is often about making line calls with nobody but the gods of the game, and one’s conscience in observation. Squash: is the ball ‘down’ or not as one attempts to rescue one’s opponent’s brilliant drop shot? Real tennis: Setting and concluding the chase. And so it goes on.

It reaches deep into one’s psyche and into family rivalries. My brother was a very talented cricketer. He turned professional and had a successful twenty year first class career. I admired, and often, envied his success. Shortly after he turned pro he was keeping wicket for his club side against mine. It was a championship decider. I was opening for my team in a run chase on a turning, late-season wicket. The bowler was also on the Essex staff, as were a number of the close fielders. My brother led a concerted and co-ordinated appeal that I had nicked one. I thought I was miles from getting a touch. The umpire concurred, but my brother led the muttering and dissent. Gamesmanship. I was furiously angry. A few overs later I was dismissed. We drew the match that we needed to win.

My parents were attending – they had never seen us in opposition. As I left the field of play, having been dismissed, and mindful that we were planning to dine with them and our new girlfriends, I informed my parents at some volume that I would not be dining with that – and I offered a selection of expletives. Swearing in front of my mother was a ‘no-no’ in our family. My brother and I not only did not dine together with our girlfriends and parents, but did not speak for some weeks. I rationalised it as the difference between his ‘professionalism’ and my Corinthian, amateur approach to the game. He would maintain, and does, to this day, that I cheated by not walking having definitely got a touch. Absolutely not. In cricket, I was a ‘walker’, and that did not change for a title deciding game with your brother behind the stumps for the oppo. But I guess we will never agree!

My sporting conduct is not above reproach – I think my golf score counting has sometimes been ‘forgetful’, and I am sure I have called a tennis ball ‘out’, when suspecting my opponent nipped the line. In football I was never sent off, but I was booked. In squash I may have believed I had reached a ball, when I had got there a millisecond late, and in real tennis my ability to read the setting of the chase was sometimes flawed. Nothing feels dirtier that ‘winning’ a sports contest and not feeling that it was unimpeachably 100% deserved. Outside of sports, it may be why I am so saddened by Brexit. Not the outcome. I accept it. I was a remainer, but far from enthused by the European Project, but saddened by the nature of the ‘win’. Too many laws broken, too many lies exposed, to feel that it was a worthy win, and that I and anyone else should want to support the ‘winners’.

But as our new PM is revealed, I am hoping that future political games are played in a better spirit and abide by laws, so that I can accept outcomes more easily. Internationally, I am saddened that the phrase ‘very fine people’ now makes me think contemptuously of Trump and his far right pals, than it does of genuinely fine people. The fine people I see, seem to be concentrated on sports fields right now, or at least podcast studios where their sporting prowess has given them access – I particularly recommend Maro Itoje and Ebony Rainford-Brent interviewed by the Campbell father and daughter duo on their ‘Football, Feminism and Everything in Between’ series. Nor do I think this is a summer 2019 feature. I think this shift began with the dignified response of Raheem Sterling to racist abuse in a match at Chelsea last year. His conduct has had extraordinary ramifications.

Sport has the capacity to touch emotions in a way very little else can do so. Only music, I think, can affect large numbers of people simultaneously in a similar way. I am loving the quality of the sport currently on offer, but especially loving the conduct of the players. I hope the Rugby World Cup and this summer’s men’s Ashes series are other examples. I strongly believe that they will be. As for the political arena, I cling to my faith that all things are cyclical. Great leaders emerge when history needs them. To me, they feel needed now.

On Books and Mariella

Smithsonian Libraries' Adopt-a-Book Program
Books do furnish a room – Powell

One of the many joys of my Second Innings is having a little more reading time. Having exchanged an income for time, it is important to me to fill that time productively. I can think of few things more productive than becoming more widely read. Time has also allowed me to become familiar with more and more podcasts, and I have a new favourite. It is ‘Books to Live By’ and is hosted by Mariella Frostrup, of whom I am a long time admirer.

The first edition, which seems an appropriate way of starting any sentence that might be bookish, was with actor Dominic West. It was naughty, flirtatious, sometimes salacious and rather wonderful. I am such a fan of her’s, and I so liked the format, that I tweeted her an appreciation. She replied. I felt like my nine or ten year old self when I had just grabbed an autograph from one of Essex’s finest cricketers. Should one be exhibiting fandom at the age of 55?

The podcast is a kind of ‘Desert Island Discs’ for bibliophiles and, just as the best DID hosts have used music choices as a way to open up the castaways’ psyches, so does Mariella use books. The selections reveal a good deal about the guest. Cate Blanchett was particularly good; Brian Cox and Dougie Poynter too. As I learned more about space and the universe, or about dinosaurs, I started to get a sense of the people, especially their younger selves who read the books, and why. The programme has a charm and a sense of escapism that is akin to the act of reading itself.

There are many podcasts looking at literature appreciation, including Radio 4’s ‘Books and Authors’, but Mariella has the best format, I think. In R4’s offer, Harriett Gilbert and two guests describe a choice each has made and debate the merits and demerits of the choices. Passive support for another’s choice is not the order of the day, and I like listening to some feisty, sometimes highbrow and usually passionate, debate. Actor Russell Tovey discussing Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain was especially good. All of this is a satisfying distraction from my psychoanalysis and from Business Psychology text books.

It made me start to think about my own love of books and the path I had explored as a reader. The joy of books is how they open new worlds and I tried to recall what I fell in love with on the page, and perhaps, why. As Hemingway noted, “there is no friend as loyal as a book”. Equally, one feels very loyal to the books that have given pleasure. As a child I think I was a very keen, maybe even a voracious reader, but in adult life newspapers and stock market research intruded on my reading time and pleasure, plus I had the obviously delightful distractions of marriage and parenting.

The first author or book that I can recall having me swept away, enjoying my mental construction of the scenes described on the page, was Enid Blyton. I am not sure how accurate my memory is, but as I recall it I read the Fives from beginning to end (were there 21 of them?) and then the Sevens (14, I think). From an early age I had this need to read things in order and not to break authorial sequences. Obviously the adult psychoanalysts will all be nodding sagely and wondering about me completing my anal development stage. And yes, my bookshelves were alphabetised.

There must have been other authors and books that broke my sequences but I remember that I left the Secret Seven behind and found Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ stories. I ‘graduated’ from those to Jennings and Darbishire, by Anthony Buckeridge. Are these still read today? I did read to my children but I don’t think I introduced William or Jennings, and not just because two of them were girls. Next came Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ and Biggles, by WE Johns, although in which order I cannot recall.

Then I left what I regarded as ‘schoolboy’ reading and started to transition to adult authors, although not before an inspired teacher in my first year at secondary school introduced PG Wodehouse, by getting me to read The Gold Bat and to think about secrets, honour and loyalties. I know I would have devoured Harry Potter, if Hogwarts has been a thing then. After that it was Alistair MacLean for adventure, and lots of detective crime from Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Secondary school introduced me to very little literature that made an impression on me until we hit ‘O’ Level year. That may have been because of a zealous, enthusiastic, earnest, young English teacher, fresh out of Cambridge and unsuited to the Essex comprehensive school I attended, who thought our 13 year old selves would be enamoured of Chaucer – and not even a ‘naughty’ tale like Wife of Bath. Franklin’s Prologue and Tale for us, which almost ended any positive relationship I might have hoped for with literature, although it was clearly designed to teach us hot-blooded teenagers the values of patience, honour and respect for women.

I did start to read Dickens, but I think that was my own choice, not a school one. These days I love Dickens, but then I found him trying, other than A Christmas Carol. As I moved through my teens, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield redeemed his reputation, but the novel that made the greatest impression on me before I hit the critical exam years was Howard Spring’s Fame is the Spur. It is about Hamer Shawcross, who makes his way from the low end of society to its political peaks. I did not know, at the time, that it was a fictionalised account drawn largely on the life of Ramsay MacDonald, but I loved it. Something about the underdog, and taking on difficult odds, and having to absorb contempt but ultimately triumph, meant a good deal to my teen self.

Then, ‘O’ Levels and ‘A’ Levels, and blessed by an examinations board that set us marvellous texts. My reading appreciation was transformed, and the places and societies that these words took me, were wonderful introductions to new worlds. My memory is a little confused with what was an ‘O’ level text and what was ‘A’ level, but these were really important to me. I discovered that I had an appreciation for them that I could convey in writing, and get good marks. My confidence soared and I read widely outside the exam curriculum.

The first of these was The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell. Even now I can remember the scene when Lucy Hughes tears off her muslin dress, as a scene that caused titters of embarrassment in our class, which had just become mixed after three years of single sex classes. The novel is brilliant in observing the destruction of social codes, and of considering the weaknesses of a sexist and racist era and society. A worthy Booker prize winner.

Around this time the exam board was introducing me to Thomas Hardy. I doubt very much that I would have been a Hardy reader had it not been something imposed on me. By very good chance I had to study The Return of the Native. Hardy has at least three much more famous novels, possibly four or five, but I really love this. If you can appreciate Hardy’s languorous and patient, heavily descriptive style and you do not yet know Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright, you are in for a huge treat.

He is the personification of honesty and virtue, but a little old-fashioned and unimaginative, and she is the sexiest of tragic heroines, who yearns for the sophistication of a great city like Paris. Their love affair is intense but doomed, and their marriage unhappy and unsatisfying. There are, it being Hardy, many sub plots and other potential lovers and suitors, and I think it is some of his finest writing, especially the strain on Clym’s relationship with his mother.

More modern authors completed the novels for our exams. Drama was Shakespeare, and poetry was the Metaphysical poets up to the Great War poems, but novels did not go back further than Hardy. Fortunately, we were introduced to Evelyn Waugh and to EM Forster. Waugh was easy to like because about this time the country was totally absorbed and enchanted by Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons, in the brilliant TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, making a star of a teddy bear called Aloysius.

Our set text was A Handful of Dust. Similar to Return of the Native, it features a doomed marriage with a wife, Brenda, who is hugely frustrated by her boredom with husband Tony. She has an unfulfilling affair. As events play out and become more absurd, the cuckolded husband ends up in the South American jungle where he is kidnapped by a madman who demands that Tony read him Dickens. The pain in the relationships and the different senses of being imprisoned; her in England, him when he leaves it, are really affecting. And, as with any Waugh, it is laugh out loud funny in places. I had a period of ‘binge reading’ Waugh then, every one of which I loved.

For Forster, whose work I also found it necessary to read extensively, inspired by the ‘A’ level exam selection, I had the fortune to be made to start with Howards End. There is something so heart-aching in the unsuccessful meddling in other people’s lives, and the survival of Leonard’s illegitimate child that interested me, as well as trying to get a sense of what ‘only connect’ truly meant. I came to prefer A Room With a View and especially, A Passage to India, more, but Howards End was a great novel for me because the characters and the events were so brilliantly defined and delineated and so easy, therefore, to conjure up when having to answer an exam question.

We were also introduced to Joyce, but mercifully to Dubliners and not to Ulysses. I am pretty sure Dubliners was our set text but I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the same time. I liked Joyce, which brings me to Ulysses, and what I think of as the ‘unreadables’. I am sure we all have novels that sit in this category. I was of a fairly determined and near masochistic disposition, and I prided myself on always finishing a book I had started.

Ulysses broke me, and I have had two subsequent failures with it. The list of books that have done this to me is short, but bothersome. One is Don Quixote. I read it on my trip around Europe by train last spring, and am about three-fifths through it, but it was becoming harder to pick up every day. I have not quite admitted defeat, but it is a tough one. The other is Catch 22 which, like Ulysses, is supposed to be a work of genius. It passed me by. Maybe the upcoming television adaptation will give me the impetus to try again. I feel less obsessed with the need to finish novels these days, but I am sure most people have a list of unreadables (their definition).

So, I left school, very much blessed with a love of books and of reading. My determination not to put down books that I had started was helpful. Some novels and authors became almost ‘punishment reads’ for me, but by ploughing on I came to reach points where everything fell into place and the book was transformed for me, into a source of pleasure. That happened to me with Dostoevsky, especially Crime and Punishment, and also Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. When I was a little older it meant I kept up with Widmerpool all the way through Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

And it is good because some books pay handsomely for perseverance. Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s genius ‘Booker of Bookers’, took me some time to get into, but once in, the reader can only be fully immersed, and it is a wonderful and comforting feeling. I felt very much the same about Vikram Seth’s amazing A Suitable Boy, and almost the same again with his An Equal Music. A number of the so called classics deliver this delight of being pulled in, at times slightly unwillingly, until one is a disarmed captive. There are many examples, but Frankenstein stands out for me.

What are the great reads currently? My eldest is part of a Book Club, and that has kept me updated with contemporary reading fashion. Although I love and value the sense of being alone with my imagination and an author’s words and ideas, I enjoy the opportunity to discuss books a great deal. Having a different gender and generational perspective at the table is particularly enjoyable. I doubt that I have discussed books much other than in my school classrooms, but now she and I regularly encourage one another to read something, so that we can discuss it over supper. I would never have found Macrae Burnett’s His Bloody Project, without her prompting, and it is one of the finest things I have read in the past year.

She has introduced me to Sally Rooney – there are so many things to be said about the lovers in her Conversation with Friends, and about the social divide inhibiting the lovers in Normal People. I persuaded her to read Anna Burns’s Milkman and she has recently responded by giving me Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways as a present for Father’s Day. She is keen that we share and discuss Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which will allow me to insist she reads the amazing Regeneration trilogy, which captured me some years ago. Of all novels, these Barker ones are the most perfect for my Psychotherapy friends and fellow trainees.

That brings me to a huge question. With so much to read, should one devote time to re-reading? In the past my attitude has been to answer, ‘no’. I am not even sure why I was like that, but a book read was something to be regarded as completed, like a school project. Now, I see the folly of that. I want to understand why Hamer Shawcross was important to my younger self, and I feel a need to revisit Hardy, and to see if Eustacia really deserved her awful fate.

What I have not revisited in this trawl through my mental library, is non-fiction. I wonder if it is an age thing, but the mix of my reading from non-fiction to fiction is now heavily skewed in favour of the factual. In my teens it would have been almost exclusively fiction. The first book that started to change my direction was Dennis Healey’s Time of my Life. I was brought up in a predominantly Conservative party household, and there was little time for Labour politicians in the 1970’s.

However, Healey appeared on the Parkinson show and talked about the need for politicians to have what he called a ‘hinterland’. This was a love of things outside politics. His interests were varied; walking, travelling, art, literature and he played piano to near concert level standard. Reading his book was probably the first time that I started to understand that people were multi dimensional, and that there was probably something to like and admire in everyone. His fascination with ideas, his wartime experiences and his deep love for Edna make it a very fine book. I have read many politicians’ memoirs since and few are as rich, although Ken Clarke’s Kind of Blue is a good rival, politically, musically, and hedonistically.

Healey led me to an adult life of loving history and biography. I had had brief teenage ambitions to be a journalist, so Bernard Levin’s Taking Sides gave me the chance to think about style and use of language. More recently, on a visit to Russia, I read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World. It is a great prompt to think about how historians will report the history we are creating currently. Interpretations of history – invariably written by the winners – are great conversation drivers. As my children grew up I wanted them to have good conversation and to be well-read. I think I was rather over earnest, but all of them are happy to talk books with me. A book by Theodore Zeldin, which is called Conversation, is worth trying. We care more about what to wear to social occasions that what we will talk about. Why? And should that be turned about?

So, which handful of books would I choose to share with and discuss with Mariella. I seized upon three great classic novels: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, and then started to wonder what my fascination with these tragic, ‘fallen’ women might say about me. I would certainly include A Suitable Boy, as the hero doggedly preserves his dignity and sustains his hope. Almost certainly, Birdsong. It had such a physical impact on me. I recall feeling suffocated as I read about the work in the tunnels. Lastly, reflecting a love of politics, intrigue and history, and also Hamer Shawcross-like, a hero rising through a contemptuous, unappreciative society to its summit, Wolf Hall.

My daughter would be appalled that Gatsby is not on there, but I preferred Tender is the Night, and it feels wrong not to have 1984 in any selection of finest reading and recommendations. I had a think about what I need to read that has yet to really capture me. More Patrick O’Brien perhaps (I only managed the first in his series), more Iris Murdoch, much more North American literature. Donna Tartt is high on my ‘to do list’ and at least I have now started to work my way through the wonderful James Baldwin canon. In fact, barring India, my bookshelves are badly under-representing international authors. I tried Garcia Marquez and did not share the widespread enthusiasm for Love in the Time of Cholera.

Typing away at this, I appreciate that this has been one of those hugely joyous mental walks. I am happy to swap reading lists with anyone, at any time. The Mariella podcast is hugely provocative; thoughts tumble about madly, charming though it is. One could go on and on talking and recommending books. There is always more to come, just as on a physical walk there are always fresh and changing views to the walkers. Same route, different views, thanks to weather and the seasons. I see now that that applies to the mental walk that is reading, too. My new passion will be the ‘re-read’, truly those books that have fresh things to say on re-acquaintance, are what the podcast means when it is discussing ‘Books to Live By’.

On Leadership

Great leader – great success?

Leadership is back in vogue. I read about the success of the Liverpool team’s victory in the UEFA Champions League and noted more than one comment to the effect that it could not have been done without the leadership of Juergen Klopp. Then I thought about what it has taken to make Saracens RC, the rugby power in our land reflected in overcoming brilliant Leinster and Exeter teams, to achieve a merited and much heralded double.

Continuing to wear my sports-loving hat, I thought about how Gareth Southgate was feted after last year’s World Cup, but now his England team have exited a second tournament at the semi-final stage, how he is no longer regarded with any reverence at all. Good leader? Weak leader? I have been thinking about the leaders that influenced me, my career, and to whom I lend my admiration.

The only team to beat Klopp’s Liverpool in the domestic season was Manchester City, who duly deprived the Merseysiders of the Premier League title. Much of the success was attributed to Pep Guardiola’s leadership. Justified? I like Guardiola, not just for winning, but because he seems to have improved all of his players individually, as well as creating the harmony and mutual respect of a great team.

England’s cricketers are playing in a World Cup. They are rated favourites. That has, cricket writers say, been due to the leadership of two men, coach Trevor Bayliss and on-field supremo Eoin Morgan. It may be so, but it may be the happy coincidence of them being able to select two ‘other-worldly’ talents in Joss Buttler and Ben Stokes, to say nothing of a batsman (Bairstow) whose rate of scoring even exceeded Buttler’s in the past year.

England’s women footballers also have a World Cup to compete for. I wonder if having a male leader in Phil Neville will come to be regarded as the key influence on the success or failure that lies ahead for them. Great leader or gender hindrance? Neville has been quoted in the press about leaving legacies. He is referring to the opportunity to raise the profile of the women’s game and to make more young girls see it as an opportunity for fulfilment and some fame.

I just wonder if the women in his team will be motivated by the same motivations he had as a player. How does one adapt leadership for such a challenge? Academic research suggests that female goal setting and group formation differs from males. There has been little leadership research done on gender specifics of leadership. As women continue to break glass ceilings, I would be interested to see whether we conclude they did it by applying different leadership skills or they needed to be ‘blokeish’.

Leadership is newsworthy all the time, but seems to be especially so right now. We know leadership prowess is not enduring – think 1930’s Churchill and post-War Churchill – compared with the lion and orator at the critical juncture of our resistance to Nazi Germany. The current newsworthiness of leadership is largely due to the political field. This country has just played host to the so-called ‘leader of the free world’. The leadership qualities demonstrated by the latest President of the US, may be worthy of some debate, but if leading is the antithesis of following, it is clear to someone like me, despite my low regard for Mr Trump, that he has a decent number of followers.

In this country, the paucity of leadership skill in politics is being demonstrated by eleven candidates for the job as leader of the Conservative party, which happens to come with the additional distinction of being Prime Minister in the very near future. In a recent ‘Brexitcast’ podcast, James Cleverly explained why he had briefly been a candidate and now had stood down. It seemed for all his, perhaps inflated, ideas of his own value and his analysis of global appetite for political generational and cultural change, there were just too few followers. Some people grow into their roles, it is true. We are familiar with ‘greatness thrust upon them’, but I may not be the only person uninspired by all eleven remaining potential leaders to the Tory throne.

In today’s UK politics, winning the contest to be Conservative leader is about appealing to a cultish subset of the UK electorate, of perhaps 100,000-120,000 people. It will say nothing about leadership. That will come when sufficient UK electors become followers and a mandate is provided to that leader, who then designs and enacts policy in an appropriate fashion. This is probably a poor time to write about leadership because all of the candidates to be our leader are penning their own views and making their pitches in the printed and digital media. We may be close to ‘leadership analysis fatigue’. I maintain, however, that we are all intrigued by leaders, perhaps by their competences, or perhaps just their narcissism.

Back to Herr Klopp. I like Klopp; his relationship with the city where he now works, with its people, with the media, and with the way his teams play. Liverpool’s victory over Tottenham has allowed many compliments about his leadership to be uttered or written. But he is not a serial winner, as his record in finals prior to the Tottenham match had proved. Would he be any less of a leader had the result not gone his team’s way? Likewise, Guardiola. Unprecedented domination of the domestic football world with all three major trophies, but not making the last four of the Champions League despite such a lavishly assembled set of playing assets, means some people question his right to be regarded as a ‘great leader’.

Leadership. What is it? What is required to be good at it? How does one distinguish a leader? And, are leaders born, or can they be trained? My boyhood heroes included Bobby Moore and Mike Brearley. Different leaders, different circumstances, but clearly leading. In my adult lifetime I have had the opportunity to captain sports teams, and also to manage people in my professional career, as well as to structure and organise sales desks. I came to think a good deal about leadership, especially after the pounding my investment banking industry took reputationally through 2007-9. (It was deserved, I think).

I have worked for a number of leaders whose skills underwhelmed me hugely and a small handful I really admired, so I wanted to see what was common and germane to those leaders. I tried to think about leadership in my roles, and I hope that I demonstrated leadership and integrity, even if not all decisions and outcomes achieved what I had anticipated.

I used to think that to lead was to harness the power of teams and to create an atmosphere of mutually supportive work and workers. I arrogantly assumed that my experiences in sport gave me an edge and that my leadership views were the exclusive and ‘right’ approach. Imagine my disappointment that now I have studied Business Psychology, I have had to confront the issues of group productivity deficits and ‘social loafing’. Embarrassingly for me, it is hardly new news. Back in 1913 French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann discovered that tug of war participants had a tendency to pull harder if pulling alone than as part of a team. Moreover, the more people in the team the lower the average pull force exerted.

That sense of ‘leaving it to the next man’ is what became defined as ‘social loafing’ by Latane in the 1970s. I saw it in my own team in my last job. We had one highly competent guy, who plainly thought he ‘did enough’ and expected to continue to be paid fairly handsomely. He was a few years from retirement, but clearly had no ambition other than to milk the system as it was constructed by my predecessors, and wait until reaching that point.

Had he made it to retirement it would have cost the bank well over £1m in remuneration, but the cost was far greater in his impact on others. His apathetic attitude struck me like a Harry Potter Dementor – he just sucked energy from those around him. I knew he had to go and I knew his client rankings would make my choice rather shocking to his long standing colleagues. But leadership, as I was not yet fully aware, is about addressing group productivity deficits.

What else it is it? What is leadership? There are a number of definitions, but I like this: It captures the essentials of being able to inspire others and being prepared to do so. Effective leadership is based upon ideas (whether original or borrowed), but won’t happen unless those ideas can be communicated to others in a way that engages them enough to act as the leader wants them to act.

Is there a UK ‘leadership deficit’ when Farage and Johnson can dominate the news agenda, and because that has been part facilitated by Corbyn’s approach to leadership?What is needed to be good at leadership? A whole body of research exists and much more will be written. It is fascinating.

Leaders have a huge impact, even if outcomes like commercial success or winning football trophies is plainly the work of more than a leader. What leaders do I recall? My first boss was physically small. He was soft spoken. He did have, though, the aura of authority. I earned one only bollocking from him. I still recall it. He made me feel about three inches tall and ignorant and inarticulate, but not because he was malicious. On the contrary he led me to understand my own shortcomings.

What I recall is that he did not raise his voice once. He patiently repeated a question to me several times, before I realised that he was trying to get me to answer why I had done something, not to tell him what I had done, which he clearly knew. I worked it out at the third attempt. I was that arrogant that when he asked me the second time I just assumed he had not heard my answer. I apologised and left his office and expected to be dismissed at some time shortly afterwards. Instead, a year later I was promoted. I would have walked over hot coals for that man.

A few years later when I switched from trading to research, I was lucky to join a department led by a brilliant ‘light touch’ manager who mentored me gently, mainly from afar. His skill was to keep the pressure off me when I was learning my new job and to let me provide my own aspiration and ambition. He knew I would be my harshest critic and my most demanding taskmaster. He may be the reason I have such contempt for box ticking and appraisal ratings and scores. I made it from not knowing the role, and barely having the skills equipped for it, to being an Extel-winning best-in-class performer within a few years. I maintain that he was the reason. So, I do believe in the power of leadership. 

Leadership theories began with trait theories, which is to say that they developed from a view that leaders were imagined to have the optimal combination of personality traits. This was based on the ‘Big 5’, which are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Later, research was done to see whether the ‘dark triad’ of traits, Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy, were attractors or detractors from leadership capacity. Decades of research have established that personality traits are useful signallers of who might be offered leadership positions, but not of the effectiveness of the leader. In other words, trait theories can help to predict leadership but fail to explain it. 

If traits fail to highlight the perfect leadership candidate, perhaps leaders are not born but can be trained. A whole new set of studies formed around what became known as behavioural theories of leadership. Leaders can be trained, it was posited. This was most comprehensively studied in what became known as the Ohio State Studies. These studies attempted to isolate leader behaviour and began with over 1000 dimensions. Eventually it became clear that two characteristics largely accounted for what employees described as ‘leadership behaviour’. These were labelled as ‘initiating structure’ and ‘consideration’. 

The former is really task setting and goal pursuit, akin to commanding and controlling, and the latter is about relationship management in the workplace. In what was known as the GLOBE programme, 18000 leaders over 62 countries in 825 organisations were studied. Results are inconclusive. Considerate managers generate more respect from followers, and have more followers reporting job satisfaction and high motivation, but task managers typically had higher productivity from followers, despite less respect. The studies also revealed cultural divides, especially between Western and Eastern companies and countries. Westerners are less collegiate and like goal setting, and Easterners tend to value leadership and managerial consideration.

This led to what became known as Contingency Theories of leadership, which aim to give context. It notes that leadership styles are often effective but only in certain types of circumstance. Leading a ‘growth organisation’ is very different from the appropriate approach for leading people in a mature industry at a time of economic recession. Similarly, the demands on, and methods used, by Klopp and Guardiola, at the top of the football tree are different to those Sol Campbell needs to be successful at Macclesfield Town, where he has just preserved the club’s League status. And Campbell’s impact in the half season he had the job is very apparent. Genuine leadership.

So, no two leaders are alike or need to be alike, but we are typically drawn to ‘charismatic leaders’. Is charisma important? One thing Trump, Obama, Klopp and Boris Johnson all have in common is that the media likes to describe them as charismatic. An academic called Robert House even established ‘charismatic leader theory’. Followers attribute heroic and extraordinary leadership qualities to people who offer certain behaviours.

These leaders tend to articulate a vision, however meaningless (“Make America Great Again”), and engage in ‘emotion-inducing’ and often unconventional behaviour to demonstrate courage and conviction. But actually there is little evidence it works. For all Klopp’s recent success for Liverpool, the club’s most successful manager is a man of whom the commanding former centre-half, Alan Hansen said, “he had little personality, no charisma, and he struggled to express himself”.

He was talking about Bob Paisley, the only Englishman to have led his teams to three European Cups and one of only three men in Europe to have achieved such distinction. The ‘most successful’, but most of my Liverpudlian friends would not even describe him as their ‘greatest’ manager; a title they usually prefer to confer on Bill Shankly.

Leadership, it seems to me, is not restricted to those in leadership positions. By which I mean leadership can settle on the shoulders of unsung and hitherto uncharismatic individuals who become identified with a cause or an issue. I think the last half of this decade has seen two remarkable ‘thought leaders’ emerge, but neither heads an organisation. Simply, by being who they are and focusing on specific issues important to them, they have generated huge follower populations. I am thinking of Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.

Neither does being a winner in a contest to lead, automatically define who is a leader. By that I mean Al Gore’s defeat in the US Presidential election was simply the precursor to him being a global thought leader on climate, as he devoted more attention to a single issue. He generated massive followership, especially with the success of his ‘Inconvenient Truth’ film. 

How does one distinguish a good leader? Your good leader and my good leader may not be the same. In my last job, the regional head had previously worked at Barclays. The investment banking industry’s reputation was damaged by many, many people in the first decade of the 21st century, but I had a view that few people had contributed to that damage more than Bob Diamond. I had not worked for him, so that may be unfair. My boss had worked for him. Diamond had given him opportunity and he had had some handsome financial rewards. We had to disagree when the subject of Diamond came up.

It is not just banking that has different perspectives on leadership success. Plainly the criteria for good leadership in politics is poles apart. I know of many huge Margaret Thatcher admirers, but equally I have friends from parts of the UK where she is regarded as having been in league with Satan. I grew up with ‘Thatcherism’, whatever it really is, but the ever shifting nature of my social circles has forced me to reappraise to eat and where she led this country.

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” — John Kenneth Galbraith

And are ‘great’ leaders of their time? Does history reinterpret their leadership? The recent publication of FBI papers about Martin Luther King may serve to tarnish his reputation. It is probably true of JFK too, but sometimes those who led and were unappreciated find that history reviews them more positively, like Jimmy Carter. How do we think of protestors who use violence – thugs and terrorists, or passionate leaders of a cause? A handful of characters from Irish history come to mind, and also Nelson Mandela.

Mandela’s ‘leadership’ may never have been greater than in his ‘passive’ role interned on Robben Island, rather than his active role before his arrest and subsequently in inspiring the nation’s reconciliation. And some leaders ‘fail’, but seem to acquire more gravitas and statesman-like regard as they leave their roles behind. That may be true in this country for John Major and Gordon Brown. What too, of cultural leaders like artists undermining dictatorships and holding up their mirrors to society? Leadership comes in many guises.

I have decided that leaders are not ‘born to lead’. I am much more drawn too, to relational rather than task manager leadership styles, but I understand the values of each depending on circumstance. I think one can be trained for leadership, but leadership attracts those with special qualities. Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa may have impressed important views on his mind, but I doubt anyone knowing him, least of all himself, thought then about leading a nation or a movement. I suspect the leaders of tomorrow will emerge like Malala and Greta Thunberg, as Geldof did when he forced the West to consider the plight of the starving in Africa.

Nonetheless, as you go into your place of employment, or you consider the way we are being governed, or you subscribe to the views of your favourite social campaigner, or you tune into updates on your favourite sports team, you will be considering its leaders, their competence and your relationship with them. I know I care as much about Pellegrini at West Ham, as I do about our next Prime Minister. I also know that is rather shallow. Above all else, we can all aspire to leadership daily, by being our best selves. Simple good citizenship.

Business Ethics: Is Affirmative Action Ethically Coherent

As part of my studies I took a module called Philosophy, Business and Society. It’s focus is Business Ethics. The lecturer likes to make several references to the banking industry at the time of the Global Financial Crisis. Right up my alleyway. Part of the assessment of the quality of the student learning was to write an essay on any one of eight different moral and ethical challenges. I chose Affirmative Action, not least because it was something with which I had wrestled during my time heading sales teams at three different banks.

One of my first discoveries was a Philosophy essay is not the same as any other essay. It’s structure differs as does the approach and the conclusion. So much so that Harvard, Cambridge, UCL and others have papers about the design of the optimal Philosophy essay and in some cases, ‘how to’ videos. I really enjoyed the challenge. I received a decent score, but was some way from achieving ‘best in class material’. My fellow stray from Business Psychology, Haidie, earned a much higher mark, and I have read her piece on the merits of bullshit on business, and it was extremely good. That said, I am pleased with this and I do think it is a subject that merits a great deal of debate.

Righting a wrong is a moral imperative. Affirmative action, which I shall define below, is an attempt to redress an historic discrimination against a minority. What is morally ambiguous is whether it transfers a right from one person or group to another, and therefore uses a discrimination to compensate for an earlier discrimination. If we agree that discrimination is unwelcome, then affirmative action is morally questionable. In considering whether or not affirmative action is ethically coherent I want to start by exploring the limits of the terms ‘affirmative action’, specifically if it is the same thing as ‘reverse discrimination’. To do that requires a view of what discrimination is, and if it is always an ill, or if it can be morally supported. I will also examine what it means for anything to be ethically coherent, concluding that affirmative action may be morally desirable but is not ethically coherent. 

To discriminate is to confer advantage or preference for one individual or group compared with another. It is not always the case that discriminating is unworthy, or has a moral implication. Take the example of a cricket team being selected for an overseas tour to the sub-Continent. History suggests spin bowlers are more successful in the local conditions than seam bowlers. The selectors would discriminate in favour of spin bowlers when selecting the mix of the party. Discrimination can be necessary. A business providing tourist coaches might have a policy giving preference to candidates with disabilities, but would discriminate against a candidate with impaired sight becoming one of its drivers, because of its greater responsibilities to its passengers. 

For the purpose of examining affirmative action the discrimination in question, is a moralised version. It is the imposition of a relative disadvantage on one party compared with another, because of the membership that the first party has of some social group. That social group would be defined by race, ethnicity, sexual preference or gender. That is not an exhaustive list but for the purposes of this essay will be sufficient. I shall restrict myself to public discrimination such as university placements and employment recruitment, because these are the fields in which affirmative action is most widely considered necessary. It will not cover, for example, the fact that discrimination is often demonstrated in the home, in something like the educational choices a parent makes for a son compared with a daughter. 

If an individual or group has been discriminated against, the question of redress needs consideration. The discrimination may have been direct, such as excluding a work colleague from a meeting or social gathering on the grounds of ethnicity, or it may have been indirect, such as a manager taking colleagues for a team building exercise on a wine tasting, and failing to consider that some people’s faiths proscribe drinking alcohol. What if the hurt was inflicted on a group historically, but an individual now. Is redress merited? I shall come to the problematic issue of affirmative action assigning compensatory rights later.

Moreau (2010) defines discrimination such that we all have the right to ‘deliberative freedoms’. Some anti-discrimination laws are necessary to protect individuals from immoral landlords, employers and other service providers. A deliberative freedom allows one to choose how to live insulated from “normatively extraneous” features such as skin colour or gender. Discrimination is a personal wrong against the victim because it has compromised his or her right to a set of deliberative freedoms.  

Affirmative action, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology is “any measure, beyond a simple termination of discriminatory practice, adopted to correct for past or present discrimination or to prevent discrimination from recurring in the future”. Reverse discrimination is something of a pejorative term. It should not be. There are two ways of thinking about the word ‘reverse’. First, it implies that if discrimination were an electric current passing from one party to another it simply is the change in direction of that current. That does not seem satisfactory given the understanding that discrimination that requires redress is unethical discrimination.

However, it can also be understood as something that undoes a discrimination. To reverse something, is to undo it. Undoing historic discrimination by applying affirmative action is much more ethically satisfying and coherent. There may be differences, however nuanced, in what is affirmative action and what is reverse discrimination. For the purpose of this paper, I intend to treat them as synonymous as I examine whether supporting such policies is ethically coherent. 

Sher (1975) considered reverse discrimination in employment. One might argue that employment legislation and practices are much improved since he authored his piece, which is a partial justification for the reverse discrimination. He examined the need to equalise the wrongs of history. It raises a further question of whether old discriminations can die. However, Sher is not convinced that the validity of reverse discrimination can be proved. He suggests it requires that a group must demonstrate it has been wronged. Typically, harms are individual in nature.

Fundamentally, can a group be wronged, or is it always an individual? One needs to establish whether a group has been targeted specifically, or an individual who happens to be a member of that group. Redress, by conferring benefit on the maligned group is not morally satisfying, insofar as it insufficiently compensates the individual and/or inappropriately discriminates against other individuals in a separate group. 

I think that a group can be wronged. Detractors of affirmative action highlight the fact that it rewards individuals at the expense of other individuals who have not perpetrated the harm. Those who suffer the consequence of affirmative action are suffering on behalf of their societal group for no reason other than that they belong to it. Detractors would say that offends the principles of fairness. They may even accept that their group is culpable, but that it is unethical and incoherent to apply any sort of sanction to an individual because of his or her unchosen membership of said group. 

The counter to this sort of fairness justification would be:  What is the appropriate time line to analyse what might be fair? It returns to the question of whether discriminations die. How can one compete equally for a university place or a job if one has been brought up in relative poverty with poorer diet, education, teaching skills, access to computers and books? What one receives in childhood and in the home, will causally affect the skills and capacities developed for adult life. Is it ‘fair’, therefore to compare the candidate from this background with a candidate from a much more affluent background? The detractors of affirmative action would argue that this is about merit. 

What they choose not to define is how that merit is earned. What if the ‘merit’ was solely defined by the efforts and sacrifices given in order to be a candidate, rather than the academic qualification? Sher asks if employment actually needs to be allocated on the basis of ‘best qualified’ to be fair, when it should be sufficient to consider all candidates of a given level of competence and qualification.

To challenge the merit defence, I ask if a failure to utilise affirmative action is simply the perpetuation of social crimes of inequity and inequality. Tahmindjis (1997, cited in Burns & Schapper, 2008) referred to “unearned benefits” when challenging what I call the merit defence. Those supporting the case for merit are those typically well placed to demonstrate the qualities deemed meretricious in a competition. 

Burns & Schapper (2008) make a case for the justification of affirmative action by challenging the ethical and philosophical scaffolding supporting the contra views on merit and justice. I have considered the role of fairness and merit already. The issue of rights is more problematic insofar as it seems to me that any affirmative action is designed to withhold the right from one party to compete on an equal basis. That is not to say that there is not cause and justification for this bias, but merely to state that a right is being compromised. Or, “the illegitimate appropriation of jobs” as Burns & Schapper would have it. Shaw (1998, cited in Burns & Schapper, 2008), countered that opponents of affirmative action held their view “only because they stand to gain so much from past discrimination do they stand to lose from affirmative action”. 

Burns & Schapper (2008) ask what if the levers of power are predominantly in someone else’s hands? The novelist Malorie Blackman asked a similar question in her series ‘Noughts and Crosses’. Her novels echo the Burns & Schapper view that affirmative action is not an affront to ‘justice’, but a grave affront to the values of a particular group. In the novels, it is the darker skinned population; in Burns & Schapper it is what they call ‘Benchmark Men’, often derided in modern society as ‘male and pale’. I share the view that it is not ‘justice’ as and of itself, but a form of justice that is tailored to the dominant group in society. It may not be the majority, for example, whites in Apartheid South Africa. Therefore ‘justice’ is not a valid criticism of affirmative action.

Ethical coherence was described by Thagard (2008) as “maximisation of positive and negative constraints”. Accomplishing ethical principles should take into account “deductive, explanatory, analogical and deliberative coherence”. De George (1990) reminds us that it raises the question of what is supposed to cohere with what. He wrote that “coherence gives us all the objectivity, all the realism, and all the cognitive content of which morality is capable”. I have attempted to examine constraints objectively, in order to establish the ethical coherence, or otherwise, of affirmative action.

The major ethical theories of deontology, utilitarianism, rights, casuist and virtue do not expressly test for coherence. Plainly, any ethical theory that is incoherent is one that cannot be supported. My interpretation is that for affirmative action to be ethically coherent, it needs to be able to be supported. I have shown that it has several merits and I believe it is a worthy attempt to right a wrong. 

I cannot argue that it is ethically coherent to deny a right of one person or group in order to bestow it on another person or group. An example would be the October 2018 case against Harvard. The lawsuit was designed to suggest that affirmative action had led to the discrimination of one minority against another. In this case it was alleged that African Americans and Latinos were being given preferential treatment to the detriment of Asian Americans. The defence used was that race was never used negatively in applications, but it did not deny that some form of race quota was used.

This may be why affirmative action has become more widely known as ‘positive discrimination’. Language is important. Discrimination is uncomfortable for anyone to support, but the use of the word ‘positive’ allows supporters to feel virtuous. Its ethical coherence is not established, for me. That said, there are practical demonstrations of good societal outcomes, such as the increasing catholicisation of the security and policing forces in Northern Ireland since ‘The Troubles’.

This paper is concerned with a moral stance and ethical coherence. Rubenfeld (1997) explored the constitutionality of affirmative action. I am not attempting to define and illustrate points of law. However, his paper does raise two further objections to affirmative action. First, does it entrench racial thinking? The suggestion is that in the case of racial affirmative action it is only necessary because of the inherent inferiority of one race compared with another. Second, does it lead to stigmatisation? Is there violation of Moreau’s deliberative freedoms when the State purposely acts to assist minorities? Offering special opportunities to an oppressed group is not the moral equivalent of the racism it seeks to address, but I believe it undermines the ethical legitimacy of the thesis.

My conclusion is that affirmative action may be intellectually rational, but morally questionable, albeit intuitively welcome. The Harvard example rests on the desirability or otherwise of affirmative action if it raises the bar for some races for admissions and lowers it for others, despite its best intents. The Socratic Dialogues show that people’s ideas of virtues are not consistent. It is because moral questions are complex. Simple answers are unavailable and therefore demonstrating coherence is challenging. We can only weigh competing claims. I find myself instinctively favouring affirmative action but unable to comprehensively defend its usage from an ethical standpoint. 

References : 

A.K. Appiah, ‘“Group Rights” and Racial Affirmative Action’, The Journal of Ethics 15, 2011, pp 265-80. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41486914

P. Burns & J. Shapper, ‘The Ethical Case for Affirmative Action’, Journal of Business Ethics 83, 2008, pp369-79. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25482383

R.T De George, ‘Ethics and Coherence’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 64, (3), 1990, pp. 39-52. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3130075

S. Moreau, ‘What is Discrimination?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, 2010, pp 143-79. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40783254

R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., ‘Affirmative Action’ Harvard Business Review Mar-Apr 1990

J. Rubenfeld, ‘Affirmative Action’, The Yale Law Journal 107 (2), 1997, pp. 427-72. Available online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/797261

G. Sher, ‘Justifying Reverse Discrimination in Employment’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, 1975, pp 159-70. Available online:http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265161

P. Thagard, ‘Ethical Coherence’, Philosophical Psychology 11 (4), 1998, pp. 405-22. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089808573270

From first to second mountains and work-life balancing

3 Questions to Get You Greater Work-Life Balance | Thrive ...

The Sunday Times Magazine published a piece by Matt Rudd last weekend that appealed to me. In it, Rudd notes that having written about mid life crises at the end of 2018, and continuing to write brilliantly about mental health, he had begun to recognise that he had not paid enough attention to his own psyche. As he riffed through stress and anxiety, and what it means to be a success, or at least to be perceived as one, he sadly (I thought) concluded that “as a father of three boys, my parental expectations are changing too. I want them to be happy rather than successful”. I thought it was sad, because I do not think the two things are mutually incompatible. I do realise that definitions of success are different, and that is a good thing, but I too am a parent of three and I think of them all as successes (one in a career, one about to graduate and start a Masters, and one partying hard and studying a little, in her first year at Manchester).

In the article he referenced US writer David Brooks. Brooks is the author of ‘The Second Mountain:The Quest for a Moral Life’. This is a book that defines ‘first mountain’ people as in pursuit of status and reward. ‘Second mountain’ people have shed their ego, lost their self and are journeying to a deeper spirituality. I have not read the book but some of that troubles me. There are very pragmatic reasons for having an early adult life focus on status and reward. One should not disparage anyone whose ambition is so formed. In my early City career, fuelled by Thatcherite drive, everyone saw themselves as in pursuit of status and reward. Certainly those of us defined as ‘yuppies’. Also, as I work more deeply on psychoanalysis studies, I do not recommend anyone losing their self or sense of self – quite the contrary; find it and be reconciled with it.

However, the first and second mountain thing seems to me to be about distinct phases of adult and working lives, which is precisely my experience and impression. It was what led to my definition of the Second Innings. Coincidentally, the article appeared just after my latest Occupational Health Psychology lecture, which was about work-life balance. The lecture/seminar generated the liveliest debate in my two years at Birkbeck and made me consider a number of things. First, it took on a gender splitting context, as maternity leave and its consequences, and unconscious biases were explored. Not altogether harmoniously. Second, it moved to a focus on generational impact. I think there are two elements to this as I shall explain.

I know from the number of views that my recent piece on Burnout attracted, that there is a huge appetite for shared experiences on work style impacts on lifestyles. The recent Mental Health Week coverage and supportive ‘likes’ and comments on social media was very revealing. I also know that demand for information on these sorts of topics is highly indicative of the number of undeclared cases of various stages of mental anxiety in the workplace.

Rudd’s articles gently address a number of these topics. In the most recent one he described a man who didn’t want to think about his own happiness because it might ‘set him off’ and that he might ‘spiral’. Soldiering on was the appropriate approach. Some of this is tied up with maleness and a need to not be seen as weak. I know how often I felt exactly like that in the days when I was labouring on the 05.37 from Colchester to London, being ultra sensitive to the inconsideration of any commuter who might dare to speak when I was newspaper reading, whilst I convinced myself it was all worth it.

Work Life Balance is now very much a ‘thing’, and I am impressed that it is. When I was starting out in 1982 though, such an expression was inconceivable. This was the age of Norman Tebbitt ‘on yer bikeism’, which was about seizing opportunity and glorifying in individualism. The only sense of understanding the divisions of work and life were to understand that the important goal was to work hard (certainly harder than your peer group) in order to get the best promotion opportunities and reward oneself with all the materialist joys that decorated magazine and tv advertising. I would have recoiled from any invitation to think about work-life balance.

My understanding was that one worked and life came later, because of the returns on all the productive work to which one was committed. One thing about the era was, it was in some respects, quite feminist. Partly because of who the PM was, but also because of the sense that anyone could achieve anything if they just worked hard enough. It is why Caryl Churchill’s play ‘Top Girls’, which is still running at The National, and is well worth seeing, is such a good take on the era. Its about women and sacrifice, but it also sums up the historic period as well as any play of that time. And it concludes with a brilliant intrusion of ‘life’ into ‘work’.

I explained to my lecture colleagues that in those days, there was no sense that women could not work alongside men, however my industry had only just begun to employ women in front line roles, and so, they were welcome, provided they knew how to behave like blokes. I remember the banter and the drinking and wonder how my daughters would have coped. Since those days workplaces have seen a feminisation of conduct and expectations, very much for the better. So work-life balance was something, and is something, which was anathema, and then the unfamiliar, to my cohort and may still feel like that to many of them.

The second take on generational impact on work life balance was something I learned through active engagement in graduate recruitment at two of my employers, and in mentoring programmes, in which I set great store. I got used to candidates setting out their own expectations of what the firm could do for them, even before they had been hired. My girls are one Millenial and one Generation Zer. What the Zer expects from her career in a couple of years’ time is not clear to me, but I get a sense of what she may be unwilling to countenance.

My eldest, the Millenial, is enjoying some success in the world of PR and is about to move into a new role. (yes, very proud dad). I have enjoyed hearing about her career development but I admit to wincing when I hear about the ‘drinks trolley’ Fridays and the flexi working hours. Much as I admire the business’s approach to being accommodating to its employees, I find myself having to not say “wouldn’t have happened in my day”, but more significantly, not thinking smugly that our old ‘disciplined’ ways were better.

Alain de Botton said “There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.” I like it. I like it because it suggests that having one’s life unbalanced, albeit not permanently, is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a reflection of the oft-used pitch to get people out of their ‘comfort zones’. Although I overworked myself to the point of something I think was Burnout, I know that the best days of my career were when I knew I had many, many plates spinning, but also, I was content that I could keep them spinning. Not all stress is bad stress, although all stress that goes unrelieved, that is to say the cumulative effect of stress, is unequivocally bad.

Now that I am embarked on a Second Innings, I think about work-life balance with the benefit of hindsight, but also with a sense of hope that it finds a tangibility in the careers of all of my three children. I tried to encourage more home working amongst my team but the organisation was uncomfortable with change. I see my daughter working at home and I sense that she is at least as productive as ever I was when at my desk. Not that I would know if a good PR executive was being productive or not, to be honest.

How her generation sits on the spectrum of work to live or live to work, I do not know, but I know that when I was at my most keen and ambitious in my twenties, I did not find work a chore. I simply wanted to ‘get on’, get recognition and improve my finances. As Brooks highlights that is ‘status and reward’, but it did not feel then like the hamster wheel it had become by the time I was a forty-something commuter.

That, I think, is important. Much of what mountain one is on, or how one is being affected by the work-life balance, or lack of it, is linked to the impact and pressure of what goes on outside the office. In other words, the ‘life’ bit. My understanding has come to be that WLB is often felt to be at its most unbalanced when ‘life’ intrudes by becoming a more mind and time consuming experience, such as dealing with an errant child or an infirm parent, or with a relationship infidelity. It is not always the workplace that is the bullet piercing the armour. In the WLB literature there is something called ‘boundary management’ and it is often when the ‘life’ bit spills over the ‘work’ boundary, that the most problems occur.

In my last role, a couple of team members were having to deal with serious health impacts on partners or parents, in one case complicated by the parent living in another continent. I had such admiration for those members of the team, who managed to handle these huge strains but never let their professional competence and commitment fall away, even when I made it clear that we could accommodate some changes to what was required of them.

I doubt either of them were familiar with the Employment Act of 2002 or the Work and Families Act of 2006, but they were both eligible to be able to request working from home, to changes to their hours, to changes to the times that they were required to work. In the context of Mental Health Week, and the reaction to my piece on Stress, all I would suggest is that those ‘soldiering on’ should consider talking to line managers and to HR teams, and exploring what can be done to provide the ‘balance’ they need.

It is important to conclude that WLB discourse, is just that; a discourse. It is not something to be imposed. The desirability of finding a balance is questionable, given that it may be very different for each employee. There is no universal achievable goal, but equally, pushing it away is to load up on the stressors in one’s life. Anyone watching the BBC documentary on David Harewood’s Psychosis (recommended i-player catch up) should be very wary of that (and also of not smoking as much cannabis as he was!)

For me, and the many friends I have, who are now sharing their Second Innings ambitions, expectations, and experiences, the wisdom acquired over a small handful of decades is that one should continue to value professionalism at all times, but never become so institutionalised that work has become dehumanising. That is what I see when I see some of my fellow hamsters spinning their wheels. And I worry not about their WLB, but about their overall mental health and happiness. My Second Innings still sees me spinning several plates but probably with more satisfaction than hitherto.

I have traded more autonomy over my time, for financial income. Previously I tailored my time to match the generous income that came my way. Whichever mountain you are on, make the best of your climb, but know that there is much to which you can look forward. My studies have taught me that WLB is not really gender neutral, and senior male managers need to think about the implications of that; that WLB is not really about ‘individual choice’, but about the way work is structurally organised and valued; and that WLB stretches into other life phases including education and semi-retirement.

Football and me: Why are muddied oafs so affecting?

Bringing poetry into prose in praise of the beautiful game

“Football. Bloody hell” as Sir Alex Ferguson said. I missed the extraordinary performance by Liverpool’s latest generation of Anfield heroes thanks to an evening in Birkbeck’s lecture rooms. I did see Rio Ferdinand post-match commentating, saying that “it is only … football that does this to you,” as Robbie Fowler attempted to hide some tears of joy. The degree to which we feel emotion is called ‘affect intensity’. Why is football so affecting? I may have missed the match but I did not miss the traffic of texts from the many Reds fans I know. A remarkable and special night. Then Lucas Moura ensured I was in digital touch with all of my Tottenham Hotspur supporting fans just a day later. Another remarkable night.

It left me thinking about the tribal nature of football support, and how supporting a club team can have huge emotional impact, even when the club involved is not competing for the sorts of prizes Liverpool has almost routinely sought, and Tottenham is beginning to. I tend to think more of images of tearful fans whose team is relegated, and less happily of the aggression written on the faces of fans rioting in derby matches or in foreign cities. Emotional it undoubtedly is. People experience the same emotion with different intensities. Affect intensity is often enhanced in crowds.

What is it about a game played, according to Kipling, by muddied oafs, and sometimes described as a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, that is so beautiful, so inspirational and so seductive? And if it does attract hooligans, why does it also inspire the poetic? Sir Alex Ferguson was a great manager, but poetry did not always come to mind when he spoke, yet I think this phrase about his first seeing Ryan Giggs, is amongst the finest things I know associated with the game: “I remember the first time I saw him. He was 13 and just floated over the ground like a cocker spaniel chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind.” How does a something that is just a game turn the son of a Clyde docker into such an elegant observer and wordsmith?

Liverpool crushed Barcelona, and Tottenham denied Ajax. Before either of these matches I had been thinking about my own relationship with the game thanks to finishing reading Galeano’s ‘Football in Sun and Shadow’. It is a long established classic, but was new to me. If it is still new to you, you are in for a treat. Exceptional writing, wry perspectives, loving appreciation for all the game’s artistry and an overriding concern for the player who makes things happen. Also deep contempt for FIFA. I have certainly pondered on his view that a goal is “football’s orgasm”. An explosion, an eruption of joy and physicality. Hmm. One of the finest birthday presents I have been given – in this case with many thanks to my son. I particularly like noting that football is “a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it”. I know both sentiments.

It has given me a number of feasting experiences and a great deal of joy. My first recollection is shortly after my sixth birthday. My beloved nan bought West Ham shirts (she lived near the ground, and my mum went to the local grammar school) for my brother and for me. It was my great good fortune to be six at the time. The club has retired the number 6 shirt now, in honour of the magisterial Bobby Moore who wore it. My brother’s number 5 shirt would have been associated with Tommy Taylor. I have never really lost the sense of footballing superiority that that first shirt gave me over my brother, despite him being a junior at two professional clubs including Spurs, and me not making it to one. I also had a letter asking for a trial at West Ham politely declined!

Where I grew up football was not allowed for boys until they reached the end of primary school as ten year olds, and could play in the U-11 local youth leagues. The exception was being a Cub Scout. Most of the players in the cub leagues were ten and eleven years old but if your pack thought you were good enough, you could play. You joined the cubs as an eight year old, so my first experiences were playing what was once described as ‘right half’ for my Cub Scout pack. A couple of years later, my brother had joined and our pack made it to the cup final. It was the major event of my life at that point and it’s memory still makes me smile. We lost!

Cub Scout football introduced me to representative teams. I played for the Chelmsford area and we travelled most of central and south Essex. The thrill of being selected for a team never left me. That sense of winning the approval and admiration of others. It probably says a good deal about deep insecurities but it was good for my pre-adolescent self-esteem. The more I played, the more I loved spectating and appreciating the game. The emotional injection football can give had found me. As Galeano wrote, “we lost, we won, either way we had fun”.

Television gave us Match of the Day, for which I was occasionally allowed to stay up, and ITV’s Sunday round up, ‘The Big Match’. Some international games were televised, but again tended to be evening games screened after my bed time, unless it was the Home Internationals. I recall England playing Greece in 1971, and winning 2-0. Geoff Hurst scored, and I was peeking through the banisters perched on the top three stairs to see the television. My uncontrolled seven year old self screamed with pleasure and was sent back to bed and probably given another punishment too. Just about worth it. I had just started attending big games in the flesh too.

It is strange how memory gets distorted. I so want to recall seeing Bobby Moore in his pomp. My brother, who has better recollection than me, assures me that we saw him play. I do recall Boxing Day 1972. The Hammers drew at home with Spurs 2-2. Moore played, but my memory cannot see him on the ball. What I remember is my brother and I being lifted forward by the crowd so we could sit on the wall to see. (Did that really happen?) And I recall the crowd singing ‘Nice One, Cyril’ to Spurs’s Cyril Knowles. By now, I was a Trevor Brooking fan, and no West Ham player has enjoyed my admiration more. I am sure I watched him that day and so failed to appreciate Moore, Bonds, Lampard (all club giants) and the indefatigable Clyde Best. I am sure I worried about Peters, Coates and Chivers tearing West Ham’s defence apart, and being frustrated that Spurs had the great Pat Jennings protecting their goal, to spoil my day.

I am a Hammer. Supporting West Ham: What an experience that is! I have never lived in the East End, like my grandparents and my mother, unless you count a fancy flat in Wapping currently, but when I used to walk down Green St, or when I now walk from Stratford to the London Stadium, I feel like I am among ‘my people’. I like to say that being a Hammer makes one into a philosopher. Treating the twin imposters alike is something that comes to every football fan, in every football tribe, but somehow the Hammers offer more disaster than triumph. Good training for stoics.

I had my first Wembley visit in the autumn of 1975, after the soaring triumph of seeing the Hammers win the FA Cup on television. That day, I do recall watching Moore, but he was playing for the opposition, Fulham. The Hammers were up against League Champions Derby County, to play for the Charity Shield. Kevin Hector, Derby’s England international striker, ruined my day. I think the score was 2-0 but it felt like one of the great humiliations, and a severe drubbing. Things improved though; at the end of the season at 2-2 vs Anderlecht with just twenty minutes left to play, it looked like the European Cup Winners Cup would come back to Upton Park, as it had in 1965. Instead, a 2-4 disappointment. I was only twelve, so I thought these disappointments would ease if I had to suffer them in future, but Steve Gerard’s FA Cup Final equaliser in the dying moments thirty years later hurt just as much. Even worse was traveling to Cardiff in 2004 to watch the Championship play off final against Crystal Palace, and realising that I might have turned up, but my team had not.

I could write for ages about the Hammers, and I may do so in a future blog, but suffice it to say that I cannot imagine supporting another club despite being rejected for a trial, and seen so few triumphs. Why do I, and why do football fans generally want to be part of a tribe? And how is it that our tribal associations can mean we can revere and loathe the same player depending on the match circumstance, and the shirt he wears? An example is Liverpool’s outstanding young right back Trent Alexander-Arnold. When he is up against Felipe Anderson, my current favourite Hammer, I want Anderson to nutmeg him, and cause him ninety minutes of embarrassments and provide chances for a Hammers goal. However, the same two players could be in opposition wearing England and Brazil shirts and then I would be imploring Alexander-Arnold to impose his anticipatory skills and use his pace to nullify Anderson, and to be part of an England win.

It part explains the hostility fans have to players who leave the tribe. Hammers fans have an unforgiving attitude to Paul Ince and to Jermain Defoe, because they left. They cannot bring themselves to appreciate two of the finest players of the past couple of generations, who were product’s of the club’s coaching set up. I was a huge Ince fan. Even greater is the hostility towards players who not only leave the tribe, but who transfer allegiance to the dearest, deadliest rivals. Sol Campbell did it in North London, Denis Law in Manchester and Mo Johnston in Glasgow. The fandom and tribe issues are at the heart of the research done by Henri Tajfel and John C Turner on groups. Tajfel was a Polish Jew who survived WWII after fighting for the French and being incarcerated, but not having his faith revealed. Turner’s research developed ideas about the separation of personal identity and social identity.

Belonging to a group forms part of one’s personal identity and makes sense of people’s behaviours to other groups. We adopt in-group and out group mentalities. The country’s current polarisation over Brexit is a good example. The outgroup becomes homogenised, stereotyped and demonised. There is a process of deindividuation. We assess our own group’s worth by comparison with other groups. The outcome of inter group comparisons is important because it contributes to our self-esteem. If our group demonstrates superiority we can bask in the reflected glory.

This is difficult for football fans – usually there is only one winner. However tribes have ways of rationalising any shortcoming. In the case of football teams we might reframe the view of superiority so that even if the team loses, it is because of the bias of the officials or the budget of the opponents. Perhaps we feel vindicated because our team will not sign proven, expensive internationals, but prioritises the development of youth. Perhaps the club only signs local players. We can assure ourselves that if all else had been truly equal, we would be the superior team, whatever the outcome of the most recent fixture. A sort of necessary delusion to maintain the affection for and loyalty to, one’s own tribe.

It gets interesting with national teams. Galeano is especially good on this. He asserts that the way one plays and thinks about and supports football is indicative of where one is from. He is especially good on why South Americans are so focused on retention of the ball and the Northern European game is much more direct and determined by having the ball close to the opposition goal. With nationhood obviously it is about establishing the in-group and outgroup sets – ‘they’ play differently, and ‘we’ play the best. Of course, World Cup after World Cup shows that playing styles change and England’s great tragedy was that it failed to adapt to a post-1966 world, despite the fact that the ‘wingless wonders’ had been something of a tactical innovation. I may not be a typical football fan, but I rarely get emotional watching England play football, certainly not as I can do for West Ham. Or put another way, I love seeing England win, but my ‘affect intensity’ is lower than it is when I watch England’s rugby teams. Just watching the Underwood brothers’ mother cheering them on to try scoring feats used to get me worked up.

Having said that, I screamed as loudly as the most passionate English football fan when the Trippier free kick went in the last World Cup semi-final and I can think of few occasions of such elation that I had felt than watching and being part of the crowd when England’s 1996 team overwhelmed the Dutch in the European Championship. Shearer and Sheringham scored the goals, but it was a victory founded upon the relentless efforts of Paul Ince to break up the Dutch attacking threats. He played for an hour and England led 4-0. Once he had been substituted the Dutch finally scored a much merited consolation. I was at Wembley for the semi-final against Germany, and screamed as much as any fan, but somehow England teams affect me less than seeing West Ham in a more mundane league match.

I saw something on social media last week congratulating Julian Dicks, one time Hammer, for leading Heybridge Swifts to success in a championship play off. They had beaten Maldon & Tiptree FC. Before Maldon merged with Tiptree, it had been Maldon Town. It was where I played my first adult football for the princely sum of £5/week. I was 17 and pretty green, but I enjoyed it and it allowed me to learn the game from gnarled ex professionals that we signed, like Bill Garner (ex Chelsea) and Alan Moody (ex Middlesborough). One of my other former clubs, Finchley, has also been through a merger and is now Wingate Finchley. Non league football is tough and the economics are miserable, clubs have to merge, but I have noted that attendances seem to be rising.

Perhaps the internationalisation of playing teams in the top leagues is reawakening an interest in truly local clubs and football support. I hope so. This ‘shamateur/semi professional’ level gave me some huge highs. I played in a Witham Town team that had such a good run in the FA Vase, (last 16, I think) that we really thought we might make it all the way to Wembley. Then we were thrashed by Falmouth. It finished 2-1, but we were so outclassed. It also meant I can say I have played and scored in the FA Cup. But I was not that good. When Galeano’s book was first published (it has since had updates), he concluded “for years I have felt challenged by the memory and reality of football, and I have tried to write something worthy of this great pagan mass able to speak such different languages and unleash such universal passion. By writing, I was going to do with my hands what I could never accomplish with my feet: irredeemable clumsy oaf…I had no choice but to ask of words what the ball I so desired denied me.”

That really speaks to me. When I was at Witham, I played alongside Jimmy Greaves’s two sons, Andy and Danny. Jimmy attended regularly and he despaired of my lack of calm in front of goal. He did not dispute the opinion of one muddle headed team mate who likened my playing style to that of a ‘headless dog’. Notwithstanding that, I loved and do love the game. It represents so much. One can project into players or to teams, so many hopes and expectations. This season I have willed Raheem Sterling to continuous success, because of his courageous stance against racism, his work with Grenfell survivors and community, and his articulate response to many years of negative media coverage.

Race and football are a huge subject. All Hammers appreciate the courage of Bermudan Clyde Best, who put up with dreadful racist abuse when he played with bravery and dignity in the 1970’s, and all England fans have watched the brilliant integration into the national team of BME players since Viv Anderson. Since Anderson, there have been almost 90 further BME players selected by England, and I strongly believe it has been helpful to accommodating more generous and widespread social attitudes since my schooldays. Callum Hudson-Odoi is the latest, Ashley Cole, the most capped. Sterling, alongside Ince, Ferdinand, John Barnes, and Cyrille Regis, may be my favourite. I think it gets to the bottom of why football is a ‘bloody hell’ game as Sir Alex Ferguson said.

It is a game, but it is sometimes more. It can be political (Franco regime and Real Madrid) and it can be artistic (Cruyff”s Total Football), but it seems to me it always reflects society. I think these words are profound and brilliantly assembled by Galeano: “In 1993 a tide of racism was rising. Its stench, like a recurring nightmare, already hung over Europe; several crimes were committed and laws to keep out ex-colonial immigrants were passed. That year a team from France won the European Cup for the first time. The winning goal was the work of Basile Boly, an African from Ivory Coast, who headed in a corner, kicked by another African, Abedi Pele, who was born in Ghana. Meanwhile not even the blindest proponents of white supremacy could deny that the Netherlands’ best players were the veterans Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkard, dark skinned sons Surinamese parents.” Given the modest successes of the ‘Kick It Out’ campaigns in the game and the re-emergence of virulent racist attitudes in football stadia, and indeed, more widely, I think we need to respect football on the pitch for how it can make us see differently.

I think that is why Eamon Dunphy asked in the title to his autobiography, whether football was ‘Only a Game?’. We invest so much emotion in football and it continues to surprise us, to delight us, and to frustrate us. It allows us to belong to a tribe and it allows us to remember our more athletic days. It allows those if us that are less than proficient, to imagine ourselves in the great stadia, because with jumpers on the ground and a ball to kick between them, we can imagine being alongside these heroes. Football clubs are so much better at raising money these days, and it means that people like me can have played at Premiership grounds like Arsenal’s Emirates stadium. Just as in my love of theatre, football allowed me, and allows crowds, to suspend belief. It is why football fans talk about who ‘we’ are playing’ and that ‘we’ won or lost, despite being no more part of the team’s success than I am a Premiership player. As this week proved, football makes you think ‘bloody hell’.