Archives de l’auteur : admin

Writing

Fifteen years ago, the answer to what do you want to be when you’re older was ‘a journalist in Africa’. For some reason, which I can’t really identify the inspiration for, I went about this mission with a methodical determination. I poured over the CVs of journalists and even student journalists who happened to have got into the best programmes. I tried to work out everything that an ideal African journalist would know and do, and find a way to get that. I worked on my touch typing, I learned short hand, collected work experience across the country, took French classes, I signed up to the right magazines and joined the Royal African Society.

Maybe I’m at that stage again. At least I have an idea that I’d like to do a lot more writing and photography in the future. To take writing, it seems clear that writers write a lot, they read a lot, they associate with other writers, and they know about their craft. I’ve built many of these things into my life, though the key thing – doing a lot of writing – remains rather absent. Today I finally got to write a couple of short creative texts, and hopefully this can continue. Part of the excuse I give is that I spend my working life in front of this computer, and it doesn’t seem sensible to have a hobby that involves more hours at this keyboard. One option I’m considering is being a separate personal laptop that helps me differentiate mentally from work time. Another option, might be to hand write, at least for writing that I’m just doing to exercise the creative muscles.

Between now and the end of the year, I should have plenty of time to find out whether this writing malarkey is my thing.

Becoming

I mentally pulled myself up short this week in a meeting at work, when I realised how much I behave like my dad. I can’t really remember ever being in a meeting with my dad, but perhaps we pick up more than we realise through osmosis. My dad could have a reputation of being ‘the difficult’ one in business meetings, by which I mean, asking the awkward question, taking singular stands, trying to be the practical one, but sometimes getting people’s backs up.

I can’t say I’m all of those things (or perhaps I like to think higher of myself than I deserve and cherry pick the more positive elements). Certainly, I often find myself being the one who calls for realism, practicality, and is fond of asking the bigger questions, particularly if something is really worth all the effort, or might be hindering our ultimate objective.

I wonder if it’s something that’s come to me through nature or nurture. Or perhaps, it’s simply a role I’m playing. This afternoon I was reading a book about team meetings, which talked about the different ‘games’ (or roles) that people play in meetings – the peacemaker, the encourager, the initiator, the humorist, the onlooker, the side-tracker, the monopolizer, etc. Maybe, I’m play-acting the role of my dad.

 

The French dream

For a reason I haven’t quite fathomed, depression over brexit inspired in me a strange and particular desire to read a few of those vicarious books about Brits who abandon everything for rundown rustic homes in southern France (or elsewhere on ‘the continent’). Perhaps this sort of thing won’t even be possible come 2019. I’d already read a couple of the classics of the genre; ‘A Year in Provence’ and ‘Driving Over Lemons’. ‘Under a Tuscan sun’, which I think is the Italian equivalent is sadly not available as an e-book.

Such publishing successes have spawned many copies, especially of the home-made variety (no pun intended). After all, the dream of a southern French retirement to enjoy the good life has been a British middle class obsession for a large minority over a number of years, as TV shows like ‘A Place in the Sun’ testify. In the end, I plumped for: Michael Wright’s ‘C’est la folie’ and ‘A piano in the Pyrenees’ by Tony Hawk. I added in Bill Bryson’s travels around Europe (‘Neither here nor there’) for good measure. Having finished all three, I can say I’ve scratched my itch.

For me, such a move would have its attractions – the pleasant weather, the possibility of being close to mountains and lakes, good food, and relatively cheap and attractive housing. Being comfortable in French helps as well. For some that would be the definition of the good life.

But reading these books left me pretty sure that if a French home lies in my future, it wouldn’t be a full-time residence. An over-riding feeling from these books is the self-focus involved on having a comfortable life.

I feel life should be about something more, and it’s fair to say that that something resides in the city. These rural dreams have almost no-one under 40, have none of the buzz and intellectual stimulation of the city, and don’t really have a sense of contributing anything to wider society (unless you count restoring a crumbling chateau for future generations, or writing an escapist book that thousands might enjoy) or being part of a dynamic Christian community. Maybe it’s a function of age, but I really think of life as much more about making a difference.

But perhaps if we want a place in future to retreat and write (a la Montaigne), and if children are close by, then maybe a stone cottage in the hills will have a place.

Drinking cultures

For reasons that will be explained in another blog post, I’ve suddenly got quite a bit more free time on my hands, which has given me the chance to head out for drinks with some of my male colleagues on Fridays. It leaves me again reflecting on the role of alcohol and drinking.

Firstly beer. I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed drinking beer and so I only do so very occasionally. I’ve probably drunk less beer in my entire life than others drink on a heavy night at the pub. Un-needed calorie consumption turns me off a little bit, but the fundamental truth is that it just tastes bitter to me, and not in any enjoyable sense. So, I find myself a little jealous of the beer drinkers. I can’t reward myself with a beer at the end of a hot day. Beer isn’t the wonderful refreshing and relaxing drink it is for others. I don’t have a liquid item that I can keep in my fridge and break out when the good times roll.

Then there’s wine, which I do drink – I suspect part of that is making a statement that ‘I’m not morally against alcohol, and let me show you’. But when I think about it, the plain truth is that wine leaves me almost entirely neutral – it’s an unusual taste in my mouth, neither bad nor particularly good. It certainly doesn’t set the pulse racing.

As we left the bar last night, a friend lined up some strange flaming shots, which in following the lead of others, we knocked back. I’m not sure rationally what this was about either. Did any of us enjoy the taste of the shot? I suspect not. Did it come at a financial price? Yes. Did it give us more alcohol to make us relax more? Perhaps marginally. But I suspect the main reason behind why this act was done, was to do with male bonding, a shared experience, and overcoming a difficult challenge.

It all still leaves me thinking about what all this gives us. Some clearly find drinking pleasurable, which I’ll just have to accept as true. Alcohol seems to help relax as well; stories start flowing (there’s a tipping point in any night (from the perspective of a sober listener) when they become rather too long and without a point), and there’s a sense in which a good time is had. For some people, it might also encourage them to switch off, dance or speak to the opposite sex. It seems like a lot of effort for very little gain, and that if you pursued the same goal through other means (say hiking up a mountain, or playing sport), you could get better results.

Going back to drinking though, there’s almost no drink – alcoholic or not – that can reach me. I enjoy tea, and drink a lot of it, but I don’t need it in my life like others seem to need coffee. It’s a British treat – a mild subtle pleasure but not something to excite. Beyond that, I’d almost me tempted to say water or sometimes a smoothie or milkshake can give me a degree of refreshing pleasure. But liquids just don’t do it for me. This is rather odd, because when it comes to food there’s no shortage of pleasure to be had. So now, when going out, I regularly order water – something that would be unthinkable five years ago. I think part of this, is that natural process in your mid-30s, when you come to accept who you are, give up trying to be something else, and for you drinking just doesn’t do anything magical.

So perhaps while others drink, I should just order a Tiramisu.

A sprint

The office recently headed up country en masse for the annual two-day retreat. A time for important reflection, but also a bit of fun – and centre stage was the sports afternoon. In the 4x100m mixed relay I was at second base. We already had the lead when the baton was passed, but it was such good fun sprinting down the side of the football field. The exhilaration was to accelerate for the first 30m and then find that there were still more in the tank, so it felt like I was getting faster and faster almost all the way through.

I’ve never done any proper sprinting, though on my now occasional jogs I like to finish with a sprint. There’s something primeval about it though – just running as fast as you can over a short distance. It makes you feel young and athletic as you push your body to do something it’s intricate autonomy is put together to accomplish. In a couple of decades sprinting will be something I dream about rather than do, but how many of us give-up prematurely on these youthful and simple pleasures?

A morning stroll

I was up country this week. After rising early, I took a stroll out from the hotel while awaiting breakfast. It was before seven but you already had the feeling a hot day was coming – far hotter than what we get on the coast. The hotel itself was Lebanese-owned and the separate bedroom blocks around a narrow quad each had a large 4×4 parked outside.
Outside the gate, the high wall, and the G4S security guards, the mud road was wide and looked like it had recently been flattened. The ground was moist with dew yet to be burned off, and the majority of traffic outside was schoolchildren walking in all directions, and the odd dog shuffling around. The hotel was on the outskirts of town, so the land in the vicinity was a mix of small homes and fields. There was green space. A stream with croaking frogs ran through fields a short distance from the hotel, and I picked one of the mud crossing paths and headed to a small bridge. Children said hello as they passed. Around homes, kids were washing themselves from buckets, lathered from head to toe in soap. Parents were sitting on their front steps greeting passers-by and exchanging news with the rest of their families. There was often laughter in the air.
I’m sure they knew I was from the hotel. They probably considered I was one of those crazy people who’d waste $80 for a bed for the night. I obviously had more money than sense.
An idea came to me to make a little video one day juxtaposing the start to the day here, and then with some busy professional in the West. Emphasising (unfairly, but for a point) how the latter could go to work without anyone saying hello, and never sharing a joke. At the end they would both see representations of the other – the westerner would say a charity advert showing a miserable African, and the West African would see something aspirational showing the apparently glamorous life in the paradisiacal west.
In less than a month I’ve been in deep snow in the foothills of the alps, spread out on perfectly cut lawns at an English country house on a warmish Spring day, and here several hours from the coast in Sierra Leone. It’s a privilege.

Weight loss

For a few years now I’ve been a fairly consistent 83-85kg, and the marathon training in 2013-14 did almost nothing to change that. I never thought of myself as a fatty, but it has been an objective for a while to try and get below 75kg which was my normal weight in my late teens and 20s. I felt that my weight was greater than what was best for me, and it seemed that the power was within my grasp to get closer to an ideal weight, so why not.

I’m happy to say that I’m now under 75kg, and ten kilos less than I was in March last year. My approach was to set a target (75kg by Christmas), and then set-up a monthly objective of losing 1.5kg. My method was the 5:2 diet, which seems to work for me because with two days of discipline, you spend the rest of your life eating normally.

It’s great to hit my objective (a month late), though technically I think under 73kg is the ideal weight following the BMI scale. I’ve now set-up a sort of control valve system – if I’m over 75kg on a Sunday morning, I follow the 5:2 diet (500 calories on a fast day). If I’m 74-75kg then I fast just once (the Wednesday), and otherwise, I don’t have any reduced calorie days. What I haven’t yet done is got rid of some bad habits like eating too much, always eating everything on my plate, pigging out when food is free… But the control valve system does set-up a simple reward system for eating well and keeping control on things, and hopefully means my current weight level will be maintained.

Money

Isn’t money one of those strange concepts we live with but don’t think much about? [Not that we don’t think much about money, but that we don’t think much about what it means.]

Every now and again I have the reserves spare to invest my monthly pay cheque entirely in savings/shares etc.. What I get at the end of the month are numbers on a (virtual PDF) pay slip, that then appear as numbers on my online bank screen. These I then transfer (thanks to websites and email) into investment accounts. At no point (at least at my end) does the money materialise itself even in the form of printed numbers on a real piece of paper.

Then what happens? Well the investment in say shares/savings will continue for many years and in itself only ever ‘appears’ on regular electronic statements. The sum will hopefully earn interest/dividends/capital gains, which will increase my financial value, and perhaps one day give me the security to retire (hopefully early) (when I say retire, I really mean, change careers to something I’m 100% passionate about for which I do regardless of financial gain).

But there’s probably a good chance that the initial investment will never be ‘cashed in’, i.e. transferred into something material like a house, car or holiday. Instead, it’s quite likely that what started as payment for a month’s work, will in its entirety be handed over to my descendants upon my death, who may well finally convert it into something physical. [If I was in the mood of the writer of Ecclesiastics, I might speculate about the pay cheque eventually being meaninglessly wasted by descendants :-)]

Looking at this whole process, doesn’t it seem rather strange how much power virtual numbers on a page mean to us? Perhaps the power they have is the potential they embody. But it still seems that this month’s pay cheque makes almost zero difference to my life. Of course, I could simply head out and spend wildly – but for some reason I’d prefer seeing the value of the pay cheque as numbers in a virtual online account, rather than materialised in a new car or a few foreign holidays to far-flung destinations.

Italy

It’s been a good morning on two fronts (base and elevated) – firstly the bathroom scales displayed 74.6kg, so a month late, I’ve hit my 2015 goal of getting under 75kg. And I had a bit of time free before coming into work, so I finished off an Italian novel; ‘The Leopard’ by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. There’s something special about finishing a novel and still getting into the office by 7am.

I’d never heard of ‘The Leopard’ until about 18 months ago when I read ‘How to be well read’ by John Sutherland, which consists of lots of different pen portraits of the great works of literature (I think he covers about 500). Sutherland was profuse in his praise for ‘The Leopard’, which was interesting as I’d never heard of the book or indeed heard it being referenced. Hearing about an amazing (and yes, short) novel attracted my curiosity. It is an incredible book, telling the story of a noble Sicilian family around the time of the creation of Italy (1860s, Garibaldi et al). It’s witty and very moving.

I haven’t delved much into Italian culture – but from the little I’ve seen (‘The Leopard’, and films like ‘Dolce Vita’ and ‘The Great Beauty’), there seems to be a common set of themes – of past greatness, nostalgia, worship of high culture, the Catholic church, aesthetic/erotic pleasures, and decline. Admittedly my sample size is not large for these generalizations. In other literary cultures, I’d most compare the spirit to the one you find in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ or ‘One hundred years of solitude’.

I’ve spent very little time in Italy: a few brief hops over the border from Switzerland, and a week hitch-hiking from Ancona to Florence in 1999. The beauty of even the most simple dwellings makes it a country I definitely want to spend more time visiting in the future.

I leave you with three quotes from ‘The Leopard’ (I’ve only just figured out Kindle highlights):

« The two young people looked at the picture with complete lack of interest. For both of them death was purely an intellectual concept, a facet of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh, yes, it existed of course, but was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit. »

« free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency and plain good manners, he moved through the forest of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed. »

« They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors set to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither was good, each self-interested, turgid with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies destined to die. »

The CAR chapter

I was going back through old career files last week and came across my supervisor’s feedback from my three month deployment in the Central African Republic in 2014. The feedback was positive, but that period seems such a long time ago (is 18 months really such a long time?). It pushed me to reflect on that period – it seems like such a discreet chapter of life, unlinked to anywhere else. I developed good new friendships with work colleagues, but these almost all but ceased when I left. I was able to develop a good reputation within the office, but now I no longer work for the same organisation or the same people. So it feels like whatever I achieved there is now closed and has no relationship with what I do now. Isn’t it strange to build something and then start from scratch a few months later? Anything you did to establish relationships, institutional knowledge or a reputation remains in a closed box marked ‘CAR’. All you take with you are some experiences, some skills, and the knowledge that you can through a test.

Maybe it’s a bit like life. You work so hard for certain goals and ideals that seem very much part of the world you live in, and then when you move on, you realise that from another perspective what’s important seems very much different.