My Gap year comes to an end

Three hundred and sixty five days have elapsed since I became unemployed. After thirty two years of gainful and eventually lucrative employment, I was let go via a phone call I mistakenly answered on the beach during my holiday. That was over a year ago now and I still recall the mixture of outrage, relief and fear the call brought with it; Outrage because how dare a manager call me from the other side of the world and launch straight into contract-speak about the end of my career whilst I was on holiday; relief because the final year had been a nerve-wracking roller coaster of managing perceptions of my performance in an impossible job; Fear because I have a huge mortgage and no means to pay it beyond my redundancy payout which is beginning to run out.

The world of employment has become a largely inhumane place. I was lucky that I had relatively good pay and conditions. Others have to scratch a living on zero-hours contracts. But even so, that was no way to divest yourself of an employee. It was cowardly and inconsiderate because no consideration is required, at least beyond that of being a decent human being. Even that was lacking here as it seems no longer to be required in a manager. disappointing.

Possibly by writing this in a publicly visible setting, I burn my bridges. Well, I can't say many bridges have appeared to employment so maybe I lose nothing by this. But somehow I find this helpful to write.

In the last year I have completed probably three hundred job applications. Of those, I heard back in the negative for about six, had three interviews and been ultimately unsuccessful in getting a job. I suspect my age might be a factor. In the interviews it was clear I had significantly more experience at a higher level than the hiring manager and nobody wants an employee like that, do they? After some interviews, I received no further response at all. How indifferent and arrogant is that? Well, another sucker will always come along, won't they!

And so here I am, an electronic engineer, chock-full of all kinds of knowledge, speaking passable French and German, 25 years experience in sales with a major tech company, articulate and healthy. And unemployed. One of a number of cast-aside people with skills to offer that nobody seems to want. And yet industry screams "We need engineers! technologists! Scientifically literate candidates!" as if there were none available. And there are. They are just "too old". Perhaps deemed too expensive to too close to retirement to be considered.

Reading the industry press, my situation is far from unique. Indeed, it seems an endemic problem; Skilled and experienced people in their forties and fifties finding themselves surplus to requirements. It seems a shame that this pool of talent is going to waste. But wasted it is.

And so, I resign myself to never getting another "proper" job again, at least not in the sector I trained for. What to do? Oh, I have a plan. I am not sure if it will come off, but what choice do I have? Too old for tech, too young to retire.

It has been a good year. I went round most of Europe in a van (I never told you about that, did I? 4500 miles in a little over a month, meeting lovely people, some of them from here! Perhaps I should write some of that down) toured Scotland and lived on a beach at the foot of a mountain by the sea for days on end. I spent weeks this summer in Cornwall bobbing about in a canoe. I landscaped the garden. I made hundreds of loaves of bread and ran a baking course. We built a new pizza oven and filled the greenhouse with incredibly productive plants.
I am really good at being unemployed. I am always busy! But now it's a year and I need to do some work. So, I sit down to my business plan, review what I have to offer and find myself... hopeful. Let's see where my new path leads.

Just an atavism really

I almost never come here now. There was a time, oh, a very long time, when this was my lifeline to my eroding self. Now, the forces of distortion are long gone and with it, the need for some kind of assertion of my own will and character.
You hear people say:"I know people think I am a bitch/bastard, but on the inside, I am actually quite nice!"
This is to miss a central truth about identity: We are what we appear to be to others. As far as the world is concerned, what lies within is of no consequence if the external manifestation of a personality is a bitch or bastard. That is what we all experience.
And so, were we to be on a desert island, alone, could we be said to be an extrovert? A kindly soul? Mean-spirited? It doesn't seem so. Perhaps we could be determined or a defeatist. We could struggle valiantly against the odds, or lie down and die. Is that character, personality?
Perhaps our character is then to some extent our own experience of ourselves, at least in properties which are not social attributes.

So, maybe that is what this was: A reassurance that regardless of how external forces try to shape one, personal opinions can remain beyond the reach of others. Knuckling down day-to-day need not mean losing sight of what makes us who we are. We can "secretly" be who we actually are, only ironically of course in a public realm.

Well, I have no need of that now. There are no forces of correction to divert me to a path not of my choosing or contort me to fit the expectations of another. I have no employer (which is not without its own worries) to watch my every keystroke for dissent.

Perhaps then, i have no need of this, being able to "be myself" in the entirety of my "new" life.
But... Oh... this is so difficult! So out of practise have I become that my prose won't flow. It sticks and falters and the results are not as i would have wished. Short of the odd, admittedly verbose, paragraphs in my facbook statuses, I never write now. And that seems a shame.

So, that tells me I need to resume writing. If not here, then elsewhere. Probably not here actually: Too much painful history, though I do enjoy reading back the more whimsical entries. But somewhere. And since this isn't a desert island, personality may be retained.
Ahh, nobody reads this anyway so the pressure is not on. But they might, and so standards must be maintained. And that's the value - rigour.

Where to then? I am not sure. Somewhere because writing this was a real exertion and it shouldn't be. Somewhere else then. Yes. A new start. That feels good. Another one.

Who we are in the garden

Aha! Some writings! well, I have to keep my mind alive and my tools sharp. As will become apparent should you read this, circumstances dictate that some intellectual rigour must be maintained. And what better way than this: The examination of thoughts and the putting-into-words. And so, where to begin? With the situation I suppose. it's been a while, but here goes...

To look at a life and decide what it is about it that defines us is a difficult thing. I suppose this is why people ask at parties or when acquaintances are formed "What do you do for a living" or some variation thereof. It seems to provide a shortcut to an understanding of who it is we are talking to and their probable value system (or, if I am to be cynical, in some cases of a person's potential usefulness to the questioner).
Such pigeonholing seems ubiquitous and I think undermines the potential for friendships. To learn that someone is a consultant anaesthetist or works at a recycling plant sorting bottles from cans tells you something about their likely educational level and possible drive but nothing about whether they might be kind to animals or fun to spend an evening with by a fireside.
It is an unimaginative question and one I never ask unless it becomes pertinent to the immediate conversation. A better one, i have found is "So, what do you do for fun?" (Though sometimes this has startled the recipient by the sudden realisation that they actually don't do much beyond work and watching television).

And so, here I find myself at a loss now. I have no job. My questionable career trotting round the globe persuading people to buy what I genuinely believe to be very high quality and innovative technology has come to an end. After almost thirty years, inevitably and understandably, the market changes and my services are no longer required. That's ok. These things happen. We all need to adapt to new situations.

But of course, I now have to answer the tedious question on those occasions it appears. I could of course reply "I am a confidence trickster. I identify suitable people at parties to take part in my audacious and almost certain-to-succeed business ventures. Would you like to buy my miraculous tonic wine?"
Or I could just respond with a euphemism for "I am unemployed" such as "I am between jobs" or "I am currently a gentleman of indolence and leisure".
This latter is actually quite accurate. Though I am no longer being paid by a company for the hours of a week I attend to their endeavours, I am finding plenty to occupy my time. Imagination does that.

If someone were to ask how I spend my leisure hours, I could reply with any number of activities: I garden. I dance! I bake bread. I brew fine ales from the basic ingredients. I make furniture from suitable recycled timber. I kayak on seas and on inland waters. I work on my self-build camper van. I make pizza ovens out of clay from gardens. I ferment my produce. I read about science. I write (occasionally).

And any one of these can be a point of commonality. Myriad conversations might begin from any one of these topics. Or a long and enthusiastic dialogue might begin from the natural links between some of them.
So much better, it seems, than talking about the rather specialised and artificial nature of my (former) employment.

So, we never need fear the question. There is plenty that one does that can indicate or define the type of person we might be. Of course, I could do all of those and still be a psychopathic manipulator who enjoys pulling the legs off flies (I am not, btw. But I do resort to fly papers in my kitchen due to the rural populations of insects that otherwise tend to congregate where many of my aforementioned activities take place).

So, are we what we do? An opinion exists amongst learned thinkers that personality is an illusion and no more really than a set of individual cognitive processes. There appears to be some merit to this argument. But that aside, we cannot deny that we each possess a kind of set of characteristics and behaviours that define us and which others may like, tolerate or abhor.

"Doing loads of stuff" and the nature of that stuff may therefore tell us and others a lot about what that personality is. And by this I do not say "appears to be" because if that is how we appear to people, it must by definition be what we present to the world. Being "Not like that at all on the inside" is not really relevant with regards to how the world finds us. To all intents and purposes what we manifest is what we offer the world as our personality.

In the last year or so, I have divorced, moved house, lost my job, got another relationship. It is as if every single component of my life has been replaced by something new and different. And yet, I feel in all of this, pretty much the same person. Perhaps a little more carefree and dismissive of life's niggles. Maybe a little more outgoing. But essentially pretty much still me.

Is who we are immutable then? Is it not contingent on our situations? well, that is a complex question. But it is one I feel is a little bit clearer to answer in the light of my recent upheavals. My feeling is no. The essence of us is subject to modification in some minor ways (brain damage aside) but the essence of who we are remains essentially the same.

And asking what I do for a job isn't going to tell you what that is. So ask something else. It will almost certainly yield more fruitful results.

The new inhabitants of my life

I sat this evening in the rather too plentiful dark, looking into my pond with a torch. A few short weeks ago, the area was a thicket of hydrangeas with a small ash tree in the middle. Now it is a half-metre deep pond just larger than a king-sized bed with ledges just visible in in its murky depths and gently sloping beaches of tiny flint pebbles for the creatures to get in an out. It is a popular pond with the birds; An extended family of sparrows bathe in it noisily and fractiously every day and a grey wagtail visits in between their bickering baths. A hedgehog visits nightly for the mealworms which are left as incentive and a frog, narrowly avoiding the tread of my foot, leapt several metres to land in the middle of the water before making his way to the margins.

All of this endorsement of my pond-siting and pond-construction skills pleases me more than I can articulate with mere words. But leaping and whooping might perhaps go some way towards it. More alarmingly but, I suppose quite naturally, there has been a buzzard on the fence at the end of the garden a mere thirty or so metres away and yesterday a thwarted sparrowhawk, having missed his dinner in his assault on the pyracantha bush sat grumpily on a pot a metre from the patio doors. Word has obviously got round amongst the avian community, of a new and interesting garden to visit.

In the damp darkness, unseasonably warm for November, I watched for perhaps twenty minutes. There is no sign of the "supermoon", almost full this evening, due to the heavy blanket of cloud sullenly hanging over the Cotswold scarp. With the plain of the Severn to the South and the brow of the hills rising to the North the skies here can be quite big, with cloudscapes to fill the eyes. Tonight though, it is just inky blackness.

The pond seems to be teeming with life. there are several types of water beetle busying themselves with dragging their buoyant cargoes of air down to the depths, in search of.. what? what do they eat? Not the insect larvae that wiggle and wriggle convulsively just below the surface. And somehow a pond snail has arrived and is floating contentedly (as far as i can tell) upside down as if the underside of the water's surface is a pavement to be traversed. So much life is here, in this thousand or so litres of water.

Perhaps, in the bushes at the end of the garden - a formless and unintentional hedge resulting from neglect for no more than a few years - there are rustlings. It could be the hedgehog but his dense little blob of a body is usually visible as he ambles round the lawn. It is not too difficult to imagine tiny faces peering at me with bemused eyes as they perform their nightly foraging for worms or useful bits of string or anything else that takes their fancy. Did I hear a tiny chuckle as I tripped over a brick I had been using to elevate a fatball for the robin? No, i am sure it was my imagination...

In the quiet of the night, the not-too-distant motorway being less intrusive due to the hour, the noise in my head, appearing as it did at the time of my burst sub-arachnoid blood vessel, is almost deafening. This noise exploded deafeningly into my mind as the blood burst into my brain (albeit, the photos suggest, in rather tiny but still incredibly disruptive amounts) those near-five years ago now and refuses to leave. Mostly, I am not aware of it. But tonight, it is frankly annoying: A whine of such intensity that it competes with the eleven o'clock train to Temple Meads Station. So, i leave the little watchers and go back inside, content that the garden is progressing the right way to attract the wildlife I had hoped would arrive.

Inside the house, i have lit the fire. I didn't need to really as it is quite warm, but it makes me feel less lonely for some reason. The seemingly recent memory of a houseful of family rings in my mind's ear, and treasured though the memory is, my resultant regrets crowd in on me and accentuate my alone-ness in the house.This is not a house for the lone resident. It deserves more people. There are three bedrooms of which two have very infrequent but welcome visitors.
But now, as the heating turns off from the prompting of the thermostat as it is warmed by the heat of the fire, it is as if unseen occupants shift restlessly in the beds and others make their way across the landing in search of the bathroom.
Old ghosts perhaps. How nice that would be. I would invite them to sit with me and we would converse about such things as they have seen, and perhaps they would be equally enthralled at my own experiences, though I suspect theirs might be more enlightening.

But there are no ghosts. None that is, except the ones in my mind: The laughter of children splashing in the sink before bedtime, happily now grown to be admirable adults who indulge their old dad with irregular but welcome visits but who no longer fight over the toothpaste. And the singing of one once so happy in a shared life but now elsewhere doing who-knows-what?

Life is so very different now. Things change, children grow up, parents grow apart, lives are dissolved and reconstructed in ways not better but merely different. The birds still quarrel and the beetles still swim. And probably all is as it should be. Probably.

Words for a Thousand Lunchtimes

A friend died a couple of weeks ago. I am vainly attempting to write a eulogy to deliver at his funeral. I sit looking at my pen, at my keyboard, at the quarrelling sparrows on the lawn and my mind is immobile. It refuses to elicit the first words with which to describe this man. Not because there is nothing to say, because there is an abundance; But because of a sincere desire to do the memory of the man due justice. My fingers hover hesitantly over the keys, paralysed by the multitude of suddenly facile and cliched phrases that suggest themselves in such cases. So, I come here, in order to tangentially, obliquely, begin the task by proxy. Perhaps if I fling enough words onto this white rectangle, something will emerge, like a speck of gold in the vast pile of rubble from a mine in promising ground.

I was surprised to be asked by him to speak just a few days before his predicted but untimely death. He wasn't someone I saw often but he was someone with whom I formed an unlikely connection. You come across people in your travels through life and have no idea mostly what their facades hide. A bland affable exterior might elicit profound wisdom regarding the relevance of millennia-old ideas to your life, a curmudgeonly misanthrope could throw your perspective of them completely off balance by letting slip about their weekends volunteering with autistic children. We often do not wear our identities on our faces or demeanours it seems.

So, a chance observation, after a decade of knowing this previously distant man, sparked an unexpected connection that was to last a decade or more of lunchtime conversations. An observation of an article he was reading in New Scientist, which I had read the previous day, opened up a world of discussion and exchange of ideas which I am told he looked forward to immensely and with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
Our conversations ranged from the seemingly magical behaviour of radio waves within metal computer enclosures (his specialist field and one in which he would have unjustly have declined to describe himself as an expert), through religion and the more popular forms of irrationality to the neural basis of consciousness, as revealed by my own, and others' experiences of cognition with respect to the machine that creates it. A contentious conclusion but one I feel is an unavoidable inevitability. I think this may have been the topic of our very last conversation, in fact.
Ours was a particularly materialist universe, the evidence for this having been carefully and systematically examined, for this is the rigour that characterised his thinking.

So, the grumpy old bugger that refused to suffer fools gladly and would bluntly point out inconsistencies in a particular position, softened and became a man of immense curiosity when given the opportunity discuss his ideas without judgement. People really can surprise you if you give them the chance. No longer scratchy and irritated by imprecise opinions, he became wistful and enthusiastic in his examination of them. Many a lunch hour was taken up this way.

Perhaps, this is a lesson I take from this (and as you know, I always like to extrapolate from the individual experience to the general principle when observation suggests I can): Perhaps the grumpy, the spiky, the vague and the seemingly dull, hide deeper treasures which need careful uncovering. Ok, some are just what they at first glance seem and many a time I have suddenly remembered imaginary appointments to escape tedious expounding of irrelevant facts or a stream of poorly constructed opinions. But maybe it is worth persevering.  Maybe some people hide, for reasons of their own. a world of fascination, imagination or experience.

I would suggest it is worth persevering just in case.

I am still no closer to an opening, but I do feel I have freed up the hinges on the gates of my thought somewhat.

Not really sure why...

I write here. I don't do it very often. Hardly ever now in fact. I read a couple of articles entitled "is blogging dead?". Inevitably it was followed by a flurry of articles stating (somewhat self-persuadingly) "Blogging is not dead!" The consensus appears to be that it lives yet but as our attention spans decrease due to tweeting and snapchat, we no longer have the stamina or inclination to read anything longer than a hundred or so characters
Hmm.. not sure. I know my attention span is infinitesimally small these days. But this is for different reasons. In my new world of understanding the concept of cognitive bandwidth, it seems many of us are occupied with thoughts and worries that may be unconscious and my yet still take up bandwidth in our limited brains. This leaves us less for other activities.

In my case, with my brain still not really recovered, and probably now as good as it is going to get, I find so many quirks in the attention circuits that frankly never worked very well. Yep! On any test I take for ADHD, I am right up there at the top. And that's ok. I probably would have been before. It's just more pronounced now as the general amount of resource in there is reduced. So older, more pernicious problems are exaggerated. Never mind. At least it's not boring.

But I would like to be able to read again for more than a paragraph. Reading is, alas, almost an impossibility for me now in any serious sense. (Though not writing, strangely) It's a bit of a handicap to be honest. But there it is. I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. But at least I know my limitations and their implications.
Also of course, there are the ongoing tribulations: I am currently getting divorced, moving house, changing jobs and dealing with the aftermath of my misanthropic grandmother's death. All presumably take up some bandwidth. Those are a lot of the major life events that one sees in lists of such things as "The Most Stressful Things that Can Happen To A Person."

Whatever. Maybe things will improve after it has all settled down, whenever that is.

What has struck me though is the terrible quality of most training materials. In my transition to my new job, there is a lot of "multi-modal material" that is: Slide shows with simultaneous voice-overs and animations. Research would seem to indicate this is impossible for anyone to successfully follow and absorb. Cognitive overload is an inevitability even for a focussed and healthy brain. And I wonder how it is that people have the production of these materials at the centre of their jobs and are so bad at it. Surely someone responsible for imparting information ought to have a grasp of how brains learn (and how they don't!). An understanding of cognitive processes would benefit everyone I think.

So, last night, I walked in glorious English countryside along the banks of a river in which trout were leaping to gobble up stragglers from the vast clouds of mayflies. And I reflected that amongst all this complexity, this interlocking and interdependent system that is nature, runs quite nicely thank-you-very-much without any thought whatsoever. Nature asserts temporary order, it flourishes and returns to chaos. And so it goes on for now as it has done for a few hundred million years.

In amongst the foliage and undergrowth were the remains of an old mill. I have no idea how old this was. Probably early Industrial Revolution age, maybe two hundred years old or so.

Once a triumph of human ingenuity and engineering, this complex and elaborate machine, built at presumably great expense to harvest energy from nature for the purposes of industry was gradually succumbing to the forces of nature. The iron, so long dug from the ground, smelted, refined, worked, is gradually returning to the soil. There is a touch of Ozymandias about such relics, I always feel. Oh, there was no hubris intended in the construction of the mill, merely a wish to facilitate production of some goods or other and possibly to remove the burden of toil from fragile people with their fatigue and limited strength. But eventually it was no longer profitable or competitive with newer advances and it was left for nature to reclaim, which slowly it is doing.

But in the millpond, now just a feature of the river, the fish continue to jump, as they did when the mill was its owner's pride and joy and the mayflies hatch, ascend, mate and die as they did then.

So, with this reflection,  I decided to stop thinking so much and just go with the flow a bit. And I shall hope there are no unanticipated waterfalls on my route downstream.

Who are the Voices in our heads when Reading?

It would appear now that after my hiatus, brought about by unfavourable circumstance, I can now write again here without fear of sinister consequence. I shall not attempt to explain how it came to be that I needed to lay low for a while, but suffice to say that life is very different now to what it was a year ago. My marriage, my home and much of the trappings of middle-class respectability have vanished. It is indeed a new and often uncomfortable chapter in my life with some resultant and happy consolations.

I have missed writing. It is good exercise for the mind and I confess that without it I have felt lesser. Whether it is true or a matter of internal perspective, I felt less articulate and, well, frankly less effective in my communication. It is also interesting to note that to some extent the medium makes the message. Perhaps this is not to be underestimated.
I was with some people at the weekend, for a lovely if rather drunken celebration and they mostly had what would be deemed "Received Pronunciation" English accents. I do not, hailing as I do from an extremely working-class Bristolian family. My accent might be likened, in fact, to that of the animate scarecrow Worzel Gummidge. We discussed quite briefly the drawbacks and advantages of our respective accents; How they dispose people toward us and how they subsequently respond. I feel, personally, in conclusion that I suffer from more of the former consequences than they do. But to dwell on this is not my point here: To hear me speak, you would think me one type of person or one level of intelligence (perhaps) whilst to read my words you would almost certainly believe me to be something altogether different. My West-country burr might imply a number of character traits and tendencies, for instance a liking for cider (which I confess to), a certain slothfulness (arguably correct) and a lower than average intelligence (which I suspect is unlikely to be the case but certainly must remain a possibility to be entertained). Perhaps you might think I own a tractor or have an affinity with cows. Certainly such perceptions must be the result of innate unconscious biases in our individual interpretations of the communication we hear. My written words have no accent.

But putting aside the prejudices of a listener or reader, it does lead to the interesting question of whether we are "different people" in our different modes of expression. Interestingly, research on bilingual people has shown that using each of their different languages to express a set of opinions or thoughts tends to cause them to actually have differences in those opinions or thoughts. The implications of this are that the thoughts themselves are subject to the constraints and influences of the structures of that language. Our language shapes our thoughts. No surprise there then, except the part about the bilingualism.

So, perhaps then the different voices we use when speaking or writing influences the content of mood of our expression too. Perhaps writing in a "voice" different from that of our usual communication medium allows us to be a character different from our usual selves. Maybe my abstention from writing in this manner has caused me to be the other (the actual? Who is to say what this is?) version of me. And indeed, I suddenly find myself to be altered noticeably from who I was when I was talking to colleagues a few hours ago (and oddly perplexed to find this persona actually significantly more comfortable to adopt.)

So, I do wonder how you feel about this? There are many reasons to write here; Seemingly an exercise (generally) without profit but taking some level of concerted effort. For those of you who write, do you feel yourselves shifted into another person for the duration of your writing and for perhaps some period of time afterwards?  Or do you write how you speak, immediately recognisably you?

Incidentally, as an aside, though possibly this is an associated phenomenon, I often wondered in which voice the words we read appear in our heads. If you listen, it is somehow sub-vocal, as in not actually an embodied vocal entity. But intriguingly, reading various poems which should rhyme but which in some dialects do not, it can be shown that the voices in our heads when we read are, if not our own, then at least in the accent of our daily speech. Isn't that fascinating?

Anyway, here I am back, and seemingly, at least from my inner perspective, the better for it.