Is it really almost the end of 2022?

Dear Friends, I have been meaning to update this blog for a long while but somehow [excuses, excuses, etc…]

My last update was in later 2020, I’m sure a lot of water has passed under the bridge for all of us since then. The Historian in me says I can’t give you a chronological update, that’s too long and tedious, so instead below are some thematic excerpts from the last two years.

Family

Kids make the passage of time much more obvious, because they grow and change so much more quickly than we do.

Start of school Sep 2021

Calvin (8), Mackenzie (6) and Rae (3) are all doing well, although several of us have spent the last few weeks taking turns with coughing and spluttering, as winter illnesses seems to have come back into fashion now that we’re all out there mingling again.

Calvin is a very lively, loud (perhaps because his father leaves his hearing aids out – not sure what’s cause and effect here!), sports-mad boy who particularly enjoys football, tennis, (tag) rugby and in the summer he turns to cricket.  In school he enjoys maths and geography, and he regularly practices piano (previously he was also playing ukulele). Calvin is very sociable, although he doesn’t quite understand hierarchy as he’ll bend the ear of his school headmaster as readily as another boy 3 or 4 years his senior at school. Calvin sadly doesn’t enjoy reading as much, and he’s not the neatest, but he has a sweet nature and looks after his little sister wonderfully.

Start of school Sep 2022

Mackenzie is quieter and more reserved. He has an infectious laugh and lots of pent up energy which means he likes to rough and tumble although he’s very ticklish. Mackenzie is quite strong for his age, which is good because he’s one of the youngest in his school year (he and Calvin are 20 months apart but only 1 school year apart), but he has to remember to be gentle with others sometimes. Mac or Kenzie as he’s affectionately known, is diligent in his school work, his reading and writing have come along really well, and he’s also a good sportsman – enjoying football and rugby in particular. Mackenzie recently won a prize for his first term of playing the violin, of which Helen was deservedly very proud because she basically had to learn about violin from scratch to help Mackenzie with his practicing. Mackenzie has lots of kinetic energy and as long as it’s well-channelled things are ok!

Rae is a very assertive little girl (not surprising with two older brothers) and looks incredibly like Helen did at a similar age. Rae is also a left-hander, and she enjoys art and creative pursuits, as well as dancing and singing. Rae has started a few mornings a week of nursery school since September and seems to have really enjoyed it. Her verbal ability has generally been fairly far ahead of where the boys were at comparable ages, which is probably a combination of being 3^rd and being a girl. I tried to be as open-minded as possible about gender and have encouraged all sorts of different interests, but it has become clear that sometimes children seem to be coded a certain way, as Rae takes great delight in looking after teddy bears and dollies, and is already far more likely to change her outfit suddenly in the middle of the day than either of her older brothers have ever bothered to. I still don’t think Frozen is a particularly good movie but I dare not whisper that opinion anywhere near Rae who is besotted with the music and the characters!

Sports

The boys and I have enjoyed several outings to watch rugby at various stadia in London (Mackenzie did spend quite a lot of one match watching planes passing overhead), as well as a little jaunt to a French Pro D2 game in France during our last summer holiday (thanks to my father for kindly taking us after our car had a flat tyre just as we left). Both Calvin and Mackenzie now play tag rugby at a local club, and I try to alternate coaching weeks between their two age groups. I don’t find it very easy coaching such young children, as some kids’ parents seem to let them be as disrespectful or disruptive as they want, while other children get teary the first time I shout in enthusiasm! It will be interesting to see if Calvin, who shares my light-weight frame, will continue to play once there is tackling from next year at U9, but there is no pressure at all from me. I only want the boys to play games that they like, in order to cultivate an enjoyment of being active and to learn about winning and losing with good grace, and being part of a team. At home we’re lucky enough to have a decent size garden with football goals and sometimes in the evenings the boys go out and play in the dim garden lights even when it’s otherwise pitch dark.

I sadly haven’t kept up with as many sports lately. In the summer when the rugby season is over, I tend to play more tennis and some rounds of golf. Now in the Autumn and Winter (when not sick as I was for nearly 3 weeks in November, and I still don’t seem to be quite over it now) I have enjoyed regular refereeing on a Wednesday afternoon (mostly schools and universities) and Saturday (top level men’s amateur clubs and top schools). Hopefully next summer I will be less susceptible to sinus infections that seem to have dogged me in 2022, and will be more able to play some basketball and touch rugby as well. I continue to hold my own as one of the fitter referees (belying my age), but I suspect my chances of advancing beyond my current level as one of the top level of referees within my society, but not yet promoted to a regional level (the next level up is officially where clubs can begin to pay players), have dwindled. I continue to love refereeing for the combination of physical and mental challenges (being fast enough to keep up, nimble enough to move where the game is going, and fit enough to process everything mentally as well as remaining calm and composed when under significant pressure). But I’m probably not easy-going enough to be an elite referee who not only sees what is going wrong, but by sheer personality can sometimes resolve the issues without appearing to act in any way differently. I’m very grateful to Helen that she holds the fort on Saturdays and allows me to follow my passion, which often takes several hours of driving and post-match socialising, sometimes even paperwork after and between matches as well.

Home Life

The winter of 2021 was a long one for Helen in particular. A lockdown was imposed here in the UK from January to March and Helen and our au pair Keisha had to teach the boys at home and chaperone them for lessons delivered virtually via Zoom. Mackenzie was once not on mute when he turned to Helen to say “Mum this is boring!” in a loud voice while the teacher was trying to get the class to pay attention to something.
I was also studying quite intensively myself (more on this below) and did not venture out for much except to do the weekly shopping at a supermarket in a mask. I don’t think any of us miss those days. Keisha did well to live with us through a dark and cold lockdown while not being able to leave our family home much at all for an extended period of time, but by summer 2021 she decided it was time to move into London. After an abortive attempt at a third au pair in early September – a young provincial French girl who cried every day because she was homesick and left after only 1 week (I think we all spoke too fast and she was better at English on her phone than in real life) - Helen decided that she was happy for us to have the house entirely to ourselves again. Instead, we now have a lovely lady called Charlotte who is a nanny to some of the boys’ school friends and is free between 9am-2pm when they’re at school, so a few mornings a week Charlotte would come and do things with Rae for a couple of hours to give Helen some time to organise the rest of her life. Rae now is at nursery three mornings a week, but Charlotte loves Rae so much that she is still keen to come once a week.

Helen continues to be the only real grown-up in our house. This school year she has been one of the Chairpersons of the parent representative committee at the school. In exchange for the glamour of being allowed to walk in the door first and bag the front row seats at school events such as parent assemblies, prize-givings, and dramatic performances, as well as some exclusive offers including having lunch at school once a term with your child, the members and especially the Chairs of these committees work tirelessly to organise various charity fundraising events as well as other highlights of the school calendar including harvest festival, decorating the pre-prep school for Christmas, and other remarkably labour intensive seasonal endeavours which the school (sometimes) seems to appreciate. Unluckily for Helen she is a kind person, so she puts up not only with me, but also with various parents who join the committee but then never really do any work. I’d have fired several ‘volunteers’ by now but that’s why no-one invites me to join these things 😊 However, Helen has derived great satisfaction from helping to contribute to the school community as well as getting to know other parents, teachers, and children better, as part of this work, and I’m very proud of her commitment and resolve in the face of many challenges (including me, at times). Helen already has her hands full running the household including our boys having events outside of school as well: tennis practices at two different clubs, swimming coaching, musical instrument practices, playdates with classmates and a never-ending cycle of birthday parties, as well as occasionally finding time for her own tennis, which Helen has thoroughly enjoyed over the last 2 years.

Speaking of putting up with me – November 2021 was ten years since Helen and I went on our first official date (not, as I like to remind her, just randomly having her being nice to me in a bar because she’d had a few glasses of wine, then relegating me to the ‘friend zone’ when sober). We were very fortunate that my parents agreed to look after all three children, and we managed to go away together on our own for 2 nights for the first time since Calvin was born in 2014. We considered all sorts of crazy options, but in the end we settled for a weekend in London including theatre, the Tate Modern, two dinners out with different types of cuisine, as well as a chilly Thames riverboat cruise on the Sunday morning. More recently, in October this year we had Helen’s parents stay with us for a few weeks on holiday, and during that time Helen and I went away for 2 nights for some hiking and outdoors time in the hills of Wales – experiencing a very wide range of autumn weather, from weak sunshine to howling gales and rain. It isn’t all that easy to get anyone else to look after 2, let alone 3 kids, but as they grow older, hopefully Helen and I will sometimes find some more time for just the two of us. As it is, we have a reasonable rota of babysitters so that we can at least get out for a meal or a movie, or dinner with another couple, reasonably often.

Parenting is really easy. I mean, you never make mistakes. You’re never doomed to play out your own insecurities or reverberate off the (real or imagined) difficulties in your relationships with your own parents. Because you wholeheartedly accept yourself and your own flaws, it’s inevitable that you’ll take a wise and philosophical view of the seeds of those same flaws in mini versions of yourself. Your kids will never see you just totally lose your sh*t – because they’ll never work the very last frayed nerve by doing stuff you have repeatedly asked them not to do, AGAIN!! Nor do kids skate happily in the cracks in how you and your spouse approach things differently, often the same things that when there were only two of you, you could do your best to avoid. Whether that’s how to organise things and tidiness, not listening (men are never guilty of this anyway), never being more than half an hour away from a snack, talking over others repeatedly, or wearing the same clothes on repeat until they fall off or going through several outfits a day (with the others strewn on the floor). Our current rock and roll lifestyle is spending Saturday nights hanging laundry and folding millions of socks. It’s a delicate balance: you want the world for your children, but you also really hope the world welcomes them because it would be nice if they could move out one day. I’m optimistic about going backpacking again before my 60’s, but not very optimistic at this rate. Rae turns 18 in 15 years time – so the clock is ticking! Realistically, backpacking thousands of miles away isn’t really a very good answer to restlessness of the soul and a lack of inner peace and self-acceptance, but having to practice very inadequate Spanish and being terrified of losing your passport or taking the wrong transport to the opposite end of a continent at least makes it harder to ponder one’s relative distance from nirvana.

Work

You may recall that when I last updated my blog, my work in Education had been thrown rather off course by the pandemic and I had been doing some fiction writing. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and maybe I’ll return to it some day, but the lack of income prompted me to start doing some exploration of personal finance matters. I quickly realised that personal finance, and advice on how best to handle personal finances, is a fascinating area of work and combines many of my previous experiences: my accounting background as well as my understanding of Economics and business, is all quite useful from an investments and tax perspective, while my education experience helps me to work with people to help them understand their choices and the implications of different choices. The historian in me really enjoys that a big part of effective financial planning is really understanding each person or couple that you work with, and to do that properly you often have to explore their personal history and how this shapes their views of the world and especially of money (even if they don’t realise this). So, from around December 2020 to April 2021, I devoted the bulk of my time to studying and taking the exams required to become a regulated financial planner. Then from May 2021 to August-September 2021 I worked as an administrative staff member in a small local financial planning firm – learning from the ground up (including answering phones and being put on hold seemingly interminably by large insurance companies). The firm were so small they didn’t have a regular parking space for me, and I frequently had to cycle to work, and they realised they didn’t have scope for me to become an adviser in front of clients as quickly as I envisioned, so they kindly allowed me to move on to another local firm where I became a trainee adviser. Since then, I’ve managed to get an awful lot of experience working with a wide range of clients (in terms of their ages, stage of life, attitudes to risk, and income and investable assets). I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the work with clients, and in many ways, I feel like the search that started when I became an accountant, for a business or industry where I could become a highly skilled operator, has now reached fruition. I’m much better suited to the one-on-one conversations rather than handling a large room of people (whether a classroom or conference room). My diverse previous experiences are useful because they help me to relate to clients from a range of backgrounds and careers, and I think they lend some perspective that is crucial to helping people not just with money, but in their aims and goals in life and how money can form a part of these.

Financial advice and financial planning are a bit different from many other jobs, where if a friend starts a small business, usually people will try to support them. Because so much of what I do is deeply personal and people have to divulge so much that would otherwise be confidential (income, debts, health, net worth, inheritance, career plans), you find that strangers or friends-of-friends are much more willing to be clients, and only years or decades in, is it likely that any direct personal acquaintances may become clients - even though it can be really frustrating to see people you care about not necessarily doing things, or not doing them in the way that will be best for their long-term financial success. I still have a lot to learn, but I’m really enjoying my work and for the first time I can see a 5-year and a 10-year plan for what I want to be doing in my career.

Life of the mind

I’ve been influenced quite a bit by a few books that have really stuck with me. Morgan Housel’s “The Psychology of Money” has helped me to frame a lot of what I try to think about with clients and also for myself, about what is valuable to each person and why. On a more personal note, the old joke is that a man marries a woman expecting that she’ll never change, and she does, and a woman marries a man expecting that he will change, and he doesn’t! And certainly, in my own life, I’ve realised that wholesale changes are not particularly easy, our personalities tend to revert to the mean – although we can make small, gradual improvements over time. I’ve also realised that asking deep questions can be a very uncomfortable experience. Something of Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’, combined with an older Financial Planning book I have read a bit of, both suggest that most of us never really probe our deeper motivations. And perhaps for good reason, because the answers aren’t always very comforting. For Type A personalities, driven people who have perfectionist tendencies, who are hugely competitive, often the basement from which that motivation springs has some unpleasant realisations in it. You start out saying you just like to see things done a certain way, that you want to see them done right. That it’s because you are a driven individual. You’re from a family of high expectations. At some point you blame your parents for whatever imagined rejection you’ve derived in your mind. Then you realise that it’s a voice in your head, not your parents or even an imagined legacy of your parents, that is doing the criticising or driving the motivation. At its root, I’ve realised that my criticality, my touch of OCD, even my strictness with my children, most of these are reflections of my self-view. That I haven’t learned to be a very good friend to myself (Jordan Peterson’s 12 rules get rather weird for my tastes, but he’s got this one right) or even to be kind enough to myself, and this inner voice often manifests in how I treat others. It’s a work in progress, but not a quick fix.

That being said, I’ve recently been reading Oliver Burkeman’s “4000 weeks” – which is what you get if you live to around 80 years old. In it he suggests a number of rather interesting ideas, about whether we are likely to make ourselves happier by trying constantly to fit more into our day, dividing ourselves into ever-smaller slices, and also whether we subconsciously sabotage ourselves by spending time on things that aren’t the best use of our limited mortal span, which involves trade-offs in reality rather than fantasies of future perfection without compromise. But the most important idea that I’ve come across is of gratitude. Yes, being stuck in traffic or waiting in a queue, or nagging three kids to put their shoes and coats on and get out the door (remarkable how long something simple can take) can be annoying, but for anyone who is no longer with us, to have one more day on earth, even if it is spent on some of these annoyances, is something they would choose. So, I try to remember to be grateful that I am here to live this life and to experience the highs and lows. I’m not going to get a re-run so I might as well enjoy the ride!

Holidays

As things have returned somewhat more to normal since the pandemic in 2020-21, we have enjoyed various holidays with family and friends. I had originally planned a big worldwide celebration of my 40^th birthday in April 2021, but that was a casualty of the pandemic – although Helen did an amazing job of collecting messages from friends all over the world and tying them to balloons that floated in our kitchen. It really felt as though I was able to see something of so many of my friends and loved ones from different places. The summer of 2021 was rather underwhelming in terms of weather (in the UK – what a surprise!), but luckily, we went on holiday to Wales for the hottest week of the year. Having bought wetsuits for the kids in preparation for usually chilly Atlantic water, they never wore them, as the water was probably about 21 degrees Celsius in the shallows and the air temperature was around 30 degrees. We tried to go to Devon again in October 2021 and it was a bracing experience with strong winds, rain, and frigid temperatures. I unfortunately was also ill – probably brought on by work-related stress – and Helen spent several hours in local arcades watching the boys feed 2p coins into machines. We did also visit a local amusement park and an indoor pool so it wasn’t all drab, but it’s been a learning curve figuring out what holidays to take where and when.

In March this year we returned to South Africa for the first time since December 2020 and it was lovely to see family and friends there again and to spend some time on the beach in St Francis Bay, and I even managed to get in some refereeing as well. We’re planning to go again next Easter. We also joined my parents and Andrew & Romain and their kids in France in August for a week of warm weather and multiple swims in the pool every day. It was a long drive each way, but the little cousins had fun together and the holiday was a culinary and cultural experience as well as a geographical one. Luckily the past summer was so warm and sunny that we were able to enjoy an awful lot of fun together from home – playing tennis on the lawn and dipping in the pool when we could. Working from home and being able to take a lunch break to hang out with the kids has certainly been one of the great blessings of the many changes we’ve seen over the last few years.

Friendships

We’ve really enjoyed living in Woking – we like the mixture of woodlands and small villages nearby, as well as a town centre with various shops and restaurants and bars that we can walk home from, as well as a fast train connection to Waterloo in just over 25 minutes. Our kids’ school is a short walk away and they are part of a great school community through which we’ve made a number of friends among other parents. I think the older you get, the more demands there are on your energy and time and the less easy it is to build and solidify new meaningful friendships. A lot of it is just finding the time to spend together with people to get to know them. And of course, things don’t always align perfectly: sometimes one spouse gets on with another but the four of you don’t gel as well, or you get on great as couples, but your kids don’t have much in common. Being a third-culture kid who has grown up in several places also means never quite fitting in like a local anywhere, but there are quite a lot of people with varied journeys through life here on the outskirts of London, so that feels like much less of an issue. Helen has done really well at getting to know lots of people (as she always does) and has built up a few really good friendships. I’ve got a few people who I think I could call on if I had a real problem or needed support, but I’ve also gotten to know a wider circle of dads of kids in different year groups, and I’m also very lucky to have many friends here in the UK and all over the world who are accessible via Facebook or WhatsApp. Friendships also change over time – sometimes people you were once very close to, fade away, while others whom you knew less or even were distant from for a time, become much closer again as life changes. We all have busy lives, but if you’re reading this – please do reach out if we haven’t spoken recently: I always like to hear from friends near and far.  

We will be celebrating Christmas here in England, with my parents and Andrew & Romain and their family. We are also looking forward to getting a bit of (hopefully warm) sunshine on a quick holiday in the first week of the New Year to get us all ready to take on everything to come in 2023. Wherever you are, I hope you have a festive season with loved ones and a wonderful year ahead!

What the Hell?!

Anyone out there who confidently predicted, back in January, all of what this year has been? Did you short all the stock markets or take a large sum to a betting shop with your foresight? Hmmm…
I didn’t think so.

For all of us there are days where we are in a new normal now. But there are also still days when you wonder when individuals and societies collectively, will be able to wake up or move on properly from this nightmare. Like any change, there have also been positives. People have had a chance to spend more time with their families (some divorce lawyers have been kept busy since, I hear; but plenty of dads and mums have also really enjoyed a bit more bonding with their kids). But they’ve also had time to reflect on what they do, how they do it, and why. For better or worse.

We were incredibly fortunate that we moved into our new home in Woking literally days before the pandemic really took over. I paid the movers a little extra to do a second trip on the same day during our move, just to make sure we got everything across before the lockdown that I figured was coming. It was a little bit frenetic for a while: with various furniture being delivered and cupboards installed, I stayed a few nights at our new house on a mattress on the floor before the furniture was moved, while Helen remained in Harrow with the 3 kids at my parents’ house. The guy fitting new cupboards in our house fell ill part way through the job (turned out not to be the dreaded ‘rona, just good ol’ flu). He’s been back since to finish the frames and shelves, but it’s now October and we still don’t have doors on the cupboards because the factory shut-down for several weeks, and now he’s no longer answering my calls, or Whatsapps, or emails. I sympathise – many people may be tempted to avoid me. But I do kinda want my cupboards finished. Ha-ha! Funny but not funny. A bit like so many other things lately.

It is amazing how contingent so many things have become in this strange time. In the space of about 10 days we went from normal concerns about completing our house purchase and planning the move, to the disappointment of our boys not being able to experience their new school for a few days before the end of term because the school closed a week early, to knowing that our planned Easter holiday to South Africa was off because South Africa’s President closed the borders. Then gradually we realised school was likely off for a while, and luckily our au pair Laura adapted wonderfully to becoming a home-school teacher. Helen did a brilliant job managing a timetable for the boys that got them into a routine of doing a bit of academic learning with Laura in the morning such as reading or writing and numbers, then watching some educational youtube videos on whatever the week’s theme was (sea creatures, woodlands, etc), and then more active stuff later in the day – with me featuring as their PE / Games teacher “Coach or Mr Duncan” in the later afternoons. One bit of good fortune for us here in the UK was that at least the weather was good through most of the lockdown. The boys took to it all rather well, although there was a difficult phase where Calvin was reluctant to let anyone hug or kiss him because of the virus. Fortunately, we persuaded him that members of family can’t make each other sick. Poor Laura could do nothing more than retire to her room on weekends, unable to head into London or see friends in person, but she held up well. For a period of about a month or maybe even six weeks, the only time anyone left our house was me going to the shops once a week to get groceries. It was a huge relief when the boys’ school re-opened in mid-June for the last six weeks of the school year – it gave everyone a little bit of much-needed variety and time to themselves again. And the boys loved meeting other little boys and girls and being in a different environment.

We’ve really enjoyed living in Surrey – around us are many leafy, wooded areas, and as restrictions eased, we frequently took the boys out for walks or bike rides in the forests nearby. We haven’t done an awful lot of exploring the area, but once the kids were back in school, we started to make contact with parents of children in our sons’ classes. When gatherings outdoors were permitted again, we started to meet up with other parents and kids and to have them over to us for tea and coffee or even a meal out on the veranda. We’ve been pleased to find that a great many people at the school who decided to move to this area from living closer in to London, usually when they had kids. So they are people who understand what it is to be a newcomer and have generally been very welcoming. Helen has done an amazing job of socialising and getting to know lots of other mums (she has been the designated parent for dropping off and picking up the kids to and from school), and she has really enjoyed being able to play tennis once or twice a week with several of these mums. She also somehow got roped into being a parent representative for Mackenzie’s class, but sadly in these strange times that hasn’t actually created what would normally have been lots of opportunities to get to know other parents via fundraising and other parent social events. I have to admit that while I initiated emails to lots of parents at the school, I’ve been a bit slower about getting to know the dads and apart from a golf game with one of them, I haven’t really advanced my own social circle here all that much. I joined the local basketball club a few weeks ago (and decided to stick with the third team after my first practice session left me the next day or two feeling like I’d been beaten up, especially when I realised, to the surprise of the other players, that I was the oldest guy there – but not by much, thankfully). Unfortunately, after only a few weeks the basketball practices have been shut down again for the foreseeable future as new restrictions on indoor exercise have been put into place. I’ve played more golf this summer (probably 5-6 rounds) than I have in years, and have enjoyed the chance to be outside and to spend quality time with one or both of my parents, who are members at Sunningdale which is a fabulous course. Professional rugby has come back onto the TV screen, but there has been only the faintest of light at the end of a very long tunnel regarding when amateur games will commence again. The referees’ society organised some touch rugby sessions during the summer once exercise among groups of people was permitted again, but lately that has gone rather quiet, and the original projections of a start of ‘proper rugby’ in November have been pushed back to December or probably January. I had long believed it would be January but now I’m no longer as optimistic even about that. But the boys have joined a local rugby club for 'socially distanced' mini's rugby which they seem to be enjoying, particularly as it includes several friends from their school. I've even been roped into helping out with coaching - 5 and 6 year olds are like cats when it comes to following instructions!

To some of you these things about sports may seem a frivolity. But they apply more widely to so many aspects of social and cultural life. Theatres, arts, music, etc. There was great joy here for many people when pubs re-opened, but that’s not my idea of how I want to seize the day. I was very fortunate, two weeks ago Helen gave me the green light for a little holiday of my own. I sadly realised that the Highlands of Scotland, where I long to explore once more, was simply too far for a short trip, and settled on the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. I roped in an American friend, Yaz, who we met in Harrow because his sons were at Calvin and Mackenzie’s previous schools. We had an enjoyable few days of not overly strenuous walking, albeit the first day included howling gales, rain, hail stones, and even a little bit of sunshine. We even sandwiched our trip around an early-morning presentation by Yaz to a conference in Helsinki that he was once scheduled to fly over to. I learned some things about the future of employment (and how Human Resource Management Software can help), and he graciously put up with me dragging him to Wales to deliver his speech from an Airbnb adjacent to a field full of sheep. We also went ‘Gorge Walking’ which involved putting on wetsuits, splash-jackets and helmets, and climbing through a very cold river including plunging under waterfalls and trying to swim down against the buoyancy of a life jacket to pick up rocks off the bottom in pools of water that were about 10 degrees Celsius. It was good fun and despite not liking cold water, Yaz took it all with admirable spirit. It was wonderful to get away to somewhere different, and to walk outdoors with some spectacular views and very few other people around. And nice to spend some time with someone who talked about different things and lent a new perspective, and to return home rejuvenated.

Somewhere between social media and our mass media, these times have felt like a bit of a rollercoaster. It can seem difficult to try to shut out the daily waves of negative news, repeated revelations of governmental mismanagement and seeming incompetence or venality of those in positions of power. Don’t even get me started on how angry I was that the closest adviser to the UK Prime Minister, at a time of national lockdown when everyone was confined to their homes, took it upon himself to drive several hundred miles with his children while apparently suffering suspected COVID, and then later took a trip to a nearby castle to ‘test his eyesight’. The latest antics from the White House seem to re-affirm that the rules are for little people to follow, and we wonder why many young people think the whole thing is a farce. The pandemic itself has had this seeping psychological effect on many people – I know I had some very strange dreams and found myself doing a tiny mental double take when I saw people in tv shows embracing each other when greeting, before I remembered that is normal, or at least it was. I feel very sorry for anyone starting university now. Or kids in their tween or early teen years – who should normally be starting to think about holding hands, or slow dancing, or maybe even a first kiss. Never mind older teens or twenty-somethings. I understand that masks can help from a medical perspective (although they don’t cover your eyes which are a mucous membrane for air-borne viruses), but I hate the feeling of wearing one, and as a hearing-impaired person, I hate even more how much harder it can be to understand people when I can’t see their lips. In many ways I’ve found the masks even worse than the lockdown itself – they are more omnipresent as a reminder that we are now supposed to fear others and remove ourselves from one another, instead of trying to bring the world closer together. On the other hand, I think it will be a good thing if we move forward to saying that when someone has a temperature or a cough, they should not come to work or places of learning and infect everyone else. I am incredibly fortunate that I’ve been with my family, that I have access to technologies that have allowed me to keep in contact with friends in far-flung corners of the globe. One or two of my friends seem to have undergone quite radical transformations of their once-rational beliefs, which I can only attribute to the mental stress this whole chain of events has put them under.

Things have been far worse for many whose lives were already precarious or whose access to basic human rights was not equal. The effects of children being kept at home seem to have been particularly negative for working women, and many other inequalities have become more pronounced in various corners of the world. For older people, being cut off from their families has been an exceptional hardship, and yet for those who still need to be economically active and can’t necessarily do so from the comfort of a desk, it has also been a time of deprivation. I fear particularly for countries like South Africa, where the national economic situation was already severely strained even before the economic shocks that the pandemic has unleashed. I hold very little optimism about a vaccine, they won’t find a silver bullet (considering how new flu vaccines have to be released almost every year anyway as viruses mutate), and rolling out a mass vaccination will not be straight-forward – especially not when we see how poorly many governments have handled other more basic things such as testing. It seems almost inevitable that eventually we will have to simply accept a higher level of ‘normal’ risk in exchange for a more personally interactive life. That is likely to play out differently in various countries, and among different groups of people. It is quite possible that some people will segregate themselves from the world indefinitely in response to the dangers, but from my perspective, we risk losing what makes life worth living if we cut ourselves off too much or for too long. And I’m the one in our house who has been a stickler so far, telling Helen we should stick to the rules – she is very reluctant now to stop organising play-dates with other mums just because the government has decided that only six people can meet socially indoors or outdoors, of which our family alone makes 5 people. Meanwhile it is fine for more than thirty people to meet if they’re shooting pheasants, and any number is permitted in the name of education and most things where you pay are still allowed in some way, just not social interactions with friends or family apparently. 

These strange days have almost given us too much time to think, and not enough action with which to keep idle hands busy. For my part I thankfully remained fairly busy in the early part of the lockdown. I finished freelance editing another Education book (unfortunately this one was far less engaging) just as the lockdown was getting going. Then I completed the teaching of my university course – thankfully I only had to do one lecture remotely before we switched to working with students individually via feedback on their draft assignments. It wasn’t a great experience as it’s much harder to read your audience and gauge understanding and engagement among students. This culminated in my marking all of my students’ essay submissions for no pay, having been paid for the lectures only. The shenanigans that went on with some students using the pandemic as cover to request assignment extensions to cover the lack of work they had done up to the submission deadline, was particularly infuriating for me. It was a good learning experience, but I can’t say I have been entirely sad that the university has pulled back on using contract staff like me and instead has dumped more workload on its permanent staff. I wouldn’t want to be teaching remotely nor standing in a lecture theatre in a mask anyway.

I’ve also used the time since March to complete two fictional novels. The first novel I wrote mostly in April and May and I subsequently had it professionally edited by a published author and lecturer in creative writing, who gave me lots of valuable feedback. I’m onto version 7 of this novel, which is about a 9^th century Viking who appears in the house of a modern-day History teacher in England, and how they both view what it means to be a man and to make your way in the world today – many things about our lives are far easier today than they were historically but there are also many more complexities. So far no luck with finding an agent who might help me to get it published, but I’ll have to grow a thick skin and possibly accept that I’m neither highbrow enough for literary sorts, nor ‘bestseller’ enough for commercially driven publishers. The book is probably too philosophical rather than plot-driven, and in some ways writing it was a form of therapy, as it allowed me to probe many of my own thoughts about modern life and meaning. I’ll soon have to turn my attention to a re-draft / first edit of the rough draft of my second novel, which I wrote from early June through early August. It is about five men who regularly meet to discuss and debate all sorts of contemporary issues, but who also each struggle with their own personal challenges that mirror many of the most pressing problems of our time – from caring for ageing parents, to working jobs that pay but in which we don’t find fulfilment, to the growing divides in how we perceive the world and the events that are unfolding around us – often depending on what media we agree with or consume, to the challenges of marriage and parenthood.

I’ve really enjoyed the process of writing, and the creativity and autonomy over my own work that it gives me, and have no problem with the self-motivation part (although it seems to come in waves – I have had very productive months of writing and much less productive months of editing and trying to contact agents). I am the complete opposite of Helen in that I really don’t mind working on something alone, as long as I have a clear grasp of what it is that I’m doing and who or what I’m doing it for. Making small talk while working is something I have historically tended to view as an annoyance. I’ve realised that my hearing impairment was more of a challenge for being a teacher or lecturer than I’ve sometimes acknowledged (as it can be for refereeing, but thankfully, not hearing people’s verbal feedback on a rugby field can actually be rather helpful). You who know me, will know that while I can grasp situations well and reach insights or a strategic overview with reasonable ease, I also love to get into the details (sometimes to the point of pedantry) and I don’t always rub people up the right way, which unfortunately is key to corporate success or being in any role that involves managing other people. So I’m at a bit of a crossroads as to whether I commit to pursuing writing as a vocation (not renowned for putting bread on the table, and requiring a lot of dogged persistence and possibly even some luck to have your work see the light of day) which I think I’d have to give at least another two to three years to see come to fruition (no-one is good at any job for the first year or two, right?) or if I should cut my losses now and get back out into something else, and leave writing for my dotage.

Fortunately the properties that I manage in a company with my brother have continued to generate revenues, but this has not been an easy period for residential lettings and we have had to accept rental reductions and in some cases to scramble to find new tenants, as students and other people who work in London have returned to their home countries, or have scaled back on their own financial commitments. The prospects for me of working for a local company around Woking have also dimmed, with so many people now on furlough or redundancy, and it is also no longer as appealing, particularly given that it now seems entirely possible that I could be interviewed, hired and put to work without ever meeting any of my colleagues in person and instead would be carrying out all interactions via a computer at home. I had even considered going back to accountancy, but I would hate to do it just for the spreadsheets, without any of the meeting clients or seeing different workplaces. It seems possible that I could be working for almost any company, anywhere, and indeed some of my friends have spent significant chunks of time abroad while continuing to do their work for a London-based company the same way they would if they were at home.  

It will be interesting to see what the lasting effects of this period turn out to be. My father would tell me that people who grew up in the Depression learned never to waste anything (perhaps they also followed orders and hierarchy rather well, for fear of losing their jobs). We know that World War 2 had huge impacts on the world and on the generations that emerged from it – and that different countries were winners and losers in the outcomes of that defining conflict. Similarly, it would seem that this global pandemic will see shifts power, and new opportunities as well as failures. Perhaps countries with youthful populations stand to benefit from their relatively lower fatality rates? I’ve heard a lot recently about racism, and about the environment. But I’m not yet convinced that those who espouse these views, especially the young, are putting those words into actions. They are a generation who are growing up surrounded by technology – and perhaps they have been fooled into thinking that technology and talk will constitute real change? Then again, the generational changing of the guard seems to be very slow – Prince Charles may never get to sit on the throne, and both of the American Presidential Candidates (and an awful lot of congressmen and senators too) seem rather too old to me. What of the brilliant and talented members of later generations? From a world of convergence and globalisation we seem to be returning to growing divisions and differences, but I hope that I am wrong about that.

Since high school I have worried about the environment, though I have seen little to suggest that individuals can have very much impact on humanity’s pernicious influences. At first there was much happy talk of how the lockdown had helped to curb emissions or energy consumption, that has since faded. The truth is that the scale of global human population and our rising energy-intensity as modern societies, is far ahead of anything sustainable, and has been for quite some time. The global population was three billion people in 1960, it is now closer to eight. Fertility levels have declined dramatically, and it would seem that peak global population may well level off at 9-10 billion. Even with cleaner energy sources, I can’t see how global middle class growth numbering in the hundreds of millions will be anything but resource-intensive. In the short term, I think misanthropic environmental terrorism is a very real possibility – ironically, had this pandemic been a bit more effective, I would have seen it as the environmentalist’s ultimate weapon. But in writing my first novel, and considering how humanity has moved from scarcity and uncertainty to being masters of our physical domain, while continuing to show a lack of wisdom and foresight, I have reached something of a level of inner peace. The earth is around 4 billion years old, and human beings in their modern form have only been around for about 2 million of those years. Effectively, if you think of a distance that is 4 kilometres (which would take about 40 minutes to walk) then every meter of that would represent a million years, and modern mankind’s time on the planet would be only the last two meters. The modern age since the Renaissance would measure only half a millimetre. If for any reason our species should die out suddenly, it would take little more than a century or two – fractions of a millimetre, for almost everything we’ve built to crumble and fall. The exception to that, which worried me for a long time, is nuclear materials, whose radioactivity half-lives measure in hundreds of thousands of years (read Michael Lewis’ account in The Fifth Risk of the work of America’s Department of Energy in Washington State to understand what a monumental undertaking it is to attempt to responsibly dispose of nuclear waste, let alone the Soviets’ reckless carelessness). But I realised recently that even if it were to take 2 million years for our most pernicious wastes to be eradicated – that’s only two meters to walk. Incidentally, the supercontinent pangea only broke apart some two hundred to one hundred and seventy five million years ago. That means we’re a lot smaller and less important to the grand scheme of things than we think ourselves to be. And biologically, a lot more replaceable. I hate that there seem to be fewer bird species around us, and that we are our own worst enemies in terms of natural preservation, particularly if, like me, you consider that any conception of a God has to acknowledge the staggering beauty of the world around us, particularly when it is untouched by man. But I also realise that nothing lasts forever – including us. That might sound gloomy to you, but to me it is quite a liberating realisation. It means my responsibility is to my own small speck of life, and to do what I can for my kids, my wider family, and my friends and loved ones. Everything else has too many variables to it. We are grains of sand and time is an ocean. The earth will eventually swallow us just as it has every other species – we are no less mortal.

Anyway, my small speck has therefore contentedly spent some of the summer fixing up a few things around the house. Nothing major, we were very pleased to move into a fairly newly renovated home. But we did get in a landscaper to remove some extensive clumps of prickly holly and other things that took up large parts of the garden – resulting in a much bigger lawn to play on. And with my father’s significant help, I did a few little projects, including assembling and mounting an in-ground basketball hoop at one end of the driveway (before they all sold out during the lockdown) and filling some steps off the patio with concrete. I also filled in a patch of lawn that wasn’t growing well with gravel and then sharp sand which I compacted, and then overlaid with astroturf as a base. We then bought ourselves an above-ground swimming pool in lieu of a holiday away, and I assembled and filled it in early August just in time for a week of remarkably warm weather. Our au pair Laura left us at the beginning of the month to return to Italy, and I sent Helen off to visit a cousin of hers along with Rae for the weekend. So the boys and I spent most of the weekend naked and either in the pool or sunbathing on the lawn. It was positively tropical and lots of fun. We also attempted to season the fireplace in the living room / kids playroom (I figured the loose twigs and branches in the garden would at least be dry and burn nicely) and nearly managed to smoke out the entire house!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The children are all growing up quickly. Calvin is learning to read and write and loves numbers and maths, almost as much as he loves his favourite tv shows in the morning (some of which are remarkably educational). He is quite musical and a very good dancer. It can be easy to forget how young Mackenzie still is (he only turned 4 in July) now that he’s already in school full-time (in South Africa he would have started the year he’s in now, in 18months time), and unfortunately he is often quite tired at the end of the school day. But he remains a rumble-tumble physical boy who loves his food and cuddles. Rae is now 11 months old, and is starting to sleep a bit better in her own bed and for some longer stretches of the night, although it’s still pretty unpredictable (but on the bright side Helen and I have recently managed to watch a movie uninterrupted in the evening once or twice for the first time since the start of the year). Rae already babbles with a variety of sounds that suggest she is really trying to talk – she has distinctive noises / sounds for different family members, and she constantly pulls herself up into a standing position, and can walk along if pushing something to support her upper body (she loves pushing chairs and stools around the kitchen) and can stand unaided for several seconds, but hasn’t quite got to putting one foot in front of the other without holding onto anything yet. We debated whether we needed another au pair when we learned that Laura would be leaving, but quickly realised over the summer that having a third pair of hands with three young kids is a blessing. We’ve welcomed Keisha, originally Malaysian Chinese but she’s lived in England since her early teens and speaks great English, as well as expecting decent manners from the boys. She has been a huge help already, making it possible for Helen to have some time for herself and to spend time with just the boys during the week.

I had some minor surgery yesterday (nothing serious) and the forced repose on the couch has provided me with this opportunity for reflection and a chance to write this (too much chance, I’m sure many of you would say). I’m still a flawed human being like we all are: I have to keep working on being patient when my kids try to drive me insane or when things go wrong or don’t run on time, as they invariably do every so often. But the past few months have actually been a very happy time for me – I’ve enjoyed writing, I’ve loved being able to work out pretty much every day now that I have my own fully-equipped gym at home, and it has been a great comfort to have settled in a home that we plan to live in at least until our kids move out (famous last words). We are incredibly fortunate and privileged, and on tough days it is always good to remind ourselves that we have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and the love of family and friends. We are beginning to get to know people here, but of course I still think often of my friends spread around the country and the world. The biggest disappointment in all of this has been that I had planned to have a 40^th birthday celebration next year on each side of the equator, one in South Africa and one here in Surrey. The international one I have already cancelled, and we don’t even know when next we’ll get to South Africa to see Helen’s family or our friends there in person. For the more local celebration I will just have to wait and see what happens.

I hope that the world is being kind to you and if we haven’t spoken lately, please do drop me a line. I usually reply pretty promptly on WhatsApp.