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.