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!