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.

Party of Five

It has not been particularly long since my last blog update, but a fair amount has changed. Most significant of course, was the birth of our daughter Rae, on 11 November (a hundred and one years to the day after the end of the First World War). I think it would be fair to say that having a third was more Helen’s idea than mine, but I can't say I wasn’t involved ;-) Now that Rae is with us, she is the nicest Christmas present I have ever received from Helen. Rae is now nearly three months old, but that period of time is sometimes described as a ‘fourth trimester’ when the baby is too big to remain inside the mother, but is still pretty unresponsive to the outside world. She is more alert now, and we are starting to see a few smiles and hear her make some noises, but for the most part she sleeps or eats, and has those things interrupted only by digestive moments, sometimes this sadly includes a fair bit of howling when she has trapped wind (in this regard she unfortunately takes after her father and has already let off a number of belting ‘parps’ that would do most adults proud). Helen has coped remarkably well, and this time she has taken to sharing a bed with Rae at night so that she can feed easily – at home this has seen us largely in separate bedrooms, while on holiday it meant that most of the time I slept on a mattress on the floor (quite happily, I might add, rather than being pushed out of bed or woken up multiple times per night).

 The boys have been delighted with their little sister and are both very affectionate to her. In fact one of the biggest problems has been persuading them to leave her alone and not to poke or prod her, particularly when she’s feeding. In preparation for Rae’s arrival, we were joined in October by our Italian au pair, Laura, who has been fantastic support to us all. The boys love playing with her, and she has made our lives so much easier by helping with getting them ready in the mornings and picking up one of them from school, and then playing with them in the afternoons. Laura is incredibly considerate and has been a great support to Helen as well, particularly with Rae when sometimes Helen just needs a few minutes to have a shower or make herself some food. In the first few weeks my parents, and my mum in particular (despite her on-going troubles with her botched foot surgery), were also a huge help, as Helen could not drive after surgery and Pam was taxi driver and full-time granny for Calvin and Mackenzie at times, especially when I was away some days.

 

Our other  big news is that despite the warnings that pregnant women should never make big decisions, in the last few weeks before Rae was born, we found our dream home and will be moving in mid-March (barring any unforeseen calamity – in England a deal is apparently never a deal until it is totally complete) to Woking in Surrey. There is a very nice, if perhaps slightly academic, school within very close walking distance of our new house, and another school just a 5-minute drive away if any of our children don’t take to the first choice. Woking is on an unusually fast train line into London (being one of the few stopping points of the Southampton to London route) and it takes under 30 minutes to Waterloo. Our house is at the edge of a protected area of housing that features leafy streets and 1930s homes. We get the benefit of being right next to this, but our house is not covered by the heritage restrictions, which means that the sellers were able to completely modernise the house with large glass windows, lots of natural light, and modern heating and fixtures and fittings (no legendary English plumbing we hope!) On the other side of the road from our house is a golf course and a larger area of protected green space. The only downside is that it is potentially quite a busy road at times, but we are on a shared cul-de-sac for four houses only, so we are fairly secluded from that bustle. 

We are obviously a little bit daunted at the prospect of starting afresh in a place where we know no-one (any friends who know people around Woking or near Guildford please do let me know!) But at the same time we’re excited that we’ve found a place to call home, and will be putting down roots – with our intention being to stay put indefinitely. Woking itself seems quite a mixed sort of place, with a wide range of socio-economic groups and a diverse assortment of different people – hopefully that means we won’t be the only newcomers, but we’ll also be able to find a range of like-minded people around us. We’re particularly hoping to make friends with other parents at the school where the boys will be going. No doubt it is going to be a bit of an adjustment for them, especially Calvin, who has really taken to his current school, but we believe it’s the right move for us in the long run. We should still be able to see the few close friends we’ve made in Harrow with reasonable frequency, and will of course still see my parents reasonably often. But, for me especially, it is good to know that we’re setting out on our own adventure and moving into a home that is ours, rather than remaining as tenants in the house where I grew up as a teenager and twenty-something (although we've very much enjoyed it and been lucky to have the opportunity).

Our holiday to South Africa in December was filled with family and sunshine. We spent a week in Plettenberg Bay with Helen’s siblings and their spouses and her parents, as well as all of the boys’ cousins. We then all moved along the coast to St Francis Bay where, as part of Helen’s 40^th Birthday, we rented a house round the corner from my parents’ house there, so that we could have both sides of the family all together for Christmas. After about another week in St Francis after Helen’s family had left, we then spent several nights in Johannesburg, staying with Helen’s folks in her sister’s house, and seeing many of our old friends there. Our boys thoroughly enjoyed seeing cousins, building sandcastles on the beach and learning to swim and boogie board in the waves, and it was a very enjoyable and delightfully warm break from the rain and cloud that we returned to. But we felt happy to be coming home to London and we’re looking forward to the adventures coming our way this year. Woking is not far from Heathrow or central London, and we will have a guest room, so if you are thinking of coming over to this part of the world please do let us know as we’d love to catch up.

  

On the work front I’m afraid I haven’t been struck by any bolts of inspired lightning yet. I’ve been working two days a week as a visiting lecturer in the Education Faculty at a small university just north of London. It has been interesting to see the way things are done: not only the precariousness and poor pay of a lot of academic jobs (I turned down two other part-time lecturing jobs because of the poor pay combined with potentially significant transport hassles – a 2 hour round trip for an hourly paid job makes a fast food chain job rewarding by comparison), but also the academic- and literacy- level of the students, the course content, and the way most of the permanent staff seem to be scrambling all of the time as they are spread too thin. It has been reasonably enjoyable and relatively stress-free, but it will be too far for me to commute from Woking after this term ends, and in a way I think I’m ok with that at this point. More recently I have also been contacting various other organisations and even managed to secure some contract work from an Educational Book Publisher (sadly their offices are a huge distance away), editing an education non-fiction book. The writing itself was a lot of work to edit, but it was written by a psychologist who is something of an expert on bullying in schools (and covered a whole range of information about child development) so it was pretty interesting and stimulating to read while I was doing the editing. 

I’m considering finding a job in or near Woking, so hopefully that would be another way to start to get to know more people in the area. Rather than focusing entirely on the operational aspects of work, as I may have tended to do in the past, this time I will also try to use a job as a way to meet people, hopefully some based more locally rather than coming from a huge radius, as tended to be the case in my previous jobs in central London - which means that you only ever see people at work. I still haven’t quite figured out what kind of people I’d be most likely to get on with, hardly surprising given that I’ve never tended to do well fitting into just one social group. So I’m not yet sure whether I should go for something more along commercial or educational lines, or even something completely new and different. I guess I’ll have to see what opportunities I can find and go from there. I'm trying to be philosophical about it all. As many of you will guess, that can be a struggle at times, given my nature, but I'm out to prove that I'm not an old dog yet.

One Step Forward and Two Steps Sideways

This has been an interesting year in terms of work, personal development and family life. We have also managed to have some very enjoyable holidays both at home and away.

In terms of work this has been a year of some significant flux and unpredictability. Those of you who read my last post will recall that I had secured a part-time teaching job at a local state secondary school near our house in Harrow. I started a few days into January and it was an eye-opening experience from the outset. In December, before I officially started at the school, I had gone in to observe some lessons and left wondering a little bit at some of the interactions between students and teachers. Very quickly, once I started at the school, I realised that the whole culture of the school and the expectations of teachers and students was quite different to my own. By my second week there, Helen and the boys had gone to South Africa for a few weeks of sunshine, and I was left feeling quite isolated in a very alien school and work environment. I could write at length about how stressful it was as a place to work, or the things I learned about organisational cultures and leadership. There were several situations where students seemed totally lacking in respect for adults and simply didn’t care about the impacts of their actions on others in their class. I also really struggled with the fact that government secondary school starts at age 11, with students whose intellectual and social maturity levels were nowhere near what I work best with. But the short version is that within weeks I realised that the school and I were not a good fit for each other, and that it seemed almost inevitable that either I would do or say something that did not reflect the school’s values (the behaviour of some children was so deliberately disruptive and hampered the learning of other good students so much that some days I really struggled not to physically throw someone out of a classroom), or I would find myself impossibly compromised in my own personal ethics and backed into a corner (my instinct was to protect good students from trouble-makers, not to walk on eggshells around those who caused problems, as the school seemed determined to do). In less than two months we amicably agreed to part ways. This whole episode gave my confidence a bit of a knock and made me question my capabilities and even my personality.

 

At the same time, I kept several other irons in the fire (deliberately taking only a part-time teaching role in order to develop other possibilities) and I had begun to work with several different education organisations, exploring the possibility of taking on more of an education consultancy role. This involved me attending and observing a series of training sessions for teachers run by a small education organisation focused on developing critical thinking and critical thinking strategies and pedagogies for schools and students. I also ended up doing some bespoke consultancy work for the organisation, advising them on their international expansion strategy. However it became clear after a while that they lacked the organisational capacity and funding to be able to scale up much, let alone afford to take me on in any more long-term capacity. I also worked on my connections with a London-based educational think-tank for much of the year, hoping to get a foot into their door. Over time however, it emerged that their approach and philsophy was less specialised and conscientious than it first seemed, indeed they seemed to be chasing funding where it could be found, even when this risked potentially obvious conflicts of interest; such as producing a report on the benefits of tests for student learning and teacher feedback, sponsored by one of the largest global providers of external examinations and testing! Proving once again my maxim that what gets lots of money in education and what is good for teachers and students are unfortunately often very poorly aligned.

 

As these various prospects unfortunately seemed to dim, I worked on a few different pieces of writing or research. One idea I had was for a non-fiction book on education, which was a great concept (if I do say so myself) but required a network of influential contacts in education across the globe to be available for interviews, and unfortunately my research planning showed me that this would not be feasible. Another project was a blog on education ideas – including policies, objectives, and philosophies of education. You can look at it here: www.eduthink.co.uk or on the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Eduthink2/ . While I very much enjoyed writing about these ideas, my audience reach was pitifully small and I realised that in online publishing one has to devote a tremendous amount of time to marketing and media exposure, probably even more than to the actual thinking and content – or it helps to be famous when you start, then people want to hear what you have to say. 

The other project I embarked on from sometime in March, was to begin writing a play that included many of my thoughts on how to challenge or completely change how countries are currently set up – including economics, politics, education, crime and punishment, the legal system, banking and finance, etc. It’s called “A New Country” and it looks at some changes that could be made if a group of people set out to form a brand new country now, in today’s world, and some of the likely challenges those leaders would face. I realised after completing it that it didn’t work particularly well as a play, and I have now converted it into a screenplay. Unfortunately a screenplay for a typical movie should be about 100-120 pages long (a minute per page – although mine might be slightly faster as the dialogue is rapid-fire) but I had more than 180 pages, even with some substantial paring down and cutting (but it is only forty thousand words – screenplay formatting is weird!) So maybe it would be a mini-series. I know that film and television are largely dominated by who you know (and kiss up to) so I am not seriously pursuing getting it made into anything at this stage. It still needs some edits (and probably will forever need more edits) but having largely finished it by June, I am hoping in the next week or two to make a few significant edits and then to have it in a form that can be shared with others. If you’re interested (and have the stamina for it) then let me know.

  

In March I attended a jobs fair at my old school, the American school in Hillingdon. It was fun to be back in a familiar environment, with small classes of mostly well-behaved teenagers. And it turned out that they needed an Economics teacher quite urgently. So I had some quick interviews within a few days, and was offered a position as an International Baccalaureate Economics teacher to start in early August. On the one hand I was gratified to be considered by such a good school, on the other I had a nagging sense that something wasn’t right, particularly because I didn’t feel overly enthused when I learned that I had been offered the job. To try to assuage that doubt I went in to the school and shadowed some lessons, including an IB Economics lesson in which I understood very little of what was being taught – hardly surprising given that it was a particularly mathematical topic, and I last studied Economics in 2001 and dropped the subject at university because I wasn’t very good at the maths! I realised that I am not an economics teacher and more importantly, I realised that my Masters and everything since then has been working toward moving on from teaching in high school classrooms. I regret first accepting the job and then deciding a few weeks later not to take it, but I am glad that it helped me to draw a line in the sand and to say that it is time for me to move on from teaching, at least at high school level, and into something new. So, I guess that means I will be looking in some ways at my third career trajectory – having already been in accountancy and business consulting as I worked my way into the development world, only to realise that it wasn’t what I had envisioned; and now having re-trained as a school teacher and enjoyed it, but realised that it isn’t a long-term career path for me.

The question of what to do next career-wise has also intersected with some important processes of personal development and self-reflection. I finally agreed (Helen and my mother had both gently suggested it for years) earlier this year to try some therapy sessions to work through a number of different personal issues. Until now I have been very reluctant to do so, not because of any potential stigma but just because I wasn’t that comfortable with (and still find it a bit odd) talking about my life, my feelings, my attitude and outlook, with someone who is otherwise a complete stranger. But I also realised that I wasn’t particularly happy with the kind of father and husband that I find myself being, and the lack of patience and even tremendous anger that I felt bubbling up at times. I don’t think I’ll ever be some mellow and totally chill dude, and I do think anger can be healthy, but at the same time therapy has been a valuable process that has helped me. I think I’d already started some of the work before I started the sessions, having read a bit of “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and found the advice very helpful, even if I don’t always manage to personify it. Some of the realisations were, for many people, probably rather obvious, but for me they have been important to consider. For example, taking the time and head-space to acknowledge how I feel rather than only trying to apply logic or rational expectations or telling myself what I “should” feel or do. A big part of this was and continues to be dealing with and working towards resolution of a tremendous sense of sadness and loss in having decided to leave South Africa permanently. Intellectually the decision has been, for me and my family at least, the right one. But it comes with an emotional toll of acknowledging that wherever I live from here on, I will always be a bit of an outsider, and that my children will grow up different from me and my wife; and that we have chosen to leave behind many of the wonderful people and things we love about South Africa (as well as the chaotic, dangerous, and just plain annoying aspects too!)

Another avenue that I have begun to work through is the realisation that I grew up in a family culture of quite strong and dominant personalities, and contrary to the world view that I adopted, perhaps in part as a result of this, there isn’t necessarily a right and a wrong answer to quite a lot of what happens in the world, or how things can or should be done (by me or anyone else). Some of this links very much to sweating the small stuff – I still have a lot of work to do in terms of loosening my own grip on attempting to or wanting to be in control of what happens or how it happens around me. As Helen would say (sometimes through gritted teeth no doubt), I still have much to improve on in terms of learning to pick my battles, and recognising that there may not necessarily be a “right way” to do things either for myself or my family (although don’t let anyone start trying to tell me there isn’t a definite right way to make and eat a slice of peanut butter and honey on toast – that’s just blasphemy! 😊 Within this is a recognition also that sometimes I need to be a bit kinder to myself and less unforgiving of my own failings and flaws – because my criticism of imperfections in the world around me, and in others, are often an overflow of the criticism and negative feelings that I may have about myself. I’m never going to be a perfect parent, husband or friend, and will probably still end up shouting at my boys sometimes when they drive me completely crazy, or be unnecessarily pedantic about certain things in my home, but I can keep trying to be better and more thoughtful, and to be present and a source of warmth in the lives of those I love.

This links to a broader realisation that I am free to make my own choices, and that I need to figure out what I really want, and what is important to me, rather than doing what some voice in my head, or set of expectations I have foisted upon myself, tells me I “ought” to do. Yes, 38 years might be a rather long time for this thought to arrive, but better late than never. Perhaps in dealing with parts of the straitjacket I have sometimes made for myself, I will also hopefully resolve some of what might be euphemistically be called my authority issues and tendency to chafe against limits set or imposed by external forces. In reality, we are all constrained in different ways, no matter what our blessings in life. Nothing worthwhile can be achieved without at least some compromises and less-than-perfect interactions and even relationships between people. While studying and being in an academic setting as I have been in several different periods of my life, has in many ways suited me: allowing me to drive my own high standards, relying only in limited ways on the inputs of others, and allowing me to set the pace and timing to suit my own needs; the remoteness of theory from the real world, and the loneliness and isolation of much of the work have always been significant drawbacks, given that I do have at least some part of my personality that enjoys social interaction and peppering other people with questions and answers (sometimes at the same time!) At times I recall a quote (which I heard from a character played by Samuel L Jackson in a random movie called 187, but apparently it’s actually from Thomas Wolfe) that “loneliness is the central and inevitable fact of human existence” – and I think back to high school, a time when I was incredibly driven, and hard-working, and often quite single-minded, even arrogant in my disdain for those who didn’t seem wiling to put in the effort. And yet the high marks that I got in the end did not feel, even at the moment when I got them, like the achievement that I had aimed for. I have been fortunate that those marks allowed me to be able to study in some amazing places and to have met good people through those things, and no doubt those academic accolades have opened some doors for me, but I’m no longer sure they ever opened the doors that I really wanted: to have firm friends whom I could see regularly (rather than scattered to the four corners of the globe), to feel involved and wanted rather than completely replaceable, and to feel happy about myself and living in the present rather than always discounting the past and the present and looking restlessly to the future for something better. I’m not quite ready to wear orange sheets and live in a monastery somewhere in Tibet, and I do think that a hunger for improvement is still important, but I’m realising that nothing external can make up for any sense that I might have of not liking myself. So there’s a balance to be had between being kind to myself and kinder to others, while still striving for better in every aspect of my life.

 

All of this being said, I do need to find a new driving force or central motivator for my day-to-day life, and I’m actively considering several possible avenues (entrepreneurial, non-profit, creative, there certainly are lots of choices out there). Although writing was cathartic and often very enjoyable (with a definite silver lining that I’ve been able to enjoy having my hearing aids out and being my own boss), this has been a rather lonely year in many ways. I remain eternally grateful to Helen and our boys for the fact that there is always a cheerful face and a warm hug in the morning and at night. Although after several weeks of summer holiday with no school for the boys, having an entire day to myself would also be very welcome! Hopefully by the time I post my next blog update I’ll be neck-deep in a new challenging and satisfying project. 

Physically, although I have experienced the odd niggle from refereeing over the past year, since spring I’ve had a good run of time using a gym I’ve built up down in our basement to become as strong if not stronger than I’ve ever been (though I will always have skinny wrists and legs at the end of the day) – setting PB’s in deadlift and bench press, and I’m in good cardio shape again, having done pretty respectably in the referee fitness test earlier this summer (18.8 on the yo-yo beep). I think this physical health has helped to keep me mentally healthy as well. I have now joined the London Referees Society not just for mid-week games as I was doing during the last season, but for all of my games, and hopefully this will allow me to make new friends and meet lots of people in the local rugby community. The area covered by the London society is pretty wide so I’m not sure I’ll be travelling much less than when I was refereeing over in Oxfordshire, but hopefully I will also get some games closer to home.

Because rugby refereeing here is quite solitary (especially with most games taking place at exactly the same time on a Saturday afternoon and with no assistant referees until quite a bit further up the greasy pole) I’ve also looked to create other social avenues. This included a bit of squash, but socially I didn’t find the right group of people (and wound up needing all sorts of physiotherapy after all that dramatic lunging), and unfortunately my tennis has been rather dormant since Calvin was born and at about the same time my two regular tennis partners both left Johannesburg. I also attended a local writer’s group where unfortunately I lowered the average age by a few decades and it seems that the group has subsequently disbanded over the summer. One thing that has worked is a small group of us have formed a Dinner Discussion group where several guys around the same age get together for a meal and conversation once a month (partly in response to a Guardian article highlighting that men, especially those with families and a hectic career, often find themselves lacking meaningful interpersonal social interaction outside their family even though it is important for their health). This has been thoroughly enjoyable and we’ve deliberately avoided Britain’s political shambles in favour of conversations about all manner of real and theoretical topics that also allow us to get to know each other a little bit better, all while courting at least a little bit of controversy in our opinions, and some animated and amusing discussions have ensued.

We continue to live in my parents’ old house in Harrow, which has been funny to consider at times: that I am back in the house I lived in when I finished high school, now 20 years ago. Helen has made great efforts to get to know other families at the local nursery school that our boys have attended and as a result we’ve started to make a few friendships in the local area. That being said, the demographics of the area have changed a lot since my parents first moved here, and we’ve found that we’re drawn to a relatively small pool of local middle-class people, with much of the surrounding areas being much more socio-economically diverse, with a substantial minority of non-English speakers. So we’ve found ourselves drawn into both a surprisingly large diaspora of middle-class South Asians (many of whose families migrated from East Africa in the 1960s and 70s) as well as the population of schoolmasters and teacher’s families at Harrow school – many of whom seem to work like absolute donkeys during term-time, to the point where they are almost never available, and then disappear elsewhere for much of the holidays. We’re very lucky that we’re within walking distance of both the nursery school and the independent prep school that Calvin is starting at next week. But we’re not sure if we want to be this close to the middle of London and the noise, traffic, and pollution that seems to come with it. Night-life doesn’t have quite the same appeal for us these days, as by 10:30pm we’re ready for bed, and a recent evening out at a cousin’s wedding cost us more than a hundred pounds for babysitting (cheap babysitters can’t cope with getting two tyro’s fed, bathed and into bed, and people who can handle it don’t come cheap). So we have started once again considering our options for moving somewhere further out of London, to a greener, leafier area with a thriving community life where hopefully we can meet even more people with whom Helen and I can both identify, and over time build friendships. Not knowing what sort of work I’ll end up doing isn’t entirely helpful in this process, as it will certainly entail more of a commute if I need to be based in London, but on the other hand I’m keen to give my children a sense of a place that is a hometown for them, where they can return to even once they begin to venture out into the wider world.

For much of this year our boys only attended nursery school for four days per week. Helen found a wide variety of activities and excursions to keep the boys entertained and stimulated on Fridays. This included trips to a local farm / petting zoo with animals and a playground, kiddie gymnastics sessions which both boys seemed to thoroughly enjoy, swimming lessons at home in our pool (we are very lucky to have an indoor pool, so I often have a dip with the boys at the end of the day and then take them for a shower rather than the usual bathtime saga) and also various trips into London to kiddie theatre, to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guards (a favourite for the boys, who usually spend several days thereafter re-enacting soldiers marching), and also along the South Bank of the river to visit various attractions and sample different cuisines.

 

 

We have had some family fun over the past year as well. In December we were lucky enough to be able to create our own family festive season. We had several different parts of Helen’s family come to stay with us, including having two of Helen’s cousins, Robyn and Peter and their spouses and children, all together for a few days that included opening presents on Christmas morning and a big Christmas lunch; as well as just before New Year having Helen’s sister Kylie and her husband and kids to stay with us. Helen’s family are very close to her heart and she misses them very much at times (as do I), so it was nice to be able to host several of them. Helen had hoped to join the others on a big family skiing trip but unfortunately she had to cancel that as it was the same week as Calvin’s interviews for prep school entry (yes, four-year olds are asked to come to the school and they are observed and sorted into yea and nay – the school don’t call it an interview, but nobody is fooled).

Thereafter, Helen and the boys went to South Africa to catch up on some sun for several weeks but I was working at the local high school and stayed behind (although I was very tempted once or twice to catch a taxi to Heathrow and just not pitch up for work the next day!) By early April we felt a bit cooped up so we took ourselves off for a mini staycation, a few nights away ‘glamping’ in semi-permanent furnished canvas tents in the Wiltshire countryside. It was nice to be out in the fresh air, although the weather was still rather chilly and our tent was only heated by a wood-burning cooking stove, so by the middle of the night it was quite cold, and poor Helen did not particularly enjoy waiting half an hour in the morning for me to get the fire hot enough to boil water for her tea! In fact, Helen unfortunately took on more than her fair share of the childcare during the holiday as I spent quite a lot of time reading and being even more useless than usual. The boys seemed to enjoy the whole adventure very much however, particularly the fact that they had their own little mini wooden house with a bunk-bed inside it, contained within our larger tent structure. At one point we had been considering asking my parents to join us, but my mother’s health has suffered several challenges this year and unfortunately she’d recently had surgery on her foot and was out of action still; in the end it was probably a good thing they hadn’t joined us anyway, as the boys’ mini house had an open roof and they complained if we made too much noise after they had gone to bed, relegating their parents to reading by candle-light by 8pm, something I’m not sure my father would have taken with much humour!

 

In late April we were very pleased to have Helen’s parents come to stay with us in Harrow. I think it also gave them some comfort to be able to relate a little bit more to our lives here now. We discussed with them the possibility of their moving to the UK and living with us, particularly given the way that costs of life for middle class people in South Africa, especially medical insurance costs, have risen enormously and incomes have generally not kept pace with this. At times we do worry quite a bit about their current and future well-being in a country that has very little social safety net and is not particularly kind to people as they age. Although they gave the matter some serious consideration, in the end Helen’s parents realised that for them it made better sense to remain in South Africa where they both have an established life of their own, with work, friends, two other children and several grandchildren. During their visit we also celebrated Helen’s 40^th Birthday and to mark the occasion we had a number of Helen’s relatives over for a lovely gathering. The other half of the celebrations will be in December in South Africa where we’ve made plans to get together with both of Helen’s siblings and their families as well as her parents, in two different places along the coast.

Apart from our staycation I had not really been anywhere this year, so I was quite pleased that we (after agonising over the bewildering range of options available) booked ourselves a week-long holiday in Montenegro at a fully catered resort focused on holidays for families with small children. There was nothing fancy about the place, but the sun shone for the most part, the boys loved the various swimming pools, and we enjoyed being able to drop them off at the kids club for an hour each day and to tag team looking after them so that we could read books and have some long chats. While the buffet meals became a little bit repetitive after a while, it was still great to be able to offer the boys various foods and not to have a struggle on our hands when someone turned their nose up at something different. Helen also managed to get out on one full-day tour of some of the sights of Montenegro, and on another night, we visited a local vineyard, although unfortunately neither the scenery nor the wine was much to write home about.  

School summer holidays are long (amazing how much more parents appreciate teachers by the end of them), and while Helen has done her best to keep all three boys (me included) from driving her crazy, it certainly hasn’t been easy.

More recently we all went to Sweden for just over two weeks, the first part of which we spent 2 nights in the home of a Swedish friend Vania, who I met in South Africa, then two nights with another much older friend Pontus, whom I met in junior school while living in Sweden. We then drove up to Stockholm and stayed in a rented holiday cottage on the Baltic archipelago about 40 minutes from the city. While we were in the area we were able to catch up with old friends Jon and Lynn who moved from London to Sweden several years ago, and also to see another childhood friend of mine Johan, whose two boys are within months of our boys in age and all four seemed to get on very well, playing with a plethora of toys and dancing to Michael Jackson music. We then drove down to the West Coast and spent several nights staying in the holiday home of Johan’s parents, along with my parents and Andrew and Romain and our nephew Ilya. We were all together to celebrate my mother’s birthday, which was nice to be able to do for the first time in a while. Our trip to Sweden included eating lots of local food, and swimming in many lakes and seas (when the weather wasn’t too bad, which unfortunately it was for some of the trip). Helen had both the highs of a day’s sightseeing in Stockholm (while I looked after the boys and did our laundry over several hours in Johan’s rather slow washing machine), and the lows of me shopping for weird Swedish foods that she didn’t like very much, and a miscommunication meaning that on our way to the west coast we had to make an unplanned stop for one night, which we spent in a hostel in the village where I grew up in Sweden. Unfortunately, the bathrooms were shared, which is not ideal when pregnant and wandering the halls in pyjamas in the middle of the night, and our neighbours in the next room were apparently quite noisy (luckily I didn’t notice at all). I think Helen was very relieved to join Andrew and Romain who like to prepare a variety of foods and are much better cooks than I, and our boys love playing with Ilya and had a great time with all the children’s toys in the house.

Our boys have grown a lot in the past year and their personalities continue to develop. Calvin loves to talk loudly and non-stop, and he has a great love of stories and characters from those stories: he seems to have moved on from The Lion King and Peter Pan to Robin Hood (the Disney version where Robin is a fox), the Jungle book, and now his obsession is How To Train Your Dragon. I don’t think our boys always fully follow the stories in these movies, but I try to watch with them the first time and to help them to understand at least some of it (not always easy when Calvin tends to talk over the characters in the movie with his own running commentary). Calvin is very gregarious and seems to make friends readily. He has a phenomenal memory and may also have picked up some of his uncle’s and grandmother’s knack for languages. He is slender and not particularly tall (wrists like his father), but very fast and full of energy. Mackenzie, as appears to be typical of second children, seems to be doing a lot of things much earlier than Calvin – for example he can almost dress himself entirely and is currently potty training. He is still a very enthusiastic eater and can be very good at using his fork and spoon and makes very little mess at mealtimes (maybe because he doesn’t want to miss the food going into his mouth!) Mackenzie is very physical and still loves to be hugged and tickled. He also expresses himself physically, in contrast to Calvin’s tendency to talk, and unfortunately with Mackenzie this includes using violence to make his dissatisfaction or frustration clear. To some extent this may also be that Mackenzie still doesn’t seem to be entirely aware of his own strength – sometimes when he and Calvin end up in disagreement Mackenzie simply sits on Calvin even though he is almost two years younger (there is no more than a few hundred grams of weight between them and Mackenzie continues to have what the Zulus would call ‘umkhaba’ – a paunch traditionally associated with rising prosperity and more senior rank of middle age). He is naughty, but always contrite, at least until next time! We are hoping that Calvin will enjoy his new prep school which starts later this week, and we are also looking forward to meeting other parents in his new class as a way of widening our social circle. I still have significant misgivings about how early they start with serious school in England, and what kind of academic pressures Calvin might face, but he will be one of the older children in the class and he generally gets on very well with teachers and students, so hopefully that will make things a little bit easier for him.

Our considerations of houses and schools now has the added dimension that Helen is expecting our third child, a girl, in November this year. Helen’s pregnancy has been relatively straight-forward, although she is starting to suffer more regular heartburn and it seems that her bump has grown much more readily the third time around, and that has made it a bit harder for her to sleep well (never mind that catching a nap with two other boys running around has not been easy). The National Health Service approach to pregnancy has been interesting to observe, with Helen seeing a completely different person for each of the myriad of appointments, all of which are simply notified by post. As in: you have been given this day and this time, if you want to change it please be prepared to hold on the phone for at least 20 minutes and then wait a month to see anyone else. I have no idea how career-women cope with it, they must have a very sympathetic employer. I have not always been enamoured to find myself saddled with the boys for an entire morning in the middle of the week (school holidays!) even though that is hardly a big ask. It is a remarkably communist system in a way, certainly not one with much personal care, although the actual appointments have been with people who are friendly and competent. Helen continues to handle it all with (mostly) her usual aplomb and I am lucky that she generally just takes things in her stride. I have tried to have some Sundays where I take the boys and give Helen some time off to relax, or head into London and explore. Helen has also very much enjoyed taking part in fairly regular tennis sessions at the courts down at Harrow school, and has started to have the odd girls’ night out with other mums from the boys’ nursery school.

We are happy, but also a bit daunted by the prospect of an enlarged family. In my case perhaps also a twinge regretful that we are going back to square one just as our boys are reaching an age where they might possibly have been able to stay over with grandparents for a night at least! By the time the third one is out of nappies and reasonably independent it will only have been a total of about 8 years of our lives (I’m sure there are some pretty serious offences that carry shorter sentences, but at least the inmates are often highly amusing and remarkably cute!) I remember a quote from Bill Gates at a High School graduation where he told teenagers, ‘your parents weren’t always boring, it was looking after you that made them that way’. Even if what we do has changed, Helen and I both still enjoy meeting new and old friends and having people to share meals and afternoons or evenings with. We’re pretty optimistic that we’ll be able to do that wherever we end up. So there are lots of possible changes coming our way, but lots of exciting adventures too, no doubt. I love hearing from friends far and wide so please do get in touch. And if you’re thinking of a trip to London please do give me a shout as we have spare rooms and enjoy having friends over and catching up.