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Have we met and what did we do in the future?

[ 5 minute read ] 

What chapter are you on?

It seems I am a ghost or a zombie and quieter than a cat. Sally, my next door neighbour, was cutting her hedge and didn't notice me when I walked up to her, bare-footed, with a handful of strawberries for her. The look of horror on her face will stay with me for a long time; probably the whole weekend. What did she expect after she jumped out of her skin?

We just stood there, staring at each other; she with shears in her hands and me with my right arm extended as though I wanted a fist-bump. Eventually, she placed one open palm under my fist and I released the strawberries. I wouldn't say there was a sense of relief but I would also say I felt a change in her. She didn't smile and thank me; she, instead, turned away and started walking towards her front door; not a word. I told her, to her retreating back, about the damp and mould experts who visited me in the week. She smiled then.

It puzzles me.

In a fantasy medieval world, I might have been paying a token amount for entry into her secret areas:

       'This is the last time, Martin. I know you serve the community well and I suppose I can contribute to the goodwill we all want to offer you, but I am a good Christian and I have only myself and sanctuary in my home to give. You know I live frugally.'

On a spiritual plane, we might have once met before and she thought she had killed me but I am alive or re-incarnated:

       'I see I was not ruthless enough, and left off from drowning you too soon, and I have failed to suppress your force long enough to make it last. What now?' She walked away in silent resignation.

She was alarmed! Both of those imagined scenarios are steeped in resignation, aren't they. Yet, she might have simply been confused. How did I manage to suddenly appear next to her when she is convinced her hearing is so acute that she can hear the hedgehogs munching outside with the noise passing through double-glazing, and she is woken by her cat walking towards her bed?

Of course, Sally has a very loving cat and I know Sally is affectionate and caring. I am pretty certain that her cat recognises the change in Sally's breathing as she starts to wake up and pads across the floor towards her for a cuddle. Hearing hedgehogs is a bit of a mystery to me though. I am no expert but a passing car is pretty loud and cannot really penetrate the double-glazing. Maybe, Sally leans out of her window and listens.

It doesn't signify. That is an old expression I got from the writer C.S. Forester in his books on Hornblower. Through some kind of magic transmogrification it means 'It doesn't add up' or 'It doesn't make sense as it stands'. Just like Shakespeare wrote in a language that the people of his time could understand, but modern people need a translation book for, it seems that Sally and I speak different languages, or have lived on different planets and now both find ourselves bumping up to one another on Earth.

If Sally and I were reading the same book but separately, I imagine she might have gotten to the pages where we know each other much better and either we are close, as in relaxed in each other's company, or have fallen out for some reason. It isn't hard for me to lazily lean on an old and obsolete notion that she might be, as a woman, absorbing the passion of a story of love and betrayal, while I, on the other hand, stereo-typically, as a man, might be reading the same book but enjoying different parts; the interplay of characters but with a bent towards understanding the function and progression of relationships; work-like, if you will. It is difficult for me to put this notion aside. Of course, this is glaring sexism, even misogyny, by the back door. Yet, I would offer that I have detached emotions and all people are romantic fantasists to me; people who skillfully and silently weave their own lives into stories, with a hope for a future they have already secretly enjoyed.

Sally, is an intelligent woman. I admire her. She is not silly; she is practical. I sometimes think I have had glimpses from the future. Certainly, when I was driving throughout Europe I have had a prescience that there is something blocking the road beyond a blind bend and braked almost to a crawl as I rounded the curve. Yup, loose cows or broken-down vehicle. I think Sally might be a few chapters ahead of me in the same 'book' we are reading. Actually not, she has somehow flicked forward a few pages to read a passage or two and then returned to the 'story' in the right place, where ALL of us are reading. You know, when something is happening in a story and we simply must know the resolution; will they, won't they?

I have had a few relationships, both romantic and platonic, in which there was an expectation that I would fill a role. The classic one in the romance realm is when a long-term relationship breaks down and then, unbeknownst to me that there ever was one, I turn up; perhaps even having been snared by a well-prepared web, and innocently think I am entering a fresh relationship, only to find that it is stale from the outset. I have had to fill the role of a long-term lover, even a married man of many years. It is really sad. I see new relationships as green buds of potential growth that are shaped by the environment and nutrition that the people involved in the relationship give to it. Old relationships, of course, need fertiliser, just as plants and trees do.

I married a woman who had a notion of how we should be. She didn't tell me. The marriage failed after only a year or so, but trundled along for another three years. Her fantasies had advanced our relationship so far that even with a limited amount of prescience I was left only guessing. Truth be known, I never tried to guess or work out what was going on because I was always wrong-footed.

       'Why won't you comply with what I imagined you to be like?'

       'Why, are you not in the now, without ever having read forward to see what the resolution is in a fantasy novel?'

[ 7 minute read ]

You can't stand in the way of progress or change

It seems that if you are renting out a house in Funafuti, Tuvalu, it is unnecessary to include in the description that it is two minutes walk to the beach. There is a picture on the FRANCE 24 News website of Tuvalu as a strip of land in the Pacific ocean, midway between Australia and Hawaii, that has houses along its length and, I would guess, takes about six minutes to walk from the beach on one side of the island to the other beach on the other side of the long and very thin island.

'Discover the unspoiled paradise of Tuvalu, one of the smallest and most remote nations in the world. Explore the atolls, lagoons, reefs, beaches, diving, culture and history of this South Seas destination.' says timelesstuvalu.com. 

Sometimes, businesses use a particular type of marketing that plays on our desire to not miss out on a good deal. Those businesses offer a deal for a limited period, or for the first hundred customers, or so. The quote from timelesstuvalu.com remarkably does not include 'while you can', or 'this offer ends soon'. According to climatologists, Tuvalu will inevitably disappear under the waves.

Something that struck me was that the residents cannot get away from the lifestyle of beach-life. Given, they may like eating fish and swimming but there is no skiing or bungee-jumping there. Where do they go on holiday? 

I lived in a very picturesque village for most of my life; I was born there. There was a camp-site in Summer that was a field for grazing a dairy herd in the other months. One year, I came across a teenage girl, my age, and got chatting to her. She told me she was from Clacton, in the county of Essex, England. I was amazed. Clacton is a seaside resort. Why would anyone leave a seaside resort to go on holiday? I was ignorant. Being inland for her was different. There was a river that she could swim in and lovely green fields and village-type stuff; chocolate-box / picture-postcard village stuff like thatched houses and winding paths and lanes.

My parents, of course, would take us to the seaside for our holidays. We had use of a beach-house while we were there. A beach-house in the UK is a small, single room, wooden hut planted directly on the beach and is for day use, like changing into swimming costumes and cooking shell-fish on a little gas powered cooker. Great memories. Yet, the passage of time has changed that holiday town to be practically unrecognisable to me. The roads and streets are still there; the amusement arcades are still there, but the harbour is now unusable. It is full of sand. No-one dredges it now that fishing is no longer viable in that area. It used to be that we, as kids, could, when the tide was in, reach the sea from the beach-house in less than twenty seconds; and old ship-wrecks were washed right up to the sand dunes. These days, there is an undulating desert of sand before one can reach the sea, six minutes walk away. That is the width of Tuvalu in some places, it seems.

Locally

There is a telephone-box library in my neighbouring village. In England, almost all of the iconic red telephone boxes were dug up and removed when mobile (cell) phones became ubiquitous. Once everyone had a personal phone the public phone boxes disappeared, and now very small children have to run a lot further and faster when they fell off their bicycles and need help. Where I lived, when I was a kid, there were just lots and lots of fields and one telephone box per village. However, a few red telephone boxes were saved. They had shelves installed and these were filled with unwanted, second-hand books. Anyone can take these books, supposedly for a while, but if you keep one there isn't a gap on the shelf for more than a week, because someone shoves another book in its place. 

I found a book on ageing in the telephone-box library. Having started a couple of businesses in the past and recognising a gap in the job-recruitment market, I thought I might start a recruitment agency specifically to get upper-age-group people into work or new jobs. Best learn about people over fifty then, I thought. That was over a year ago. Yesterday, I opened the book and discovered it is actually a collection of papers on ageing; how reflexes deteriorate or not, and the such-like. There is a whole bunch more reports in it, but I stopped reading when I recognised that none of the studies included more than a handful of people in their seventies. The book was published in 1972. Today, I have gotten used to people working when they are in their seventies, in the area in which I live. My next-door neighbour is one hundred and two and I am amazed at his mental acuity. He still goes somewhere everyday with his flask of something and sandwiches, both in the morning and afternoon. Perhaps he goes on picnics with  new girlfriends.

Just as Tuvalu will cease to exist, and the beach I played on every summer has expanded; and just as holidays are taken because people desire change, people have also changed. I am only just realising that we cannot expect the world to stay the same if we change. Most of us have adapted; many have not. It sees it is difficult for many people to accept inevitability in their lives. They think they are King Cnut (Canute) in the eleventh century AD, and can hold back the tide.

Where I live there is bad sentiment towards a new railway line. Many of the complainers will not be alive to reap the benefits derived from riding a train from the east side of the south of England to the west side of the south of England. Yet, they are the most vociferous at the village hall in their protests. 

'Noise'

'Disruption'

'Can't sleep'

'Noise'

When I was seventeen, I worked in Bavaria, fifty miles (80km) east of Munich (München), in Germany. I lived in the 'Railway Hotel' - Bahnhof Gasthaus, directly opposite the train station. That train station was also a shunting yard for goods. Bang! Bang! at one in the morning, three in the morning, throughout the nights. I got used to it and after a week slept through it. Bear in mind that I was born and bred in a rural area where the loudest thing we heard was a cow. I am pretending there were no occasional Phantom F4 fighter planes howling overhead. OOOOO Wooooo. They were flying really slowly in England.

I have had a few conversations with the opponents to building a rail link between cities in the nearby fields. They are concerned about their property prices. They can't spend the money when they are no longer alive. They thought they could retire in the village but now their peace will be ruined. I am always left with the overwhelming feeling that these people have deceived themselves for their whole lives. When they were young and entering the job market, they lived in a world that was far different to the world we live in now. They could expect to be able to pay for a mortgage on a house from their forty or fifty years of work earnings. The 1980s had not happened and there were areas of derelict land and abandoned houses. 

In the late 1990's I started to feel sorry for people who persisted in thinking that everything they knew at that time would be all they would need to know today. Another neighbour I have, not yet fifty years old, has not realised that specialisation in large sectors of the work environment is fading fast. Now, there are specialists with PhDs and everyone else needs to have skills and attributes in an ever-widening scope of activity. Right from the hod-carrier on the building sites of yesteryear, who now needs to be a general labourer who can read plans, drive plant machinery, operate hydraulic machinery, and most importantly, not go to the pub at lunchtime; to the head of a department in an office environment who needs to hand off their capabilities and ability to computer algorithms, that he or she is expected to be able to manipulate, control, and assist.

The existence of Tuvalu will pass just as inevitably as our own idea that what we once knew would always be enough for our future. We cannot hold back the tide just as we cannot move away from progress, or prevent it spilling into our back yards.

Competitiveness in a fast changing world

Perhaps I should add this: If I was to start a logistics business with warehousing, no-one applying for the simplest role in the warehouse would get an interview without a Level 5 Diploma in Warehousing, Logistics, or Supply Chain Management; no-one applying for a driving role would get an interview without an Advanced Driving pass certificate, or a ADR (dangerous goods) pass certificate, or a current Driver CPC pass (Certificate of Professional Competence) or a FORS Driver certificate (Fleet Owners Recognition Scheme), AND MUST HAVE a certificate demonstrating completion of Health, Safety and Environmental Preservation, AND demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the most up to date UK Highway Code. Not only that, they would, as part of the interview, need to navigate from and to, set points in the UK, using only printed maps. No-one applying for an office role would get an interview without a level three award, certificate, or diploma, in Customer Services. Front-line customer-facing staff should also have a minimum of a level 2 certificate in Negotiation before an interview would be granted.

A Mental Health in the Workplace certificate would be good too.

Just saying.

To all those who are not delighted with their degree pass score: Even graduates with a first, would not get a job flipping burgers in my Burger Bar without having a Michelin Star. 

What I am trying to say, is that, for me, it is the diversity and combination of education, certification, and qualifications that is important; not the level of a single qualification.

Decades of experience means so many different things: stuck in a manner of behaviour; resistant to change; someone consistently employed by mediocre businesses; anything. It might also indicate, a leader who keeps abreast of industry progresses. But this last means that much evidence of further education should be available, and, for me, it must encompass a wide spectrum of knowledge for even a supervisor role, with any business I might own.