Category Archives: People

From boy to man

Posted on by Neil
2

There was a young man, let’s call him D. D was having a hard time. I won’t go into the history, but his childhood had been mixed. He was loved, but he didn’t know how to accept the love and more than that, the people who loved him didn’t know how to show it. There was a whole load of love, but somehow it didn’t connect.

At school, D started misbehaving, being mouthy and aggressive. Drink and drugs became part of his life and his education took a hit. After a long period of suffering all round he was kicked out of home and ended up in a hostel.  Surrounded by people a little like him his behaviour was reinforced and things went on a downward spiral. Violence, brushes with the authorities, debt all joined in the mix. It was a sad, sad mess.

I knew this young man as a kid. He was bright, precociously intelligent, caring, funny and almost boringly stable.  Years later, when I met him again as a young man, he was hollow, lost, inarticulate and quite frankly pathetic.

Five years ago I welcomed D into my house. Not for a drink, not for dinner, but for as long as he needed to be there. His mum drove him up to us. I can remember that day with an alarming clarity that alludes me most of the time these days. It was awkward, I had kids, but I didn’t have a teenager. Now I had both. I cooked, but I hadn’t realised how little appetite he now had. I remember we watched the Champions League together Chelsea Valencia, when we should have been watching Man U Roma.

I can’t say it was easy, there were good times and bad. He was taking medication to help him kick the drink. He was dedicated and committed, but he couldn’t sleep. The months and years spent sleeping in the fug of alcoholic stupor had taken their toll. He applied for job after job with little success, his heart sank when he either heard nothing or heard more rejection. Then little by little the chinks of light started to show.

D got a job working at the same place as me not, I should add, because of me but because of his ability. It was mundane and it was boring but it was something. We contacted the companies that he owed money to and sorted his debts. He was great with the kids (although he scared the neighbours in our little rural village – who thought we were mad). But he missed his life and his friends, he missed his past.

The one day he disappeared.

I can’t tell you what happened to me. I can’t tell you what I thought, what I feared. I can’t tell you that I hoped, because quite frankly I didn’t.

But then he came back.

In retrospect this was a turning point to equal anything penned by the good and the great. I like to think that he stood and looked into the metaphorical mirror of life. I don’t know whether that was the case. If you meet him you can ask him for me.

And from the lows come the highs and from despair comes hope. He was clean and debt free. He had a job. It wasn’t a great job, but it was a job. Then to top it all, he had a girlfriend. She wasn’t new to his life, she was from his past, but she’d gone to University, gone to learn. But once again, she was there and there was fresh hope. And she wanted to come and be with him wherever he was.

There were people who believed in him, people who supported him, people who showed their love for him. And, for the first time, he was prepared to accept their love.

Let’s roll the clocks on five years. The world has changed, people have come and gone, we’ve loved, we’ve lost, we’ve fought, we’ve cried. D is working  to help young people like the one that I welcomed into my home. He has incredible responsibility and works tirelessly and with a passion and commitment that can only come from the ills of the heart. He owns a beautiful flat, that he shares with the lovely lady that showed faith and commitment to him. He plays sport. He plays it well.  And he has an amazing group of friends around him. He drinks, but these days only like any other young 20 something. He is in control.

Sadly I don’t see D as often as I would like, we both have busy lives. But we keep in contact whenever we can. If I’m honest, I hadn’t realised it was five years ago that the story started. Like most of you I was sat on the sofa on the Thursday before Easter, relaxing and feeling good about a four day weekend, when something caught my eye on my Facebook page.

“Next week it will have been 5 years since I left xxxxx,5 years since I left my past and started my future, a special thanks needs to go to two amazing people that gave me an opportunity and a chance, thank you xxxx and xxxx”

Quite frankly, I can say….the pleasure was all mine. We saw you grow from boy to man.

You were a wonderful boy, you’re becoming a wonderful man.

There is nothing more that we could ever ask from you.

Stupid is as stupid does

Posted on by Neil
5

Every person is made up of opposing and contradictory forces. Ultimately this is why we are so damned interesting.  We are not one thing or another, but one thing and another.  For me, that includes my work and my private life. They are very different, although at times one inevitably overlaps the other.

During the day I wear a suit (most of the time) I talk business, I make big decisions that impact on the lives of thousands of people, I work hard and I try to stay focussed. We do laugh, but a lot of the work that I do is very serious.

When work stops, you’ll find me in an old pair of shorts and t-shirt, cracking jokes, cooking, writing, taking photographs, messing with the kids and generally being a bit of a berk.  Sometimes work impinges on that, but I try to keep the two things separate.

Work is not my life and my life is not my work. I have work colleagues and I have friends.

Similarly, I have two Twitter accounts.  The one that is associated with this blog, which touches more on family and creative endeavours and the other which focuses on work issues and is connected to my work blog.  Pretty simple don’t you think?

Apparently not for some. The social media gurus out there would say that I’m not being authentic, particularly because I don’t openly reveal my identity on here.  Being anonymous is so last year. But of course this collective of idiots can see no further than their swinging dicks, their egos and the self-professed expertise in a media that actually requires little or no expertise (which is kind of the point about it – but they haven’t worked that out).

In my work, I have a lot of connections with Americans, who for the uninformed and the above group of idiots work to a different time zone. So the afternoon in the US is generally my evening.  As I sit down with a glass of wine and my laptop, I don’t want to be reading about the latest link to this that or the other related to my work.  Likewise, if I want to tweet about how I’m going to have another bottle of wine, how hung over I am or how I really fancy xxxx off the Television and wouldn’t mind doing the horizontal mambo with her, I don’t really want people from my work associations reading them.

I don’t have the same conversations offline with my work colleagues as I do with my friends, so why would my online be any different?

So to those people who question or don’t get it, I know that your lives are built around your work and you need to be online 24/7 showing how clever you are in order to try to get business.  But I don’t and nor do a lot of users of social media.  I mean……even Google understand that and have addressed it in Google +.

There is no rule book and even if there was, you wouldn’t be qualified or intelligent enough to write the contents page never mind the rest of it. At the end of the day, life is about choices. You make yours, I make mine. I’m happy with that, so why can’t you be?

Freedom isn’t just another word for nothing left to lose

Posted on by Neil
7

Do you know how hot a kettle is before you touch it?

How sharp a knife is before you cut yourself with it?

Or, how it feels to be lost….until you are lost?

When I was a kid things were simpler.  When my parents were kids they were simpler still.  I ran through the woods, I did shit and stuff and we walked the streets looking for fun.

What has changed?

Surprisingly little, other than our fear, our paranoia and our absolute dissociation with reality.

What I mean is…the problem is in your head, the problem is not other people.

Kids learn by taking risks, kids learn by getting things wrong, kids learn by fucking things up.  That is how I learnt, that is how you learnt, so why the hell are we preventing our kids from learning in exactly the same way?

Let them run wild, let them do things that make you worry, let them fall out of trees, into rivers. Let legs and arms be broken, let tears be shed, let fear be feared and let us let them free.

Free from us.

Free from our fears.

Free to grow.

Sex, lies and the internet

Posted on by Neil
6

What would make you cheat on your partner? A hard one to answer for most of us I’d guess. And not really the sort of question that you mull over with your corn flakes on a sunny day.

If you read a lot of the articles like this one, though you’ll begin to think the answer is simple.

The internet.

And of course the statistics are looking quite amazing with 20% of divorce cases in the US now involving Facebook in one way or another, Twitter in 5% and other social media in 14%. But the thing is, this doesn’t really deal with the question in hand.

For people to contravene societal norms, two things need to be in place:

Opportunity + Intent

A first glance would say that the internet is opportunity. Going back to chat rooms, or Friends Reunited and moving up to Facebook, Twitter etc. there is clearly greater opportunity for indulging in bad behaviour if one wants to. You can reconnect with old flames or acquaintances in a way that was never previously possible. “I wonder what happened to xxxx” becomes not a philosophical question, but an easy research topic.

But the thing that really interests me is the intent.  Divorce rates have been increasing and adultery remains the main reason that relationships end. So there is a trend there anyway. There will be crossover between online and offline too. Where the internet is just a replacement for the hushed phone calls.  But looking at the statistics there is also a whole load of people doing stuff that they wouldn’t normally do.  The intent paradigm has shifted.

Something in the human brain seems to say, “this isn’t real” or perhaps even “this doesn’t matter”. Of course looked from the flip side, the “deceived” partner would probably argue that the feelings of betrayal, loss of trust etc. are absolutely as real. So what’s going on? And where does it stop? As social media and the internet develops as the mobile internet becomes quicker and faster and easier and as usage becomes second nature are we going to see societal views change and a new norm of acceptability become defined? Or are we sitting on an emotional time bomb that will severely impact our children, their children and the essence of social fabric as we know it?

Equally stupid

Posted on by Neil
10

We all want gender equality right? I mean deep down we all believe that the male and female species are more or less equal? Good at some things, not so good at others, acceptable differences but across the board fairly much adding up, or cancelling out….depending on which way you want to look at it.

The last couple of days I wrote about the ten worst things about men and the ten worst things about women.  There wasn’t a huge reaction (because nobody reads this blog  only my friends read this blog) but the reaction that there was interested me.  The men post, had a level of humour in the responses and was tweeted on Twitter by a number of men. But when I came to the women post….a lot damper reaction.

Was it because the post wasn’t as good? Well I don’t think either of them are up for the Pulitzer.

Was it because fewer people saw it? The viewing stats for both days are almost exactly equal.

So why?

Well my theory is this. Men are ultimately scared of the reaction of women.  If we say something that might be considered un PC then all hell will break loose and a thousand banshee from hell will rip us apart bit by bit. We’re scared that what might be meant as light-hearted banter could be taken seriously and held up as an example of our deeply misogynistic views.

Let me give you some examples of how this plays out.  I have a number of female friends that I interact with online, I respect them and their views and I in no way want to disparage them through this.  One example is a lady who recently this week went to see a group of male strippers and tweeted for a while about the men and their assets. Another lady participates in Fireman Friday where each Friday on Facebook a picture of an alleged fireman is posted, semi nude. And finally a conversation again on Facebook about the Olympics, where there was broad consensus from the ladies about their desire to get tickets at the swimming for the men’s events…and clearly not for the sport.

I’m not against any of this and I should be clear I am in no way individually criticizing the ladies. But if you flip it on its head. If I was tweeting about a night in a lap dancing club and how fit the women were, if I was posting page 3 semi nude pictures on Facebook or talking about going to the women’s volleyball so that I could eye up the talent….well my guess is the reaction wouldn’t be positive and I would be seen as a bit of a social pariah.

So why is it acceptable to objectify men in public but not women?  Is this equality or is this actually misandry?

My honest view is it is neither, in fact in a funny way it is actually a new play on male power and sexual stereotypes….the women aren’t genuinely sexual empowered and are instead fulfilling male fantasy role models of the wanton sexy woman. Meanwhile the men, scared of the reaction, just secretly going on behaving as before, objectifying women, but pretending that they aren’t.

I’m not taking the happy-clappy, no objectification argument here.  That is just intellectually stupid and impractical. Physical attractiveness has been the subject of appreciation for as long as there have been people. But there is a certain level of societal hypocrisy that we need to address.

Objectifying men, doesn’t empower women in the way that the opposite doesn’t and didn’t empower men.

Or two wrongs don’t make a right.

Here’s [not] looking at you kid

Posted on by Neil
3

What do we know? That beauty is only skin deep? That beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

What else do we know? We also know that there is widespread consensus within cultures on beauty and attractiveness, replicated by numerous studies.

So does anyone actually think that they have an ugly child? Does anyone think they were an ugly child?  As parents we are all in love with our kids, I get that and I myself think my two are wonderful and gorgeous.  But let’s differentiate looks from love here though for a moment

If I take my father’s hat off and look at them, I know that neither will be models, but neither have they fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. They’re somewhere in the normal category….as I guess are most kids….most people…and certainly I would say I was and am. (Although that said, my son WAS an ugly baby until he grew into his ears.)

But attractiveness is a range and so whilst there will be people who are more attractive, there will also be people who are less attractive.  I saw a photo a little while ago of a kid. Showing it to a couple of people in quick succession their reactions were the same, a sort of intake of breath, a pause and then a sort of “ohhh” sound. Because we could all see that this kid wasn’t a looker. And of course if we could see it, then I’m sure others would.

But did their parents? Or does our unconditional love blind us both metaphorically and literally to the imperfections? Should parents be honest and support children (knowing that they are going to be highlighted to them by their less sensitive peers) or should we turn our backs on reality and maintain the line that everyone is beautiful in their own way?  And does either matter to the self-esteem of the kids, both in the short and long-term?