Babies. Making idiots of us all since, well, forever

We have a baby.  Our daughter born six months ago is a happy, smiley constant source of joy to my wife and me. The story of her provenance is a long and tortuous one but no matter, this is not that tale.  She is here now and is exactly as she should be. 

Today's thought is a follow-on from last week's idea that one of the roles played by my smarter self is to remain vigilant in the face of the dumber version.  There are recognisable patterns: fatigue levels differ on Tuesday morning as against Thursday night and I try to allocate tasks appropriately.

One definition of 'experience' might be to identify, and to operate within, the rhythms of one's working life.

But babies are arrhythmic.  The edicts of Gina Ford notwithstanding, they only know what they want when they want it.  We do our best to anticipate and shape our daughter's rotating need for food, clean clothes, attention, distraction and sleep.  'Shaping' being a euphemism for ignoring her demands for food and attention for at least a little while.  

Thus my carefully calibrated plans to get the tough work done whilst the house is quiet are more often stymied than realised.  My daughter doesn't care whether she's being fed by the smarter or dumber version of her father.  She just wants the food.  

(cue: hollow laughter from my wife whose entire life is presently subsumed by the feeding-changing-cleaning-bathing-washing-feeding cycle)

One partial solution will be the creation of a discrete workspace, either on our property or elsewhere.  This is a work in progress.  Another is to (further) improve my smart-me:dumb-me ratio by staying fit, rested and out of the pub.  A third has been to hire someone to help out with the myriad tasks that are usually entrusted to my dumber self.  The beginning of the end of Headcount: 1?

But mostly my response must be attitudinal.  Our daughter was so longed for for so long and I am blessed with a career that lets me stay close to home for more of the time than most breadwinners.  So I count that blessing.

A final thought: I have nothing but respect for single parents.  The sense of grinding isolation must be close to overwhelming almost all the time, especially if the child is too young to be anything other than demanding.

Such a very long time between drinks

I see that I last wrote in these pages on February 11.  Seven months and God knows how many miles ago.  The reputation that I've assiduously built over the eight or so years in the UK now precedes me around the world.  I find myself in all sorts of priviledged positions.  I am an insider.  People who are new to a client company are told to make contact with me to learn what's going on.  I'm asked to give feedback to other agencies.  I have become, in some circles at least, a 'trusted advisor'.  This is the holy grail of consultancy.

It's doubtful that I gain anything by even stating as much in these pages.  Discretion is a big part of trust and even writing as I write right now feels like an impulse to self-sabotage.  Except that the internet is such a wonderful place to make huge mistakes in plain sight.  Better even than the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I am a consultant now and not much else.  No time for producing theatre or performing comedy.  No time even to consume it.  I wake up early and work online or I fly somewhere to do my thing in person.  A week without passing through an airport feels strange these days.

But soon I am to be something else besides.  After nearly ten years of trying I am to be a father.  A baby girl will enter our lives on Christmas Day, if not before.  And then everything must change.  Part of the reason that I've embraced the Global Loman lifestyle is that it's nice to be wanted and especially nice to be wanted in far-flung parts.  But soon I'll be wanted more at home than anywhere else on the planet.

I have no idea what that wll be like but I can't wait to find out.

Inclination v. Obligation

Work is an obligation. Even if I really like my job (so much of the time of inclined to do it) I'm obliged to do it regardless of any momentary preference.

When our weekends and holidays 'feel like work' it's because we find ourselves obliged to do things during time we'd mentally put aside to pursue our inclinations. We like our friends because they're similarly inclined to us; time spent with them doesn't feel like an obligation.

I'm visiting Australia again in a few weeks and there's nothing like a trip home to focus the mind: which activities and engagements am I obliged to do, which am I inclined to do and which ones sit happily in the centre zone of a simple Venn Diagram?

This trip will be far more complicated because my wife and I are traveling together. As our separate and collective diaries fill up we're negotiating a much more complex Venn Diagram: there are things that are inclinations for one but obligations for the other, things that are obligations for us both and happily a few things that we're each inclined to do.

Travel alone and the trade-offs are purely internal. Travel with someone else and the negotiations need to be overt and honest otherwise we end up dragging the other person to events that we're only attending out of obligation anyway.

Adult life is a lesson in compromise and never more so than when returning to the sites of your childhood.

RIP Drew Leavy, improvisor

I woke up this morning at my family home in country Australia to the news that Drew Leavy, improvisor, had died in London.  He had been battling brain cancer for over eighteen months.

I first met Drew after a Grand Theft Impro show.  GTI have long been the best improv troupe in London and Drew, alongside Phil Whelans, Dylan Emery and later Cariad Lloyd, deliver consistently high quality, innovative shows in an otherwise hit and miss field.  As he was from Canada we bonded in that familiar 'colonials-in-Britain' way.  The last time I saw Drew was about a year ago, also at a GTI show, when I was privileged to perform along side him in what I think was his penultimate show.  He was as anarchic, generous, funny and erudite that night as ever.

As with any great improviser, when you made eye contact with Drew across the stage what you saw in there was a sort of 'deliberate unknowingness'; neither he nor you knew what was about to happen, only that it was going to be fun.

Form versus function

I am in Australia visiting family and friends for the first time in fifteen months.

I've lived in the UK for over six years now and the trips home get harder not easier.  Life moves on and because there are always new nieces and nephews to meet as well as old friends to catch up with, time becomes absurdly, depressingly precious.  Anyone who's lived away from their home for any length of time can testify to the horrible push-me-pull-you feeling that overwhelms the visitor the minute he gets off the plane.

I have about three weeks on the ground in Australia and my time is divided between family and friends on a 2:1 ratio; with my parents in beautiful Far North Queensland (I'm writing this from Mission Beach), with my sisters and their families on the farm where we grew up in country New South Wales and then with seemingly innumerable old mates in Sydney.

It's seeing the mates that creates the stress.  As time is so short at every turn I'm confronted with a simple choice: -

Do I opt for the form of the relaxed rhythms and banter of the old friendship but by so doing risk not getting a real sense of my friend's life or do I sacrifice some of the familiarity that made us friends in the first place on the functional altar of information expediently exchanged?

One feels too superficial yet the other can be brutally businesslike.  Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Yet like many of the problems in my life, there are far worse ones to have than how to get on when seeing old friends.  I'm reminded of my favourite Christopher Hitchens quotation: -

"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends." 

Colin Munro (1940-2010)

My father’s best friend died on Monday.  Colin ‘Slim’ Munro was the doyen of the ABC’s Rural Department for over 25 years.  He died of a stroke but had already succumbed to a vicious dementia whose timely diagnosis had been stymied by deafness suffered since childhood.

For many years Slim was the voice of Australia All Over, a Sunday morning call-in radio programme that celebrated the spirit of a rural Australia where isolation and hardship was met with laconic humour and reflexive kindness.  The premise was that ordinary people living in often extreme circumstances had wonderful stories to tell if properly encouraged.  On air and in person Slim was a genius of teasing out a tale that seemed commonplace to the teller but was extraordinary to the rest of us.

He was an indefatigable supporter of latterly unfashionable rural charities like the Country Women’s Association and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame.  He was a wonderful after-dinner speaker who was in continual demand throughout the Australian bush.

In Slim’s time the ABC really did see itself as being owned by all Australians.  He certainly felt that way and he affected an amazing ability to remember the name of everyone he’d ever met.  He’d met so many thousands of lovely yet thoroughly ordinary people that his recall wasn’t always immediate.  Watching him ask a procession of perfectly disguised triangulating questions until his memory jogged was to witness a peculiar sort of genius.  Dementia was an especially cruel fate.

Slim and Dad met on their first day at Wagga Agricultural College in 1958.  Their friendship was both immediate and unwavering.  Slim had known five generations of my family.  He’d taken champagne and chicken sandwiches at my great grandmother’s bedside on the day of my parent’s wedding and he’d spoken at the lunch to celebrate my first niece’s baptism.  To be loved by someone loved by so many others is a blessing that my family will always cherish.

I grieve for Slim but my heart breaks for my father.  Never again will he cause his best friend’s face to light up merely by walking into the room.  Our ability to affect another in such a way dies with that person.