bignoseduglyguy

Given my recent posts on the lot of corporate managers and their longsuffering employees, Squonk’s Mind the gap… post doesn’t really make me feel any better. Meanwhile, I’m off to MOT the the department’s pool car – ah, the glamour of middle management.

As I mentioned below, Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian Weekend piece ”Sweet smiles, hard labour’ (from her forthcoming book, with it’s frank and unblinking look at the emotional investment demanded by employers these days, struck a chord with me.

Today’s follow-up extract is equally incisive, detailing how the prevailing cultures of overwork and consumerism are altering our attitudes to work. Bunting explores what she describes as “the emergence of a new form of elitism in the labour market: work as vocation and work as pleasure. In a society that places a high premium on self-expression and fulfilment, to have a lot of interesting work is a status symbol. It’s not just that you have a job that pays decently; you have a job which is so satisfying and fulfilling that you don’t want to stop working.” I don’t believe many of those involved in corporate life could deny the truth lying behind the observation of Kristen Lippincott, director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich: “We’ve become enamoured with deadlines. We want to feel an adrenaline rush. We believe that if we’re always chasing the next deadline, we must be important. A lot of our busyness is a way for us to avoid thinking about what is most important. There’s a difference between being busy and being productive.”

I used to work 5 minutes’ walk from home and yet I regularly stayed late in the office working on the ‘latest important thing’, missing never-to-be-repeated family moments, all because I knew that I could be home in 5 minutes…but never quite tearing myself away to do so. A good few years on, having worked out that such behaviour doesn’t actually change anything and garners little thanks from the Board, I have focused on working more efficiently in order to be more productive in less time. However, as I am now faced with a four hour round trip to the office and back, I have plenty of time to rue all those hours I wasted trying to feel important and make an impression. Rob Parsons – of Care For The Family and The Sixty Minute Father reknown – and many others, have often written that no-one ever lay on their deathbed and uttered the words ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’. How true.

Woodward: “It was a tough day at the office…I was disappointed with the 30 points they scored in the first half.”
Dallaglio: “In most areas, we came second best…this is very disappointing for all of us.”

Of all teams, it had to be against the All Blacks. Juffs, if you read this, Umaga’s boys did great, you have permission to gloat.

We live in London, a mere drunken banker’s stagger from Canary Wharf and the new financial heart of London. We are lucky enough to have a ground floor flat with a small south-facing garden. In this garden, we can enjoy good weather by eating and loafing in the garden, admiring SWMBO’s flowers and shrubs. For this, it has to be said, is her domain. Were such matters within my remit, all the garden bar the patio and the shed, would be be given over to cultivating vegetables with, perhaps, the odd decorative planting here and there.

As a child, I grew up in a home where in the back garden, my Dad grew a fair proportion of the vegetables we ate. Although this was done partly by choice, it also helped to supplement the far from stellar incomes of a self-employed engineer and nurse. Although we were far from self-sufficient, I now realise that we were living an mild approximation of the lifestyle later portrayed to great comic effect in ‘The Good Life‘. Although I don’t remember playing a very active part in the actual market gardening, I do remember being captivated by John Seymour’s seminal book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. Seymour’s plain economic yet evocative prose made the backbreaking and often thankless life of a smallholder seem simple, achievable but most of all, enviable. Not that this spurred me into action at the time, I simply did as little as possible to help and grew up eating good food that was well prepared with ingredients whose provenance was, for the most part, known. In the intervening years, my awareness of issues environmental has quietly grown and I have long held the desire to have a less frenetic and immediate life, hoping instead to ‘downshift’, as it is now called. Recently, SWMBO and I have discussed a variety of ways in which we can bring this about – ultimately, to find a way in which can spend far less time in traditional work environment (nine to five, stressful work, long commute, little family time*), enabling us to spend more time together working in, around and maybe from the home. Over the years and months, various bouts of online research and reading have brought us to the point where we are now seriously looking at a number of ways in which we can make this idea a reality, whether at home or abroad. Although I am by nature a serendipitous optimist, I am no wearer of rose tinted specs and I am realistic enough to know that a corporate salary will be a necessary evil for a while yet if we are to affect such a change. Having said that, I recently came across the Down The Lane website and I have to say that the lifestyle Richard Cannon is creating for himself is probably the most realistic work/life balance I have seen and close to that which I believe I would be happy with. One of the key factors in wanting to find a smallholding or, failing that, a house with a large garden in a more rural setting is our determination to have greater control over the food we eat. We try and shop wisely and we try to ensure that we eat healthily – or at least we thought we did until we read the Chemical World investigation supplements recently published by The Guardian. If you are not disposed to read it, I won’t cover the same ground here, save to say that I have not bought prepacked washed & ready-to-eat salads since. Although farmer’s markets and organic box deliveries are a boon for those seeking safer organic alternatives, they are a tad too strong for our budget and still keep us at some remove from the source of the food. Likewise, the exceptional quality of the produce of Rick Stein’s food heroes – whilst quite rightly lauded and championed – comes at a price that puts it into the occasional treat category for us. I suspect that in approach if not execution – I don’t have a Channel Four production budget to play with – we are more inclined towards the path trod by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. In essence, we would like to be able to grow a fair proportion of the food we eat and make informed decisions on the produce we buy in. In the last year or so, I have taken to carting the sprogs off to the Borough Market to show them what meat looks like before it is skinned and butchered, how a large fish is filleted in seconds by an experienced hand and to buy vegetables with dirt on that they can handle, smell and taste before buying.

All of which is a very roundabout way of getting to the point of this post-with-pictures. Earlier today, I and three of the sprogs had great fun setting up a couple of organic growbags on our south-facing patio today and planting them out. Anything which involves mucky hands, full watering cans and sharp knives is a winner with kids so a good time was had by all. Ranging across the two bags, we have gone for old favourites like tomatoes (plum for sauces, ordinary for salads) and cucumbers and the less ordinary aubergines and chillis.

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As all these like a deal of warmth and sun, we decided a little husbandry was called for. With no budget or inclination for shop bought stuff, the eldest and I decided to scrabble around the garden and shed for the wherewithall to build a ‘greenhouse’. An hour later, we had fashioned a detachable and re-usable leanto affair from transparent rubble sacks, canes, scrap fence wood and tapes both parcel and duct. As you can see from this rather iffy shot, the result is an exercise in frugality, recycling and craftsmanship.

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Whilst I have done this sort of thing before, it is a first for the kids so I will attempt to diligently report on their progress as super-smallholders in the weeks to follow.

*Strangely enough, whilst taking a breather after losing the first draft of this post, I read Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian Weekend piece ‘‘Sweet smiles, hard labour‘ which contains a damningly accurate summation of what it is like to work in my industry sector at the moment. Is it any wonder that folks at all levels of corporate life want out? I hinted to SWMBO that she might read it to better understand why I can be less than communicative upon returning from work on a Friday.

Footnote: Now the peed-offness has subsided, I can releate that I lost a version of this post after writing for an hour or so earlier today. I was particularly annoyed as I nearly always hardcode my posts in EditPad Lite or HTML-Kit, saving frequently as I go. I didn’t on this occasion as I was bracketing the pictures with text so I thought I would try Blogger’s Preview function as a handy way of seeing how things were looking. Suffice to say, I shall be sticking to tried and tested methods in the future.

Ken Livingstone has just been returned as the Mayor of London for a second term after a close run contest with Steve Norris.

City and East, which is our local constituency in the London elections, are just reported as having returned Labour – though the BBC result page has yet to update – they must be busy!

Reading Roger’s post on his new Trek bike reminded me that I have an old neglected Trek 900 in the shed. It’s not that I don’t want to ride it, it is just hard to fit rides in along with work, family, running and everything else. It is hard to believe that I used to clock 100+ miles a week as a cycle courier way back in the early eighties. In weather like we’re having, I often think back to the freedom and the companionship that that the job offered – the quick snatches of conversation in Soho Square between jobs, the chocolate pudding and custard in the Court Cafe, hanging out of the office window watching the world – and the film industry girls* – go by, changing the gas bottles for the prostitute downstairs and refusing the freebie offered in return. When I started, there were only a handful of cycle courier outfits in London and it was still something of a novelty. Nowadays, it is a full-blown industry with associations, federations, international gatherings and competitions.

Sadly, one of the things that hasn’t changed a great deal is the lack of a decent integrated transport policy for London, despite the best efforts of the likes of the London Cycling Campaign and the London Bicycle Messenger Association. The fact that major cities around the world seem incapable of developing coordinated transport schemes means that the more vulnerable users like pedestrians and cyclists are perpetually at risk from other road users. In all my 20 years of cycling in London, quick wits, defensive riding and treating all others as homicidal maniacs means that I have thankfully only had a handful of bad spills requiring hospital treatment. Some, however, are not so lucky as the list of names at Messenger Memeorial shows. Unknowingly until today, I happened upon the scene of Sebastian Lukomski’s accident minutes after it occured and was in the area when London cyclists staged a Critical Mass protest later and distinctly recall thinking how easily that could have been me.

On a lighter note, all this is quite pertinent because Bike Week 2004 starts tomorrow in the UK – so join me in digging out the bike, pumping up the tyres and heading off to a local event near you – like these run by Tower Hamlets Wheelers.

* One of whom later became SWMBO.

Enjoying an afternoon of baking (as you do) whilst listening to Kath Melandri and Eddie Nestor presenting a Mayoral Election special on BBC London 94.9. Whilst I am waiting for the dough to rise, I am online with my friend emma the sys ad and she has just pointed me towards a hilarious collection of overheard conversations on b3ta.com. Off to knead me buns…

Many thanks to m’learned friend Jason who just pointed out that my Atom XML feed was not updating. This advanced form of literary self-critisism was brought about by careless path editing when moving the whole shebang over from MT.

Just heard that Ray Charles has died.

Little did he know it at the time but Ray played a key role in the courtship of SWMBO and myself many moons ago. Not long after we started seeing each other, I was very keen to get hold of a copy of Ray Charles’ version of the classic ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’. SWMBO had never heard it so, as we walked through Covent Garden heading for the then new Tower Records megastore at Piccadilly Circus, I sang it to her in my own inimitable style. To this day, she refers to the occasion during which, in an eclectic set, I also busked my way through several numbers from Sinatra’s Songs For Swinging Lovers. Whilst I heard every soaring note of Nelson Riddle’s orchestration of the Capitol Records classic, I suspect the theatregoer’s in St. Martins Lane thought someone was strangling cats. For younger readers who are not familiar with Ray Charles, he’s the blind music store guy who does a great musical cameo in John Landis’ movie, ‘The Blues Brothers‘. If you haven’t heard of The Blues Brothers, you won’t get much else on this blog.