I must have been asked that question twenty times last week.
It’s become annoying and I’m starting to be selectively rude up to the ‘why the fuck would I be doing that? I’ve got six weeks left and I’m still doing my fucking job’ point with one person.
It’s alien to me.
Why would I abandon my team or the colleagues that I actually like before my last day?
Weird.
The thing is though, politics has started to rear its ugly little head and something that I’ve been trying to get sorted for the whole group of companies could be derailed by somebody in my organisation who’s too scared to cross the road on their own, let alone take over some very interesting ( and very classified) stuff.
This could hurt my team in the long run and I’m not happy about it at all..
And then had drinks with a friend who’s recovered from a brain inflammation, a pretty good night really.
The guy that I was talking to about the veterans’ concert sent me a song from ‘his’ band
And today, my little Milo who’s got arthritis and is taking some more drugs for doggie Asthma was so fit at the end of a four mile walk that he ran ahead of us.
And disappeared altogether.
He got home about FOUR MINUTES ahead of us.
I was relieved and so fucking proud that the little bastard still wants adventures.
So back to winding down and politics.
Until I leave I won’t and can’t say who I work for, but I was approached by somebody on Friday who is part of a joint venture with Italy and Japan.
Their part of the company has money like you wouldn’t believe.
But very little expertise in what my teams do.
They want a data centre (two actually) to be built and managed by my team.
I’m going to go to war for my staff to secure their future.
I’m not winding down for the next six weeks at all.
‘Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the… little emotions. In… you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are.
So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did.
Would you like to know which of them were cowards?’
If you haven’t seen The Dark Knight, you really should.
A film that turns superhero mythology into something believable and terrifying and a scene that stays with you – how would YOU fare against that monster?
Fuck knows
Anyway, that’s not the point of this post, it’s not about bravery, imagined or real, it’s about the choices we have.
But if you want to stay with fiction, what about Galadriel ?
‘ I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel’
Given the opportunity to take everything, she steps back from something that would ultimately destroy her.
What about us though? How do we know if we have enough? What do we actually want?
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’ve given my notice at work and the last week or so has been weird.
(Mostly) younger people have asked if I’ve started to wind down, to be met with mild abuse, I’ll do that in my last couple of days, not with eight weeks to go.
I also talked to some people about starting something new within the wider company.
And I was tempted for a day or so. I was in London and London isn’t the real world.
It’s something I could do, I’m fucking good at that sort of thing and the lure of money is always there.
Then I got home.
I rescued a sparrowhawk from my hedge and watched the dogs play at sunset, I remembered that I WANT to go on a road trip and that I WANT to fix some things around the land.
I remembered why I’m quitting.
I’ve got more than enough money, my parents would be astonished at what I have – and if need be, I can downsize at some dim and distant point.
Or sell some gold or shares.
And quite frankly, the taxman can go and fuck himself – I’ve done enough.
So.
For my friends in the real world, the doglets and for me, corporate life ends on the 31st March.
I spent most of Thursday going through some real-world activities with my team, including public speaking training where I had to be the first presenter- just to make it all fair.
And..
They gave me thirty minutes to research, write and present on a subject of their choice.
Quantum Physics..
It was fine.
Then they had their turns and that was fine too.
I took them for a nice lunch upstairs at the Waterstones on Piccadilly, almost a perfect location, a huge bookstore with a restaurant and bar.
Then I took them through some more advanced commercial training around VERY difficult conversations.
We’ll be doing more before I leave and by the time we finish, nobody will be able to fuck with them.
On the same day, I got a formal invite to the book launch in Covent Garden next week of an old friend and we chatted.
I mentioned that I was writing a slightly bizarre management guide and I’ll now be chatting to her publisher at some point in the evening.
I then had dinner another evening of mild debauchery with The Smurf and when she left to go home, I had a nightcap in the bar of the Army and Navy Club.
Then it got interesting.
I was asked where I’d served – I never did but I did almost join the intelligence corps.
One of the people I was talking to had passed training for the paras but was injured before he could join the regiment.
We talked of various things and it turned out that we’d both been involved with the film Kajaki -( if you know my real name, you’ll see it in the credits towards the end ).
And we were both in awe of the genuine bravery of the unit’s medic. I’ve never heard anything like it.
After a while, he told me that he was trying to organise a concert at Wembley this year for WW2 veterans along the lines of Live Aid.
And I was sceptical, obviously.
Then he showed me his contacts list and some messages from quite a few people.
Including the managers of a couple of major rock bands.
He’s connected at almost every level and works for a hedge fund that has so much money that it’s almost incomprehensible.
I like him and believe him.
So we’ve swapped numbers and had a quick chat over the weekend and I’ve offered to help any way I can.
The idea of a concert for veterans is awesome.
I’m not passing this chance up.
So the future is still vague.
I’m still leaving, but life is there for the taking and I plan to have fun.
It’s just about getting dark on Sunday evening as I write this.
The dogs are gently snoring in front of the log-burner in the lounge and I’m in the kitchen multitasking.
I’m making a chicken stock for a soup tomorrow, I’m listening to music, drinking beer and writing this whilst half-looking out of the window at the hills and the sunset.
The frost is still on the ground and the last few years of living here have given me a feel for the slow change of the seasons that I’ve never had before.
With knowledge comes change.
I’m not the same man that I was, although he appears occasionally and I had a night of debauchery with an old friend that I call The Smurf on Thursday.
But it’s the slow changes that really matter.
Cairo is in for a minor op tomorrow and my whole diary will revolve around her, she’ll be terrified when I leave her at the Vet and she’ll be in paroxysms of ecstasy when she wakes up properly at home in my arms.
This is how life is supposed to be, I think.
So, having been asked whether I’m ‘on the bus’ at my annual review in December, it was a real pleasure to hand my notice in on the 2nd Jan.
It was even more fun to respond to an asinine question about whether I’d like to leave earlier with a storm of hard-learned legalese that had people panicking for a few hours.
I’ve broken the news to my team and apart from the dogs, they’re my focus for the next few months, I need to teach them some of the corporate dirty fighting that I’ve had to learn over decades and I’ll help them make their own decisions for the future.
As for me:
I have no plans at all really.
Nothing fixed.
I’ll do a road trip to see as many people as I can after things settle and I’ll bring Cairo with me.
I’m writing a ‘management’ book, but it’s nothing like normal books – I’m concentrating on real life rather than theory.
I’ll do more work on the house and grounds and I will probably do some short term engagements for some extra money
I won’t be a corporate drone and I’m not going to work for people with less morals than a bonobo ape.
We had lots and lots of gin and beers and a few bottles of wine with a curry.
We talked of friends past and friends passed.
And we laughed.
We laughed a lot.
We’d already made plans to meet up next month and have a house booked in Warwick for a few days next month.
He got enormously pissed and was apparently making boop, boop noises in bed, after waking his wife up after he crashed to the floor in a heap.
It’s the drunkest he’s been for twenty five years apparently
I’m very proud.
And as I sort of mentioned a while ago, I’m making changes at work although I’m not telling them til January and I plan to spend a lot more time seeing friends next year.
I’ve been working at the same place for just over six years now and I’ve scrupulously avoided the most senior roles, mostly because politics bores me.
My boss resigned in July and I made it clear that I wouldn’t be applying for his job, work-life balance and a new international team that I’d created being the two main reasons.
The third and unwritten reason being that I didn’t want to deal with all the crap that comes with being in charge.
Still.
Along with one of my best friends in the whole world, I shared the role until a suitable successor could be found.
Said successor hasn’t been in post for a month yet and I have to say, he’s made some decisions really easy for me.
My little Milo developed a really bad cough that I’m hoping will just be a consequence of aging and asthma – the drugs that he’s been on since Thursday have worked actual wonders and he seems better than he’s been for ages.
I’m fortunate in that I don’t need money, my pension pot is good, I have a previous pension that’s paying out and would cover most monthly bills.
And
I have no mortgage or debts.
Which is a quantum leap from my early life.
My parents lived in one of those third floor flats for some of my childhood.
From Hackney to Shropshire isn’t far but it’s more than a lifetime away for me, I’ve been to places that I never dreamed, seen wonders and horrors and lived what seems like multiple lives.
So it’s been an interesting feeling over the past few days as I’ve looked at emails from the new boss and seen the reactions from my colleagues.
He’s a disaster waiting to happen.
We can’t stop anything, corporations don’t work like that.
But I can do something.
We have our first in-person leadership meeting next week.
I have a plan and many, many years of experience of working with people like this.
I’m going to have a little fun.
And.
By April, I’ll be doing something else.
Something that gives me some more time to do the things that actually matter.
When you’re very young, you don’t think about your own mortality, or if you do imagine your own death it’s probably tied in with some sort of romanticism, with a heroic ending.
That’s not the case for ninety nine point something of us, our time probably won’t be decided by us even if we’d like to think it will.
Just to make something clear here.
I’m not afraid to die.
At all.
I can say that from a position of having had my heart reset a number of times, the first time was a bit scary as you’re giving yourself over to the possibility of death and lying down to do it.
It was easier each time after that.
An internal flight from Edinburgh to Stansted was once so turbulent that the stewardesses were crying. I surprised myself by just relaxing and thinking that I’d had a good life if that was the end.
It wasn’t though. I’ve been all over the world since then, seen ancient wonders and glittering cities, played games with a Hindu God and dared the elements to take me while I stood in the sea off Thailand during a monsoon lightning storm.
I’ve also seen banal, low level Evil close up and tried to ensure that it didn’t win ( I think it was a draw).
In the past few years, I’ve adopted a couple of dogs and they’ve given me a more simplistic, live for today worldview and I try not to worry too much about the outside world.
But, fuck me, the outside world makes it difficult.
This week, the UK Government made assisted dying legal.
Or, they made assisted suicide and assisted killing legal.
This was something that had huge amounts of funding and support, along with ads showing a woman dancing for joy, more like an ad for feminine care products than actually killing yourself.
Our wonderful MPs had five hours of debate and passed this thing through.
Any concerns have been dismissed and anyone showing concern on social media has seen the same sort of attacks from seemingly coordinated low follower, almost dormant accounts that are designed to suppress dissent – as used during Covid.
This country has followed the same path as the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
‘But there’ll be safeguards’ say the people behind the bill.
Yeah right.
Unless you’re a proxy – the below is from the act as passed at second reading this week
So a proxy can be somebody who has power of attorney over a vulnerable person, is named in their will and can now legally FUCKING KILL THEM.
None of our social services systems are linked up and crimes can and will be left uninvestigated by a police force if the perpetrator doesn’t live in their area.
That’s if anybody investigates an assisted death at all. It’ll all be legal.
I’ve watched a couple of friends die recently, they wanted more time even though they were so frail and the system tried to give them that time.
What if the finances don’t stack up for that? How much pressure will be applied to the already broken down and vulnerable ‘terminal’ patients? How many people will sign something they don’t understand?
How many poor bastards are going to have a last moment of lucidity as somebody kills them?
It’s a problem though.
We all want to die with dignity, perhaps heroically or romantically- just not in a chair or bed covered in our own shit.
So I want to hang on as long as I can, maybe Musk’s Neuralink will help with some of the problems of aging and dementia so that our minds don’t go and the decision will be truly our own.
Maybe the science fiction of Altered Carbon will be realised in our lifetime and death will be a pause in between bodies.
What happens to our souls – if we have them is an issue for that time.
What I do know is that killing people for convenience or finance reasons will erode whatever souls the medical people who do this have, that they’ll be indistinguishable from concentration camp doctors.
So – what can you do?
Make sure you have a will and that it’s difficult to change should you fall into the hands of those parasitic scum who’d wish you harm or those of ‘Health Professionals’ – make it clear that you have a codeword or phrase captured elsewhere that must be correct before anything can happen.
For me, I hope that if and when I do choose to die, it’ll truly be my choice and that I’ll hold true to the things that I believe deep down.
That I’ll remember that I once believed this by Tecumseh to be the model for my own death.
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
That I’ll go with the question of ‘what’s next? on my lips and that I’ll be ready for whatever that is.
Genuinely, I’ve seen things in the past few weeks that make me question whether I’m locked up somehow and imagining my whole life.
But.
Before we go there, how do you feel about this country?
This England.
If you feel that it’s a hotbed of intolerance, racial hatred and the home of slavery, can I suggest that you fuck off somewhere else.
If you’re of recent immigrant stock, go back to wherever you or your recent ancestors escaped from.
If you’re white middle class, just fuck off.
Go somewhere else.
I don’t care where.
I worked and lived in India for almost a year and all cultures aren’t equal.
No running water in some major towns, people shitting in doorways, corruption that was so ingrained that almost nothing could be done without bribery.
For a large part of that year, I lived here:
It was built on the site of an old Dutch fort from 1720.
And the English took it by force, from small ships that had travelled thousands of miles.
We were awesome.
We brought language and a way of life that was far superior to what existed almost anywhere else in the world.
We stopped Napoleon dead.
Twice.
We held the line against the nazis when all others had crumbled or stayed neutral.
We ended slavery at huge cost.
And not a day goes by that I look at this county and think of what we could be, not what we’ve become.
Pro-terrorist filth fill our streets every weekend, almost every council in the country is near bankruptcy and our tax burden just went up again.
And for what?
So that the real cost of illegal immigration can be buried somewhere, that the costs on the balance sheet are listed as ‘social care’, that rape and murder are now so commonplace as to be almost not worth reporting.
And our government(s) piss in our faces and tell us that it’s all our fault.
£22Bn for ‘Co2 capture’ – the thing that trees do.
The trees that are chopped down to build solar farms that are effectively useless at this time of year.
£11Bn for climate support for other countries.
While our taxes go up.
Inheritance Tax on farms, the same farms that are on a knife edge year in, year out.
Because land somehow equals money, which equals tax that we have to increase because REDACTED.
Three little girls were murdered brutally in the summer by somebody who also downloaded an Islamist terrorist manual.
Oh yes, he also produced one of the most deadly toxins in the world.
And we were told this in the past week, while the same government who called normal people ‘far right thugs’ and imprisoned them for some hurty words knew all along and actively covered it up rather than treating the populace like adults.
And the American government murdered a squirrel and a raccoon.
We have to stem the tide of this shit, government overreach and coercive control of the populace isn’t a dystopian fantasy any more, it’s becoming the norm.
From now on:
I will not blindly comply, I will do the best that I can for my friends and neighbours, I will call out anybody trying to run my country down because they’re too fucking stupid to see how bad it’s becoming as a result of their words and actions.
It’s easy to think that everything is shit, there are so many things wrong with the country and the world that you could be forgiven for seeing that a bleak existence is all we have to look forward to.
But I just watched something live.
On the phone that I’m typing this.
The same phone that’s controlling streaming music that’s playing while I cook chilli, drink a raspberry vodka martini made from my own raspberries and look at the ancient hills beyond.
I just watched science fiction become real.
A booster rocket in America just docked with uncanny precision into a massive metal arm.
This was impossible when I was growing up.
But so many things were.
And now we take them for granted.
I don’t travel for work or go to an office unless I have to, I sit in my own office that’s around 30 metres from the house, with music playing over the same steaming system and I can do four or five things at once.
If I look backwards, my grandfather was a blacksmith and he made me a bookcase from what would have been an amazingly expensive wood for him at the time.
The mahogany that he made it from looks as new today as it did fifty years ago and he’s the only person from my past that I’d like to talk to.
He taught me about the balance needed in nature, about how to pick nettles with your bare fingers and how to look at the world with open eyes when you can.
He also made sharp things, the apple doesn’t fall that far.
I’d love to talk to him and show him the world that I live in, I’d love to tell him about all the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen.
I can’t.
But I can pause and think about it all though.
So….
What’s all that wonderment business about?
It’s a recurring phrase from a film called the Great Northfield Minnesota Raid as said by Cole Younger ( played by Cliff Robertson) –
‘Ain’t that a wonderment’
And here we are.
Growing up, I never imagined that I’d chat to people that I hadn’t met, send and receive photos and LEARN SO FUCKING MUCH EVERY DAY just by using a device didn’t exist until my 30s.
Or that an artificial intelligence could generate a picture like this within 10 seconds.
On the same phone
Or…..that I’d have a robot lawnmower that needs to be rescued when it’s icy.
Or that I’d be being watched by a dog that wants to go outside – and that at 16:33 on a Sunday afternoon, I can take a photo of her…
The drains were cleared twice a year, potholes were an occasional annoyance, councils employed their own staff and they mostly got the job done unless they were striking.
But our bins got emptied, the streets were clean and in the poorest areas of London where I grew up, the oldest people still cleaned their own doorsteps religiously and many of them had a key on a string so that the milkman or his son ( me) could put the milk inside.
Policemen were large gruff creatures and they walked a beat with cars in reserve, you fucked with them at your own cost.
The NHS had a huge number of community hospitals and you could get local treatment for minor illnesses.
Our army and navy, although diminished, could fight and win a war in South America and the RAF could send a message that was undeniable.
If you can remember this, you’re getting old.
Nothing has worked like that for a very long time.
Our councils are nearly bankrupt as they try to cope with the sheer amount of migrants being forced on them.
So care suffers, particularly for the mentally ill, because some fucking genius decided to let ‘the community’ care for them.
The old suffer, fewer buses and services, more hostile young men fighting in the streets outside their houses and flats while they stay quiet and hope that the problem of the day blows over.
A politicised police service colludes with community leaders’ as to how they will police the streets.
The UK government gives 11 billion pounds to other countries to fight climate change or some such horseshit – knowing that the money will be stolen and funnelled back into a banking system that’s the only winner.
Our electricity is the most expensive in the whole developed world and we’re constantly lectured about our co2 emissions by rich scum and elected filth who fly everywhere and travel first class.
Our brand new, shiny Prime Minister, who lectured the country for years in opposition now appears to be the creature of a billionaire.
But.
As of a few days time from now, you have to register with the government if you own one single fucking chicken.
That’s not a joke, I wish it were
Here’s the thing though.
One of my very few, actual friends disagrees with me about almost everything, particularly politics and regulations.
I was walking the doglets earlier today and asked her if she’s registered her flock ( she rescues chickens) – and I was a little surprised.
‘No. I suspect my anti-establishment mate Thunderdog may have some views, but I’m VERY NERVOUS about registering them. I am a personal small holder with a protected coop and I don’t let mine free range in winter or if there is a bird flu outbreak, to keep them safe. I am very wary of Defra.’
And then the kicker.
The thing that I’d personally been thinking about.
‘Although one of my neighbours is a cunt and will rat me out, no doubt.’
So.
Do you remember when we just lived without thinking about whether our neighbour would turn us in for being against the current thing?
I do.
I don’t know how we get back there but if we don’t, it’s going to get bloody.
I know what side I’m on and it’s not the fucking Chicken Stasi
smallthunderdog 