Poignancy

All Saints Day. The day after Halloween. You could tell here in Madrid, if only because some of the people we saw had clearly not finished celebrating from the night before.

Halloween revellers in the Madrid metro
Heading home late the morning after

We were in Madrid because that’s where my company’s offices are. My ex-company. That ‘ex’ is the reason I had to visit the office at all. Because, while an event that should have happened on Halloween didn’t, one that shouldn’t have, did.

31 October was the latest date that Britain was to leave the EU. This was absolutely clear. To Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, it was a matter of ‘do or die’. Indeed, he said he would rather die in a ditch than accept that he had to get a further extension to the Brexit timetable.

But he didn’t do Brexit by the deadline he set. Nor did he die. A ditch? No trace of one in his existence yet. It’s enough to make one wonder whether one can entirely trust his word. Many tell me that you know that Boris is lying by the fact that he’s breathing. However, as my American friends can no doubt testify, you just don’t get pathological liars leading major nations.

Do you?

So no Brexit. Or at least not yet.

On the other hand, the event that wasn’t supposed to happen was my brusque and involuntary departure from the company. Halloween was the day of my latest redundancy. But at least, on this occasion, I’m going out on a high. This was undoubtedly the best job I’ve had, with the best boss and the best team. What’s more, a great many people with whom the team worked have written to say how much they’re going to miss us. My quarrel isn’t with anyone I know but only with people who haven’t the faintest idea about what the team was doing. Just a pity that, despite knowing so little, they were the ones taking the decisions.

Good memories accompany my departure, and contacts I hope will endure, with former colleagues who are also good friends.

We took advantage of our presence in Madrid to see our sons and their partners and, in particular, our new granddaughter Matilda.

Matilda appreciating life

It was on our way to one of those visits that I was struck by a statue near the metro station we were using. It’s dedicated to the “Atocha lawyers”. They were members of a group involved in the defence of workers’ rights in the early years of democracy, after the death of the dictator Franco. On 24 January 1977, far right terrorists attacked them, leaving five dead and four injured.

Monument to the Atocha Lawyers

The main targets of the attackers were trades union leaders from the Communist Party, at that time still banned. Ironically, its legalisation was accelerated by the attack. That’s the response we should all have to terrorism: when our rights are attacked, we should respond by strengthening of those rights. That’s not always the case: since the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in England, the momentum for Brexit, which she loathed, has if anything increased.

The statue in Madrid is a moving reminder of how costly it can sometimes be to defend rights. And how important.

Equally touching was a pair of paintings I saw in one of my favourite galleries, the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The first was a portrait of Quappi in a Pink Jumper, full of affection but also of forceful personality. 

Powerful, intriguing portrait by Beckmann
Quappi in a Pink Jumper

I hadn’t previously come across the painter, Max Beckmann. He was German, but he died in the US, and the painting was dated 1932-1934. Which places it in just the time Hitler was coming to power.

Max Beckmann in one of his many self-portraits

Later, I looked him up. When Hitler denounced ‘degenerate art’ in 1937, many of Beckmann’s canvasses were seized and some were included in the degenerate art exhibition of that year. He fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where he somehow managed to survive the war and German occupation, in the course of which the attempt was made to force him into the German Army, even though he was 60.

In 1948, they left Europe for the US where he renewed a successful career not just as an artist, but as a teacher. Far too short a career, as longstanding heart disease killed him in 1950 at the age of 66 (my own age, so I can testify that it’s far too young to die).

According to his widow, he had been on his way to see one of his paintings in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And who was that widow? Why, the Quappi of the painting. It seems that the affection it radiates isn’t simply art. It reflects a real sentiment.

Degenerate art? How could the failed painter Hitler have any idea of what was good or what wasn’t? And what a disgraceful abuse of power it was to oppress men like Beckmann, as it was to murder the Atocha lawyers.

The US gained by Germany’s attempt to crush Beckmann. As the Spanish Communist Party benefited from the right-wing attempt on some of its leaders. A lesson worth remembering at a time when many in America, or Britain, seem indifferent to the value of tolerating opposing views to one’s own.

My Halloween trip was full of poignant moments. Leaving a much-loved job. Seeing some much-loved family members. And admiring two works of art dedicated to the protection of much-loved freedoms.

A lightning strike in the same place. For the fourth time

The lightning bolt of redundancy has struck me again.

Whoever said that lightning never strikes the same place twice?
Me, it’s struck four times. 
Though on the first three occasions, I may have been a bit to blame

For the fourth time. But this is the last, as now I’m going to head into retirement. At nearly 67, it’s late enough, I’m unlikely to find another job and I’m not especially keen on the idea of undergoing all that stuff again.

Ironically, on this occasion I feel entirely blameless. On the others, I may well have contributed a little to my own discomfiture.

The first time, I probably made it too obvious that I had nothing but contempt for an incompetent at the top of the company, not weighing enough the fact that he was an old friend of the owner and the godfather of at least one of his children. Being more polite might not have saved me, but not being polite enough certainly made sure I was buried.

The second time, I was altogether too keen on transforming our rather lousy main product into something we could be proud of. But it really was terribly bad and the cost of improving it much too high. The owners’ aim was to show a profit, sell the company, make a lot of money, and forget about the quality of the product. They were probably right, because after a wave of redundancies they did just that. The product remained lousy and has now disappeared into well-deserved obscurity – I don’t think anyone’s using it any more – but the money’s real and in the shareholders’ bank accounts.

The third time, my division’s chief was one of those glad-handing incompetents, always ready with a smile, a cheerful word and an encouraging thought, but who presided over an organisation that set itself ridiculous targets that it systematically failed to meet. I should have gone several months earlier, but instead I just coasted, doing far less work than I would have had I been able to work up any enthusiasm, until I hit the buffers of redundancy.

This time, though, it was the reverse. I worked hard, and the work went well. I built a little team, seven strong, with representatives in seven countries on three continents, though most of them in Europe. They were great people, an awe-inspiring mix of clinicians and sales people and customer support specialists, who bounced ideas off each other to produce still better notions and then, and this is quite unusual, put them into practice.

Every single one of them spoke at least two languages, some more.

They were – are – talented, intelligent, enthusiastic. Not by accident. My boss, certainly the best I’ve worked for in my long career, spent time with me making sure we had the right people, and freed ourselves of others who were just as bright and talented but showed that our type of work ultimately didn’t suit them.

The team never stood still either, by which I don’t just mean they were always working, but that they were always looking for the next way to work better. Right at the end, we were beginning to explore a completely different way of selling the product which, I believe, would have been far more successful. It’s a tribute to the team’s approach that the various sales teams with which we were working reacted with great enthusiasm to these ideas for change.

This time, I’d done nothing to attract the baleful god of lightning to strike me down. This time, it was merely cold accounting: we were expensive and that looked bad in a profit and loss statement. So the axe fell on seven of the eight of us, including me.

I won’t pretend that there’s no pain in suffering this fate. Redundancy feels like rejection, of being regarded as of little worth, and that hurts. It would also have been satisfying to work on a few more years as I planned. On the other hand, my soon to be ex-colleagues have been uniformly supportive in their comments to me, which certainly mitigates any pain. Above all, I’m happy to retire, especially when leaving on a high. And a high it’s certainly been.

The last nearly three years have been the best of my working life. I’ve had the best boss, and the best colleagues, working on the best product. I have absolutely no complaints about any of that, and I’m simply grateful to have had the chance to work in that environment.

That’s another of the reasons I don’t even want to look for another job. Even if I found one, it would be a let-down.

Indeed, I’m even going out on a high within the high. My last presentation to a customer was exactly the kind I’ve always longed to give. It was well-received, but I gave it on content I’d known little about the day before, until one of my team members briefed me on it. She explained what I needed to present, how I should present it, and the medical rationale behind it.

It was another powerful example of the value of teamwork. I was covering her while she was at another meeting. And she gave me the material I needed to do it well.

I have a great launchpad from which to head into retirement. I look forward to it as there are so many things I’ve always wanted to do and couldn’t. Now I can.

Watch this space.

Sunset in our local woods: not a bad place to spend time
And not a bad metaphor for where I want to head next

A trip down Memory Lane is only as pleasant as the memories it conjures up

It wasn’t until I arrived at the hotel where I’m spending the night that I realised that I’d been here before. Not to stay, but to present a piece of software I’d been working on with a team of colleagues. A piece of software that wasn’t quite ready.

Nothing unusual about that. I’ve known exceedingly few software projects that complete on time. I even came up with an addition to the traditional grammar to cover the problem, a new tense I called the ‘future present’. You use when you say something like “the system does this” when what you really mean is “it will do that thing long before the time you slow lot get around to deciding to order it.”

This isn’t a lie. I was firmly convinced that the software would do all we claimed for it and more. Sadly, I’m not certain my audience shared my conviction. Nor did the executives of the company, though many of the colleagues working on the project with me certainly did.

Sadly, both they and I turned out to be cruelly misled. We never completed the project. I had naively believed that the owners of the little company for which I worked were keen on delivering a high-quality system to their clients. In fact, in a perfect illustration of all that the Left denounces in capitalism, they were only interested in maximising the gains they could make by selling the company.

The company’s systems, of which my project was only the latest module, had started off pretty damn smart. But time had passed, technology had progressed, so what had at one time been dynamically innovative had eventually become old-hat, and been overtaken.

What’s more, it suffered from the problem that afflicts a great many ageing systems. It had been tinkered with far more than was good for it. So bits had been added to correct problems or to improve functions, but no one had bothered to document any of those changes or check whether they might, in fact, solve a problem in one area but create a far worse one somewhere else.

By the time I came to work on it, it was a colossal mass of what is technically referred to as spaghetti logic, a maze of interwoven functions which it was beyond the capacity of the human mind ever fully to understand. Somebody wanted a button to be orange over here? No problem. We’d make the necessary changes. And only afterwards would we discover that we could no longer enter a date over there.

Fixing all this was a huge task that would have involved the company owners in a considerable investment, and a delay in realising their capital by selling their shares to someone else.

The far simpler solution was to fire a whole bunch of us and sell the company as it was, with its products as they were. Of course, they didn’t call it firing. We were made redundant but, believe me, anyone who’s been made redundant knows that it doesn’t feel any different from being fired.

You’d think that a company with a piece of software that really didn’t work any more wouldn’t fetch a high price. You’d be wrong. The executives of bigger companies like nothing more than buying smaller ones. It gives them the sense of having far bigger external genitals than the people around them. I think that’s even true of the female executives, despite the obvious biological problem that their genitals are internal. Don’t ask me to explain.

So the executives of the company that had just fired me and my colleagues sold it for a princely sum, making themselves really quite wealthy. That included the laziest executive I’ve ever come across, a man capable of disappearing for weeks at a time and doing nothing useful even when he returned, who actually made more money than anyone because he held the most shares.

The software module I was working on disappeared without trace. As far as I know, no part of the company’s software is still in use anywhere. But a few people made a lot of money while a few others lost their jobs.

Glorious setting for a hotel

Still. The hotel’s in a great location. And I’m happy with my comfortable room.

Freedom or rootlessness

It was a strange feeling setting the address for my mother’s flat into my car’s GPS for the last time. Even stranger turning up there and seeing it completely bare, just a space to be filled, without any of the jumble that had previously given it character and expressed her own.

They were ambivalent feelings. Once you’ve travelled the same route two or three hundred times, it’s a relief to know you won’t have to do it again. But the sense of relief is tinged by the sadness of the end of an era, when the one person you knew before you were even born has gone for good.

Good to be spared the drive. But I’ll miss the lunches

The death of my mother cut one of only two ties that kept me in Britain. My wife Danielle and I had decided we would, in time, move to Spain for her retirement and the rest of my working life – my job is one I can do from anywhere in Europe and, fortunately, I took the opportunity to take French nationality fifteen years ago, as an insurance policy against Brexit, which already seemed likely all that time ago.

The other tie to Britain was Danielle’s job. By coincidence, she was caught shortly after my mother’s death by the latest wave of redundancies in her company.

It wasn’t a fate unique to herself. A few dozen of her colleagues are also going, and two other companies on her business estate are laying off, while a fourth, from Germany, is moving its entire operation back home. Brexiters are always telling me that leaving the EU would free Britain to forge a powerful new presence on the world stage. If that’s so, it seems that we’re moving a long way back to get a runup to that seductive leap forward.

And that’s before Brexit has even happened.

With Danielle’s redundancy, the last constraint on our leaving has been removed. We’re free now, free to enjoy that freedom of movement that the EU guarantees and Britain, anxious to exclude immigrants, has rejected. Freedom feels good.

But the other side of the coin is a sense of rootlessness. For all its insularity and inclination to look backwards at a distant past that never happened, I liked my country. While my mother was alive, I had family here. While Danielle had her job, we both had livings here. Before Brexit, it kept its xenophobes in check.

Now those factors that formed something of an anchor have gone. Of course, the important thing with an anchor is not simply to drag it and end up adrift in increasingly rough seas. As we prepare for Spain, I like to think that instead we’ve deliberately hauled our anchor up, to set a new and more hopeful course.

After all, Spain is currently showing a much firmer attachment to liberal values than Britain. Spain is taking in migrants rather than leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean. Spain recently brought down an incompetent Conservative government to replace it with a Centre-Left one that might do rather better. A course that leads there strikes me as a good one to follow.

Our first step on that way is to put the house on the market. That, too, is a little ironic. We spent quite a lot just a year ago to make it far more comfortable. We won’t get the money back. We just have to take comfort from our enjoyment of a more pleasant house for the best part of a year. We have a track record of doing that: we spent a small fortune doing up a flat in Germany before moving back to England.

We’re far from alone in deciding that it’s time to move. The ‘For Sale’ or ‘To Let’ signs have been mushrooming all around our neighbourhood, though more especially in the streets with the cheaper housing. That’s where many immigrants from Poland or Eastern Europe live, and I wonder if it’s they who are going. After all, they can hardly feel entirely at ease in the foreigner-hostile environment Brexit has created.

'For Sale' or 'To Let' all the way down the street

So much property on the market could make selling our place more difficult. And time’s running out. With a hard Brexit looking increasingly likely, I can imagine that getting out after next March will prove far more difficult still.

It’s a shame. Britain was fun when it was more open, when so many – never everyone, of course, but many all the same – revelled in its multi-culturalism. It’s sad to see it declining, Trump-like, into a state that prefers walls to bridges. Walls that too many Brits think they can hide behind to keep the world out.

The Brexit illusion from which, sadly, they’re likely to suffer a painful awakening.

End of an era, end of an error

It’s strange to see a ‘To Let’ sign suddenly sprout outside the house where you live – it feels slightly as though the ground is being cut out from under your feet.

The reality, of course, is just that we’re moving. Last weekend was my last as a resident of Stafford, and like most last weekends, it was dominated by cardboard boxes, being filled one by one and clogging up our living space.

What shall we miss about Stafford? One place, certainly: magical in its wildness, Cannock Chase with its deer and foxes, with its wide open high ground in contrast to its lush wooded valleys and gentle streams.

Far more than that, though, we shall miss people. Stafford was a surprisingly friendly place, where people you meet almost aways seem to have a smile and cheerful greeting. At the office, I enjoyed the company of colleagues who as well as being competent and hard working, were friendly and fun. And we were extraordinarily lucky with our neighbours. We shall miss them badly, and I very much hope that they meant it when they told us they would take up our invitation to visit us in our new place.

For us it’s the end of an era. For me, professionally, it’s also the end of an error. It’s received wisdom these days that mergers and acquisitions don’t do much for businesses, often being little more than a way for the acquiring company to show its virility and adding little or nothing in the way of value. Sadly, that seems illustrated by my stay in Stafford.

Some years ago I was working with eight other people in a tiny little company in which, when we weren’t fighting about how badly we were doing commercially, we had a great deal of fun. We had customers we enjoyed knowing, products we were proud of and projects that gave us exciting challenges. Unfortunately, the rows kept getting louder because the one thing we didn’t have was anything like the number of sales we needed.

Then we got a call. An old friend and former colleague contacted us from a company that might be interested in acquiring us. It was as though the 6th Cavalry had just come over the hill. Within a few months we had been absorbed. The acquiring company got six of the nine staff, with whatever skills we had, our thirty clients with their maintenance payments and some reasonable products.

Unfortunately, it all started to unravel within months. The first blow was that the old friend who had launched the acquisition process was made redundant. Then the users we had brought with us began to wake up to the fact that the new company was not going to be doing any work on the products they had bought. They began to drift away.

Next the attrition on the six staff started. One by one, voluntarily or pushed, we left. It was my turn when I was made redundant this summer, most courteously but nonetheless firmly escorted to the exit.

That still left one of the six in place, but I did a reference for her last week. Since I rate her highly, what I wrote isn’t going to make her new employer review the decision to take her on.

So in a few weeks none of us will be left. A handful of clients have stuck around, but the products have vanished. A chapter will have closed.

Not that I’m complaining. The acquisition gave me over four years of a good salary and my severance terms were more than fair. The sad thing is how little I was able to contribute. Thanks to a talented team, I was involved in the launch of one new application of which I’m really proud, but so many other things I got started and had to leave unfinished.

So this was another acquisition that delivered far less than it might. An episode that started with great hope left me at its close with a lot of regrets. The end of an error indeed.

These are thoughts I need to put behind me. It’s sad to move away, but it may be the only way to move on.

For me, it’s time.

The end of redundancy

Sometimes it may seem worrying that one feels ambivalent about so many things. However, when you think that nothing is usually either wholly good or wholly bad, ambivalence seems only natural.

I’ve now completed two days in a new job. Since it’s in London and it’s going to be a while before we can move, I’m having to do an hour and twenty minutes each way by train, plus travelling at each end. As I want to walk the dog before I go, I have to be up at 5:00 to be sure to catch the 6:53 train. After two years of living a five-minute car ride or eight-minute cycle ride from work, this represents something of a shock to the system.

That’s the downside of finding work again.

The upside is no longer being unemployed. It’s strange how bad I felt about being out of work. Funnily enough, it was when walking the dog that I found it most painful. Frequently, I’d meet people out with their own dogs. If it was early, I’d realise they were getting the walking done before going to work, which gave me an unpleasant sense of exclusion from the world of gainful employment. If it was late, and I got a pleasant greeting from the pensioners, housewives or househusbands, I felt bad about being among them with no legitimate reason.

Either way, I felt bad about it. The luxury of time off was spoiled by the feelings that go with redundancy. After all, ‘redundant’ seems such an awful expression: it suggests that you were surplus to requirements, which doesn’t do a lot for your self-esteem.

Now of course I meet dog walkers at half past five in the morning, and get the warm glow of shared solidarity between people who are not just working but having to get out there on a limb in order to do their work. You know, the kind of insufferable types whose very behaviour seems to be saying ‘I really have to earn my salary. What about you?’

At core, my problem was all to do with the difference between heart and mind. In my mind, I was sure I wouldn’t be out of work long. Unfortunately, I had no idea where a new job was going to come from, so my heart was frequently subject to attacks of anxiety – even, occasionally, at 2:00 in the morning, of panic.

In my heart, I felt terrible about having been regarded as dispensable. In my mind, of course, I’ve always known that no-one in a company is indispensable, that I was no more essential than anyone else. I knew too that being made redundant wasn’t my fault, but simply the response to a financial problem. In fact, the wrong response, as it happens, in my not particularly humble view.

But in my heart I knew that perhaps I was at least in part to blame. ‘Telling the truth to power’ is always presented as a virtue – I remember an episode of The West Wing when one character asks another, ‘do you have what it takes to tell the truth to power?’ Well, I’ve always gone out of my way to tell the truth to power. The trouble arises when power doesn’t agree that what you’re saying is the truth, or recognises the truth but just feels uncomfortable about it. In which case insisting on your point of view, as I do, doesn’t make you courageous or principled, just a pain in the backside. The kind of irritation that power would far rather be shot of.

Teach me to believe anything I hear in a soap.


Anyway, feeling that perhaps I’d brought my own misfortune on my own head didn’t make me feel any better about it.

You can be absolutely sure that getting up at five and travelling four hours a day is a small price to be free of all that.