There's a lunchtime Step meeting in Covent Garden Thursday about half a mile from where I work. I go there about two weeks out of four, stay for about forty minutes and get back to the office before the lunch hour is up. It's like a lot of meetings: the usual suspects say much the same things, which is okay if they're a good act but not if they have chips on their shoulders, and occasionally someone shares something honest and emotional that reminds me why I go to meetings. I don't say much and a lot of the time I doze a little – I wake up before six in the morning for god's sake.
It was Step Seven - “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings” - and the speaker said a couple of things that grabbed my attention. The first was that he regarded it as a Step to take every day, not just the once. The moment he said so, it made immediate sense: having a whole heap of shortcomings, it would be a good idea to remind myself to leave them behind every morning, to remind myself of what they are and to watch out for them being triggered. I'd always thought of Step Seven as a one-time thing that worked out over a while, rather as Steps Four and Five do, but I'd never been entirely convinced. The idea that I remind myself every day of the “stuff” that's still lurking deep inside, masquerading as “who I am”, and so reminded reduce the odds of tripping up over it during the day, well, that's a good one.
The second thing he said was about being “right-sized”, a term of (Recovery) art that means we have abandoned grandiose and inflated ideas of ourselves, what we're entitled to, what we can expect by way of treatment from others and other unrealistic ideas that often compensate for being slagged off for no reason when we were younger. Needless to say, for most alcoholics, getting right-sized is mostly an exercise in reduction and (gentle) deflation. Not for all of us, and not in every aspect of ourselves. We may be under-valuing our abilities and character in some things, and so, for instance, being underpaid because we don't ask for what we're really worth on the market. Thinking too little of yourself is as “wrong-sizing” as thinking too much. Getting right-sized means getting a realistic view of ourselves, and being down on ourselves is a shortcoming as much as being grandiose. So if I can sort out what opinions I have as a compensation mechanism and what I have because certain people important to me behaved like I'd never amount to anything, and correct both, I'm on my way. And that is Step Seven – every day because that stuff is buried deep.
Friday, 7 August 2009
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Where Do I Go Next?
So it's August, which is a good time to think about where I want to go after The Retail Bank. I accepted a role graded below my current one – it was that or be thrown in the internal clearing house – and while I have a couple of years on my current salary, they can impose a pay cut after that unless I've worked myself back into their good graces. The Retail Bank won't be allowed to remain in its current condition by either the EU, the Conservatives or the various government authorities who were told to shut up and let the deal go through. So there will be another re-organisation within, I'm betting, the year. The short odds are on a floatation of The Scottish Bit.
So I have some time to do this right. I can't leave it too long or the CV will start to degrade a little.
My first thought is that the roles I want are “hands-on”. At and above a certain level, which I'm at, in The Retail Bank and I suspect a lot of other companies, most of what you do is about making the organisation change or do something. You attend meetings, work the bureaucracy, fill in online forms for permissions to do this and that, persuade people to do things for you and most of all, try to get IT and Operations to do stuff for free – or as part of “BAU”. You make Powerpoint presentations and occasionally crunch a few numbers. You don't learn any transferable skills or anything interesting. To me, this isn't real work and it isn't interesting: why do I want to clutter up my head with the workings of an old and clunky system? Someone has to, but it isn't me.
And it gets worse. Because it's a bank, you're working with poorly-documented old systems that no-one understands and consequently everyone is afraid to touch. It takes a huge effort in IT and Operations just to keep the normal business going and of course they downsized several times so they don't have spare people to assign to projects. So any change that the commercial people want to make has to be prioritised, assessed, lobbied for and ultimately referred to the unspoken pecking order. (In The Retail Bank, that's Branches, Telephone Sales, Current Accounts, Credit Cards, Credit Risk, Audit, Operational Risk and Personal Loans – in that order.) So there are a whole bunch of roles which amount to little more than “internal lobbyist”. If you're lobbing for a function towards the bottom of the pecking order, you are on to a loser. Another way of describing this I've used to two agents today about the same job is “silo-runner”, because the organisation is divided into silos and they want you to run between them and dodge the shells. One agent burst out laughing at that description.
I don't want to be a silo-runner. I want to do stuff. At heart I'm an engineer: I want to be designing things or processes, creating, solving problems, using tools and learning stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'll punch the air when I've used one part of the bureaucracy to beat another part, but I wouldn't want to do that for a living. Read this and this to get a pretty good picture of me, then add some charm and a few more social skills.
It's not about the size of the organisation - though I keep thinking it is. It's about the role. Large organisations do tend to have a larger number of silo-runner roles described in the most preposterous language. I was sent one recently that asked for an “acclaimed specialist” in pricing. I will take the mickey out of that one later. Small organisations don't go in for the BS but do expect a lot for the money, and the really small ones are often set up by entrepreneurs who realise they have no technical understanding, need rescuing but want to resent you for it because they thought it was going to be an easy buck.
What I don't want to do is have my choices dictated by the bad times I've had at The Retail Bank. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in large, broken down companies, but that's not all large companies (is it?). Am I sure I want to go on doing a lot of VBA and expanding to Visual Studio? I do programming when there isn't enough brain candy in the business side of a job, not because I really dig programming. I don't rush home to learn more cool tricks on my Mac. Yet if there ever was a computer you could spend a long time learning cool tricks on, it's a Mac: it's Unix, Objective-C, it's Ruby and others, and I should be editing my own videos by now. You see what I mean? I'm making decisions not based on what I want or am interested in, but on what stops me from going barmy. If I could find an interesting management job that wasn't lobbying, Powerpoint and silo-running, I'd be interested and maybe not want to program.
It's August, I have a job and I don't have to rush this.
So I have some time to do this right. I can't leave it too long or the CV will start to degrade a little.
My first thought is that the roles I want are “hands-on”. At and above a certain level, which I'm at, in The Retail Bank and I suspect a lot of other companies, most of what you do is about making the organisation change or do something. You attend meetings, work the bureaucracy, fill in online forms for permissions to do this and that, persuade people to do things for you and most of all, try to get IT and Operations to do stuff for free – or as part of “BAU”. You make Powerpoint presentations and occasionally crunch a few numbers. You don't learn any transferable skills or anything interesting. To me, this isn't real work and it isn't interesting: why do I want to clutter up my head with the workings of an old and clunky system? Someone has to, but it isn't me.
And it gets worse. Because it's a bank, you're working with poorly-documented old systems that no-one understands and consequently everyone is afraid to touch. It takes a huge effort in IT and Operations just to keep the normal business going and of course they downsized several times so they don't have spare people to assign to projects. So any change that the commercial people want to make has to be prioritised, assessed, lobbied for and ultimately referred to the unspoken pecking order. (In The Retail Bank, that's Branches, Telephone Sales, Current Accounts, Credit Cards, Credit Risk, Audit, Operational Risk and Personal Loans – in that order.) So there are a whole bunch of roles which amount to little more than “internal lobbyist”. If you're lobbing for a function towards the bottom of the pecking order, you are on to a loser. Another way of describing this I've used to two agents today about the same job is “silo-runner”, because the organisation is divided into silos and they want you to run between them and dodge the shells. One agent burst out laughing at that description.
I don't want to be a silo-runner. I want to do stuff. At heart I'm an engineer: I want to be designing things or processes, creating, solving problems, using tools and learning stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'll punch the air when I've used one part of the bureaucracy to beat another part, but I wouldn't want to do that for a living. Read this and this to get a pretty good picture of me, then add some charm and a few more social skills.
It's not about the size of the organisation - though I keep thinking it is. It's about the role. Large organisations do tend to have a larger number of silo-runner roles described in the most preposterous language. I was sent one recently that asked for an “acclaimed specialist” in pricing. I will take the mickey out of that one later. Small organisations don't go in for the BS but do expect a lot for the money, and the really small ones are often set up by entrepreneurs who realise they have no technical understanding, need rescuing but want to resent you for it because they thought it was going to be an easy buck.
What I don't want to do is have my choices dictated by the bad times I've had at The Retail Bank. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in large, broken down companies, but that's not all large companies (is it?). Am I sure I want to go on doing a lot of VBA and expanding to Visual Studio? I do programming when there isn't enough brain candy in the business side of a job, not because I really dig programming. I don't rush home to learn more cool tricks on my Mac. Yet if there ever was a computer you could spend a long time learning cool tricks on, it's a Mac: it's Unix, Objective-C, it's Ruby and others, and I should be editing my own videos by now. You see what I mean? I'm making decisions not based on what I want or am interested in, but on what stops me from going barmy. If I could find an interesting management job that wasn't lobbying, Powerpoint and silo-running, I'd be interested and maybe not want to program.
It's August, I have a job and I don't have to rush this.
Monday, 3 August 2009
Who I Am (at August 3rd 2009)
You know what? I'm tired of pretending to be someone I'm not. I'm tired of pretending to be one of you. I'm not. I never was. But here's the trick: I'm not going to tell you what I can't do that you do and I'm sure as heck not going to tell you why. Because it doesn't matter why.
So here I am:
I am going to disappoint you. Because you're going to have expectations about what kind of person I am before I've even finished saying “hello”. That doesn't happen to you, but it does to me.
I guess at what normal is . I have no idea what normal is but I know it exists. I used to think it had to do with having a job, a partner and a garden shed, but that's because I was guessing. Now I know it isn't that. I have this idea that if I was ever inside the mind and soul of an ordinary person, I'd want out quickly so I could breathe and think and feel again.
I have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end. That's why I had to learn about Time Management and Project Management and Planning Stuff. I can do it as naturally as you breath. I just lose motivation or run out of money and ideas.
I find it easier to lie than tell the truth. It took me a while before I understood this, partly because we tell so many white lies at work disguised as office humour that I've lost track of when we're supposed to tell the truth. Take away the white lies, office gossip with a trusted few, comments about movies, places to get lunch and other miscellaneous bullshit, and there's nothing left of my conversation. I lie by omission and silence all the time. Actually I have no idea what truth I'm supposed to be telling to whom. I do know this: if I don't trust you, if I think you're not on my side, I can tell you black is white with a clear conscience. Of course, at any given time there are only a couple of people I trust. Sure, it's way easier to tell white lies and talk empty bullshit than tell the truth: a lot of the time, that's all people expect.
I judge myself without mercy. Anyone who has to tell themselves “that'll do, this is only rock-n-roll” is trying to silence the inner critic snarking that I missed a bit. There. And there. And look at the mess. And it took way longer than you thought. I've had to learn to turn that one down.
I don't do fun. Nothing makes me feel miserable like a paper hat at the office Xmas lunch, except the afternoon games after the morning speeches on a company team day. I can sit in a crowded cafe and be content, but put me in with a hundred people I'm supposed to be networking with and I'd rather be dead. Exception: the wonderful world of wholesale switched minutes.
I don't drink, which means I won't be doing the after-work Friday booze-up and I will be leaving your wedding reception / birthday party / victory celebration / whatever after about an hour. Just so you know, it is thoughtless to expect people who don't drink to hang around a bunch of people on their third one.
I take myself too seriously. I don't know what this means. If I did, I'd agree, probably.
I have difficulty with intimate relationships . An intimate relationship is where I share all my thoughts as long as they're the ones you want to hear? That's it, isn't it? Or does this mean I have a problem with sex? Actually, there are no such things as “intimate relationships”: the whole idea was invented by women to guilt-trip men and is encouraged by therapists because they don't know any better. So yes, I have difficulty with “intimate relationships”.
I over-react to changes over which I have no control. Well, yes, I do. Equanimity is not my middle name. I'm not so bad at it as I used to be, but man, you should see me when I have to rush the commute and can't find my keys...
Any criticism of my work or behaviour threatens my very survival. Because you're looking for a way to get me out of your life. You're plotting to sack me and I'll be without an income. Because you're going to leave me. Because you're going to pass on the pay rise and I'l be five percent or more less well-off next year than this. Because all you do is criticise and you never ever help. And while we're at it...
I don't do mentoring or being mentored. Because when Daddy was visibly not too good at managing his own life, when you can't learn from him how to make friends, run a network, build a career, you have an abstract idea of what a mentor is but don't really believe they exist, let alone how to choose a good one or be one for someone else. Ask me for advice and what I'll say will boil down to “RTFM”.
I don't do authority. I respect skill, knowledge, achievement, character, integrity, stuff like that. I respect the sergeant, not the stripes. There are far more people with stripes on their arm than there are sergeants.
I constantly seek approval and affirmation. At school the other boys used to call it “fishing for compliments” and I got the idea it wasn't too cool. I have to stop myself from doing it all the time. But there's a catch...
I don't believe your compliments. Because you don't mean it, you're just saying it to be polite or because you went on a course that told you it works. Also because your compliments are just words: there's no pay rise, introduction to a useful contact, funding, assistance or new toys. Nice words are too often a substitute for good deeds. In fact, they are little else. When a girl starts by saying something nice about you, it's pumpkin time, because you are not going to get lucky.
I don't expect you to keep your promises. I don't doubt your sincerity, but: you will forget, you will change your mind, you will meet someone else, you will hire someone else. You will decide to fund another project. You will get the next financials and decide to announce pay freezes to keep the City happy. You will be busy. You will keep your promises to someone else, but never to me. Hence my principle of diary management:
Don't tell me it's not personal. If it isn't, don't do it to me, do it someone else. Thought so. You did mean me. What people mean by “it's not personal” is “don't get upset about this because we don't want to have to deal with it”. If it's got my name on it, it's personal. If the bruise is on my skin or my soul, you know what? It's personal. I don't care if you knew my name at the time or not.
Always agree to every meeting, as they will all be re-scheduled or cancelled. (This is not true about tedious bureaucratic meetings held in airless offices – those always happen).
I feel I am different from other people. There's nothing like seeing a herd of your fellow humanity to tell you that you are not one of them. However, I bet we have this in common...
Why does the loony always get in my carriage?. See? It's not just you. Finally...
Going away is pointless because you have to come back to exactly what you left. It's not that I don't want to go on holiday, it's that if I go, I have to come back, and I don't want to come back. Because nothing has changed and I don't want to be there.
I don't know how to make it better. I don't know what “better” means: if I did, and I knew how to get there, I wouldn't be here.
So here I am:
I am going to disappoint you. Because you're going to have expectations about what kind of person I am before I've even finished saying “hello”. That doesn't happen to you, but it does to me.
I guess at what normal is . I have no idea what normal is but I know it exists. I used to think it had to do with having a job, a partner and a garden shed, but that's because I was guessing. Now I know it isn't that. I have this idea that if I was ever inside the mind and soul of an ordinary person, I'd want out quickly so I could breathe and think and feel again.
I have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end. That's why I had to learn about Time Management and Project Management and Planning Stuff. I can do it as naturally as you breath. I just lose motivation or run out of money and ideas.
I find it easier to lie than tell the truth. It took me a while before I understood this, partly because we tell so many white lies at work disguised as office humour that I've lost track of when we're supposed to tell the truth. Take away the white lies, office gossip with a trusted few, comments about movies, places to get lunch and other miscellaneous bullshit, and there's nothing left of my conversation. I lie by omission and silence all the time. Actually I have no idea what truth I'm supposed to be telling to whom. I do know this: if I don't trust you, if I think you're not on my side, I can tell you black is white with a clear conscience. Of course, at any given time there are only a couple of people I trust. Sure, it's way easier to tell white lies and talk empty bullshit than tell the truth: a lot of the time, that's all people expect.
I judge myself without mercy. Anyone who has to tell themselves “that'll do, this is only rock-n-roll” is trying to silence the inner critic snarking that I missed a bit. There. And there. And look at the mess. And it took way longer than you thought. I've had to learn to turn that one down.
I don't do fun. Nothing makes me feel miserable like a paper hat at the office Xmas lunch, except the afternoon games after the morning speeches on a company team day. I can sit in a crowded cafe and be content, but put me in with a hundred people I'm supposed to be networking with and I'd rather be dead. Exception: the wonderful world of wholesale switched minutes.
I don't drink, which means I won't be doing the after-work Friday booze-up and I will be leaving your wedding reception / birthday party / victory celebration / whatever after about an hour. Just so you know, it is thoughtless to expect people who don't drink to hang around a bunch of people on their third one.
I take myself too seriously. I don't know what this means. If I did, I'd agree, probably.
I have difficulty with intimate relationships . An intimate relationship is where I share all my thoughts as long as they're the ones you want to hear? That's it, isn't it? Or does this mean I have a problem with sex? Actually, there are no such things as “intimate relationships”: the whole idea was invented by women to guilt-trip men and is encouraged by therapists because they don't know any better. So yes, I have difficulty with “intimate relationships”.
I over-react to changes over which I have no control. Well, yes, I do. Equanimity is not my middle name. I'm not so bad at it as I used to be, but man, you should see me when I have to rush the commute and can't find my keys...
Any criticism of my work or behaviour threatens my very survival. Because you're looking for a way to get me out of your life. You're plotting to sack me and I'll be without an income. Because you're going to leave me. Because you're going to pass on the pay rise and I'l be five percent or more less well-off next year than this. Because all you do is criticise and you never ever help. And while we're at it...
I don't do mentoring or being mentored. Because when Daddy was visibly not too good at managing his own life, when you can't learn from him how to make friends, run a network, build a career, you have an abstract idea of what a mentor is but don't really believe they exist, let alone how to choose a good one or be one for someone else. Ask me for advice and what I'll say will boil down to “RTFM”.
I don't do authority. I respect skill, knowledge, achievement, character, integrity, stuff like that. I respect the sergeant, not the stripes. There are far more people with stripes on their arm than there are sergeants.
I constantly seek approval and affirmation. At school the other boys used to call it “fishing for compliments” and I got the idea it wasn't too cool. I have to stop myself from doing it all the time. But there's a catch...
I don't believe your compliments. Because you don't mean it, you're just saying it to be polite or because you went on a course that told you it works. Also because your compliments are just words: there's no pay rise, introduction to a useful contact, funding, assistance or new toys. Nice words are too often a substitute for good deeds. In fact, they are little else. When a girl starts by saying something nice about you, it's pumpkin time, because you are not going to get lucky.
I don't expect you to keep your promises. I don't doubt your sincerity, but: you will forget, you will change your mind, you will meet someone else, you will hire someone else. You will decide to fund another project. You will get the next financials and decide to announce pay freezes to keep the City happy. You will be busy. You will keep your promises to someone else, but never to me. Hence my principle of diary management:
Don't tell me it's not personal. If it isn't, don't do it to me, do it someone else. Thought so. You did mean me. What people mean by “it's not personal” is “don't get upset about this because we don't want to have to deal with it”. If it's got my name on it, it's personal. If the bruise is on my skin or my soul, you know what? It's personal. I don't care if you knew my name at the time or not.
Always agree to every meeting, as they will all be re-scheduled or cancelled. (This is not true about tedious bureaucratic meetings held in airless offices – those always happen).
I feel I am different from other people. There's nothing like seeing a herd of your fellow humanity to tell you that you are not one of them. However, I bet we have this in common...
Why does the loony always get in my carriage?. See? It's not just you. Finally...
Going away is pointless because you have to come back to exactly what you left. It's not that I don't want to go on holiday, it's that if I go, I have to come back, and I don't want to come back. Because nothing has changed and I don't want to be there.
I don't know how to make it better. I don't know what “better” means: if I did, and I knew how to get there, I wouldn't be here.
Friday, 31 July 2009
What's Normal?
There are two schools of thought about the existence of “normal”. The first is that there's no such thing, and the second is that there is, but you have to be a fuck-up or excellent to know it. I subscribe to the second school.
Normal isn't about what you are, what you do or what's happened to you, it's about how it affects you, how you handle it and how you carry yourself in this world. To keep it simple: normal people don't go in for any extreme behaviour, and don't have extreme and lasting reactions to the indignities, insolences and incompetencies of life. If you're a normal person, all but the most dramatic events in life roll off your back like water off a duck's back, leaves you pretty much unchanged. The world as seen by normal people is an impersonal place and much of what happens in it is not the result of human agency, so they don't take anything personally and don't get upset when things don't work. Normal people accept that when they and other normal people go to work, they are bound by the rules of the institution for which they work and are therefore not responsible for doing bad things to people during working hours. They didn't, after all, make the rules.
Not-normal people see a world made by people, in which most events happen because someone decided that or not, did or didn't do, thought of or ignored something that made whatever it was happen. Someone made the rules. Someone decided to spend the money on the roof not the medicines, the computer systems not the number of social workers. Someone left the train full of discarded newspapers from last night, and those parents definitely decided to bring their child on this eleven-hour flight, where it is keeping us all awake with its crying and squalling.
Normal doesn't mean ordinary, dull or conventional. It doesn't mean well-behaved, it doesn't even mean particularly moral. Normal people can be into BDSM or missionary sex once a month, or just have given up. They can like spicy food and flamenco or white food and Big Brother. They can be graphic artists, plumbers, driving instructors and bus drivers – but mostly they work in central and local government, the NHS, education, banks and other large institutions. They can be spiteful, kind, honest, boot-lickers, creeps or stand-up guys. They drive at thirty-five in a thirty-zone and occasionally park really badly.
What they don't do is steal from the supermarket or drive at sixty past a school at tipping-out time. They don't sell drugs to schoolchildren and they don't get into fights because they like it. Normal people aren't alcoholics, junkies, degenerate gamblers and people who sleep with anyone they pick up just so they don't have to be alone. They don't have a DSM-IV personality disorder (you have to be seriously messed-up to have one of those). They don't grieve too long, hold grudges too long and get upset when you downsize them.
That's the good news. On the other hand, they aren't on the Olympic squad, don't know any chess opening more than about four moves deep and they don't even get to the heats of a major music competition. The highs and lows of human achievement and failure are not theirs. No-one in a Western professional Armed Service is normal: the standards and risks are way too high.
This may seem a little unfair on normal people: can't they achieve excellence as well? Bluntly, no. Being good is one thing, being excellent takes another one or two orders of magnitude of practice, dedication and single-mindedness, which means far more time than most people will have after they pay proper attention to their everyday lives. John Coltrane was a finer man than many of us, but even the other jazz musicians noticed he practiced a lot. CEO's who do nothing but work aren't normal either, nor are creative mathematicians (who will tell you that you have to work six days a week just to stay in the game). They may be having fun and could not think of anything better to do, but they are not “normal” - and thank God for it.
After you're twenty or so, you're either normal or not. Whatever it is that turns people not-normal has happened – and maybe it was the genes – and cannot be undone. Nor can being normal. You can change the details of your behaviour, your style and manner, but not the fundamental emotional reactions, and you can hope that whatever it is that will reveal you as a not-normal will never actually happen. A friend of mine back in the day once said: “inside all of us is a normal person screaming to get out”. The more I see, the more I think this is not true. Everyone goes off the rails, the only question is when and for how long. Normal people get back on fairly quickly, while the rest of us are de-railed for life. Some of us were never on the damn rails in the first place.
Normal isn't about what you are, what you do or what's happened to you, it's about how it affects you, how you handle it and how you carry yourself in this world. To keep it simple: normal people don't go in for any extreme behaviour, and don't have extreme and lasting reactions to the indignities, insolences and incompetencies of life. If you're a normal person, all but the most dramatic events in life roll off your back like water off a duck's back, leaves you pretty much unchanged. The world as seen by normal people is an impersonal place and much of what happens in it is not the result of human agency, so they don't take anything personally and don't get upset when things don't work. Normal people accept that when they and other normal people go to work, they are bound by the rules of the institution for which they work and are therefore not responsible for doing bad things to people during working hours. They didn't, after all, make the rules.
Not-normal people see a world made by people, in which most events happen because someone decided that or not, did or didn't do, thought of or ignored something that made whatever it was happen. Someone made the rules. Someone decided to spend the money on the roof not the medicines, the computer systems not the number of social workers. Someone left the train full of discarded newspapers from last night, and those parents definitely decided to bring their child on this eleven-hour flight, where it is keeping us all awake with its crying and squalling.
Normal doesn't mean ordinary, dull or conventional. It doesn't mean well-behaved, it doesn't even mean particularly moral. Normal people can be into BDSM or missionary sex once a month, or just have given up. They can like spicy food and flamenco or white food and Big Brother. They can be graphic artists, plumbers, driving instructors and bus drivers – but mostly they work in central and local government, the NHS, education, banks and other large institutions. They can be spiteful, kind, honest, boot-lickers, creeps or stand-up guys. They drive at thirty-five in a thirty-zone and occasionally park really badly.
What they don't do is steal from the supermarket or drive at sixty past a school at tipping-out time. They don't sell drugs to schoolchildren and they don't get into fights because they like it. Normal people aren't alcoholics, junkies, degenerate gamblers and people who sleep with anyone they pick up just so they don't have to be alone. They don't have a DSM-IV personality disorder (you have to be seriously messed-up to have one of those). They don't grieve too long, hold grudges too long and get upset when you downsize them.
That's the good news. On the other hand, they aren't on the Olympic squad, don't know any chess opening more than about four moves deep and they don't even get to the heats of a major music competition. The highs and lows of human achievement and failure are not theirs. No-one in a Western professional Armed Service is normal: the standards and risks are way too high.
This may seem a little unfair on normal people: can't they achieve excellence as well? Bluntly, no. Being good is one thing, being excellent takes another one or two orders of magnitude of practice, dedication and single-mindedness, which means far more time than most people will have after they pay proper attention to their everyday lives. John Coltrane was a finer man than many of us, but even the other jazz musicians noticed he practiced a lot. CEO's who do nothing but work aren't normal either, nor are creative mathematicians (who will tell you that you have to work six days a week just to stay in the game). They may be having fun and could not think of anything better to do, but they are not “normal” - and thank God for it.
After you're twenty or so, you're either normal or not. Whatever it is that turns people not-normal has happened – and maybe it was the genes – and cannot be undone. Nor can being normal. You can change the details of your behaviour, your style and manner, but not the fundamental emotional reactions, and you can hope that whatever it is that will reveal you as a not-normal will never actually happen. A friend of mine back in the day once said: “inside all of us is a normal person screaming to get out”. The more I see, the more I think this is not true. Everyone goes off the rails, the only question is when and for how long. Normal people get back on fairly quickly, while the rest of us are de-railed for life. Some of us were never on the damn rails in the first place.
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
The Movie List: Part 3
The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecorvo
If the French army ever had a colonel as lucid and objective as Colonel Mathieu, sent in to quash the OAS after its first bombing campaign, then it was a lucky army. When he dismisses the border controls at the edge of the Kasbah with the remark “If anyone's papers are going to be in order, it will be a terrorist's” you know the guy is smarter than you average flic. The French army were not angels, but neither were the OAS – Pontecorvo makes you realise just how shattering bombing civilians is. Made with the assistance of the people in the Algiers Kasbah and many amateur actors, the film is tight, balanced, cool and manages to get you feeling for both sides. It's still the finest political film ever made.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – Jean-Luc Godard
This is the movie where a lump of sugar dissolving in a cup of coffee becomes the entire universe, each bubble a galaxy against the blackness of space. You have to see it to believe it. The opening has a 360-degree pan round a suburban housing estate: before it's half-way through you don't know if you're going right-to-left or vice-versa or where on earth you are. That's why Godard is a genius. “Her” is Paris, and Juliette Janson, a housewife who has to turn tricks in Paris to earn extra cash to pay the bills in her family's new and more expensive apartment in the suburbs. It's based on an article about such housewives – called “shooting stars”. The film is Godard at his poetic best.
My Girlfriend's Boyfriend – Eric Rohmer
This was the film that converted me to Rohmer: it bore a reasonable resemblance to my own love life at the time. The fact that it was set in an Eighties suburban development of Paris also helped, as did the wonderful performance of the central character by Emmanuelle Chaulet and the fact that the two male leads, Eric Viellard and François-Eric Gendron, had a lot of characteristics in common with me as well. The structure is neat, the story moves along, the moments are real and it feels real, as all Rohmer's movies do.
Grand Prix – John Frankenheimer
This remains the best film about motor racing ever made. It's set in the Golden Age of semi-pro Formula One, before the huge budgets, wind-tunnel testing and non-stop circus. There are real motor racing drivers in the background (look out for Graham Hill's moustache), while the climactic ending was to be done for real in the 1967 Monza Grand Prix when Honda won its only race with John Surtees at the wheel. The cars are Formula Three dressed up as Formula One, and the tracks are for real. The on-car filmed racing sequences are still more exciting than the live broadcasts. The scene you will remember for ever is Antonio Sabato picking up Francois Hardy and I'm not going to spoil it for you.
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse) – BBC
How this Season Two, Episode Two tale got by the BBC censors I will never know: it drips the same insight and contempt for the influential upper-middle classes that comes off the pages of Raymond Chandler. A depressed and morose Morse crosses his own boss, an influential businessman whose daughter has gone missing, exasperates Lewis with his insistence that the girl is dead, gazes at a field of teenage girls in sports kit and interviews a young but buxom Elizabeth Hurley. It's the 1980's and there's an air of money, power and intrusive change – that mechanical digger outside Morse's house is a metaphor. It's the standout episode from a standout series.
The Long Goodbye – Robert Altman
Chandler purists were outraged by this adaption. Elliott Gould shambles through the story the hippest Marlowe there ever was. Today it's a classic and regarded as one of the best Chandler adaptations ever.
Catch Us If You Can – John Boorman
The best Swinging Sixties movie made: it's as sour and refreshing as a lemon, sharply written, the photography is luminous and it doesn't matter that the acting creaks a little.
Duck Soup – Marx Brothers
You haven't seen this? Get the boxed set of the early Marx Brothers from Amazon and do so now. It contains the funniest scene in the history of cinema.
If the French army ever had a colonel as lucid and objective as Colonel Mathieu, sent in to quash the OAS after its first bombing campaign, then it was a lucky army. When he dismisses the border controls at the edge of the Kasbah with the remark “If anyone's papers are going to be in order, it will be a terrorist's” you know the guy is smarter than you average flic. The French army were not angels, but neither were the OAS – Pontecorvo makes you realise just how shattering bombing civilians is. Made with the assistance of the people in the Algiers Kasbah and many amateur actors, the film is tight, balanced, cool and manages to get you feeling for both sides. It's still the finest political film ever made.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – Jean-Luc Godard
This is the movie where a lump of sugar dissolving in a cup of coffee becomes the entire universe, each bubble a galaxy against the blackness of space. You have to see it to believe it. The opening has a 360-degree pan round a suburban housing estate: before it's half-way through you don't know if you're going right-to-left or vice-versa or where on earth you are. That's why Godard is a genius. “Her” is Paris, and Juliette Janson, a housewife who has to turn tricks in Paris to earn extra cash to pay the bills in her family's new and more expensive apartment in the suburbs. It's based on an article about such housewives – called “shooting stars”. The film is Godard at his poetic best.
My Girlfriend's Boyfriend – Eric Rohmer
This was the film that converted me to Rohmer: it bore a reasonable resemblance to my own love life at the time. The fact that it was set in an Eighties suburban development of Paris also helped, as did the wonderful performance of the central character by Emmanuelle Chaulet and the fact that the two male leads, Eric Viellard and François-Eric Gendron, had a lot of characteristics in common with me as well. The structure is neat, the story moves along, the moments are real and it feels real, as all Rohmer's movies do.
Grand Prix – John Frankenheimer
This remains the best film about motor racing ever made. It's set in the Golden Age of semi-pro Formula One, before the huge budgets, wind-tunnel testing and non-stop circus. There are real motor racing drivers in the background (look out for Graham Hill's moustache), while the climactic ending was to be done for real in the 1967 Monza Grand Prix when Honda won its only race with John Surtees at the wheel. The cars are Formula Three dressed up as Formula One, and the tracks are for real. The on-car filmed racing sequences are still more exciting than the live broadcasts. The scene you will remember for ever is Antonio Sabato picking up Francois Hardy and I'm not going to spoil it for you.
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse) – BBC
How this Season Two, Episode Two tale got by the BBC censors I will never know: it drips the same insight and contempt for the influential upper-middle classes that comes off the pages of Raymond Chandler. A depressed and morose Morse crosses his own boss, an influential businessman whose daughter has gone missing, exasperates Lewis with his insistence that the girl is dead, gazes at a field of teenage girls in sports kit and interviews a young but buxom Elizabeth Hurley. It's the 1980's and there's an air of money, power and intrusive change – that mechanical digger outside Morse's house is a metaphor. It's the standout episode from a standout series.
The Long Goodbye – Robert Altman
Chandler purists were outraged by this adaption. Elliott Gould shambles through the story the hippest Marlowe there ever was. Today it's a classic and regarded as one of the best Chandler adaptations ever.
Catch Us If You Can – John Boorman
The best Swinging Sixties movie made: it's as sour and refreshing as a lemon, sharply written, the photography is luminous and it doesn't matter that the acting creaks a little.
Duck Soup – Marx Brothers
You haven't seen this? Get the boxed set of the early Marx Brothers from Amazon and do so now. It contains the funniest scene in the history of cinema.
Monday, 27 July 2009
Imagine This
I'm going to ask you to try to imagine something. Imagine that everything you ever did, however high as a kite it might have sent you at the time, always felt hollow because there was only ever you doing it, because you had to plan it, get there, get back and always do it on your own. Imagine that you never had any active encouragement to do anything you wanted to do and did. No-one stopped you, but no-one helped you either. Imagine whenever you did things with other people, you never quite knew why. Imagine half the sex you had was faked (oh yes, men can have fake sex too). Imagine looking at the world and wondering why people did what they do, and when you tried it, wondering what you must be missing out on because otherwise what's the fuss? Imagine that no matter where you are and who you're with, at the back of your mind, you don't want to be there. Not because you don't like wherever and whoever it is, but because you just went there faux de meiux. Tricky, isn't it? Keep trying. What you'll have problems with is getting the exact feeling of emptiness, the exact sound of a hollow steel drum from your insides, the exact way the feeling of pain sweeps through you when you heard the sounds of laughter in the next room. Now imagine that nothing seems to be able to make you feel better – not even drugs and booze and movies and chocolate and sex, not even all of them together. Except maybe for a moment. Which fades.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Why Soaps Aren't Drama
There is a fascinating series to be written about a real hospital: how people lie around in casualty for hours because there is only one decision-making doctor and he's in an emergency surgery for the rest of his shift, how people with cancers are turned away as being pregnant or suffering from indigestion, how doctors don't dare call consultants at the weekend and one consultant would rather leave a patient suffering than deal with another consultant's case – Private Eye's On The Rounds or any of the medical blogs will give a writer and producer endless material. A few dozen hours spent with nurses and disenchanted NHS managers will give them the inside stories and the touches of realism you need.
That series is not Casualty, Holby City or any of the others currently on British television. None of those hospitals is recognisable as any I have ever been in. Where are the groups of nursing assistants gossiping at the admin desk but doing nothing? Why is a consultant wandering around the ward waiting for something to happen? Why are the staff talking in English voices? How did any patient get treatment within three hours? How on earth did they find a nurse who knew the patient's name? And where did they dig up the awful chavs who have family rows by the hospital bedside? If there's one thing that impresses me about hospitals, it's how quiet, considerate and well-mannered the visitors are – and my local hospital is the West Middlesex. What are doctors doing having affairs with nurses or each other? Have you seen real doctors and nurses? Would you have an affair with them? Anyway, that myth grew up in the time when a fair number of nurses came from the same strata of society as the doctors – rather as airline stewardesses came from a similar strata as their passengers in the Fifties and Sixties, when airline travel was for an elite, not you and me.
You have to like your characters to tell stories about them – even the bad guys, in fact, especially the bad guys. You can't like them unless you let them into your head. And who would want to let the endless parade of chavs, dysfunctionals, mediocrities, uglies and nobodies who make usual people in The Bill? It's as if there is a guideline that attractive, intelligent, well-balanced and communicative people must not be portrayed.
You also have to understand the world of your characters, and by the nature of the job of writing, what most writers understand is the world of the freelance and the edges of the State arts bureaucracy and the BBC. They have never worked in a public- or private-sector management role and don't know what happens there. They haven't worked on the railways, in a hospital, a local council, a bank, a retailer or anywhere else. They have no idea how modern corporations and institutions work. I'm not expecting every writer to be Neil Simon, but they ought to do better than the utterly unrealistic portrayal of journalism and politics that is State of Play. Any journalist who behaved as the Kelly MacDonald character did would never keep a job on a national newspaper.
The major employers of writers in the UK are the Big Soaps. Soap operas have strict conventions, the most important for our purposes is that the characters cannot develop, only suffer random setbacks that result from the clash of circumstance and their static character (in tragedy, the setback arises from the character, not a car crash). Hence no-one can learn, there is no development: slimy Nick Cotton is down but will return, as nasty as ever, in a few episodes' time. In a Soap, these defined and stable characters meet life's insults, challenges, whips and scorns and fight back, break down or run away and cry, as they might. But never change – even when they are written out. (Okay, the best cop show ever made – The Shield – has the structure of a soap opera, as does The West Wing. Sometimes it can work. )
Soap characters live in the most heavily-populated town in England: Denial. They cannot believe this could happen, nor that you could have done it to them. What were you thinking? You're in trouble now, this could ruin everything. I can't believe this has happened. It can't be true. Not only are English soaps are set in Denial, they are set in the lower-income end at that, Denial-by-the-Industrial Estate. This limits the characters even more, as they have no money or time for any moments of contemplative life, their every waking moment taken up with the daily round, dodging, diving, grafting and, oh yes, drinking tea and beer. This ensures the viewer never thinks to ask why the characters don't do something about their lives. The Soap inhabitants of Denial are nothing like the people who really live there but a parade of stock characters, who appear in every Soap, sometimes wearing a stethoscope, sometimes pulling a pint, sometimes teaching a class.
Because the Soap cannot countenance change, it is not drama. Drama is about change: characters develop through meeting or not the circumstances they find themselves in. The Soap therefore has to substitute conflict and confusion for drama (there's nothing wrong with either as plot devices - Romeo and Juliet has a plot based on the conflict between the Capulets and Montagues, but it's a love story). Writing conflict and confusion is a lot easier than writing drama: all you need are people shouting at each other because they thought that he was cheating on her with Sally Evans, when all he was doing was hiding her birthday present there. It's why Soaps are reassuringly unrealistic, as our daily lives are carefully organised to reduce the possibility of conflict and so little happens in them that there is very little room for confusion.
Soaps corrupt writers. A writer's job is drama, and there is no drama without change, development, a character's strengths holding them up through a crisis as their weaknesses threaten something fundamental about their existence. This can be done without guns, crossed messages, mis-communication and fist-fights: it can be done without conflict. Eric Rohmer's charming little ditties are drama on exactly this level.
That series is not Casualty, Holby City or any of the others currently on British television. None of those hospitals is recognisable as any I have ever been in. Where are the groups of nursing assistants gossiping at the admin desk but doing nothing? Why is a consultant wandering around the ward waiting for something to happen? Why are the staff talking in English voices? How did any patient get treatment within three hours? How on earth did they find a nurse who knew the patient's name? And where did they dig up the awful chavs who have family rows by the hospital bedside? If there's one thing that impresses me about hospitals, it's how quiet, considerate and well-mannered the visitors are – and my local hospital is the West Middlesex. What are doctors doing having affairs with nurses or each other? Have you seen real doctors and nurses? Would you have an affair with them? Anyway, that myth grew up in the time when a fair number of nurses came from the same strata of society as the doctors – rather as airline stewardesses came from a similar strata as their passengers in the Fifties and Sixties, when airline travel was for an elite, not you and me.
You have to like your characters to tell stories about them – even the bad guys, in fact, especially the bad guys. You can't like them unless you let them into your head. And who would want to let the endless parade of chavs, dysfunctionals, mediocrities, uglies and nobodies who make usual people in The Bill? It's as if there is a guideline that attractive, intelligent, well-balanced and communicative people must not be portrayed.
You also have to understand the world of your characters, and by the nature of the job of writing, what most writers understand is the world of the freelance and the edges of the State arts bureaucracy and the BBC. They have never worked in a public- or private-sector management role and don't know what happens there. They haven't worked on the railways, in a hospital, a local council, a bank, a retailer or anywhere else. They have no idea how modern corporations and institutions work. I'm not expecting every writer to be Neil Simon, but they ought to do better than the utterly unrealistic portrayal of journalism and politics that is State of Play. Any journalist who behaved as the Kelly MacDonald character did would never keep a job on a national newspaper.
The major employers of writers in the UK are the Big Soaps. Soap operas have strict conventions, the most important for our purposes is that the characters cannot develop, only suffer random setbacks that result from the clash of circumstance and their static character (in tragedy, the setback arises from the character, not a car crash). Hence no-one can learn, there is no development: slimy Nick Cotton is down but will return, as nasty as ever, in a few episodes' time. In a Soap, these defined and stable characters meet life's insults, challenges, whips and scorns and fight back, break down or run away and cry, as they might. But never change – even when they are written out. (Okay, the best cop show ever made – The Shield – has the structure of a soap opera, as does The West Wing. Sometimes it can work. )
Soap characters live in the most heavily-populated town in England: Denial. They cannot believe this could happen, nor that you could have done it to them. What were you thinking? You're in trouble now, this could ruin everything. I can't believe this has happened. It can't be true. Not only are English soaps are set in Denial, they are set in the lower-income end at that, Denial-by-the-Industrial Estate. This limits the characters even more, as they have no money or time for any moments of contemplative life, their every waking moment taken up with the daily round, dodging, diving, grafting and, oh yes, drinking tea and beer. This ensures the viewer never thinks to ask why the characters don't do something about their lives. The Soap inhabitants of Denial are nothing like the people who really live there but a parade of stock characters, who appear in every Soap, sometimes wearing a stethoscope, sometimes pulling a pint, sometimes teaching a class.
Because the Soap cannot countenance change, it is not drama. Drama is about change: characters develop through meeting or not the circumstances they find themselves in. The Soap therefore has to substitute conflict and confusion for drama (there's nothing wrong with either as plot devices - Romeo and Juliet has a plot based on the conflict between the Capulets and Montagues, but it's a love story). Writing conflict and confusion is a lot easier than writing drama: all you need are people shouting at each other because they thought that he was cheating on her with Sally Evans, when all he was doing was hiding her birthday present there. It's why Soaps are reassuringly unrealistic, as our daily lives are carefully organised to reduce the possibility of conflict and so little happens in them that there is very little room for confusion.
Soaps corrupt writers. A writer's job is drama, and there is no drama without change, development, a character's strengths holding them up through a crisis as their weaknesses threaten something fundamental about their existence. This can be done without guns, crossed messages, mis-communication and fist-fights: it can be done without conflict. Eric Rohmer's charming little ditties are drama on exactly this level.
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