The optimism of the young and the cynicism of the middle-aged

When I was out and about the other day I overheard two young shop assistants discussing their futures. They were talking about the degrees that they were currently studying for and how much they were looking forward to joining the world of work. One of them was hoping to enter the publishing industry, working with art books (her degree was in history of art, I think). “I just love the look and feel of those books,” she said. She sounded so excited, so enthusiastic, so full of energy.

I wonder what happens to us in middle age? Of course, some people still love their jobs, but many (at least those who I know) do not. Work is a means to earning money, to maintaining a certain standard of living, but the day-to-day grind is, well...a grind. I spent many years working in the publishing industry (and still freelance in the field). The work is fine, but certainly not glamorous. The reality is all about the bottom line, rather than the books, trying to get as much done with as little resource as possible. It’s much the same in most industries today, I think.

I look at the up-and-coming generation with awe. My oldest daughter is a case in point. She already, at the age of twelve, knows what she wants to do career-wise. And she is enthusiastic, articulate, confident, as are all her friends. I just don’t remember my own generation possessing such maturity and poise at such a young age. As middle-aged parents we need to be careful not to dampen our children’s spirits, not to tarnish their optimism with our cynicism.

My novel FREE on Amazon, 26--30 December

"Travels on a Greyhound Bus" will be free on Amazon from 26 until 30 December inclusive.

This is a lively, fun novel with a serious point -- how romantic relationships change over time and how people react when those relationships come under pressure. It has good independent reviews and 4.6 stars on Amazon.

You can download "Travels on a Greyhound Bus" at Amazon UK and Amazon.com.

The blurb follows below:

People change. Relationships evolve. But sometimes by too much...

Hip students Araminta Stewart and Giles Richmond meet entirely by chance when travelling around the USA by Greyhound Bus. They hit it off. Some twenty years later, they are married with three children and have reached a crisis point in their relationship.

Araminta thought she knew what she wanted all those years ago. But now she’s got it, is she really happy? Or could there be more to life than this?
Told from Araminta’s point of view, "Travels on a Greyhound Bus" follows the couple as they navigate these two very different periods in their lives. While their early relationship flourishes, their later relationship appears to be disintegrating.

Faced with disappointment, frustration and the biggest challenge to their marriage yet, the question is: will Araminta and Giles’ relationship survive the journey of a lifetime?

Christmas postage bankruptcy

There has been quite a bit in the news recently about Royal Mail and Amazon. Specifically, the complaint that by setting up its own parcel delivery service and so removing (some) of its custom from Royal Mail, Amazon is cherry picking the lucrative part of Royal Mail’s service, leaving Royal Mail with the much-less-lucrative rural delivery market.

I have been wrapping and sending off Christmas gifts and cards over the past few days. Last week, I took two parcels (one national and one international) and one card (international) to the Post Office. The total price for sending these three items was in excess of £40! I was astonished—the cost of delivery was almost more than the cost of the gifts themselves. My 2kg parcel to Southern Ireland cost over £26 (via so-called globaleconomy!!); my (almost) 3kg parcel to Scotland cost over £12; and my letter-sized card to Italy cost 90 pence. And the lady behind the counter assured me that this was via the cheapest services available. She was right—I checked online when I got home.

I am sure that Royal Mail would provide me with many reasons for the enormous cost of delivering my items. But the bottom line is that it is just too expensive for the consumer. I won’t be using Royal Mail to send my Christmas gifts next year because I can’t afford it! I will have to explore alternative options. And, yes, this may well include getting my gifts sent direct to my family by Amazon using, I assume, Amazon’s own parcel delivery service.

I don’t know anything about the ins and outs of parcel delivery and the associated cost to the delivery company. However, based on my personal experience, I can understand why Amazon has chosen to set up its own company rather than using Royal Mail. In the end, if there’s a much cheaper and equally reliable alternative, any sane person would take the cheaper option. And as for competition and cherry picking parts of the market...well, that’s how capitalism works. If someone can provide an equivalent service cheaper, then they are likely to gain custom. Similarly, if you are a privatised company, you can’t just expect to rely on people’s goodwill if you don’t provide them with value for money.

I wonder how Royal Mail survived prior to the advent and growth of Amazon? Not easily, if my memory serves me correctly, which, I suppose, is the problem.

Paddington

We went to see the Paddington film last weekend. I really wanted to go as I remember very fondly watching Paddington on TV after school back in the 1970s. I also love the dry, oh-so-British understated humour that Paddington delivers. And it is all just so improbable, a bear from darkest Peru who is quintessentially English. I love it.

The film was certainly good, but not much like the old TV series. For a start, the film fell into the adventure genre. It didn't just bumble gently along, rather it was full-throttle action for much of the ninety minutes. But maybe that’s how it has to be in order to hold the audience's attention for that length of time. And it was perfect, of course, all computer graphics and no flaws. I rather missed the cardboard sets and pencil drawings of old, but I don’t suppose that would impress an audience nowadays. It really is just my nostalgia kicking into play. There was quite a bit of humour in the film, but it didn't take the form of Paddington being ironic (he was actually quite naive), rather it was largely situational, with a number of amusing references to other blockbuster films, presumably to keep the adult viewers on board.

It sounds like I'm being negative about Paddington, but I'm not. I really enjoyed the film; it was very nicely done—but it just wasn't quite how I had expected it might be. My kids really enjoyed it too, so I’d definitely recommend Paddington as a good, fun family outing. But when you get home, fire up your computer and watch a couple of the old TV episodes on YouTube. You may just find yourself addicted.

Christmas in the city

We had a very productive Saturday in London last week. We decided to combine seeing the Christmas lights with progressing our Christmas shopping.

First off we visited Oxford Street and saw the lights there—globes strung high up in the sky. I imagine that they would have looked really impressive at night, as if they were free floating in the darkness. We spent a lot of time in good old John Lewis and managed to buy quite a few presents there. The Christmas foodie gift section just has so much lovely stuff—beautifully presented chocolates, sweets, biscuits, preserves...the list goes on. And the range and choice in the Oxford Street branch is amazing—such a revelation for those of us from the provinces! We also spent some time in New Look on Oxford Street—our daughter needed some new clothes and our local branch of this shop doesn't have the teenage range in store. We collapsed on a chair while she hummed and hawed about what she might buy. I hate clothes shopping and try to get in and out of clothes shops as quickly as possible. But not so my daughter.

Then it was off to Covent Garden. The festive trappings were pretty impressive there too—a huge silver reindeer dominated. We were aiming to see the real reindeer there as well, but didn't make it in time. I'm not sure we would have got a look in anyway—I imagine that a single reindeer in Covent Garden in the run up to Christmas would be besieged. We browsed the stalls in the market—lots of pretty things on offer—and spent a few minutes watching the opera singer who was busking in front of diners at one of the open-air restaurants. She was quite unusual—a fantastic classical singer, yet dressed in ripped jeans and T-shirt with brightly dyed hair. Not a combination that you see often.

We finished off the day by wandering around the boutique shops in Seven Dials, then had an early dinner at Prezzo on St Martin’s Lane before heading back home.

I love that we live close enough to the capital to visit for the day, but I am also very glad that we don’t reside there. It’s just too busy and polluted to tackle on an everyday basis.

The changing world of work

I read with interest the recent furore surrounding Greencore. This sandwich manufacturer, which supplies ready made sandwiches to several of the big supermarket chains, hit the news because it had been in Hungary hiring staff, when local unemployed people in Northampton (the factory's base) knew nothing about the vacancies. People were outraged that an employer was looking abroad, rather than locally in the first instance, to hire its staff.

However, what really struck me about this news story was something rather different. First off, I was somewhat surprised that sandwiches were made by people on a production line, having naively assumed that such an activity would be mechanised. It was also interesting that despite the long hours, low pay, and cold conditions that the work entailed, one employee (a graduate from Poland) considered the job "a great opportunity". I know a number of people in similar situations -- highly-qualified graduates from across the EU who work in low paid roles in the catering and hotel business. There simply isn't the work available in their specialist areas in their home countries, or indeed in this country, hence they are forced to  find work where they can. What counts as "a great opportunity", then, is very much relative -- dependent on the particular circumstances in which you find yourself.

Things have changed a lot over the past three decades or so. Graduating in the very early nineties, I was just at the start of the employment situation becoming tougher. Having a good degree from a good university was no longer a passport to anywhere you wanted to go in the world of work. Ten years earlier, and things were quite different. A colleague recently told the story of how he dropped out of university at the end of his first year and then managed to get a job as a radiographer (without any experience in the area). Several years later, he returned to university and studied for an undergraduate and a Masters degree simultaneously! That kind of trajectory simply wouldn't be possible in today's world.

All of this makes me feel nervous for my own children. I (and they) assume that they will go to university but where, exactly, will that lead them? Quite possibly into low paid and/or unskilled roles with few prospects. Or perhaps halfway across the globe in search of something better. Or maybe, just maybe, things will have come full circle over the next decade and the world will again be their oyster.

The changing definition of 'friend'

A while back I heard an article on the radio about a woman who had set herself the target of phoning a certain number of her Facebook friends over the period of a year. Her aim was to reconnect with people she hadn't spoken to for years. She missed the kind of relationship which she (and I) remembered from her teenage years where she would get in from school and then pick up the phone and chat to one of her friends. She missed the intimacy and nuanced voice-to-voice conversations that you can have by phone, but which are almost impossible to have on line.

What surprised me, though, was the number of people she was proposing to phone. I can't recall exact details, but I know that it was in the high tens. How could all these people be friends, I wondered, and how on earth would she find that she had anything to say to all of them. Conversations by phone are considerably more in depth and demanding than communicating via someone's Facebook wall, for example.

This got me thinking about the nature of friendship and the change in the meaning of the word 'friend' that has been precipitated by Facebook and other social networking sites. In my book a friend is someone I know well, who I can trust, who I have things in common with, who I can sit down and really talk to over a cup of coffee. But a Facebook friend is none of these things -- not by definition, anyway. It is possible that a 'real' friend (as per my definition) can be a Facebook friend too, but a Facebook friend does not have to have any of the characteristics of a 'real' friend. And that, of course, is how people manage to have so many Facebook friends. . .but they're not really friends at all!

I've noticed something similar with LinkedIn. I had someone connect to me the other day who categorised me as one of their friends. This is someone who used to work in the same unit as me. We didn't work together as such, and we certainly weren't friends. Not in my book, anyway -- we had no social relationship separate from work. In my book we were colleagues. Yet this colleague is twenty years younger than me and so I wonder whether, being fully of the social networking generation, his definition of 'friend' is simply different from mine. His definition is informed by Facebook, and mine is not.

So, it seems that the on-line world really is affecting all aspects of our lives -- even the semantics of concepts as old and basic to human nature as friendship.