With every storm, we ask ourselves the same question. Why do we construct fences around our gardens and not walls?
Having only just finished fixing fences along one side of the garden, I peer out of the window to see panels blown down on the other boundary.
Up and down, it never ends.
There’s not that much difference between our lad and how I was at his age. Sure, I wasn’t a teenage tearaway, but I was still completely disengaged at school. Indeed, my parents faced a school parent’s evening much like I did last night, with all my teachers telling them I was destined to flunk everything, and achieve nothing at all in life.
My wife met me just after I had completed a Masters degree, and just as I was settling into a professional career, so it has always been hard for her to imagine my pre-story. Her journey in education is very different from mine.
Showing promise at an early age, she moved from a far-flung rural village to attend secondary school in Istanbul, before attending one of the top universities in Turkey. Me? I was removed from my state primary school being so behind in learning, and put through private education until 16.
Throughout, education was a real struggle for me. The only subject I excelled in was nature studies, dropped at eleven. And so my dreams were much like my son’s, seeking out a job that would be simple enough for me that I’d nevertheless love. On my shortlist for a long time, to be a gardener.
To this day, I’d still rather like to be a gardener. That would beat filling out exhaustive paperwork for yet another cyber security assessment, or working long hours staring at screens. I might not feel that way on a cold, blustery day, pouring with rain. No doubt on those days, every gardener wishes they were a bored office dogsbody.
Much like me at his age, our son has given up all hope of passing his exams, and has already begun searching his options for jobs that are simple but pay well. He’s set the desktop wallpaper on his Mac Mini to a matt black M3 coupe with sports trim, so good pay here is key. High aspirations, no ambition.
In the end, I did get serious about my revision, and left school with a decent set of GCSEs, in all my worst subjects. The hope is being able to convince our son to do the same: to just believe in himself and have hope. Something I’m only able to say with hindsight.
Like him, I went through my second year of A-Levels with similar levels of despair. So much so that I didn’t apply for university at that point, utterly convinced that I would amount to nothing in life at all.
Much like him, I too would prefer a simple job that pays well. But such jobs seem to be in quite short supply. By the time he reaches my age, and realises how expensive life is, he will be content to pursue a dreary management job that pays well, even if it sucks the life and soul out of him.
So far, I have failed in convincing our son that he actually has great potential, just as I had without knowing it. But then, it’s only in the last year that my parents have started being open with me about their failures in education. Something they couldn’t speak of during my youth, as they sought to encourage us to emulate their later successes.
Who knows, maybe our son will make a better success of life than I did, restoring the former glory of our lineage, joining the ranks of my siblings, setting in motion greater fortunes for his offspring. Anything’s possible, really, regardless of what teachers may think.
I too was written off at his age. Sure, I never joined the ranks of the doctors and lawyers, but I haven’t been a complete failure. I just lived my life a bit differently, that’s all. Hopefully, he can do the same. If only he can find a way to believe in himself.
is seeking you
We can be heroes. Just for one day.
Did I just save our organisation £xxK by doing work touted to take Xteen weeks by external supplier in about 4 hours in-house?
Maybe I did. Savour the moment. It won’t last.
We are the untrainable. It doesn’t matter how many times training is repeated or reinforced. It still won’t be translated into practice.
But then, of course, I knew that during the training. For even in the midst of a session delivering the guidance needed, I could see they were not with me at all, but were elsewhere, ploughing through their emails, thoroughly engaged in something else.
Which is exactly why nothing changes, and no improvements are ever made, and everyone carries on as before. Because although they attended the session, they were not with me, not listening, much less understanding.
So on we go, business as usual, continuing as we have always done. Why? Because we never heard anyone telling us it should be done any differently.
To good and evil equal bent… both a devil and a saint.
A country with one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world reportedly bans female students training to be midwives and nurses from completing their courses.
Don’t try to find any logic in these imbecilic declarations. There is none. If anywhere there was a justifiable communal obligation for female education, it was here.
If true, these men must lack not just knowledge but also basic commonsense. What are women seeking medical attention to do now?
Give birth with a turbaned beardo standing over her, gun in hand, invading her privacy at her most intimate? No, no, I get it: she’s not supposed to access healthcare at all.
What lamentable ignorance from a people claiming to uphold Islamic tradition. A tradition once at the forefront of education and endeavour in medicine.
Now just a gathering ground for the common ignoramus, enforcing their retrograde fallacies on unwilling populations, who most likely know their own faith better than the enforcers.
Let the learned rise up against this wicked backwardness. Islam is for the preservation and perpetuation of life.
At this stage, I’m twelve years into the role as solo operator, looking after all web infrastructure — internal and external — for an organisation with over 6000 employees, serving 1.5 million people annually.
Therefore I’m neither surprised nor particularly disappointed that my case for increasing capacity has been rejected once again. This has been the state of play for over a decade and I know by now that it is never going to change.
On one hand, I might say this benefits me personally, in that at least it offers me some job security. On the other hand, I might say it stifles career development, limiting options to move on.
Certainly, I’m at about the most senior position I could get with my current focus. So, if I wanted to progress in pay or status, I’d need to leave this specialism behind. Something that doesn’t exactly appeal.
As we go through yet another changing of the guard — I’ve outlived multiple CEOs and executives by now — there’s always the worry as to what new ideas they’ll implement this time, and how it will effect our work.
Long gone the directors who used to be our advocates, ensuring we were credited for work we did. Here the apparently bold visionaries, intent on stamping their own mark on everything. They will have their own ideas about how that is achieved.
One thing is certain: it won’t change anything at all about how this service is funded. I’m too long in the tooth now to entertain the notion that I will ever be taken seriously. My job is simply to deliver. Nothing more.
How daft I was, thinking anybody would be interested in what I have to say. Anyone other than spammers and hackers. Remove them from the equation, and we’re left with no one at all. Lesson learned.
I work on a project with a passion, it occupying every thought and second, for weeks on end.
Then, all of a sudden, I stop. It’s gone. All interest in it has left me. I can no longer be bothered with it.
Is that good or bad? Could be either. Perhaps I’m never meant to finish anything. And perhaps my not finishing is best for me.
Maybe I was just a runaway train, and somebody finally found a way to slam on the brakes or derail me. Did a faint voice call back into my soul?
Why does it take me to tell the school that something is a safeguarding issue?
Is it because we’re hypersensitive Muslim adoptive parents, forever on alert to every source of potential harm?
Could it be that we’re battered by a decade of Prevent, grooming scandals, knife crime, countylines drug gangs, and teenage extremism?
Or is it our training kicking in, from our days of prospective adoptive parents, or from our working lives in health and social care?
Or is the explanation much more mundane? That these are in fact commonplace concerns, understood by all, and the school is merely failing in its duty of care?
Why does it take me flagging an issue for others to take note, despite months of communication and meeting after meeting?
Whatever happened to duty of care?
Does our community really need another ten-week course on “deviant groups”?
How about a ten-week course on how to be a good Muslim?
I know, I know, these are deviant ideas. True heretic, me.
Why do I always get deeply invested in what I know I will eventually have to leave behind?
My photo album reminds me that on this day, six years ago, our home was ransacked by intruders, who turned our house upside-down in search of all that Asian Gold they couldn’t find because, um, we don’t have any, because, um again, we’re not Asian, and the only things we have of any value to us they didn’t see as valuable at all. Inner peace.
