Work on David Marsden

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:39:52 +0100

Please try again later.

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 11:49:39 +0100

Wife’s employer is introducing custom AI software and apparently now expects her to do twice as much work, which is, of course, impossible.

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:26:38 +0100

Well, we didn’t get a million, but £150,000 is still a very substantial grant!

On the work front, which I haven’t forgotten about, before my recent illness, I developed a £1m+ funding application for a cross-borough youth project that will transform young people’s lives in two of the most-deprived areas in west London - and, we hope, support them to become our community leaders of the future. All very exciting, and not a little stressful - a lot depends on it being accepted and successful. I hope we find out soon if we get the grant.

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:42:41 +0100

Back at work today after three weeks off sick. Finally started feeling like I had some energy yesterday. Thankfully not too much email and urgent bookkeeping required, and I got what needed to be done, done this morning.

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:33:16 +0100

I have been putting off doing some really important work for what feels like weeks, until it became both important and urgent. That always gets me going. (Probably only a couple of weeks in reality, one of which was a holiday). I completed it today and absolutely killed it. Hopefully. I won’t find out for another month.

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:15:24 +0100

Every time trying to file urgent documents online at Companies House. They say the will send a confirmation code by email, but it never arrives. You ask for another one, then both arrive after you’ve forgotten that you were waiting, and now you’re timed out and have to start all over again.

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:46:21 +0100

Just when you think things can’t get any worse. Not content with failing to pay salaries, CAF Bank have now processed a payment for £1,607.09 by transferring £16.007.09 to the payee.

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:17:38 +0100

Successful and fulfilling work “Vision Day” yesterday. Everyone brought their own ideas about what lunch should look like. My refried leftovers and pitta with hummus paled in comparison with the homemade salad bowls, tiger roll sandwiches, and a Tesco Meal Deal. One colleague brought homemade cupcakes, fruit and chocolate bars to share.

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:20:03 +0100

We have our work “Vision Day” tomorrow. Some last minute emails back and forth about what we might do for lunch. Agreement reached on “bring your own”. Still no “vision document” that we were promised. Wish me luck.

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 19:43:14 +0100

The CAF Bank saga just gets worse every day. Their new website is horribly broken in almost every possible way - user experience, functionality all significantly worse than before. I hope they can roll back to the old website. It was a little clunky, maybe, but it worked.

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:54:51 +0100

Yesterday I said something out loud that I thought might upset people. Instead they all laughed and cheered. “Finally, someone has said it!”

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:45:10 +0100

Oh, well the day just gets better! Our payroll service has been unable to collect funds from CAF Bank to pay salaries. What an absolute shitshow this has turned out to be.

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:06:04 +0100

I am “currently number 28 in the queue”. Which is better than the previous “we cannot answer your call” effort, I suppose.

Anita Harper, a charity accountant, wrote: “Something has obviously gone catastrophically wrong within CAF Bank. But the immediate problem is that it is payday and it’s not possible to pay the staff. Or speak to CAF.”

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 13:10:49 +0100

I was no. 2 in the queue to get put on hold yesterday. Today I’m no. 60!

54 minutes on hold.

David Marsden https://davidmarsden.info/2025/06/11/minutes-on-hold.html

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 13:21:31 +0100

Statement from CAF Bank.

…the transition to the new service has not been an easy process for all of our customers.

At least it’s not just me.

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:46:09 +0100

So far today I’m locked out of the new work bank account and the old work pensions account, and then I “upgraded” to the shiny new password manager web app and - hey presto! - lost all my passwords. Not sure it’s safe for me to go and pick up the kids today.

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 13:17:05 +0100

Whoever did the CAF Bank redesign and new login security protocol must be having a very bad day today. I know I am.

Fri, 02 May 2025 18:31:31 +0100

We hired a recommended, highly experienced copywriter to rewrite everything on our six months late new website, to make it accessible to a diverse audience. We all think he’s done a great job. So obviously now we’re rewriting his rewrite. 🤷‍♂️

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:51:01 +0100

These meetings are usually as dry as a bone. This one was unexpectedly raw and bloody.

Trustees meeting tonight. Must be a few years since we had an evening meeting. In person, too.

David Marsden https://davidmarsden.info/2025/04/29/trustees-meeting-tonight-must-be.html

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:00:09 +0100

Trustees meeting tonight. Must be a few years since we had an evening meeting. In person, too.

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:40:44 +0100

Obviously I’m in a work meeting.

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:12:05 +0100

Back to work after the Easter (Spring Break) holidays. Half an hour to login to the Office 365 account to add a new user. Had to update Microsoft Authenticator on my phone, and even then it didn’t work. Half an hour waiting for the the security code email from Companies House to file a change.

Ecclesiastical gobbledegook

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 13:57:34 +0100

Had a good week with work. Lots of serendipitous connecting things and people together means that we now have what we hope is a very realistic big funding opportunity in front of us, which will enable us to get started with our proposed new youth centre.

We also got accredited as a Living Wage employer via and thanks to the Young Ealing Foundation. Through that connection we got two hours of free business consultancy thanks to the often-maligned-by-me Ealing Council. I wasn’t expecting much from this, but it was absolutely incredible, such a fantastic consultant! Not only did she give some very honest, useful and practical advice to develop our vision for community transformation, she also put me in touch with a couple of potentially very useful contacts.

She said I very eloquently painted a moving picture of life in Southall with it’s rich tapestry of people and cultures, it’s unique mix of all faiths and none, and it’s wealth of community resilience, resistance and defiance in the face of very real challenges from the National Front and the Special Patrol Group in the 1970s and 1980s, deep-rooted socio-economic problems of poverty, deprivation and low pay, pulling together and surviving the COVID pandemic despite chronic overcrowding and few remote-working jobs, and fifteen years of austerity politics topped off with a cost-of-living crisis under successive ConDem, Tory and Labour-in-name-only right wing neoliberal governments, and the needs of our 16,000 young people currently served by just one youth centre and struggling with the everpresent threat of lack of work and education, drugs, offending and knife crime.

At one point she asked me what my job title is, and suggested I’m working way above my pay grade. Which was nice to hear. She described me as the driving force of our project. I suggested maybe I was more rudder than anchor. She said I’m the captain of the ship!

To be honest, I felt like I’d had ten years of successful therapy in the space of three days.

She also left me with my favourite phrase of the week rightly critiquing a section of text on our new website as “ecclesiastical gobbledegook”.

Fundraising update

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:10:54 +0100

Over a year ago I did some refresher training in fundraising on “writing a successful fundraising application”, “winning grants from trusts and foundations”, and “developing a fundraising strategy”. All very useful and highlighted particular areas we the organisations I work with need to improve and do more work to meet funders' minimum expectations. Nothing we couldn’t do, but it would need a shift in focus and energy, and some new people with specific skills and experiences on (the) board.

There’s no lack of vision, but one of the difficulties with this sort of thing generally in the charity and voluntary sector (in my experience) is that everyone is very busy doing the good work that needs to be done every day and week and month, which leaves very little time or headspace, if any, to work on how to bring the bigger picture to life, to make it happen.

Another difficulty for us has been that one of our key organisations is going through a difficult leadership transition, which effectively means they are out of the strategic picture, at least until that is resolved. That’s likely to be months if not longer.

This year I started fundraising efforts for new youth work. But rather than work on what it would take to make it happen, developing a case for support, and making sure we have all the building blocks of good governance in place, we excitedly jumped straight into finding out what money is out there and shooting off a few half-baked applications.

One thing that seems to have changed since my previous fundraising efforts fifteen years ago is that then it was difficult to get grants for continuing existing work - everyone wanted new projects. Now, it seems that funders all expect you to have a track record delivering the very work you want new funding for. I guess that’s what fifteen years of neoliberal austerity politics does!

Thankfully, now, we have agreed to work on developing our fundraising (and organisational) strategy and getting our own house in order before we start applying in earnest again. This will delay any new fundraising income for us, but that is offset by our current sole funder happily allowing us to repurpose money that was originally earmarked for different work to fund the initial youth work set up instead.

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:19:22 +0100

Twice in the last two weeks my boss has called me the team’s anchor.

At least that’s what I think he said.

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:28:36 +0100

The funder who changed the closing date has rejected our grant application as it was submitted late.

No great loss as it’s confirmed now (and we kind of knew it already) that our project proposal would have very little chance of success anyway.

So far so good

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:19:11 +0100

Six weeks into my new full-time role at work with the additional two days a week focussed on fundraising for a new youth work.

I’ve scoped about 15 potential grant funders, small and large, and submitted 4 applications or pre-applications.

It seems to be grant application season as many of the closing dates are in February and March.

Unfortunately, one funder switched their closing date to Thursday last week after previously advertising it as Friday (The Wayback Machine agrees with me). Another closed their online form the day before or on the morning of their published closing date (Friday). Luckily, perhaps, they didn’t remove the live application form page I had bookmarked so I could still submit.

It will be annoying if our applications are disregarded in these two cases, although the lesson is don’t wait until deadline day.

I’m not beating myself up about it. We only had a few days to put something together, and I was chasing/waiting on my boss to draft and agree final wording. It’s a learning curve for all of us, and lots we can do better.

AI tools were genuinely helpful, and also provided useful feedback on our applications - need to remember to do that step before submitting them next time.

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:16:51 +0100

Still setting up this bloody laptop.

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:14:13 +0100

Setting up a new laptop for a colleague at work. A very sleek and lightweight Lenovo V15 G4.

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 23:48:24 +0100

A better all round social work experience for everyone involved. They should be able to move to a four day week.

Ealing Council slashes admin work by 44% with new AI tool ealing.nub.news
ealing.nub.news https://ealing.nub.news/news/local-news/ealing-council-slashes-admin-work-by-44-with-new-ai-tool-250186

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:35:50 +0100

I just used Voicenotes.com on my phone to record various training prices from historical invoices reading them off my laptop screen, asked it to create a summary, copied into NotebookLM to sort and make a pretty table I could paste into Sheets, then tidied up the presentation.

Then asked Gemini to research three equivalent types of training from external providers, copied responses into Docs, imported Docs into NotebookLM and got a second shiny table for comparison.

Productivity through the roof.

Once it can make coffee and bring cake to the table, and make off-the-cuff wisecracks, I will be expendable.

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:04:30 +0100

Back home early from work after second meeting had been cancelled without anyone telling anyone else. So we were all sat there like lemons for twenty minutes until someone asked if we were going to get started. 🤦‍♂️

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:30:54 +0100

Oh, and printed a couple of things I’ll need later on our new home printer - only to discover the kids have used up all the colour already printing off photos of planets.

I could use the printer at work, but it’s almost certain not to work when I actually need it to work.

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:28:57 +0100

Spent the morning going over the AI’s homework that I assigned it last week, correcting it and filling in the gaps. Still quicker than doing it myself? Not sure, although I found its formatting helpful to follow, and that surely saved me some time.

Virtual meeting completed eventually after the organiser (initially) and my boss (all together) failed to appear.

Quick lunch and out for two back-to-back in-person meetings (likely with all the same people).

Back to work

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:50:00 +0100

The last time I worked full-time, in 2015, I got fired for taking too much time off sick.

The last time I worked full time before that, in 2011, I got fired for taking too much time off sick.

So I was quite happy to work part-time since 2016, fifteen hours a week to begin with, increasing to twenty two and a half hours in 2017. It felt like something I could cope with.

And it allowed me to spend a lot of time with big kid when he was little, and then little kid, too. Although that was often tiring ‘work’ I feel very fortunate to have had that much time with them when they were so young and fun.

Working two or three days a week and really being in charge of my own hours and schedule also allowed me lots of flexibility. I could almost work when I liked and didn’t worry about how many hours I’d done. If I needed to I could easily make up time or catch up on another day.

Going back full-time today, I was very conscious of how much time I spent working, and not working. I’ve got much less flexibility now to make up my hours.

Then again, I know that at work, it’s possible to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway, and the office not actually doing much work. I won’t be too hard on myself for making a cup of tea, powdering my nose, connecting the wife to the internet or checking my online socials every now and then.

All in all it wasn’t a bad day. Nothing urgent to do and I ended up going down a fundraising rabbit-hole. Found a couple of new-to-me funders and shared them with the relevant people, one of whom has already said they will apply.

Job done.

This year

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 10:28:59 +0100

This year I’m returning to full-time work for the first time in almost a decade. I’m looking forward to it, though, and my main focus is going to be on researching and writing grant funding applications for local community youth work.

Last term I joined my sons' school’s parent teacher association specifically to help find grant funding they can apply for. I need to get on with that.

I also hope to be able to get more involved (again) in local democracy and activism in person. I’d like to see if we can get some kind of organised mutual aid and self-help community going.

I want to get fitter and lose some weight, so I’m intend to walk every morning (flat feet permitting) and I’m no longer taking sugar in tea and coffee.

I want to sleep better (which is partly dependent on little kid staying in his own bed all night), breathe better, and get my psoriasis under control.

And I want a new hat.

The Last Supper

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 21:03:59 +0100

Work xmas lunch today was delicious, especially the spiced pear cake for dessert (albeit with the tiniest slice of pear I’ve ever seen).

Company was good, and highlighted how socially inept I am without a couple of pints inside me.

Service was excellent apart from the ridiculous length of time it took to pay the bill. They seemed to need to input each individual course into the till, but couldn’t work out why the total didn’t equal 13 x £16.95 - one of us didn’t order dessert.

Another one of our gathering is likely soon to be deported, which I felt uncomfortably aware of throughout.

No room at the inn

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 14:47:50 +0100

Immigration case I’ve been working on since almost exactly a year ago has finally gone kaput with devastating and life changing consequences for the person involved.

They’ve lived here since they were eighteen. They volunteer to run a wellbeing cafe in a local church. They applied for grant funding to keep the cafe open over winter. We wanted to employ them as a community development worker.

They now have to leave the UK by the day of our office xmas lunch or face deportation.

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:12:50 +0100

Years ago, I would grab a Greggs sausage roll every morning for breakfast on the way into work.

On The Bales

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 11:38:48 +0100

The recent farmers' protests in the UK and a comment on micro.blog about old style rectangular straw bales reminded me (again) of my own farming history.

[@Miraz](https://micro.blog/Miraz) It has taken me many years to get used to this way of packing hay. I grew up with the old rectangular bales that we had to fill the loft with for the horses' winter. What do they call this big rolls of hay? Also "bales"?

markstoneman https://micro.blog/markstoneman/50684702

Now, obviously, without farmers we don’t eat. All those fields left to grow wild kindly paid for by the European Union… oh, wait, that freebie blew away in the Farage wind and now costs us £2.4 billion of our own money every year.

Talking of wind, apparently the new inheritance tax farmers are protesting will incentivise them to use or sell their farmland for use as wind or solar farms. Presumably to keep the lights and the air conditioning on for the rich when it all goes tits up, while the rest of us scrabble around blaming immigrants and woke lefties.

Farmers are notoriously tight-fisted, as I related in my own story about having my farm labouring wages deducted by the farmer after he gave me a lift home. Tight as a duck’s arse as we used to say. Steve, the farmer’s foreman, walked like a duck. Probably because he spent all day sitting on a tractor shovelling straw bales on to trailers for us to stack.

My first day on the bales ended in disaster. Steve could have lifted me down on his tractor shovel thing, as he he did many times thereafter, but instead allowed newbie me to slide down the ropes we’d just tightened.

My fingertips took several days to regrow. I had fifty pence deducted from my wages for the cost of replenishing the first aid kit, and received a straight knockout for bleeding on the ropes.

Baling was actually decent fun when you got used to the physical aspect of the work. I worked with my mate who lived on the same road, and it was a challenge to stack the bales in the right way and learn particular tricks for making them fit into impossibly small spaces. The lorry drivers often helped and, being Northumbrians, they were usually a good crack. They wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible and to make sure their load wasn’t going to topple over on the long road back to Cockermouth.

The days were often hot and long, and I would spend a lot of time visualising my first pint of the evening when we were done. But invariably, by the time I’d got home, soaked in the bath, eaten and gone out, the last thing I wanted was beer. I usually drank a shandy instead and went home for an early night.

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 17:39:49 +0100

Notionally returned to wfh today.

✅ Made chilli sans carne
✅ Emailed work to say I will try to ease myself back into things, but still feeling exhausted
✅ Declined work meetings on health grounds
✅ Had a three hour nap
✅ Woke just in time for a late lunch
✅ Picked kids up from school

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 18:28:12 +0100

I wrote 300 pages of notes and reflections in my personal and work journals in 90 days.

WFH Saved My Life

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:24:42 +0100

I’ve worked from home since the end of February 2020. I transferred all my work and systems online to do so, and while I’m still part-time, in practice I’m now available 24/7 for every conceivable administrative emergency (“Hi David. Please order me some large coloured post-it notes and have them delivered to my home tomorrow” or “Hi David. Please bring £200 in cash to my house this morning so I can pay for my lunch meeting today.").

I won’t pretend I’ve always been highly productive, in the office or at home. But I always get everything done that needs to be done, and I’m super-flexible and adaptable. I’ve been asked to do - and done - huge, complex projects at short notice and with short deadlines that are outside of my remit and frankly beyond my skill set, but I’ve done them, learned how to do it on the spot or got help.

I do go into the office for occasional in-person meetings and social gatherings (“xmas lunch” looms) when necessary, and indeed spent a solid three hours working last Thursday with a masked colleague (she had a fever) in a freezing cold office. I’d just recovered from a bad reaction to the covid vaccine. Next day was a write-off. I was exhausted and worried about whether the work we did was really good enough. The day after and since I’ve had a terrible cough and cold, shortness of breath, wheezing. (Since my COPD diagnosis, every rasping breath I take is assessed and rediagnosed by my non-medic wife as requiring medical attention.)

My workplace is bad for my health. Pre-covid I had multiple chest infections that kept me away from work and reduced my productivity to zero for weeks at a time. Since I worked from home, and catching covid aside, I’ve had zero time where I’ve been unable to go to the office for essential work that can only be done there. Even when I’ve had coughs and colds, I’ve felt well enough to do the work that needed to be done. Somehow (until now with this new cough) I don’t seem to get so ill or feel so bad when I’m at home.

Working from home has given me the time and space to transform how I work for the better. I’m better organised, more thoughtful, less rushed and distracted. I can honestly say that I’m now the most productive I’ve ever been thanks to a more comfortable, relaxed and focussed personal work space.

And, yes, being part-time, and flexible, I can take a nap if I need one.

Why should people work at home? https://youtu.be/bQN_Fb03RfE?si=CZoQagrotTA_urw8 The ‘return to work’ now being enforced by many organisations makes no sense for many people, or the planet. It really is time that we have some enlightened managers who did what is best for people and the world, and not what they see as being best for them.
Richard Murphy https://mas.to/@RichardJMurphy/113468713160356801

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:57:29 +0100

Finished a grant application with a colleague just in time to meet tomorrow’s deadline.

A massive relief, and hopeful for success. Had hoped to get it done sooner but my covid hangover put paid to that plan.

Fortunately we’d done most of the groundwork in advance, but today was intense.

Chasing youths with carving knives

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 22:06:14 +0100

How my journey into care work was a serendipitous outcome of my search for meaning and purpose beyond the confines of traditional work. At least, that’s according to Google NotebookLM, based on my Curriculum Vitae series of blog posts.

Transcript

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 09:23:25 +0100

I can’t opt-out of LinkedIn’s new AI data gathering exercise, and neither can I delete my account, because I can’t login (got a new phone, 2fa linked to old phone, fucked).

Hopefully their AI will be richer and more fully rounded as a result of my content.

Wed, 08 May 2024 14:22:04 +0100

OFFICE ABANDONED - SUN STOPPED WORK

Today’s office.

- davidmarsden, https://davidmarsden.info/2024/05/08/todays-office.html

Wed, 08 May 2024 12:01:23 +0100

Today’s office.

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:08:10 +0100

Nine year old said he wanted to grow some potatoes, so we planted chitted seed potatoes in bags tonight.

He said he didn’t know it was so much work!

Thriving?

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:43:17 +0100

My son’s school’s Thrive teacher is leaving. She helped transform my lad’s experience of school from being one where he had weekly if not daily challenges with regulating his emotions and his behaviour, to one where he enjoys school every day. She’s going to be very greatly missed.

I managed to tell her this today and thank her for her work. It was so sad to hear her story.

She has committed ten years of her life to helping our youngsters get the best start in life, and done lots of extra work getting accredited to do so. But, at the end of the day, she can no longer afford to continue, and has taken a job elsewhere in sales and marketing.

What a stupid, shit country we live in.

Curriculum Vitae (Hocus Pocus)

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 11:13:00 +0100

Inevitably, my time as a Manchester University player came to end, and I left the club by mutual consent when my contract ended.

Somewhat bizarrely, looking back on it, I joined what appeared to be an obscure and tiny religious cult in the middle of nowhere (deepest, darkest Lincolnshire), dabbling in some rather questionable therapy / witchcraft.

My role was primarily as Administrator with responsibility for making sense of the almost entirely lacking paperwork, contracts, and financial arrangements of the company (?) / sole practitioner / lead sorceress. Bed and board were included in my pay, which meant I didn’t get paid much at all, and had to do a lot of household chores on a strict rota, along with the other, er, residents.

I got kicked out about six months later for dropping acid at the weekend. Somehow, with a couple of band mates, we cleaned ourselves up and managed to persuade a friendly estate agent to rent us out a four-bedroomed semi-detached house that had one careful previous owner (the local vicar), that was ideally located opposite a big pub and just up the road from the local drug dealers.

We spent eighteen months there, mostly on the dole, getting our musical act into gear. Completely by chance (we put up a card in the local Spa shop window asking for a “chilled out lamppost”), we met a nomadic (on the run) alcoholic junkie who could actually sing, write songs, and also played a mean guitar. We rehearsed every day in that house (pity our poor neighbours), recorded a couple of decent demo tapes (got to number one in the local newspaper charts), and played some wild gigs that were generally pretty well received.

The end was nigh, though, as it always is. I’d got a job to help pay for gear, and fell madly in love with one of my new co-workers. Euro 96 appeared, and we all took a break from music to enjoy Ing-er-land’s latest heartbreak efforts. Our junkie friend wasn’t into football, or staying around, and one day he was gone. My love interest left, too.

This was the catalyst for me to focus on work for the first time in my life, as a coping mechanism for loss, as much as anything else. The more I worked, the less loss I felt. I couldn’t get enough of it.

I started at the bottom. Literally. The job I applied for was Personal Carer in a Residential Home. I assumed that it meant psychological care, and didn’t pay much attention on my first morning shift when I shadowed another carer who was wiping bottom after bottom (and more) of all these frail, elderly folks.

Anyway, I got into it (and my new co-worker), and found that, yes, there was a quite a degree of psychological care involved, too, if you had the time, skills and inclination. Unbelievably (or so it seemed to many in the industry at the time, when frail, elderly people find they have something worth living for (a friend to talk to, something fun to do, something like a day out to look forward to), they’re much more capable of getting themselves dressed, feeding themselves, staying continent.

Of course, many carers had none of those things, and in fact, got very little psychological care themselves in their own lives. Often it was just a continuation of the sadistic brutality from their school days.

But I found myself actually enjoying the job despite the low pay, and often quite unpleasant working conditions. I enjoyed the people - the camaraderie and comradeship of the staff and residents. We really were all in it together

That said, there was only so much arse wiping I could do before I got fed up with it. I’d done everything and more I’d been asked to do and applied to be a Senior Carer and even a Care Services Manager (responsible for running the shifts, and the home in the absence of the Home Manager). But I wasn’t successful - too little experience, I was told. Which might have been true. I’d only been there a year.

But I suspect it might also have been because I was too much of a threat to the darker side of what was going on. The manager was taking money from at least one of the more severely demented residents, and some of the staff were in on it, too. At least, that’s what I’d been told.

Curriculum Vitae (Ad Absurdum)

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 14:59:56 +0100

I spent most of my three years ‘working’ in Manchester down the pub. When I was in my shared smoke-filled office, I was more often than not playing a very early demo of football manager (four free seasons, on repeat), or compiling a regular comedy fanzine for the five-a-side footy team I helped to found and run. They were crazy and fun times.

Every other weekend, I got a train back to Lincolnshire for band rehearsals, recordings and occasional gigs. Although these were more often than not simply excuses to drink to excess.

I forget how much I was being paid, but it seemed like a fortune (it wasn’t, but life was free and easy back then). My boss Terry was a quietly manic Irish gynaecologist who had somehow ended up leading European studies into vertebral osteoporosis. He had more faith in me than I had in myself. He would type things on to the computer screen and ask me to read them. I would say things like, “You need to slow down, mate. Use some spaces and punctuation.”

My main role was to input response rate data, which consisted of reams of handwritten register books from all over Europe containing names, gender, dates of birth, and what kind of fracture they had suffered, if any, and if they responded to our survey, or not. Thrilling work.

On the plus side, I got to go to a couple of conferences (excuses to drink to excess) in Bath and Prague. I remember watching Ireland beat Italy in the 1994 World Cup with a bunch of Italian bone doctors in Bath. And we stayed in a stereotypical concrete skyscraper communist-era hotel-cum-conference centre on the outskirts of Prague, but had enough free time to explore the gothic city centre in the midst of a wintry, thundery snowstorm while drinking Czech vodka.

As what felt like a last resort to motivate me, my boss sent me on a week long working holiday to Athens. My objective was imply to visit one of the research centres there and make sure they knew how to complete the response rate registers correctly. A two hour job, as it turned out. They sent me for a week, as it was cheaper than sending me for a day or an overnighter, flights only, I had to find somewhere to stay when I got there. When I arrived in the heart of Athens and got out of my airport taxi, I stumbled on to the street trying to catch my bearings. A ‘friendly’ local ‘took pity’ on my and asked me where I was from. “Manchester” I said. “Aha! Bobby Chalton! Nobby Sti-les! Come! Come! I have a bar! I will get you a drink!”

I walked into his dimly lit bar just around the corner. I bottle of cold beer was waiting for me. So friendly and welcoming! As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I looked around to take in my surroundings. A group of scantily clad young (and not so young) women giggled at a table opposite the bar. Red lights everywhere! I made my excuses and left!

After doing my two hours work, I spent the rest of the week walking all around the old town and seeing all the ancient sites by day, and drinking to excess in the evenings.

Curriculum Vitae (Ad Nauseam)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 10:47:00 +0100

After failing to become the next George Harrison, I spent three years idling around, getting into trouble, and generally not knowing what to do with myself.

I had some summer jobs working on a local farm stacking straw bales on to lorries from Cockermouth, feeding turkeys, and working in the grain barn (doing what I can’t remember, although I do remember not being able to breathe because of all the dust).

I remember one day my car broke down, leaving me and my baling partner stranded in a field in the middle of nowhere. It was a very second hand Mini Cooper, which ultimately failed its MoT when the papier mâché the previous careful owner had used to fill the side panel caught fire while the mechanic was welding something (it’s a long time ago, and I never understood how cars work, partly thanks to my Physics teacher, who told all the boys to leave his class on “how cars work” because, obviously, being boys, we already knew).

Anyway, the farmer kindly gave us a lift home. On the way, he told us he would deduct the petrol money (£5 each) from our wages. Now in those days, £5 was quite a lot of money, certainly enough to get royally drunk on at the weekend and still have enough for a bag of chips from the Chinese takeaway afterwards.

I also worked some summers in the plastics factory my mum worked at. She, and the other local mums made children’s play clothes, while the local children put poles into windbreaks to make sitting on the local beaches bearable in the face of the North Sea winds.

I came to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with me, and so I decided to go to University to study psychology and find a fix.

In order to get into Uni, I needed a better ‘A’ Level result than me three Es from school, so I did a correspondence course in Law and got a B. I could have gone to Manchester Polytechnic, but instead elected to go to Bolton Institute of Higher Education. I was really too terrified to go to Manchester Poly (too big, too big city centre). Christ, I was even terrified of getting on the train (not knowing how or where to buy a ticket, how to know which train to get on, how to know when to get off, etc.).

Manchester appealed because it was where my dad hailed from (well, Oldham, really, although he went to school in Manchester, and, of course, went to Old Trafford to watch Best, Law and Charlton in their heyday).

Bolton was interesting and fun, though, and I made some good friends there, got a 2:1 degree, spent a year in the US on an exchange programme where I did several road trips across the country, climbed a mountain, nearly died in a blizzard, skied down other mountains, made no. 26 on the University Soccer Team, among other things.

In my first semester in the states, I was terribly homesick and made an unscheduled visit home for Christmas and New Year. When I went back, I got into the experience so much I wanted to stay, but couldn’t get a job or visa to do so.

When I finished my degree, I was hopelessly lost again with know idea what to do. My degree had taught me (wrongly, imo) that psychological problems were contained wholly within the individual person and could be treated by taking lots of drugs (not that I was against that, at all). My careers advisor helpfully counselled that I could do anything I wanted to do as long as it wasn’t psychology (for which I’d need a medical degree). I half-heartedly applied to do a Masters degree, but the thought of more constrained studying wasn’t what I wanted (I wanted money to buy drugs).

So, with friends, I got a summer job with an employment agency picking orders in an old cotton mill converted into a warehouse in Shaw. We supplemented the permanent staff, who could mostly be found sleeping in dens hidden inside a maze of boxes, and so had to work twice as hard for a fraction of the pay without any benefits of regular employment like sick pay, holidays, etc. Or in our case, as it turned out, no pay at all, at least until I led a delegation of workers to confront the hapless recruitment agent.

I quit that job, and looked around for work. I remember going to an interview in leafy Stockport (or maybe it was Wilmslow) or somewhere “down south” for some kind of “trainee manager” job. There were a lot them about at the time. While I was waiting to go in, I saw and heard all the staff gather for what appeared to be their regular morning meeting, where they began chanting some bizarre marketing cult bullshit. I made my excuses and ran for my life.

I signed up, instead, as a “trainee manager” for Domino’s Pizza at their franchise in Swinton. I lasted six weeks, although it felt like longer. I worked 80 hour weeks for £80 a week and all the leftover pizza I could eat. My nadir was a Saturday night when I found myself left alone in charge of the shop and unable to cope. I was never the fastest at making the fast food. In those days, Domino’s promised to deliver within 40 minutes of your order or you get it for free. Once I got behind, it was impossible to catch up. On this night I swear people were phoning their friends saying, “Free pizza at Domino’s! It’ll be stone cold when you get it, but hey!”

My dad threatened to get me a job in the pea processing plant where he was now a supervisor back in Grimsby, and while I ended up moving back with him I worked in a high street burger bar called Yankees (I called it Wankers) instead. Why? I don’t know, because I was clearly unsuited to the frenetic, frantic pace of the work, and dealing with drunken customers in the early hours of a Saturday or Sunday morning. I remember chasing a group of youths down the street with a carving knife after they squirted ketchup all over my nice clean shop walls. Wankers!

Along with my best friend at Uni, I applied for a job at Manchester University as a Research Assistant. I was terrible at interviews then, while he breezed it. I was absolutely gutted, and couldn’t believe it. Then, out of the blue a few weeks later, my mate called me to tell me they had a job for me. So back I went. I spent three years researching nothing at all, but thoroughly enjoying living the life in Manchester city centre, with all that entailed, in the early 90s.

Curriculum Vitae (Repetitum)

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 11:32:55 +0100

Following on from my success delivering the news to my local community, I took a break from the world of (very part-time) work to focus on… playing in my first bands. And learning to play the guitar. Much of which came at the expense of any interest in or motivation to study, or revise for ‘O’ Levels, and later ‘A’ Levels.

Living in a small rural market town, some of my friends, and my own younger brother, in fact, had Saturday jobs bush beating - literally (as far as I know) beating bushes to encourage game birds to fly to their sporting deaths. Let’s never forget that killing is a sport for our aristocracy and their hangers-on. Famously, at the time, the host of these shootings was “peppered in the buttocks” by our drunken home secretary Willie Whitelaw. You couldn’t get away with a name like that now.

My brother graduated from bush beating for toffs to hunt sabotage.

I did well enough in my ‘O’ Levels (one A, eight Bs, and a C), that my maths teacher told me I would “never amount to anything”. He wasn’t wrong.

My dad tried to motivate me after my mock ‘A’ Level results by leaving me a drunken handwritten note and caricature drawing of me with an arrow pointing to it (I mean, in those days what else could he have done?) saying: “THICK CUNT”.

Then he got me what felt like a punishing summer job at the duck processing plant where he was a line supervisor. Being the boss’s son was no fun when they put me on the killing floor. I became a vegetarian for nine years after that (although since returned to meat eating - that’s another story).

I messed up my ‘A’ Levels (three Es, and failed General Studies writing about the punk band Stiff Little Fingers). I was profoundly depressed, but had no one to talk to about it. Mainly because I had been brought up not to talk about or express any “bad” or “difficult” feelings. Random people used to come up to me and say “Cheer up, it may never happen”, but it in my internal world, it already had.

Music, and playing guitar in a band, was my only outlet, but we were young and totally delusional. We were a three-piece, but believed we were the next Fab Four. We played a successful debut gig in Cleethorpes at The Sub, but instead of building on that, we immediately packed our bags and gear into a van, and drove to London to live in a series of squats in Stepney, Poplar and Limehouse.

An older ex-school friend was part of an anarchist community based out of a bookshop, and helped us find, gain entry to, and occasionally get the water, gas and/or electricity working. In those good old days, you could easily “sign on” the dole and get enough to actually live on.

I read and heard a lot about the politics of anarchism, which I found very attractive to my idealism. That said, I couldn’t ever see how it would work in practice, in the real world. It would need a revolution, of course, but even then, it would need a revolution in people’s minds and thinking first.

Six months living in squats, a couple of lousy gigs and a demo tape later, we packed our bags and returned home.

Curriculum Vitae

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:09:00 +0100

I’ve had a long and winding career in the fields of work and education. At one time, I was doing quite well, but it all got a bit too much and it’s been a bit of a struggle since.

Which is a shame, because it would have been nice if things had turned out better.

I was never really suited to work. It’s almost always felt like a real imposition, a drag, and a massive downer.

The money was never enough, and most of it went on social and recreational activities, which, looking back, were a means of self-medication.

It’s funny, because I really did try hard to fit in and make a fist of it from the age of twenty-nine to forty-three. A mid-life crisis along with pleurisy, a collapsed lung and an empyema, followed by a thoracotomy, two consecutive nine month long frozen shoulders and that bastard GORD (gastro-oesophageal reflux disease) almost finished me off.

Those fourteen years working in therapeutic activities for older people with dementia, and later in training and employment for with adults with psychotic diagnoses were mostly relatively happy and relatively mostly successful (repeated ultimate catastrophic failures, aside).

I went from wiping arses to leading a rehabilitation centre for some of the most disadvantaged people in society.

Before all of that I’d been completely lost. I never wanted to work, only to play music in a band. My first ever paid work was a paper round, but I regularly mis-delivered whenever there was a change to the round. The best thing about that job was getting to read all the different back page headlines and football stories before anyone else.

ERROR 55 - Internal Communication Problem

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 14:30:22 +0100

Boss: Can you order a new printer for the office?

Me: Sure. *orders a new printer for the office*

Office: Did you order a new printer for the office? It’s arrived.

Me: Yes, I’ll come over and set it up.

Office: No need, we already moved the printer from the other office. And we have a tech person coming in Monday to set it up.

Impossible Job

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 09:48:00 +0100

Last week, my boss asked me to produce a professional looking ten page job profile for a potential new appointment.

He provided me with an example from another employer, and asked me to use the same format.

He wanted me to find some suitable photographs “online” to use.

This was all outside of his skillset.

And mine.

He wanted it “by tomorrow” (Wednesday), and gave me the text he’d written for the first page, as well as the headings he wanted to use for the remaining pages.

The formatted example he’d given me was a pdf. I was very pleased to discover that Adobe now provides a free pdf to Word conversion, which certainly made my job easier.

It was easy enough to find photographs, of course, but not so much photographs that are free to use. My boss later told me he wasn’t worried about that, as he “wasn’t using them for commercial purposes.”

The next day (Wednesday), my boss emailed to say he would send me the final nine pages of text he still hadn’t written “tomorrow morning” (Thursday), and that “we” would “populate” the template document then.

While I was eating lunch the next day (Thursday), his email arrived leaving me two hours to put the whole thing together. I didn’t think it would be enough time, but just got on with it.

Two hours later, I still had two pages to do, but had to collect my kids from nursery and school, make their tea (or dinner, as they call it), and get them in the bath. I managed to finish it later while they watched TV.

My boss was very pleased, although he said he didn’t expect anyone would actually see it.

Pay Rise

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 09:24:00 +0100

I haven’t had a pay rise since April 2017.

Taking into account the cost of living increases year on year, and especially in the last year or two, I’ve effectively taken a pay cut every year.

To be fair, I was thankful to have a job at all during and after covid.

Thanks to Kate Morley’s historical UK inflation rates and price conversion calculator, I now know how much I should be earning if my pay had kept up with inflation.

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:06:08 +0100

Waiting for account verification emails from Companies House is like the proverbial waiting for a bus. Nothing for ages, then four come all at once.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 12:05:57 +0100

In my work email.

As part of our Corporate and Social Responsibility, we are running a digital poverty mission to “Connect The UK”. We have already purchased 40,000 brand new Tactus GeoBook laptops and have donated over £2.5 million in device discounts. These laptops come fully loaded with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Education, a 3 year warranty and are discounted to just £84 per device.

They’re £80 each on Amazon.

Return To Work

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 09:14:00 +0100

I returned to work last week after my extended absence due to respiratory illness, which may or may not be related to three years of breathing the poisonous gasworks' air.

I find I now have to literally climb over two rough sleepers camped outside the door of my workplace in order to get in. There is no more space in the nearby doorway, and the doorway around the side entrance is similarly occupied.

By my reckoning, we have five more rough sleepers than we did two months ago, or two years ago, or four years ago.

Meanwhile, Southall’s skyline is rapidly changing from terraced family houses to much-needed ‘genuinely affordable’ skyscraper studio flats, while ‘parklets’ are opening up in the posher parts of Ealing.

To be fair, I did see that the Bell regime have cut a deal with Compton’s foldaway bikes so that residents on the Copley estate can hire them without having to pay a membership fee, and improve air quality at the same time.

Wed, 03 Sep 2014 22:28:00 +0100

3 days into my new job. Company policy says staff must remain upbeat. Loving every single minute of my return to wage slavery.

Careers Advice

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:00:00 +0100

“When I grow up, I want to play football for Manchester United!”

For an eight year old boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire in the 1970s it seemed like an honest and rational response to an impossible question. No one else at my school wanted to play football for Manchester United. Leeds, maybe. Liverpool, definitely. Other kids said they wanted to be firemen, soldiers, doctors, and nurses. More of that later. Maybe their parents were firemen? Or maybe not. I didn’t know what my parents were. My dad went out before I got up every morning, and came home after I went to bed. At weekends, he told me stories about George Best, Denis Law (his favourite), Bobby Charlton, and the Busby Babes. About Manchester United and how they had the best team and had the best players. Not any more. That was all before my time. I was born in the year United had won the League for the last time, the year before they went on to win the European Cup. The Glory Days. Now, in my time, United were in Division Two (although I didn’t understand what that meant at the time). What I did understand was that I got to see highlights on Yorkshire TV occasionally, with a young and annoying Martin Tyler commentating on matches against the likes of ‘local’ teams Hull City, Sheffield Wednesday and York City. United were good that season. Stuart Pearson was my favourite then. Stocky and powerful, he played with the passion that I came to expect from United players. He was never the best, but he scored goals and looked like he meant it. I meant it when I said I wanted to be a footballer.

“Think of something realistic,” I was told.

“You’ll never make it.”

“Concentrate on your studies.”

I couldn’t wait to prove them wrong.

I got in to the school team. In games lessons and playtime, I was a stocky and powerful centre forward who scored goals. Our first proper match was against another village school.

Five years later, in big school, I’d had my chips pissed on, but I still wanted to make it. I wrote to East Stirlingshire Football Club (just before a young Alex Ferguson took charge) offering my services. I got a polite rejection letter back.

No one ever told me why. I was too upset to ask.

Later, in Art class, I put together a morbid collage of war and that terrible question in cut-out newspaper headline letters:

“Why?”

“Don’t be so childish!” the teacher scolded me when he woke from his alcoholic stupor.

Well, pardon me. I was a child. Surely I was allowed to ask, and expect an adult answer?

So instead, I told them I wanted to join the Army. Not because I wanted to, but because that seemed to keep them happy.

Later still, when approaching school leaving age, after filling in countless forms asking me what I liked doing and what I was good at, I was told by a ‘careers advisor’ to study chemical or electrical engineering at university. I didn’t know what they were or why they’d been chosen for me. I resolved to go on the dole.

(Has careers guidance gone off the rails?. Was it ever on the rails?)

No onions, but plenty of fireworks with bier

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:24:00 +0100

Abstract: Gertcha by the wiener. Tags: fireworks, photos, video, bier, Chas ‘n’ Dave, hot dogs

Last night, eight of us from Enfield Clubhouse went to Alexandra Palace to see London’s largest and most popular fireworks display. Here’s a video I took. The fireworks were pretty and spectacular - worth seeing, if you like that kind of thing!

After the fireworks, we climbed up the hill to the Palace itself and queued to get into the German Bier Festival. To call it a Festival is really a big overstatement. It’s a few years since I went to a beer festival and it was most likely Up North in deepest, darkest Bury, Lancashire, or somewhere like that. Maybe they do them differently Down South, but this was a bit of a let down. One tiny little bar, like you might find in a marquee at a modern marketed music festival. One brand of German Bier - Paulaner - and only two varieties: Munich and Weiss. The Weiss was off by the time I had been pushed and shoved forward by the ten deep bar queue. If you didn’t fancy Paulaner Munich, you could have that old Bavarian favourite, Foster’s. And they insisted on calling it Bier, which makes me wonder how authentic it really was. Not that authenticity seemed to be high on the agenda as it was all served in the obligatory health and safety plastic beakers.

So, we all got beer and seats in the Great Hall by which time a bunch of Cockney Irish fiddlers and banjoists started murdering Pogues' classics, much to the delight of the mostly student audience who I’m sure were out of their minds by now. Not that it stopped one of the thieving little tykes nicking my beer when I laid it down to rest and turned my back for five minutes.

What followed is a little hazy - maybe the bier was real, after all.

I fear that I may have danced to Chas But Not Dave or Chas And His Band or whatever Chas ‘n’ Dave are now known as. I was a little disturbed by the large, bald bass player, especially when he kept repeating ‘Gertcha!’ like an overly loud belch, totally drowning out scrawny-looking Chas on vocals.

To make matters worse, on leaving, I stopped for a Hot Dog.

‘Sorry, no onions’ said the serving assistant.

‘Oh, that’s a shame. I like onions on my Hot Dog. So. They are £3.00 with onions, right?’

‘That’s right, sir, but we don’t have any onions left.’

‘No, you don’t. So, if it’s £3.00 with onions… how much is it for a Hot Dog without onions?’

‘It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

By this time I was already in full Basil Fawlty mode.

‘I’d like a discount, please. If it’s £3.00 for a Hot Dog with onions, then I’d like 20% off for a Hot Dog without onions.’

‘It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

‘How can it be the same price, with or without onions?’

‘It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

‘So, can I have a discount, then or not? I’m willing to pay £2.40 for a Hot Dog without onions. If only you’d removed the empty onion trays and not told me you had no onions I’d never have known. Or you could scrape up the remaining slivers and let me have those….’

Now, I felt like Yossarian in Catch-22 trying to get out of the Air Force by being crazy, but being told that he couldn’t be crazy because he wanted to leave. And only a sane man would want to leave.

‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t give a discount. I just work here. It’s £3.00, sir. With or without onions.’

‘You could give me a discount if you wanted to. I’m sure you could.’

The guy (no pun intended) behind me piped up, offering to call the Office Of Fair Trading. I suggested that they might want to consult the Sale Of Consumer Goods Act.

‘I can’t give a discount, sir. It’s £3.00, with or without onions.’

‘OK, I give in. I’ll have a Hot Dog without onions for £3.00.’

‘You have to pay first, sir.’

‘What?! But you just gave him one! He hasn’t paid yet!’

‘I’m sorry, sir. You have to pay first and then I’ll give you the Hot Dog.’

A young American woman approached me.

‘Please stop harassing my staff, sir.’

‘What?! Harassing your staff?! You’ve got to be joking?!’

‘No, sir. You’re harassing my staff. Now, please stop it or I will have to call Security to come and remove you.’

‘All I want is a Hot Dog with onions for £3.00 as advertised. If you don’t have onions, then fine, I’ll buy a bareback Hot Dog for £2.40.’

‘Sir, you can buy a Hot Dog without onions for £3.00 or go without.’

‘Why can’t you give me a discount?’

‘I only work here, sir. I can’t give you a discount.’

‘Hang on. I thought you were in charge? Surely you can use your discretion and keep your customers happy? I just spent plenty of money tonight on donating to the cost of the fireworks display and buying beer for me and my friends.’

‘What’s your problem, mate?’ asked a student grumpily and who looked like he had dyed his original wiry ginger hair black. ‘It says Hot Dogs £3.00. Doesn’t say anything about onions.’

‘No, I know it doesn’t say anything about onions. That’s a very good point. And that’s why I’m not going to engage you in any further conversation. Enjoy your Hot Dog! Thank you all and goodnight.’

Thanks also, to Lee, Gemma, Michael, Atul, Dan, Raheem and Angelina for making it a fun night out. And my apologies for any offence caused to the Hot Dog stand workers.

Twenty Ten (The Prequel): The Cheesemaker

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Originally intended as a follow-up to part one of my milk-based food product styled personal review of 2010, this post quickly regressed into a metaphorical guide to the cheesemaking process, as you will see.

By the end of the first week of March 2010, I felt like I was several thousand feet above sea level. High up a mountain, again, perhaps mostly due to the ever-decreasing capacity of my right lung, but plummeting to new emotional depths thanks to the leaden weights of my ever-increasing self-doubt and sense of despair, perhaps partly as a reaction to stopping taking my antidepressant medication (although I stopped because I was feeling worse, not better).

One of the problems I found with officially going a bit mental is that I started to lose all confidence and trust in myself and the rest of the world. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve always been a bit of an independent-minded so-and-so and generally not afraid to say out loud whatever comes into my head. This invariably leads to me getting punched in the face. Or some other non-violent conflict.

The Big Cheese

A few years ago, I worked for someone who was responsible for making the lives of a few of her staff abjectly miserable, quite contrary to our organisation’s stated raison d’être ‘for better mental health.’ It appeared that she would move from one person to another and to another and then, it seemed to me, it was my turn. I decided I wasn’t going to take it.

During a torrid six months as her primary target, I had to undergo hospital tests on my heart for still unexplained and not since repeated vomiting and blackouts. When I told my GP what was going on at work she immediately signed me off with stress and didn’t want me to go back when I did. By the time my boss had finished with me I was unemployed and unemployable. Never underestimate the power of a bully.

I learned from painful experience quite a lot about how bullies and psychopaths operate. I learned that, while part of me wants to stand up to them and expose them for what they are, the sane part of me wants to avoid them altogether. So when I did manage to find a new job with a decent manager and then moved on from that with a good reference into my current post four years ago, I was delighted to be in a position where I was ‘the boss’, although, of course, I still had to report to a management committee made up of volunteers, led by a truly wonderful Chair.

When I say I was glad to be in charge, I don’t say that because of any desire to have power over others. Quite the contrary, in fact (unless I’m deluding myself). I’ve always believed in sharing power and responsibility as much as possible, but you can’t do that if you have an egomaniac boss or a rigidly hierarchical organisational structure. Yes, there are differences between staff and service users (staff get paid being the main one), but I try to minimise these as far as I can.

Cheese Grating

It was also gratifying to work in a London borough that not only funded my new organisation’s work, but whose commissioners seemed genuinely supportive. Within two weeks of me starting my new job, however, it was grating to be informed that the local authority would be able to fund us for only 40% of what we had budgeted for on their advice of just three months earlier. My first significant and highly unpleasant task, therefore, was to have to ask staff to reduce their hours from full-time to two days a week or to make them redundant in order that the organisation could survive.

Over the next two years, we began to flourish and I was able to bring in external funding to supplement the local authority’s money so that we could provide a still much-reduced service to what we had originally planned. Even so, it seemed popular with members, staff were highly skilled and dedicated to their work and feedback from carers and professionals who referred people to us was without exception, I think, almost worryingly positive.

Cheese Ripening

By working together on daily household and business tasks, we had established a sense of community, friendships and social engagement from a safe and supportive workplace. A lifeline for people whose experience was often one of many years of loss of sense of self and worth and an absence of meaningful relationships and occupation. A second home, where they were welcomed back with warmth and kindness into the human family (cite Richard Bentall’s ‘Doctoring The Mind’) and encouraged to believe that they had real reasons to hope for - and expect - better lives.

We had people going out into the community to volunteer and set up our own catering service to employ some of our members in very part-time casual work, based on their existing skills and interests. For all but one, this was the first paid work they had done in years. We weren’t able to find anyone permanent full-time employment during a time of global recession, but still I felt proud of what we’d achieved in difficult circumstances and with fairly limited resources.

Cheese-Induced Nightmare

So when I attended our annual review in 2009 with our main funder and described what we did and the impact it had on people’s lives I was gobsmacked to be told ‘We don’t care what you do or how you do it. We just want people off benefits and into work.’ I felt physically sick and faint.

While I understand (and, in principle, support) government targets to help people with disabilities to return to work, I’ve always been sceptical about the management-theory driven obsession with outcomes and, worse, the introduction of outcome-based contracting - where service providers get paid only if they meet agreed targets. What happens, is that the largest national providers are able to tender for local contracts with the lowest unit cost, inevitably, in my opinion, sacrificing quality (process) in the name of quantity (outcomes). Except that they fail to deliver.

Processed Cheese

To me, what we do and how we do it - the process - is of fundamental importance. There are plenty of organisations who work in completely different ways and who consistently fail to get people with diagnoses of schizophrenia (who form 60% of our membership) off benefits and into work and who receive considerably larger sums of money for doing so, making their CEO’s rich (and famous) in the process. Pushing people who lack confidence and don’t feel ready to work into inappropriate and unsupported employment simply doesn’t work for most and carries the very real risk of being detrimental to their mental health.

In order to massage their figures, these organisations ‘cherry-pick’ or ‘cream’ the most able and likely to find employment while ‘parking’ those with the most complex needs and severe disabilities, the very people small, local organisations like mine tend to work with. This is not to say that these people are not able. My experience tells me that indeed they are, but that they require much longer to build up sufficient confidence and trust and need much more support to do so. Time and support costs money, but so does a lifetime of unemployment and welfare dependence, not to mention the personal and social costs of inactive and isolated lives.

Cheesed Off

Well, that was a rather long-winded way of saying that in 2009 I began to feel that I was being fucked about at work. What I believed to be the right way of working and what I was being told to do by my paymasters conflicted and didn’t make any sense to me. A year later, while I had time on my hands due to my own physical and mental illness I ‘discovered’ that evaluations of the way I was being told to work clearly stated that this approach doesn’t work, either. I felt angry for not trusting my own judgment (based on experience and advice from mentors) and felt like I’d been bullied into submission, yet again.

Join me for another cheese and whine morning next time.

Twenty Ten (Part One): Hard Cheese

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:45:00 +0100

Abstract: Thankfully, there is no Part Two.

Tags: snowcock, nanowrimo, manflu, cheese, depression

Note: probably none of the links work now.

I began 2010 by wishing everyone (except fascists) a Happy New Year and a promise to blog my reflections on the naughty decade in due course.

Well, that will have to wait for another time, but here - thanks to my identi.ca memory aid - are my reflections on 2010.

After recovering from hiccups, speaking in tongues, a hangover the size of every Xmas and New Year and forced communication with O2’s customer service drones, I went back to work and set about the urgent task of building a snowwoman in the front garden.

This was my equal opportunities response the the much celebrated #SnowCock (replete with massive snowballs) of Glossop erected by Tim Dobson and friends.

Heaven snows he’s miserable now

Snowwoman somehow ended up transgendering into #SnowMorrissey until he inevitably lost his head, prompting a lyrical tribute from the similarly all-white and undead Andy C.

Just as life imitates art, ‘real’ life inevitably imitates life online. Perceptively and spookily - leaving aside the evidence of my maniacal online rantings - Andy C was concerned for my mental health.

If I’m honest, my most recent mental breakdown occurred somewhat earlier. Without wishing to go into too much detail and bore anyone with my personal troubles, I had been speaking with a psychotherapist since September 2009. After a few sessions, she expressed her concern that I might be ‘bipolar II’ and asked me to see my GP in order to get a referral to a psychiatrist for an assessment. I felt pretty shocked to hear this as I’d never considered that I might have had any hypomanic episodes (let alone needed to see a shrink) even though that might have explained some of my problems.

In tears, I told my GP what my psychotherapist had said, and thus I began my own pharmaceutical research into the effectiveness of anti-depressant medications to give me some respite (my GP’s word) from my heightened and unstable emotional state. My GP also referred me for a psychiatric assessment.

Mightily relieved finally to have spoken to someone about my difficulties and for allowing myself to ask for help, I felt as high as Jesus on the mountain for forty days and nights. Looking back now, it’s perhaps significant that my identi.ca output during this time was the highest it’s ever been (according to Michele’s Denticator - unfortunately it only shows the last 12 months, so you will have to take my word on that). Interestingly, my output last month, since I’ve been feeling better and like my ‘normal’ self was just as high if not higher:

I also increased my long-form blogging output, with a serious intent to try to write more regularly and have some fun in doing so. Perhaps significantly, my first post during this high period was about mental health. I wrote eight proper blog posts in those forty days and nights including:

A rant on authority and the War of Terror

A tribute to Manchester United and my Mum and Dad

A reminiscence piece I originally wrote in 1989 about my time stuck in a blizzard on Longs Peak, Colorado

An Ubuntu fanboi article

Another reminiscence piece, this time about a childhood incident

And a frankly bizarre post about a blue tit

It had taken me nine months to write my previous eight proper blog posts and almost five months to write the next eight. I wrote only one in the two months reviewed in this post while I was feeling so physically and mentally ill. Between May and December 2010 I wrote another fourteen.

I crashed down to earth only three days and six thousand unpublished words after my spur-of-the-moment decision to write a fifty-thousand word NaNoWriMo ‘novel’ in thirty days. Like all the other novels I’ve started, this one remains unfinished, although I did get past page four on this occasion. All of this was while I was working full-time. Mild insomnia helped.

Man flu

Just like in 1994, 1999 and 2004, I felt myself slowly burn out as Xmas approached and by the time #SnowMorrissey had melted I was feeling too depressed to work or do anything else other than go to the doctor’s surgery. My GP doubled my anti-depressant dose and I later self-diagnosed the new but familiar sharp stabbing pain in my lower right side under my ribs as pleurisy for which I prescribed myself Lemsip Max. The previous year I’d had a similar but worse pain with frightening shortness of breath, which only cleared up after a month or so using an inhaler.

Less perceptively and spookily - and admittedly without the benefit of a stethoscope, cheeseometer or any medical training - Andy C was less concerned about my physical health. Less is more.

Six days later, after a brief investigation with her stethoscope, my GP confirmed my pleuritic self-diagnosis, signed me off work and prescribed my some antibiotics for a chest infection, too. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a cheeseometer either. I started to feel a bit better, but a cold winter’s night a week or so on and the pain returned. Perhaps understandably, I was generally feeling more and more miserable, too.

At least everything was running smoothly at work during my two weeks absence.

‘It’s just a slice of cheese’

I went back to work on 1 February feeling much better after United had made City wait another year at least for their first trophy since 1976 and after setting in motion Arsenal’s annual implosion.

Seventeen days and an x-ray later, however, I was in Accident and Emergency with a suspected collapsed right lung. After a blood test to make sure I wasn’t suffering from a heart problems I went home the same evening. The following day I developed a strong desire to punch Nicholas Winterton in the face. Repeatedly. And regularly. Say every ten minutes. Coincidence?

Pull yourself together

By now, I’d lost touch with Reality, defending homeopathy. I’d lost hope, despairing at James Robertson’s inevitably futile struggles to print and use his own postage using only Free and open source software. I’d lost my humanity, calling Basil Brush impersonator Richard Cutts a demented glove puppet for agreeing with me about Nicholas Winterton.

Three weeks before my x-ray, I’d phoned the local mental health trust to find out what had happened to the referral letter my GP had sent them back in September 2009, four months earlier. They helpfully told me that I wasn’t a priority for treatment because I was working and, therefore, apparently OK. I asked them what did I have to do in order to become a priority? Try to kill myself? They offered me an appointment the same afternoon.

Naively, I assumed that this would be an appointment with a psychiatrist. After waiting for an hour behind the locked doors and shatter-proof glass partitions of the Community Mental Health Team building that kept the professional healers and helpers apart from me and rest of the presumably perceived as dangerous local community it serves, it turned out to be an appointment with a nurse who scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper. He then produced a copy of a letter dated the same day that he claimed had been posted to me the day before inviting me to a meeting with a psychiatrist in two weeks.

Three days before my x-ray, I met the psychiatrist. I made an extra effort to wash my hair, shave and put on clean clothes to make myself look less like Jim Ignatowski.

He sat in front of me reading my notes as if for the first time. After a couple of uncomfortably silent minutes he said ‘You’re not Stephen Fry bipolar.’

I suppose I should have been relieved about that, but my immediate reaction was confusion - how could he possibly know? All he had asked me was ‘Would you like a coffee?’ He didn’t even ask if I wanted decaf, sugar or milk and yet he was magically able to undiagnose me without conducting any blood tests, x-rays, scans or other measurements of the balance of chemicals sloshing around in my brain, which is the current unproven theory of choice among the medically inclined.

We had a bit of a chat. I asked for psychotherapy on the NHS as I could no longer afford to pay privately. He recommended that I keep taking the medication even though I complained to him that I felt worse than ever after four months on them. I was finding sleep difficult, yet felt tired all the time, couldn’t concentrate properly, had a dry mouth and sometimes felt my mood change from OK, to tearful, to agitated, to angry and even to suicidal in the space of a few hours.

I told him I’d washed and dressed specially for him. He laughed and said that was good, because otherwise he’d have had to section me under the Mental Health Act (have me forcibly detained in the mental health unit of the hospital). He rounded off our meeting by suggesting that I should pull myself together and get a life (not his exact words, but my honest interpretation and not far off). As I bid him goodbye and was closing the door to leave he asked me if I had any plans to kill myself.

I decided to stop taking my medication. Within ten days I successfully predicted England’s abysmal failure in the South African World Cup.

Look out for more cheesy Twenty Ten goodness next week as I march on into March and explain the cheesy references….

Waterboarding on the NHS

Tue, 25 May 2010 09:00:00 +0100

Abstract: Gagging for it. Tags: waterboarding, NHS, bronchoscopy, torture, worklessness, Nazi, psychotherapy, banana, splat

On Another Planet this week: controversial new government plans to tackle ever increasing worklessness using waterboarding.

Techniques refined and perfected by secret military personnel known only by their codename ‘Our Boys’ are being piloted by the NHS in an effort to ‘encourage and empower’ people claiming statutory sick pay to return to work.

One persistent malingerer, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he was subjected to an horrific ordeal at the hands of his torturers and says he was tricked into believing he was just playing a game of ‘doctors and nurses’.

‘I always liked playing doctors and nurses when I was a kid,’ said Roger (not his real name).

Over to Roger to tell the rest of his story.

Nazi

I received a phone call from my local hospital telling me I had an appointment with the chest consultant I’d seen before. I thought it was a bit odd, because I’d seen the surgeon who operated on me only the previous day, but I went in anyway. I felt I could trust these people after they did such a great job of fixing my lung. Anyway, when I got there, they made me wait for an hour as usual, then a pretty young student doctor asked if I minded if she sat in on my appointment? How could I say no? I could barely speak with my tongue hanging out like that. So I just nodded and wiped the dribble from the side of my mouth hoping she hadn’t noticed. When I got to see the consultant himself I thought it was a bit odd that he was wearing full Nazi regalia, but he seemed like a nice guy and to know his stuff.

‘Don’t rush back to work", he said.

‘Now, about this bronchoscopy. Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be OK. I’m 90% sure everything’s fine. People say it tickles a little bit, but you’ll have a sedative and some local anaesthetic that they put up your nose and on the back of your throat. That will make you cough, but it’s really nothing to worry about.’

‘Fine, I’ll do it,’ I told him.

So this week I went in for my ‘bronchoscopy’. After waiting the requisite hour, I was hurried into the day surgery operating theatre by a pretty young nurse and ignored by the doctor. Another nurse made small talk with me to reassure me. I clambered on to the operating table so that I was sat upright with my legs outstretched. The second nurse put a bib on me to deal with my dribbling while the doctor chatted with his friend on his mobile.

‘Hi, I’m Dr Heydrich,’ he said to me finally.

Although I had been feeling relaxed, at this point I suddenly felt a twinge of anxiety.

‘I’m going to put some anaesthetic gel up your nose,’ he said, as he squirted anaesthetic gel up my nose.

The second nurse then stuffed a tube up my left nostril, saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only oxygen.’

Banana splat

I looked at her and she had donned what looked like a welder’s visor. ‘You look like you’re about to do some welding,’ I said.

‘It’s just to protect myself from any splatter,’ she replied.

Another twinge.

‘OK, open your mouth, please,’ barked Heydrich. ‘I’m going to spray some anaesthetic on the back of your throat. It tastes very strongly of bananas,’ he added, as he sprayed what tasted like banana flavoured liqueur on to the back of my throat, making me cough. ‘Just a little bit more,’ he said.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I splattered.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated.

‘It’s OK,’ said the second nurse, holding my head down with her hand. ‘It makes you feel like there’s a ball in your throat and you can’t swallow.’

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated, desperately.

Heydrich then took what I had thought was a stethoscope and zoomed towards me with the bright flashing end of it and shoved it up my right nostril.

AARRRGGHHH!!!" I said.

‘Let’s try the other one," said Heydrich.

They swapped the oxygen for the stethoscope, which then dropped out of my traumatised right nostril.

‘AARRRGGHHH!!! AARRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated.

That hurt even more than the right one did. The second nurse (I don’t know what the first nurse was doing, but she was there afterwards) then pushed something into my mouth, saying, ‘Open your mouth and hold it with your teeth.’

Heydrich zoomed back into view.

‘We’ll try it through the mouth’, he said, as he pushed the thick black fibre-optic tube down my throat.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’

I tried to cough and splutter, but my throat was numb and I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was drowning.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! AARRRGGHHH!!!’

I panicked and pulled the tube out, gasping for breath.

‘I can’t do it!’ I cried, literally, tears rolling down my cheeks.

‘I can’t do it. I’ll go back to work. I promise!’

Over. Roger and out.

Another Planet understands that if this pilot is successful, then the procedure will be rolled out to the rest of the UK in the coming months.

As Nick Clegg-Hess, Deputy Prime Minister, said:

‘What we need is strong, stable government. That means we must weaken and destabilise people who are not working for whatever reason and by any means necessary to get them to conform and work to pay our taxes. This is about control and maintenance of the status quo. Anyone who thinks otherwise is sadly deluded and will be dealt with accordingly. Waterboarding is an effective and reliable means of manipulating even the craziest of people to do what we want them to do. It’s in the national interest to get people off benefits and into work and we will do whatever it takes to make that happen, even if it means torturing people after they have already confessed."

On a more serious note, I’m open to suggestions for other medical procedures you’d like me to blog about. Let me know your ideas in the comments!