Keep Shining

Elizabeth Miles (@ikenceo) was one of my first contacts on Twitter back in the day, always warm and inviting. Our connection was through law and technology initially, however we rarely talked about either. Our conversations were always about children, Peppa Pig, learning, animation, the arts, the importance of creativity. A passionate lady with a large heart. I'm glad we met in real life a number of times at Tweet Ups and always had a great natter. It was through these conversations we struck upon her love of a rare piece of Disney animation by Salvador Dali that was in the depths of the Disney vaults and I too had seen snippets when I worked at Disney, it was great to find the piece for her, it's the only thing I was able to do for her.

Walt Disney y Salvador Dali - Destino HD from Ivan Wenger on Vimeo.

I'll miss Elizabeth, somebody so giving and open that I felt I knew her better; from our online chat and few real life meetings, than some people I have known for years. One last #FF video to say goodbye and here's hoping your warmth keeps shining down.

FF Sunshine from Jon Harman on Vimeo.

Arthritic Stigmata

My historical disdain for education has amused me over the years, particularly the irony of ending up working in legal education, if I could go back in time to explain this to my 14 yr old self, he would stare at me in slack jaw wonderment. Why? Because in my formative years I held a strong distaste for both education and lawyers. I'll come to the lawyer bit in a moment, but let's first zero in on the education bit.

Today I was diagnosed with degenerative arthritis in my my big toe, initially it made me feel old beyond my years and then I fixated on the injury that had led to this. My doctor explained that arthritis in someone as "young" as me was likely the result of a childhood injury, had I broken my big toe in childhood?

Bang! I was instantly taken back to the incident with 12 yr old me, we had been instructed by our teacher to move some antiquated school desks in our classroom. Believe it or not, in the mid eighties I was working on a wooden desk with an ink well from the Victorian era. As we moved the desks, somehow mine toppled over and landed on my toe. 

Crack! What followed was excruciating pain, I remember crying in agony. My teacher then proceeded to taunt me about being in pain, deriding me in front of the class about not being able to handle it. I asked to see the nurse and he denied that of me and subsequently made me hop the 2 miles home after sitting for 3hrs in excruciating pain. Other old school friends have confirmed this memory today, along with a list of other atrocities (putting a metalwork ruler across a fellow students knuckles and then sitting on it), just so I know that I have not exaggerated this. 

When my mother complained to the school about the teachers behaviour it was rigorously denied. That was the moment that I lost faith in education, the moment I realised it wasn't about learning. I just switched off and spent more time taunting teachers who seemed intent on constantly telling who and what I was. It's been at the back of my mind ever since and now I have a constant throbbing in my toe to remind me on a daily basis, an aggravation of sorts. 

A short time later I had an after school job which was essentially a posher version of a paper round, I was a post boy for a small solicitors office. 

I disliked them with a passion too. Until I worked in that office, I never had any idea the level of contempt people could have for another fellow human being. Rude, obnoxious and vile. 

It was the first time I was hyper aware of the class divide, I was Ronnie Corbett to John Cleese in that famous class sketch.They weren't just rude to me, they were as bad to their clients, immensely patronising and demeaning. The nail in the coffin was when one day I had been held up because they hadn't signed some documents that had to be at the DX office within 10 minutes and it was a bike across town.

I sped along down the hill, slipped on the pedal, caught my foot in the wheel and went over the handlebars. Crack! Smashed my collarbone on the kerb and knocked myself out. I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance and came to as they wheeled me in.

When we got home there was a message on the answer machine from the firm stating that they had heard I'd been in an accident and it was imperative to know - did I get the post to the DX? No enquiry at all as to my well being.

I was particularly proud of my mum's Tuckeresque tirade of abuse in response the next day and I was fired with immediate effect.  Which was a shame as I still had the keys to their DX box, the only ones apparently. I'm both slightly ashamed, but also proud of my 15 year old self at depositing the keys off a bridge into the River Wensum. Another broken bone, another dislike chalked up on the board. 

So by the age of  15 I had a formative assessment of the legal industry and education as two equal levels of Dante's Inferno that were both seemingly underpinned by high levels of arrogant patronising attitudes.

So how on earth did I end up here?

This is the rather strange flip side to the coin. I realised in my career that whilst I despised the machine of education,  I loved learning, it was a wondrous life affirming thing and I also discovered a favourable leaning to copyright law and contract law in a geeky way.

I didn't realise I loved learning until I eventually scraped my way to University and aligned my passions with an excellent learning environment. We called my Uni - "a rubber roomed environment" - meaning somewhere we tried, we failed and we practiced until we became skilled. A course designed by a Disney imagineer who was years ahead of others in education. As I studied broadcasting I became fascinated in the business side which enveloped a vast array of commercial contracting and I discovered a great book: Art of the Deal by Dorothy Viljoen which opened my eyes to the beauty of commercial law.

By the time I ended up in legal education I had overcome my initial dislike of law and education and found a new glimmer of inspiration, that said I saw a lot of echoes of my original dislikes around and thus have set about trying to disrupt and change where I can, I like the term my Oxford mentor gave me "positive deviant". 

So as I sit here contemplating my aching toe and wondering if my collar bone will go the same way, I reflect on the bizarre nature of having this arthritic stigmata that spurns me on to change legal education wherever and however I can.

Work Globally, Live Locally - Disruption

This morning I awoke to see more news on the phases on the HS2 train project and can't help thinking that by the time it is built, how we work will be very different and the need to commute to large urban settlements to sit at a desk in an office or cubicle will seem somewhat redundant. The way we think about jobs, careers and the economics of these is where I see mass disruption occurring, breaking the shackles of the industrial age which are embedded in our management culture, our education system and our growth strategies. They're broken though, and we are trying to hang onto them in the same way HMV tried to cling to the high street. The next generation are already wising up to how broken this system is, when are we going to....







 More later on these trends.....

Work Globally, Live Locally - A New Beginning

For a while now I have been musing on an idea of "Work Globally, Live Locally" as a new model of living and approach to work, breaking free of big economic hubs of urbanisation and commuter pain. I'm still forming my manifesto, which may end up like Jerry Maguire's memo - but we'll see.

In the meantime, have a flick through PSFK's Future of Work Presentation, it will be one of the things that I base my thoughts on.

PSFK Future of Work Report 2013 from PSFK

Paper Bullies

There has been a lot of bullying behaviour on Twitter et al recently and it made me think of a story from a New York Teacher:

A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stamp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty it was. She then told them to tell it they’re sorry. Now even though they said they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bully’s another child, they may say they’re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home.

Please take time to pause for thought when getting caught in heated debate online or teach your children this valuable lesson.

Retrospective Rationalising

Hmmm, there seems to be a new idiot zeitgeist surrounding the topic of rape at the moment, either to somehow build a straw man argument around abortion in the US or to defend Julian Assange in a bid to perpetuate what seems the most convoluted conspiracy theory I've heard in a while.

I'm not going to try and cover the facts of these recent cases as they have been covered expertly by countless others in far better posts.

I want to turn my attention to this phenomena of various people, predominantly men, trying to redefine rape. Why do they do this?

I'm hyper aware as a man myself I am potentially walking into a minefield here, but I think it is quite simple - no simply means no, before or during.

So why all these re-classifications by people? I think it is what I would call retrospective rationalising. What do I mean by this?

Put simply I am convinced many men in their past have been in a scenario that was either extremely borderline or was rape. This is probably quite hard for them to reconcile.

I think this is because of the fact that rape narratives for so long were of the violent stranger definition, therefore all other forms of non consensual sex don't or rather can't fit into the "legitimate rape" category because to do so would make countless men who do not consider themselves rapists to realise they have raped or nearly raped in their past, hence the post rationalisation we are seeing.

Bold and sweeping generalist statements I know, but let me explain my rationale.

I can already think of a handful of situations in my own formative years where I could have come quite close to crossing that boundary in a terrible mess of hormones, opportunity and drunkenness. I'm thankful I didn't but I do recognise the possibility of it amd that is scary. I think there are countless others who know this too, but won't admit it and won't recognise that it would be rape.

That's a sad indictment isn't it? That as men we have not had this conversation about where the boundaries are and what it means, recognising that our testosterone is a powerful driver that we have to control, particularly in adolescence or the discussion has been had and we didn't listen.

Thankfully I never had too much über testosterone flowing through my body and thus became deeply irritating in sexual encounters by asking multiple times for clarity on consent - if I could have had a contract I probably would have because in my brain it deeply concerned me about either being coercive or pushy in this arena as so many teenage men probably are.

I think I thought about it a lot because I had the unfortunate encounter of being in a public toilet and listening to a group of lads conspiring to gang rape my sister when she was 15. They didn't know I was her brother.
I don't think they realised they were conspiring to rape her either, just spike her drinks until she was unconscious later at a party and then all have "a go on her", they were deliberating which order they were going to do it when I intervened and pointed out I was her brother.

Sadly I have heard a number of similar discussions like this over the years, this I think is more common than most realise.

Too many men also think the predatory approach is all part of the game, there's an element to this approach that also starts to validate rape in their minds too.

I've been on the receiving end of predatory males persistence before, I've started politely to state that "I'm sorry, but I'm not gay" to still be lightly molested by grabbing and once having my exit blocked and locking of the door, I thought then I was going to be raped myself and that feeling of violation of your consent and your personal space is unforgettable. Sadly I think women have many more stories of incidents like this with men than I do.

So I think there are many things in the melting pot, there was a severe lack of discussion about rape being about non consensual sex and the different forms that takes and may still be. Too much emphasis on rape as a violent stranger assault narrative.

Not enough discussion or education with young men about respect and consent in sexual encounters.

So when I hear people re defining rape in the ways I've heard of late, I tend to think that they have a situation in their past which is consciously or subconsciously making them retrospectively rationalise the subject.

These are just thoughts and happy to hear your thoughts.

Just Little Snapshots.

Snapshots. That's what you remember. Little mental polaroids or flash frames of what happened. Hardwired into your memory but disconnected somehow from the bigger picture. Little jigsaw pieces that don't come together easily. A fractured mirror that distorts the reality somehow. Little fragments, shattered, exploded, sprayed.

6th July 2005. Have spent the day looking at and thinking about enhancements to our elearning packages with a Professor from Strathclyde University. We get on well and don't get to cover everything we want to discuss. Later that evening he calls me to ask if I can meet him at Euston before he makes the long commute home to Glasgow. Sure I think, what's a small diversion first thing in the morning, how can this have any impact on my day. I can accommodate it.

7th July 2005. I say goodbye to my mum and our new live-in nanny who has just arrived from Norway to look after our 2 year old son, she's nervous being in a new big city. It's okay as my mum is here to settle her in. I'm leaving a bit earlier than my wife who is going to a training event in central London, but we're travelling different ways. We would normally travel together on the Piccadilly line into Holborn, but today we've both been diverted to our different destinations because of fate.

I arrive at Euston station, the tube pulls into the platform. As I walk to the escalator, something seems wrong, people seem eager to get out because there has been a power surge and the escalators are not working, there are more tube workers milling around than usual. Little flashes of fluorescent jackets. Looking down at the non-moving escalator, the metal grooves in the steps. Quickly some trainers fill the frame and I look up to see two young men running fast down the escalator as if escaping something. I remember baseball caps on their heads, but nothing else. It was only peculiar because it was so out step with the rest of the atmosphere.


I'm out of Euston and meeting my Professor friend for coffee, this must be around 9am and we chat for some time about the project we are working on. Then more fluorescent jackets, this time ushering us out of the station. They look scared, this is not a drill I remember thinking, the power surge, the metal grooves - it all connects.

We step just outside Euston, but the barrier of fluorescent jackets pushes the crowd further and further out and as we step further out the volume of sirens increases, a cacophony of ambulance, police and fire. But they're not coming here. They're going somewhere else. Here is safe compared to where they are going, but the faces appended to the jackets are saying this may not be true for long.

My Professor colleague suggests we get to my office on some other form of transport, I see the wave of people heading to the buses. No chance I say, let's find another place to have coffee whilst this calms down and we cross the road to the Quakers meeting house. Lots of people get on buses as they move away from Euston.

Within seconds there is a loud crack, not a bang but a crack through the atmospherical noise. It's all out of vision but there is smoke or dust or something rising just above the buildings and trees. Then it starts, one by one the walking wounded or slightly injured are walking towards us.
A young lady violently shaking is the first to us, people crowd her to find out what is happening. I can see she is in shock and get a cup of tea, she needs sugar. I remember nothing of what she said as explanation, I just remember the pain in her eyes, the strained tears and having no idea what had just happened.

More walking wounded, more blood stained people, too many people coming to look at what had happened rather than helping, breathing, calming.

All phones were down, no chance of telling anyone or connecting with anyone as to what had happened, were my family okay, did they know I was okay?

Something told me to get to the office, make sure people were okay and it would be a better place to communicate from. Professor and I parted company, somehow we did not know the enormity of what was happening and this seemed rational. I headed off, to weave my way to work, not realising, not contemplating that what I was about to see would be etched on my brain for some time.

I rounded the corner into Tavistock Square. The front of the BMA building. Sprayed with matter. I thought it was moss, a dark red burnt moss. Lots of twisted metal and shards of things. Lots of bits. Bits of people. Bits and pieces scattered across the floor and on top of cars and sprayed up the walls. More fluorescent jackets, pushing back, pushing away...but too late...the image is there...the sight is there....the memory hangs there forever. I can not walk through that area with out those images being superimposed over the now tranquil scenery. Cannot do it. Even deep breaths can't help it.

Walking away, moving away, not sure where I'm going. Armies of us now, meandering like zombies looking for the mall. London confused. London scared.

Bang! The entire army drops to the ground, me too. My face on the cold concrete with small traces of weeds springing through the cracks. Is this it?

"Sorry" says the builder who just threw a lot of bricks into a skip from a great height. Relief at surreal moments. A momentary smile amongst the chaos. More walking.

Eventually got to the office and locked things down and ensured people were safe, but locked away those snapshots, those memories. Family were safe, we were safe. Relief.

But 52 people weren't, 52 people and countless more saw worse, experienced worse than I did. Just little snapshots that are polaroids on my mind.