THE ROUND

I grow, perhaps, unsociable.

Walking with others is a fine thing. But walking on your own ices the cake. It has the meditative benefit of quiet self-alignment. You see more. Nature runs away from you less. You hear more, with only your own breath (oh, and the entire Universe, of course) to listen to. Your walk can become focused on the walk, rather than on the conversation of the walk. Your pace does not have to be adjusted to another. More importantly, it can be adjusted self- indulgently to the interest in a thistle, the pattern of shade under an oak, the curiosity aroused by a fungus on the oak, which, when you press it, is almost as hard as the oak itself. You can stop to marvel at the ostentatious aggression of a bramble. You can listen to the curlew’s music. You can tune in to the humming and chirring of the summer land. You can stop at a sudden perfume, and wonder at its source, astonished that, attuned to it, attending to it, the humble clover flower becomes sense – filling sweet.

Thus are my constitutionals. Just as their pace is voluntary, so it varies. At times they are route march, sweat forming on my back. At times they are stroll. And at times they are lolling, lounging and stopping stock still.

In a six or seven mile round, I am disappointed if I do not see deer. I see few other mammals, scarcely ever other humans. Small rodents – shrews, field mice – they’re too scared of me to be seen. I sometimes see them when I am mowing the orchard. But only when the grass is long. Then they cower and scurry away from the blades and I am always reminded of Burns and his “wee sleekit, cowering,  timorous beastie”. Then I also see toads, occasionally murdering them for the hell of it. Once, turning over an old woodpile, I found a colony of orange bellied newts. Walking, I see stoats and weasels – like watching a thick nibbed orange pen, putting a dash across a road. Then they are gone. They don’t hang around for us. And you definitely don’t want to get too close to one. They could bite you through to the bone. I have a feeling that this year their numbers may be down. I have seen few, and, more telling still, there are hundreds of rabbits. Weasel v rabbit? Weasel, every single time. Put money on it.

On yesterday’s walk I went all the way to the penultimate stretch – a road section encouraging of speed walking - until I saw the deer. There were a few vehicles on the road and to get out of their way I stepped through a break in the hedge and into a baked field rather sparsely planted for an oilseed rape patch. I had a pee, and while the thin stream was coming out of me, noticed about eighty yards off a young doe, just at the field’s edge, just into the field, near enough to the shelter of the hedge and woodland beyond it to be able to bolt. Her head was tiny. I remember thinking momentarily “if I had a rifle I could get off a shot and take her, but not a head shot.” I’ll avoid saying “I put my weapon away” but I very soon abandoned all thoughts of violence. I stood for about twenty minutes, silent and watching her, peacefully grazing. It adds to my own peace immensely to know, that, within a mile of my home, and often much nearer, she and her kind are doing what nature intended: feeding, sleeping, excreting, mating, nurturing young – the great cycle in which we all live, to which, regardless of all human aspiration, we all contribute, into which we all return, and by which I am constantly inspired.

ONE THING AT A TIME

Men, it is commonly jibed, are incapable of multi tasking.
It's rubbish.
Whenever I have a practical job to do it is an almost impossible task to do one thing at a time. Yet this is the secret of all successful DIY / carpentry / almost anything.
Quieting the jabbering mind and hands seems inordinately difficult, even though failure results in pinning on the name badge of Captain Calamity,
Thus I broke the antique fluted stone birdbath now filled with beautiful and edible nasturtiums at the centre of the vegetable garden.
I was fixing the bird frames I made  a couple of years ago and, hands full of hammers, nails, a pencil  behind the ear, a saw between my knees and carpentry accoutrements bulging from all pockets of my overall, I thought I'd use it as a sawing trestle.
Blast.
It's broken into three pieces which I'll now have to cement up.
And you can bet, when I'm doing so, I'll be trying to do three or four more things at the same time.

RANDOM NOTES

• The day starts with mizzle as though to underline the micro season of Mistlemas.
• Dew dampens the gooseberries as I pick them. They are undersized, but I am determined the birds are not going to have this little lot. One bush yields fruit almost the colour of red wine. The other, a unique gooseberry green. Both bushes have thorns and I wonder why. What predation are they designed to halt?
• When made into a syrupy puree, the gooseberries are delicious. I pour the still hot puree over Greek yoghurt. Smashing. I may have overdone the sugar. It is very lush. My tummy feels swollen after eating it. I may have been greedy.
• About 1030 the mizzle burns off. Steam rises from the lawns.
• Norfolk people evaded the birds and bees questions of kids by explaining that babies come from under the gooseberry bush. Why? Why that especial bush?
• Expanding on the theme of more than four seasons

  the season of easterly winds

  the season of yellowhammers
  the season of buttercups
  the season of dandelions
  the season of earth warming
  the season of first buds
  the season of blossom (different seasons for hawthorn and blackthorn)
  the season of first fruiting
  the season of first grass growth
  the visit of swallows
  the coming of bramblings

• Everything has its season. Turn, turn, turn.
   
•  Why don't savoury things grow on trees? If its from a tree, its sweet. I suppose nuts are exceptions - debatable. Avocados, too, maybe?
• I have bought a falcon, to try and keep the birds off the cherries. Today, I am going to put some planks into the tree, so that every three or four days I can move the decoy, and maybe dissuade the thrushes. I feel almost mean doing it. I've heard mixed reports on the effectiveness of these things. From good, to "useless - I swear the pigeons were laughing at it." We'll see.
• Last night, leaning on a gate looking across a buttercup filled field, towards an utterly rural horizon, I finally named the place I live. Paradise.
• Digging up potatoes in the vegetable garden, one feels like an old time prospector - little nuggets of gold in the soil. I am brought back from daydreams of the Yukon by the fact that each time I bend to retrieve the gold, the aroma of the onions growing as neighbours to the potatoes fills the senses.
• The last smell I would like to smell on earth is the Missus. Failing that, wild honeysuckle, such as that in the hedge just at the gate to the vegetable garden. Heavenly.
• Blackcurrant leaves smell of mint.
• At one point this afternoon the Missus says to me "watch out - you'll get stung by that nettle". I laugh loud and long, as for the last three hours I'd been battling nettles brambles, the lot and my body looks like its gone three rounds with a mad knife man.
   

MISTLEMAS

When Vivaldi wrote the Four Seasons, how come he left so many out?
Any countryman knows there are many more than four. How many is a good question. Awareness of the tiny changes in nature which mark out the real, micro changing almost infinite true seasons demands a regularity of contact and a slow pace for full attention. Leaning on gates is good. Standing beneath Stella, my largest fruiting cherry tree - also good.
Paying attention to Stella makes me realise it is Mistlemas. That is, the season of thrushes. In our garden there is a dominant coupling - two mistle thrushes who guard their prime territory with a fierce jealousy. Stella is the reason - the prize. Right now, Mr and Mrs Mistle are colonising it, ensuring that the very second a cherry is ripe, it disappears down their greedy gullets. They laugh at my attempts to protect the tree. At evening they sing a brief song of gratitude. Hearing this, I was accused by the Missus of madness, when I shouted at the birdS.

"Is that it? Is that it? Is that what you call a thank you? You've eaten all the cherries, you bastards."

"Thought of netting it?" said one smart arsed friend.

Great idea. Missus and I spent a happy hour trying to do so with a huge piece of netting I bought for the purpose. In the end, as our breaches of all sensible health and safety principles became more and more flagrant and frenzied, we gave up. Without a crane its impossible, and even with it, I'm unconvinced the mistle thrushes wouldn't get through anyway. For next year I am going to buy one of the plastic owls I have seen on yachts, designed to stop seagulls shitting on decks, by frightening away all bird life.

I love cherries.

I have eaten none.

When I light a fire I start with newspaper, taking the sheets, rolling them up and then tying them into a croissant shape.
I call this tying the Guardian Knot.

CONSTITUTIONAL

Blame.
It triggers a visceral response in me.
Like stretching a rubber band and letting it go, so my rebellious response gets going.
It doesn't have to be me getting the blame. When I witness someone else dishing it out, it is repulsive to me. Literally. Beautiful women become sad and ugly in my eyes, once they start it. Fine men look pathetic.
I encounter someone blaming their life on someone else and it troubles me for a long time. Not hours, but days. It reminds me of the old joke about the man who works in a sewerage plant.
"Not much of a job," he says, "but it does have one benefit."
"What's that?" asks his mate.
"I've stopped biting my nails."
So the stink of blame stays with me.
So I'm blaming the blamers. What an idiot! And the hypocrisy is not lost on me.
I go on a constitutional -  a meditative walk, to see if I can fix things.
The first thing I  notice is that I am not filled with my usual ecstasy with the teeming universe present in every hedgerow, copse and field. I feel distracted, both by the thoughts which I am trying to resolve, and by the thought of journeying from A to B rather then being exactly where I am. Hey ho. Walk on.
As usual, Mother Nature does her healing, in very few paces. I get to think about rabbits. They eat their own shit. It doesn't appeal to me, and I wouldn't encourage it in my offspring, but it isn't wrong for them. Pelicans, and maybe even other bird species (owls and hawks I have a feeling) commit fratricide, throwing their unfortunate sibling from the nest, to perish from the fall. Just so they get more of their parent sicking up into their beak. Something else less than appealing to me.
I wouldn't think any of these things wrong. Why, then, do I have such a problem with blame?
Explaining the childhood roots of my allergy seems to provide less than satisfaction. But the natural world's oddities are emphatically calming. I realise that if I were the exact species, the exact individuals doing the blaming, I would too. I suddenly see them like rabbits (yes, caught in life's headlights) and perfectly acceptable as they are. That does not mean it's a game I want to start. Indeed, I realise, it's a game I want to stop, more than I admit playing it. It is a game, a way of avoiding the regular fact: that the very thing you are blaming someone else for, you are guilty of yourself.
I enter a copse of young trees. The ground is entirely covered with cow parsley, so that the light between the foliage and the lacy white has a strange, turquoise quality. It feels like a reward. For getting the answers to blame right? Perhaps. For deciding to seek all my answers in closer conversation with the natural world. Certainly.

MALLARD (for CT)

137 mph

 

faster than my walk

 

during which

I did not see Mallard

but saw instead how

pigeons landed as a squad

wingbeats synchronised

suggesting animal heuristics

we do not understand

and the purple lane shimmered in the hot afternoon

blackberry blossom competing with dog rose

in a pink haze

a field away a deer made off startled

perhaps by me

and I saw a yellow wagtail

whose sweet simple call summoned my attention

and was answered from somewhere beneath the wild honeysuckle

by his invisible mate

attracted to the morsel he was bringing

and we looked at each other

wagtail and I

five feet apart

and I thought how like his life is mine

a morsel here

a morsel there

just doing the best we can

going along

one foot in front of the other

and I did not think of validation
or at least, did not think I thought of validation

nor of striking deals with tie flicking egos

but thought instead of doing what I say

of standing tall in the mirror of my life

bringing the promised morsel

without cringing away in embarrassment

good enough

to have walked, one foot in front of the other,

good enough

to have brought that morsel

good enough

a kind of validation.

"Forever is a map of nows,
Charted every now."

THE CARING PROFESSIONS

A friend of mine comes to stay. She says "I want to retrain." She is a production manager.
"Oh?"
"Yes. I feel I need to move into a caring profession."
"But you're already in a caring profession."
"Haha. I don't think making soap is a caring profession. No one would see it that way."
"I might. But what would you be doing in a caring profession that you're not doing as a production manager?"
"I'd be making a real difference to people's lives."
"And you don't now?"
"No."

I recalled a story she had told me some time ago. She had a production worker - let's call him Mike. He was one of the best workers she had. After he had been working at the plant for some time, she noticed that he seemed downcast, not himself. Asking around tactfully, she soon discovered the reason. He was being bullied by some other workers who were threatening to reveal to the boss - my friend - something they had somehow discovered. The secret was that Mike had been to prison - not something discovered in the recruitment process.
My friend acted decisively, calling Mike into her office. He was clearly terrified.
"I hear the rumour mill is grinding out some stuff about you Mike?"
"Ah..."
"I hear that you have a criminal record. Is that true?
Mike was close to tears. "Yes. It is."
"Ok," said my friend. "Here's what we're going to do. Nothing. I'm glad you told me as now I know, and that means that anyone threatening to grass you up can come straight to me, as I know about it anyway. You're one of my best workers. I don't want to lose you." Mike, predictably, continued to be one of her best and most loyal factory workers.

"You don't make a difference to peoples' lives?" I asked. "What about Mike?"
"Well.............. yes."

You don't have to be in a caring profession to care about people. You can run a burger van and do it. You can work on the checkout at Tesco and do it. In fact, you can illuminate (I think that is the right word) any job by merely seeing it as a context for loving. So that your real job becomes loving people, giving them a loving level of care, and your paid job is just the context - the setting.

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.
Consultant, coach, facilitator.

ONE THAT GOT AWAY

What the hell is the matter with you, Berry?
You've let an opportunity for hundreds of thousands of dollars slip through your grubby fingers.
Worse, you've refused to pursue it.
You idiot.

This would not, in truth, be the first time that such a thing has occurred. I've regularly turned away contracts, for all sorts of reasons.

My friend, Chopper, was working for a major airline as their Head of Strategy when he rang me to ask for some help in a workshop he was facilitating. After a short phone call I determined I couldn't add any value, and told him so. It was, he said, the first time in twenty years he had ever encountered a consultant turning away work. It led to many years happy and profitable acquaintance.

Then there was the time we were being treated as slaves by a client. It was offensive to me. But the contract was a big one. Half a million or so. My associates begged for a tolerance I do not have. Driving to catch a train to one of the tiresome meetings with the client, during which, they would be no doubt (as they had been) misreading my name badge for one which said cunt, I suddenly turned right instead of left. Right again brought me 180 degrees, heading home again, rather than to the railway station. I didn't even apologize for missing their meeting. No more money from them. But it felt good. Literally. My body felt at ease, knowing that I had decided against the abuse and slavery so far endured. And, more complicated, but equally relevant - a slavery which meant that change agency was being at all points dumbed down and rejected. Five hundred grand was the manumission. Clear.

There have been other incidents of refusal. Each has been accompanied by the same clarity. It's a clarity not understandable to many. But, to me, it has always been something other than money which has been the motivator behind my own business. And it has been that clarity, born of a desire for free thought, for independence and for a commitment to originality and adding real value in the matter of creating distinctive businesses, and expressed individuals, which has won many a contract too.

This week, through twists and turns, comes another example. Tempted out to the Middle East by an old client, I'm asked to run a visioning workshop, for his Arabic clients (he is acting as a consultant with a large consultancy but doesn't have the visioning skills in house). So far so good. But going to the Gulf isn't my idea of fun, so I quote top dollar rates. He agrees. But then he hits me with an unsignable contract, with such blanket indemnities in it that it could only be signed for twenty or thirty times the fee - hundreds of thousands of dollars. The deal falls apart. But behind the deal is the larger opportunity - to go direct to his clients (whose contact details I have) and persuade them they should do the job properly with my Company, for the much more significant fee implied by the onerous contract. The Missus frowns in moral opprobrium when I mention this as a possibility, citing the principle of not shafting a mate. To me, morally, it would be little more than a swingeing, unexpected chess move, and its audacity is appealing. But I don't take it. Why?

It has taken some time for clarity to come. The bodily check reveals it to be tension free, and therefore the right decision, but why?

The answer is that the venture is loveless. The people are loveless in their venture. It is people who are used to so much money that you and I can't even begin to imagine it. But not money earned by creating anything. Money earned by shaking a money tree with infinite supplies of money to be had from it. Magic money. Silly money. Money with no point to it, there's so much of it. Money with no meaning. Money not earned by creating anything anyone else finds intriguing or appealing, but money that just flows unstoppably out of the ground.

I realise that it's love, not money, that interests me, and that explains this aberrance. I like putting love into things, and these people aren't interested, because they are so soaked in money, they can't undrestand the creative process normally needed to get it. Their venture will be loveless, no matter how much money it makes. What's the point of hiring a chef, if what you want is semolina? What's the point of hiring a fresco artist, if what you want is a magnolia painted wall? I don't want to make semolina. I don't want to spend my life painting magnolia, no matter how much money there is in it. This will surprise the odd Sheikh or two, perhaps. But it will surprise no one who knows me. And it is good to be reacquainted with that and have it reaffirmed. Through actions, of course. Not words.

Contentment makes poor news.

THE ART OF CONVERSATION

Sometimes I play a game.

I meet you for the first time. I enquire about you. I volunteer nothing but equally evade no enquiry about me. Each thing I find out about you is a point to me. Deduct a point for anything you find out about me.
I played it yesterday with a new acquaintance.
In under an hour of casual acquaintance I found out:

His name
Where he lives
Where he grew up
What he does for a living.
Where his business is.
Where he was educated.
How many kids he has.
Of what gender and ages.
How he got into doing what he does for a living.
How he had a business, employing 180 people.
How that business went bust.
How he lost his house, his car, everything else he owned, and his marriage.
How a consortium re employed him to run a crucial bit of the business he previously owned.
How that affected his personal confidence.
What his new suggested equity buy in scheme is like and how that restores his confidence.
What his product range is.
Which products are doing better than others.
Which products are rated best for quality.
What his factory utilisation is.
(By a bit of mental arithmetic therefore) what his turnover is.
What his distribution chain is like.
How many people he employs
What the brief is for his new sales person starting tomorrow
What that person's background is
What his sales growth plans are
What his son's name is
What his children's interests are
What he is passionate about.

26, maybe 27 points.

Deduct one for "I am not an insolvency practitioner".

25 or so, then. There or thereabouts.

I wonder what this says about the art of conversation?

Dale Carnegie advises that if you want to be thought of a s a good conversationalist (win friends and influence people), simply ask people about themselves. They're only to happy to talk about that most fascinating of subjects, seemingly endlessly, and seemingly without any interest whatsoever in you. So don't expect anything else.