Conorthoughts

Career update

I walked out - resigned, that is - a month ago from my latest job, as a marketing writer in the asset management division of Bank of New York Mellon in London, before the job resigned on me. My boss who was not an easy person had become unhappy with my performance, unfairly I thought, and then made it difficult for me to continue in the New Year to the end of my probationary period. I am having to repeat a mantra - simple thoughts about what happened, a string of positive thoughts overall - every time I have a new thought about the experience, for new thoughts risk opening things up in an unproductive way. I have a tendency, in difficult situations, to think negative thoughts and these are to be warded against here. Writing this is a new thought, though an oddly gentle one, and I will bring it to a close by substituting the mantra for it, and, where I would normally put a full stop at the end of this sentence, say in its place the string of words  

Breakdown

Like evil, the banality of it.

I went into work this morning , having failed to go in again yesterday  - another blue Monday to join the blue Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays I've been having over the last ten weeks or so -  and said that I needed some time off, as of immediate effect. Agreed. A break. A breakdown. My third, each one smaller than the last (I think). Must have some lunch.

                                                           (To be continued, hopefully)   

Keep it slow

A 'my job' update. Since I last posted on it, it has been going, well, ...

A colleague Yvonne wrote a comment on that post. It had contained a veiled question to her that she answered neither in her comment nor in person. I would still like to know what happens to them.

Yvonne is leaving here very soon for another job. I don't know whether she will be sitting in a corner there. I must ask her. She is off sick today. I'm still sitting in my corner. Keep it slow.

The job has been going, well, ...

I'm writing this at work, during my lunch break of course, a splendidly movable feast.

Trying to talk the other evening about how the job was going with M., one of my more self-absorbed friends who had to get up very early the following morning - I had not overstayed my welcome but it was quite late and I think she wanted to have her nightly bath - she suggested swimming. It works for her. I left shortly after that.         

You know that line about always asking for and listening to your friends' advice?

This morning I woke early - again - and went for a swim. I haven't been for one for at least a year. The menu of lanes was 'Front Crawl', 'Fast & Furious', 'Getting Fast', 'Keep It Slow'. I chose my level, the 'Keep It Slow' lanes at the end. I managed eight lengths, albeit with multiple breaks and bumpings into others.

M's was good advice. Today, for a change, work has been going, well, swimmingly, not that I have got that much done yet but swimming takes many forms, as do productive days.

An adviser to whom I pay fees said to me when we last met that being in work is important because it means you're swimming.

Must go to lunch now. Keep it slow.       

 

Middle

Aristotle recommends a middle way, in the Nichomachean Ethics. I'm too tired to find the book on my shelves to read what the way is about again but will go on here - my fingers are less tired - in search of it. Lots of people recommend a middle way, or they write it.

Hannes Böhringer is a thinker I like who writes it. I am name-dropping tonight. A foreign name counts here as a dropped one, I think. In his book Auf der Suche nach Einfacheit (Looking for Simplicity) - I am showing off now, one can overdo simplicity, showing off a little sometimes is perhaps part of a middle way - Böhringer, who cannot walk without a stick, manages at one point to thread his middle way through the maelström in Edgar Allan Poe's story 'A Descent into the Maelström'. But I better end quickly as my reader is, I sense, at risk of leaving me before I leave her or him.

Quickly and I will award myself a glass of wine uncorked two weeks ago!

Might the quiet corner of the office, about which I wrote yesterday, be a middle way through a

 

                                                                             (To be continued, hopefully)
 

Job

I've been in my job six months and two days now. I am speechless, sentence-less. Well, not quite. I sit in a corner. I must look for another one, a job, that is, rather than a corner, though I have nothing against corners.  A colleague who will be nameless and sits in another corner told me that people in the one I sit in - I am not its only inhabitant - don't ... I must ask her what happens to them.   

Love

He said that it wasn't fair to ask him to do this.

She continued to ask questions.

I withdrew and walked around, then sat down again, by them. They were talking, she asking questions, he responding.

They finished, I asked her whether the meeting that we had just had was the meeting I had wanted to have.  She thought it was. I said that I had had another meeting in mind. He had said to me, I said to her, that he had talked to her in detail about something that interested me and that she had taken notes. I had thought that it would be a good idea for the three of us to together go through the notes she had made. That was the meeting that I had had in mind.

She had to go into a meeting.

He left, an hour early.

Why the title 'Love' here?

To try to get my writing going again, I am planning to go to to a meeting next week of the London Writers Cafe Meetup Group. The organiser is Bohemia. The subject of the meeting will be love. We have been asked to bring along a piece of writing on the theme of love, of five hundred words or more. So I thought that I would call this post 'Love'. Why not? It is everywhere.

I am still some hundreds of words short, however. I think I'll open at random the novel that I began in the bath last night and copy some of it here (two hundred and fifty words will be enough):

"   "Shit man, if they hit that bag __"
    "Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto." Off in the middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.
    "Oh, fuck!" A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurping pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory's been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.
     "No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We're back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt."
     When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy's plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.
     Towards sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. "Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft." The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the colour of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside"

End of quote. Not the luckiest of dips. That makes four hundred and eighty six words so I am nearly over the five hundred word line set by Bohemia. "Phew!".

The passage above is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow¹.

That's five hundred and eleven, and rising, word by word. I hope that Bohemia will let me read my piece.

                                                                                                         
P.S. I failed to read the instructions about what we had to write carefully. I've been overdoing it. Bohemia in fact wrote "under 500 WORDS or an extract from something larger". This doesn't strictly qualify anymore, though I could argue on the night, I suppose, splitting hairs, that it is an extract from something larger, my blog or my life.

1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, New York, London, 1973, Picador, London, 1975, p. 336.

Three weeks in

I have been at my new job three weeks now, and I haven't managed to write here, or anywhere else, for two weeks to the day, to the evening, in fact. I promised in my last post to write something the following evening about the explosion in private equity finance, on which I have a mouse-hole view from my desk, but I am not going to try to deliver on this promise now, or tomorrow evening. Sometime in the near future, perhaps.

My ambition to get my writing going again here in the evenings has been thwarted so far partly by fatigue. I haven't worked full-time for some years (not that I say this on my C.V.) so I am not in condition. Also, I am cycling to work, which is adding for the moment to the fatigue. It is a fine cycle, divided into three by my crossing the river twice, over Westminster bridge then back over Blackfriars bridge, cutting out a bend in the river. I thought it was at least a four miles cycle for the first couple of days but it is probably only three and a bit. Even three and a bit each way five days a week comes to thirty three miles or so, meaning that I can eat some chocolate, which I had virtually given up, and lose weight. 

What can I report from work? My fears that I would find it difficult to continue having my lunch in the nice well-lit room where I was having it, mentioned in my last post, have proven well-founded. But it is not so much that I am now, like everyone else, too busy to have it in there. It is more that I feel I should be busier so, uncertain of my relative productivity after some years out of the conventional fast lane, or middle lane, and unwilling to draw attention to myself in a way that might mirror my uncertainty, I am now tending to have lunch at my desk, reading things work-related. I am conforming. But perhaps I should try to look at that little mirror, until it begins to crack a little. I did have lunch in there today.

But I will have to write about something more interesting than this. My lunching habits are of limited interest, even to myself. The problem is, that with my fatigue, which has been extending to the week-ends, I haven't been reading books or articles that I would be like to write about or seeing things - art works, perhaps - on which I could write. Reading and writing, and seeing and writing have always been pairs for me. I have been reading Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colours, and enjoying it, almost to a high degree, but I don't want to write about it.

My strength will up - even writing this is a good sign - and I need to get to the British Library on a Saturday, when it is open until five.       

New job old friend

It is Monday evening, and I have been a week in my new job now. Well, four working days as I was`away in Holland from last Wednesday evening visiting my brother Paul and his family.

My initial feeling that my colleagues work hard has been confirmed, and I still think that this probably has more to do with the times than with the company. Most of my colleagues have lunch at their desks while continuing to work. That makes a nine hour day. The lunch break seems to consist of a quick visit to one of the myriad of sandwich and lunch bars on or near Goswell Street, the local thoroughfare. Our offices are about sixty yards off it, on Sycamore Street.

I am managing so far to bring my lunch with me and have it at the circular table in the kitchen cum common room where people make their tea or coffee (Being England, there is a good deal of tea- and coffee-making). I like the room as it has lots of natural light, unlike the rest of the office. A couple of people have remarked, not at all disapprovingly, that it is unusual to eat one's lunch in there. I fear that, within a couple of weeks, I won't have time. For the moment, it is a good place to meet people as they come in and out.  Today I met Nicola and Natalie, both nice. Nicola works in conferences, Natalie in ... I can't remember.   

Investoraccess is, as mentioned in my last post, a financial publisher for the private equity industry. Private equity, a way of financially structuring the ownership of businesses, was a long established but relatively small part of the financial world when I last worked in London, as a financial journalist. In the last five or six years, it has grown to enormous proportions. It has become a different animal, and there is little sign of the acceleration of its growth stopping. Hedge funds have also grown enormously, in their case from zero, over the same time period, and for, I think, essentially the same reasons. But I have been drinking some wine tonight, am tiring and will have to aim to continue this tomorrow evening.  Sorry!

New job old rhythm

I started a new job today here in London, a modest one, with a matching salary. It is as a market researcher at Investoraccess, a trade publisher for the private equity industry. I am pleased. It will get me out of bed and will pay the bills, almost.
 
The people there are nice. Unfortunately, there isn't a shower. I had been hoping there would be as I was planning to cycle but get very warm cycling and could have done with a shower. I will give it a try, will rub myself down in the gents and see if that cools me enough. 

Old habits die hard and so do joys. In writing this, I am returning to an old rhythm and pleasure. I used to work in financial publishing in London, as a journalist (1986-1997). I would return home in the evening, cook my dinner then settle down to write for a few hours. That is what I have done this evening. I wrote on art then and, later, on my thesis subject which had in part to do with art. I don't know what I will write on now. I am writing this, and that is a start. If I get the same rhythm going again, come home, eat and write and find pleasure in writing, subjects will come to me, I believe.

I am back in an old place in myself, but it is also a new place, and I like it here where the old and the new threaten to dance together.

Two things I noticed about work today. The hours are long, and people work harder in this industry than I remember them doing. At 5.15, everyone was still working. I was puzzled. I had looked rapidly at home last week at the draft contract of employment that David H. had sent me and had noticed that there was a hour for lunch. If work begins at 9, I thought as I looked around at my colleagues at 5.15, and if there is an hour for lunch, then at least some people should be gone by now. I have looked at the contract again this evening. Hours of work are 9 to 6. The lunch hour is not included. Then it was. But that was 1997 and this is 2006.
          

Interview

I have an interview in the morning with an Ian Williams at financial P.R. company Lansons Communications. I wrote to Dan a little earlier. 

Dan,
hello. Hope all is well.
I haven't been making much headway in the job search, so I am heading into financial P.R.-land.
First up, Lansons Communications, in the morning. I haven't asked whether there is a job on the table but I don't think they would be calling me in unless they are hiring.
I've done enough preparation: I had lunch with Marc Pops [our friend Marc Popiolek] last week.
Two questions, though.
1) I want to convey that I have a down-to-earth side. What, in your view, is the most obvious and basic thing that most London PR people make a mess of all the time?
2) Lansons is a good firm, Marc tells me. Do you happen to know how good?
C

God knows where Dan was but my guess would be with Sam somewhere half-way up the slope in Hong Kong (Is it called midtown? No, that is New York. I can't remember what it's called.). Luckily, however, he was on his Blackberry so I got an immediate response.

Hi Conor, good luck with the interview.  I don't know much about Lansons except that they are a niche firm with expertise in financial services clients (I think!). As to your other question, it always surprises me how PR people will ring journos to talk about clients or to respond to breaking news without having briefed themselves properly. So you often end up with "I don't know" or "I'll have to call you back". To me that is a very basic failing!
A close second in the annoyance stakes is when they ring up to sell a story without having checked whether it might be relevant to the journo they are calling.
Best, Dan

These are useful things to know, and should do the trick in the morning. Maria! (Is 'maria' - with the emphasis on the last 'a' and meaning  'I'm only joking' - Hibernian English? Martha - my late sister - used to use it a lot. Or is it North Cork? It could be in Shakespeare, for all I know.).