Angels around you at all times

Day 25 (Sunday 25th December 2016)

25% increase in UK trained doctors is planned by the UK Government to

enable the UK to become "self-sufficient". This plan was 

announced in October 2016 and will take effect as from 2018.

Doctors' Training places are set to expand from 6,000 to 7,500 pa.

Currently 25% of doctors working for the NHS were trained abroad.

For those of you who are celebrating today, I wish you a very Happy Christmas. Regardless of your religious beliefs, I hope that the next few days are good and that they provide you with some time to recharge and connect with loved ones and friends. I am spending the day with my family in London.

Our Christmas Day post comes from the wonderful Michael Carty. He is seen by many as the connective glue that holds many in the HR social media community together. Always interested, always mindful of others and respectful - a true gentleman. Michael is a thoughtful and talented blogger - you can read his words on Tumblr.

Michael has for many years followed and commented on HR for XpertHR and is known as a benchmarking guru who can make sense of complex analytical data and communicate it in an easily understood manner to others less capable than himself. He is active and supportive on social media (often encouraging people to attend tweet-ups and events), indeed he and I first met at a tweet-up and over the years we have established a close friendship. You can follow him on Twitter (his handle is @MJCarty)

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Angels around you at all times

For much of 2016, the world has seemed an appallingly cruel place. There has been much to make a heart feel heavy and hollow. Comfort and joy - those traditional fixtures of the festive season - might seem in short supply. But even in these times they are still there, as abundant as they have ever been. Angels are not on high. They are around you at all times. You just have to ask for their help.

"I can't believe people care about me like that, and they don't even know me." 

Hearing these words brought tears to my eyes in public at the start of this month. 

These words come from a story that seems - the more I think about it - like a modern-day, real-life It's a Wonderful Life. Angels play a key role in this story. So does Twitter.

The tears came as I was walking to the train station through the bustle and tacky Christmas lights of a noisy and busy part of South London on my commute home. I was listening to an episode of RuPaul's consistently delightful What's The Tee podcast. He was talking to his podcast co-host - and fellow RuPaul's Drag Race judge - Michelle Visage about Jake.

The media recently picked up on Michelle Visage using Twitter to crowdsource help for Jake, a gay and trans teen from Elizabethtown, Kentucky (you can read one brief account here). Jake's mother had banished him from the family home on grounds of his sexuality, telling him by text message (as Visage recounts it): 

"We didn’t raise you to be like this. That’s not the way God wanted it. No, you can’t come home."

Jake set up a Twitter account to reach out to Michelle Visage, who shared a screengrab of the text message, and asking for reassurance that life might get better for Jake from the wider community.

She responded to Jake with words of support and reassurance, and shared Jake's situation with her own Twitter followers. "Floods of tweets" came through, with people offering moral support, help, jobs, food and shelter for Jake. 

Both Jake and Visage were overwhelmed and humbled by the love and kindness out there. Through the advice and support offered by Visage and legions of perfect strangers, Jake has made tentative progress with his mother and been able to move back into the family home. He is by no means out of the woods ("I fear for him" when Jake raises the trans issue with his mother, says Visage). But Visage is there for him. As is a new support network of thousands of friends. 

Michelle Visage is humble about her role in Jake's story:

"I knew that I don't have that many followers - 290,000 or whatever. All I did was tweet it and it got picked up. But it wasn't meant to be about that. It was meant to be about - anybody would do this. And thank you so much for this help. And because of this help, this kid saw that he was loved. It just goes to show you how strong and how resilient and how amazing our community is when we pull together."

RuPaul takes up this theme:

"I wonder how many people have this story to tell? So many people go through this. And so many people survive. I've said this before. There are angels around you at all times. But because you have free will, they will not intervene unless you say: 'I. Need. Help.' Boom. It's done. And that's what happened with this kid."

Angels. Friends rallying to offer support. This could be a modern It’s a Wonderful Life. No man is a failure who has friends.

Back in 2014, I wrote the following about our hostess in this advent blogs series, Mrs Kate Griffiths-Lambeth: 

"I said to Ailsa Suttie earlier this year that Kate is perhaps the closest person to an angel that any of us are ever likely to meet. Kate has time for everyone, judges no-one, and is generous with her wisdom and support. Here are some beautiful words from a post she wrote last year: 'Life is so short, but it offers an amazing journey, it would be a shame not to appreciate and enjoy each precious step.'"

There are angels around you at all times. Kate is one. I want to thank Kate for all she has done and does for me, for our community, for perfect strangers about whom none of us but Kate will ever know. 

Kate when a little girl

Please join me in raising a toast to our wonderful advent blogs hostess, Mrs Kate Griffiths-Lambeth. And if you are on Twitter, please, please tweet her a Christmas message of gratitude and love.

Defining moments

Day 12 (Monday 12th December 2016)

12 literary awards and numerous accolades, including a commendation

in relation to the Nobel Prize for Literature, are a reflection of the talents of

William Trevor, the Irish writer, playwright and short story specialist

(he is widely considered to be the finest short story writer in the English

language for the past half century). He died on 20th November 2016.

We have reached the start of a new week and I am sure you will agree with me that the blogs so far have been stunning; today's, by Tony Jackson, is no exception. It is a very personal reflection on a defining moment, not just for him in 2016 but in his life as a whole. Tony is the founder and managing director of Chelsham Consulting Limited, a firm that specialises in executive, leadership and transition coaching, facilitation and people consulting. Tony is active on social media (his business Twitter handle is @ChelshamConsult or you can contact him direct via @JacksonT0ny) - he writes an excellent coaching blog, "Silos, boundary-spanners & hot spots" and publishes posts on LinkedIn. Tony is both emotionally and intellectually intelligent and is swift to get to the heart of an issue. Resilient, perspicacious and empathetic - he is a great person to bounce ideas off or to discuss an issue with, to determine a solution.

As an added treat to his post, the beautiful pictures (excluding the one of David Bowie and the final one of the Fylde coast) are all photographs taken by Tony himself.

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Defining moments


There are some moments which define you.

If ever there was a bad year personally it was 2015.  And if ever there was a bad year for the world it has been 2016 – although  remarkably it turned into a much more positive one on the personal front.

(As an aside: I genuinely felt David Bowie’s death in January as if it was that of a beloved & close family member – and somehow it seems that since that awful day it has just been one thing after another on this blue planet of ours. As if David was the one who held things together for us.)

I had a complex, difficult relationship with my father. And then he went and died in October 2015 – leaving me without parents. My dear Mum died way back in 1990. His death incited so many memories of her and so many mixed emotions. 

Genuinely complicated.

My hollow came a year later. A surreal day.

My brother was much closer to him than I ever was – and given their geographical proximity (I escaped to London at the first opportunity as a young man) had managed the estate and the house for many months. My step-mother – his second wife - had moved out and into a home near her daughter as she gradually slid into the parallel world of vascular dementia. 

So it had been a trying year as we navigated new territories in a variety of ways. And none of us had ventured anywhere near my father’s wardrobes & cupboards to do the necessary clearing. Quite a hard task.

And the time had come. I’d decided that I could probably choose to be more dispassionate about matters. Nevertheless I needed to brace myself so I did, then sped up the motorways to the Fylde, popped into the village shop to buy some bin-liners and in I went.

For reasons I will not go into, it is not a place filled with exclusively happy memories. And the village is a place about which I have blogged before so let’s not go there either.

I kid you not…the lock collapsed as I opened the front door.  As if the house was saying either do not enter or ‘I have you again – you may not leave’.

I started in the loft. Pausing on the old 78s and 45s which I remembered from my early childhood. Finding…well…finding little really.

And then in the bathroom cabinet more than one unopened Christmas aftershave which I had given him many years before. Oh so he didn’t like it after all.

And then those wardrobes. With each new door a memory was provoked. Still some things which belonged to my mother. Clothes of his which hadn’t been worn for decades. Multiple packs of new shirts (his recent habit had been hilariously over-ordering on the internet). Medical paraphernalia. Now I’m feeling wistful. The overnight bag he’d taken with him on that final admission into hospital. Still packed. Now I’m feeling hollow.

Hollow with the realisation  that something profound has happened.

A generational shift.

There’s no longer anyone ahead of me.

I am the responsible one. 

Fylde coast