Pause. Step back a moment. - Day 28

28th December 2018

28 is the curing time for concrete - curing concrete is the term used for stopping freshly
poured concrete from drying out too quickly. This is done because concrete, if left to dry out of
its own accord, will not develop the full bond between all of its ingredients. It will be weaker
and tend to crack. During curing hydration occurs, allowing calcium-silicate hydrate (C-S-H) to form.
Over 90% of a mix's final strength is typically reached within 28 days. Concrete is the most
used construction material in the world.

I'm back to work today. I have new clothes to wear, a few treats in my bag to cheer me during the day and the music from Hansel and Gretel as an earworm. 

I am in awe of the lady who wrote today's post - it is candid and well balanced, but it must have been hard putting her thoughts onto the page. I would like to thank her for her contribution (she is a regular writer for the series) and also for being such a valued member of the HR and L&D social media-linked community.

Today's post is by Rachel Burnham, a learning and development consultant, sketch-noter and designer based near Manchester. Rachel works with trainers, L&D professionals and HR teams to help them modernise their approaches and become more effective. Rachel, as you can surmise from the sketchnoting is highly creative. The photographs for today's piece are taken by Rachel herself. Rachel is a talented lady. She writes an excellent L&D focused blog - L & D Matters and is active on social media (you can follow her on Twitter via @BurnhamLandD). When not drawing, reading or helping others to learn, Rachel enjoys spending time with her nearest and dearest and has a passion for gardening (as you can tell from the below piece). She is also a keen jazz aficionado - a cultured lady. Reading between the lines you can see that 2018 has been a challenging year for Rachel but that she has found a way through. She is brave, resourceful, honest and resilient.

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Pause. Step back a moment.

In the spring of 2017, my son and I took a day trip from the island of Mykonos, to the nearby island of Delos.  This was our second trip to Greece – part of the big shake up in our family life.  Sam is a history nerd and so we spend these trips visiting museums and archeological sites – the only beaches I have visited in Greece have had nearby ruins and that’s fine with me – I am getting a great second-hand classical education and it is rather wonderful when an adult child chooses to have you as a holiday companion.

It was a hot day – deep clear blue sky and even early in the morning it was blazing hot.  The island of Delos is one huge archeological site – one fascinating ruin, statue, and pillar after another – far more than it is really possible to take in in a single day.  And on this April morning it was also full of wild flowers – self-seeded all through the walls and floors were vivid red poppies, purple mallow, chamomile, vetch - cousins of garden plants I know and love here in the UK, but smaller, more intensely coloured and billowing everywhere across this small island.  As the heat intensified, we explored the remains of villas, shops, streets, temples and a theatre.  Buildings once grand and lavish – though I was captivated by a drain from some indoor plumbing and the complex water tank system used to store water captured from the roof of the theatre.

Half-way up a hill, we turned in to the courtyard and colonnade of a villa, which seemed more sturdy and upright than many of the other parts of the site.  And in these rooms found the most wonderful, not-much damaged mosaic floors. 

We looked and looked at them.

I love mosaics.  As a child I remember seeing Roman mosaics found in the UK shown on television – probably Blue Peter.  I had a phase of cutting up magazines to create piles of colour-ordered roughly rectangle scraps of paper, which I then used to make mosaic pictures. Tesserae from paper. It took hours. I’m not sure I would ever have the patience now.

When you look closely at a mosaic you sometimes lose sight of the picture – of the images, pattern and story.  As you focus, you home in on the tesserae and pick out the mix of shades and colours – the individual tiny tiles that the artist used to create their picture with.   Sometimes as you focus in on an area representing the sea or sky you are able to distinguish the mix of hues – shades of blue, dark and stormy,cornflower, to the palest blue, and mixed in a stone or two of sea-green, or a speckle of white and cream or brightest of all a gleam of gold.

And that is what my year has been – a mosaic.  Some stormy blue days of heartache, many many days of the palest blue of work and home and the doing of life, a taste of sea-green and speckles of pure gold. 

Part of the heartache for me is that this is my first full year since I separated from my husband, after 33 years together – which has been a very sad thing, but through recognizing that things had gone wrong between us, also has led to new hopes and a new phase in our lives.  We continue to share a house and I am incredibly proud that we have both worked at finding a way to still be a family.  Somehow we are finding our way back to being good friends.

I have been learning how to manage holiday seasons when on my own – a bit of a mixed experience – I actually like time on my own – good for recharging, great for reading, which is one of my passions, it gives me time for drawing and is a necessary balance to the social busyness of my work and volunteering.  But I find it is a bit tricky to get the balance right and I have had one or two wobbly Saturday nights when I would really rather of had some company. 

I have had heartaches too in my professional life – real blue days.  Back in March, I had one of those horrible times that so many of us face of a total loss of confidence – when you are independent there can be times when you don’t win contracts, when you don’t just feel rejected, but are rejected and even when you have been freelance for 18 years as I have, it doesn’t make it any less challenging to deal with.  I had a very long and tearful phone call one wet Wednesday with my closest friend before I moved into a more sea-green state.

Towards the end of the year, I made a poor decision and ended up letting down a client.  Definitely a low and very blue moment.

And there have been other times of hope, fulfillment and great contentment – a great times introducing groups to Sketchnoting in both Manchester and London, reading student reflective blogs on their learning from a programme, hosting CakeCamp evenings, co-leading a session at NAP with Mike Shaw, lots and lots of fabulous live music – jazz of course, but also being swept away at a performance of Tosca, drawing a picture of my father that actually looks like him!  

When your life is busy, sometimes you don’t have a sense of the whole picture, what the pattern is.   It rushes by and all of a sudden it’s the near the end of the year and it seems a blur – all of a murkiness.
  

But when you pause.  When you step back.  When you seek out and sense the pattern, then you can see the whole picture.

And now that I have paused, I see that this year has been full of golden moments and days as well.  Sitting outside and eating our first meal in the garden in the sun – not realizing then that this year it would be the first of many.   Visiting Delphi with Sam – breathing in the scent of oregano on a sunny hillside.  Conversations in the course of a piece of research.   Working with Gem Dale and a whole team of folk to put on a conference on flexible working.   Trying out so many new things but particularly starting flamenco classes.  Cutting back a shrub on a very cold day in February and the beautiful blue hibiscus flowers that resulted in July.  Cricket on a super hot day with friends. And more.

(Blue hibiscus)

And what stands out is that it was the people who made this year – students, clients, volunteers, co-workers, new friends to draw with, family, my closest friend and Sam. The people who see you through the heartache, who you share hopes with and dream dreams with and celebrate every small win with.  It’s the people who make the year.  Thank you.

Rachel Burnham

Home - Day 51

Day 51 (Saturday 20th January 2018)

51, the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was first elected to be President
of the U.S.A., in 1933. On the 20th January 1945 he was sworn-in for an unprecedented
(and never to be repeated) 4th term as US President. He was the first sering President
to fly in a plane, the first to speak on television (when he opened the World Fair in 1938)
and the first to appoint a woman to the US Cabinet (Frances Perkins, who was Secretary
of Labor from 1933 to 1945. She was one of only two cabinet members to remain
throughout his presidency. She helped establish many of the important aspects of the
New Deal, including laws against child labor, the first minimum wage and overtime laws,
assigned the forty-hour work week, a policy for working with labor unions, established
unemployment benefits, pensions for uncovered elderly, and welfare.)

Today is Saturday and I am relieved, as it has been a busy week. There were moments when I wondered whether I would manage to keep a flow of Post-Advent blogs running for you. I am looking forward to a period of calm. Despite the rain, some of today will be spent pootling in the garden, filling bird feeders, etc... in preparation for next weekend's RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch - something I do every year; playing my part in the annual assessment of  birdlife in the UK. Last year's results showed that there has been a 44% increase in the numbers of goldfinch since 2007. I love goldfinch - social, chattering flashes of yellow, with red patches on their heads that come to feast as a family on the Nyger seeds. Goldfinches are the connecting imagery through the pages of the beautiful book, The Lost Words, given to me as a gift by fellow nature-lover Simon Heath. The book was inspired by the words that were being removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary and hence being lost to parlance. Robert Macfarlane (one of the authors) wrote a beautiful piece, Badger or Bulbasaur, about the book and our diminishing connection with nature last September. We may not like it, but we are a part of nature and should be more careful with our home - the Earth is the only one we have.

Today's post, whose theme is "Home" is written by an Advent Blogs pioneer - she was one of the very first to become involved when the series was founded and established by and she has remained loyal ever since. This piece comes all the way from New Zealand and has been crafted by Zoe Mounsey. Zoe was born and raised in the UK, in Nottinghamshire. She initially studied Psychology and commenced a career linked to the Education in the UK. In 2013 she, her husband and two children emigrated to New Zealand. She has retained her close links to Academia and now works as a Senior Research Programme Advisor for the New Zealand Fire Service (a job she started last February, having previously focused her academic attention on Disaster Research at Massey University). Zoe and I first became acquainted via Twitter (you too can follow her on Twitter, her handle is @zoemounsey). 

Both photos are provided by Zoe, I added the music at the end.

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Recently I have been thinking a lot about home and what it means to me as an immigrant. I use the word home to mean one of two places - firstly the place where we live in Kapiti, New Zealand. When driving from Wellington there is a point on the road or train line, where you suddenly see the sea and Kapiti Island which always tells me I am nearly home. Home, also means my parents house in the UK where I lived from aged 11. This year my parents will move into a new house and it will be interesting to see how I feel about their new place - will it be home for me? Or will their old house always be ‘home’ because of the memories. Is home about four walls or is it about people and connection? Is it about a space where you feel safe, accepted for who you are? 

My work in disaster research has taught me about the importance of home for those who experience disasters - those that have to relocate due to damage from fires, floods or earthquakes often experience more negative psychological outcomes. This has been on my mind, especially with the Grenfell disaster, as I know the community has been dispersed and I worry what this means for the people impacted by the tragedy. I know I feel more secure in New Zealand now that we have bought a house and have slowly made it our own. It’s more than security, it’s about having our own space and being able to make decisions about how that space looks. 

When I was 13 I wrote a poem called Home which was published in a children’s poetry anthology. 

Back when I wrote that I was the one growing up and home was very much a place of safety and security for me. Now I am the parent and it’s my job to create the home where my kids feel that they can tell the tales of growing up. It’s harder than I ever imagined - this year has involved bullying, friendship difficulties, first boyfriend and first kiss, anxiety about academic performance, concerns about appearance, internet boundaries and discussions about sex, pornography and suicide. Technology has been a key theme and her ability to access information that she is not yet mature enough to process. YouTube and a series of vloggers are Miss 10s preferred sources of information and provide her with insights into the world. I have learnt that while we can restrict access the best approach is to discuss with her what she has been watching and try to put it into context for her. Not always easy when I am often the last person she wants to talk to. 

So I am still musing about home, what it is, what it means and how I can create a space/place that my kids will always feel is home. And hoping that there is still a ‘home’ for me in the UK.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Home Is Where The Heart Is

Of Nice and Men

Day 34 (Sunday 3rd January 2015)

34 is the age at which men are "at their most attractive"
(according to research conducted by Allure Magazine,
using a sample of 2000 respondents);
for women perceived peak appeal is at the age of 30.
Personally I don't think that age is important.

How are you enjoying the first weekend of the New Year? I am off to West Sussex to visit friends. I will be taking traditional New Year gifts of food, drink, light and heat to wish them well for the months ahead. I am looking forward to spending some time with them relaxing and catching up on news.

After the rush of the past few weeks, it is good to sit quiet and contemplate. This reflective post by Tim Scott hits the spot. Tim is Head of People and OD at the charity Brook, based in Liverpool and winner of the HR Management category of the 2015 Charity Times Awards. Tim is a social media adept - active on Twitter (his handle is@TimScottHR), he blogs (his site is  , but he also writes guest posts for the CIPD and for HRD (HR Director) magazine, and he has even co-authored a book on "Putting Social Media to Work" and future-casting the world of work in a decade's time. Tim has an active life IRL - he is a devoted father, husband and a music-nut. He often brightens people's timelines through his quick wit, repartee, sound advice and music recommendations.

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It feels to me like 2015 was a year of austerity and blame, celebrity and social antisocial-ness. All too often, what marked us apart was given more attention than the things we have in common. We saw it demonstrated time and time again that people are complex, messy and unpredictable. 

As we go about doing our daily stuff, we all leave trails in our wake through our actions, interactions and lack of action - like a comet's sparkly tail streams after it and coal leaves behind a dirty, powdery dust. The theme of this year's Advent blogs made me wonder whether, in this time of supposed mindfulness, we are really mindful of the trail we are leaving - and particularly the impact it has on others?

What I see on a daily basis suggests that not all of us are. For example, just a few minute ago I was walking to the station to catch the train I'm currently travelling on. Two men passed each other on the pavement in front of me, walking in opposite directions. Neither moved completely out of the others' way and they ended up catching each other's shoulders awkwardly. What surprised me most was that neither even broke their stride: without a backward glance, they carried on walking. 

Days of Judgement Cats in the City, sculpture by Laura Ford, 2015

This was hardly a life-changing incident - I imagine similar things happen thousands of times a day - but it was quite a forceful impact and for neither party to apologise or even acknowledge what happened didn't feel right somehow. Maybe I'm old-fashioned on this kind of thing but it all felt a bit, well, "not nice" as my kids would say. 

"Nice", is a seriously underrated attribute in my view. We see "nice" as being almost an insult sometimes, suggesting something insipid or just OK - particularly in business and management where we still regard Sir Alan Sugar's pantomime baddie act as something to aspire to. 

Personally, I regard being called nice as a compliment. I remember being involved with a disciplinary dismissal years ago and as I was escorting the unfortunate ex-employee from the premises, she thanked me. I said, somewhat incredulously, "why are you thanking me? We've just dismissed you!" She said "Yeah, but you did it nicely". 

Not every dismissal I have been involved with has gone quite so smoothly but that's an occupational hazard for a whole other blog...

My ultimate point I guess is that sometimes HOW we do stuff is as important as WHAT we do in terms of the impact on other people. In our day-to-day interactions, we can choose the how, even if we can't choose the what. Would it have hurt those two guys to have apologised to each other? Certainly not as much as the initial impact must have - and it might have eased the glowering look on the face of the chap coming towards me. So my challenge is, as we enter the start of the New Year and look back on the old: what is the impact you are having on the people around you? What trail do you leave in your wake? As someone said at a conference I was at recently, "Do you light up a room when you enter it - or when you leave it?" Are you sprinkling magical comet trails or depositing sooty coal dust?

P.S. Apologies for the appalling title. Sometimes once I think of these things I can't get them out of my head. Just like you are probably now singing Kylie to yourself. Sorry again.

Of Nice and Men

Day 34 (Sunday 3rd January 2015)

34 is the age at which men are "at their most attractive"
(according to research conducted by Allure Magazine,
using a sample of 2000 respondents);
for women perceived peak appeal is at the age of 30.
Personally I don't think that age is important.

How are you enjoying the first weekend of the New Year? I am off to West Sussex to visit friends.

After the rush of the past few weeks, it is good to sit quiet and contemplate. This reflective post by Tim Scott hits the spot. Tim is Head of People and OD at the charity Brook, based in Liverpool and winner of the HR Management category of the 2015 Charity Times Awards. Tim is a social media adept - active on Twitter (his handle is @TimScottHR), he blogs (his site is  , but he also writes guest posts for the CIPD and for HRD (HR Director) magazine, and he has even co-authored a book on "Putting Social Media to Work" and future-casting the world of work in a decade's time. Tim has an active life IRL - he is a devoted father, husband and a music-nut. He often brightens people's timelines through his quick wit, repartee, sound advice and music recommendations.

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It feels to me like 2015 was a year of austerity and blame, celebrity and social antisocial-ness. All too often, what marked us apart was given more attention than the things we have in common. We saw it demonstrated time and time again that people are complex, messy and unpredictable. 

As we go about doing our daily stuff, we all leave trails in our wake through our actions, interactions and lack of action - like a comet's sparkly tail streams after it and coal leaves behind a dirty, powdery dust. The theme of this year's Advent blogs made me wonder whether, in this time of supposed mindfulness, we are really mindful of the trail we are leaving - and particularly the impact it has on others?

What I see on a daily basis suggests that not all of us are. For example, just a few minute ago I was walking to the station to catch the train I'm currently travelling on. Two men passed each other on the pavement in front of me, walking in opposite directions. Neither moved completely out of the others' way and they ended up catching each other's shoulders awkwardly. What surprised me most was that neither even broke their stride: without a backward glance, they carried on walking. 

Days of Judgement Cats in the City, sculpture by Laura Ford, 2015

This was hardly a life-changing incident - I imagine similar things happen thousands of times a day - but it was quite a forceful impact and for neither party to apologise or even acknowledge what happened didn't feel right somehow. Maybe I'm old-fashioned on this kind of thing but it all felt a bit, well, "not nice" as my kids would say. 

"Nice", is a seriously underrated attribute in my view. We see "nice" as being almost an insult sometimes, suggesting something insipid or just OK - particularly in business and management where we still regard Sir Alan Sugar's pantomime baddie act as something to aspire to. 

Personally, I regard being called nice as a compliment. I remember being involved with a disciplinary dismissal years ago and as I was escorting the unfortunate ex-employee from the premises, she thanked me. I said, somewhat incredulously, "why are you thanking me? We've just dismissed you!" She said "Yeah, but you did it nicely". 

Not every dismissal I have been involved with has gone quite so smoothly but that's an occupational hazard for a whole other blog...

My ultimate point I guess is that sometimes HOW we do stuff is as important as WHAT we do in terms of the impact on other people. In our day-to-day interactions, we can choose the how, even if we can't choose the what. Would it have hurt those two guys to have apologised to each other? Certainly not as much as the initial impact must have - and it might have eased the glowering look on the face of the chap coming towards me. So my challenge is, as we enter the start of the New Year and look back on the old: what is the impact you are having on the people around you? What trail do you leave in your wake? As someone said at a conference I was at recently, "Do you light up a room when you enter it - or when you leave it?" Are you sprinkling magical comet trails or depositing sooty coal dust?

P.S. Apologies for the appalling title. Sometimes once I think of these things I can't get them out of my head. Just like you are probably now singing Kylie to yourself. Sorry again.

Walking with the Spirits - Day 44

Day 44 (13th January 2015)

44th President of the United States of America - Barack Obama
elected in 2009
Obama has 44 confirmed cousins in the US Senate

Chris Kane came into my world in 2014 through the link up between BIFM and the CIPD to determine what the workplaces of the future should be like. Chris is an engaging Irishman and a recognised global leader in Facilities design and management. He was head of Corporate Real Estate at the BBC, before becoming CEO of the BBC's Commercial Projects (a part time role that enables him to be a Non Executive Director for the NHS and director of a housing association). He lives in London but travels with regularity around the world, where his workplace knowledge and insightful advice is requested. He is active on social media - check out his YouTube pages or follow him on Twitter, his handle is @ChrisKane55 or read his internationally followed blog. He is engaging to meet and chat with in real life too...

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When Kate suggested I contribute to this series, my initial thought was that I would be way out of my depth: it felt like a major challenge. However, when you get positive encouragement, coupled with some inspiration,  it’s remarkable what one can overcome. For me, the inspiration was prompted by reflecting on recent events that included the death of a close friend and the end of a 17 year journey of uncertainty.

Life in 2014 (and now 2015) is fast-moving, complex and challenging; it affords little time for reflection and thought. For many of us the simple things and matters spiritual are just not on the agenda. I wonder why? Sitting down to write this post, I have taken a step back from the day-to-day buzz of things temporal to consider the path I have followed and what is really important.

Escaping The Turmoil, by Mel Brigg, acrylic on linen

Last week I learned that my childhood best friend - my next-door neighbour and my rugby playing buddy - had passed away. There is little I can do aside from comforting David’s family and reflecting on the good times and the paths we followed. Receiving such sad and shocking news can be numbing, but it also inevitably jolts one into thinking about what actually matters. It may be cliche to say, but such thoughts almost invariably lead to 'people'.

Having spent a lot of my professional life moving clients and organisations to new buildings, I learned at an early stage that is not just about bricks and mortar: as readers of my blog are probably all too aware, the human experience is central. So many of my peers focus on the real estate deal, the interior design, the operating costs, but fail to grasp the people dimension. Human beings have concerns, emotions, needs and agendas, all of which need to be considered.

This idea was thrown into sharp relief recently when dealing with the relocation of the home of London Irish Rugby football club to a new training ground. Back in 1997, when this long-standing rugby club entered the professional era, it embarked on a lengthy period of uncertainty.  The future of the club’s home The Avenue was up for grabs: the alternative use value for residential was a much better financial proposition than playing pitches.

London Irish's final game at The Avenue vs. Saracens

To cut a long story short, this 17 year journey or long drawn out Advent, which saw the club splitting and diverging (Amateur and Professional), has now come to a satisfactory conclusion. The old place is no more, and we have a new home down the road.

London Irish new training ground in Sunbury

The Avenue was very important to the lives of a great many people in the diaspora; the ashes of many club members have been scattered on its hallowed ground over 79 years. There was a strong feeling that this spiritual connection had to be honoured and that a traditional tape cutting ceremony would not suffice.

And so we gathered at The Avenue as churchmen spoke, rubbed earth on a rugby ball and watched 

Fr Patrick Devine blessing the ball

as 23 players aged from 5 to 55, both amateur and professional, carry this 'spirit' of the club to its new home. 

Ball relay to the new grounds - U6 player Lars Esse,
flanked by London Irish players, carries the rugby ball in to Hazelwood
(Photo: Malcolm McNally)

For the people whose relatives had chosen to have their remains there it was important to see that the club had not overlooked their loved ones in the move to a new place. 

Memorial bench

Some of us chose to walk with the spirits of former club mates in a small gesture of solidarity to pay our respects to the ones that are gone before us.  It served as an opportunity to reflect on and anticipate what life will be like in the new home, this 'rebirth' – an important aspect of Advent. We walked secure in the knowledge that, superficial things aside (moving the playing kit, the posts, the offices), the spirit both of the old world and the new had been honoured.

Samhain - celtic period from 1st November to 31st January
Traditionally starts with a day of honouring the spirits
before looking forward.

It was a powerful and timely reminder to this London Irish boy that place is so much more than what you can see or touch: it's a feeling - and if we want our spaces to really work, we can't ignore that.

To belong in a place is a feeling

Clearly happy to be together at the new place
Former london Irish players - John Gilligan, Chris Kane, Michael Connole and Peter Whiteside