Missed a week – sorry!  And can’t find hashtag on my old MacBook here…

There has been a lot of family stuff.  A first birthday.  A Mothers Day Roast. A wine tasting and food evening.  All very smiley. Hectic, but fun.  The one year old was Finley in Kidderminster.  2 hours in a soft play place.  Great fun – and hard work for the kids who really only lasted 90 minutes before getting a bit grizzly…Wine and food was Sue, newly on committee of local Village.  We are so good at this in the UK, I think.  Community spirit and volunteering.  Not a bad thing to have, and it just sort of happens, doesn’t it?  Easy to support.

I do like the photography too.  Great to send stuff after the parties, and feel the warm glow as the thank you’s flood back.  Nice to do.

My nephews and great nephew

Couldn’t photograph the eclipse here.  Sun came out 2 hours after the event.  Even with full cloud cover though, it still felt like evening.  Birds went quiet.  And it looked lie that sort of muddy grey you get before snow.  You can see why ancient civilisations thought the portents were bad when the eclipses occurred.  A bit out of the ordinary.  I loved the school kids getting excited on TV – you can’t fake jumping up and down with pure joy, can you?

Great quote on a training course.  “It’s best to be you – everyone else is taken”.  Apparently heard on radio that morning – Chris Evans – and I use it a to already – if you are a manager or leader – you can only authentically be yourself.  And be proud of that.  This is not to say you can’t steal with pride from others.  Creative swiping is a great shortcut to betterment.  So is seeing someone in another position doing it wrong.  Learning comes as much from “I’d never do that” as much as “I like that – and will try it myself”.  Sadly, I think the stronger lessons come from the former!

A friend wanted to say good-bye at his mums funeral. She was 104. Czech.  “B” had never learnt.  Another Czech friend was able to help, via me and e mail video – and it really worked.  Proper networking at it’s best.  You only need to ask.

A fun week of What I learnt yesterday last week, including the obvious line from a twitter follower – “I was going to look out for your WILY, but it just sounded so wrong”.  yes, our love of Carry On style jokes and puerile humour is alive and well!

I did throw a couple of extra one’s in too – mmumtm – My Mum Taught Me – felt too similar to WILY, so had to follow.  My mum’s two favourite expressions were:

“Listen politely, then please yourself”

and

“It costs nothing to be polite”

That’s probably enough thought provocation for the whole week?  But my other themes were about food, team work and me.

Teamwork – was seeing a very busy service at our local, The Crooked Billet in Sheepridge Lane (Little Marlow).  Everyone has their allotted jobs – but no “that’s not my job” attitudes.  The bar overseer noticed her colleague couldn’t take all the plates from one table, so as she stepped into the bar she quietly said “I’l take the rest”.  No drama, no scene.  Effortless and simple – and it just works.

Gym is annoyingly painful and good for you.  It just doesn’t feel so. Is that enough on that one?  Thanks!

Loved a couple of coaching chats.  I said the immortal line “It isn’t only cream that floats”.  But the big headed person who doesn’t realise he is not as good as he thinks he is,  in perspective.  His boss – the coachee – enjoyed it.  Smiling makes it easier to cope, don’t you think?

Missed an 08:15 deadline because of a party – hard to hit 0815 when you roll into bed at 2:30 a.m.

And discovered a new shape of pasta this week.  Mafalda Corta.  Slightly wrinkly little oblongs – and great for a quick meal. I liked it more than the spirals or little tubes – easier to drain for a start.

Work life balance, finally.  Having a planning lunch away from the office, in the calm of my local-est pub, is actually fun and efficient. Enough said.

Food, health and happiness.  Not a bad week?

Sarah Wollaston (one O, two L’s – she must always have to say when giving her name…) chairs the Health Committee in the House of Commons.  She was also a GP in rural Dartmoor – real world work – before she moved to the dark side. And she provided fascinating insights when grilled (judiciously) by Roy Lilley at The Kings Fund last night.

Sarah & Roy before the chat…

She decided to join the Westminster crew when she heard David Cameron say ‘we need more women and more people with real world experience who would never think of going into politics to do so”.  Careful what you wish for Prime Minister!  Sarah did just that, and now chairs a committee that quite often is at odds or even at loggerheads with government policies.

Real world extended to being a Forensic Medical Examiner – a Police Surgeon often called in the dead of night to examine traumatised victims (or alleged victims) of sexual assaults, partner abuse or worse.  Having a female examiner reduced the trauma for many of the patients I guess.  So yes, very real world experience.

We learnt a lot of how Parliament has changed, and specifically about her work on the Health Committee.  Here are my (as ever) biased and filtered highlights:

• She was not prepared for the tsunami of e mails and other messages.  Everyone has access to you.  There is also no induction course or CPD for MPs.  I assume this is one way for the whips and gentleman’s club nature of the Westminster plutocracy to be perpetuated?  Keep the newbies a bit in awe, and procedure lite, and you have a malleable set of sheep to deal with? Perhaps someone could design an induction course, Sarah?  (You have my card!)
• Sarah went through a Primary Election – maybe one of the only ones so far? – and this she contended made it more democratic – in that you can choose which flavour of safe seat candidate you want.  (As 95% of seats are safe, then I contend we need more than this to make our system democratic.  It isn’t at the moment.  People don’t vote because their vote really doesn’t count in first past the post).
• Scrutiny of parliament is extremely poor.  Much has been wrenched away from whips and others where patronage was the way to fill committees.  So, membership of Select Committees and Specialist committees like Health are now voted for.  It falls at the next level, with Parliamentary Private Secretaries still being in the gift of higher echelons, but the back-benchers are chipping away solidly.
• “Have you ever spent a night in a cell” was not a floated question I expected from Sarah – and a surprising number of hands shot up!  Perhaps they were all lawyers??
• The Health Committee has recently voted not to publish a report, but they had managed to put 100’s of PDFs on line regarding the evidence that had been before them.  Better than nothing.  But frustrating, I guess, for many. Including me.

Sarah Wollaston MP sounded justifiably proud of the work as chair of the committee.  Her attitude of “Publish even if the content is inconvenient” applies to Pharmaceutical companies, so maybe should to all committees too (And dare I say it, even to Chilcot).

More real world people in Parliament?  Laudable aim, and on the evidence we saw last night, a great result.

Well, different old week.  So What Did I Learn Last Week?

1.  I love being busy  (For those with sensitive souls – I just had to change that from the spell check which made it BUSTY – oh dear!).  This goes as far as gritting ones teeth after running a fairly exhausting 2 day course, and going out to a networking evening.  It was for volunteers on a local radio station – MarlowFM – 97.5 Mhz locally, and on line.  Just a lovely bunch of people in a lovely pub, doing something lovely locally!
2. I love my job.  Being with a group of highly excited very committed set of people on a leadership course is both inspiring and uplifting.  I get paid to do this – how lucky is that?  I get a huge buzz from it, and always arrive home tired but happy…just great to see people grow.
3. I occasionally become jealous.  A friend has enormous fan base on Twitter – highly deserved, but still felt those ‘if only’ pangs!  If you want to see her, use @LarkinQuotes – some lovely thought provocation. e.g.”Why don’t you have a go / if you’re so bloody clever”?  Oh – 31 000 followers. 
4. The total immersive joy of live Theatre – we saw War Horse as a family on Saturday – Christmas pressie to each other.  2 rows from the front.  Wow. Wow. Wow.  I sobbed, a lot… So close and so involved and just so heart rendengly good.

5. Don’t share negative thoughts on a football team in a general text to your friends whom are mainly Tottenham fans, and not realise one is a closet Chelsea fan, and you almost fall out…

6. A metaphor – had to find a hotel on Sat Nav which had changed it’s name – maybe need to update my mental maps as well as the Sat Nav ones.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?  Update your internal maps?

Week 8 had two themes in What I Learnt Yesterday. And a few extras.

Lets do extras first.  Why does anything that you do always seem to take longer than you think?  Look at tyre changes in Formula 1 racing.  6 seconds to do it.  But because they have to slow down and speed up, it adds about 35 to 45 seconds onto that lap – because of the time taken away from what the car and driver were doing on a normal lap.  Same with interruptions at work.  Same with an emergency dental appointment.  40 minutes for the treatment.  Set off at 11:50.  Got home 4:45.  Maddening, isn’t it??

Feb 14th – eating outside!

…at daffodil festival

Amazing to see so many people at Mawgan in Meneage parish church in the Lizard Peninsula, West Cornwall. The church was crammed with visitors for the whole festival – from Saturday at 10.30 until Monday at 4.  Loads of volunteers, driven by our friend, Wendy Bailey.  Both the daffodils (and the church) as well as the whole spirit of volunteerism, were equally uplifting.  Congratulations to all.  We loved it in a tired but happy way…!

Now can I just get a bit personal. We have had some work done on our house – Andy the tiler has done a fantastic job on the bathroom and en-suite.  Him being a plumber too helped a lot…darned old kit just doesn’t got back where you took it out from.  (Another useful metaphor, I feel?)

So it’s down to me, the occasional DIYer, to do the titivating and decorating:  Here’s my rant of tweets:

• Preparation and putting stuff back is 90% of the time taken – only 10% is painting.
• Why do we keep aged old medicines at the back of that cupboard?  1997 was the use by date of one of them…
• You waste a lot of time with the wrong kit (another useful learning metaphor?)
• It is very satisfying when you have finished!

And finally two more personals. Talking about #WILY on MarlowFM (local community radio – all run by volunteers: again, very uplifting) – actually talking about it, really brings it home.  It is really making me think every day about learning something new.  You should try it!

And Janie was away over the weekend at a Spa Hen-Do.  I missed her a lot.