on social media
I have been neglecting this blog, not for the first time, but I have found it increasingly difficult to put together 600 words or so in some cohesive format and also with some relevant point. This blog was never intended to be the sort of random, and brief, thought: that was what I used Twitter, as it was, for, but the latter platform I abandoned prior to Mr Musk taking it over because I felt that it had become a place that I did not want to be part of.
When I was very active with my collectables business I did try Instagram, but could not get enthusiastic about it and my DriverJohn page there was left fallow. However, the Berkshire Belle, who eschews most soclial media, has become an Instagram groupie, and spends plenty of time there after I set her up an account (albeit not as the BB). That prompted me to have another look and I now have a second account, as bowenjohnj, and have begun to post short videos.
These are meant to be complementary to my blogs here and over at johnjbowen.com, so I will not be abandoning this format. The short videos may turn out to prompt me to getting a weekly, or more regular, presence here. Who knows, time will tell (feel free to add your own cliche).
What to do next? that is my Monday Musing for this week. read or watch to find out.
Stay safe out there
on changes
Nine years ago I had got back from another overseas trip working for an American based oil and gas multinational. This time I had been working in Bangkok and, as usual in my globetrotting executive days, the joys of working in somewhere very different to the UK had been tempered by not being able to share the experience with the Berkshire Belle.
I was very happy to be home though, and all I had on the books for my consulting business was a four day trip to Riyadh for July. On getting back to base the Hasting Hottie asked me to give up the working away. She had begun to feel very vulnerable on her own and with her support network having all moved away, so I agreed that the Saudi project would be my last. I had my other venture to generate income, and could always pick up consulting jobs that I could commute daily to.
But then the Saudi job was put back to August, then to September, hopefully, and I decided that enough was enough and stood down, someone else could have the job. It seemed to trigger a cataclysmic slump I n my work: The business magazine that I wrote a monthly article ceased publication, the training company that I did some evening classes for closed its London venue and so my income stream got severely dented.
The solution seemed to be to find a part-time job that would provide a regular injection of cash, but would leave me some free time to carry on my trading in collectables where income was erratic, but lucrative enough to make it worthwhile, and with the occasional spectacular success. It was good fun, and I liked the element of living on my wits. A part time job would possibly also allow me to do the odd consultancy work.
And so I found myself back in normal employment for the first time in eight years. It was good fun, five days a week, four hours per day. It was nice being back at the sharp end again, and I could honestly claim to have climber the ladder from the shop floor to the boardroom and took the next snake all the way back to Go. There was the supreme irony of taking a day off to suit up and earn, in that day, more than my new job paid in a month, but life was good and the bank was leaving me alone.
It was a change in circumstances that I had not expected, but I had started my first job back in 1963, and few months before my 11th birthday, working at the village butchers delivering meat on my big trade bike with its small front wheel beneath its bi wicker basket, and doing menial jobs like sweeping up the sawdust. After that I had a range of jobs after school and at weekends until I started full-time work in 1969. Work is a habit for me; I like it and, more importantly, I like being paid.
Jobs change over time. I spent more that 30 years working for an organisation, but only one of the many jobs I had there lasted more than 3 years. Promotions and reorganisations saw me shifting around. The last job I had with them lasted eight years in name, but what I did changed to some degree every year and, in terms of end, one change too may saw me walk away..
My part-time job also began to change a couple of years back, and last Saturday I walked out having put my best into that last day’s work, so here I am, musing on a Monday on what comes next. As yet I don’t know.
on cataracts, part one
I can’t remember when I was first diagnosed with a cataract in my right eye. I do remember that it was during an eye test in the US, and that it was whilst we had a home there, so it was before 2019, and probably about 2015 or 2016, so that has a significance that I will come to in a moment.
Having my eyes tested in America was done for three reasons; firstly because I wanted to experience the service over there as compared to home in the UK, secondly because of the more attractive range of frames available, but lastly because I knew that I had some sort of issue, and wanted to find out away from risk that the optician would tell the DVLA that I had a problem that would put may driving licence at risk.
The process was different to any that I had experienced in the UK, and I was impressed, both in terms of how they did it and the fact that I could come back a couple of hours later and collect my new glasses. No 2 weeks wait over there. But the news that I had a developing cataract was troubling, even though I was assured that it would take some time before I needed to address it.
It was during a routine visit to my doctor a year or so later that I mentioned the cataract and was told no to worry, that it would be as long as ten years or more before it got to the point where an operation would be considered.
The issue had been on my mind since but it was still a shock when I went for my annual eye check at the opticians in January this year to be told that things were bad enough for an operation referral. Not only that but that I also had one developing in my left eye. My ten years seem to have elapsed as predicted.
We had been discussing the probability of an operation, and that going private might be the best option should the waiting list be too long for one with the National Health Service. However, I had the referral letter by email two days later and, having accessing the web site that day, an operation scheduled for 6 weeks later. I was impressed.
And so there we are. Der Tag is this Wednesday. I am terrified. Hopefully I will be back in action next week to report back on the results.
on fake food
I have long been aware of vegetarian sausages, burgers and such, but doing the weekly shop I came across a vegetarian haggis.
Over my life I have been aware that some of my friends, colleagues and one relative are people who don’t eat meat. I have no problem with that because I believe in people having a choice, and, whilst I am an omnivore, there are things thatI will not eat because I choose not to. I do not have, to the best of my knowledge, any food allergies, but there are foods that make me feel ill after eating them and some I just can’t face.
I enjoy food, and come into the live to eat category more that the eat to live. I like to cook and try to cook healthy meals from scratch so the the Berkshire Belle and I have a decent diet. We have cut down on quantities over the years and eat somewhat frugally these days, Meat or fish form the protein element of our dinners most nights, although we do occasionally have a vegetarian meal, usually a curry.
Our basic premise for cooking is to buy decent ingredients and cook them simply: We enjoy good food done well, and neither of us can understand why you would want to disguise one thing as another. It is one thing to take a vegetable mix and shape it as a burger or sausage for convenience , for example to fit into an appropriate shaped bun, but why try to disguise it as meat?
Nearly 50 years ago I was fed what looked like, and sort of tasted like, minced beef in gravy served over a baked potato. After eating it I was told that it was not beef, but tofu. My hostess, Stella, seemed very pleased to have fooled me, but my only thought was that she had promised a tasty meal, and that was what she had delivered. But the thought had struck me then: If you don’t want to eat meat, why try to make something look and taste like it?
Which leads us back to haggis, something that requires various parts of an animal, along with other stuff, to make. If you don’t put the meaty bits in it ain’t haggis. What is the point of making something look like it is meat to serve to someone that does not eat meat? Even more bonkers, to me, is tory and make something that is not meat to taste like meat and feed it to someone who does not eat meat.
The world of 2025 is a truly strange place to me.
on the Tories, an open letter
You have betrayed me, and my brief membership of your party is now over because of your recent stupidity.
Having given us the chance to vote on EU membership you got the result that your leadership of the time did not want. They left, but you elected, as leader, another Europhile who presided over an exit from the EU that was turgid and poorly managed, thanks in part to allowing a pro-EU civil service to do their best to foul things up.
This was the point at which I decided, after years of avoiding to affiliate with any political party, to join your ranks. As a member I voted for Boris Johnson as leader and was happy to see him duly elected. He was a true leader, but you decided to depose him.
Given the choice, we, the membership, chose not to elect the person that we saw as the architect of you ridding us of our hero, instead voting for the alternative candidate. Instead of aligning the party behind her and trying to move forwards with governing, you did, in my opinion, collude to rid us of our chosen candidate so as to inflict on us the one that we did not want.
Whilst he may have been an adequate manager, he was no leader, and the shenanigans that you had put the party through had destroyed confidence in the party so that when the 2024 general election came around a Labour victory was assured.
Reform is not a credible threat if the Tories can emerge from the ashes of the past and reclaim the right of politics. Sniping at Mr F is a waste of time and only drags the party down to his level. You need to rise above that, show some leadership and demonstrate to the electorate that you are the best choice to run the country.
So, you have lost me as a member, but you will get my vote, simply because I abhor the politics of the left as they stand these days. Your problem is to persuade enough others to do the same. I see no evidence that you are even close to doing that. I am waiting.
holiday humour, on heaven and hell
I was in a room in a large building when the man came for me. It isn’t often that you get to meet a man in a black cloak and hood, and carrying a scythe, but there he was. As he lead me out through a back door I saw the mini-bus, the sort they use for shuttles from American airports and hotels. He motioned me to board.
I took a vacant seat, there were other people on the ‘bus, and we moved off. The realisation that I had no luggage struck me, although in most places, outside of the UK, the driver would have loaded my bags for me, but I couldn’t remember taking anything out of the building with me. Outside it was dark, and we seemed to stop for other people to get on, but without all of the usual activity that goes on when a ‘bus stops.
The ‘bus also seemed to have morphed from the small one into a full sized coach. No-one spoke to anyone else, and the silence was eerie. I tried to look out of the window to see what we were passing, but all I could see was my reflection. That took me by surprise, because I seemed to be a good thirty years younger, and was suited and booted as I was at the height of my working life.
Looking back down the ‘bus it seemed more like one of those new underground trains that appeared in London around 2010, where there were no doors between the carriages and you could see right down the train. I did what I always do on journeys, I closed my eyes and tried to go Zen.
The vehicle began to slow and, rather than a public address announcement, the message that we were arriving at our destination, all change please, seemed to come more as a thought. We all got up as the doors hissed open, but there was no rush to get off, no pushing or shoving, just an orderly disembarkation.
Where were we? An impression of corridors and escalators saw us arrive into what looked like an enormous airport lounge, but there were no departure boards. People sat, then got up and walked out for no apparent reason, and then I heard, or rather thought, my name was called. Before I could process the thought I had got up and was walking forward.
The lounge had gone and I walked into an area where an identical man was sat at a table with what looked like a laptop. Alongside every one one of these identical men was one of my former fellow passengers, except for one, and he beckoned me to him, motioning for me to sit beside him. He asked my name and date of birth, consulting an entry on the laptop screen, but this had become the size of a 55 inch flat screen TV on which my name and date of birth were writ large.
As I looked on a series of image appeared on the screen, like watching an animation of a photo album. In turn I appeared at each of the five schools that I had attended, then in the various employment that I’ve had. These were all highlights; receiving school prizes, exam results, getting pats on the back, pay rises, promotions and the like. then we seemed to go back to the start and, this time, I was in trouble; getting caned, staying for detention, getting told off, things going wrong. Not so much fun.
Then ladies began to appear, although only a few, a dark haired one in a bikini, a schoolgirl, one who could have worked as a lookalike for a young Sophia Loren, a blonde, an Amazonian redhead, another dark haired one, and then my first wife. Then a series of children, each on which then grew into adulthood. There were six, but I only recognised the last two.
There was more; sporting activities, charitable stuff and other memories from my life, but I was puzzled by the omission of the Berkshire Belle from the parade of ladies. The old man’s voice came into my head again; “So here we are, at the gates of heaven and hell, somewhere that you did not believe in. How wrong you were, and you are about to find out your fate, but first, you have questions about these memories, but the answers will come to you in due course, but, to answer the main question, what are heaven and hell.”
“In heaven you will meet anyone from your past that you would like to meet, as long as they want to meet you. You will see them as they were at some point in your memory that you were happiest with them, and they will see you likewise. You can do what you like and the aim is that you should be happy. In hell you will meet only the people that you wronged, that wronged you or that you most disliked. You will have no choice over who they are, nor when they visit you.”
“As to where you go from here, this is being voted on now”, he indicated the screen where two sets of counters were whizzing around, on above a green thumbs up symbol, the other below a red thumbs down. Everyone in heaven has watched the video that you have just seen, but with a commentary, and they are voting as to whether or not you should be admitted.”
I thought that I had no chance of avoiding purgatory, and closed my eyes. Opening them again I was in a darkened room. It slowly dawned on me that I was looking at a Venetian blinded window, and that it was very alike my bedroom at home. I raised my head slightly, and could see the tip of one of the blades of the ceiling fan. Behind me came the sound of gentle breathing, and I stretched out a hand under the duvet to find a warm thigh. “Groff” came a sleepy voice. It was the Berkshire Belle, and I was still very much alive. I tried to go back to sleep, just to find out a bit more about the parade of people, and other unanswered questions, but the dream had gone.
Author’s note. I am an atheist, and believe that when I’m gone I am gone. For me there is no heaven or hell, no afterlife, just nothing: It will all be over.
I did have a very similar dream to this when I was in hospital last year, during that first week when it was touch and go as to whether or not I would recover. I think that it was just the effect of some industrial strength drugs. Who knows? Anyway, I hope that you have enjoyed this tale. I enjoyed writing it, and, maybe, my Holiday Humour muse might be making a comeback. Happy Holidays!
holiday fun – saving Caesar
The Ides of March
There I was, pottering in the garden doing my Winter chores one afternoon. As I stepped back to admire my handiwork a familiar sound echoed around me. A sound that anyone who has seen a certain sci-fi show will know all too well and, sure enough a Police box materialised onto my deck. A good job I had recently replaced those rotten boards, I thought. It would be a bugger of a job to have got him back to the perpendicular, although maybe he could just dematerialise whilst on the tilt. One of those imponderables, like Daleks and stairs.
The police box door opened, and an arm appeared, beckoning me in. We had not parted on the best of terms last time, well the only time, we had met, so I was a little unsure of my ground, but there are times when you do things without thinking it through, and in I went. There was still a sense of wonder at the inside being so much more spacious that it should have been, and the light was very bright after the British Winter gloom in my garden.
The Doctor was not the same as the one I’d met before, but I was aware of the regular changes of form. This one was large, Caucasian and male, and was busy operating various controls. He hushed me as I went to speak, and motioned me towards a seat, and then, having finished what he was doing, approached me.
“I need your help, much as it pains me to take it” he said, “I’ll explain in a moment, but first, a drink. Beer, do you?” I nodded assent. As he opened two bottles of beer, he told me not to worry about my wife, for he could drop me back into my garden to the second and she would not have noticed my absence. I wasn’t sure about that one; he didn’t know the Berkshire Belle, but there wasn’t much that I could do about that now.
“It’s the Daleks again, and you did rather confound them last time. Twenty-two years ago, wasn’t it?” He moved around the console to get nearer to me, and tripped, his bottle of beer flying from his hand a hitting the control panel out of reach of either of us. Sparking noises and puffs of smoke erupted and the equipment stopped with a graunching noise. I kept quiet, for there was nothing that I could do but let him fiddle with his beloved machine.
Eventually he told me that we were somewhere, possibly the correct location, but possibly not the right date. “We’re a little North of Oxford in the UK, and it’s 54BC. Julius Caesar is part way through his second invasion, he’s heading for The Wash, and we have a force of Daleks on the loose over near Cambridge. I want to keep them apart. Now listen carefully, for this is important. You have met Caesar before, and he trusts you.”
“I don’t know Caesar! What are you talking about?” I interrupted.
“Be quiet and listen. It is one of the aspects of time travel that time is not entirely linear. I don’t expect you to understand that, but you are going to meet Caesar again in your future, but in the past as far as today is concerned, so your meeting him has already occurred for him, if not yet for you. So, you are going to meet him and talk him out of something. Assuming that I can fix this mess.” He indicated the control panel.
I had learned that I should just accept some of these things and just go with the flow, but I felt that I needed to know what had happened in this previous meeting with JC, and why he apparently trusted my word. This was not the moment to ask though. Instead I asked if I could go outside, for the view on the monitors showed that we were in what looked like open countryside. He said that I could, but to stay close, and to come back inside if I saw anyone.
On my return I found the Doctor agitated; “Where the hell have you been?” he roared, “You’ve been gone for six hours!”
I asked if he had fixed the TARDIS. He said that he was almost done, and should soon be able to make the final move to Caesar’s camp.
“Don’t bother” I told him, “It’s just over the hill there, and that’s where I’ve been. Your problem is solved, he’s going back the way he came to Kent and will pick up some tributes on the way. I told him that there was a hostile tribe called the Ides on the route he had planned, and that he would be outnumbered.”
“The Ides? That’s also the 15th of the month. Surely you didn’t tell him to beware the Ides?”
“Er, sort of. You see the idea came to me from that saying and knowing that March is a town roughly on the route that he was planning to take, as well as him trusting me like you said that he would, it just seemed like a plan. I didn’t actually tell him to beware the Ides of March, just suggested that it would be a good idea not to go that way. And the a messenger came to tell him that some of his ships had been damaged in a storm, so he’s struck camp and is on his way back the way he came. So there, aren’t you glad you brought me along?”
“Beware the Ides of March!” He shook his head, “Let’s get you home.”
on falling, a random rant
Che said; “You had a fall at home, an ambulance crew attended”, I interrupted the doctor, sorry, but I collapsed at home, I didn’t fall. To me, there is a big difference between a collapse and a fall. Yes, you end up on the ground in both cases, but they are not the same.
Unless you are the National Health Service, and you are over 60, in which case you have a fall. I don’t know why they are so pedantic about this, and yes, I know that I am being pedantic too, but there seems too me to be a significant bit of age discrimination going on here.
In my case I had been feeling ill, and with a thumping headache I had gone upstairs to lie down. The Berkshire Belle, who had been a nurse in her younger days, had given me strict instructions to call for help if I wanted to use the toilet, but I had got up and gone there anyway. Leaving the smallest room, I passed out and collapsed onto the landing.
I was running a temperature of around 40c, the result of a streptococcal infection that had caused ulceration in the portal vein from my brain, which, in turn, had resulted in blood clot, although we knew none if that at the time. What we did know, or at least the BB did, for I was enjoying the carpet, thinking how comfortable if was and understanding why the cats liked to lie there. She also knew that she could not move me, and that I was too close to the top of the stairs for any attempts to get me to move myself. She dialled 999.
I was very ill and not too far from shuffling off. It took a day to find the type of infection and start to counter it, but a week to work out where it was coming from, by which time I was a lot closer to shuffling off. But, once they’d worked out the source and cleared it out, I was quickly back. I had to learn how to walk again, and there were some indignities to face, but I was home after a 4 week stay in hospital and it took another two months to recover enough to go back to work. I’d been that ill.
But I didn’t fall! I am stuck with that on my medical records now though, and it rankles. If anyone reading this knows why the medical profession decided that old people fall, please write in and explain it to me. I really would like to know.
So there, a random rant. I haven’t had one here for a while, so maybe it was about time. I’ll shut up now and let you get on with your day.
on getting it done
I was fairly good at time management from early in my career, I just seemed to have a natural focus that served me well, but I was into my late twenties before I encountered any sort of formal training on the subject.
That was a time when I had become a computer programmer, so all I really did was project work, and a project management course was the done thing, a tick in the box for one’s boss and the Personnel team (they weren’t calling themselves HR back then). That was when I first encountered the four box Eisenhower Matrix, a tool that the US President, and former General, had devised, although I don’t remember him getting any credit for it where I was taught about it.
You can look it up for yourselves, but the basic premise is that you categorise tasks in four boxes as Urgent & Important, Important not urgent, urgent not important and not important & not urgent. The first box you do now, the second you schedule, the third you delegate and the final box you ignore. Like most tools it works well if you use it properly, but sometimes you bend the rules a little.
The problem is that the plan you make from it, like any strategy, rarely survives the first hour, so your day can be completely screwed if you try to stick to the plan. Often you have to do what you can, and that means anything from the first, second and third groups. You may be breaking the rule, and therefore not being fully efficient in the strict sense, but if you are using your time to do something, anything, then it is time invested well.
I remember a similar where I was doing most of the speaking, but had someone else on the team to give my voice a rest, and the audience a break from me, a lady that I knew vaguely from the speaking circuit. Mid-morning I stood down at the coffee break and my colleague took the rostrum for a session on time management. I was checking my notes for my next session, and not really listening when the chairman leaned over to me and said “She’s got that arse about face”.
My substitute was using the Eisenhower Matrix, but suggesting that you started your day by getting rid of all the trivia that is neither urgent nor important so as to clear your desk for the important stuff. She called it removing distractions. From the examples that she gave she got me thinking that, whilst her logic was flawed in the model’s specific sense, it occurred to me that there might be things in that discard pile that might be used to give one of the team a chance to explore.
Sometimes there is merit in letting one of your people have free rein on a topic. It might not go anywhere, but, even if it doesn’t, they have had a chance to use the research process and have had to come up with a report and conclusion. Whatever else, they will have learned and gained experience that is of value to them, and thus to you.
To return to the point of the matrix, to get things done, first you have to do them. Use the matrix principles to prioritise your day, but it is likely that you will not be able to rattle all of your list off; people you need to speak to may not be available, information may need collating, something else might come up. It happens, so, when it does do something else, even if you are dropping down to box 2. Getting something done is better than doing nothing.
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