It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive
$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.
…
HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
…
This was a really bold move, and gave many people I know pause for consideration. “Quit today, and we’ll pay you six months salary,” could be a pretty high-value deal for some people,
and it was offered basically without further restriction2.
Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head
spin. Zappos is one of those companies
…
It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the
company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people
to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its
new employees to quit!
…
I’m sure you can see the parallel. What Zappos do routinely and Automattic did this week have a similar outcome
By reducing – not quite removing – the financial incentive to remain, they aim to filter their employees down to only those whose reason for being there is that they
believe in what the company does3. They’re trading money for
idealism.
Buried about half way through the Creed is the line I am more motivated by impact than money, which seems
quite fitting. Automattic has always been an idealistic company. This filtering effort helps validate that.
The effect of Automattic’s “if you don’t feel aligned with us, we’ll pay you to leave” offer has been significant: around 159 people – 8.4% of the company – resigned this week. At very
short notice, dozens of people I know and have worked with… disappeared from my immediate radar. It’s been… a lot.
I chose to stay. I still believe in Automattic’s mission, and I love my work and the people I do it with. But man… it makes you second-guess yourself when people you know, and respect,
and love, and agree with on so many things decide to take a deal like this and… quit4.
Departures have been experienced across virtually all divisions, but not always proportionally.
(These numbers are my own estimation and might not be entirely accurate.)
There’ve been some real heart-in-throat moments. A close colleague of mine started a message in a way that made me briefly panic that this was a goodbye, and it took until half way
through that I realised it was the opposite and I was able to start breathing again.
But I’m hopeful and optimistic that we’ll find our feet, rally our teams, win our battles, and redouble our efforts to make the Web a better place, democratise publishing (and
eCommerce!), and do it all with a commitment to open source. There’s tears today, but someday there’ll be happiness again.
Footnotes
1 For which the Internet quickly made me regret my choices, delivering a barrage of
personal attacks and straw man arguments, but I was grateful for the people who engaged in meaningful discourse.
2 For example, you could even opt to take the deal if you were on a performance
improvement plan, or if you were in your first week of work! If use these examples because I’m pretty confident that both of them occurred.
3 Of course, such a strategy can never be 100% effective, because people’s reasons for
remaining with an employer are as diverse as people are.
4 Of course their reasons for leaving are as diverse and multifaceted as others’ reasons
for staying might be! I’ve a colleague who spent some time mulling it over not because he isn’t happy working here but because he was close to retirement, for example.
It opens almost apologetically, like an explanation for the gap in new releases for most of the twenty-teens. But it quickly becomes a poetic exploration of a detached depression of a
man trapped under the weight of the world. It’s sad, and beautiful, and relatable.
I’ve been having a tough time these last few months. Thanks to COVID, I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
Times are strange, and even when you get a handle on how they’re strange they can still affect you: lockdown stress can quickly magnify anything else you’re already going
through.
We’ve all come up with our own coping strategies; here’s part of mine.
Only people who are highly-allergic to pine needles normally look like this when they’re shopping for a Christmas tree.
These last few months have occasionally seen me as emotionally low as… well, a particularly tough spell a decade ago. But this time around I’ve
benefited from the self-awareness and experience to put some solid self-care into practice!
By way partly of self-accountability and partly of sharing what works for me, let me tell you about the silly mnemonic that reminds me what I need to keep track of as part of each day:
GEMSAW! (With thanks to Amy Blankson for, among other things, the idea of this kind of acronym.)
Because it’s me, I’ve cited a few relevant academic sources for you in my summary, below:
Gratitude
Taking the time to stop and acknowledge the good things in your life, however small, is associated with lower stress levels (Taylor, Lyubomirsky & Stein, 2017) to a degree that can’t just be explained by the placebo effect (Cregg
& Cheavens, 2020).
Frankly, the placebo effect would be fine, but it’s nice to have my practice of trying to intentionally recognise something good in each day validated by the science too!
Exercise
I don’t even need a citation; I’m sure everybody knows that aerobic exercise is associated with reduced risk and severity of depression: the biggest problem comes from the
fact that it’s an exceptionally hard thing to motivate yourself to do if you’re already struggling mentally!
But it turns out you don’t need much to start to see the benefits (Josefsson, Lindwall & Archer,
2014): I try to do enough to elevate my heart rate each day, but that’s usually nothing more than elevating my desk to standing height, putting some headphones on, and dancing
while I work!
Warming up. Things only get nuts when the bass drops, but I’ll spare you having to watch that.
Meditation/Mindfulness
Understandably a bit fuzzier as a concept and tainted by being a “hip” concept. A short meditation break or mindfulness exercise might be verifiably therapeutic, but more
(non-terrible) studies are needed (Vonderlin, Biermann, Bohus & Lyssenko 2020). For me, a 2-5 minute
meditation break punctuates a day and feels like it contributes towards the goal of staying-sane-in-challenging-times, so it makes it into my wellbeing plan.
Maybe it’s doing nothing. But I’m not losing much time over it so I’m not worried.
Sunlight
During my 20s I gradually began to suffer more and more from “winter blues”. Nobody’s managed to make an argument for the underlying cause of seasonal affective disorder that
hasn’t been equally-well debunked by some other study. Small-scale studies often justify light therapy (e.g. Lam, Levitan & Morehouse 2006) but it’s possibly
no-more-effective than a placebo at scale (SBU 2007).
Since my early 30s, I’ve always felt better to get myself 30 minutes of lightbox on winter mornings (I use one of these bad
boys). I admit it’s possible that the benefits are just the result of tricking my brain into waking-up more promptly and therefore feeing like I’m being more-productive with my
waking hours! But either way, getting some sunlight – whether natural or artificial – makes me feel better, so it makes it onto my daily self-care checklist.
10 minutes of overhead, unoccluded sunlight is the minimum therapeutic dose. That translates to about 30 minutes of winter sun at my latitude or 10,000 lux full-spectrum sunlamp.
Acts of kindness
It’s probably not surprising that a person’s overall happiness correlates with their propensity for kindness (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener 2005). But what’s more interesting is that the causal link can be “gamed”. That is: a
deliberate effort to engage in acts of kindness results in increased happiness (Buchanan & Bardi
2010)!
Beneficial acts of kindness can be as little as taking the time to acknowledge somebody’s contribution or compliment somebody’s efforts. The amount of effort it takes is far
less-important for happiness than the novelty of the experience, so the type of kindness you show needs to be mixed-up a bit to get the best out of it. But demonstrating kindness
helps to make the world a better place for other humans, so it pays off even if you’re coming from a fully utilitarian perspective.
Writing
I write a lot anyway, often right here, and that’s very-definitely for my own benefit first and foremost. But off the back of
some valuable “writing therapy” (Baikie
& Wilhelm 2005) I undertook earlier this year, I’ve been continuing with the simpler, lighter approach of trying to no more than three sentences about something that’s had an
impact on me that day.
As an approach, it doesn’t help everybody (Zachariae 2015), but writing a little about your day – not even
about how you feel about it, just the facts will do (Koschwanez, Robinson, Beban, MacCormick, Hill, Windsor, Booth, Jüllig &
Broadbent 2017; fuck me that’s a lot of co-authors) – helps to keep you content, and I’m loving it.
Despite the catchy acronym (Do I need to come up with a GEMSAW logo?
I’m pretty sure real gemcutting is actually more of a grinding process…) and stack of references, I’m not actually writing a self-help book; it just sounds like I am.
I don’t claim to be an authority on anything beyond my own head, and I’m not very confident on that subject! I just wanted to share with you something that’s been working
pretty well at keeping me sane for the last month or two, just in case it’s of any use to you. These are challenging times; do what you need to find the happiness you can, and
hang in there.
Other cars have parked and left on either side of it, every day, but this car remains.
I pass by it, as I find parking, on my way in to work.
I know what it means.
…
Short story by a nephrologist (kidney specialist). I haven’t a clue why people try to use Twitter to write long-form content – by the time you’re bending the medium so far out
of shape, perhaps you chose the wrong medium? – but I still enjoyed this piece.
My nephew, Michael, died on 22 May 2019. He was 15 years old.
He loved his family, tractors, lorries, tanks, spaceships and video games (mostly about tractors, lorries, tanks and spaceships), and confronted every challenge in his short,
difficult life with a resolute will that earned him much love and respect. Online in his favourite game, Elite Dangerous by Frontier Developments, he was known as CMDR Michael
Holyland.
In Michael’s last week of life, thanks to the Elite Dangerous player community, a whole network of new friends sprang up in our darkest hour and made things more bearable with a
magnificent display of empathy, kindness and creativity. I know it was Michael’s wish to celebrate the generosity he was shown, so I’ve written this account of how Frontier and
friends made the intolerable last days of a 15-year-old boy infinitely better.
…
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
A beautiful article which, despite its tragedy, does an excellent job of showcasing how video gaming communities can transcend barriers of distance, age, and ability and bring joy to
the world. I wish that all gaming communities could be this open-minded and caring, and that they could do so more of the time.
The next suspect insisted that he had been arrested by mistake—that his name was similar to that of someone in ISIS. A private defense lawyer explained that his
client had confessed to ISIS affiliation under torture—he had a medical examination to prove it—but none of the judges appeared to be listening. As the lawyer
spoke, they cracked jokes, signed documents, and beckoned their assistants to collect folders from the bench. Sahar yawned. The trial lasted eight minutes.
…
“Enough evidence—I ask for a guilty verdict,” the prosecutor said. It was the only phrase she uttered in court that morning.
…
Iraq’s well out of the news cycle and even ISIS isn’t getting the coverage it once did. But for many in post-ISIS Iraq, the battle is far from over. A country bloodthirsty for revenge
against the terrorists who held Mosul, a judiciary more-interested in fast results rather than right results, and a legal system that promotes and accepts confession under torture
creates the perfect breeding ground for tomorrow’s disaster.
On 14 June 2017, televisions across the country showed a west London tower block burn. For some, this was history repeating itself – as if five similar fires had simply not been
important enough to prevent the deaths of 72 people in Grenfell Tower.
Catherine Hickman was on the phone when she died. It wasn’t a panicked call or an attempt to have some last words with a loved one.
As a BBC Two documentary recounts, she had been speaking to a 999 operator for 40 minutes, remaining
calm and following the advice to “stay put” in her tower block flat.
As smoke surrounded her, she stayed put. As flames came through the floorboards, she stayed put. At 16:30, she told the operator: “It’s orange, it’s orange everywhere” before saying
she was “getting really hot in here”.
Believing to the last that she was in the safest place, she carried on talking to the operator – until she stopped.
“Hello Catherine.
“Hello Catherine. Can you make any noise so I know that you’re listening to me?
“Catherine, can you make any noise?
“Can you bang your phone or anything?
“Catherine, are you there?
“I think that’s the phone gone [CALL ENDS]“
Miss Hickman was not a resident of Grenfell Tower. The fire in which she and five others died happened in July 2009, at 12-storey Lakanal House in Camberwell, south
London. But that same “stay put” advice was given to Grenfell residents eight years later. Many of those who did never made it out alive.
…
Excellently-written, chilling article about a series of tower block fires which foreshadow Grenfell: similar mistakes, similar tragedies. This promotes an upcoming BBC television programme broadcasting this evening; might be worth a look.
The gannet heeded conservationists' calls to settle on a small New Zealand island. Unfortunately, no eligible ladies did.
Nigel, a handsome gannet bird who lived on a desolate island off the coast of New Zealand, died suddenly this week. Wherever his soul has landed, the singles scene surely cannot
be worse.
The bird was lured to Mana Island five years ago by wildlife officials who, in hopes of establishing a gannet colony there, had placed concrete gannet decoys on cliffsides and
broadcast the sound of the species’ calls. Nigel accepted the invitation, arriving in 2013 as the island’s first gannet in 40 years. But none of his brethren joined him.
In the absence of a living love interest, Nigel became enamored with one of the 80 faux birds. He built her — it? — a nest. He groomed her “chilly, concrete feathers . . . year
after year after year,” the Guardian
reported. He died next to her in that unrequited love nest, the vibrant orange-yellow plumage of his head contrasting, as ever, with the weathered, lemony paint of hers.
“Whether or not he was lonely, he certainly never got anything back, and that must have been [a] very strange experience,” conservation ranger Chris Bell, who also lives on the
island, told the paper. “I think we all have a lot of empathy for him, because he had this fairly hopeless situation.”
French Subs by: Garance Broze ✨✨Here's the Plan merchandising available at https://herestheplanshop.tictail.com !✨✨
Well, I just had my heart broken by a cartoon about a dog and a cat. Or as the top commenter at the time of writing puts it “I’M NOT CRYING! YOU’RE CRYING, SHUT UP!”
I am a survivor of an abusive relationship, and parts of that experience affect the way that I engage in romantic relationships… but I have difficulty quantifying exactly how
much. Insert obvious (minor) trigger warning here, and scroll past the kitten if you want to read more.
Mew.
I’m fine, by the way. It took… a long, long time, like in the region of a decade, to be completely fine about it, and I appreciate that compared to many people, I got
lucky. Like many victims (and especially among men), my recovery was hampered by the fact that I found it difficult to see the relationship as having been abusive in the first place:
that first step took many years all by itself. I’m not kidding when I say I’m fine, by the way: no, I don’t need to talk about it (with many of my circles of friends made up of current
and former helpline volunteers of various types, I feel the need to make that doubly-clear: sometimes, one just can’t escape from people who care
about you so much that they’ll offer you a cup of tea even if they’ve only got saltwater to make it with, if you catch the drift of my needless in-joke).
But I wanted to share with you something that I’ve gradually realised about how I was changed as a result of that relationship. Something that still affects me today and, for all I
know, probably always will: a facet of my personality whose origins I eventually traced back to that dreadful relationship.
Earlier this year, I finally got around to reading the (brilliant) Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. As somebody who loves to take apart his own brain to see how it
works, I loved the story of an automaton who more-literally does exactly that.
A major factor in my attraction to people, for the last decade and a half, has been whether or not they demonstrate being attracted to me. I’m sure that’s the case for
everybody, at least to some extent – there’s a necessary reciprocity for a relationship to work, of course – but in my case there’ve been times in my past when the entirety of my
attraction to somebody could be described in terms of their attraction to me… and that’s a level that definitely isn’t healthy! It stems from a lack of belief in my own worth as
relationship material, which had grown to such an extent that feeling as if I were even-remotely attractive in somebody else’s eyes has, regardless of whether or not I’d be interested
in them under other circumstances, made me feel as though I ought to “give them a shot”. Again: not healthy.
This, in turn, comes from a desperation of considering myself fundamentally unattractive, undateable, and generally unworthy of the attention of anybody else in any
relationship capacity… which is highly tied-up in the fact that I had a relationship in which my partner repeatedly and methodically taught me exactly that: that I was lucky to be in a
relationship with them or indeed with anybody, etc.
Given enough time, persuasion, and coercive tactics, this is the kind of shit that sinks in and, apparently, sticks.
If this picture makes you sad… then you shouldn’t have scrolled past the kitten, should you?
I don’t mind that I’m a product of my environment. But it bugs me a little that I’m still, to a small (and easily managable, nowadays) extent the product of somebody else’s deliberate
and manipulative efforts to control me, a decade and a half after the fact.
Now I’ll stress once again that I’m fine now: I’ve recovered by as much as I need (or at least expect) to. Some years ago, I finally got to the point that if you let me know that you’re
attracted to me then that isn’t by itself something that makes me completely infatuated with you. Nowadays, I’m capable of actually engaging my brain and thinking “Hmm: would I
be interested in this person if it weren’t for the fact that they’d just validated my worth in some way?” But I’m still aware of the sensation – that nagging feeling that I’m acting
according to a manipulative bit of programming – even though I’m pretty confident that it doesn’t influence how I behave any more.
It’s funny how our brains work. At the end of the relationship, I made a reasonably-rapid bounceback/recovery in terms of my general self-worth, but it took far, far longer to
get control over this one specific thing. I guess we all react to particular stresses in different ways. For me, somebody who’d spent his childhood and teen years with perhaps, if
anything, a little much self-worth, it might have been inevitable that I’d be unable to rebuild the part of that self-image that was most-effectively demolished by somebody
else: the bit that is dependent upon somebody else’s validation.
But who knows… as I said, I have difficulty quantifying how much that abusive relationship impacted me. Because it is, of course, true to say that every single thing I’ve
ever experienced will have affected me in some way or another – made me the person I subsequently became. How can I justify blaming a single relationship? I know that I wasn’t
“like this” back when I first started my dating life, but I can’t conclusively prove that it was the result of any one particular relationship: for all I can claim, perhaps it was
something else? Maybe this was always who I’d become? Or maybe, of course, this entire paragraph is simply the result of the fact that my brain still has difficulty with the
term “abusive relationship” and is more-than-happy to keep trying to reach for whatever alternative explanations it can find.
Once again though, I’ll stress that I’m okay now and I have been for many years. I just wanted to share with you an observation I’d made about my own psychology… and the long
tail that even the “tamest” of abusive relationships can leave.
Update: following feedback from folks who found this post from Twitter, I just wanted to say at the top of this post – we’re all okay.
Our holiday in Devon last week turned out to be… memorable… both for happy holiday reasons and for somewhat more-tragic ones. Selected features of the trip included:
Croyde
This pile of breezeblocks on the edge of a camp site was perhaps the sketchiest fish & chip shop we’d ever seen. Not bad grub, though!
We spent most of the week in Croyde, a picturesque and tourist-centric village on Devon’s
North coast. The combination of the life of a small village and being at the centre of a surfer scene makes for a particularly eccentric and culturally-unusual place. Quirky
features of the village included the bakery, which seemed to only bake a half-dozen croissants each morning and sell out shortly after they opened (which was variably between 8am and
9am, pretty much at random), the ice cream shop which closed at lunchtime on the hottest day of our stay, and the fish & chip shop that was so desperate to “use up their stock”, for
some reason, that they suggested that we might like a cardboard box rather than a carrier bag in which to take away our food, “so they could get rid of it”.
“You’ve never seen a beach before, have you? Isn’t this exciting?” /stares in wonderment at own thumbs/
The Eden Project
In the right dome, a Mediterranean climate. In the left, a jungle. In both, lots of things for Annabel to try to grab hold of and put in her mouth.
Ever since it opened in the early 2000s, I’d always wanted to visit The Eden Project – a group of biome
domes deep in the valley of a former Cornish quarry, surrounded by gardens and eco-exhibitions and stuff. And since we’d come all of the way to Devon (via Cardiff, which turns out
to be quite the diversion, actually!), we figured that we might as well go the extra 90 miles into Cornwall to visit the place. It was pretty fabulous, actually, although the heat and
humidity of the jungle biome really did make it feel like we were trekking through the jungle, from time to time.
The jungle biome was a little hot for poor Annabel, and she was glad to get into the cool room and have a drink of water.
Geocaching
In Devon, nipple-high grass counts as a “footpath”.
On one day of our holiday, I took an afternoon to make a 6½ mile hike/jog around the Northern loop of the Way Down West series of geocaches, which turned out to be somewhat gruelling on account of the ill-maintained rural
footpaths of North Devon and taking an inadequate supply of water for the heat of the afternoon.
Seriously, Devon: if I need to bring a machete, it’s not a footpath.
On the upside, though, I managed to find 55 geocaches in a single afternoon, on foot, which is more than three times my previous best “daily score”, and took me through some genuinely
beautiful and remote Devon countryside.
GC24YCW (“Way Down West 105”) was the last in my 55-cache series, and my body was glad of it.
Watermouth Castle
We took an expedition out to Watermouth Castle, which turned out to be an
experience as eccentric as we’d found Croyde to be, before it. The only possible explanation I can think of for the place is that it must be owned by a child of a hoarder, who inherited
an enormous collection of random crap and needed to find a way to make money out of it… so they turned it into something that’s 50% museum, 50% theme park, and 100% fever dream.
A group of animatronic robots playing automatic-organ versions of ABBA songs greet you at Watermouth Castle. And then things get weird.
There’s a cellar full of old bicycles. A room full of old kitchen equipment. A room containing a very large N-gauge model railway layout. Several rooms containing entertainments that would have looked outdated on a 1970s pier: fortune
tellers, slot machines, and delightfully naïve peep-show boxes. A hedge maze with no exit. A disturbingly patriotic water show with organ accompaniment. A garden full of
dancing gnomes. A hall of mirrors. A mock 1920s living room. A room full of primitive washing machines and their components. The whole thing feels schizophrenic, but
somehow charming too: like a reminder of how far entertainment and conveniences have come in the last hundred years.
Baggy Point
The tip of Baggy Point gave me vibes of Aberystwyth’s own Constitution Hill, with the exception that it was sunny at Baggy Point.
We took a hike out to beautiful Baggy Point, a beautiful headland stretching
out into the Atlantic to make it the Easternmost point in North Devon. It was apparently used by soldiers training for the D-Day landings, but nowadays it seems mostly to be used to
graze goats. The whole area made me reminisce about walks to Borth along the Ceredigion coast. Unfortunately for Ruth and
JTA, who headed back to our accommodation before me, I’d failed to hand them the key to the front door before we
parted ways and I went off to explore the rest of the headland, and in my absence they had to climb in through the window.
The Collision
For all of the wonderful things we got up to in Devon, though – everything above and more besides – the reason that we’ll no-doubt never forget this particular trip came as we set off
on our way home.
[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Warning: this section discusses a tragic car accident.[/spb_message]
About an hour after we set off for home on our final day in Devon, we ended up immediately behind a terrible crash, involving two cars striking one another head-on at an incredible
speed. We saw it coming with only seconds to spare before both vehicles smashing together, each thrown clear to a side of the road as a cloud of shattered glass and metal was
flung into the air. JTA was driving at this point, and hit the brakes in time to keep us clear of the whirling machines, but it was immediately apparent that we were right in the middle
of something awful. I shouted for Ruth and JTA to see what they could do (they’re both Red Cross first aiders, after all) as I phoned the emergency services and extracted our
location from the SatNav, then started working to ensure that a path was cleared through the traffic so that the ambulances would be able to get through.
Ambulances, fire engines, and police cars arrived quickly, or so it felt: honestly, my perception of time at this point was completely shaken.
A passer-by – an off-duty police officer – joined Ruth and I in performing CPR on one of the drivers, until paramedics arrived. My first aid training’s rusty compared to Ruth and
JTA’s, of course, but even thinking back to my training so long ago, I can tell you is that doing it with a real person – surrounded by glass and oil and blood – is
a completely different experience to doing it on a dummy. The ambulance crew took over as soon as they arrived, but it seems that it was too late for her. Meanwhile the driver of the
other car, who was still conscious and was being supported by JTA, hung on bravely but, local news reported, died that afternoon in hospital. Between
the two cars, two people were killed; the third person – a passenger – survived, as did a dog who was riding in the back of one of the cars.
Once we’d handed over to the emergency services, we retreated to a safe distance and, for perhaps the first time, began to contemplate what we’d seen.
I am aware that I’ve described the incident, and our participation in its aftermath, in a very matter-of-fact way. That’s because I’m honestly not sure what I mean to say,
beyond that. It’s something that’s shaken me – the accident was, as far as I could see, the kind of thing that could happen to any of us at any time, and that realisation forces
upon me an incredible sense of my own fragility. Scenes from the experience – the cars shattering apart; the dying driver; her courageous passenger – haunt me. But it feels unfair to
dwell on such things: no matter what I feel, there’s no way to ignore the stark truth that no matter how much we were affected by the incident… the passenger, and the families and
friends of those involved, will always have been affected more.
It took hours for us to get back on the road again, and the police were very apologetic. But honestly: I don’t think that any of us felt 100% happy about being behind the wheel of
a car again after what had just happened. Our journey back home was slow and cautious, filled with the images of the injuries we’d seen and with a newly acute awareness of the
dangers of the glass-and-metal box we sat inside. We stopped at a service station part-way home, and I remarked to Ruth how surreal it felt that everybody around us was
behaving so normally: drinking a coffee; reading a paper; oblivious to the fact that just a few tens of miles and a couple of hours away, people just like them had lost
their lives, doing exactly what they were about to go and do.
It’s all about perspective, of course. I feel a deep sorrow for the poor families of the people who didn’t make it. I feel a periodic pang of worry that perhaps there were things I
could have done: What if I’d have more-recently practised first aid? What if I’d more-quickly decoded our position and relayed it to the operator? What if I’d have offered to help Ruth
immediately, rather than assuming that she had sufficient (and the right kind of) help and instead worked on ensuring that the traffic was directed? I know that there’s no
sense in such what-if games: they’re just a slow way to drive yourself mad.
Maybe I’m just looking for a silver lining or a moral or something in this story that I just can’t find. For a time I considered putting this segment into a separate blog post: but I
realised that the only reason I was doing so was to avoid talking about it. And as I’m sure you all know already, that’s not a healthy approach.
Right now, I can only say one thing for certain: our holiday to Devon is a trip I’ll never forget.
This is the first in a series of four blog posts which ought to have been published during January 2013,
but ran late because I didn’t want to publish any of them before the first one.
2012 was one of the hardest years of my life.
My retweet of JTA’s sentiments, shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, pretty much covers my feeling of the year, too.
It was a year of unceasing disasters and difficulties: every time some tragedy had befallen me, my friends, or family, some additional calamity was lined-up to follow in its wake. In an
environment like this, even the not-quite-so-sad things – like the death of Puddles, our family dog, in May – were magnified, and the ongoing challenges of the year – like the
neverending difficulties with my dad’s estate – became overwhelming.
My sister Becky with Puddles, both younger and more-foolish than they eventually became. I don’t know why Puddles is wearing a t-shirt.
The sudden and unexpected death of my dad while training for his Arctic trek, was clearly the event which had the
most-significant impact on me. I’ve written about the experience at length, both here on my blog and elsewhere (for example, I made a self-post to Reddit on the day after the accident, urging readers to “call somebody
you love today”).
My dad, climbing Aladdin’s Mirror in the Cairngorms.
In the week of his death, my sister Becky was suffering from an awful toothache which was stopping her from eating,
sleeping, or generally functioning at all (I tried to help her out by offering some oil of cloves (which functions as a dental contact anesthetic), but she must have misunderstood my instruction about applying it to the
tooth without swallowing it, because she spent most of that evening throwing up (seriously: don’t ever swallow clove oil).
My dad’s clothes for his funeral. My sisters and I decided that he ought to be dressed as he would be for a one of his summer hikes, right down to the combination of sandals and socks
(the funeral director needed reassurance that yes, he really did routinely wear both at the same time).
Little did she know, worse was yet to come: when she finally went to the dentist, he botched her operation, leaving her
with a jaw infection. The infection spread, causing septicæmia of her face and neck and requiring that she was hospitalised. On the day of our dad’s funeral, she needed to insist that the “stop gap” surgery that she was given was done under local, rather
than general, anasthetic, so that she could make it – albeit in a wheelchair and unable to talk – to the funeral.
Five weeks later, my dad finally reached the North Pole,
his ashes carried by another member of his team. At about the same time, Ruth‘s grandmother passed away, swamping the
already-emotional Earthlings with yet another sad period. That same month,
my friend S****** suffered a serious injury, a traumatic and distressing experience in the middle of a long and difficult period of her life, and an event which caused significant
ripples in the lives of her circle of friends.
The notice of Ruth’s grandmother’s death, as it appeared in the online version of her local newspaper.
Shortly afterwards, Paul moved out from Earth, in a situation that was anticipated (we’d said when we first moved in
together that it would be only for a couple of years, while we all found our feet in Oxford and decided on what we’d be doing next, as far as our living situations were concerned), but
still felt occasionally hostile: when Paul left town six months later, his last blog post stated that Oxford could “get lost”, and that he’d “hated hated 90% of the time” he’d lived here. Despite
reassurances to the contrary, it was sometimes hard – especially in such a difficult year – to think that this message wasn’t directed at Oxford so much as at his friends there.
As the summer came to an end, my workload on my various courses increased dramatically, stretching into my so-called “free time”: this, coupled with delays resulting from all of the
illness, injury, and death that had happened already, threw back the release date of Milestone: Jethrik, the latest update to Three Rings. Coupled with the stress of the 10th Birthday Party Conference – which thankfully JTA handled most of – even the rare periods during which nobody was ill or dying were filled with sleepless nights and anxiety. And of
course as soon as all of the preparation was out of the way and
the conference was done, there were still plenty of long days ahead, catching up on everything that had been temporarily put on the back burner.
My sister Sarah and I at the christening of a bus named after my dad. Click the picture for the full story.
When I was first appointed executor of my dad’s estate, I said to
myself that I could have the whole thing wrapped-up and resolved within six months… eight on the outside. But as things dragged on – it took almost six months until the investigation
was finished and the coroner’s report filed, so we could get a death
certificate, for example – they just got more and more bogged-down. Problems with my dad’s will made it harder than expected to get started (for example, I’m the executor and a beneficiary of the will, yet nowhere on it am
I directly mentioned by name, address, or relationship… which means that I’ve had to prove that I am the person mentioned in the will every single time I present it, and that’s
not always easy!), and further administrative hiccups
have slowed down the process every step of the way.
On the first anniversary of my dad’s death, I cycled up a hill to watch the sunset with a bottle of Guinness and a Mars bar. And sent this Tweet.
You know what would have made the whole thing easier? A bacon sandwich. And black
pudding for breakfast. And a nice big bit of freshly-battered cod. And some roast chicken. I found that 2012 was a harder year than 2011 in which to be a vegetarian. I guess that a nice steak would have
taken the edge off: a little bit of a luxury, and some escapism. Instead, I probably drank a lot more than I ought to have. Perhaps we should encourage recovering alcoholic, when things
are tough, to hit the sausage instead of the bottle.
It’s been a while, old friend. A while since I used this delicious-looking photograph in my blog, I mean! This is the sixth time… can you find them all?
Becky’s health problems weren’t done for the year, after she started getting incredibly intense and painful headaches. At first, I was worried that she was lined-up for a similar diagnosis to mine, of the other year (luckily, I’ve been symptom-free for a year
and a quarter now, although medical science is at a loss to explain why), but as I heard more about her symptoms, I became convinced that this wasn’t the case. In any case, she found
herself back in the operating room, for the second serious bit of surgery of the year (the operation was a success, thankfully).
The “F” is for “Fuck me you’re going to put a scalpel WHERE?”
I had my own surgery, of course, when I had a vasectomy; something I’d been
planning for some time. That actually went quite well, at least as far as can be
ascertained at this point (part three of that series of posts will be coming soon), but it allows me to segue into the topic of reproduction…
Because while I’d been waiting to get snipped, Ruth and JTA had managed to conceive. We found this out right as we were running around sorting out the Three Rings Conference, and Ruth
took to calling the fœtus “Jethrik”, after the Three Rings milestone. I was even more delighted still when I heard that the expected birth date would be 24th July: Samaritans‘ Annual Awareness Day (“24/7”).
One of the many pregnancy tests Ruth took, “just to be sure” (in case the last few were false positives). Photo from Ruth’s blog.
As potential prospective parents, they did everything right. Ruth stuck strictly to a perfectly balanced diet for her stage of pregnancy; they told only a minimum of people, because –
as everybody knows – the first trimester’s the riskiest period. I remember when Ruth told her grandfather (who had become very unwell towards the end of 2012 and died early this year:
another sad family tragedy) about the pregnancy, that it was only after careful consideration – balancing how nice it would be for him to know that the next generation of his
family was on the way before his death – that she went ahead and did so. And as the end of the first trimester, and the end of the year, approached, I genuinely believed that the string
of bad luck that had been 2012 was over.
In Ruth’s blog post, she’s used kittens to make a sad story a little softer, and so I have too.
But it wasn’t to be. Just as soon as we were looking forward to New Year, and planning to not so much “see in 2013” as to “kick out 2012”, Ruth had a little bleeding. Swiftly followed
by abdominal cramps. She spent most of New Year’s Eve at the hospital, where they’d determined that she’d suffered a miscarriage, probably a few weeks earlier.
Ruth’s written about it. JTA’s written about it, too. And I’d recommend they read their account rather than mine: they’ve
both written more, and better, about the subject than I could. But I shan’t pretend that it wasn’t hard: in truth, it was heartbreaking. At the times that I could persuade myself that
my grief was “acceptable” (and that I shouldn’t be, say, looking after Ruth), I cried a lot. For me, “Jethrik” represented a happy ending to a miserable year: some good news at last for
the people I was closest to. Perhaps, then, I attached too much importance to it, but it seemed inconceivable to me – no pun intended – that for all of the effort they’d put in, that
things wouldn’t just go perfectly. For me, it was all connected: Ruth wasn’t pregnant by me, but I still found myself wishing that my dad could have lived to have seen it, and when the
pregnancy went wrong, it made me realise how much I’d been pinning on it.
I don’t have a positive pick-me-up line to put here. But it feels like I should.
A few days before the miscarriage became apparent, Ruth and her dad survey the back garden of the house he’s rebuilding.
And so there we were, at the tail of 2012: the year that began awfully, ended awfully, and was pretty awful in the middle. I can’t say there weren’t good bits, but they were somewhat
drowned out by all of the shit that happened. Fuck off, 2012.
Here’s to 2013.
Edit, 16th March 2013: By Becky’s request, removed an unflattering photo of her and some of the ickier details of her health problems this year.
Edit, 11th July 2016: At her request, my friend S******’s personal details have been obfuscated in this post so that they are no longer readily available to
search engines.
Edit, 26th September 2016: At her request, my friend S******’s photo was removed from this post, too.
Warning: this post contains details of the nature of the accident that killed my father, including a summary of the post-mortem report and photographs which, while not
graphic, may be evocative.
Last week, I attended a coroner’s inquest, which (finally) took place following my father’s sudden death earlier this year. It’s been five months since he fell to his death in the Lake District, while he was training for a sponsored trek to the North Pole
this spring. Despite the completion of the post-mortem only a week or so after his death and the police investigation not running on too much longer after that, it took a long time
before the coroner was ready to set a date for an inquest hearing and finally put the matter to rest.
A selection of “lawyer things” notably absent from our minimally formal inquest hearing. Photo courtesy “_falcow” (Flickr).
I made my way up to Kendal – presumably chosen for its proximity to the coroner who serves the hospital where my father was airlifted after his fall – in a rental car, picking up my
sisters and my mother in Preston on the way. We were joined at the County Hall by my dad’s friend John (who was with him on the day of the accident), Kate (a partner of my dad’s), and – after his complicated train journey finally got him there – Stephen (one of my dad’s brothers).
Mostly, the inquest went as I’d anticipated it might. The post-mortem report was read out – the final verdict was that death was primarily caused by a compression fracture in the upper
spine and a fracture of the base of the skull, which is a reassuringly quick and painless way to go, as far as falling injuries are concerned. John’s statement was summarised, and he
was asked a series of clarifying questions in order to ensure that my dad was properly equipped and experienced, in good health etc. on the day of his accident.
The last walk my dad ever made: the yellow line shows where he and John walked. The magenta line shows the path of my dad’s fall.
This was clearly a painful but sadly-necessary ordeal for John, who’d already been through so much. In answer to the questions, he talked about how he and my dad had rambled together
for years, about how they came to be where they were on that day, and about the conditions and the equipment they’d taken. And, in the minutes leading up to my dad’s death, how he’d
been coincidentally taking photographs – including the one below. He’d been in the process of putting his camera away when my dad slipped, so he didn’t see exactly what happened, but he
looked up as my dad shouted out to him, “John!”, before he slid over the cliff edge.
Later, we heard from the police constable who was despatched to the scene. The constable had originally been en route to the scene of a minor road crash when he was diverted to my dad’s
accident. He related how the two helicopter teams (the Air Ambulance hadn’t been able to touch down, but paramedics had been able to leap out at low altitude, so an RAF Search & Rescue
helicopter was eventually used to transport the body to the hospital) had worked on the scene, and about his investigation – which had included seizing John’s digital camera and
interviewing him and the other ramblers who’d been at the scene.
This photo of my dad, approaching a snow bank as he scrambles up the hillside, was taken only moments before he slipped and fell.
That’s all very sad, but all pretty-much “as expected”. But then things took a turn for the unexpected when Kate introduced herself as a surprise witness. Making an affirmation and taking the stand, she
related how she felt that my father’s walking boots were not in adequate state, and how she’d told him about this on several previous occasions (she’s now said this on her website, too).
I’m not sure what this was supposed to add to the hearing. I suppose that, were it not for the mitigating factors of everything else, it might have ultimately contributed
towards a possible verdict of “death by misadventure” rather than “accidental death”: the subtle difference here would have affected any life insurance that he might have had (he
didn’t), by giving a reason to reject a claim (“he wasn’t properly-equipped”). John’s statement, as well as subsequent examination of my dad’s boots by my sister Sarah, contradicted
Kate’s claim, so… what the hell was that all about?
A further photo by John, showing one of the two helicopters that were involved in the operation, hovering above the spot where my dad is attended by paramedics. A selective blur
filter has been added.
We all handle grief in different ways, and its my hypothesis that this was part of hers. Being able to stand in front of a court and describe herself as “Peter’s partner” (as if she
were the only or even the most-significant one), and framing his death as something for which she feels a responsibility (in an “if only he’d listened to me about his boots!” way)…
these aren’t malicious acts. She wasn’t trying to get an incorrect verdict nor trying to waste the courts’ time. This is just another strange way of dealing with grief (and damn, I’ve
seen enough of those, this year).
But I’d be lying if it didn’t cause quite a bit of concern and confusion among my family when she first stood up and said that she had a statement to make.
Anyway: regardless of that confusing little diversion, it’s good that we’ve finally been able to get the coroners’ inquest to take place. At long last – five months after my dad’s death
– we can get a proper death certificate I (as an executor of his will) can start mopping up some of the more-complicated parts of his estate.
Geoff Major’s tweet about my dad reaching his destination.
So it was a really special moment to discover that, this weekend, my dad finally made it to the pole. My sisters and I had arranged that a portion of his cremated ashes would be
carried with the polar trek team and scattered at what must be one of the most remote places on Earth – the very top of the world. It’s nice to think that not even death was enough to
stop my dad from getting to the planet’s most Northernmost spot, even if he had to be carried for the last 600 miles.
My dad, “dressed for cold weather”, according to my sister.
Meanwhile, donations flooded in faster than ever to my dad’s fundraising page,
taking the grand total to over £12,000 – significantly in excess of the £10,000 he’d hoped to raise. My family and I are gobsmacked with the generosity of the people who’ve donated, and
incredibly grateful to them as well as to the team that took him on the last ten days of his journey to the Pole.
The fundraising total, according to JustGiving. A significant amount of money was also raised offline, via donations at or around my dad’s wake, and is not included in this
already-impressive total.
It pleases me that my dad gets to trespass somewhere he shouldn’t be, one last time: this time, breaking the international conventions that require that nothing gets “left” at the North
Pole. The remainder of my fathers ashes will be scattered by my sisters and I from the top of a particular mountain, as he’d sometimes said that he’d wanted.
And after all of these adventures, I think he deserves to get what he wants. With no apologies for the pun: he’s urn‘d it!
