Things

Some time back, I began looking at how AI/VR is affecting our lives and, perhaps more important, in the near future. Is it good to have a small robot reading books to small children? How long before your job is better done by a machine? And so on… Then the focus shifted to that word which we over-use and with good reason – things.

For a start: Things will soon be running our lives. The worst/best thing that can happen. Things keep changing/things will never be the same again. Things can only get better/things cannot get any worse.

And then: Get ahead of things, put things behind you, look forward to things, look down on things, look up to things and get on top of things. My memory will never let go of “Things getting on top of you” mainly because of what happened in Ostrava a long time back. I was in a group being taken on a tour of a coal mine (I had no choice) and we entered a lift which was to take us down to the coal face. Then we walked, bending so as not to hit our heads on the ceiling, for what seemed an eternity and, since I am a pretty good claustrophobic, I felt a little ill. Our guide then opened a door at the end of the passage and… we were in the carpark! The “lift” had taken us all of 5 meters down and I felt pretty silly when we realised this. I wish this thing had never happened…

Go back with me to my school days where we came up with “If things don’t change… they will have to stay as they are!” which was our way of throwing philosophy back at one or two of the teachers. About this time, I remember some songs like “These foolish things (remind me of you)” sung by Frank Sinatra. The lyrics are a little dated (“A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces. An airline ticket to romantic places. And still my heart has wings these foolish things remind me of you” At school we turned these into extremely vulgar lyrics of course.

Another Sinatra song was “Just one of those things”. Then how about Duke Ellington “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be”? From 1962, take a look! A couple of years earlier, Max Bygraves (best known for his hit “Tulips from Amsterdam”) recorded “Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be” which I urge you to listen to. The lyrics transport me right back to 1960. “It used to be fun Dad an old Mum paddling down old Southend, but now it ain’t done, never mind chum Paris is now where we spend our outings”

That’s things for you…

Right

It is one of those words which mean everything to everyone. For a start, everyone thinks they are right. How many wars has that caused? You try to stay on the right side of someone (ever wondered what the other side is called?) You have to keep on the right track. Most people are right-handed (we will come back to this soon). And you have the exclamation “Right!” which my dad used a lot.

For him it was often just like punctuation, closing one line of thought and then free to start a new one. But he also had what I grew to hate the habit of having his wife and two children stand on the side of the road waiting for a safe moment to cross, which was when (and only when) he said quite loudly “Right!” I suspect my mum hated this but she, as ever, never showed it.

As a schoolmaster you have to maintain the position of always being right, especially to your class of children. My dad once expressed his disappointment in anyone who thought a hair could grow again from the place where it had been pulled out. And how remarkable it was to have an injection in your left arm to cure a condition in your right arm. No-one dared challenge him. Certainly not his son.

My sister is left-handed, despite many efforts by my parents to ‘correct’ this when she was young. It is for me always a surprise to find the next left-handed person. I said that to the lady cutting my hair as a sort of compliment and she told me that it was because of the mirror that she appeared to be left-handed (making me feel a little stupid). Just a few weeks ago my sister sent me a postcard with this on it:

Sums her up from when I was that little brother she could (and would) dominate when we were young. Now she is a super sweet lady. How we all change! Go back in time and being left-handed made you a potential threat – hence the word “sinister” (Latin for left). My dad was always happy when I learned a new Latin word.

Being right-handed saves you a lot of money. Fountain pens (no longer used of course), hockey sticks, scissors and a whole load of other things are more expensive. Odd when you think of it is wagons and later cars drove on the left side of the road because the drivers were right-handed. Also shaking hands you use your right hand – exception being when the other person has no right arm, as I learned as a small boy when I met the father of a girl who had no right arm.

Finally, you have the Right Wing in politics and they are generally bad news. Brexit is the most recent opportunity they have grasped to rob the poor even more. This may sound controversial but surely when you think about it you will see that I am right – oh dear!

Letting Go

Not one of my strengths. Some people have absolutely no problem letting go – I have. From as early as I can remember, I was super careful not to lose anything, memories and anecdotes in particular, and friends. Not so long ago I had a list of so-called ‘contacts’ or personal data I had collected on all those people who had entered (and perhaps also departed from) my life. I t became an annual ritual to go one-for-one through the list and consign some people to my equivalent of oblivion (erase). I could look at a name and/or an email address and scratch my head as to who this person was and why I had stored his/her data on my PC.

Delete. Are you sure? Yes! And he/she was gone. For me anyway. Then I had people whom I had known, perhaps admired, but who had died. Could I bring myself to delete them? Difficult. There again, I also had names and data on some real schmucks who really irritated me – oh the joy of deleting them! At the end of such a session I felt refreshed, invigorated, happy. So why no longer? maybe because the list keeps getting smaller. Or because it is part of a larger evolution in my life – yes, I think so.

Ask anyone who knew me 15 or more years ago. Dick (they would tell you) always had a bigger and better car, a larger house, every sort of gadget, nice clothes, etc. How happy I now am after leaving all that behind me! OK I renewed my driver’s licence two years ago but have not driven since then. My reasoning is that if the bus/train is no solution then I will take a taxi – let someone else worry about the route and the traffic. Fortunately I have never been in an accident where anyone was injured. So why risk that now, especially when I am getting older. Even Prince Philip (97) handed in his licence after his crash where two women were hurt.

Cars in general are objects of a past I try to forget. Put me in a new car now and I doubt if I could get out of the street. They are so complex, over accessorised and electronic. Big houses cost big money (which I no longer have) and I recall clearly thinking in my last big house (prior to 2003) about all the junk you collect because you have room to store it and cannot bring yourself to throw away. Same with clothes. In my own company I always wore a good suit, good shirts and ties and very expensive shoes. Last time I bought a few shirts was more than three years ago, and jeans are fine thank you.

My greatest satisfaction (yes, you guessed it already) are my three kids and a close set of good friends. The number may be small but so what? I am happy to be there somewhere in the background watching the new generation make all the mistakes I did, but also making big successes of all they do. Often as I dream, I am back in the 90’s when I was always traveling, unaware of the treachery growing inside my company and that soon I would be on the street without a penny. Those responsible still reappear in the (bad) dreams and how much I would like to delete them from my head.

So here I end and I underline that it is a happy person who writes these lines. A simpler person too, a more considerate one too I hope. If I pissed any of you off in the past then I am sorry. But maybe you have already deleted me from your contacts?

Another Chapter

Yesterday, Guus sent us (his sisters and me) a text message. He had just heard he had been awarded his Masters in Law, and with a very good score. On 28 March he will receive his degree at a ceremony and I might be the proudest father in the hall. In his 25 years he has enjoyed many chapters, the charming young boy, the keen school student, the fanatic football player (and Ajax supporter), law student and now masters graduate. A new chapter will soon start on an open page that only he can write.

 

When I was 25, I was in the middle of a PostDoc in London, unaware of the big adventure that awaited me. New York, California, Shell, my own company and three remarkable children. On reflection, it is good that the book often writes itself. I see my role as with one hand on the tiller but not using it all the time (odd I use this metaphor since I hate boats). Life has been kind to me but also extremely cruel. The bad times also come unannounced and stick around longer. But today I am grateful, happy that all three children got “there” using their own intelligence and a lot of hard work.

   

My role now fades to an occasional adviser, waiting to be asked but happy if I am not. I have written about this several times in my blogs, letting go more and more every year but being around to warn of holes in the road or a ceiling about to collapse. That is how my father did it (I think). I still regret not having all those conversations with him before he died so young. He was a great teacher in so many ways.

But this is about Guus today. It is short but underlines why I am so curious about the chapters to come. May I see a few before I too pass away.

Evolution For Millennials

A quick search in the 700+ blogs I have written since 2012 surprised me – I have already written a fair bit about evolution, much more than I recalled. I am what they call a Baby Boomer, one of the masses born after the Second World War and now becoming a burden, physically and financially, on those who are now called the Millennials. My three children are Millennials and I marvel at how well adjusted they are to life as we (and they) live it.

Recently, I have been helping my son with English texts to be used in legal correspondence. He will soon receive his Masters degree in Law (specialised in employment legislation) and about to get his first job in a law firm. Instead of composing each letter from scratch, he rather cleverly hit on the idea of hanging the sentences that fit best to a template designed for the topic in law. A bit like decorating a Christmas tree (template) with decorations (sentences). All three of my kids are Apple addicts and very adept at getting them to do exactly what they want them to do. Their poor father still stumbles along with his Android telephone and Windows on his PC/laptop. Watching Guus, I became extremely impressed by how he applied the Apple text commands so effortlessly and so effectively.

They all grew up in an age where the mobile (smart) phone was a basic, with Internet for communication and Google as a source of all knowledge you could reasonably need at any time. Or in other words, they are fully adapted to the world in which they were born. My childhood was in sleepy English villages, knowledge you found on paper, entertainment was woefully backward (I simply cannot bring myself to watch again on YouTube what I grew up appreciating so much).

People then were naïve, distant and showed little warmth. The telephone became affordable, as did the (black and white) TV, the portable radio was born and by the early 80’s you could buy and try to use the first personal computers. It was slow progress but there again evolution is slow, dreadfully slow. It amuses me to watch Dirty Harry, the 1971 movie starring Clint Eastwood, where he runs through a city park using pay-phones to communicate. The mobile phone arrived in 1973 but was so heavy Dirty Harry would have never caught up with the law-breakers. The incredibly fast evolution of the mobile phone into the smartphone was powered by the manufacturers rather than the users. The annual multibillion dollar business fuelled the investment and the users ditched their last phones for the new one. It amuses me to think that today’s smartphone with its so-advanced camera, internet connections and apps, is still used to actually call people!

As a small boy, the telephone was in the hallway, connected by a wire to “the wall” and connections were made by an operator. The circular dial stayed for a long time before giving way to push-buttons and my dad was so clever as to place an egg-timer next to the phone so that my mother spoke for no more than 3 minutes.

Oh it took so much effort to move from an old product to the new one, learning all those new commands and rules. My kids have no idea what I am talking about should I try to tell them this. User manuals are as out-dated as I am – everything now is so logical you are wasting your time on a manual. My apparent frustration as a Baby Boomer with adjusting to the rapid technological advances is elegantly summarised in a most readable article. It reassures me that I can point at evolution not equipping me fast enough to stay ahead but it does not explain why the Millennials have apparently no problems here.

I try to turn the tables round by claiming that Millennials are more and more superficial because they never learned to find knowledge “the hard way” in books and in encyclopaedias. They lean entirely on automated spell-checkers which generally are based on American English (Urgh!).

So now let’s be fair – Victorians would have had the same opinion about Baby Boomers as I have about Millennials. It is all subjective and depends more on you then them. If spelling is no longer taught because computers do it better, should I just accept this? If people no longer see the need to finish a sentence, so what? Listen to most of the idiots spouting on about Brexit (including people of apparent power) and listen to how badly they express themselves. Why let all this upset me? Maybe I will be less critical in the years that come…

 

Henk

My last blog was about “a better year” written one year after the fall that changed last year for me in many ways. The next morning I received a telephone call from Roel, my brother-in-law to tell me that his father (Henk) had just died. Henk was 94. My children and the whole family were in shock and deeply saddened. Henk’s health had been remarkable but recently his body could take no more.

I first met Henk, the father of my wife-to-be in 1988 and I then took part for the very first time in the family Whitsun Weekend, a reunion of more or less everyone on a farm in the east of this country. It was a glorious weekend where I became amazed by the warmth and welcome of everyone, as well as joining them in a very beery weekend. There would be many more such weekends, many birthday parties or dinners where I cooked and each time the warmth was there in its so many forms. His three children worshipped him, not hard to understand why, as did all the other family members. He was a rock who brought peace and safety to everyone, in his own quiet way and always with humour. In the war he had been in a camp in the Far East – in itself a traumatic experience where Henk learned so much about people. To and for everyone, Henk was forever taking the time to listen and to help in what way he could.

It would take a book to tell you everything about this man. Let me just give one anecdote instead. It may have been the first or second Whitsun Weekend on the farm just outside Almelo and Henk was relaxing in the sun after lunch. His granddaughter (Frederiek) was then 4 I think and wanted so much to look at the horse in one of the paddocks. So every ten minutes she would come to Henk and ask him to walk her to the paddock to see the horse. It took maybe five minutes and they were back again. Then the repeat and so on until I wondered how long before Henk refused. He did not. Each time, and with a soft smile, he took Frederiek to see the horse. That was Henk.

At his cremation last Sunday, his family captured in their own words how he had touched them. There were many photographs and at the end a video taken some time back where Henk said “goodbye” in just a few seconds. Beautiful.

Thank you Henk for everything you were and will remain

A Better Year

No, this is not about Trump, Brexit or China. It’s about me. Exactly one year ago tomorrow, I managed to fall and convincingly break my right arm. For whatever reason, or just to make bad things worse, the hospital tried to mend the break using a stiff corset-like armband although the X-Rays clearly showed the bone ends far apart. I was confined to bed, nursed twice a day by the day-care medical helpers and all the time by my three magnificent children. Consistent with theory, my central heating broke down for a week, as did my dishwasher and washing machine.

At the end of March I had the good fortune to see an orthopedic surgeon who advised an operation to fix the break and place a metal strip on the bones. The day after Easter Monday this is what he did and life started to get better. In 2004 I had a cataract operation on my right eye, the one badly damaged by a squash racket in 1978. Last year it was clear that the new lens had become detached and wandered over my eye making things occasionally difficult. In the summer, an eye surgeon in Rotterdam placed a new lens in the eye and that made life a lot better.

The time I had spent in bed in February-March had taken a toll on my leg muscles. I had lost 12 kilos or more and after walking a few hundred meters (with a stick still) I felt pretty exhausted. Not surprisingly, the fear of falling again was a big worry making me even slower. Then in December Christy advised me to have a check-up at my GP for Parkinson’s disease since she saw early signs of what could be just that. My GP disagreed but nevertheless referred me to a neurologist who could see me mid-January. So Christmas was a little different with this looming over my head and by the end of the year I was so weakened I had to spend more days in bed.

Last week, the neurologist examined me and ruled out Parkinson’s disease. What a relief! Christy was there for the appointment taking time off work and hiring a car to get me to the hospital and back. All three kids have again been magnificent in helping me at home with shopping and such things. Now I have the resolve to get those muscles strong again and try to regain my independence. It will soon be (I hope) a better year…

Cynical

The Holiday Season is upon us. It only lasts two months so be prepared. Step One: hang on to your money! Let’s look at it like Jack and Jill would – you have €10 to spend and before you know it there is nothing left. The first stores that discount their glittering new products could take every one of those Euros in one dizzy minute. The Sales used to take place between Christmas and New Year but there just ain’t any Euros left by then!

The Netherlands has Sinterklaas who as I write is doing his annual tour before December 5 when the kids get their presents. Not so long ago, children left a shoe in the hall with a carrot inside (for the horse that Sinterklaas rides) like other kids do for Santa (he has reindeer to feed). The idea was the carrot was replaced by the small present. Nowadays shoes would have to be bigger than the horse or the reindeer since kids want (expect) big presents. As a parent of young children not so long ago I knew what that meant to the wallet and in those days I was earning a lot of money – God help the parents of today.

So let’s look at the word that covers all this – cynical. 1. believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity. 2. concerned only with one’s own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them. Yes, it’s talking about the sales machine homing in on your €10. Even before the Sales you now have pre-season discounts… Last Friday was “Black Friday” which sounds rather ominous but the “black” is the colour of the ink, meaning profit (red means debt). In China they are ahead of the game with Singles Day (11 November) which is getting bigger every year.

Black Friday used to be an American tradition – Thursday Thanksgiving and then off to the stores the day after. But Europe has caught Black Friday disease in a big way. Then someone came up with “Cyber Monday” which was yesterday – so you were meant to go on-line and snatch those heavily discounted things you do not need.That is all cynical.

Then Christmas comes and everybody (including the Dutch) is resigned to yet another great spend and the kids can expect even bigger presents. We told our kids that Sinterklaas was all they could expect and that Christmas was about Jesus and all that stuff. It worked (I think). Finally New Year’s Eve, a mega spend on booze, food and fireworks and the next year can begin. But the cynics are busy the whole year. They invented “free” WiFi, no charges for shipping or returning goods ordered online, and long after the Air Miles and Reward Schemes attached to your credit card. And we all fell for it – I certainly did! It never occurred to me that the expression “there is no such thing as a free lunch” meant a lot more than that.

It is so simple. Charge everyone more than the product should cost, give the extra profit (or some of it) to people stupid enough to sign up for the loyalty awards and laugh at the idiots who pay the high prices but fail to pick up on the pay-backs. It still has a long way to go. “Buy Two and Get One Free” has worked for years, but what is next? “All the spareribs you can eat…” never fails; Oh and those stamps you collect for months and then claim your special present/product (favourite supermarket trick).

Milton Freeman is largely credited with the Free Lunch quote so let’s end this (cynical) piece with another of his quotations: If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

 

Viral

Until not that long ago, ‘viral’ meant something really nasty, mostly an incurable medical state. It was a word with a shadow. In January 2003 a marketing man introduced me to the expression ‘viral marketing’ which when he explained it to me sounded really powerful. Yes, I am naïve.

Nowadays, if your YouTube video does not go ‘viral’ within half a day you are more or less finished. And, to underline what a fossil I have become, the viral videos just make me despair. With exceptions… Let me show you some which I still feel are powerful and clean. Firstly, the one from Icelandic about Palm Oil products which has been banned in the UK recently. It is about the “orangutan in my bedroom” – take a look! Clever heh? Now read how the UK has reacted – “too political” indeed, maybe helped by Unilever and their like. Good to see Greenpeace at work here too, well done all of you. It is another of those Christmas videos where John Lewis is way ahead. In 2014 they had a brilliant (viral) video about a penguin and a small boy – be prepared to shed a tear or two. Then came the parody version – every bit as brilliant with a sharp ending.

Still (for me) the video about a girl growing up (‘Dear Daddy’) a Norwegian masterpiece that still makes me cry. I have two daughters.

Finally, to Australia and a video about young people and the dangers that await them. It is called ‘Set Yourself Free’ and do not watch it after a meal!

So ‘viral’ has come a long way it seems. And thanks Veroon for the Orangutan video you sent me – see what you made me do!

Signs Of Life

Anyone who knows me a little bit will also know how much I appreciate (good) humour. I collect cartoons and similar stuff for days like this – November gloom and winter approaching. Let’s begin with this which has been on my list of stuff to use in a blog for about a year.

The original was written in Dutch and I have translated it – it may well have originated in English and been translated into Dutch of course. It is yet another example of humour caused by your thinking you are so smart to “see” what happened.

Now here is another favourite – the office at work in two notices on a door.

Could it be from a door in your company? If so, poor you!

Doors are a constant source of inspiration when you take time to look at them

If ever you needed some encouragement, this will help. It is a fine sign of life. But there are also signs that are basically ominous.

This is a big favourite of mine since I find myself increasingly focusing on its real meaning. I told you long ago I write my blogs primarily for my children. They will understand fully why I look at life the way I do. That too is a sign of life.