The Blog...

Having spent the last 20 years as a business owner in Bournemouth, I reached one of those turning points in life – you know the type – where one reflects on the past, present and future. After a while I realised that on the whole I was doing fine, having scraped through two recessions and now, especially with the epoch-making impact of a global pandemic, I fully understand how much those two decades have left me with a threading of stresses and scars, failures and triumphs. Out of my rumination rose a very positive outcome. One that both acknowledged retirement was still some way off for myself and my business partner, but also set in train a fresh objective, a longer-term vision … something beyond us.

It’s been a year.

A year into the unknown and can I use the word unprecedented, or has it been overused? I wanted to write about this last year from a business and home-life perspective for both bear different responsibilities. It came as a seismic shock, coated in eery silence, to be locked down for those first weeks which turned into months. Overnight our world and lives morphed into a dystopian vision that would win the Booker Prize.  

For most of our staff, they had or were bought laptops so they work from home, but we had different circumstances to deal with in terms of how the business would function during a time of pandemic. For instance one of our members of staff wanted to continue working in our small office in Boscombe. The answer was to accommodate that request with the proviso that no-one else could do the same.

In the case of our data centre facility we needed at least one person on site, you know, to turn things off and on again, and occasionally two, to safely handle heavy equipment. Above all, there was one absolute imperative we had to ensure in the face of national lockdown – we were the people keeping online systems running so other businesses could work from home. The GOV UK website even classified our IT and data infrastructure sector as key workers. Not equating ourselves to front line nurses obviously, but we had a responsibility to provide a level of service so other businesses could function through the pandemic.

The new nirvana, working from home.

Unapologetic Learning is the process of not giving a f*ck and being open to reading, listening and watching others share knowledge, and not being afraid to ask the simplest of questions.

It could be that you are covering ground that you think you already know, but want to take on board how someone else is presenting it. There's always space for you to say "Let's put it another way..." as different people, different ages, different cultures might respond to different phrases.

Also, it can be a check on how you are expressing your thoughts. Could you have conveyed it in as simple terms, are you using too much jargon, is there any bias in your approach that you haven't picked up on?

There could be some things that you are scared of showing that you are attending that course for fear of someone thinking "Oh, don't you know that already?"

No need to apologise, just soak it up.... as and when you can.

I suffer from "Tsundoku", a Japanese word meaning the act of buying too many books that don't get read. I don't have many fiction books but have a stack of cookery books, for eye candy, and a small growing set of business books.

In the past I have been intimidated in business peer groups when conversation goes around the table and people are telling you what books they have read lately, or more to the point, what you should be reading. Gulp, it's that awkward moment when I mumble and move on, or make my apologies about not being much of a reader.

Why do I keep on apologising?

The books that I have sailed through are silly nonsense fact books like Notes and Queries by The Guardian, Does anything eat shit, Does anything eat wasps, and Why don't penguins feet freeze to name a few.

Lately though I am doing better and the reason why is that the books are from Conference Speakers Mark Schaefer and Andrew Davis. Mark Schaefer is someone I have seen speak twice in Bournemouth, and Andrew Davis did a full blown knockout presentation, which was really a production, for the Atomicon 2020 conference. Also, both were kind enough to give me one-to-one time in talking through some points or ideas I had.

What seems to be working for me is to read just a few pages, dotted throughout the day.

Google and Bing didn't return any results for the phrase Unapologetic Learning, although there were instances with punctuation between the words.

Let's do it bigger and better this year.

It was a fantastic effort last year and this is a video showing the colour on our streets from it.

https://youtu.be/6g1_GuXxxiQ

As part of BCP Council’s My Local Lockdown Life project, we also go listed at the end of this page on the Poole Museum website.

http://www.poolemuseum.org.uk/museum-from-home/online-exhibitions/my-local-lockdown-life/

For this year, not only do we want to push the joy of trying to grow the sunflowers, sharing tips, getting the whole family involved, we hope to make more of the charitable angle so discussions underway on that front.

We have a little bit of time to get ready for April-May planting. Tips from Gardeners World.