I lived in a range of places as a kid, partly because my father was a bit of an itinerant who didn’t know what he wanted in life, other than that I mustn’t live with my mother. Go figure.
Eventually I got to settle down with my grandmother, but in the process I learned a lot about life as a child in different places. Where I felt safe and where I did not.
I did not feel safe in large council estates surrounding cities. I did feel safe in a caravan park. I did not feel safe in a city centre. I did feel safe in a built up part of a large city, living in an apartment block.
Right now I live in a mid-sized house, with a decent garden, in the town of Widnes. It’s nice. I genuinely think Widnes is a very lovely place to live in. Where I am, I have easy access to nature, pleasant walks, parks, a GP, a train station, shops and am not too far from a major hospital. It’s getting close to the ideal 15 minute neighbourhood and I’d say it’s one of the better planned areas I’ve lived in. It’s higher density than some old neighbourhoods I’ve been in, but way lower than others.
But it’s not sustainable. It was built on countryside. Soon more houses will be built. These houses will be between 90m² and 150m². Not that big, really, and they’ll take a fair chunk of land up.
Meanwhile, I can think back to a place that I really enjoyed living in as a kid in Spain. It was rented by my father, so it wasn’t unaffordable, and it was bigger and nicer than any house I lived in here in Britain. It was clean, I didn’t suffer asthma there… almost perfect. And within a short walk we had bars, restaurants, a bodega, and sports facilities. I loved it. I could play safely in the playgrounds with friends, and even went to school there as we had a primary school on site!
Here’s a snip from Google Maps.
As you can see it’s a big old building. I estimate there are between 400 and 500 apartments, varying in size from approximately the three bedroom 90m² apartment we lived in and the larger end apartments which I believe are about 140m².
The caravan I lived in with my grandmother can be seen here although in other pictures it seems it’s been knocked down:
Let’s have a think about housing density here, however.
The caravan park I lived on, including internal roads but not the road to the caravan park used about 320m² per home. Some were more densely packed, some more loosely, but it’s a fair approximation. My current house sits on about the same, funnily enough. The apartment block, however, uses about 100m² of land per home and includes playgrounds, two swimming pools, three tennis courts, a basketball court, shops, bars and more! Use the slider below. Both images are at exactly the same zoom level, and see how 400+ homes compares with about 200 homes for facilities and space use. Our towns could be half the size they are, and rammed with leisure facilities, all at lower cost.
Why don’t many British people live in apartments then?
Trust.
That’s it. One word. Due to systemic issues in how the UK treats and manages high density housing, we’ve ended up with a situation where there is very little trust in large apartment buildings.
We have miserable stories like The Decks in Runcorn, where residents have been waiting a decade for resolution and have felt locked in their unsellable apartments.
Historically there have been a number of disasters often down to poor design of buildings so that if something bad did happen, people died. Grenfell is the classic disaster.
You had this tower block with a single stairway, no decent quality fire extinguishing system built in, flammable cladding. So many people were let down by the way this country treats high density housing. It was a disaster.
Meanwhile, when I visited family in Poland I noticed there were three stairways in the apartment block – the central one and one at each end of the building. Each corridor also had fire doors at each end, with security access, making it safe but also giving people plenty of options for escape. At the bottom you had a playground, sports facilities, and nearby a park and woods along with good access to public transport and very close shops.
High density housing makes living easier and nicer. You don’t have a garden to tend constantly, and you get a decent amount of space for the money because you’re not handing over a pile of money to wealthy landowners.
But we can’t get from where we are to where we should be without addressing these systemic issues. Meanwhile, we can’t be denying young families genuinely affordable, quality housing. So that means we keep building on land that really shouldn’t be built on. Because we’re scared of towers. And I understand why.
We can build better neighbourhoods, with better facilities, and better lifestyles. It’s possible. I’ve seen how it’s done in other countries. Having family in Spain and Poland, and friends in many other countries has taught me a lot. Being poor up to the age of about 25 has also taught me that we can’t foist middle class solutions to working class problems either. That got us the Southgate estate. It stank of piss.
You know that friend, the one who always promises to help you move flat, or help you fix your mower, but then doesn’t turn up? Yes. Or the guy who goes on a date and pays for the meal and somehow that comes with access to your body? Or the airline that makes you think you have to pay for a seat upgrade in order to take any baggage on board when actually you don’t?
The first two are obvious red flags. We all know people like this, and once we’re done excusing their behaviour we tend to move on. They’re often charming people at first. They have to be. They keep needing new friends and new partners, so they get really good at the introductory gab. But as I always say, the only perfect people in this world are people you don’t know very well yet.
To most of you I’m a suave, sophisticated man of the world. What? No? OK, well at least if you don’t know me I’m probably fairly mid. If I was on a charm offensive you might find me quite nice. Yet I snore, I go off on overly long rants about how a £70,000 car can have a misaligned number plate, and I walk into garage doors that I didn’t bother to put up all the way.
And so it is with companies. They’re often amazing at the introductory gabble. They’re smooth, funny on social media, and charming in their promises. But so many will let you down. Sometimes that’s your own fault. In a way, I kind of admire the Ryanair model because you actually know they’re going to play games and it’s out in the open. It’s a game! It’s a bit like that girl who you know is a heartbreaker but you’re gonna date her anyway because you’ll have fun for a while. Ryanair will be cheap. But sometimes you’re dealing with a business that should be well behaved, is very much business to business, and you’re thrown a curve ball.
Jabra’s survey
I have a Jabra headset I use for all my work meetings and honestly, it’s absolutely lovely. It’s clear, has good sound, and an excellent microphone. It’s also light enough that I can wear it all day long.
I also have the Jabra app, which is a bit annoying in needing frequent updates for something that does almost nothing. So when I saw a survey I thought I could give feedback on this, as well as the headset, so that they can improve.
I worked my way through the survey. It wasn’t especially long, but at the end, I couldn’t submit, because of this:
As you can see, the bit that says “I agree to terms and conditions and that Jabra, its parent company company can contact me by email or advertising…” is a mandatory field in the feedback form. So I’ve been asked to invest time in giving feedback yet here we go… in order to give that feedback there’s a price!
It’s like the Hotel California – it’s a classic case of social entrapment and a breach of the natural human social contract. Akin to being asked some questions at the supermarket then the surveyor saying “but if you don’t agree to let me stalk you, I’m throwing away everything you just told me.”
So I changed my address to one that included a tag* so that I could identify it as being from Jabra and submitted anyway. Because they need to know.
And you could say no sensible designer would build a survey like this. But it doesn’t matter. The survey was designed, even if by a person without the job title of “designer”. They were either careless, or cynical. I can’t be sure of which. And yes, my form entry was harsh. I was annoyed.
What do you think? Is it fair for companies to do this? Have you seen other examples that you’d like to share? Comments are open!
* many email platforms let you format an email with a + such as david+jabra@example.com, meaning you can see where your email went and block it easily if you wish to.
This blog post has now been re-arranged with the manifesto at the top, and the reasoning that led up to it beneath. Because, after all, placing the important content six or seven hundred words in is hardly being pure, is it?
Web Dogma 24. By me.
Content First. All articles, images, and graphics must be there to serve a purpose. Superficial or filler material is forbidden.
Real-world Photography. Photographs should not be bought from stock suppliers, but either provided by the subjects, or taken by a suitable photographer using only natural and available lighting and real life settings.
No AI. AI generated content is highly derivative, prone to errors, and could get you in trouble. It must not be used on any serious website to create content.
Simplicity in Design. Layouts must be clean and simple, with a focus on readability and user experience. Decorative elements that fail to enhance content comprehension are not permitted.
Environmental Care. A website should be as efficient and fast as possible, minimising the economic impact of running it. Where real life products are created, they should be on recycled paper using biodegradable inks.
No Sacred Cows. There are no firms, people, suppliers or institutions who cannot be investigated or criticised in the event that they behave badly or produce poor work.
Transparent Authorship. All articles and images must be clearly credited. Ghost-writing and anonymous contributions are forbidden.
No Advertisements. The website must be free of advertisements. Revenue should be generated through subscriptions, donations and grants.
Timelessness. Content should focus on timeless principles of the website’s subject matter, avoiding trendy or ephemeral topics.
Interactive and Inclusive. The website should encourage reader interaction through letters, feedback, and community events, fostering an inclusive community.
The story behind this
AI is making it much easier to produce content on the web. I could literally ask it to write this article and it’d do a half decent job of it. It might, of course, be a somewhat plagiarised equivalent, because of the way large language models work, but it would be an article.
They’re amazing. They’re also inauthentic and only relate to the past.
Search engines are getting in on this too – taking the content of websites and digesting it in order to provide what are AI generated responses, rather than sending you to the right websites:
Of course, Google created the problem, and is now offering a solution to the problem it created. How so? Let’s take a look at recipe websites. You’ve got a vegan visitor and you want a recipe for, say, homemade vegan sausages that everyone can enjoy. You’ve never made them before, so you search Google.
And you get not a personal blogger who’s landed on such a great recipe they wanted to share it, but a professional and well made site which isn’t a pleasure to use: https://elavegan.com/vegan-sausage-recipe/
If you don’t run an adblocker, the site is clearly set up to serve ads. Which in many ways, is fair enough – they need to make money, and Google provided this easy monetisation channel. By the time you get to the recipe itself you will see, get this, around twenty-two advertisements! And these sometimes rotate, so it could easily be more and rarely fewer. Meanwhile, I can hear the fan on my laptop starting to spool up as it handles rendering the video advertisements on a moving page.
And people are so, so tired of this. The reason they love TikTok and a lot of the newer social channels that come along is because, frankly, it often feels more authentic. It feels like real people giving advice and having opinions. It’s nice, honestly, although of course TikTok needs to make money too, so they do their thing. At least it’s easy to flick past their ads. People are getting their links inside WhatsApp groups. Emails are, incredibly, becoming a channel once more.
So to help people navigate past the advert dross, Google are, instead, going to serve up AI generated renderings. In fact, Bing are ahead of the curve here. Take a look at this block that you get on a Bing search for vegan sausage recipes:
They’re taking away the need to visit a site at all! Which is, I think, terrifying for sites that have entirely generated their revenue through an overdose of display ads.
People have been finding old school search terms less useful and, instead, have been appending site names in order to help get them to more useful content. In fact, it is quite normal to see search terms appended with Reddit, or, in the case of recipes, “BBC” is quite a common suffix. Why? Because we know the purpose of these sites is less to sell a lot of adverts, and more to inform.
People crave authenticity
Designing to hold a reader on your website in order to maximise the value of the reader’s time to advertisers is grating. We all know website publishers have to make money. We all know that it’s hard to do so. Which is why I find myself now subscribing not to the big local newspaper, but to a small, independent one that sometimes scrimps on presentation, but does get deep down into real stories. It doesn’t tell me which tube dress is suddenly selling well in Primark, however.
I don’t think people would even mind some promotional work, but again, only if it’s honest and blended with other genuine, non paid content, just so long as it’s well advertised that it is indeed a paid piece.
The craving for authenticity isn’t just a problem for websites. It’s created new trends in videos, podcasts and reels. This video is a great deep dive into this phenomenon on YouTube:
Of course, to get to where he is, Tom Nicholas above has had to distribute his videos on the YouTube walled garden. Which is favoured by Google’s search engine. Google owns YouTube.
Google in effect has an enormous effect on how the web works, and even how it is designed. But true success now can’t depend on just getting search engine or social media generated traffic. It has to be by being a destination of usefulness for your readers. One so useful, that they feel they’re part of something. Connected to it. Tuned in together.
Which has caused me a lot of navel gazing, and I decided I needed a fundamental set of principles for websites that I think can be the starting point for what is good… And at one point I started to think of Dogme 95 and how influential it was to filmmaking, even if most people haven’t heard of it.
It’s worth noting that Dogme 95 didn’t become the way to make films. Many made in the style were not even particularly successful or critically acclaimed. In large part, because it’s an extreme position that is generally unsustainable. It’s an idea that can season the whole, not the One True Way. So if you head back to the top of this post, you’ll see Web Dogma 24 and that I’m using the same rationale.
But reality will intervene
I don’t think it’s possible to run anything with that sort of purity. Life and the need to make a living means that compromises will have to be sought. But it offers an idea of what’s possible.
What do you think? What would you add or take away? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I hope you haven’t missed the big AI revolution going on right now? No? Yes? YES? You have no idea about it? Where do you live? On Mars? Ah OK, you were kidding. AI is being talked about everywhere, new devices like the Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit R1 are very much about it, and everyone involved is scrabbling around like mad for venture capital to fund their incredible ideas.
Having access to these language models is immense, right? We can sit down, whip out our AI, and enjoy a better than life experience. We can ask it questions and often it can come up with remarkably lucid explains. It seems intelligent. Here’s a conversation I’ve just had with ChatGPT’s latest model, after I asked it to settle into a British conversational style:
Me: The weather’s nice isn’t it? ChatGPT: Oh, absolutely! It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? Perfect for a stroll in the park or perhaps a spot of tea in the garden. How are you planning to enjoy the fine weather? Me: I have to work, sadly. In fact I’m working right now. ChatGPT: Ah, that’s a bit of a shame, isn’t it? But needs must, as they say. Hopefully, you can steal a few moments to enjoy the sunshine, even if it’s just a quick breather by the window. Anything I can help you with to make your workday a tad brighter? Me: Give me a joke to help me get over my vague sense of imposter syndrome! ChatGPT: Of course! Here’s a bit of light-hearted humour for you:
Why did the scarecrow win an award?
Because he was outstanding in his field!
Hopefully, that brought a smile to your face. Remember, everyone feels like an imposter at times, but you’re doing brilliantly!
It’s a decent conversation, although no British friend I know would chat like that. They’d be less polite and more vaguely abusive, to be honest. But it does seem intelligent. Then I can ask it a tricky question:
Me: I’m struggling with a maths question. I have a formula for a parabola, and I need a graph and the location of the y intercept: f(x)=3x²+7
ChatGPT:
No worries, I’m happy to help with that. Let’s break it down.
The given function is:
f(x)=3x²+7
To find the y-intercept, we need to determine the value of the function when =0x=0. Plugging =0x=0 into the equation:
(0)=3(0)²+7=7
So, the y-intercept is at (0,7).
Now, let’s plot the graph of the function and visualize it. I’ll create a graph for you.
Here you go! The graph of f(x)=3x²+7 shows a parabola opening upwards. The y-intercept, marked in red, is at the point (0,7). I hope this clears things up for you!
That’s so freaking clever!
Except… except… it’s not actually clever.
Let’s try asking it a question you can use on a seven year old child who would almost universally get the answer right:
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives who was going to St Ives. How many people are going to St Ives?
I think you’ll agree that this riddle is pretty simple. I’m going to St Ives, the man is going to St Ives, and the seven wives are going to St Ives. Look at this madness I got back:
The riddle goes as follows:
“As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits.”
The key detail in the riddle is the first line: “As I was going to St. Ives.” The person telling the story is the one going to St. Ives. The man with the seven wives and all the others are simply met on the way; the riddle doesn’t specify their destination.
Therefore, only the narrator is confirmed to be going to St. Ives. The answer is:
1 person (the narrator) is going to St. Ives.
And that reveals the weakness of large language models. There’s no inherent cleverness. What it does is to look for what it thinks you’re talking about then infer an answer using a combination of techniques, and it then picks what the most likely question is then creates a response based on what it thinks is correct. If the problem is very well known, it can do some really quite incredible things. But if the problem given to it is a novel variation of an old problem it will absolutely fall apart.
Life is full of novel problems. Don’t be misled by the clever bullshit attitude of a large language model, but at the same time, if you know its limitations, it can be a wonderful tool. Use it wisely and carefully, or there’s a risk it’ll make a fool of you. And yes, the post image at the top is, indeed, AI generated – because I have bugger all budget and this is a personal blog. Bite me!
In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.
Both sides have got themselves worked up about issues that I’m pretty sure most transgender people would prefer to be handled with a little less shouting and little more thought. I have my own opinions, but that’s not for me to share here. What I’m looking at is how design can make the situation better, by picking on one such contentious issue: public bathrooms.
We’ve all got to admit that the concept of women only spaces wasn’t dreamt up at a lovely cocktail party. They often serve as a refuge from the stormy reality of life that many women face. The abused, the desperate, the traumatised who’ve experienced the worst aspects of a male dominated society are, quite rightly, entitled to seek out a safe space away from men.
Meanwhile, imagine you’re a transgender woman and are about to transition. You’ve got to live life as a woman for at least a year or two before anything permanent happens. It’s an obvious safety precaution so decisions aren’t made in haste.
So out you go on your first night in full femme mode. Nature calls, and you head to the bathrooms. You aim for the ladies, because, well, that’s where you belong now. But for some women in there you might be as welcome as a fox in a chicken coop.
Head into the men’s toilets and many trans women are as vulnerable to the nasty side of men as the traumatised women who want their safe spaces. You don’t feel you belong there.
All you want to do is check your lipstick and adjust the heels.
And there’s a twist here. I’ve met some women who are burly and could beat the majority of men in arm wrestling. They may look pretty masculine too. They’re now sometimes finding themselves being shouted at for heading into the ladies’ bathroom!
About designing loo layouts. The Brits generally build them with two doors going in, and stalls that are pretty private or, as is increasingly common, the toilets are individual spaces with floor to ceiling walls.
They love a gap! You could pass a handbag through that! Nobody wants to make eye contact with someone taking a dump.
So how about work is done to make sure bathrooms accommodate everyone? Picture a row of stalls which are just little rooms with proper walls. Private, no tinkling sounds being shared. Just a nice, lockable door for each person with a sign saying “Thinking Room”.
We can have scents and nice music for everyone, and ladies can compliment the prospective ladies for their make-up skills. Remember – the more people there are around the more likely they are to hear a shout for help. Predators hide in shadows, after all.
Just a thought. Ultimately then, this isn’t a potty problem. It’s a design problem. And that means we can design our way out of this mess, and make sure everyone is happy. Or are we going to just keep arguing until we’re just too old to care what’s going on in the next door toilet cubicle?
Comments. Please. Just remember the one rule on my site. Be kind.
Could VW really be in trouble, if they’re cancelling a factory and pushing back a car launch? I don’t think so, but they’re not entirely in the clear…
I’ve seen people commenting in various EV forums and social media on VW Could Delay Trinity EV Until 2030 And Scrap €2 Billion German Factory | Carscoops and concluding that VW are in big trouble and failing in the market. In reality I think it’s hard from the outside to draw any conclusions. VW is a master of building factories and cars. We know that. They provide variety and interest to a huge number of market segments.
The problem they have isn’t really an ICE/EV problem. It’s not a factory problem. It’s not a mechanical engineering problem. It’s the other ICE – in-car entertainment. They don’t have a software culture. No matter how much of a twonk you think Musk is, you might have noticed his contentious statements are never about software. Nobody says “Gosh, his opinions on software are so controversial.” And that’s because he’s a software guy. Tesla’s board is stuffed with software guys. His main weakness is that he thinks more can be solved with software than is always realistic – AI is still as dumb as a worm and easily tricked. So the newer vision only Tesla’s are known for being a bit, well, not great at stuff like self parking whereas the older hardware based ones do quite well. I’ve embedded the video below just to help:
Back to VW. They really need to get their head around the car’s user focussed software, build the right team, and nurture it well. That’s going to take a little while.
As for scrapping a new factory – that just makes sense – we’re moving to a world where people keep their cars for longer and there’s a larger gross margin per car. You can’t grow your market through price competition any more, VW as a group sell cars in one form or other in literally every geographical market too. They have to drive other value.
The transition to EVs *is* dangerous for older makers, but the choices to buyers are still sparse. Tesla make some of the most efficient electric cars out there, with some delightful software, but the cars aren’t to everyone’s tastes and cover a fairly tightly defined sector. I don’t like the idea I’m tied to apps from their store – why not use Android Auto or Apple Carplay as well?
So the legacy car makers know how to make cars. That’s absolutely not the problem. The “hours to produce a car” bit is spurious – you absolutely can’t compare two makers with that statistic. It’s often quoted, but I’ve seen wildly differing values from the same car maker’s different plants and it’s such a complex subject that isolating a single variable is likely to be misleading. Profitability over capital employed is the only real meaningful measure in any business, and even that can be hard to isolate if the business is deep into self-investment.
My own EV purchase considerations
I’m in the market for a new EV next year. I really like the mechanical side of the VW Group EV range, but the software puts me off. Some of their brands implement it a little better than others, but it’s still a problem, and I can’t afford a Porsche or Audi EV.
Honda aren’t giving me something to progress to from the little e, which has amazing styling and is a lovely thing to drive and own, but the limited utility means it sits firmly as a second car… but then nobody else does such an interesting small EV, and the e-Up is gone if I wanted to go for just cheap utility. In fact
Only a few car makers sell smaller EVs with some sense of personality, decent RWD chassis, nice interiors. I don’t yet feel ready for a road-trip car to be electric only either. As a family it can work out more economical and maybe even greener to take a fully loaded and efficient diesel car on holiday than to fly. Although, yes, you can stop and relax with your car whilst recharging it, the stops come every 200 miles, and if you’re driving through the night, sitting in a car park with nothing to do for 40 minutes to get another 200 miles in just doesn’t appeal. In reality, I think Hyundai’s group, with Kia and Genesis, seem to be leading the pack with reasonably affordable EVs on 800 volt systems, decent in-car software, and good options for different types of buyers. I could see myself in a Kia EV6 or a Hyundai Ioniq, but they’re also still quite big, and I feel like we’ll have too much functional overlap between something like that and the old Volvo, with the result that the Volvo only really gets pulled out when we need two cars – something increasingly rare with more home working and both kids about to be in high school. At that point, we may even feel it appropriate to go down to one useful car in the household again, with the Lotus Elise providing last measure status for those rare days when we need to transport six or seven people.
What do you think?
P.S. This is a little experiment. I realised I was tapping out a huge comment in a Facebook group and thought that with just a small amount of extra work I could put the content on my blog instead of giving it away for free, to barely ever be read by anyone else, in a billionaire’s walled garden. I opine on loads of stuff. A lot of it is just that. Opinions. But whole magazines are sold on the back of the opinions of thirty writers: so I may as well put mine out there on the open web.
At 18 I was skint and got made homeless. It took a lot of graft, patience and mistakes to get out of that and into a moderate middle class lifestyle. Here’s how.
When I was 18 I found myself in a weird situation. October 1987. I’d just started my first job, straight from 6th form, and was happy with that. My favourite song the year before had been The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. I was optimistic and hopefull. I’d done my A levels finally surrounded by people who actually cared about education. I was no star pupil at 6th form, except at computers, but computers were the big thing so I had confidence.
All good then. I mean it wasn’t perfect, but I just had a fresh optimism. I’d lived with my grandmother since I was about 12 (my childhood memories are imperfect and I have few witnesses to refer to. I’d been casually fostered for a number of years prior, was fed up, and had been dumped with her. She was one of the few consistent things in my life and could see I was breaking in front of her. So I in effect ‘divorced’ my father and she took custody of me. She lived in a mobile home type caravan at the time. She was poor, but stability mattered more to me. I got my education. The future felt very bright.
I got through the various stages of ICI (then one of the largest chemical firms around) to get a job in their computer centre as a trainee printer operator, with the idea being to climb into a programming job. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, my grandmother had been in a lot of pain and, within a day of being admitted to hospital (this is another story to tell) where we discovered she had terminal cancer. Very terminal. She had less than a week left.
I was so very alone. My father turned up, signed over to me to handle everything, then disappeared to South America, never to be seen again. In 1986, my mother who I had some mild relationship with, had taken her family to Spain and, for some reason, me being told and having a goodbye seemed to be forgotten… so I’d accepted they weren’t a factor in my life. That was it. Me, alone, in the world.
Things got quite bad, quite quickly. Here’s what I learned, what I did wrong, and what I think I did right.
The world is not your friend
When you grow up, generally there are adults who look after your interests and needs, until you’re old enough to do it for yourself. But often you feel this interconnectedness with everything being generally good. Often in adulthood we discover things can be quite different – especially if we have some failures. I think learning that the world isn’t your friend is important. I discovered, for example, that if you have no cash, you can’t just take over a substantial asset (a house, in this case) and expect to not pay off debts that your grandmother had. The answer should be simple – I could have borrowed from another bank or building society to buy the house off my grandmother’s estate. Except her bank refused unless my grandmother’s estate was up to date on the mortgage payments. And because my grandmother’s estate had debts and no income, it couldn’t make the mortgage payments, and I was advised that if I paid the mortgage it would potentially make me liable for everything. When you’re an eighteen year old that leaves you in a bind.
The bank took the house, and I was made homeless, briefly (I kept a spare key and let myself in at night to sleep on the floor!), and I quickly organised myself and bought a tiny flat. Good job, because the council wouldn’t help me, the bank wouldn’t help, renting privately was almost impossible for me. Thank heavens I was organised and found the right combination of people.
Finance is risky and can be expensive
Because I was young with little credit history, all finance was risky. I figured that with my job and my flat I could now live a little and went stupid, bought myself a small engined sports car – a Scimitar SS1 1300 if you’re a car geek – a tumble dryer and washing machine all on credit, and thought everything was great. But I had nobody around to advise me I was being dumb, remember? No parents, and even most of my friends had gone off to university.
What happened was that when something went wrong with the car, it really stretched my finances to fix it. Then it got stolen and damaged, and I either repaired it myself or my insurance would get really expensive. Every little bad thing that came up, made life harder. But I discovered that I couldn’t just sell the car and forget about the finance – the interest and the way they did it meant that I’d need the value of the car plus another £1k to pay it off. I was trapped.
Toxic parents usually remain toxic parents
My father was still in touch with me, but for some reason thought I had plenty of money. So when he got into financial trouble in South America, he started giving me hard luck stories about how dangerous things were, that he was going blind (or a bit long sighted as we call it now), and he needed £1.5k. Or £3.5k in today’s money. I was 19, skint, and instead he banged on about how I must have had money from my grandmother’s death and my good job. “Yeah, Dad, but you’re not here and you have no idea.”
However, guilt led me to do my best. I sent him all my spare cash for a couple of months, before finally arranging a loan. I used some of it to consolidate my credit card debts, and two thirds went to him. I sent him, if I remember correctly, about £800 in total. He wrote to say he was struggling and needed more and he was in a dangerous situation I didn’t understand.
So I did what I felt was the right thing – I spoke to the Foreign Office, and eventually secured a facility for him to be able to catch a flight home, where he’d at least get benefits.
I called him, told him the good news, he was furious. And that was the last time I spoke to him. Ultimately, narcissistic, self-centred and selfish people rarely understand that other people have struggles. They just don’t get it. And they stay that way.
Stability matters
One thing I did right was to stay at ICI for many years. I kept that job. My head wasn’t in the best place, so I wasn’t the best employee, but I was useful and smart enough to keep it as well, and had some reasonable progression. For a while I’d been renting rooms after financially over-extending when I lived in my flat, and that job gave me the much needed anchor to my life. Eventually I bought a house with my then girlfriend. That stability then allowed me to think about taking a risk again… But it also established a nice final salary pension plan that will still be useful even 40 years after leaving!
I went contracting
Sometimes, income really matters. I don’t think contracting is for everyone. I hated some aspects of it, and it ruined my relationship at the time because I was away from home so much. But it really helped bring in money, which then really helps you to just establish a buffer of more than a month or two of money. Suddenly I felt like I had an actual surplus and proper savings. I got rid of the rust wreck of a Peugeot and bought a three year old Rover. I started to dress more smartly. I had nearly ten years of this solid and high income and it probably made the biggest difference of all to me.
At the end of my ten years, inflation and low interest rates made my mortgage look tiny, I had asset wealth in the house, shares, and low outgoings. When you’re in that situation, as many middle classes get born into, you can start to take risks. I decided to set up a proper web development business, now called Interconnect.
I could have lost a lot with Interconnect, and we came close to giving up. It didn’t ever give me more income than contracting – not even close. But it does give me another source of stability. And that, dear readers, is worth more than you might think.
I learned about how money and how the stock market works
There’s one book I read early one which just opened my eyes to the world of money. I’ve bought it several times, lent it to people, forgot who I leant it to and lost it! Doesn’t matter, it’s worth it. Its called How The Stock Market Really Works and it goes way beyond stocks, shares, and bonds, but into planning, risks, retirement and so on. In reading it, several times, I established a baseline of understanding that stopped me falling for scams, stopped me making bad investments, and generally helped me ensure I could make best use of the spare money I had.
I no longer pushed my finances hard
Now I understood money better, I knew that, for example, if you have assets of £100k and a debt you can’t pay of £50k, you’re in a really really bad situation. If you have assets of £10k, a debt of £100k and some short term cash flow issues, then you’re in a strong position to start negotiating. Why? Because if you have no assets and a big debt, the bank can’t recoup anything much if they send in the bailiffs. Once their costs are accounted for, they lose everything. So they’re more willing to negotiate. If you have loads of assets, you’re stuffed. That was, in effect, what the bank did to take my grandmother’s home from me when I was younger. They had no motivation to negotiate with me.
So you either max out your finances, Donald Trump style, or you very carefully segregate them. Because I value stability and security above all else, I segregate them.
I learned to think like an accountant
After ICI, I spent a lot of time working in corporate finance departments on their software.
Here’s a thought experiment. You have £10,000. You go out and buy a car for £9,000. How much are you worth? The naïve answer is £1,000. You see yourself as £9,000 worse off. But if your car helps you earn more money by opening up a job you otherwise couldn’t reach where you’ll earn £5,000 a year more, then you have two things happening:
First, your balance remains at £10k, because you have a £9k car and £1k of cash.
Secondly, you have a future benefit over, say, the five years you expect to have the car, of £25k. So over the five year period, assuming the car becomes worthless, you’ll end with £26k on the balance sheet. Or you use that £26k to put into a mortgage which, again, is generally a good move because it’s a limit liability loan secured on property which, in most economies, is a pretty safe bet.
But all accountants will say that cashflow is of utmost importance. You may have a pile of assets, but if you can’t service your responsibilities then you become insolvent – you can’t always easily sell assets without a big loss. So always think about cashflow – it’s best to be gently increasing your cash position as your wealth grows.
I learned to let go of status plays
When I was young I caused myself trouble by buying that sports car. It wasn’t, in itself, a bad buy on the surface – sports cars depreciate more slowly, the insurance on this one was the same as a similar powered Ford Escort, and it didn’t use any more fuel. And it’s not like a 19 year old needs to carry a family. Two seats was fine. Reliability wasn’t great either. But where it went wrong is that my boss therefore believed he paid me too much! My older superiors didn’t like that I had, on the surface of it, a fancier car than they did.
Of course, I was financed to the hilt, and they weren’t. They didn’t know that. They just assumed I had more money than I let on to.
Had I been in a humbler car, they’d have had no idea of my financial status.
It’s better to let people assume you’re a bit skint, and focus on reliability plays in order to establish your career. Took me into my thirties to work that one out.
Same with clothes. Stick to cheap clothes until buying them is easy. If you do what young me did and buy everything on credit at Top Man and Burton’s (yeah I know) then you’re setting yourself up for bad decisions and bad outcomes.
Adaptable accent and open attitudes
I’m actually quite Scouse yet a lot of people I meet and work with down South just think generic, educated Northerner with a light accent. The reality is I just adapt my accent to suit the situation. This means I don’t terrify upper middle class people, whilst I can still sit and have a chippy lunch with garage mechanics. Non-threatening to everyone, basically. I accept that most people know stuff I don’t, that they believe they’re trying their hardest (they may not be trying optimally, or coping badly, but I accept their belief), and generally try to learn from the people I meet.
Meet lots of people from different backgrounds
The more people you meet, the more lives you get to understand, the more mistakes you can avoid and the more opportunities can come up. Local politics can teach you how councils and Westminster works. Bankers can tell you how finance works. Medics can give you really good reasons why you shouldn’t smoke, drink, or eat too much sugar! Bin men can teach you that you can make a good living even if you’re not well educated (or are – there are some very well educated bin men and women out there). Truckers can tell you how their industry works.
Just avoid the cynical and the put upon – there’s little useful information there.
One good thing with the internet today is that there’s so much sharing online that you can virtually meet almost anybody, from African villagers to corporate board members. Just be kind and open and remember that they’re all humans, every one of them.
What about you?
None of the above is unique to me, or in any way makes me special. I just think they’re what helped me. Feel free to comment on what you’ve experienced. Everyone lives different lives and found different ways out of poverty traps. And of course, some people find themselves ground down by a system that can be unfriendly and downright hostile at times which means they can never escape, no matter how hard they work.
About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was a two year project and he’d got £100k funding. I asked if it was just him… and no, he had a colleague. So £100k, for two people, for two years? £100k didn’t sound a lot… £25k/yr each, basically. Or what you can earn in a much simpler tech support role. I decided not to say anything and leave the poor guy in peace, although this sort of work seemed a lot like gambling to me.
Today, things are different although there’s still a sniff of gamble about it overall. If you’re a developer it’s relatively easy to find a highly capitalised employer that’s positively dripping with money who will pay you £60k-£90k a year. Potentially quite a bit more. This reminds me of the late nineties dotcom boom. In 1997 I myself quit my safe but somewhat dull job at a multinational to become a freelancer, doubling my income almost immediately, and quadrupling it another year later. The new work was, in some ways, more interesting. It was also a lot more stressful, bad for my health, and definitely wasn’t the most exciting coding work. But it paid. I honestly don’t blame developers who decide to do what I did 25 years ago. It set me up. I think it was also a large part of why I had a heart attack in 2019… living out of hotels for a decade wasn’t healthy, and cheese became far too much a food staple for me as a vegetarian. However, the money was very good and it helped set me up. When you’re poor, it’s very hard to catch up and a good income was necessary for a while.
I bring this up because today I’m not ‘just a developer’ but actually run a web development company that specialises in websites and custom software for clients. And things are happening today that are reminiscent of the dotcom boom on the late nineties. 25 years have passed, but people don’t really change nearly as much as you may think.
The dotcom & Millennium Bug era
The late nineties were a period of post-recession growth and capital release. Banks had been deregulated, money was being created in the way it can be, and we were riding high on increasing productivity. Life felt good. And when money is created it can be invested.
There’s only one little problem in that. Sometimes, people get giddy and start splashing the money out too readily. The boom of the late nineties and early noughties, and the deregulation that encouraged it around the world, eventually led to the financial crisis of 2008. I’m a bit of a cautious soul, so even though I had plenty of income, I resisted borrowing too much to get a bigger house. In some ways I was foolish, because I could now be living mortgage free in the house I have now. But I figured that not having a big mortgage would afford me some other freedoms and I could use my money elsewhere. Mostly I just invested my money in solid companies. Friends, however, were telling me to invest in dotcoms. But I looked at the fundamentals. One example was a firm called Vocalis. They did, basically, telephone voice services software. Small team, and had some crazy valuation that was effectively equivalent of £20m per member of the staff. I rightly reckoned that was mad. My friend went ahead and pumped money in, and I mocked him. For a while I looked a fool. The value of the shares rose and rose.
Right now, there are loads of speculation bubbles. At the café at work I was trying to explain Bitcoin’s fundamental problems to our barista, when our receptionist came over excitedly wanting to know more. Both seemed interested in getting involved. That means the crash is likely imminent. They’re both lovely people, but in the economic chain, they’re nowhere near the top, which means that the speculation bubble is reaching it’s limits.
“If shoe shine boys are giving stock tips, then it’s time to get out of the market.” – Joe Kennedy, 1929 as the stock market was about to crash and lead to the Great Depression
So the dotcom boom and Millennium Bug led to a boom in demand for developers. New software was being created to replace supposedly outdated software that couldn’t be fixed (narrator: “It could”) and salaries were rocketing. I took advantage of that boom. I also knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. My day rate as a PeopleSoft developer went from £200 a day in 1997 to £600 in 2002. It could have been higher. Cisco did an amazing job of raising funds in that era and I remember they kept offering me more and more to go to work for them in the Netherlands. But I didn’t really want to go to work there. I never really chased the money, so that’s about where I peaked. But I remember people with the right skills, experience and self confidence were on as much as £1k a day. That’s getting towards £2k a day at today’s prices. Some skills seen as super hard and rare could command double that. Most people didn’t, of course, make nearly that much, and some people preferred a job with reasonable hours and close to their families – a very valid and decent decision. But I was single with no ties.
There are a lot more developers around today – good incomes have brought many people into the trade. I meet people who called me a nerd in the eighties and now they’re working in IT. It’s a bit weird.
Today’s situation
Now it’s a bit weird. Rates still aren’t at the dotcom level, once adjusted for inflation, but they’re close. You can do very well in tech. But in my little firm we pay typically around £40k for a developer, plus various benefits, kit, resources etc, meaning you’d need to make around £70k as a freelancer to equal it. At least the way I calculate things and always did. I nearly swapped my £600 a day for £60k a year and kind of regret not doing that.
But why have the rates risen? Well, there are a few hot areas, and they can be summarised as AI, analytics, mass market apps, and blockchain. I’ll discuss each briefly:
AI
This is a hot one – the idea we can replace rooms full of people doing dull and not very high value work (from the perspective of the company) such as service desks with AI bots is very attractive. It won’t work though. Most “supposedly AI” bots are just following decision trees and the only bit of AI is in parsing the meaning out of a sentence in a very tightly defined context. AI is useful today for categorisation problems – e.g. looking at a picture and deciding “this is a cat” or “this is a threatening comment”. It’s not brilliant at the job, but I like that an AI can work out which pictures are of my Mum, for example, even if it misses about a third of them… it still makes my life easier. A bit. But what an AI can’t do is right a decent blog post. Sorry, it can’t. They’re awful at it. There’s loads of AI generated content out there and it feels obviously fake. The main job of these AI generated blog posts is to trick other AIs (Google, Bing etc) into categorising a website as useful. And because AI’s make toddlers look worldly wise, they can be easily fooled… and that means you can’t trust them with anything of real importance. Like your business decisions.
But, it’s a hot keyword, and naive venture capitalists like the idea. So in comes the money.
Analytics
Tracking and stalking customers across the internet is very attractive for advertisers believing that doing so makes them seem more interesting to consumers. I’m not convinced. People often find it creepy. They feel like they’re constantly stalked. They visit the website of, say, a printer supplier and they receive ads for a month for printers… but not only for that supplier, but for other printers because the tracking provider is cheerfully using your data as a supplier against you and selling that information to your rivals! I think advertisers are starting to cotton on, but are unsure of what to do… but I know there’s a lot more direct selling of adverts between publishers and advertisers than there used to be.
But, the siren call of analytics is strong, and people love a nice chart on which to justify a decision, so the more nice charts your system can create, the more people will pay to use it and try to gain an advantage over competitors. And advertising is huge, so in pumps the money. For now.
Mass market apps
Can you build the next Facebook, Instagram, or Slack? What’s the potential for an app that lets people read books from any publisher for a fixed monthly fee? How about an app that revolutionises food delivery? Interestingly, some apps are about replacing old and inefficient intermediaries and putting new ones in place. Uber is a nice way of hiring a minicab with flexible pricing that rewards drivers for being available at the right time. They don’t disintermediate, however. The customer is both the driver and the passenger. The new intermediary takes their share.
If you can replace old intermediaries you can make a lot of money. Imagine taking 0.5% of every single financial transaction, like Visa do? That’s a lot of money. Then you have intermediaries between the card firms, providers, and networks, such as Stripe… and then there are those replacing old ones, like Wise, for money transfers across borders.
What other things can be improved? Well, literally anything.
But most attempts to build these apps and the supporting infrastructure are doomed to never turn a profit.
Blockchain
Blockchain is a really interesting concept for a public ledger, using an interesting concept called proof of work to make it hard for any one person to try to dominate the network and win the consensus mechanism on new transactions. There are theoretical ideas out there to improve on this, but at the moment they remain just that and haven’t been proven.
And it’s a scam. Pure and simple. But it’s a hot topic. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and many others are actively speculated upon, as well as being used for the exchange of value – often in a hope to evade regulators. It appeals to the natural rebels amongst us because it’s outside of government control… and given that governments aren’t always a force for good, I get that.
Problem is, Blockchain breaks the rules of good software development… if you look at the big O notation for software, it has to follow certain rules or it will fail at some point and need to be re-engineered. Big O matters. I don’t have academic access to papers, and the internet is full of vested interests pretending that Blockchain scales just fine. I used to see the same in WordPress land, where people said the software scaled fine… but it doesn’t. In WordPress we get scale by putting a layer between WordPress and the internet to balance things out – the work the software itself does goes up in line with the number of people talking to WordPress. We can define that as O(n) so long as you know what you’re doing – that’s OK. We can live with that. But the consensus mechanism required for multi node agreement of transactions as required to track transactions will, by its nature, follow a curve that is likely to be somewhat greater than O(n^2) (each node does O(n) work in a linear fashion but the total work done on the network as each node is added therefore grows as O(n^2) plus a bit for network latency and overheads. Yet bitcoin transaction cost isn’t following that curve in spite of huge interest because, I reckon, most Bitcoin trades aren’t real.
Yes, that’s right. And what does that mean? It’s because wideboys, crooks and the overly-optimistic are involved. Given it is, by design, a pyramid scheme, it will have to fail at some point. But people are motivated to hide that, so there are Bitcoin tracker schemes, rather like gold purchase schemes, that never hold the asset in question. They will pump and pump values as hard as you like. And as long as there are new people coming in, like our receptionists wishes to, all is good.
And there are enormous amounts of money to be made. As in a goldrush, the people making real money are the shovel makers and traders. And they need developers. So for as long as there’s money to be made, coked up wide boys will be gurning their way through stressful meetings, fidgeting and anxious to cash in before it crashes out. You can earn a lot there. For a while.
OK, so thanks for the very long essay. What does it mean then?
Well, it means developers are really expensive right now. Small firms that do actual useful work and aren’t highly capitalised (like mine) can’t grow because we can’t suddenly charge our customers double for the work so that we can compete against these booms. It’s as if a very rich person has moved into your town and hired all the builders possible to create a huge mansion. They even approached builders working for firms and offered them double to come build that mansion. Soon builders are all swanning around town in Teslas and feeling pleased with themselves for being so cunning as to be in the building industry.
Same in software. Locally there’s a Tesla with a crypto referencing private number plate and a young, bearded and muscular techbro driving it. Fine, I’m not going to judge. He’s happy and making good money.
But if builders are all hired by the rich, the rest of us get priced out. Same in software. Small firms are going to find they can’t afford websites unless they just use some cheap web builder platform – it’ll give a less good solution, but it’ll do the job. Ish. And the firms that can afford will do that bit better. And better. And the gap will grow.
At my firm I’ve had to raise salaries, but we still struggle to clear a profit with the raised salaries. I’m fiscally conservative, so we’ve always had decent cash reserves. This lets us ride out the storm. From 1997 to 2002 dev rates went crazy. By 2005 they were back to normal again. We as a firm can’t handle eight years of this. But it’s not quite the same as back then – you can now hire developers globally and have them work remotely, if you really wish to, which can save some money and also help those countries out with extra foreign revenue. I, however, really like quality and good communications and I find that a geographically tight team works the best. It also makes it easier to hire new people into the trade. So, for now, I’m sitting tight. I won’t seek venture capital, or borrow. And if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll add AI to something that does basic statistical analysis, and blockchain to something with two computers in the network and hope someone out there fancies throwing us some money so we join the party. In the meantime, however, there’s still a healthy living to be made as a business doing useful things and avoiding the hot trends. I never set out to be rich, merely secure – I’ll ignore the rich mansions and do my own thing, creating good code for good people.
n.b. about the above – the above isn’t a paper. It’s a set of opinions designed to inform and illuminate about what’s happened. It relies on anecdotes. Don’t take it too seriously and don’t use it as the basis for what you want to do with software and investing in software. Or crypto. Do your own thing with the information you gather from multiple sources. Also remember that a lot of people say misleading things because it’s in their interests to do so, and that you shouldn’t trust a random blog or news source on the internet. Mine included.
A year ago, I was sitting, shorn of all body hair and waiting to go in for a five or six hour operation. I knew the next two weeks would be hell.
It’s hard to explain the odd calm that came over me as I sat there, waiting for the biggest operation of my life. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel miserable. It wasn’t as if I’d been feeling terrible. I’d just had one bad morning two and a half weeks earlier where I felt rough, then more rough, then really really rough, then fine again.
It’s weird. You see heart attacks on TV and you get this idea of a mad bad event where you keel over, clutching your heart in agony. But it doesn’t really work like that. The night before I’d felt tired. In fact, for a few years I’d been feeling like hard exercise was a challenge. It took me an age to warm up for a sport, and then I’d be fine. But the first half hour was a chore. And if I’d eaten I was basically useless for an hour or so.
I put it down to age and asthma.
I wish I hadn’t. But thankfully, I got lucky, in a way.
So driving along to work I felt this tightness in my chest, a tiredness, and a general malaise. So I decided, as was sensible, to pick up some vitamin tablets on the way to work. That’s what you do when you’re tired. Take vitamins, and get plenty of sleep. That was my plan. But by the time I got to the counter, I felt even worse and decided to mention the chest tightness to the chemist. She very clearly said I should go to the walk-in centre and get checked out. Instead, of course, I decided I’d get it checked out at some more convenient moment. But by the time I got back to the car I realised I was very out of breath just walking slowly.
I was having a heart attack. I didn’t know it yet. I looked at my Fitbit on my wrist and it said my heart was doing a nice old 70 bpm. Normal enough for me. So why was I puffed out? Must be an asthma thing. But I decided that I would go to the walk-in centre after all. I drove, feeling increasingly out of sorts, parked quite badly, and shuffled in to reception.
A few hours later, I was hugging my wife in A&E at the Royal Liverpool Hospital. I was worried, but not terrified. The doctor dealing with me said “I’m concerned but not worried.” That was a relief. The diagnosis was swinging between heart attack and pericarditis. I was atypical. Relatively young, slim, non-smoker, evidently in reasonable health, and moderately active for someone desk-bound at work.
But they couldn’t satisfy themselves. The A&E cardiologist said I had to go in for observation. They observed me.
Observation is boring
I was sent up to a cardiac observation ward where there were a range of folk from really quite ill and very elderly to me. By then I was feeling fine, quite chirpy, and generally comfortable. My biggest complaint was that the ward was a bit noisy, with an elderly chap who was rather confused causing the most noise. But hey, I was alive, the food was tolerable, I had my Kindle and my phone. I started to obsessively read about the heart, interpreting ECGs and so on. It’s all quite fascinating. And complex. I won’t pretend a lot of it stuck. But now I knew the possibilities.
The rather wonderful Mr Fisher, my cardiologist at the hospital there, did a series of echocardiograms. He felt that I was 95% likely to have pericarditis, in which case a few tablets and I’d be right as rain within a couple of weeks. However, there was a 5% chance of something else, so he’d scheduled me for an angiogram at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. If they found something, they would be able to stent me there and then and I’d be on the path to recovery.
95% chance of some tablets and everything was fine? OK, I cried a little and started looking forward to the family holiday we had planned.
Angiograms feel weird
An angiogram is where a fine catheter is inserted up to the heart, then a substance that can be detected using x-rays is released into the heart. This allows the surgeon to get a visualisation of the heart. It’s really interesting. And a little unpleasant, but definitely not much more unpleasant than a longer dental visit. It is surgery of a sort, and done carelessly it can do damage, so they always have someone on standby ready to whiz your chest open and do some emergency surgery.
Thankfully it’s usually very safe. It just feels odd, sitting there with this big machine whizzing around you imaging your heart, a massive TV screen to your left, and a very precise talking and unambiguous surgeon on your right instructing his team. I was anxious. He noticed that, and he said “just give him the valium. Now”. At least I think it was valium. In some ways my memory is a bit fuzzy.
Because then, as he finished everything up, he explained that a stent wouldn’t be possible and I would need what is called a coronary artery bypass graft. Four, maybe five. I… didn’t like that news. I felt shocked, scared, and unhappy. I’d gone from probably just an annoying health scare to looking towards having my chest sliced open and my heart operated on.
How do you even operate on a heart? It’s not supposed to stop. Right? Stopped heart = dead. No?
The wait
So then you just wait. And wait. They wouldn’t let me leave the hospital. I was at risk of another heart attack, the blockage was so bad, and they needed my system to flush out the drugs I’d been given when I was suspected of a heart attack. Risks, apparently. It took two and a half weeks from admission to operation. Long enough to think about my mortality, prepare some things, and do weird things like have a company meeting in the middle of the ward to ensure everyone knew what to do, and how.
It was an interesting time. People came and went. I got to know some, and would chat to them as they faced their fears. Most people were older, most were as surprised as I was. What really surprised me is that the image most of us have of people waiting for a bypass wasn’t really fulfilled. Sure, you had the smokers and the fatties. But loads of us were relatively active, relatively slim people. Not that athletic, mostly, but in a line-up of people most likely to need a bypass, you wouldn’t have picked most of us.
Sometimes I’d chat with people facing the operation the next morning and they were, usually, very anxious and worried. Some said things like “well, if I die… I won’t know it. It’s my family I worry for.” Others joked about having their last cup of tea. There’s some morbid humour, but it felt like a release too. A way of expressing anxiety with a laugh.
But the fact so many of us weren’t people who’d neglected ourselves felt terribly unfair. I struggled to deal with that.
Could’ves and should’ves
One chap, about ninety years old and looking in remarkable health, was in for a new valve. He said without it he’d likely not survive the year. With it he had a good chance of another five years. Yes, there was a risk, but as he said “I’ve had a good life.” I guess by the time you reach your nineties you come to a realisation that you can’t really have that long left, no matter what you do.
I talked about my own misgivings. I’d been a bit plump in my twenties, and I enjoyed partying and chocolates. I’d also been a hard working type with little time to do lots of exercise. He smiled and said something like “Life’s full of could’ves and should’ves, but they really don’t matter. You have to deal with the present and make things as best you can for the future. The past has gone. Leave it be.”
He was so right.
Getting closer
As the date loomed I thought I’d get increasingly anxious, but it just stopped. I wasn’t aware of being pumped with chill-pills. I’d seen more frail people go off to operation, and I’d chatted with them as they recovered. It was clearly hard going for them, but they lived and they seemed in good spirits. It’s a very hard operation to go through, I knew that, but now it felt tangible. I also had visits from colleagues, friends and family, so each day I had something to look forward to.
I did do some morbid things. I wrote a note to my family, should I die. I have no skeletons in the closet, but wanted to ensure they knew where to find financial stuff. I knew that they knew that I loved them. I kept the schmaltzy stuff to a minimum. Just crack on. What needs to happen has to happen.
The day itself
Now, this is where it gets more interesting, really. First thing you have to do is shave off all body hair below the neck. You’re handed a quality hair trimmer, with a sterile trimming blade, and pointed to the bathroom. Bzzzzzz! It takes for ever! And those things bite! Once on the balls. I wasn’t really sure where to stop, and I couldn’t really do my back on my own, so I left that, assuming they knew that too.
My operation, schedule for the afternoon, meant no food or drink. I read a bit, chatted with Romana, and refused to say goodbye. I was coming back. I knew it. I was confident. I’d already met the surgeon, and he seemed confident, precise, and concise. I like that in a person. We talked a little about technicalities and how the procedure would be done one me, what arteries they were harvesting and from where. I’d also spoken to another surgeon who I assumed assisted. He poked me and checked how various bits of me worked. I had a breath test. I had a lot of tests. But the day of the operation itself was quiet, really.
So I knew the operation was going to be a beating heart one, without using a heart-lung bypass machine. The attachment of the grafts would be done using some weird sucker machine (maybe called an Octopus) that would stabilise my slowed down heart, but at no point would it be stopped. Amazing. Each stitch carried out between the beats of my heart on arteries just 1.5mm wide.
And then it comes. The porters arrive, you give everyone else on the ward a wave, they say good luck, and you go. All the stuff you have is bagged up and taken away. You don’t need it the next day, and if there are emergencies stuff can get lost, so it’s better if a friend or partner handles it.
Then you wait in a pre-operation room with clouds painted on the ceiling. It made me think of going to heaven, but it was better than white tiles, I guess. That was when I chatted with Romana, ensured she knew I loved her, again, and waited. And then they come for you. You say goodbye, and off you go to theatre.
There, the anaesthetist I’d met before, hooked me up to a skullcap for monitoring my brain, and started preparing me with those injection thingies. A theatre nurse chatted and joked with me. Clearly there to keep my mind off things and keep me calm. And the moment comes. The anaesthetic is injected and you’re switched off.
It really is like that. You don’t have any awareness.
I’m awake and alive!
Actually, I remember a vague moment of having something pulled out of my throat, being conscious, and then out of it again. According to Romana when I first woke I became agitated, so they sedated me again for a while. When I next woke I had a nurse talking to me, giving a button to press with instructions about how it delivered morphine and would ease my pain. I couldn’t overdose with it apparently.
I tried.
I clicked that button again and again! Not to deliberately kill myself or anything, but because it was so nice! However, it’s rate limited. Keep pressing and it just beeps. When it kicks in you feel this warmth, and the pain goes. It’s a very nice drug and I’m not surprised people get addicted.
Romana came in. I was… not really in the best place. I was in pain. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I don’t even know if I have the order of events right.
Click. Oh, that lovely morphine button.
We chatted a little, but I remember very little. I had an oxygen mask, I was uncomfortable. I realised I had a urinary catheter in place, so I could stay still. She left, and I think I slept.
Intensive care is weird
One thing I never realised from films, is that intensive care really is just that. It’s actually, in this case, Post-Operative Critical Care. A nurse is stationed at the end of your bed and watches you constantly in the first night. At one point I remember being woken.
“David… can you breathe please?”
I took a gasp.
“You’re worrying me with your apnea,” she said.
I took a few breaths. I felt as OK as I could manage.
I could only see one other person on the ward, and he would wave at me and give me thumbs up. He couldn’t take his mask off. We waved and smiled at each other. I never saw him on the cardiac recovery ward, but he could have had different conditions – they do other kinds of surgery there beyond hearts.
The next day was a bit less painful. You get x-rayed in your bed, poked, prodded and checked. My blood pressure tended towards the low side, but you could see that at the 24hr point I was getting a lot less attention, all the pipes in my chest were out, stitches put in, and I was being made to sit for a while now and again. The second night I was definitely left to my own devices for a bit.
After a few checks the next morning, it was off to recovery.
The poo of doom
Each day you feel better. You need less and less supplemental oxygen. You start eating normally again.
I’d also heard that after a major operation, you get constipation. Had I known this I’d have been tempted to stop eating two days beforehand!
Because after a few days, you realise you have to poo. Thankfully this comes once you’re mobile again. But even walking fifteen metres to the bathroom is still tiring on the third day. The poo won’t wait. Nor should it. Because the longer it takes, the worse it’ll be.
Man, you’re giving birth.
Seriously. I sat in the bathroom. It started to come. Very very slowly. It. Was. Huge.
And a huge poo is going to be unpleasant, no matter how much time you give it. I feel for heroin addicts dealing with that. Their piles must be quite something.
I strained, but only a little as I’d been warned not to. So I had to tolerate this thing… half in, half out. Slowly but surely, little by little, it came. But it seemed to never end. I swear, I spent an hour in that bathroom, swearing, cursing, and wishing I’d never been born. And if I pushed too hard my heart rewarded me with a palpitation or to and I’d feel breathless.
The thought occurred to me… what if I died right now? A poo, half the way out of my arse and me, on the floor? That would be the last thing the world saw of me. Ew.
Deep breath.
Carry on. Wait. Be patient.
Eventually, it was over. I hobbled back to the bed, grabbed my oxygen mask, and had a nap. I’d deserved it.
Eventually you get to go home
Six days after being open and lying surrounded by dedicated specialists, I was going home. They test you to see if you’re capable of being trusted. You have to walk a certain distance, unaided, and climbing and descend a flight of stairs. A group of you go together for this test. We all did it. There was some sort of air of celebration around us. We were survivors! This thing wasn’t going to defeat us after all! Each day we were stronger!
The homecoming
Getting to leave the hospital is a joy. I’d been taking walks and stepping outside anyway. I was very keen to be moving. I felt frail and slow, but it allowed me to feel like life was going to improve.
But in spite of that, on discharge, you’re given your bag of drugs and wheeled to the door. Once you’re off in your car, you’re no longer their problem. Until then though, they have a process to follow and they’ll stick to it!
As you can see, I had the weird hospital socklets and stockings on. The compression stockings help reduce the chance of a blood clot forming in your legs, and reduce swelling. You can see from this photo that my left leg, from which a vein had been harvested, was definitely bigger than my right
And that’s it. The next phase is about getting back to full fitness, work and leading a full life. I surprised myself, and I’ll share more soon. I’m planning to discuss stress, work-life balance, family and a few more things. And this blog may even come back to life a little bit. I’m bored of helping Facebook and friends to keep their platforms populated with content that is then lost in a silo. Longer writing definitely has a place. Please feel free to join me here.
One of the funny things about children and their memories is just how fallible they are. Full of false memories and forgotten realities. I lived, for a while, somewhere on the outskirts of Douglas on the Isle of Man, when I was about nine years old.
The family I stayed in had a boy about a year older than me, and a girl about a year younger. The girl was nice, if disinterested by my presence. The boy was giddy at first, but horrible if I dared beat him at anything. Within a month or so every toy I’d brought with me (and they weren’t many) was damaged in some way by him and he wasn’t great at sharing… though he didn’t always get much choice in that matter.
His parents were, I suppose, alright. Why would they have looked after me if not? The father was a Scottish oil-rig worker and absent for what seemed like an age at a time. I didn’t mind. When he was home there seemed to be a lot of porridge to eat, and they weren’t good at making porridge. Then it became An Issue when I didn’t eat it all. I remember one day being left alone with what seemed like a monstrous bowl of porridge while everyone went out. I had to finish the porridge.
The good news is that with care and running water you can wash any amount of porridge down a sink. I don’t know why I didn’t think to use the toilet instead, but I didn’t. It would certainly have been a faster way of disposing of the sticky gloop.
And I have a massive collection of memories from the place. There was a bar of soap in the shape of a blue elephant. A bar of soap which, I must add, wasn’t to be used as soap. Simply not allowed. No idea why. But the days passed. I would go to school, come home for lunch of some thin, hideous soup – often oxtail, and go back. Sometimes I’d have a sandwich to take with me. I only remember soup and porridge from the Isle of Man. I’m sure I got nice meals too. I just have zero recollection.
The funny thing about informal fostering is how risky it is. I suppose that isn’t funny at all, really. But in doing it, your parent(s) could be unwittingly exposing you to dangers. So if I spoke to strangers in the park (and I would, being that kind of child) then my Dad would make it An Issue. But being dumped on an island while Dad goes off to marry his new 19yr old wife? Yeah, no problem!
But nothing bad happened, porridge aside. Nobody molested me. Nobody beat me. Nobody really shouted at me. All the people who put me up were better at the basics of childcare than Dad, no matter how bad their soup was. No matter that mostly they were much more boring in my eyes. Because Dad, although volatile and drunk, was funny and interesting. I didn’t want to live with him, but when he was sober and happy, he was great. But it’s how you act when things aren’t going well that tends to define you. And when things went badly he was a horror and couldn’t keep things together. Hence all the informal fostering when his latest escapade had gone wrong.
What was best about this informal fostering was the new experiences. In Horwich, the landlords of the Albert Arms put me up for quite a while. They handled feeding me, discipline and keeping me relatively on the straight and narrow. I was a little feral, I suppose, but that wasn’t so unusual in 1980. They even made delicious food like fish fingers. They even bought me my first bike, a used Raleigh Chopper. Good people. Took me on holiday too. To Garstang, admittedly, but it was still a holiday and I loved it.
Back in the Isle of Man there was one memory…an experience… that really sticks with me. There was a bakery in a nearby row of shops. I’d been told by some other children that they sold “staleys” some days. Confused, they explained a staley was just yesterday’s cakes and still tasted delicious! I was reluctant at first, but a friend, the guy with the mute mother, took me in and showed me the ropes.
To a nine year old with relatively little going on in life this was… heaven. The only feeling better was the same friend whose mum handed me unused toys and board games to take home. I loved her, a little. And I loved that bakery, because if I found 2p in the nearby phone box I had a treat to look forward to. I’d run in excitedly, ask to be shown the staleys, and choose the nicest I could afford.
But it annoys me that I don’t know the name of the school I went to. Or my friend with the mute mother. Or the name of the family I stayed with. Or their grandparents who often looked after me for long, tedious weekends. Nothing. Just gone. But I remember the bakery. And I remember the broken JPS Lotus model toy that got broken by my temporary roommate. The little shit.