Tag: support

The astonishing power of modern computing

Being very old (or at least, that’s how I feel being in tech!) means that after coming up to nearly forty years in technology, I’ve seen some changes.

My first computer at home, that I owned, that I could truly call my own, was a Dragon 32. It was a small, 32KB computer using the rather lovely little 6809 processor. This CPU ran at 2MHz and the system as a whole allowed me to learn a heck of a lot about computer science as a geeky teenager who was busy ignoring sports.

Continue reading “The astonishing power of modern computing”

Off-Cloud Backup for Heroku apps – a possible answer

The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost.

All the services offer backups, and the VMs are built from scripts and are essentially read only. So if something catastrophic happened to one of our databases, we can roll back a day and be OK. Except… let me explain my fears around data.

Trust issues with providers

In our very earliest years we used a VPS provider that used Plesk. Everything was solid and stable until one day, we got a report that a site had been hacked. Then another. It turned out that a vulnerability had exposed our sites to being hacked. And they were. This resulted in a big old clean up operation and restoration from backups. Except the daily backups we’d been paying for turned out to be weekly. So the backups we had were three days old. Ever since then, I’ve preferred to have a way of pulling backups separately to a server under my own control, unless the provider is Kumina, because I know the people so well that I’m 100% certain they’re as paranoid as I am and they’ve never ever let me down. But in the era of hustle culture bros who move fast and break things, you need a safety net.

Creeping corruption

My next fear is corruption you don’t notice immediately. I can well imagine that if all the meta data for the posts on a site before a certain date got wiped out, most people wouldn’t notice for ages. Imagine you’ve got a site with 200,000 posts, and various elements of the first 100,00 were damaged – the long tail matters to these sites and suddenly it’s all gone. Well, thank heavens for backups!

Except, of course, most cloud providers don’t provider substantial generational backups. Instead, they keep a few days or a week or so. And that’s your lot. If you need to go back months you’d better hope a developer in the company left a dump on their laptop somewhere – except of course that very very few developers keep dumps of production systems on their laptops – it’s bad practice and only tends to happen in exceptional circumstances and should be deleted soon after use.

How we fix it today

In the end, I asked one of my Linux oriented colleagues, Gianluigi, to create a service that would connect to Heroku’s API and then download every database, and sync every S3 bucket. It worked, with some limitations. More recently, because he’d left but remains a good friend, he helped me with a crash course in Linux sysadmin basics and I was able to extend and improve some bits. The system is a service written in PHP that does all the work. I then asked another colleague internally, Jack, to extend things to cover the PostgreSQL databases we also now used and to create a dashboard so that I could monitor the backups easily without resorting to logging into the backups servers.

The dashboard also doesn’t run on the backups servers. I needed to keep the backups as safe as possible – they’d be a great honeypot for a hacker, so they’re onioned away, and the backups service isn’t reachable from outside. Instead, it messages the dashboard with information about the backups taken. The dashboard also provides details on application and framework versions, for security monitoring and making sure updates have been applied appropriately, and it also sends me a daily summary email showing me storage space available and what was backed up in the previous 24 hours.

Here are a few screenshots of the system, with some censoring, but I hope you catch how it works from what you see.

To commercialise, or not?

And now to one of the reasons why I’ve decided to write about this. In the past, I created the first version of Search Replace DB – a quick script and algorithm I knocked up to parse a database and search and replace items in it. A fast, dangerous tool that I released as free open source code. Other people took it and commercialised it into successful products. We didn’t. And with the code being integrated into wp-cli and most devs would use that in preference (myself included!), except in those tricky situations where command line access wasn’t possible – mostly on cheap hosts. I think we were right to release the code, but where we failed was in realising the commercial possibilities. And that’s left me a little torn.

So now I’m torn – it’s not easy to set up services in Linux, but once you do, these things just run and run. It’s also not going to be the easiest thing to work with, so I anticipate support costs being quite high. It’s proper server level work. And I certainly don’t feel inclined to build a SaaS that acts as a conduit for people’s backups. It’s just too risky to have a central pool of lots and lots of backups, and people find them lurking on S3 buckets all the time. So I want to put this out to the community. Is this something you’d find useful? Let us know in the comments below. If we did release it, the code would be open source, but access to the latest versions would be restricted.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Recovering from a heart bypass. The physical and mental challenges.

Having a coronary artery bypass isn’t much fun and comes with challenges. Four years later I thought I’d describe some more of my experiences.

In my previous blog post, I described the adventure of having a heart attack and the five coronary artery bypass grafts that resulted. That procedure saved my life and actually restored my quality of life and fitness, within six months, to about the level of five years before. Today I’m as fit as I’ve ever been as an adult. So everything’s fine, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated.

Let’s not mess about here, having a heart attack is a traumatic and terrifying experience. So is having a major operation with a risk factor measured in percentages. My risk of death was given as a bit under 2%. Which doesn’t sound too bad, but if you were told one in fifty planes crashed fatally, you’d perhaps be rather scared about flying, right?

With an event like this you come face to face with your mortality. The evening before the operation, Romana brought our chidren to see me. I hugged them hard before they left, but I also wanted them to know I was OK. No tears. But in a way I felt oddly calm. I knew my chances were better with the operation than without. But without the operation I was almost certain to be alive at the end of the next day. You have a fear horizon.

That’s… hard. For me I went into a different mental state. I always imagine it’s that mindset that a meditating Buddhist monk might go into. I was calm and collected. I thoroughly expected, when I was told about the need for a bypass, that I’d be a gibbering mess on the day. Yet most people I met facing this situation seemed to be the same. We know our choices are limited and this is our best chance. So off we go. But let’s not pretend that it also doesn’t scare and scar you. We may seem brave. We may be brave. But what choice do we have?

The ascendance from survival

You can read about my waking up on that previous post, if you like. I’m mentioning it here because it marks the start of the new life. A life which is separated into the before, the after, and the now. The initial week you focus on moving, and managing the pain. There’s a lot of support available, the nurses are wonderful, people visit you. The odd one might nearly faint when they see nearly a metre of stitches.

You go home. My in-laws were staying and helped keep the house bustling during the day, which was honestly a help. We can’t communicate well as they don’t speak a lot of English, but they were always there with cups of tea and help with cooking – stuff that’s still difficult in the first few weeks home.

The operation then changes you. Different people react differently to these events, so I can only really talk about how I felt, and how I still feel at times. Please indulge me, or feel free to ignore me! I do this sort of writing because it’s good therapy for me. It gets those feelings out. Other people have other ways. I’ll try and break up the feelings into types, and describe how they pan out over the four years from the event. I’ve not sought out a diagnosis for any of the following, or treatment, so bear that in mind.

Anxiety

Let’s start with the big one and most common for survivors that I’ve dealt with. The fear. The feeling that every twinge is the start of the end, every bit of shortness of breath is the start of new heart trouble because maybe a graft is failing or new plaques are being deposited. Thing is, having had your sternum pulled apart hard, your pericardium sliced open, your arteries and veins harvested… well, it’s pretty natural you’re going to have all sorts of aches and pains and periods of struggle. You notice everything new. Can’t help it.

So we live in this state of increasingly intermittent rather than constant anxiety. It does get better too. I hold on to that. After a year the panicky moments are every couple of weeks. After four years, they’re every month or two. Still there though. I’d been doing some new exercises with weights. The next day my chest was aching and I had a moment where I thought it was a heart attack before I remembered I’d been working out my chest muscles.

Other things come in to play with anxiety also. I suffered a frozen shoulder following the operation, and that is painful and annoying. It eased off six months later, but you find yourself worrying that you’ll never have a pain free day again. And no, you can’t take ibuprofen if you’re on blood thinners despite it being the usual go-to drug for pain relief for things like this. Ah well.

And sometimes I’ll be puffed out because I have asthma, but I’m never sure… worsening asthma marked the decline of my heart health. Is this asthma or is it my heart? Take the inhalers and see if it improves and when it does you do feel this mental relief kicking in!

Depression

This is a very normal reaction to these events. Sometimes you can work through it, sometimes you can’t. I’m pretty certain I had a period of mild depression as a consequence. I still relapse and seem to have a bout of a week or two every now and again in this weird, empty space – I’m either too sensitive, or struggling to enjoy anything or do anything that is outside of routine. Then I’ll have a period where I’m super focussed and really get stuff done. When I’m in it I kind of resent hearing “let’s meet this week” or “there’s a birthday party for one of the boys’ friends this week and they’ve asked us to go along.” I always say yes. But I don’t want to. I want to be left alone. Half my current life I don’t want to talk to people, listen to them or do anything with them. But I do it, because it’s better for me than being alone, even if I prefer being alone. Mad eh?

I still sometimes like and need to be alone though. Last night it was relatively warm, Romana was studying a presentation she had to give, I’d done my chores, kids were in bed, and I curled up on the bench in the garden, with the cushions, and headphones on listening to some good music for an hour and not even glancing at my phone (which was now in do not disturb mode), and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in a while.

Anger & self pity

I’ve put these two together here. There’s that “woe is me!” feeling which feels like the other side of the coin which is “you’re so f*cking happy and healthy and yet you drink and smoke and don’t exercise and do everything wrong! Feck off!”

These aren’t helpful emotions. But they exist and they’re real. And need acknowledging. And this tendency to anger means that when people get under your skin you have to decide whether they’re actually a positive impact on your life or not. I had a friend who was perfectly lovely and supportive in many ways, but the 2019 general election was coming up. She was very Momentum in politics even if it doesn’t quite chime with her middle class lifestyle, but that’s fine. The problem, the big moment, came when I’d posted something on Facebook about the Lib Dems who I support. She described Jo Swinson as “that vile woman.” And I flipped out. Had a go at her, blocked her, and that was that. She wasn’t the only person I did that to either.

I don’t miss these people I cut out, really. They had toxic personalities to me at that moment in time, and you know what you don’t need when you’re recovering from a major life event? People who are toxic. To you. They might be perfectly lovely people overall. People don’t get into Momentum or the Lib Dems or even the Conservatives, generally, in order to make the world worse. Sometimes they do, but that’s not usually the intention for most people. But those people can be terribly toxic to you. And I’m still recovering, so I don’t have the capacity to cope with that substantial difference of opinion.

I’ve got this! syndrome

Here’s an interesting one, and there’s probably a proper psychological term for it. But I just describe it as “I’ve got this! syndrome.”

A belief that I can deal with all of this. That all I have to do is eat perfectly, exercise perfectly, behave perfectly, care for myself perfectly, take the medication perfectly, be a perfect husband, be a perfect boss, be a perfect dad, a perfect patient, and everything will be fine.

Which is, quite frankly, delusional. There are no perfect people. Myself included.

This knowledge, sadly, doesn’t seem to stop me. I go through phases where I decide I’m going to run faster and further than ever before. Then I realise that in doing that, I’m skipping quality time with the kids, not doing laundry or jobs around the house… or I go camping with the kids and feel that I ate badly and didn’t do my run for the weekend… or I switch to alcohol free beer and then realise that actually it’s still full of simple carbs… or I think sod it, have the chocolate, but now I have to run extra hard, only to find that the extra hard running leaves me sore and exhausted the next day.

It’s probably PTSD

I guess this is that post-traumatic stress problem that people talk of.

So why don’t I get help?

Because I’m functioning, frankly. I’m not so depressed that I can’t get by. I’m not so anxious that nothing happens in my life. My kids are happy. I think my wife is happy. I think my colleagues are mostly happy. But each little setback, even if nothing to do with my health, sets me on a path of questioning and trying to work out how to be better, stronger, smarter, more organised, more caring, more focussed, better at caring for myself, better… better… better. Because that’s how I get over this and make the most of the 5-30 years I probably have left.

About that 5-30 years

All things being well, there’s no real reason why someone who’s had a bypass like me, following a heart attack (myocardial infarction) with relatively little damage to the heart shouldn’t live another 30 years. Maybe more. An active and full life. I’ve come across people in amazing shape, aged nearly eighty, thirty years on. They look amazing.

But I also see some people pass away. Some of my grafts were from veins and they’re just not so tough and have a high chance of failing after ten years. I could get really unlucky and they could block and cause trouble in a bad way. Which could kill me.

Who knows, eh? I certainly don’t. Nobody does. I just keep taking the pills and hope for the best. Speaking of which:

Now the good stuff: The weird disappearance of my xanthelasma

So, xanthelasma are interesting. I had a couple of these. Here’s a before and after shot:

Excuse the ropey shots used – I never set out to document the disappearance of these things, but there you go. I had them, now I don’t.

Xanthelasma are made of cholesterol, and are, in fact, an indicator of risk of cardiovascular problems. The fact they’ve gone is actually reassuring. I can see that my cholesterol levels in my blood, from blood tests, are about half what they used to be. This is potentially great news. I’m hoping it keeps me safe.

Turns out that it’s possible that strong statin therapy so dramatically reduces cholesterol in the body that these things can disappear.

Blood pressure’s not bad too

With blood pressure, we all know that high blood pressure is bad for the arteries. It damages them, and is linked to stiffening as well.

In this case you can see that I’d started logging my blood pressure in the top part of this chart in early 2019, half a year before my heart attack. Then I kind of lost interest. It was a bit high-ish but not so high as to be of any real concern. I didn’t worry too much.

But the heart attack came! I started logging everything as soon as I came home, and you can see how I did it very regularly by the density of data points. Sometimes I was measuring two or three times a day.

You can track it along until March 2020, when I came off beta-blockers. You can see that the blood pressure readings became a little more varied, with more readings above 120/80 – my target is to keep below that. The trend didn’t really change, but over 2021 I’ve noticed that if I’m over 120/80 it’s by a very small amount. Most typically I see readings around 110/70 which is exactly where I want it to be. Ever since then it’s been much the same, but I’ve zoomed in to show how my desire to measure my blood pressure quite suddenly tailed off. Because I felt a lot better. You get the odd spike, but they often go with a bit of relaxation.

Ten key things I do to try and help recover from the bypass

So now for a little list of the things I try to do to help myself. They don’t always work:

  1. Exercise. I’m told this is the single best thing I can do. So I try and do at least three solid bouts of exercise which substantially raise my heartbeat each week. I also now try and incorporate some more strength exercise – sit ups, press ups, pull ups, etc. So long as my shoulders don’t hurt too much.
  2. Cut out toxic people and walk away from disputes. I always stood my ground in a dispute in order to ensure a negotiated settlement was the end, or the other person would give up. Now, sometimes, I just think “nah, sod it. I don’t need the argument, and I don’t need these people. Step away.” I still need to be better at this, but watch out for it.
  3. Eat reasonably well. Still like some treats though. I’m largely vegan, so I avoid dairy. I really enjoy a peanut bar with a bit of chocolate as a bit of a treat. But the rest of the time it’s wholegrains, plenty of protein, not too many simple carbs, no sugar in coffee, no sugary fizzy pop, no alcohol, no deep fried food, no cheesy food.
  4. On the point of no alcohol, I still allow myself the odd glass. On very very rare occasions I’ve been known to have two glasses of wine. Needs to be a good reason though. Because alcohol is bad for you. Yes, even red wine. I could link to studies, but if you don’t believe me you’ll find the outdated studies that say it’s good for you, and if you do believe me… well, you don’t need further evidence do you?
  5. Break work into chunks. I sometimes use a visual countdown timer, just to get things started. I allocate myself twenty minutes to at least start a task, and see what I can achieve in that time.
  6. Self-care. If I can, I take time to myself. If it’s been gloomy I’ll allow myself six minutes on a sunbed (with sunblock on the scars) to give me a little boost. Not very often, but seems to lift me. Other things can include getting a haircut, going for a walk, or treating myself to something enjoyable.
  7. The pills. Oh the pills. I take them carefully and religiously! Very occasionally I forget one, but it’s rare. They keep me alive. I also supplement with magnesium (it’s a mild calcium channel blocker and can help with relaxing) and some other multivitamins as feels appropriate.
  8. Appreciate the people around me. They matter. They give me the support and grounding that I need.
  9. Try not to think too much about work. You’re either working, or not working. It’s OK to not be busy when working and to be thinking. Don’t work eight hours, then think about work for another five hours, never quite present with other people.
  10. Have things to actively look forward to. Your things, not the things you’re supposed to do. A mild bit of selfishness is OK – in fact it’s healthy. Just don’t make it pathological. If you’re spending more time playing golf than with you’re family you should probably tweak things or deal with why you prefer that to family. But enjoy yourself. Give yourself space for pleasure.

So that’s it. I just saw my word count and 2800+ words is far too many, really. If you’ve made it this far without merely scanning, then well done you! Take care 💖

Have you had a bypass operation? How did you recover? What tips do you have?

Interesting times in the world of software

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.

The great pension scam, how people were conned, and how young people fixed it

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of separating wealth from income, and to stop beating up a chap called Rob Barber who made the mistake of having a high income but not feeling rich. I get exactly where he’s coming from because I’ve been in the same position. In fact, it was more dangerous, because I made the mistake of thinking I was rich before having a sudden epiphany.

In the hazy distant past of my life, I worked at ICI from 1987 to 1997. It was a good ten years, in many ways, because although it started skint I acquired the skills and knowledge to make life a lot better for myself. I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have done at the time, but in part because being skint at 18 is equivalent to trying to get out a pool of oil. Slippery and error prone.

In that time at ICI, and in the years when I left to become an IT consultant, I worked on payroll software and corporate financial software. When you code something into software, you have to know the subject intimately. Everything I code, I learned about in great detail then explained to a dumb computer. Programming is a really great way to understand things – a computer is like a very patient, dim student with fantastic memory. And when you teach, you learn. You have to.

So I remember when I was around twenty-five some of my older colleagues would always go on about how they hoped for early retirement. This seemed dreadful to me, because I remember my grandmother’s retirement in poverty. But what I didn’t know was how much things had changed.

These colleagues, you see, had a defined benefits pension scheme and ICI was a company on the wane. It needed to reduce headcount each year. One way that a department could reduce headcount was to retire people early, as young as fifty. Today I’m fifty and the idea of retiring and not being poor just isn’t there. I’d be quite hard up. So how could these guys get excited at the idea?

Defined benefit (DB) pensions vs. defined contribution (DC) pensions

All those guys retiring in the nineties onwards were born around 1940 onwards. They started work sometime around the early to mid sixties. And they won life’s lottery big style. They had two key things going for them. 1: the economy of the country was growing fast after the war, so there were lots of opportunities for work, and 2: because of a difficulty in hiring people, firms needed to find ways to attract and keep staff that was cheap at the time and hopefully kept wages down a bit.

At ICI, we were all on what’s known as a “defined benefit pension.” That means that the pension you get is defined according to a set of rules. If I remember rightly, the rule at ICI was quite simple – you got 70% of your final salary. This kind of final salary scheme exists today in only a few legacy situations or with older staff in some firms.

I remember thinking how it was crazy that a 50 year old with thirty years of experience could then look forward to another thirty years on 70% income. Given the reduced costs of retirement (no commute, no need to keep smart work clothes, etc) it was almost like having a full salary. Not only that, many would take a consulting or part time job and be on substantial incomes. They would earn more money in retirement than they would during their working careers!

I smelled a rat! The maths didn’t work out. As I then worked more and more on corporate finance I got to know a lot of accountants and some financial directors. I asked about this problem and they all said one thing: “Those pensions were promised to people by directors who are long gone, and mostly now dead. Totally unaffordable and the company now has to make up the gap… or go bankrupt.”

If you’ve ever wondered why so many of the giant companies of the UK that existed in the sixties are no longer with us, then that’s one key reason. Pensions. At one point, Rolls Royce was putting over a third of its gross profits into pensions. British Airways was once described as a massive pension company with a small airline attached.

This problem was known about in the seventies, but few people discussed it. It was brushed under the carpet. If you have some time, I highly recommend reading this 1975 letter from Warren Buffet on the subject of pension funds and likely shortfalls.

Moving on to your situation today – now you have a defined contribution scheme, if you start a pension scheme. It’s generally a good idea to have a pension scheme, especially because the UK government encourages it with generous tax breaks on contributions. Both you and your employer can contribute, within limits.

A defined contribution scheme (DC) is based on the money you put in, and that’s it. In many ways, that makes more sense. But how does saving a portion of your salary get you close the pensions your grandparents or parents got from large employers like ICI, universities, and the public sector? A hint… it doesn’t.

The great wealth shuffle

What’s happened, and it’s absolutely not the fault of the benefactors, rather than of cynical weasels that are long dead, is that wealth has been shuffled to the older generation in a very effective way. Not all older people, sadly, but those who had decent jobs in decent employers  and owned their own homes did best, whilst those in more casual employment, rented their homes, and didn’t realise the importance of savings are left with nothing more than a state pension… so they did the worst and can still be in relative poverty. Unfortunately, if you’re not thinking and acting carefully today, your retirement, even if you work in a good employer, could be a lot more like that poor old person’s than you think and a lot less like your grandparents with their motorhome and three bedroom house.

So, I like charts, right? Remember this one from the last article?

That shows my wealth including the value of my property, savings and other bits and bobs like a car up to the age of thirty, with a different line for a middle class person with the same career.

Let’s see how that changes if we take into account the defined benefit pension scheme I had at ICI. I then didn’t contribute to a pension scheme until I was in my forties, mainly because I had other priorities and, well, I knew what I was up to. But for most people that would be terrible advice. Don’t do as I did!

Take a look below:

Now, do you see the change? In fact, for one glorious year in this story I was ahead of the middle class chap called Julian from the previous post! It wasn’t to last, because we’re assuming he worked in the same way I did and had the same sort of career, just a few years later.

Just so you know, I worked out the pension wealth on a simple basis – it was worth, based on my leaving salary, the equivalent of £100k if I tried to buy an annuity, because today, to give the benefits I can still expect from my pension, I would need about a £200k or so fund in order to buy an income equivalent to my defined benefit. I hope that makes some sort of sense. In essence, I count my pension scheme as being a £200k bit of wealth that I don’t think about.

Defined benefits pension schemes made people who started work before the mid-nineties surprisingly wealthy. It’s just not fungible.

What does fungible mean when it comes to assets? It means that the money isn’t readily available. A bicycle is fungible. You sell it for cash, and can sell it quickly. A house isn’t terribly fungible, but still better than a pension scheme because the pension scheme is sort of a bet. It can release some money to spouses, but doesn’t necessarily have to – that depends on that defined benefit.

So my ICI company scheme increased my effective disposable income in those years by more than 100%. I never even realised it at the time, because I only really learned properly about money in my early thirties.

So now you know how that sweet little old lady with the poor education, who worked at a factory, has managed to afford a decent pension with three annual holidays and a mobile home near Carnaerfon.

So this is good, right? We made older people richer!

It is fantastic that older people were made richer. The only slight fly in the ointment is who paid. And why. And why it could be better.

First of all, remember above I pointed out that companies had big shortfalls in their pension funds? Well, if they had to find £5,000 for each year that I worked extra, that had to come from somebody who currently works at the company, and from the dividends. But if all big firms cut dividends, all pension funds (which hold shares in big firms) would have had even bigger shortfalls! And share values would have gone down, making these firms vulnerable to aggressive takeovers.

Reality is, and this is all a layman’s explanation without too much detail, that younger people paid to make older people richer, but without having the same future benefit for themselves. The older generation, realising the problem, and now running companies, took away those benefits wherever possible.

Pension funds also being large shareholders and needing their income, also pressured companies they held shares in to return greater profits! So that meant that younger people’s incomes were pressured in another way!

At least young people have avocados now?

Well yes, they have access to avocados. But not houses – they’ve become more expensive, because with people living longer, and fighting any development that may affect them and their neighbourhood, young people can’t afford houses. A starter home in my home town of Widnes is around £200k. That’s a *lot* of avocados you’re going to need to cut back on to make a dent in the wealth differential. Relatively speaking, my grandmother bought a brand new starter house for £17,000 in 1984. Which is about £55,000 today. Good luck buying anything other than a tiny ruin in Widnes today for that sort of money.

Houses and pensions have led to the following interesting chart:

Now, this chart has its caveats, and I recommend reading the full article here, but let’s face it, with these sorts of gaps, Rob Barber is going to have to earn £85k (a lot less after tax) in order to catch up with a well established boomer. And let’s not discuss how much harder it is if you’re working class and end up supporting the boomers that didn’t do so well on the pensions lottery and had more casual jobs. Life is harder if you started poor.

Photo credit: Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

Why political parties lose support by winning.

People do like to look back angrily, don’t they?

Yet many a time, their anger today doesn’t reflect how they really felt back then. If you look at the Iraq War, and the UK’s involvement in it, most people supported the action. For sure, an awful lot of people today don’t think it was right to be involved in Iraq. And if you suggest they did, they react angrily and deny it vehemently.

A Yougov poll and survey suggests that what’s happened isn’t the same as what people say happened.

Are people lying?

Not really. It’s more that most people’s memories are far more plastic than people realise. Hindsight bias is one type of problem with perception.

So if you support Labour right now, it’s very easy to throw everything that happened in the Blair years under the bus. To disassociate yourself from the man who was involved in starting an illegal war in Iraq. It was obviously illegal at the time. That’s why you cut up your Labour membership card and joined the Liberal Democrats. Right?

Labour membership did plummet just afterwards.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#/media/File:Labour_Party_membership_graph.svg

Oh.

It was already pretty much half what it was. In other words. The plummet started… when Blair got into power.

Membership up in opposition when an attractive leader turns up. Down when he or she deals with the tricky nitty gritty of life in power.

Never mind.

At least councillors, being local and well known figures in their communities, won’t be punished by the parliamentary party shenanigans, right?

Party membership chart over time, showing its decline overall. Source: House of Commons Library

Dammit. No. Whilst Labour were in power, their councillors dropped off. Whilst Lib Dems were in power… their councillors dropped off. Whilst Labour were in opposition, councillors went up.

So in the Lib Dems, a traditionally localist party, we can look back and see that being in government was terrible for the party. But it turns out, that being in government is terrible for all parties.

Why?

Because, it’s hard. Being in government is tough on a party. It means making difficult decisions and trade offs that can’t possibly satisfy everyone. And they can express that dissatisfaction and will hold onto it for a cyclical period.

Which leads to a question. What’s missing in politics? Why does the party in power always suffer loss of members (although Conservatives have been failing to gain members whilst out of power, which is a problem for them) and councillors and never please the majority of their actual supporters?

Is it a case of becoming complacent? Like a decent but lazy football team that gets 2-0 up and then coasts to a 2-3 defeat?

I’ll posit another reason.

No party politicians ever manage to engage with a majority, because they never address all the issues

So here we go… turnouts for the last twenty years have always been below 70%. And not above 80% for over fifty years. That’s in spite of it being ever easier to use postal votes.

Voter turnout in UK general elections 1918-2019. Source: House of commons library

And the number of votes for the winning party has hardly ever been over 50%.

Source – Wikipedia

Look at that. Since 1930, no single party has offered a view to satisfy the majority of voters, let alone the majority of the population. So when a party gets into power, it’s in an unenviable position – most people don’t want them there.

Only twice have there been governments that are technically approved by a majority – the WW II coalition, and the 2010 Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.

Both weren’t rewarded by their voters.

If we keep repeating the same mistakes, all parties keep losing by winning

One of the best ways to avoid losing your hard fought members is to not win. UKIP have almost entirely fallen apart recently… because they ‘won’ at Brexit. Boom! Job done! Party wiped out. Their purpose over, and the public scrutiny of the Brexit process rapidly revealing them as little more than political arsonists of little substance. Everything they said turned out to be bluster. It’s not the fault of the immigrants, and it’s not the fault of the EU that people’s salaries have been stagnant. It’s more to do with a greedy class of company boards and underperforming pension funds coupled with a financial crisis. The reasons for all that I’ll go into another day.

Now, given that avoiding losing members and popularity by avoiding winning in parliament sounds like a silly idea for a political party, we have to think a little more deeply about what anyone, in any political party, can do to actually get some stability back into the country.

I have a few ideas, and I’m using my marketing and business experience here…

1. Work for everyone, but especially the people who have been left stagnant

The economy has been stagnant for a lot of people, for a long time. Not the very poorest, who are generally in a better situation than ever before.

Not the very richest, because they’re actually quite well off and much more so than for a long time.

Labour has systematically failed people who are not unionised and who work. Try being a cleaner on £8 an hour, looking after two kids, and dealing with school holidays and child care in a constructive and nurturing way. Go on. It’s almost impossible.

And the Conservatives have been cutting finite resources, such as social housing (and Labour, when in power, didn’t grow social housing either, so they can’t get too smug here) and then both have become surprised when populist anger has risen, blaming immigrants, globalisation and bankers. Yet without more immigrants we are not going to be able to care for our elderly, or deal with our NHS… we will go bankrupt. If we allow the populists to leverage the anger of the people who have lost out from economic growth, then we will have huge problems in the future.

This graph charts the distribution of income across earners, with 50% of people getting only 20% of the income and the top 10% most recently getting 35.7% of the income – so 3.5x as much as the rest.

On the upside, it’s way better than it was at the turn of the 20th century. But the lowest half haven’t increased income that much, and the top have reduced income, so it suggests that people the top 50% to 90% range, the middle classes, have done best of all and must have seen their incomes do quite well in that period – probably largely due to the emergence of a new technical class.

Source: ONS Chancel and Piketty (2021), in the World Inequality Report 2022

2. Stop looking at averages

Don’t look at averages, but look at curves like the above. Those poor performing people, those losers, are the working class and lower middle classes of Western economies.

We need to look and listen to the stories of people and stop looking at averages. Average income going up is no use if you’re in the group of people where average income is not going up. But we need to find convincing stories to bring back to them. We can’t say “Hey, we’re cutting back all the welfare for you and spending on your schools, but we can spend it on bringing in a load of immigrants!” Now, we are 100% correct that we need lots of immigrants here, but we have to explain why – if our economy is based on the amount of workers and the amount of capital in the system and we’re not replacing our population then populists will do the stupid thing. They will say “No to immigrants! More welfare and money!” But that can’t work. It’s pathetic.

But it’s imaginary and easy and short term. So when Farage says this they’re just trying to take advantage of a situation that the rest of us leave lying around.

3.  Politics has to stop ignoring the voters

All parties are doing this. They pretend people are better off because they can afford smartphones and big TVs, but if going to university leaves you with a massive debt (rather than leaving it on the shared government balance sheet) and you feel you can’t afford a house like your parents had, then you don’t feel better off than your parents did… you feel annoyed and angry.

But listening to the voters doesn’t mean doing what the voters tell you to do. It means showing thought leadership. Explaining, patiently, why you can offer more than the previous status quo. The constituency I live in has voted Labour since its creation. But it hasn’t become better off even when Labour were in power. Why not? Why did house prices still rocket up?

4. Create these policies

Because I’m intolerably lazy, I’ve broadly nicked these 5 changes from an expert on all this. A chap called Mark Blyth. He’s an expert. I know we’ve had enough of them, and I know why we’ve had enough of them. But Mark Blyth is genuinely sharp on this. Look him up. He’s not right on everything, nobody is. But that doesn’t mean these points aren’t valid:

  1. Make university tuition free again. Because it takes a stress away. Yes, the system in the UK is very well structured and very fair, but it doesn’t feel it. And that matters.
  2. Provide much more subsidised childcare over a broader. Including during school holidays. Because it discourages women from fully contributing when the cost of childcare for two children is more than a salary. And because it helps single parents to function properly and give the nurturing care their children need.
  3. Resist and prevent the NHS being dismantled or turned into a multi-payer US style system. Simple, that one. The NHS is hyper-critical.
  4. Corporate reform of how shareholder value is distributed. I know this will scare the capitalists, but it shouldn’t. Because trust me, an angry and inward looking economy looks like North Korea or Venezuela. And that’s even worse for you. You’ll still be rich if you can keep our economies open. Trust me.
  5. Break up or open up digital monopolies. They have too much power and too many rewards for too few people, with returns of over 60%. That’s just not sustainable. So you have Google blocking YouTube from certain platforms and Facebook downgrading your pages’ natural viewings if you don’t have a healthy advertising budget.

If you notice, none of this says “Punish the rich.” Don’t do that. They feel unfairness as much as anybody, and there’s no point making them angry as well. Just fix the structural issues and things should balance out fine. You don’t need to simply turn up and take their money off them with a massive tax application. Just make sure their money has to be invested, rather than spent on impressive schemes like rocket ships that don’t address the problems that many people actually face.

Enough already

That’s my thoughts for now. About 1800 words of them, which is enough. These are the under-considered problems of the past generation, that are structural and required for a political party to prosper. And, if they get it right, perhaps they can even get a majority of people on-side.

Who knows eh? Maybe somebody can do it, and can convince enough people to do so. I don’t really care whether it’s Labour, the Conservatives, or my own favoured party, the Liberal Democrats. But somebody has to do it before the populists get another chance at polling booth. We don’t want them. At all.

Photo by H E N G S T R E A M on Unsplash

This article was updated with new charts and some copy changes on the 28th of May 2024.

Finding a missing person in South America (and elsewhere)

I promised, ages ago, that I’d write up some tips on how to find somebody who’d gone missing in South America. Recently I had an email from somebody in the same situation which has spurred me into action.

Since 1997 I’ve found or been found by my mother, my brothers and my sister. Here I’m sharing some ideas and tips that I wish I’d known when I started.

Before I start

What I’m going to tell you may help improve your chances of finding somebody who’s missing. It may not, but I suspect it won’t hurt because these are things to add to what you would do naturally anyway. I can’t promise they’ll make any difference, but had I done them I may well have found my father before rather than after he’d died. But hindsight is always perfect. Hopefully by sharing this I can help you.

Whether finding my father would have made my life or his life any better, I don’t know. And you’ll have to think about that for your own situation. Sometimes people hide or disappear for a reason, and finding them may not help. On the other hand, they may have no idea that actually they’re still loved in spite of what’s gone before. Who knows?

I hope that if you use these tips they help you achieve what you need to achieve. It’s not easy missing a friend or a family member. It’s not easy finding them. It’s not easy reconciling what’s happened. The important thing is to be open, forgiving, and at peace with yourself when you set out. If you want them to say sorry, to be humble or to suddenly love you then you should probably not start out. If you want to show them your love and be a person in their life, even if that’s a small part of their life, then go for it. Anything else is setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak.

I’m going to refine this post over time. It’s not cast in stone. What you read is based on nothing more than my own personal experience and understanding. It’s not definitive. You will have your own things to add.

So let’s get searching

I’m going to break this up into a few parts to break down the problem.

1. Gather all the data

You’re going to need every address, phone number, email, photo and location possible, because that’s where you’re going to look. You can do a lot of this without leaving home, if you’re organised. Get it together. Scan or photograph everything so that you can store it somewhere off-site like Skydrive or Dropbox. These will be important documents in your search – don’t risk losing them. Don’t carry them with you on a trip. You’re going to use this data to create a one page letter and email to send out to as many people as possible.

2. Think about differences

There are key things that will differentiate the person you’re looking for compared to those in the country they’ve settled in. Language, looks, and so on. But there will also be their interests. Were they big tennis, pool, or football players? They may have taken it up in their new location. List everything that is distinctive about this person relative to where they live. I’d divide this list into culture (languages, country of origin etc), interests (sports, pastimes, hobbies), and work.

Then, tackle each one. If you’re dealing with an English speaker, perhaps they’ve tried teaching it in order to make some money? It’s a common way for travelling types to make ends meet. If they’re mad keen on pool, they probably headed off to the local pool halls. If they’re computer programmers, they may have tried to do that. This gives you targets in your search.

3. Find the matches

So, now you have a list of things about the person, and some data. Start to work out how to match things up.

For example, with my father he liked pool (and billiards and so on), gambling, drinking, watching sports, puzzles, and he spoke English and Spanish. With the data I had there were about 12 cities which he seemed to have written from and talked about. So, for English I need a list of all English schools in each of those cities. For pool, every pool and billiard hall. Gambling is trickier – but casinos can be worth checking out. For sports and drinking, think sports bars. Link things together. You have limited resources, so look at the best possibilities based on the data and knowledge you have. Did most letters come from one city?

Then there’s the most important – embassies, consulates and honorary consuls. At least, that’s what they’re called in Britain. You need to contact as many of these in your target regions as possible. The people who work at these places are often well connected within their local communities. They may not be able to facilitate directly, for confidentiality reasons (after all, not everybody wants to be found) but they can pass a message on.

4. Time to get organised!

OK, you know what you need to think about, now it’s time to get organised. I’d personally create a database or spreadsheet into which all this data can be pumped in. That means you can later run a mail merge to produce letters to each of these targets. In my naivety I only sent mail to all the embassies in South America.

5. The letter itself.

You’re going to create a letter describing the person you’re looking for, his or her names, and, most importantly, photographs. Nowadays colour printing is cheap, so scan in those old pictures and include them in the letter somewhere or on a separate sheet. If you’re on a budget, use a black and white laser printer.

So, you found them. Now what?

This is where it gets tricky. You find your missing person. Depending how that happens, you either have to initiate contact, or make friendly contact happen.

Here’s another list…

1. Don’t assume it’s really them

You get an email back. You need to meet up, perhaps, or something else… perhaps they need help? Do be careful you’re not being scammed. There are a lot of people who are hungry, poor, or plain greedy and they might just seize the chance to get some money out of you. Be wary. If you’re meeting them for the first time, ensure it’s in a safe, public and neutral place.

2. The pain

Here’s another potential issue – depending on the nature of the separation, establishing a fresh link could be incredibly painful. They could be in a relatively bad way. They could be angry about being found. They could be happy, but emotionally messed up about it all. Do not underestimate the problems here. Be prepared to be strong, to walk away if you have to. If I’d found my father and he’d tried to manipulate me like he did when I was a teenager then I don’t know for sure if I’d have coped. I’m far stronger today, but who knows? Would I regress? It’s impossible to tell.

So, make sure you have support on hand – either with you if you’re meeting in person, or on the end of a phone line.

3. And then…

Once you have re-established contact… you now have the long path. My sister and I coincidentally started to look for each other around the same time and we worked out where we both were. She approached me first, after months of deliberating about how to do it. I’d similarly been waiting for a while, and worrying.

The thing you have to remember though is that it’s not all going to be just like a normal relationship. The gaps and the different lives you’ve experienced will make things different. You won’t be visiting each other every week, or acting like brother/sister or mother/daughter for the rest of your lives – the relationship will take time and real work to make things happen. You’ll go to social events if invited. You’ll send cards and gifts. At times it could feel one sided – you may be overwhelmed, or the other person might be. All I can say is that once you know each other you can work on filling in the gaps. Don’t rush it. It’ll happen if you give it time.

The findability thing

In 1997 I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother, father, brothers or sister for years. I didn’t know where they lived, what they did, or exactly how they might look. My half-sister and my half-brother I knew the least.

In 1998 I found my mother, brother and half-brother in a remarkable half hour of work one lunchtime! I simply rang every address and phone number I could find and asked if they knew them. Within no time I was speaking to my half-brother, that evening with my mother. Problem solved.

My father… well, you can read the story here on this blog and then viewing the newer posts in that archive. There are twelve at the time of writing, you should start with the oldest.

My sister… this is where “findability” works out. I consciously made a decision around 2001 that I should be easy to find online. Since around then I’ve been the top ranking “David Coveney” on Google. But that’s not what she first searched for, because she didn’t even know she had a brother…

It works the other way – if you have a blog and you’re looking for someone with a reasonably uncommon name, create a post about them. If you searched for “Chris Coveney” then for years a post on this site about my father would come up highly in Google. It gave a chance. I thought my father might Google himself. He didn’t. But his daughter did. And as a consequence, Maria, my half-sister, found me a few years ago. Happy days!

This is what I call passive searching – you set everything up to make things as easy as possible for people to either let themselves be found, or to find you. Because maybe, and you can hope, the person you’re looking for is missing you too.

If nothing else, running a blog will let them know how you are – they may not want to contact you, but they can follow your life, your loves and your family in a public and open way. Obviously, be careful what you publish.

Get out there, look around, be prepared, and be open. Good luck, and I hope you find who you’re looking for. If you have a story to share, please do so in the comments section below.

Why You Should Be A Secularist

All these arguments about Britain being a ‘Christian’ country at heart (see Baroness Warsi here, here and most importantly here) are so much bull, and I’m tired of it.  It’s part of an attack on the growing secularist movement but framed in such a way that it’s designed to scare the religious into thinking they’re going to be stopped from practicing.

We’re No Christian Culture

The point being, it's easy to make a logically inarguable statement that is still utterly and completely fallacious. "Jesus Saves" could be another one - maybe he does, but there's no way to prove it.

I mean, look at how we named our days of the week – there’s no “Jesusday” or “Paulsday” – no, we have Thursday = Thor’s Day, or Wednesday = Woden’s Day = Odin’s Day, and Friday = Freya’s Day.  At Easter it’s all about fertility and I don’t see many people chowing down on chocolate crucifixes.  OK, that last bit is pretty flippant, but the truth is, a lot of our culture has plenty in common with old Pagan rites and beliefs.

Religious Freedom = Good

So if you’re Christian then that’s fine, but any politician who says that to be secularist is somehow non-Christian is like a secularist saying that being Christian, or Muslim or Rastafarian is bad.  It’s important for all to respect all our beliefs – few are provably right or wrong, but if government ever becomes about religion, or driven by religion then it causes inevitable sectarian divisions that are frankly disastrous.  Not only that, but government moves away from being evidence based to belief based.

Scrub that last bit – a lot of government is belief based anyway, even when religion doesn’t come into it.  People are like that.  But secularism is a big part of moving towards evidence based governance and away from running a country based on peculiar notions of what is good or bad based on differing interpretations of where we come from and who we’re supposed to be trying to please in order to get a decent afterlife.

I’m a secularist.  Not a militant one, but I do believe that state and church need to be completely removed from one another.  In Britain we have a curious situation where there is still a small amount of religious interference in the state – it’s almost inevitable when your nation’s leader is also expected to be the head of the church.  Currently an English heir to the throne can’t stay as heir to the throne if they marry a Muslim, for example, unless the Muslim converts.  And that, if you think about it properly, is a serious worry, because it tells people that it’s OK to consider a different belief system to be inferior.  It legitimises religious intolerance, which is bad for all of us.

So let’s keep pushing for a secular state, and let’s encourage religious freedom.  I’m not going to reveal my religious beliefs here, but I’ll support yours.  Unless, of course, they’re based on intolerance – in which case, time to take a hike.

The Story of Juanito

Here’s something… a smiling, happy and charming man who knew my father in Arica, lives just around the corner from the hotel I’m staying at.

He actually lives in the cabin that guards a car park.  Just him.  He’s been married twice, I believe, but that’s all I know.

So how can I tell his story?

I can’t, not really.

But it made me realise – he had many things in common with my father.  Two marriages, keeps quiet about his personal life, and a very modest lifestyle.  And truth is, I see people like this all the time.  And they all have a story.  It’s just that it is, largely, untold.

Even when it is told, you only have their take on it.  Given how fragile memories and emotions can be it’s almost impossible to extricate what’s really happened.

Pushing Away

I think it’s entirely possible that anybody can end up alone and relatively marginal.  Worse, some can even end up utterly destitute and on the streets.  Something makes this happen to people.  They destroy their personal relationships.  Before too long, they are relatively alone.  They have friends, for sure, but not close ones.  And drinking friends, as we all know, are the ones who aren’t there when you need them.

If we look at my father, he ended up being rejected by me.  If you look at the picture of me with my father, you’ll see something that I’d never noticed until a psychologist here noticed it and mentioned it to Joaquin… my father is touching me, but I’m distant.  I could be just another surly teenager, but here’s the thing… I wasn’t a surly teenager.  I just hand’t formed many attachments.

At the pool hall

There were two points when I pushed away from my father.  When I was around 11 years old he’d split up with his second wife and I was living with my grandmother.  I’d struggled to settle into the new school – a rather rough school that was failing its pupils, and the bullying and harrassment had become quite extreme.  Yet some level of that had happened at every new school.  So I stood firm and when my father suggested I went with him to Belgium I opted not to.  Enough was enough.

Wasn’t easy.

That was the first stage.  He was obviously angry with his mother who supported me in the process of requesting her to be my guardian, and consequently their relationship deteriorated even further.

He’d already pushed away from his second wife and daughter, simply by failing to cope with certain aspects of the relationship.

Then, years later, when he was demanding money from me, I couldn’t handle it.  He was too hard on me.  I had to reject him even more. Not so easy, really.

Suddenly, he’d lost all familial contact.  Nobody wanted to deal with him or support him.  He was a lost soul.

We Judge on the Negative

One thing I’ve realised is that most people form relationships with other people based on the good character traits.  They find the other person attractive, or intelligent, or caring… that kind of thing.  But they break relationships based on the bad.  That may be stating the obvious, really, but it’s important because the bad things are usually a very small part of that person’s character.

Think about it – your average burglar probably spends no more than a few hours a week breaking into house.  A wife beater doesn’t beat his wife every day.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  It’s why sometimes women find it so hard to break away because “he’s a good father” or “he’s so generous most of the time.”

People aren’t black and white, no matter what films and the media appear to suggest.  My father wasn’t generally a bad man.  Remove the mood swings and the occassional domestic violence and you had a charming, intelligent and thoughtful man.  Everyone I’ve met here considered him a good man.  If anything, they found him a little naive – he got ripped off and let down on a number of occassions because he trusted too much.

He wasn’t evil.

He just had flaws that made him impossible to live with.

And Juanito?

I know I made the title of this post misleading, but it’s relevant.  I don’t know his story.  I can’t even suggest that he was pushed away from his family.  All I know is that he’s living alone, in a small hut in a car park, and that he’s a personable and kind man.

All I know for sure is that there is a story in everybody, and no matter what mistakes they or others made they’ll feel the pain of their past.

What Have I Learned?

Value your friendships and relationships.  As far as I can see, they’re one of the primary things that keep us from ending up alone and in poverty like my father did.  It’s important to accept that although they can be a pain sometimes, and oh so restrictive, we need those boundaries and checks that they bring to us.  Being told you’re wrong, or being stupid, or hurtful… that’s something we all need to hear now and again because we can all be wrong, stupid or hurtful.

Without that, we can’t limit ourselves, and we can’t free ourselves from our mental barriers.  It’s often said that children need boundaries, or they can become insecure.  I believe, very much, that adults need them also.

Now, I must apologies for the random keyboard psychology above, and promise that normal service will be resumed soon!

The Funeral

And so it came.  In a way it’s weird… I always felt there were only two likely things to happen.

First, I would find my father (or he would find me) and a period of reconciliation may take place.  Closeness, perhaps never, but reconciliation would be fine.

Second, I would never find him, and that would be that.  Finito.

I’d actually come to the conclusion a few years ago that maybe he’d died some time ago.  In some ways it was an easier conclusion… it stopped me feeling guilty for not continuing a search or trying harder.

I don’t think I was ever ready for this.  And this morning I woke up very early at around 5am.  Partly because I went to bed very early, but also because my mind was spinning.  I decided to put some music on.  And this piece came up:

And I took a moment to try and remember what was really good about my father.  I’ve told the story that shows the negative in him.  The curious thing is that our negative moments in life tend to be far fewer in occassion than our positives, yet they often define us.

So I remembered:

  • Football in the garden when I was very young.
  • Him teaching me pinball – and his pride when I started to beat him, and most people, from the age of about five.  I still love pinball and if I ever have the space, I’ll have one!
  • Going to watch Liverpool play at Anfield on several occassions.
  • Learning about different cultures through him, that there was more to the world than the area(s) I was growing up in.
  • When I was 16 I met a girl in Oostende and, late in the evening, him quietly handing me enough money to take her clubbing.  He then made his excuses and dragged away others to give us space.  He continued in this vein all week.  It was just a holiday romance, but hey…

There was more… but those are what sprung to mind.  And I had my first ‘moment’ there in bed at about 6am this morning.

The next came during the funeral.  But first, a little about Chilean funerals…

Culture Shift

Chile doesn’t feel wildly different to Spain, in so many ways.  The climate, the landscape even… at least, when I compare it to Alicante where my family lives.  Culturally it’s similar enough that you expect things to be reasonably similar.  And I suppose they are.  But that’s still quite different to Britain.

First things first, you arrive at the hospital with all your paperwork a little before the funeral directors come to collect the body.  In our case we then had an hour or so of waiting before heading to the cemetary.  I’ve already mentioned that instead of burial plots, niches are used.

And in our case, as there were only two of us at the undertakers we could ride in the hearse, up front.  I was disappointed, in a way, as the hearse was simply a silver Ford Taurus Estate.  With BMW hubcaps.  As a car geek I was disappointed!  But then in the UK we use Fords for hearses as well, so I can’t complain… but I’d still prefer to head off in a Daimler, if anyone’s listening….

In the back was the coffin, wrapped in the skin of Bungle.

I realised that if we had an accident (not entirely unlikely) the coffin was unrestrained.  It would be… messy, to say the least.  Still, we made it to the cemetary where I met the kindly David Hucker from the Anglican Church, his wife, a singer he’d brought along, my father’s landlady, and several of his friends.

Given that funerals tend to be arranged very quickly here, and that he had no family at all here, it was a good turnout.

We then slowly walked behind the car to the tomb, where two rows of plastic garden chairs were laid out.  The Bungle-Coffin was then placed on a support, and the car left.  Nearby a bell tolled.

Rev. Hucker gave a simple ceremony in both English and Spanish with accompaniment and song from the delightful guitarist.  And then the moment I was completely unprepared for.  Everyone who knew my father stood up to say a few words of remembrance.  When it came to my turn, I fell apart.  I didn’t even start talking, just sobbed.

It’s so unlike me.  A few tears, sure.  But sobbing?  Proper, wobbly belly, heaving chest sobbing?  Nope, not since I was a little kid.

Every time I remembered the good parts of my father, I went again.  More than in the morning which was a single burst of tears.

After a few minutes and a few tissues I managed to compose myself to string together a barely articulate sentence.  It would have to do, or I’d just be off again.  I patted the Bungle-Coffin, sat down, and the ceremony was then brought to a close.

Of course, the English bits didn’t make sense, entirely, in the context, but they were familiar, which helped, I think.

Then the next new part – the coffin was then pushed into the tomb, and we got to watch the workers carefully seal it up.  The flowers were then placed in front of the stone, and we took turns to quietly pay our last respects.

My thoughts have also drifted to my brother and half-sister back in Europe.  The five grandchildren my father never even knew about, and the joy he missed out on with all of them.

One day I’ll explain this whole story to my new born son (and any others) and maybe I’ll be back in Arica once more.

And when we come back, I’ll give Joaquin Alvarez, the British Honorary Consul, a call.  He has been amazing, taking a lot of time and trouble to help me with arrangements.  He came to the funeral with us as a friend of my father’s, and has touched me with his kindness and generosity of spirit.  A true giant amongst men.