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Life saver

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

In Spring of last year, on the 28th of May, in fact [the significance of which we’ll come to], I happened to save someone’s life, and I’ve only ever told a couple of people about it. It’s a bit of a hard one to slip into a conversation if I’m honest, certainly without a great deal of tangential segueing anyway. And the longer ago it gets, day by day by day, the less relevant it seems to bring up, or the less likely I would be to get away with bringing it up with at least a passing glance at nonchalance.

And also, it seems like such a weird experience – so heightened, so very vivid and memorable, yet at the same time so ephemeral and unbelievable and isolated from the rest of my life – that now it almost feel like a dream I once had.

The couple of times that I did bring it up, it felt weird too. I knew once I started I would have to get to the end, but I also knew that it did all seem like a dream and there are few things more boring in life than listening to someone else’s dream [I always have an overwhelming urge to interrupt and scream “NONE OF THIS HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE” at the top of my voice] but of course this wasn’t a dream and I know because I was there.

So let’s get to it shall we? I’ll give you a run down of what happened and then I’ll tell you what it’s left me with.

I will warn you at this stage that a lot happened in a short space of time so if you think I’m going to “cut to the chase” you’re in for a disappointment. This is the director’s cut. So if you were also thinking of reading this then making a nice cup of tea, I’d suggest making the tea before you start.

Right, we ready? Lovely.

Now come with me, if you will, back to the end of May.

It’s a lovely sunny Saturday, and we have my wife’s cousin and his family visiting us in Kent from their home in Cardiff in South Wales. Cousin, wife, ridiculously cute baby of almost exactly 18 months, and a big shaggy dog [a Canadian Duck Tolling Retriever, for the caninophiles amongst you] all descend and because it’s a lovely day and we have a dog too we decide to head down to the seaside in Rye, East Sussex, which is just down the road.

This is the actual dog mentioned above. He’s called Dougie.

We decide to go to Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, and once there, after stopping to get an ice-cream for the kids, we head off along the path towards the beach.

This walk takes us alongside the River Rother which has wound its merry way for 35 miles through Sussex and Kent and is now looking forward to fulfilling its destiny of spilling out into the English Channel.

Who knows, in a few weeks the water herein could be enjoying a nice weekend as waves lapping against the beach of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the French coast, closer to where we are walking than London as the crow flies. Or any bird actually. But for the moment it is trapped in by high brick walls on either side, designed to stop the tides completely flooding the unspoilt salt marshes of the nature reserve on one side and totally spoilt members of Rye Golf Club on the other.

About halfway towards the beach, my younger son (8 years old at the time) decides he had a stone in his shoe. I say “decides” because he doesn’t have a stone in his shoe at all: he’s just a bit tired and being a bit of a pain in the arse. I love him with all my heart, but he does have “pain in the arse” in his locker and trust me, he will pull it out whenever he feels the need.

So there I am, sitting on a bench, taking his shoe off for the third time and considering whether I can get away with just leaving him here forever. My wife and elder son have carried on walking with our dog and the visiting Welsh folk. If you look at the pic below, I’m at point 1. [Yes that’s correct, dear reader: I have done a bloody diagram. You are most welcome.]

Then there is a commotion. Something is going down. This is a quiet, peaceful place, and yet someone is shouting. A ruckus! I’m instantly titillated. This has potential for drama, and who doesn’t like a bit of drama, eh? So I’m half listening to my son’s whining and half trying to work out what’s happening when I hear a woman shout out with the unmistakable timbre of fear in her voice.:

Somebody help, please!

I’m not sure what happens in my mind at this point, but before I know what I’m doing, I’m ushering my youngster to run over to mum and I’m running towards the lady and her two young kids, and over towards where she’s pointing. Another shout as I come towards her:

My dog has fallen into the river

I’ll be honest, at this point I’m a little less urgent all of a sudden. I mean, I have a dog, and I love dogs, but surely the dog just swims to the edge and gets out, right?

When I get to the edge, I realise that isn’t going to happen.

The woman’s husband is lying face down on the ground, right on the edge of the river [point 2 on our diagram]. The tide is going out so it’s a good four feet down to the water, and he can’t reach the small black dog, who’s desperately swimming against the river flowing out through the narrow channel, the tide pulling it along towards its French holiday destination.

The current is really, really strong. The dog is getting tired. The kids are crying, and the woman is shouting at the man:

He’s getting tired. You’ll have to jump in and get him

To which the man shouts back:

If I go in there I’ll fucking drown.

I’m glad he says that, because I think he’s right. This is like one of those news reports you hear on the radio where someone has gone into a river or a lake or the sea to save their dog or climbed onto the roof to save their cat and they end up dead and the animal ends up fine. Let’s not do that, eh mate?

But the woman is right, too. The little dog is getting very tired.

At this point the woman runs off back towards the café which has just opened [point 3 on the diagram which you’re now glad you were supplied] to “call for help”. As she does this I’m wondering what kind of help that might be. No one is going to send a chopper out for a little dog.

And the little dog is getting very, very tired.

I shout to one of our group to hand me my dog’s lead, and for a few extremely unsuccessful seconds the man tries to lasso the little dog’s head with the lead. We both then try to encourage the little dog to bite onto the end of the lead. But the little dog doesn’t understand what we’re shouting at him to do because he speaks dog and we’re shouting at him in English. A couple of times he drifts downstream a few inches and pushes himself to swim back to us.

The little dog is really fucking tired now.

The man looks at me and says:

I’m going to have to go in.

I’ve never met this bloke before but it’s very clear I’m in this with him now. If he’s going to have to go in, I’m going to have to help him get out.

I have the dog’s lead in my hand and in the split second I have to think, I tell him to hold one end and I’ll hold onto the other and help him out.

I’ve got you mate. I won’t let you go.

So he quickly takes off his jacket and shoes, holds onto the other end of the lead to the one that I’m holding, and jumps into the dark, fast-flowing water.

He goes completely under for a moment, and when he comes up I can see the panic in his eyes. The water is so cold it’s taken his breath away completely. And the current is stronger than either of us could tell, and immediately I’m straining to hold him where he is. That little dog’s done bloody well against this unrelenting flow.

In another moment, the man catches his breath, grabs his dog and shoves it upwards out of the water, where a set of hands snatch it up. The little dog has been saved. But as I think you’ll probably have guessed, that isn’t the life I’m talking about,

So what next? A grown man is in a fast-flowing tidal current, four feet below the ground. I’m holding on to him but I’m starting to slip in the mud at the edge.

I start to pull him up but as I pull, the back of his hands, gripping the rope of the dog lead, are getting cut to ribbons against the barnacles on the side of the brick wall designed to hold the sea tides at bay. It’s too painful to continue.

I’m slipping more and more. I grab onto a rusty metal pole that is sticking out of the ground to steady myself.

It’s now that I realise I’ve got the end of the dog lead which has a slip on it, designed to stop the dog pulling. What it’s doing now is pulling tighter and tighter and cutting into my wrist and pulling my shoulder. I’m attached to this man and I’m the only thing that’s stopping him from floating off into the sea. And we all know how that news story ends, right?

Don’t get the bottom bit stuck around your wrist

I’m not going to be able to pull him out. I can’t let him go even if I wanted to, and in any case I don’t want to. I decide that I’m going to take him along the edge of the river wall towards the sea and just hope, hope that something comes up which means I don’t end up in the water with the man.

It’s the only option. And it’s just hope. And whilst we all know that hope is not a strategy, right now I don’t have anything else.

But as I let go of the pole and start walking along, I’m slipping more and more. My cherished Adidas Nite Joggers (other cool-ass trainers are available) are great for wandering along a path but they’re not great for trying to grip in a grey mixture of sea mud and sand. A couple of times I slip forward, leaning back so my body weight holds me until my Adidas get a grip.

At this point I’m kind of thinking I’m going to end up in the water unless something happens pretty soon, and then both me and this bloke are in trouble. In deep water, you may say.

I shout for help, and my wife’s cousin (who up to this point had his toddler strapped to his chest) runs down the beach and grabs onto my hand. Another, older man turns up and suddenly it’s not just me and the man, and now I think we’re going to be okay.

And then the universe decides that we need a break here, and out of nowhere there’s a set of steps cut into the wall a few yards away. I keep hold of the man and kind of lead him along to the steps, pulling him through the water like I’m trying to land a massive fish. At the steps, I and the other people help him out.

The next bits are quite strange as the world that was always all around comes back into focus. I see my wife looking after the man’s small children who are both crying. Her cousin’s wife has the tiny, shivering little dog wrapped up in her jacket to warm it up. My younger son is crying because he’s been watching the whole thing and has been scared for my safety.

And the man is more embarrassed than anything. He’s trying to say everything’s fine and thanks for your help and is the dog okay and where’s my wife, and everyone is telling him to just take a minute, and helping him on with his jacket.

He’s bleeding quite a lot from where his hands scraped on the wall and he’s shivering a lot too. I ask him to hold on while I gently clean the blood off his hands with a spare tissue I got from the ice cream van [ONLY ABOUT FOUR MINUTES AGO] and see that his cuts aren’t too bad. I tell him I’m a first aider and then hear myself say:

I don’t think you need any further medical attention

Which sounds weird as it comes out as it’s not a phrase I’ve used before or probably will ever use again. How very formal.

We walk up across the rough ground and pebbles towards the path, and I see my elder son running back down the path from the café. I later found out that he was told to run to the café but when he got there wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, or say, or get, so just ran back.

The man is telling his kids that he’s fine and the dog is fine and when we get to the path we see the woman running back down from the café too, and we all wave and say everything’s okay. She runs up and thanks everyone and gets the dog and holds it to her chest under her coat and tells the kids that everything is fine.

And I hug both my sons, and my wife. I’ve cut my leg and my hand and they’re wet so the blood is running a bit and makes everything look worse than it is, and my wrist has a nasty rope burn on it. But I tell them everything is fine, because in the grand scheme of things, it really is.

As the metaphorical dust settles, my wife and I offer to help the man, the woman, the little dog and the two kids back to the car park. It seems necessary because there’s a lot happened and the man is almost certainly in shock. So we say we’ll catch up with our own family and we’re walking just in front carrying a bag and a kids tricycle and telling the people no honestly it’s no trouble.

It’s only at this point that the woman asks the man why he’s so wet and I realise she doesn’t even know he went in the water because she was up at the café the whole time. So he tells her he went in the water and she asks how he got out, and he gestures at me and says:

That man saved my life.

Which is not something you ever expect to hear someone saying about you.

A few yards on and now the man and the woman have calmed a bit and around about the same time it starts to seem a bit odd to all of us that my wife and I are just carrying their stuff for no clear reason, so they say they will be fine from here and we say are you sure and they say yes.

The man and I face each other for the first time properly, and he notices that I’m wearing a Nike sweatshirt where instead of NIKE it says YNWA in big letters, denoting “You’ll Never Walk Alone”: the anthem of Liverpool Football Club, who are playing in the European Champions League Final that very evening. Which of course is how I know the date.

The man asks me if I’m a Liverpool fan, and I tell him I am, and he says that he is too. And I say:

You’ll never walk alone, mate

Which felt a little cheesy at the time and still does in retrospect but it was an emotional moment so I’ll let myself off.

And then we hug each other with real meaning, knowing we would, in all probability, never see each other again, but that for a few moments on this Saturday lunchtime we were connected in a way that neither of us will ever forget.

Then the woman says that they are on holiday and they ended up in hospital the day before because the little boy had hurt himself, and then this today, and “bad things always come in threes” and we all laugh and say we hope not and we all go our separate ways.

And unbeknown to either of us, she will be proved right when our beloved Liverpool lose 1-0 to Real Madrid just a few hours later.

And as we walk away my wife holds my hand and squeezes it and says:

Are you okay?

And, of course, I start to cry because I am okay but also that was about as hectic as things get and all a bit overwhelming and I could do with a hug. Which, of course, I duly get.

And that’s it. Every tiny detail of something that lasted maybe 5 minutes in total from start to finish.

And, of course, that’s the first thing that intrigues me about this: a reaffirmation of my belief that time just has to be relative [as mentioned in these pages before here] to your own personal experience. This was 5 minutes of my life which felt like so much more, with time to take in the detail of every single moment like I was rewinding it and watching it again and again.

Details burnt into my brain. The look in the man’s eyes as he came up from under the water. My foot slipping forward through the mud and catching on a brick at the top of the wall. The little black dog shivering as he was shoved up out of the river. Time stood still, as of course it would.

The next thing is about my instinctive reaction.

If you’d asked me beforehand if I were the type of person who runs towards a commotion and then puts himself in danger in order to help, I think I would have said ‘no’. But as it turns out, I am. I’m not sure what you call that? Brave or brainless? Courageous or crazy? Heroic or hasty? Probably a bit of all of these. But an interesting thing to learn about oneself, that’s for sure.

There’s also a “what if” element to it all too. What if we hadn’t stopped for an ice cream? What if my son hadn’t started complaining of a stone in his shoe? We would have been up the path by the beach. So many things aligned to make all this happen. I don’t believe in fate any more than I believe in luck. But I do like considering the magic of coincidence in our life experiences.

And the last thing that sticks with me about this is [it’s me, so of course it’s going to be…] all about how people connect.

Author and speaker Brené Brown [yes you’re right I do mention her quite a bit] has done more research into vulnerability than probably anyone in the world, and her work has come to the conclusion that vulnerability is made of three things: uncertainty, a degree of risk, and emotional exposure. You don’t know how things are going to go. There’s a chance that things might go wrong. This could be emotionally difficult. But you do it anyway. That’s vulnerability.

I can’t think of any better description of what the man and I experienced together. Uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. And because you know this stuff, you don’t need me to tell you that vulnerability is the irreplaceable, elemental, catalytic basis of human connection.

I will never, ever, forget the man I met that day. Never. And he won’t ever forget me, either. What we experienced, together, was so intense, so short-lived but so unforgettable, and so totally, totally vulnerable that we’re connected forever.

If I could change one thing – just one part of the whole experience – it’s that he could have had another bit of bad luck in the afternoon (nothing big: a seagull pooing on his head or something) to satisfy the “bad things happen in threes” rule. Then the man and I could have been further connected by the shared enjoyment of winning the footy that evening…

YNWA friends. Go safely… and keep your dog on the lead near water yeah?

P.S. Apologies for such a long post – in the words of French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in his 1657 work “Lettres Provinciales”: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte”, or as you or I might have it: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” Except of course I did have time, I just decided to spend it elsewhere.

How to be a rock star

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Rock star. Ooh just the sound of it. It evokes leather trousers, bright lights, screaming guitars and screaming fans. A life of excess – stimulation and perspiration, passion and parties, and never a dull day.

Rock stars bring in the crowds and send them home woozy with exhilaration and energy. They are the people in the bright lights, right at the front, performing and strutting and drinking in the applause and adulation.  They are the people who have that certain something that you can’t make and can’t fake.

In my industry of advertising, it’s both a truism and a cliché [funny how those often come together] to say that talent is everything. And just like in any industry where talent is key you can hear people using “rock stars” to talk about that talent. I once had a boss who always talked about who the “rock stars” were in the agency and across the industry, and that was the highest accolade anyone could get.  If you were someone they considered a “rock star”, you were someone to watch. You were cool, and exciting, and (most crucially) you were “in”. You were going places, goddammit!

So what does real rock ‘n’ roll look like? Allow me to help you take a little peak behind the safety curtain…

I once got VIP backstage passes for the last night of a European tour for a band you’ve probably heard of, which I got because I happen know one of them [in the least rock ‘n’ roll way you can imagine – my goddaughter was best friends with the daughter of one of the band members at nursery]. They were closing at my favourite venue on the planet, Brixton Academy in South London, and the gig was, as ever, absolutely epic.

South London’s finest

As the lights came on and the general public filed blinking out into the foyer, I flashed my Access All Areas wristband at the security guards with the giddy excitement of a kid at Christmas who thinks he might be getting the console he asked for because his dad gave a knowing look to his mum when there was an ad for it on the telly. I knew I was hitting the big time. I could only imagine what it was going to be like.

The closing party of a European tour! At South London’s premier venue. This is it folks:

THIS IS ROCK AND ROLL!!

ROCK

But of course it wasn’t at all. It was a load of very tired people having a quiet bottle of beer (or perhaps two) and sharing crisps from a big bowl.  No one drove a Rolls Royce into a pool. No one bit the head off a bat. No one smashed a guitar. The only drug in evidence was the paracetamol that the wife of one of the band asked for because she had a bit of a headache after all the loud music.

The guy I know from the band thanked me for coming (!) and asked if I’d enjoyed the show. And then he made a ‘ting ting ting’ noise on the side of his beer bottle and thanked all the people from the venue who had made the gig a success, and all the assistants and crew and management for their hard work over the previous weeks of the tour, and said that none of it would have been possible without every single one of them. They all clapped and then the band’s assistant got a bunch of flowers and cried a bit and said she loved her job.

So here we are, trying to bring some rock ‘n’ roll glamour to our weird creative industry, and it turns out the real rock stars aren’t like rock stars.  They’re humble and kind and thoughtful, and most importantly, they know that they’re nothing without the people around them.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that top, top talent isn’t crucially important. There’s no question that you need someone to come up with a melody that people sing on the way home. You need someone to be at the front to make the right noises at the right times.

What I am saying is perhaps the idea of the “rock star” creative or “rock star” account person or “rock star” strategist is… well… a bit narrow? It’s based on something that doesn’t really exist and it assumes that right up front in lights is where everyone should aspire to be. Which isn’t even the case in real bloody rock bands!

Yes, by all means celebrate the ones with their names in lights. Again, they’re crucial and you’re not going to make much memorable music without a few of them scattered across your organisation like the cushions which get scattered across your bed every single day only to be moved off at bedtime and then wait to get scattered again in the morning… [sorry, is that just me?]

But remember that there’s not a single band in the world who can do a damn thing without the lighting guy from the venue. Or the person who books the travel. Or the backing singers, or the brass section. Or the stage crew guy in black who runs on in a crouch mid-song and fiddles with a wire and runs off in a crouch as though he thinks that by crouching he makes himself invisible. Those are the people who make the night happen at all, let alone one to remember.

“Because I wear black no one can see me”

So take a moment, today if you can, to celebrate those people around you who don’t enjoy the limelight – who in fact would scuttle off stage into the velvety darkness of the curtains like a startled theatre mouse if the limelight came anywhere near them – and give them the appreciation that there’s no show without them.

Wait, before you do that.. maybe bear in mind that they might not enjoy being singled out publicly, so perhaps just a private message or word would do.

Or even just keep it to yourself in a moment of private gratitude, with the hope that the energy of the world will give them a warm feeling about something they can’t quite put their finger on.

Whatever you choose to do, the important thing is to do it. And know that when you do, you’ll be more like a rock star than you ever realised.

The interconnectedness of all things (via a pint of water).

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Okay, you’re going to need to stick with me on this one. It’s been one of those ideas that has rattled around in the back of my brain for as long as I can remember, and over the years I keep coming back to it and trying to explain it to people a bit and then getting a bit self-conscious about it and letting it tail off. 

Thankfully, in the last couple of years I’ve found a couple of willing (by which I mean captive) listeners who have kind of got into it… or at least pretended to because a) I’m driving and they’re in the passenger seat and can’t escape, and b) they know that by humouring me they may get to stay up a bit later than usual. [Clever boys!] Of course I’m very aware that you’re not one of my children, so if at any point you want to hit the figurative ‘eject button’ then feel free. But I do think there’s something in all this, somewhere.

With all that said, I’ll give you the overall theme and see how we go from there. It is, quite simply:

WATER.

Still with me? Great. You’re already doing better than some people.

Some water

On a macro level, we really have no concept of water – or only a very, very basic understanding which really isn’t all that connected to anything we actually get.

For a moment let’s set aside the metric vs imperial measurements – whether we’re talking about a teaspoon or a half a pint or half a litre is less relevant than an idea. And because I was born in the 70s in the UK, I dance happily between the two without really noticing, like a bumblebee flitting from lily flower to lilac flower without ever really getting the difference. Or something like that.

So here’s the thing. I know what a pint* of water looks like, and I know what it feels like to drink one. It’s not an unusual thing. Yet what never fails to be shocking is just how very wet you can be when what looks like a relatively small amount of water is knocked into your lap by one of the aforementioned passengers. You’re totally soaked. Like, ‘ruined meal’ soaked. Trust me on that. If I had a pound etc etc…

A pint* of water

So let’s take it up a notch from there. How many pints in a sink full of water? Depends on the sink, obviously, but you could probably have a guess, right? Maybe 20, or 30? But it’s already pretty vague. Now imagine a nice, steaming hot bath. How many in that? 100? 150? One hundred and fifty times the thing that gets you totally soaked and ruins the meal? Maybe double that??

Get to a garden pond, let alone a swimming pool, and unless you happen to know then you’re just guessing. How many pints in an Olympic swimming pool? A million? A billion??*

The point where this always gets me is when I go to the seaside. I’m lucky enough to live only 40 minutes’ drive or so from the beach, and we’re often drawn there of a weekend. And looking out at that huge expanse, as far as the eye can see, creating the very horizon, I can’t help thinking the following:

It doesn’t just go unimaginably far… it also goes down.

A lot of water

As far as the eye can see. And down further than the highest mountain. And I can’t work out how much there is in a pond. It’s a level of incomprehensibility that frankly I find hard to comprehend.

We have a strong connection with water which we also don’t really understand. Countless studies have shown that being close to water increases the levels of hormones that make us feel motivated (dopamine) or calm and safe (oxytocin) whilst reducing our stress hormone (cortisol) [If you’re interested in this bit then check out the book Blue Mind available here and at all non-globally monopolistic bookshops.]

Who knew that “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside” was actually a tune about hormonal balance and psychological welfare?

We humans are about 60% water. Our brains are more like 80%. Perhaps there’s something in that? That we feel connected to water because… well… we actually are connected. At a molecular level?

[Right, this is where I’m going to go for it. Strap in compadre]

From the macro of the depth of the sea, the micro of our molecular structure then drags me inexorably into my own mind.

Our planet, the place we call Earth, is effectively a closed system. Stuff just moves around within it. So every molecule of water that has ever existed, and will ever exist, is on Earth right now as you read this.

More water, this time really really small and close up

Some of it is in you. Some of it is in me. Some of it is in the tree just outside. A decent chunk of it is in the seas and oceans of course. If you look up, you can see some of it in the sky, tiny drops condensed into clouds, which will continue to grow until they can’t float any more and fall out of the sky as rain.

You know when you go outside in the winter and you can see your breath? What you’re seeing there is water. The water coming out of your body as a vapour which cools and forms little droplets of water. You are making a personal cloud of your very own.

Your own little cloud.

So come with me on this little journey…

Imagine you go outside on a crisp winter’s morning, and your breath pours out as this little cloud. As you watch it drifts up and dissipates and you think no more of it. In time one of those little water molecules in the air drifts up and become part of a bigger cloud, high up in the sky, buffeted by the wind. This molecule travels in the wind for hundreds of miles, over land and sea and eventually over to Spain, where it falls on a lemon grove. Taken up by the lemon tree, it travels through the roots and the trunk and the branch to end up in a lemon.

Don’t ask me how, but by incredible coincidence, 6 months down the line I’m sitting with my wife after a long day considering the universe, and we decide that we deserve a little gin with a little tonic. A couple of pieces of ice and we’re ready to chink glasses and go. But no! We are not heathens after all, and we know that a drop or two of lemon will turn good into great. So I reach for the lemon we bought at the weekend, cut out a couple of chunks and with a squeeze there we have it.

You and me

Yes, my wife and I are living the dream. But also yes – a molecule that was once part of you is now part of me.

We are connected in a way that neither of us can ever really comprehend, but trust me: this is as real as the hand at the end of your arm. It’s not an idea, or an ideal. This is science, and the great thing about science is that it’ll be as true in a thousand years as it is today.

If you’re still with me all this way down into my psyche [and bless you for your perseverance if you are] then you’ll be glad that we’ve arrived at the point.

On a molecular level we are, subjectively and scientifically speaking, all one.

You, me, them. Us. Every person on Earth, every animal, every plant and flower. The people you love and the people you don’t even like. The fish in the ocean, the birds in the sky. Insects in the garden and every blade of grass. Like it or not, you could have a bit of Piers Morgan in you right now and not know anything about it apart from a vague sense of nausea.

Once you get into that, suddenly the interconnectedness of all living things isn’t just some kind of spiritual, sitting on a mountain top, crystals and horoscopes level of bullshit: it’s biochemistry.

And once it’s true, and real, and scientifically accurate that we are all connected like this, then surely the idea of selfishness or conflict or division just disappears, just like your breath on that cold day?

I know, I know: I have just massively overcomplicated the concept of a body of water, and then followed that up by just massively oversimplifying the solution for world peace. Not bad for a couple of pages eh?

But there we have it. All the stuff that goes on in my brain to do with water. My brain which is, lest we forget, basically a load of water held together by the odd bit of something else.

Now we’ve come all this way together, through macro and micro, I think that rather than leave you hanging, I should probably leave you with a couple of suggestions…

First, get yourself down by some water in the next few days. Doesn’t need to be the coast – a lake or pond or even the “dirty old river” Thames will do. And stop for a moment, to consider how you feel when you’re doing it. Perhaps you might get a little boost of the ‘feel good’ hormones and a bit less of the stress one if you’re lucky.

And second… just take a moment to look around at the people and things around you – the water going into your morning cuppa; the tree you always go past on your commute; that bloke on the train – and consider how that maybe one day a little piece of that might be a little piece of you. It might just give you that little feeling of connectedness, or the idea of it, if only for a second.

And lastly, just forget about that thing I mentioned about Piers Morgan – I’m not sure any of us need to think too much about that.

[Incidentally, Buddhist teaching came up with the interconnectedness of all things thousands of years before anyone had heard of a molecule – if you want to learn more about that then I’ll share the book I read a while back which, alongside a modern understanding of psychology, discusses Why Buddhism Is True with a good dose of common sense and wit along the way]

*In doing the “research” [pushing it a bit there] for this, I found out that a pint is different in the US than in the UK***. For our purposes here, I am specifically thinking of an “imperial” pint of 568ml, not the freakish and frankly unnecessary US version which comes in at a paltry 473ml.

**In case you won’t be able to sleep for wondering, an Olympic swimming pool contains almost 4.5 million (UK) pints of water. 2.5 million litres to be precise.

***I also found out that the US have more than one kind of pint for liquids and dry stuff. From the website Britannica: “a U.S. dry pint is 33.6 cubic inches (550.6 cubic cm), while a U.S. liquid pint is 28.9 cubic inches (473.2 cubic cm)”. I know, right? No wonder they can’t make their mind up about gun laws.

Death of a brother

~ Phil Bartlett ~ 3 Comments

I’m not sure about writing this. It feels a bit… I don’t know… self-indulgent somehow? But then I can’t help thinking that the fact that we don’t talk enough about this could even be one of the reasons why it happens so much. Plus, there are things I want to say. So, here we go.

We buried one of my oldest friends yesterday. He had taken his own life.

First, I’m really not sure if that’s the best phrase for it. “He killed himself” feels too blunt and visceral. The idea of “committed” suicide brings with it the idea that it was a crime for much of history. I don’t know what to call it, but you get the idea.

He was someone I’d known since I was 8 years old. We were close friends right through high school. Played rugby together for years, and then even ended up (coincidentally) at the same university. One of my close gang from then right into our 40s.

“Never dull” is how I’ll remember him. In some ways he was always a bloody handful to be honest. The one who would get lippy in a bar or club and get us into a scrap or two. Not a hard nut – just cocky and never backed down.

But God, he was good company. A force of nature. Irrepressible, high energy and energising to be with, and full of love. Part of my life for as long as I can remember.

In the same way as you don’t choose your family, you don’t really choose your school mates either. They just happen to go to the same school as you at the same time and you end up with them. So over the years the ones who stick around end up more like family than friends. So he was kind of like a pain in the arse brother who was kind of exhausting sometimes… but a brother nonetheless. And did I mention bloody good company?

Looking back, I think he was always quite erratic, and always very intense too. But he was most intense about his friendships and about his love for them. He was someone I knew that if I called, in the middle of the night, and said I needed help, he would drop everything and come anywhere in the world. That’s quite special, isn’t it?

Over the years, we’d not seen each other as much, particularly since I’d been married and had kids. He was still free and easy (or seemed so to those who didn’t know him) and our lives were very different. He was buying a new Porsche when I was buying a new buggy. But he was always “there”. Whatever that means.

Shit happens, right? Sometimes you can control things, and sometimes you end up in the middle of things you never wanted to be in the middle of, and didn’t want to get dragged into. I won’t go into the details, because to be honest I don’t really think I know the real details, but suffice to say I’d been sort of “estranged” from him for the last 4 years or so. Shit happened. Complicated and painful for everyone involved. We’d had a couple of touchpoints along the way, but always strained and difficult. I cut myself off in self-protection in a way. I couldn’t be what he wanted from me.

I know that hurt him. I know that he really wanted everything to just be okay. Like it used to be. And maybe one day it might have been, after the dust settled. But the dust hadn’t had time to settle.

In a weird kind of self-flagellation, last week I looked back at the last messages I got from him, from a couple of years ago. I said he needed help, and that I couldn’t be the person to give that to him. I told him to take care. He said the same.

As I sit here, I’m feeling guilty as hell. Guilty that I cut myself off, and guilty that I could have done more. Before you think “oh you mustn’t”, I’ve learnt in the last few weeks that actually it’s okay to feel whatever I feel. Guilty, sad, angry. Fucking angry actually. But mostly sad.

That’s the point of writing this I think. Not to just unload, but to acknowledge the feelings.

As men, we’re conditioned not to feel things. We’re taught resilience from the moment we fall and skin a knee and are told to be brave. Boys don’t cry, remember? As a result we don’t talk about our feelings or address them. The only feeling men are “allowed” to have is anger, and that’s how so many things come out.

It’s a commonly quoted statistic that suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 40. As someone who studied statistics that annoys me a bit, because for all the shock factor of it, I can’t help wondering “what else would be??”. Too young for heart disease or cancer really. Maybe road traffic accidents? It’s information without context or insight.

But when I’ve put the pedant in me away, it’s still real.

In the last couple of weeks, there are so many men I’ve spoken to who have told me about a friend of theirs who killed themselves too. Most times we’d never spoken about it before. Everyone had an element of guilt for what they didn’t do. That feeling again.

I’ve mentioned Grayson Perry’s amazing, life-changing book, “The Descent of Man” previously in these pages. I encourage you to read it. It’s about all of the expectations of masculinity and all the issues they create for individuals, societies and ultimately the world. But one bit sticks out for me:

Grayson Perry – The Descent Of Man (read it)

I am all these things. The last one is the most difficult of course.

I told my 2 sons that a friend of mine had died, and that I was going to a funeral. After a silence, my eldest son (11) asked how he died.

What to say? Do I tell them or do I hide it? I really wasn’t sure, and I looked over a my wife who was sitting with us. Without breaking gaze with me, she said that he’d taken his own life.

We then had a conversation about how people get to a point where they think that is the best thing for everyone. How talking about how we’re feeling is so, so crucial. How being all the things above takes guts, actually. A massive part of setting them up for success in life is in giving them the rights of man – that they see them in me, and see that it makes our relationships stronger.

By all accounts, the last couple of years have been extremely tough for my friend and those around him. Those who didn’t let go, or refused to be pushed away. And honestly, talking about feelings was never a problem for him. But fuck, if he’d seen the sadness in the faces of the people who came together at his funeral, he would have known that it wasn’t better. For him, or us, or anyone.

So there we are. It would be arrogant for me to think that me being connected would have made the difference, so I won’t put that on myself, or on you as you may think of the person you have lost touch with, for whatever reason.

What I will say is that, as men, the more we talk and share the better we will be.

And however bad things may seem, you have ‘family’ who love you. Even if they aren’t there to tell you.

Time waits for no man – part two

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

A good while back* I talked in these pages about my first trip into London since before all this happened. How the familiar felt so alien, and how whilst so much had changed, so much other stuff was just as it always had been.

And the thing that I really can’t stop thinking about, which keeps on popping back into my mind, is the thing that felt like it hadn’t changed at all. And that’s the homeless guy I mentioned, sitting in the place he always sits, just along from London Bridge station, next to the back entrance to Guy’s Hospital.

His stop is by the building on the right, and he’s only there until mid-morning.

Every day for as long as I’d made the trip to our office near the Tate Modern, this guy had been there. Always sitting on the floor, surrounded by old copies of the Big Issue in plastic covers, talking to himself a bit and occasionally saying hello to the regular people who walked by. Sometimes people would stop and squat next to him to talk, but more often than not he was there on his own. Every day.

And there he was when I went into London for the first time… and there he’s been on every day I’ve been since. sitting as he always has, like nothing has changed, still asking passers-by for if they can spare some change for him.

He’d been there every day for years, so why was it so surprising to me that he was there again on the day that I decided to come back into London for the first time in 14 months? Just because I hadn’t been there, why wouldn’t he? Yet it did surprise me, because whilst the whole experience was so very different for me his presence was so very familiar, like the gap from then to now simply didn’t happen. Like Covid was some kind of dystopian daydream I’d had on the train.

And now, it’s become less surprising and is becoming more and more an expected part of my journey to our office. I think I’d be more surprised if he weren’t there. But I’ll never forget the surprise of that first time for as long as I live.

I’ve talked in these pages before about the way that your time and mine aren’t necessarily the same – that perhaps we experience time differently to each other, and even our own experience of time changes depending on what we’re doing. You think this cricket match is fascinating, I think it’s taking longer than the whole of history. This day doing something I love has flown by… this day doing something I find dull will seemingly never end.

On a micro level, that’s self-evident to me – objectively something we all experience.

But this was different. Time was playing with me here, surely. How could time fly and stand still at the same time? Make it feel like yesterday, but with the knowledge that the last time I stood here I was two birthdays younger.

And how did the last year feel to him? Did time drag or did it fly? Did it feel any different to any of the other years he’s had?

Time flies. Yet some people have time to spare, but never any spare change.

We have time and we spend time. We waste time, and we save time. It’s the same language that we use for money – hell, “time is money” remember? Precious time. We recognise its importance.

And you can tell from the phrases we use that unconsciously we understand our one-sided relationship with time too – our reliance on it but lack of control over it. Time flies. Time waits for no man. We’re on borrowed time, and ultimately only time will tell.

It would be conceited and condescending for me to begin to suppose anything about this man’s life, or about his experience of the last 20 months. Like so many of us I’ve worked out my recent history based on lockdowns – how far I could go from my house; what places I could visit or shop in; whom I could see or hug, how many could be where at any time – and all of those denote privileges and freedoms that this man does not have. For all my insignificant worries, I know where I am sleeping tonight. I know who will hug me in the morning.

What I do know about this man is that it’s doubtful that the few quid he might get from the throngs who pass by will change anything other than the few hours ahead.

Even more than that, I know he doesn’t need my pity, or the thousands of embarrassed half shrugs which mean “sorry I don’t have any change” he gets every day. I know that every time I catch his eye I give him a nod and a smile, and he does the same back, and every time I feel like I should do something more fucking useful, but besides giving him money every day I have no idea what that might be. Maybe the smile is that thing?

Lastly, I know that if there’s a better demonstration of how you might consider someone else’s experience of the world and measure it against your own to see an impossible myriad of differences then I haven’t come across it before, and I’m not sure I ever will.

Perhaps to give myself a purpose from this whole thing – to give it context, beyond just contemplation – I’ll commit to consider other people’s experience of the world even more than I have. Because there’s no question that however they experience the world, it’s unlikely to be anything like the world of which I’m in the middle.

*With noting that yeah it’s been a long while since my last post. If you’re a regular reader then I hope you haven’t missed out too much. If you’re new to the show, then I feel like there might be lots to come in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

Not drowning, but waving

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

There’s a wonderful poem by a British poet called Stevie Smith called “Not Waving, But Drowning”*, about a man swimming out of his depth and his friends on the shore thinking he was mucking around. The feelings of the man in question are too horrific to think about, but imagine for a moment the feelings those friends they must have gone through, waving to him as he panicked, laughing to each other about how daft their friend is, then realising one by one that they had it wrong. We can all imagine the blood running cold, the hole in the pit of the abdomen which seems to have some kind of gravitational pull for the rest of the body.

That feeling of realisation – specifically realisation of something negative – is something we’ve all experienced. Forgetting someone’s birthday gets you a little hit of it. Remembering you promised to do something or [in the olden days] actually physically be somewhere [remember that??], it’s all part of the same realisation. When the brain catches up, the body stays still and cold and heavy. On varying levels of seriousness, in my mind it’s the “oh…bollocks” [Please feel free to insert your own geographic or linguistic alternative here] moment.

Okay, let’s park that for a moment.

This time of year is always a weird one for me. My mum died nearly seven years ago, and it’s this time of year when the empty space she left in my world is felt most keenly. Actually, perhaps not ‘felt’ the most, but certainly brought to mind the most.

My work anniversary lands on March 8th, and I know it’s then because it was meant to be the 1st but I moved it back a week so I could go back home to go with Mum to a hospital appointment. Then her birthday is (was?) March 13th, and Mother’s Day [sorry to my arch pedant father for not calling it the “correct” title of ‘Mothering Sunday’ but I do not give enough of a shit x] is usually around the same time, then my birthday on March 20th [very nice thanks, my second in lockdown yet I had a lovely time and felt very spoilt], and then my wedding anniversary is April 5th and that’s the day she had her first round of chemo and then after that we’re on to May 4th and that’s the day she died, and the reason I remember that date so clearly is because it’s my wife’s birthday on May the 5th.

I can’t help connecting those dates, any more than you could. Take a moment and say your mum’s birthday out loud. We both know that if someone happened to say that date, your brain would automatically, without you asking it to do anything, pop up and go “that’s my mum’s birthday”.

[While we’re on that, isn’t it funny that you simply cannot help saying that very phrase out loud if someone else happens to mention that they have their birthday on that day? “Really?” you exclaim excitedly, “That’s my mum’s birthday!”. And they always say “really?!” and somehow from that moment on you’ve got a little connection with that person that you didn’t have before.]

So for around 8-10 weeks of every year, there’s a constant little reminder round the corner. Those are the dates and every day they will always be connected to a time in 2014 when my Mum went from a bit ill to very ill to very not here any more in the space of 3 or 4 months.

Okay, let me guide you back to the waves.

When my mum died, a friend of mine who runs another healthcare agency [hi Ed!] called me to “offer his condolences” [what an odd phrase we all use there. It’s the only time, just like the only time we talk about “legal tender” is when we end up with a Scottish tenner], and in our conversation he said that in his experience grief was like swimming in the surf. As you go out from the beach you jump or dive through each wave, but occasionally the waves are too close together and before you’ve got your feet or your breath you’re hit by another, and suddenly you’re under the surf and the bubbles are in your face and BANG you’re panicked and your heart rate shoots up and you just get your breath before the next one and so on.

But if you keep going, the further you go the smaller the surf becomes, until bit by bit you feel calmer and more able to ride the waves as they come. And sometimes a big one will hit you, but you have time to adjust after and so it’s not as overwhelming.

It was almost a “by the way” story, but I found it incredibly helpful in enabling me to believe that what I was in the middle of would get easier. No, wait, that’s not right. Not getting easier, but me getting more used to it and thus better at understanding it and riding the wave. It’s been so helpful that I’ve also shared it with friends who have lost someone [through death or also through break-up – the grief that comes from the end of a relationship is just as real and just as powerful as any other].

I’m talking about grief here, but honestly I think this is true for most things we’re going through. Churchill said:

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

And whilst that may seem a little glib, there’s damn good advice in there too. This too shall pass, and if you keep going out the waves will calm.

But here’s the hack for you.

Because I’ve learnt that at this time of year there are some chunky looking waves building on the horizon, I’ve also learnt to tell people I care about, and who care about me, that they’re coming. Not to excuse any behaviour, but because talking about the waves actually makes them a bit smaller when they arrive.

The people around you, who care about you, would want you to talk to them about your struggles, just as you would listen with love and care and consideration if they were to talk to you. It’s not always easy, but then nor is getting smashed by waves.

As for me, well I’m doing okay thanks. Surrounded by the right kind of people.

Definitely not drowning, but waving.

[*If you want to hear Stevie Smith talking about the poem and then reciting it (and I encourage you to do so), then you can find a recording here. It’s also in Loyle Carner’s recent album which shares its title with her poem, and if you like poetic, socially conscious hip hop then I also encourage you to check that out too, here on Spotify (and available on your music streaming choice too I’m sure) as I seem to be in the encouraging mood.]

We are all animals

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Imagine the situation – you’re in a whimsical conversation with a group of people, and someone asks “If you were an animal, what animal would you be?”. It’s a classic question. What’s your answer? A bear, because you’re strong but cuddly? An eagle, because you’d like to float over the world seeing things from on high? A sloth, because you’re incurably lazy and haven’t cut your fingernails for a year?

Well when I’m asked this question, I’ve developed a habit of saying “I’d be a 40-something male human”.

Partly I give this answer because I’m a clever-dick/smart ass [delete as appropriate for your geography] and take a kind of weird pleasure in being pedantic and low-level irritating [a trait I inherited from my old man along with various other things including gout – thanks so much Dad!], but partly I give it because it reveals a simple, irrefutable truth that we often choose to forget about ourselves:

We are animals.

And that’s what our current crazy situation has reminded me. That when you strip it all away, in a way that we tend not to do, you land on perhaps the plainest truth of all.

We are all just animals.

We are strategically shaved monkeys, and despite everything we have built up around ourselves over the last few thousand years we’re at the whim of a miniscule little virus. We can’t see it, we can’t fight it.

We have little computers in our pocket which can tell us any fact on earth within a minute or two [just think about that for a second – it really is incredible isn’t it?] and we’ve developed a society where we all know where to stand on the escalator and how to order a very, very particular kind of coffee with a particular kind of milk and even a particular way to make that milk hot and put it in the coffee.

But all of that means nothing in the face of that fact that we are the same animals we always were, just as vulnerable to a tiny little virus as our ancestors were thousands of years ago. As our descendants will be in thousands of years to come.

And as animals – simple, needs-driven animals – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tell us we first need food and shelter, then safety (personal, economic, psychological) and so on.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs | Simply Psychology
Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A theory of human motivation”. Psychological Review. 50(4): 370–96.

But in a developed country today the lower levels are, for most at least, all ticked off. Not only do we have “shelter”, we have spare rooms, underfloor heating, an app to turn on the heating before we get home.

So we create a new world of needs around us. We convince ourselves that we ‘need’ a pizza with cheese in the crust, a haircut, that new pair of Nikes, a phone with a better camera. Faster wifi, better holidays, a bigger house.

And then it’s all stripped away, by a tiny little invisible virus that closes our society down within a matter of weeks. Can’t get the pizza delivered. No point in the new Nikes if there’s nowhere to go and no one to show.

If this weird time has done anything for us, it’s taken us back to basics, exposing the real needs in our lives.

The need to get out of our homes, if only for an hour a day, to get our fix of fresh air, exercise, nature.

The need to connect with friends or families, virtually as we can’t do it in person.

The need to show our support for each other, be that through clapping into the quiet night air or by singing across balconies or by picking up medicines for those who can’t get out.

Think about these – they’re all, in their own way, a little rebellion against the feeling of having our freedom curtailed. Like any animal, we’re not happy in a cage – even an imaginary cage made of social responsibility and societal peer pressure which is protecting us from potential danger.

As animals, there’s no question that we’ve got too big for our boots. Drugged by the intoxicating idea that we are special – as individuals and as a species – and have some kind of right to have whatever we want.

So this is a unique time to reassess what is really valuable to us, and re-evaluate how we’ve been living our lives. To really establish what our true needs are, as communal animals. Because we’ve been shown that we only function as part of a wider society.

And we all need that society. In its true sense: the word comes from the Latin ‘socius’ meaning companion. Companionship, togetherness, collaborative association with others.

Surely we can come out of this with more balance than we came into it, right?

Less hubris, more humility. Less ‘me’, more ‘we’.

Yes we are all animals. Yes, individually we are vulnerable, weak, susceptible. But together, we have shown we can love and protect each other and build civilisations the like of which our ancestors could never have imagined.

And what we build from here? Well, that’s down to us to decide from this point on. Let’s not forget what feels important to us right now.

Take care. Be safe. Stay inside. Stop touching your face.

A new normal?

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

We’re all feeling it. That feeling that the world has got smaller. All it takes is a couple of weeks of self-isolation and suddenly the idea of meeting some friends, or out to see a gig, or even to go further than walking distance from your house… it all seems like a wild dream after too much blue cheese [true story – started happening to me about 5 years ago].

The restrictions on our lives, the lack of human contact, the worry about what might happen if we were to venture out: it’s all-consuming and there doesn’t seem like there’s an end in sight.

Week one was all about adjusting to the “new normal”.

Week two and the novelty has worn off a bit as we realise that we’re going to be like this for a while.

But there’s no way it can last more than a few weeks, right? I mean, people just won’t put up with it for much longer, right?

Every high street in Britain, every day

That’s the narrative we’re hearing. Even if leaving the house might endanger people’s lives or the lives of the people they love, it’s become an accepted truth that those people simply will not comply for very long at all. They’ll get bored. Stir crazy.

Just a couple of weeks into all this, with the prospect of many, many more to come, and we’re all going nuts about a situation which some people have to deal with all the time.

Millions of people around the world are effectively house-bound for all kinds of reasons – old age, chronic illness or injury, mental health – all the time. Not for a couple of weeks, but for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. Even for ever.

That’s isolation.

Some people don’t ever get visitors. Some people can’t ever go for a walk. Some people can’t ever even face the idea of human contact, or even going outside at all.

Here’s what this made me think of…

A couple of years back, the New York office of the agency for which I work (CDM) did an amazing project for a young boy called Peyton. He was 10 at the time, and because of a rare skin condition he couldn’t go out in sunlight without developing skin cancer. Imagine that, for a 10-year-old kid, unable to go outside with his friends? Never able to go to the open-air swimming pool with everyone else?

What they did for this kid was incredible. Working with all the residents of the small Midwest town in which Peyton lives, they “turned night into day” – without him knowing, they organised the whole town to come out as a sun went down to show their support for this one small boy – a huge barbeque, a marching band, high fives from the local pastor [feelin’ American Midwest enough for ya?] an announcement from the mayor, and the swimming pool floodlit and open to Peyton and all his friends, playing up to the camera just like every other 10-year-old in the world.

Once you’ve finished reading this [and not before – I am watching you] I urge you to go and watch the film of this here – it’s just beautiful, heart-wrenching stuff and if you don’t shed a single tear whilst watching it you have no soul.

They did this to highlight that people living with rare diseases – people like Peyton – have restrictions every single day. They will have for his whole life. We can’t go to the shops for a couple of weeks and we’re freaking out.

This crazy time has changed a lot of things – about how we’re working, how we’re connecting, how we’re becoming part of our communities.

If someone had said they wanted to work from home because of a disability a month or two ago I know for a fact that most employers would have totally discounted it as completely unworkable. Today we’re all doing it.

If someone had said that we should be looking out for the vulnerable in our community, checking in with them, offering to shop for them or just ring for a chat, I know that most of us would have thought “yeah, but I don’t really have the time myself”. Today, we’re creating community WhatsApp groups to make sure everyone’s covered.

Maybe, just maybe, this shitty little virus will have left us with something more than antibodies. Maybe we’ll be left with a new sense of empathy, and even some important new ways of working and connecting along the way.

Maybe when all this eventually blows over – and for sure, this too shall pass – maybe we’ll remember the feeling of having our lives, our choices impacted by something we couldn’t control.

And maybe we’ll give a little more thought to those for whom this isn’t the “new normal”: this is the same old normal as ever, just without being able to get a food delivery or any bog roll.

Now go watch “Good Morning Peyton”, and y’all stay safe now, y’hear?

Going viral

~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Last week as a birthday treat to myself [yeah, last Friday actually – not too late to send me a thoughtful yet expensive gift – I also accept PayPal] I got the new book The Rules of Contagion which has (totally coincidentally) just come out. It’s about how viruses spread. I know, right?

[In fact, it’s such a perfect time to publish a book like this that you can’t help wondering if it’s either a) someone very very quickly cashing in on a global pandemic/panic or b) that they actually started coronavirus in order to ensure people bought their book. But apparently neither are the case.]

Anyway, the book focuses around the concept of the R value, standing for the ‘reproductive value’, which basically mean the number of people that a single person with an infection will subsequently infect. Once the R value is below 1 – so that each infected person infects less than one other person (on average) – the virus starts to disappear.

For our new chum the coronavirus, that number is apparently somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5, the lower end of which is about the same as our normal seasonal flu. One seems to be that people can have mild (or even, as in the case of Idris Elba, pretty much no) symptoms which makes it more likely to get about, and old or infirm people get it really bad. But all in all, 1.5-3.5 is where it lands. There is a massive impact in the difference between those numbers, but that’s for another time…

[It does make me wonder about that guy who managed to infect 28 other people in New York – what was he doing, licking their eyes right after playing with his pet bat?]

The other part of the book – the part that gets really interesting for a behavioural scientist like me [posh name for a Psychology degree but hey, it’s my blog, right?] is that it’s not just a virus itself that will spread through contagion. So can information (or misinformation) about that virus can too, just in the same way, this time not through handshakes but through our “social” connections online, leading to worry and panic and eventually supermarkets being stripped clear of toilet paper like a corn field after a plague of locusts.

This got me thinking about the “super-spreader” of harmful misinformation that is Andrew Wakefield the ex-Etonian [really, again? What do they teach in that bloody place??] now disgraced and struck-off doctor who published a paper in 1998 claiming a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism.

It’s now claimed the whole thing was a money-making scam (he allegedly had his own patent for a ‘rival vaccine’) but regardless of his motives his research has been totally discredited and outside of a weird anti-vax bubble he’s a pariah… and yet the anti-vax movement is still raging, 22 years later, with overall vaccination rates (which need to be at 95% to protect us from outbreaks) down to 90.3% in 2018-19 in the UK. In some communities – more middle class and supposedly educated – it’s way lower. And guess what? Yep, measles is back. Measles can leave kids blind. It can kill. For immunosuppressed adults, it’s bloody dangerous. Well done dickhead.

Disinformation is a virus.

So is hate, abuse, division. And now our “social” networks spread these just as a handshake might spread coronavirus.

Look at Twitter (and Facebook to some degree, but as it’s less anonymous it’s less poisonous) and you’ll see the viruses being spread. They infect our world based on someone’s R value.

Which is why the Donald’s and Piers’ of this world are super-spreaders too. In their own selfish little way.

But wait…

If these “social” places do spread these negative feelings like viruses… couldn’t they also be used to spread something positive?

Over the last few days, Facebook has been full of people looking out for each other, setting up groups to offer help to strangers, sharing links to resources. As well as the cesspool which will always be full of shite on Twitter, there are pockets of love and kindness and connection between people who’ve never met.

This is community. This is society. There’s no time for division when we’re under attack from something we can’t see.

So let’s connect more, care more, include more than we ever have before. Isolate, sure, but do it with open arms and big hearts. Build bridges. Build connections. Seek to understand, to empathise.

See how compassionate you dare to be today.

What’s your R value? Go, spread love.

This too shall pass

~ Phil Bartlett ~ 2 Comments

Since Tuesday of last week, I’ve been in “self-isolation”. It started with having a high temperature on Tuesday morning, followed by generally feeling pretty crap for the next few days, including an annoying [dare I say “persistent”?!] cough for a couple of days too as well as feeling ridiculously tired all the time. It went from just ‘having a cold’ to “being in self-isolation” on about Thursday when the advice from the UK government around coronavirus changed…

So, have I had coronavirus?

Honestly, I haven’t a clue. If I had to put money on it I’d say ‘no’ because I really don’t think I’ve been that ill. But if this new virus chum of ours isn’t that bad for [relatively!] fit and healthy people under 60 then maybe I have. But I reckon probably not.

But suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we’re in the middle of a disaster movie from the mid-noughties, where things seem to be changing so quickly and really no one knows what the hell is going to happen.

Suddenly it doesn’t matter who you are or where you live. It doesn’t matter how much hand sanitizer you haven’t got or how much toilet paper you have. It doesn’t matter whether you think this is all going to go away like bird flu or smash through us like Spanish flu, because you’re going to be on the receiving end of what happens. Just like me, just like everyone.

[I’m sorely tempted to go down a rabbit hole where I point out that the virus doesn’t discriminate between gender, race, sexual preference, etc etc and that this show’s we’re all fundamentally just people, but I think that could end up with me celebrating a killer virus for its inclusivity credentials and whilst somewhat entertaining and whimsical I’m not sure that’s helpful for anyone…]

Okay, before I get too nihilistic, let’s consider something else, shall we?

The very first of the three Universal Truths in Buddhist teaching* is that everything is impermanent and ever-changing. To me, that seems pretty irrefutable for every possible subject: societal, social, biological, ecological, intellectual. Everything is changing, and will always change. Nothing is permanent.

Yet we wander through this world like we’re the end of evolution; like this society we’ve created around us represents civilisation is at its peak.

We’re not. And it’s not.

In evolutionary terms, our wonderful, fascinating, challenging civilisation doesn’t even register.

One day all the cities we’ve built will be found by the archaeologists of the future. Don’t believe me? Ask the Pharaohs, or the Greeks, or the Aztecs.

In fifty years the idea of social media will be laughable. I mean, we already raise a smile about MySpace or AskJeeves and they were only a few years back.

And next year we’ll look back at coronavirus, or COVID19 [sounds scarier but less interesting to me] and say “that was crazy, wasn’t it”.

“So what’s the point of all this Bartlett”, I hear you cry, “are you saying all life is ultimately futile because we’re all just dust in the wind?”

No. No I’m not.

I’m saying that whatever difficulties lie ahead – and difficulties there will be, of that we can be certain – you should just remember that impermanence, summed up so beautifully by one simple old Middle Eastern saying:

This too shall pass

This too shall pass – in Persian [apparently – blame Google if this isn’t right]

There will be a day when we look back at all this.

Perhaps we’ll sigh and say “remember all the fuss and nonsense about how it was going to end the world?”. Perhaps we’ll say “do you remember when we thought we’d be starting up sporting events in just a few weeks?”. And there will definitely be people who say “we’re never going to get through all this toilet paper”.

But until that day comes all we can do is remember to look out for each other, trust each other, care about each other. It’s how we’ve all got to where we are, and it’s how we’ll get from here to wherever the hell we’re going from here.

Take care x

*If you’re interested in learning a bit about Buddhism, you couldn’t do much better in my view than reading the fascinating book Why Buddism Is True by Robert Wright. It’s all about how ancient Buddhist teachings about the idea of ‘self’ align with modern neuroscience and psychology, and gave me an interesting perspective that’s allowed me to let go of a little of my personal angst along the way. Yes, this is the kind of shit I read for fun. Yes I know that’s a bit weird.