Over the years I have enjoyed many hobbies and interests, the most constant being reading and gardening. Cycling too, but I did take a 20-year break from this. I suppose I must also declare another interest, which is writing. I find that I can be quite creative once I start writing, although I do need a prompt to start me off. From the age of 15 I kept a diary, on and off. I missed out 1975, which I am very annoyed about, because that was a momentous year when I left school and began working. I kept a diary every year from 1976 until 1986, with entries for the later years becoming rather sparse. I didn’t buy a diary in 1987, but instead, Geraldine and I used monthly wall calendars, upon which we both jotted down what was happening in our lives and I’ve held onto these. Although not the same as a diary, they provide an indication of key events, although looking back now, some of the brief notes are rather cryptic. Since the dawn of the digital age (I first bought a PC around 1996), I have been jotting down events on an Excel spreadsheet and it is all these resources that have helped in writing this memoir.
At work in 2005, I was given a task of writing a newsletter for the Project Management function. I completed this and was quite proud of the result, which was a 4-page document containing several stories and a few photographs. However, I needed to get it approved before it was sent out and this took three weeks going through the management hierarchy. When I eventually sent it out, it was no longer ‘news’. I had a similar problem with the following edition, and so I complained to my boss that this wasn’t working. He came up with the novel idea that I should send a brief update to the PM community each week, telling them about whatever topic I felt was newsworthy. He told me not to seek approval for this, but just to send it to the 300 people on the distribution and if anything needed changing, to correct it the following week. I sent out the first ‘Weekly Brief’ on 26th August 2005, and I continued to produce this for the next eleven years. The newsletter now goes to around 1,400 people, mainly in the UK, but I do have readers in Munich, Saudi Arabia, Australia and the United States. This is my legacy to the company, and it is now known colloquially as Bernard’s Blog, even though it possibly pre-dates the term ‘blog’.
Another example of my enjoyment of writing is a Christmas letter. I know there have been numerous derogatory articles written about such missives, the main complaints being that they are self-indulgent and boastful. I received one in 2001 and enjoyed it so much that the following year, I decided to write one myself. My friends who received it gave feedback that it was enjoyable and so I have continued ever since. I make it factual but try to include humour wherever possible. My purpose is partly to inform my friends whom I don’t see too often (hence the need for them to be on a Christmas card list) about what’s happening with our lives, but it also serves as a reminder to me about what events each year has held. The letters fit onto two sides of A4 paper using Ariel 10 font, which limits me to around 2000 words which hopefully reduces boredom amongst readers.
Returning to the chapter topic, I have noticed that many of my hobbies and interests are cyclical; a hobby will rarely last for more than seven years before I grow fed up of it and move on. I’m not sure whether this is something I ought to worry about, but Mum used to tell me that everyone’s life undergoes a significant change every seven years, and I believe she is right. She explained that as we grow, we are babies until the age of seven, go through childhood up to the age of fourteen, and we are adolescents until around aged 21. Beyond that, there are subtle lifestyle changes which we just accept as part of getting older, which often seem to occur every seven years or so (moving house, having children, changing jobs etc.). I still believe this, even though for my children, the changes appeared to happen earlier than the expected seven years. I am convinced that these days all children become adolescents soon after leaving primary school, although I am remain unconvinced that they reach full maturity any sooner.
I have created a timeline of the main hobbies and interests that have taken up my spare time over the years (see below), and it is interesting to note that although two of my interests (reading and gardening) have been almost constant, the others have all had a short(ish) life. The median value for all the interests is seven years and if cycling is broken up into two separate elements, and reading and gardening are excluded, the average is also seven years, so it looks like Mum was absolutely right.
You may well wish to add another long-lasting interest of mine after reading that last paragraph, that of playing with statistics and data. I have always loved messing with numbers, from my early days cataloguing and racing Matchbox cars, through developing ways to play Monopoly on my own and more recently, becoming obsessed with cycling data on Strava. I’ve even collected data about writing this memoir. I decided before I started how many chapters there were going to be, I estimated each chapter length and I’ve then been monitoring how my initial estimates compare to reality. For the record, I initially jotted down 28 chapter headings, and estimated that they would need an average of 2000 words each. As the document has developed, the chapters have reduced to 19 (although this one has thirteen sub-sections) and the average length has increased to around 3000 words, predicting a total of 57,000 words. I’m interested to see how accurate this prediction remains.
Some of the interests in the table above, perhaps need some explanation, although I think some have already been sufficiently covered. Lapidary, however, certainly hasn’t, and I suspect that some readers will not recognise the term, so I shall elaborate below.