my life

I’m so lucky and I know my life is just perfect right now. A famous philosopher once said that to be truly happy you need 3 things: a job that fulfills you; to make a difference every day, no matter how little; and someone to share your love with.

I feel like one of the luckiest people alive as I have all those things and much more.

The view from my office as the sun goes down

Aside from the necessities like food and water, I am sitting here writing this on the terrace of my little yellow house in the middle of Italy with everything I need.  My office for the next 2 weeks is where I’ll be working on SimpleCMS, a project I really have a lot of passion for, with Simon, a man I have utmost respect for.

Estelle made some amazing Italian food... Mmmm!

Whilst I’m working away on something I enjoy, Estelle, my amazing girlfriend, is downstairs happily putting together a meal with tomatoes and mozzarella and a little olive oil and garlic for our dinner. Back at home I have a family who loves me; an amazing, beautiful mother who is ever loving and a father who supports me in anything I choose to do, as well as 3 wonderful sisters who I adore. I have some amazing friends who I have had the pleasure of spending some time with whilst back in England for the past few months.

Right now I can see the sun slowly setting over the mountains so it’s not too hot anymore, but I’ll not need to wear more than just a t-shirt for the rest of the night. I can hear the sound of birds with the clarity of nature’s surround sound… and as I wrote that sentence, right on cue, there was the distinct sound of a baby laughing in the distance.

I don’t think my world can get any better and more perfect than it is now. So I’m writing this to never forget how lucky I am, and to remember that I knew how lucky I was when I was right here, right now, in the moment.

Listen to the sounds I can hear all around me

Except that some are more equal than others. As I was walking back from the hospital having enjoyed a nice lunch with Estelle, I walked past a man in a doorway. Not an unusual sight to see in Paris, except that this man was just sitting in his doorway, with his bedding laid out, looking at photographs.

As is customary, I walked straight past him. Something compelled me to go back however and ask him why he was there. It turns out that this man was from Sri Lanka and the photos were of him and his wife. She was beautiful and they both looked very happy in the photos he was to proudly showing me.

A far cry from the yellow-brown sadness his eyes now held. He was holding back tears as he explained how he was once a fighter for the Tamil Tigers and was escaping certain death in his own country, should he return.

As this is not a political entry I don’t want to discuss the stance of the Tigers as freedom fighters versus terrorists. We may not agree with some of the things our government are doing but the worst that can happen to a European is that we are incarcerated if we fight for what we believe in. This is about a man with no options, with nothing and nobody to help him, in a place so far removed from where his life started.

He told me how he used to work in the restaurant trade when he was in Sri Lanka and how all he wants now is to get a job to be able to afford a roof over his head and bide his time until he is safe to go back to his own country and be re-united with his wife.

All I could do is give him my time and a small amount of money. Thankfully, Estelle is a social worker and an advocate for people with nobody to turn to and she agreed that she will try to help him.

I keep hearing that human beings have never been more connected than we are today. If that is really the case then why do I feel so disconnected?

We hear about the multitude of online communities, but when was the last time anyone from these online communities took out your bins out on a Sunday night or collected a parcel for you when you were out for the day?

When I was growing up, everyone knew pretty much everyone else in the place where we lived. This wasn’t the Home Counties in the 1950s where I can imagine old men tipping their hats was a regular occurrence. No, this was the 1980s and this was a village-cum-council estate outside Hull. But there was a community of sorts and it was a nice place to grow up.

A few months ago I had 750+ friends on Facebook. I had met every single one of these people face-to-face at one time or another in my life. Old friends from school (I say friends, I didn’t have that many so in reality they tended to be people I just shared a classroom with), friends from my travels around the many countries I have visited, friends from university and more recently the friends that I have made whilst living in New Zealand.

I made a decision over Christmas to have a cull. I had come to the conclusion that, quite frankly, if Lee Wilkinson (it could be anyone, Lee, if by odd chance you’re reading this) were to wander over to me in the street and offer me the opportunity to spend ten minutes looking at photos of him and his mates paint balling somewhere in South Yorkshire, or his third child’s Christening at a Church in Aldbrough, I would almost definitely decline his offer, if I even recognised this man in the first place.

So why do I find myself spending hours and hours doing exactly that, only to momentarily wake from this Facebook-induced zombie-like state wondering where the last hour of my life has gone to, never to be seen or heard from again? I decided to get rid of all these people who, to be quite frank, I don’t give a shit about.

But this got me thinking about all the people that I do give a shit about: there’s me thinking that sites like Facebook have given me the opportunity to keep in touch with all these people who I do value in my life and who I would happily sit down with over a cup of tea to look at their holiday snaps. I realised that these people are not connecting with me at all, and the likelihood is that I’m not connecting with them either.

These online communities, even the ones containing real people who would take out your bins given the opportunity, are not communities connecting real people. They’re communities alright, but they only connect our facias together. They connect our egos; ‘Cool Gav’ to ‘Successful Dave’ – they keep you up to date with ‘Fun Gav, who never has a bad day and when he does it’s almost surely going to be lived and laughed at in an ironic way’.

We’re all a part of our own reality TV show and to say we’re more connected now is just not true. We’re certainly more contactable, but contactable is not the same as connected. Right, I’m off to take Gill’s bins out!

When I was a boy I was lucky enough to visit Cornwall with my Mum, her partner at the time and my sister, Rachel. Hull to Cornwall is quite a long drive by British standards – about 7 hours, and around eleven if you keep getting lost! As I was going to be sat in a hot and sticky car for such a long time I decided I would be a good idea to compile a C90 tape of all my favourite Beatles songs. Classic titles like Blue Jay Way, Your Mother Should Know and Rain all made it on there. My Walkman (okay, it was a ‘Sanyo with Auto-Reverse!’) had brand new AAs, and with some spare ones in my pocket, I was ready for the long journey.

There was always something exciting about choosing which songs would make it onto a mix tape

Being a typical stroppy little 11 year old, and not wishing to have anything that even resembled a conversation with anyone else, I remember listening to around 15 songs non-stop for the whole duration of the trip, there and back. I knew which song would be playing next, every single word as well as every chord change and I was really happy.

Now, fast forward 15 years and I was the proud owner of a brand new iPod.

Not only could I listen to every CD album I had ever bought or downloaded, I could also rip and add every album that my friends and family had ever owned. At the last count, I had over 15,000 songs.

So, 15 songs and I’m as happy as a clam in high water; if I have over a thousand times as many songs then…… well all I do now is skip, skip… skip. I have become a lot less satisfied with the music I am listening to; not because of the music itself, but because of the medium I have chosen to listen with. Has the shear amount of choice killed the music, like video killed the radio star?

In case you haven’t guessed, this isn’t a post about Sanyo cassette players versus iPods and is actually a reflection of life in general. Not just my life, but also the lives of a good number of my friends who have been lucky enough to have ‘lived’.

I have travelled to more countries than most folk will ever visit in their lives; I have met more people than I can even remember; and have had more adventures than that little boy in the back of the Ford Escort had ever dreamed of having. On the contrary my sister, Leanne, has lived in Hull all her life and worked in the same admin job since leaving school. Leanne is one of the happiest people I know.

Whilst I know that her life choice was never going to suit me, I sometimes wish that I could go back to a time when things were just simpler. Trouble is though, once you’ve owned an iPod it’s so very hard to go back to cassette players.