Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Birthday, Daddyhood, Jill, Otis, Rosie, Sky
On Monday, I posted about why I’m a birthday bastard because I give my colleagues prick pressies in the form of customised cakes.
Well as you know, just over a month ago it was my birthday and my son, aged 8, did the same to me. Except his is less prick but definitely owning me.
You see Otis has a budgie called Sky.
To be honest, I’m quite shocked at how much I like Sky.
It has bags of personality, chirps happily every day and apart from tapping its beak on the iPad when let out its cage, is pretty perfect and beautiful.
Hell, even Rosie – my beloved moggy – likes her.
OK, maybe that’s too much of a promise, but she definitely puts up with her.
Anyway, the guys at Colenso think that because I never really talk about Sky, I hate her.
True, I don’t love her as much as Rosie, but I definitely don’t hate her.
Well one day I told Otis what my colleagues thought and last month – on my birthday – he presented me with matching t-shirts, for him and me.
And it says this …
How genius is that!
He designed it with his Mum and I loved it so much that I wore it while giving my talk with Martin and Paula at Cannes.
I had had another t-shirt made for the occasion, but this won.
Which means he’s a much better – and thoughtful – present manipulator and it’s another reason I love him from the top of his head to the tip of his toe.
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Tomorrow we have the day off to celebrate Matariki.
It’s an important day in New Zealand and if you want to know why, click here.
See you Monday.
So someone slid into my DM’s recently.
I know … what the absolute fuck?
But it wasn’t a crypto scam … or someone offering to sell me insta followers … or a Russian beauty who is really a bot.
It was a lovely, kind and thoughtful message from someone I didn’t know.
LyonsOfScotland wrote to say they loved how I talked about my parents and how it made them think of their Dad, Peter, who had sadly passed away.
Then said that to honour their Dad, they had started a sweater company – Lyons Of Scotland.
But it was no typical sweater … this was designed to be something that lasted. Lasted so long you could pass it onto someone you love when you die, so they can stay close to you even when you’re not there.
Then they said they wanted to give me one as a gift.
If I’m honest, I didn’t know what to say. I was just so touched.
Touched that my feelings towards my family had moved someone in such a way. Touched that someone had done something so amazing to honour their parents. Touched that they wanted to give me something that they made with such love.
The one thing I knew was that I couldn’t accept the gift.
As you all know, I love freebies as much as the next person [especially when the next person is a obsessive freebie groupie] but this was not a corporation with squillions in the bank, this was a company doing something that was deeply, deeply personal … so I said I would buy one of their products instead.
Now it wasn’t cheap.
In fact it may have been the most expensive item of clothing I’ve ever bought.
But apart from the fact LyonsOfScotland kindly gave me a discount code to offset the price, it is a sweater made of the absolute highest of quality.
Of course it would have to be because it is made to be loved and last a lifetime.
And I’m excited to get it … but even more excited it will be something I can pass on to Otis.
Sure, I hope it’s a long time before I have to do that, but identifying some key items that allow him and I to stay connected when we’re apart is important to me.
And I think important to him.
Which is why if anyone else feels in a similar situation – or touched in the same way – the kind people at LyonsOfScotland have offered a discount code for you.
Simply go to lyonsofscotland.com … and when you order, use the word ‘rob’ as the discount code to get 25% off.
I love what they’re doing.
I love why they’re doing it.
Because while they say it’s made of cashmere, it’s really made of emotion.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, China, Colenso, Culture, Dad, Daddyhood, Emotion, Empathy, England, Family, Friendship, Happiness, Home, Jill, London, Loyalty, Mum, Mum & Dad, New Zealand, Nottingham, Nottingham Forest, Otis, Parents
I was born in 1970 in Nottingham.
For 25 years, I lived there, worked there, socialised there.
Sure, I also worked in London … but I always came home to NG2.
Every. Bloody. Night.
But in 1995, I left.
I went to Australia and started an adventure all over the place. And while I back to the UK after 24 years – I never went back to living in Nottingham.
And yet, despite having now spent more time away from Nottingham than living in it, it’s still what I regard as ‘home’.
Sure it’s where my formative years were spent.
Sure it’s where my parents ashes have been spread.
Sure it’s where my beloved Paul still lives.
Sure it’s where my football team resides.
Sure it’s where I spent the longest period of my life in.
But still …
What is also interesting is that when I go back, while I feel a sense of familiarity, I also feel disconnected. Of course, that’s to be expected when you’ve been away for so long … but it means when I think – or am in – Nottingham, I feel displaced and comforted at the same time.
It’s a weird feeling, caught between 2 emotional poles …
A stranger in where you believe you come from.
Of course, I go through similar feelings when I visit previous places I once lived – especially Shanghai, which is the place I probably felt the most connected to – but Nottingham is where I have roots [or where I used to have them] and so while I am far away, I am increasingly surrounding myself with stuff that reminds me of the place.
But I don’t want to go back.
It is my past rather than my future.
And that’s where it all gets complicated because I want Otis to have a place where he can build roots like I did with Nottingham, but I don’t know if that’s possible or where that is.
He’s 8 and lived in 4 countries already.
More than that, at some point we’ll be leaving here.
Don’t get me wrong, we love NZ.
We adore our home.
But we feel our life still has other places to go.
It won’t happen in the short term …
We are happy here, Otis absolutely adores it, we want him to be in a place longer than the 2 year periods he’s experienced so far in his life and I haven’t yet repaid the generosity the country has shown us … but it will eventually happen and so I wonder what Otis will regard as his ‘identity’.
If you ask him now, he’ll say, “China”.
I love that, but it’s also more because of where he was born rather than where he was raised.
So we shall see.
Of course we could just stay here and remove the issue … and while there’s a big part of us that would like to do that, we also would like to be closer to the people who matter most to us.
At some point.
This may all sound like a reason to never move country and if that’s how it comes across then that would be wrong.
It’s dead easy to think about what you will miss by moving away but you need to think about what you will gain. And in my case, apart from Paul and Shelly in Nottingham … every single thing in my life is because I took that leap.
Everything.
My wife.
My son.
My cat.
My home.
My career.
My life.
So while identity is increasingly important to me, I’m not going to devalue the utter privilege of the adventure we’ve had – and will hopefully keep having. Especially given nationalism is increasingly acting as a barrier towards the understanding and acceptance of others… rather than a way for people to identify, share and grow.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Australia, China, Corona Virus, Dad, Daddyhood, Emotion, England, Family, Hong Kong, Jill, LaLaLand, Mum, Mum & Dad, My Fatherhood, New Zealand, Nottingham, Otis, Parents
The above photo was taken back in 2020.
We were living in Fulham.
Everyone was working from home.
And we suspected Otis may have had COVID.
As it turned out, he didn’t – thankfully.
But I love that photo.
The closeness.
The intimacy.
The caring Mum and the curious kid.
A shared moment ruined by me coming in and taking a pic – as usual, hahaha.
But who can blame me? Those two are everything to me.
And the older I get, the more I realise how much time I didn’t spend with them.
That realisation started with COVID.
While the pandemic was so devastating to so many – it was very good to me.
I got to be with my family for longer than I’d ever been in our time together.
Waking up together.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner together.
Putting Otis to bed and then going to bed with Jill at the same time.
EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
Now I know for so many that’s a regular thing but for me it wasn’t and the experience was wonderful and confronting.
Wonderful for how it made me feel. Confronting for how I had allowed that to happen.
Don’t get me wrong … I love work. Or should I say I love parts of work.
And as much as it may not be cool to say anymore, but I loved the travel.
Not being on a plane for the COVID years – bar, moving to NZ – felt like a genuine loss.
Not at first – initially it felt amazing, given how regularly I had been travelling – but after 2+ years, I was ready to hear those engines whir into life. Just not so regularly as I had before … because flying internationally at least once a week, every week for years was just plain idiotic.
And while I don’t want to let all of it go, I have been changing big parts of how I am choosing to live and it all came from something my Dad once said to me.
You see, my Dad had quite an eclectic early professional life.
Not just changing jobs, but whole industries.
I remember asking him why he had done it and he said this:
“I love you and your Mum. So if I’m going to be away from you both for most of the day, I better like what I’m doing because nothing would be so disrespectful as being away for something I hate”
Now I appreciate the privilege in that statement.
There are many who don’t have the opportunity to chase after things that interest them.
And for my Dad, that was enabled by the stability of my brilliant Mum – similar to what Jill has done for me in allowing me to uproot us every few years for an adventure in some other far distant part of the world.
But while I’ve generally enjoyed what I have done … as I get older, it’s becoming more and more apparent that I want to ensure my family is given even greater prioritisation in what I do. That doesn’t mean they weren’t before … but I realise they could have been prioritised a fuck load more.
In some ways, it’s a perfect time for this to happen.
I’m approaching a point in life where some decisions will have to be made regarding my future.
What do I want to do?
Who do I want to do it with – and for?
What do I want to explore, experience and achieve?
Where is the best place for us to be located?
What are the conditions we need to protect what we have?
For me, these are revelation questions.
Previously, I just went with whatever excited/scared me/us the most.
And while this doesn’t mean we’re now happy to settle – because let’s face it, I suck at it, thanks to my only-child inspired, competitive, curious and annoyingly ambitious energy – it does mean these questions ensure my/our decisions are focused on ensuring my family get the best of me, not just what is left of me because the one thing covid taught me is nothing is as important as being together.
It’s pathetic I needed a global pandemic to really drive that home.
But to paraphrase my dad, nothing would be as disrespectful to my family than ignoring what became one of the most precious times of my life with my family.
Thanks to Easter, I get to spend the next 4 days with them … hopefully eating chocolate.
So wherever you are and whoever you’re with, I hope you get to spend it with someone that matters.
Even if that’s just yourself.
Happy holiday … and I apologise for the indulgent, happy-clappy post of today.