Sing this with me this is 40

  I had the conversation about “generations” again last week. Quite frankly I’m tired of having it and I really must stop getting drawn into it. I even went to the trouble of having a related conversation with my new best friend, well, we are all doing it. Chat GPT told me how to be tactful and diplomatic in putting forward my views and the like. Unlike the young people of today, I forget which generation they are supposed to be, depends who you talk to. They are all-in with their snow-flakiness and their demands for a better life. Now any serious statistician should never promote an argument on anecdotal observations, or even worse, some kind of statement that starts with, “well I was very different when I was [insert age here]”. So I won’t do that. No, really. Back in early 1989 I had been itching to bring my training scheme to its conclusion and move on to my (see the possessive determiner there?!) first real job as an Assistant Manager. Wherever you group people together, they ...

Memory can play tricks on all of us if we allow it too, and the rose-tinted spectacles can be donned and waves of nostalgia can make the past seem much better than it actually was. That old Shakespearean theme of the bad being interred with bones, something like that. So it is with the 1980s, if you look back now it all seems so bright, optimistic and positive, when it reality it was a time of massive structural change that was atomising our communities and paving the way for the fractured and broken country we have now. But there were good things happening to me. Not that I was thinking too much about it as 1988 dawned. Life seemed quite positive as finally I got my opportunity to move to the back room and work as part of the Lending and Securities teams. This was where the fun in the branch seemed to be, most of the people working there seemed actually to enjoy being there, and a lot of laughter was always radiating from the room, in quite stark contrast to the rest of the branch, wh...

How did an idealistic, slightly naive, vaguely progressive young man of Thatcher’s Britain end up working for a Bank? It’s a very good question, well I think it is. The simple and most obvious answer is “money”. I was fed up with being broke or nearly broke, and graduate management training schemes offered great starting salaries and even better potential future salaries. Then there were the benefits. In a world, a time and a culture obsessed with owning your own home, employment with a bank offered cheap fixed-rate mortgages at a time when interest rates were high and extremely volatile.  But there was more to it than that, at least from the perspective of 40 years I think there was. At that age I was still trying to please my parents, even if they didn’t know it and I didn’t know it. Even if I was hardly speaking to them at the time, some part of me was trying to do something they’d approve of. Furthermore banks in those days were still highly bureaucratic and employed tens of th...

Forty years. Wow. That is (very nearly) how long I have been working in full-time, paid employment. On the first of January 1986 I was probably recovering from a hangover somewhere, I can’t remember, but I do know I was rapidly approaching my final exams of my Biochemistry degree at Royal Holloway, University of London. There is a long story I could tell about my student days, how I came to be there, what it was like, but the purpose of this blog is to document, in forty stories, the first forty years of my working life. I hope you enjoy reading them, but if you are not happy with any of this, please leave me a comment below. I may take your feedback onboard! There is one pertinent fact about those student days, relevant to the start of my working life, and that was how much I had become involved in so-called student politics and the role the Student Union played at the University. Unlike many other unions at the time it was not heavily politicised, and though politics played a part, t...