It’s a new school year and memories of tests failed, repeated years and thwarted ambitions waft through the air again as the leaves start to turn, the air chills and the first signs of Christmas appear on the supermarket shelves.
What did we learn from our summer break that will see us through the darkening days? That some weapons are more righteous than others? That whilst we might hope that it’s never too late to become the tennis player we always wanted to be, that in fact it is? Much too late? That our grandiose political aspirations are crumbling faster than a cup cake straight out of the oven in the Great British Bake Off?
The sound of lives cut short, the acrid smell of relationships souring, the sound of economies going pop, this is what we’re learning this summer.
It may that after the heady hazy days of summer that we cast a quizzical look at our new school pals, throw an astonished glance to the teachers in charge and run out of the school gates as fast as our little short trousered legs will carry us.
It worked for me for a while when I was about to turn five although the inevitable grip that school was to exert eventually meant I donned my cap and blazer with the best and the rest of them.
Teachers, when you’re back in that classroom, counting them in and counting them out, please save some extra time for those in front of you who are yearning to run a mile at top speed out of the classroom, down the hall and out into the road. They may have learnt far too much for their own liking over the summer and just may not be ready to soak up your phonemes and calculus.
Ruth Pringle of Blue Noun, an English language school specialising in coaching English to learners in creative professions, has recently read one of our articles in our Business Allotment publication and very helpfully fed back the following testimonial:
A nice bit of positivity for my morning. At the beginning of this year I signed up to a couple of online business trainings (which were themselves very good), but ever since, my socials have been flooded with self-proclaimed gurus trying to get me to invest with them and their ‘unique methods’. Their adverts more often than not laced with fake positivity, false goals – and assumptions about me that are frankly offensive: their currency is the transparent exploitation of what they presume are business owners’ insecurities – and not a celebration of their strengths (apparently we need them to feel strong). I love this Dr. Nick Owen FRSA MBE. Very wise. Very refreshing! I feel powerful for having dipped my toe in!
If you’d like some more helpful tips for business start ups, lessons for life, just check out our site here.
This summer, 20 prize winning phrases written by the people of Barrow-in-Furness will go on display alongside Cumbrian artists in an exhibition at Rheged Gallery, Penrith. The exhibition champions Cumbrian creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic details of which you can see here.
Inspired by 8 empty sky blue billboards in the town, Art Gene invited people from Barrow and Furness to enter their own suggestions for phrases to fill the space. From over 180 entries, 20 competition winners were selected by Artist/Directors Stuart Bastik and Maddi Nicholson, and were presented in a socially distanced, outdoor artwork created by Maddi outside Art Gene HQ on Abbey Road in Barrow last year.
Nick Owen was one of the proud competition winners with his entry:
No no no no no no no yes
which itself was inspired by an earlier poem he wrote entitled Resistance is Futile, itself inspired by the Borg of even earlier manifestations of Star Trek. The Borg would take immense amount of pleasure telling their hapless victims that ‘resistance was futile’ and that they just better buckle down and be happy with their lot. Even if it did mean colonisation, subjugation and eventual death.
It seemed right for this competition as he would often hear, when he was in Barrow, lots of reasons why things couldn’t happen – whether this be in a street, in a business, in a school: in all sorts of places from all sorts of people. Hearing ‘no’ so often suggested that resistance to any kind of positive social change was pointless: and it seemed that in some quarters, the Borg were alive and kicking in Barrow.
People who tended to say ‘yes’ though were more likely to be the artists and educators who worked or lived here. in the time he lived and worked in Barrow, he was increasingly be inspired by those who said ‘yes’ to the challenges, opportunities and sheer wonder of the town, its history and relationship with the natural (and industrial) worlds. In short, he was reminded that resistance to the ‘no’ wasn’t futile, that difficulties could be overcome and that apathy was a choice, not a biological or economic given.
So for him, the poem summarises the aspiration of when faced with so many ‘no-es’, so many reasons not to do things, we need to find the ‘yes’ in a situation. If we can find the ‘yes’, we can transform ourselves, our families, our communities and the world at large.
There’s No Such Thing as an Englishman is an anthology of poetry from an irritated England and marks the many sources of irritation faced by the average Englishman or woman these days – everything from the railways to referenda via what ever it is the young call music these days.
It was launched on 31 January 2020 – the day when the UK left the European Union and when the phenomenon known as Brexit finally, we liked to think, finally evaporated and all those years of frustration, anger, sheer disbelief and irritation all come to rest. But as Chairman Mao once said about what he thought the effects of the French Revolution were, it was way too soon to tell.
But its two authors – Nick Owen and Janice Owen – have become accomplished at becoming irritated at many facets of life in England over the years and hope that you, dear reader, will find some solace in knowing that you are not alone when it comes to feeling frustrated, pissed off, angry or just good old fashioned irritated.
Being English though, means we’ve just reached a level of irritation and aren’t quite ready to riot. Yet.
Clare is currently on holiday, sat at a Mediterranean hotel pool-side considering her next career steps. A long history of regular employment within the manufacturingindustry has been a source of much stability and comfort; but increasingly as that industry gets leaner and meaner, she finds herself increasingly inside someone elses business, looking out at the possibility of setting up her own. A recent redundancy threat has focussed her attention substantially.
This move from long term employment to making something from nothing is a huge step for a fledgling entrepreneur who’s not spent the last 3 years at university on various boot camps, workshops or motivational seminars which are all geared up to the thrusting alpha (fe)male, hungry generation Y millenials who grew up in Thatcher’s Britain and know nothing other than cutting your opponents throat before wishing them to have a nice day. For Clare, and many others who are coming into business after a long time in employment, the thought of taking the next steps into self employment is riddled with uncertainty and doubt.
Today however she’s at the hotel pool-side, waiting for her kids to join her and as it’s still early, the pool has been undisturbed, it’s surface flat and as still as a mirror. She sits on the edge of the pool and slowly dips a toe in and out: and that small action sends out a series of ripples across the pool surface which travel undisturbed to the other side and from end to end. A ripple pattern shapes it’s way across the surface and before long she sees her small actions having a series of small but significant effects across the pool. She’s disturbed the status quo and nothing will be quite the same again.
Dipping her toe in and out of the pool is her first business move: the occasional phone call, the hesitant email, the chance meeting all combine to produce a series of actions which show the early business actions, reactions, causes, effects and consequences: all at a distance, someway removed from where she’s sat: but actions they are, and there’s no un-doing them. Her business is beginning to make ripples back in the UK and when she gets home, her second steps will be to make some bigger waves and reap the consequences of those first tentative toes in the water.
