What follows is neither a how to, nor a how not to, but a one-year-on reflection on my departure from a long-established self-managing set, to which I had belonged for nine lovely years. What led me to leave? How did I do it? How do I feel now?

The set had been active for many years; I joined it in its maturity, so that I was the one to adjust my Action Learning thinking and practice to the set’s way of doing things. There were sound lessons, for I learned the strength of bringing in others’ ways, of tempering my own practice which I had ‘proved’ in other spheres. I became immersed in a way I had not done with any other group, Action Learning or not. (We met pretty well every month on a weekday for five hours.) For six months or so before I left, I had had vague feelings of not being quite settled in life generally. I never got to the bottom of them. I never took airtime to bring the feelings out, and I don’t know why I didn’t.

In coping with change we can be subject to two forces: propulsion and impulsion. The former pushes you away from something and the latter beckons you towards some new state. Of course, you rarely know in the moment that you are victim to these forces – hindsight works wonders. One of the propelling forces, I think, was that I had had my day with the group, along the lines of Ecclesiastes 3,1–4: ‘To every thing there is a season’. Impulsion? Perhaps it was a self-gift, reclaiming the time that the set took and returning it to me, not for anything specific but for the mere pleasure of ownership.

As to the how to, it took me several months to conjure up the courage to tell my fellow set members. Send them an email? Make telephone calls? I decided to announce it at the beginning of the January meeting and not to harbour it until the end, and having done that I left; ‘slunk’ might have crossed my mind. My reasons came out incoherently, it was like precipitating a divorce – as well I know. Another feeling that comes to mind is that of Arthur Mailey, the young Australian cricketer who bowled the Olympian, graceful Victor Trumper with a googly, writing: ‘I felt like a boy who had just destroyed a dove’.

And now. Aside from one email contact with one of the set, I know nothing of their doings the past year. It seems once you cut, you cut clean and forever and that seems right; that set is for Action Learning work only, and never socialises as a group although bilateral connections are common – I had several. My feelings are still the loss of intimacy with dear, intelligent, true-feeling people, but no regret at the relief of the obligation to attend.

This last Christmas morning, I attended my once-yearly Mass in a plain, 1930s church in Oakwood, led by two young Polish and French priests. As for every year, as soon as I sang the first words of the first carol, tears filled my eyes, enough to have to wipe them. I don’t know why that happens, just as I don’t really know why I left my set. But both the tears and the severance somehow feel right.

Sometimes I read a poem out loud to myself, which I did from this weekend’s Guardian. Andrew Motion’s elegantly scanning ‘In Memory of Peter Way’ laments the recent passing of his English teacher and friend.

My teacher, who reached down inside my head

and turned the first lights on. Who gave me Keats

to read, which turned on more, who made me

read. Who made me write. Who made me argue

for the truth in things themselves, who told me

manners maketh man. Who let me question

even the things he said himself were true.

Who gave my life to me, by which I mean

the things I chose and not inheritance.

Who showed me a quiet voice can carry far.

Who took the gratitude I owed to him

and changed it into friendship. Who was kind.

My teacher, who died yesterday at peace –

His hardest lesson and the last of these.

But who is Mister Cochrane? He was my brown-suited, gangling English teacher at Shawlands Academy, Glasgow in the 1950s. Although Mum had first got me in love with books, it was he who put breadth on my table, despite the heavy weight of Scots literature (I still resent the gloom of ‘Marmion’) the national curriculum demanded. He would take me aside after class and ask me if I had read this book or that, and when I won a certificate in the 1957 Glasgow Dickens Society competition, was beside himself. Our school of some 2,000 pupils did not have an assembly space. Announcements were made over a tannoy in each classroom, and when my name was intoned one morning the class gasped: I had told no one I had entered, not even Mr Cochrane.

Shawlands Academy had quite a few rough edges in those days and teachers used the tawse* freely. I felt it twice from the science teacher: once for misremembering my physics homework and another for whispering his nickname, ‘Stalin’, well he was a dead ringer for the Russian. Belting my hands never endeared me to physics. Mr Cochrane, on the other hand, when the class got unruly, used to ease open his desk drawer where he kept his strap, at which the class hushed, whereupon he closed it without comment. It was rumoured that he baked it in vinegar each night; no one had ever seen it used, nor knew any one who had, but silent deterrent it was: Trident-in-a-drawer

In my two years in his class, Mister Cochrane – whose Christian name I never knew and who was not my friend – stimulated my reading and love of the language for the rest of my life. Sometimes I have even had a stab at writing. But I never forgave him for ‘Marmion’.

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* Also known as the belt or strap: hard-leather instrument for corporal punishment of children by teachers in Scottish schools until the 1980s.

A week or so ago we travelled to London for the day, for two reasons: to renew Suzanne’s Australian passport and attend a tour of the Houses of Parliament. It was a cold day about 5°, unusual in this very mild winter, but sunny. From Blackfriars station we walked along the Embankment and up Temple Avenue where we had a coffee in Tempio’s, a pretty good basement-level restaurant run by Bruno.

At the Australian High Commission on the Strand, Suzanne had to surrender a pink comb with a long pointy bit, to the security guard. While she waited for the business to be done I made a quick walk where I had a look at St Clements RAF church, with rather small statues of Tedder and Harris flanking the approach. Richly decorated, it has much about Britain’s junior service, including many sombre rolls of honour in glass cases.

Lunchtime loomed, so we wandered around Covent Garden looking for a Turkish restaurant in Tavistock Street which we had visited a year it so ago, but to no avail; we learned later that it had closed down. Café Murano, however, provided decent Italian food served with a flourish by our waitress who took the dishes from a tray carried by a man from the kitchen staff. All much recommended.

Time was passing quite nicely towards our tour time of twenty-five past four; we took the Tube to Westminster, from which we emerged to brilliant, low afternoon sun playing on Big Ben’s facia like gold. Striking. Everywhere were crowds, throngs, selfies being taken, people staring into mobiles, hurrying office workers. But we were above all this and made our way to the entrance to the Palace of Westminster. Once in the Great Hall and sat down to wait, we gradually froze in the massive, unheated, 900-year-old chamber with hundreds of tons of wooden vaulting overhead. On the dot, we were called to a group of 18 (we were sponsored by our MP, Nadine Dorries) and off we went with Nick, our guide. Pleasant of personality, slightly bent in stature, grey-haired, about 55, he often cajoled us not to dawdle: ‘This way please, move forward, thanks so much.’ Nick explained that Westminster, a royal palace sort of leased to the Lords and Commons, is floor colour-coded to show who has sway: blue for the sovereign, red for the Lords and green for the Commons. In the debating chambers you are not allowed to sit on the benches, not even the splendid Nick, because only those MPs who have given their oath to the queen can do so, those oaths kept in the famous two dispatch boxes that frontbenchers sometimes petulantly hammer on. When I bowed my head to inspect the MPs’ pigeonholes, a frisson went through me as I read ‘Jeremy Corbyn’.

Almost two hours later, the day already advesperated, we made our cold way back to Blackfriars. Late-running as usual, the Thameslink train managed to get us to Flitwick.

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Thought for the (or any) day: Better to be insufficiently clear than to be, insufficiently.

 

One of my regular walking companions is a Catholic deacon who does not give up trying to save me from my amateur humanism. Sometimes his theological advice is rough and ready: once when I asked, ‘If I do enough good works on earth, will St Peter let me in?’, he replied: ‘Doesn’t matter how many good works you do, without faith you are buggered.’ I understand that this take or leave it support has been ameliorated of late by RC church authorities, so I live in hope. On our last walk, two days before this Christmas he was telling me about a course on lectio divina he is promoting in his parish, and is dead against calling it a course so as not to put people off, but of course it is a course, with breakout groups, a guru to lead, the lot. Taking me at my word when I expressed slight interest, afterwards he sent me a book by Brendan Clifford, a Dominican Preacher, subtitled Lection divina and the human experience, at first sight one of those self-help polemics based on ‘interesting things that have happened to me’, but not so in this case. On Christmas Day, I read Clifford talking about a lady who took comfort in Ecclesiastes 3,1–4: ‘To every thing there is a season … a time to weep, and a time to laugh’. It actually did give me a form of consolation. illuminating some of my current bothersome anxieties as passing worries. Wanting to read it in the proper (is there any other?) King James Version, I went to my Bible on the sideboard where it rests alongside the Upanishads, the Koran, The Teaching of Buddha, and The Little Red Book. Having verified the words as suitably early seventeenth century, as I put the Bible back in its box a page flew open on which is inscribed ‘To Mum, Christmas 1964, much love Chris’. I was 20.

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Saturday morning in my armchair, still in pyjamas, about eight, I’m deep into the Guardian rejoicing with Jeremy at the Oldham by-election. Beside me, a half-drunk cup of Earl Grey adds comfort to the tranquillity, the mantel clock’s ticking heartbeat, and though the high wind is bending trees at the end of the garden, there’s only a slight whooshing through the double glazing. I turn a page, folding it to how I like it. Perfect is the world. Then … I hear the cat flap, and … and … I do not hear Wilfred’s usual strident announcements that he has entered his domain. It’s quiet, too quiet, I look up, asking: ‘Wilfred?’ hoping against hope that … a second later the gates of hell are opened and before the bounding brown Wilfred flies a big black bird into the living room, as black as when the Morrighan became a raven, shedding feathers, frantically careening into the ceiling and walls away from Wilfred’s tooth and claw. I go into nervous overdrive, heart rate zooming, hating Wilfred for his ‘cruelty’, petrified that the thing will destroy the living-room and sure enough it heads for the patio windows and my fragile, beautiful orchids, three levels of them on glass racks. (A Celtic goddess, the Morrighan decided who lived or died in battle.) The size of it! Black as night it cowers in a corner trembling, face-to-face with the murderous Wilfred. With human cruelty I throw the cat from the room and he skulks in his own corner of the hallway, as if he is now the prey. I’m shaking, and without thinking much, run for a pail, dash back, drop it over the Morrighan, dash outside for some cardboard, dash for the keys to the patio windows locked closed for the winter, slide the cardboard under the pail, take the whole arrangement to where the trees are thrashing in the wind and let the poor thing flurry off into the generous undergrowth that the neighbour and I leave for hedgehogs and the like. Now, pulse abating, I lock Wilfred in to give the bird more time; I am hoping it can fly to safety. Back to the living-room and its mess of feathers, knocked-over orchid pots, thrust-aside furniture. I’m so upset that I make a second cuppa, return to the armchair, to the gentle tick-tock, to the soft sound of the wind, to my newspaper, to that evilly interrupted solitude, amidst the debris of nature’s battlefield.

 

Such a treat to be able to have friends for lunch on a Friday, something that after many years of retirement still feels decadent and somehow a fine example of idleness. All that 40s and 50s breeding of work and thrift cannot be shaken off, so that even though I have not darkened the door of an employer in fifteen years, a weekday beano seems stolen from toil. Our occasion was nothing more than a sort of regular get-together based around three of us who attended Stockport College of Technology in the late 60s. On the day, it was remarked upon that this noble institution somehow escaped elevation to university, and perhaps has retained its self-respect as a true vocational college as a result, for such it was then when we ploughed through our HND in Business Studies.

In those days I shared a room in a Levenshulme digs with Paul, and also two interests: chess and beer. Both of necessitated absences from lectures, but alas our political outlooks differed, even more sharply now. Once we attended a rally against the visit of Enoch Powell to the town hall; I thought Paul was against the visit until I saw his bovver boots designed to effect a backwards stomp on the delicate toes of any left-wing protester. Although I favoured right of centre in those days, I thought this was a bit much. Possible it reflected the North East’s enduring bitterness at being left off the Domesday Book.

To return to the lunch, which was attended by Tina, the third of our trio brought together by Friends Reunited some years ago. Paul’s wife Susan was unfortunately unable to attend owing to poor health so we were five, including Suzanne and Tina’s partner, Rob a retired and often lacrosse referee and you don’t get to meet many of those. As the day wore on, the marvellous coq au vin supported by wine and port took its toll and the much-related Story of the Paraffin Heater came up, so we go back to Levenshulme in the winter of 1968.

Imagine a small bedroom with two narrow beds on the second floor of a long terrace facing the Stockport Road. No central heating, of course: ice inside the windows in the morning, dress and undress in bed. On the days when our grant money was low, that is, we couldn’t afford the pub, we played chess, an activity of little bodily movement and even young bones require some warmth. Supplied by the landlord, a DP from Czechoslovakia and actually called Mr Czech, we used a paraffin heater that would moderate the chill but only if you leant over it. Of course it frequently needed fuel and our arrangement was that we would take turns to walk round to the garage with a refill container. A pretty good arrangement but which worked in theory only, because heated arguments developed over whose turn it was – still played out over this lunch 56 years later. Naturally, Paul was the offender, but a matured life draws the sting of wha – although we never came to blows – was once serious glowering at one’s roommate. For my 70^th birthday, said non-compliant paraffin-replenisher thoughtfully presented me with what you see below; I was also grateful that he didn’t wear those bovver boots.

 

 

 

 

 

A thirteen-minute bus ride from home brings you to the Stone Jug. Its sixteenth-century building houses a proper pub, without music, games or electronic screens, has real ale, friendly staff and good food from the kitchen. On recent Fridays I have taken to walking the four miles or so from Ampthill along part of the Greensand Ridge Walk, my companion takes a bus from Wilstead and we meet just after midday for a couple of hours of nattering. John busses it back, while I walk back or I’m collected by the wife about a mile into Maulden just beyond the Dog and Badger, which is not a proper pub.

Yesterday we spent some our time mulling over John’s visit to Brussels and the European Parliament, where he saw a debate on the migrant problem. It reminded me of the EU in/out membership debate Britain is going to have, and the referendum. Between John and me there is no disagreement that the EU and its previous forms are a good thing. For me, I reflect that I never had to fight a war on European soil as did my grandfather at Ypres and my father on a Normandy beach: the EU has kept the peace. Those of us in the UK who want to leave push a nationalist agenda over the interdependence of the European family of nations.

But I digress and back in the Jug, John and I, not for the first time, got onto the onset of ageing, for example, the annual flu vaccination (to which all over-65s are entitled, by the NHS).

‘Have you arranged for your jab?’ I asked. ‘Mine’s tomorrow.’

‘No, certainly not, never have.’

‘And, have you had the flu?’ I probed.

‘Not since I can remember.’

‘Me neither,’ I said, ‘so it must work.’

‘What must?’

‘Either not having the jab or having it. Who’s to know which is better?’

Both of us narrowed eyes at this shaky notion, whereupon he finished his Merlot and I my pint of Otter. Time to go, but another Friday lunchtime nicely spent.

Monday

Moored at five o’clock near the village of Willoughby, stared at by several milk (Jerseys?) cows. I hope they do not moo in the night. Do cows moo at night?  We had got underway on the Hooded Grebe at about 1 p.m. from the marina. It was also the first long run in the new Prius of about an hour up the M1, then country roads in the lovely Northants countryside. We have became re-acquainted with bizarre canal-life of gypsy-type boats which did not seem to have moved in years, many with their own canal-side gardens, some carefully grown with manicured lawns, kids’ bicycles stacked atop. One boat boasted a black skull as a figurehead, and most of the denizens were long-haired and bearded, some of the men, too.

Suzanne managed the locks very well, although as usual she pushed herself too much and ended up knackered. Me too. She did, however manage to take the tiller quite well for half a mile or so, but I fear that I am to steer for all time.

It has showered heavily most of the day, with a dire forecast of donner und blitzen for tomorrow when we head for Braunston, but not the mile-long tunnel which we did with Jane and Michael a couple of years ago. That was the week when the tree fell over the canal shortly before the Foxton staircase locks, and over the day’s wait for it to be cleared, time slowed down and down and down: ‘canal time’ I heard it called by several boat people on the towpath nattering about the not so unwelcome hold-up.

Tuesday Morning

A few minutes before eight we are up after poor sleep: only a mile or two away, the A45 manages to intrude; rather too much wine in the evening so you are ready for bed by nine; for me, no blackout curtains so that the dawn light makes me put my eye shades on. At least there was no rocking, no scraping against the banks.

A policeman has been run down in Liverpool, Turkey complains about Russians encroaching on their airspace, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, rivals to succeed Cameron, will speak at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester today. One of the delegate MPs said on Today that he can’t wait to use their majority to change Britain forever; I’d like to lock him in a room with Jeremy Corbyn for a week.

I type this on the kitchen table under which Suzanne slept, it is mild enough to have the stern doors open to the peace of the canal, rosy in the light, belying the imminent bad weather.

Wednesday Evening

Yesterday was a partly a disaster. Suzanne was whipped off her windlass and fell to the ground and is badly bruised, especially her crook knee (her own one). She had her iPhone in the Dryazabone which wasn’t, and her phone is kaput. It was a bastard of a day, torrential rain as we did lock after lock (‘just one more’), didn’t don our proper wet-weather gear. I mean, it tipped down. Had a pretty good night in a quiet place a hundred yards just after Spurfoot Bridge near Priors Hardwick.

Turned round at Fenny Compton (pop. 797), did the nine Hillmorton locks on the trot, amazingly with Suzanne hobbling with her walking stick and windlass, and we are now moored half a mile after Folly Bridge, the sky clearing a little for a better day tomorrow, It’s twenty to seven, Suzanne preparing dinner and we are both buggered.

There is something of a savage quid pro quo about all this aggro because the Warwickshire countryside is beautiful, mile after mile of early autumn colours, abundant birdlife. You don’t see much built-up for hours.

Thursday Morning

Yesterday wasn’t too bad, returning down the Hillmorton locks, and we spent a relatively content evening playing rummy until the time came to disassemble the kitchen table, ready for S. to sleep in. Well, not a pretty sight or sound as two wine-sodden adults puzzled incompetently over the disassembly and re-assembly of wood panelling, steel tubes and close-fitting steel connections. This glorious morning was heralded by a passing boat at six, but doing it nice and slow. An irritating thing is the battery beeper that we have to endure each morning when you put on the engine for the hot water; this appears to be a fault that the previous users hadn’t reported (not so, as the lady at the boatyard explained, all you have to do is fang the throttle in neutral and the noise disappears). Ensure that it is in neutral.

Why do we do this, or better why do I do all this since I complain the most? Boat life is strangely compelling, as if the good bits are rewards for the hard bits. And who really remembers the bad bits more than the good bits unless you are in a very bad position in life? So it won’t work for Syrian refugees, for instance, or might it if you use those cop-out, tired and overworked not-so-bon mots: ‘relatively speaking’?

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Every month or so I attend a meeting with five other people for a day in each other’s home. With two founding members still at it, the group has had slow-churning membership for 16 years. Our most recent meeting was this Friday gone, at my house. Members come from as far as Bourne End, Bucks, Redbourn, St Albans and Henlow.

We get together at 10 when we ‘check in’ bringing each other up to date with events, trends and feelings in our lives. After this comes a short period of administration, mainly to do with meeting dates (we keep a six-month future meeting-date diary), then a short tea-break. In ‘bidding time’ we sit silently to think about whether we want ‘airtime’ for anything on our minds we would like to bring to the group, sometimes just to say it to people we trust, sometimes to seek answers to problems or dilemmas. The day rolls on with people taking turns of an hour or so, being asked non-leading questions which must not contain information, advice or suggestions. At the end of each session we analyse how we did, trying not to go back into the content of the now-concluded airtime. We have a short lunch, and at the end of the day we talk about the whole-day process much as we do the individual’s airtime process, and 3 we adjourn until the next time. Each meeting someone carries out the role of ‘it’, a word that tries to nullify attempts at facilitator, leader or coach, but is necessary at times to remind us that time is finite. The backgrounds of the members are broadly in training, organisational development, social work and consultancy, and two still earn their living by some of these means. The gender split is 50/50, the average age is 64, we’re all British-born. This meeting is an Action Learning set meeting. Each of us greatly looks forward to it.

Action Learning is a worldwide activity with its roots in industrial England in the 1940s, and is a novel way of addressing problems by tapping a person’s insight and forcing self-discovered solutions rather than being supplied with answers. It is adult learning and it is social learning, and it is not everyone’s cup of tea!

For more information on Action Learning, please plug into the Internet, especially http://ifal.org.uk and I humbly offer my own published article for a closer look at our group in Action Learning research and Practice, Volume 9. Issue 2, 2012. For a no-cost look, here is a Word document: AL Study AL Journal Version copy

Flintbek is a village seven miles from Kiel and ten minutes by train. We drove twelve hours door-to-door, in Germany often ninety miles an hour on the autobahn and doing the ton once or twice. Built of red-painted timber, the exchange house has spacious, well-lit rooms and cellar, surrounded on three sides with garden and lawn.

North-west of Flintbek you drive forever through flat countryside dotted with small villages, reaching Denmark in an hour or so. Schleswig–Holstein swung between disputed Danish and Germanic ownership, not fully settled until the First World War.* The German house owner is called Sven, a neighbour Ulrich Mathiessen, and bek is baek north of the border. Come to think of it, beck is also a small stream in Northern England.

Few buildings in Kiel were not destroyed by Allied bombers seeking naval bases, but the modern-feel version gave us two varied days, interesting town walking, the Nicolaikirche, a round-harbour cruise and an el cheapo university-campus lunch. In particular I liked: Coventry Cathedral’s Cross of Nails like those we had seen in Hamburg and Dresden, taken from the ruins of its old cathedral destroyed in 1940; the U-boat at Laboe, the mouth of the North Sea­–Baltic Canal; the market at Eutin where we couldn’t find the village I knew as a soldier in 1964; Rendsburg on a Sunday, still as the grave; pretty Plön; ignoring the tourist books that ignore Neumünster.

We have tended to do less than planned and a good thing, too, for instance, today I had a quiet walk around Flintbek and we lunched al fresco at ‘home’. Our fast-growing view is that the area is not ideal for us: lots of flat-country cycling, boats, harbours, rivers, beaches, nature walking. Still, one major pleasure has been the 621 miles of distance from the horrible things in the past year at Ampthill: the appalling state the new house was left in; the debilitating slowness of the landscapers; the grind of the Christmas roof-leak’s three-month aftermath.

July 2013.

* Lord Palmerston supposedly said, ‘Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business: the Prince Consort who is dead; a German professor who has gone mad; and I who have forgotten all about it.’