I dreamed I was missing, you were so scared
Leave out all the rest – Linkin Park
But no one would listen, ’cause no one else cared
After my dreaming, I woke with this fear
What am I leaving, when I’m done here
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mortality and what is the meaning and purpose of life.
From an evolutionary perspective I’m a dead end, I don’t have children that will miss me and remember me once I’m gone, but what about my friends and family, what will they remember about me? What will my life have meant to them when I leave this mortal coil?
I can’t control what people think or feel, but this is my chance to view my life from my own perspective.
I may come across as very serious and pessimistic even in some of my writing and yes, it’s absolutely true that I’m someone that is very analytical, deep thinking and passionate about things that I think are important, but that isn’t the whole story.
Sense of humour
There is a silly and playful side to my personality too. I can remember at primary school, when we had to get changed in the classroom for P.E., dressing my chair with my clothes with the legs of the chair in my trouser legs and the back of the chair wearing my t-shirt and jumper.
I was mostly introverted, I could be very shy at times, particularly in new environments and at family events but at the same time I could play the village idiot, singing into a brush and being the comedian on the school bus.
My workmates will tell you that I have a very quick witted sense of humour, like a pun machine gun. Between the groans from all the bad jokes, occasionally I can make people laugh. Speaking of laughs, I’ve always loved comedy and managed to cram in an insane amount of shows whenever we went to the Edinburgh Fringe, the darker and more controversial the better. I have a pretty distinctive laugh and when I get into a laughing fit I can barely breathe.
I loved animals, I’ve had fish, hamsters, chinchillas, finches, canaries, budgies, cockatiels and cats, lots of cats.
Born and Red
Football was a big passion of mine too. I was a big Manchester United fan. It started with playing football with my next door neighbour in our back garden and sometimes even in the house. Every none uniform day at school I would go in wearing a full United goalkeeper kit, regardless of whether it was snowing and freezing cold outside. I got quite good at saving penalties, mostly because I was so good at causing them in the first place. It didn’t matter if I was in my school uniform and it was muddy, I’d be diving around like a lunatic and going home covered in mud.
I started watching football at the right time. I had my lucky chair that I’d watch United games on when they were on TV and I started going to Gigg Lane to see Manchester United reserves playing. I watched the class of 92 playing before breaking through into the first team. It only cost a £1 to get in and you could get a lot closer to the players and even have conversations with their families. They were good times!
I progressed to watching the first team. Nothing could rival the cigar smoke atmosphere of United playing at Old Trafford in the Champions League under the floodlights. In 1999, the year of the treble and my GCSE year I was gutted to have had exams either side of the Champions League final so I couldn’t go but my friend and neighbour, whom I would normally go to games with did.
This was made up for slightly when United extended the Stretford End and I got a season ticket (well, League Match Ticket Book). Unfortunately financial circumstances meant I could only keep it for a year but I still went regularly to watch United until the Glazers bought the club in 2005. I was a member of Shareholders United and had a very small number of shares in the club before we were forced to sell.
One time we ended up sitting next to our head master at a Manchester United game, although that was probably as awkward for him as it was for us.
I used to contribute to a TV show called Row Z on BBC Choice when digital TV was first launched. The show was setup with fans as if they were in a bar, with presenters Matt Smith and Mark Bright and they’d have guests on the sofas.
They invited me to attend the show in London, and I got to sit on the sofa next to Kenny Sansom, who was an ex-Arsenal player.
Doing my bit
It wouldn’t be my last trip to London, whilst at College, I visited parliament as part of our debating society to see our local MP Ivan Lewis. I also met Ivan Lewis when I was the chairman for the Interact club of Prestwich and Whitefield. Interact is the junior arm of the Rotary club. We would raise money for charities like Marie Curie and volunteer at local youth clubs for disabled people. As chairman, I got to go to a posh Rotary club meal. I’d never seen so many knives and forks, didn’t know what to do with them all but it was a good experience to help me get out of my shyness.
Earlier in my youth I joined St Johns Ambulance and learnt first aid, after watching a clip about it on Blue Peter.
Some mothers do ‘ave ’em
One of my less charming characteristics is my clumsiness. One one leg slightly longer than the other, and a slightly odd gait, I’m not very good at walking in a straight line. I’ve twisted my ankles so many times that when I rotate my feet you can hear the scar tissue crunching like squeezing of cotton balls.
I’m almost as accident prone as the character Frank Spencer from “Some mothers do ‘ave em”. I once swallowed a pound coin, which went all the way through my system. I have a large C shaped scar on my left knee from when a glass jumped out of a kitchen cupboard, smashed and bounced off the kitchen work top and got my knee so bad my flesh was hanging upside down. I fractured my sternum when I decided it was a good idea to go sledging in a park whilst looking up and not noticing the big oak tree I went straight into.
School “Trips”
Then there was the time at high school, on an induction weekend in North Wales when I slipped on a bar of soap in the showers, and adding to my embarrassment, my female form tutor came in to make sure I was ok when she heard the thud. Only my pride was damaged that time.
On a school trip to France, my French teacher’s husband almost got kicked off the coach for arguing with the coach driver about the route he was taking and on the way back my French teacher wrote her number on the back of a beer mat for me after getting tipsy in case I needed help with my French. It was more innocent than it sounds, I preferred the company of adults and I could be a teachers pet at times. She stopped me getting ripped off in a French market when I tried to buy a purse and the trader didn’t give me change. She grabbed a bunch of purses off him and said this is how many he should be getting for that much. She also gave me her turn on a toboggan ride.
I was fortunate enough to go away with school on three separate foreign trips, France, Belgium and Italy. Travel has always been something I’ve enjoyed, particularly the journeys.
I’ve gotten good value for money from the emergency services, managing to set far to frying pans on at least three occasions.
Spinal Trap
I’ve slipped a disk in my spine after falling arkwardly when I decided it was a good idea to push my car up a slightly inclined drive at my wife’s parents when the clutch went. I heard a crunch as my knee gave in. My back gradually got worse and worse with sciatic nerve pain going through my legs. One weekend, my back completely went into spasm and I had to be taken to hospital. Gas and air is really good stuff, but it wears off as soon as you stop breathing it in. It was a very unpleasant experience having my prostate examined, not quite sure what that had to do with my back but hey, I was in too much pain to argue.
That first night in hospital was so surreal. The ward I was on was very busy so it ended up being mixed and in the bed next to me was Wynnie Johnson, the mother of Moors Murder victim Keith Bennett. My mother spent hours talking to her when she meant to be visiting me.
It took me 6 months to be able to walk normally again. Even now standing for a sustained amount of time or bending can cause pain, but I’ve learned how to avoid it.
My career path was never straight forward, I always do things the long way round. I wanted to be a journalist or a writer originally but I was put off by shorthand. I’m left handed and my first primary school didn’t really believe in left handed people and tried to force me to use my right hand. I blame them for my terrible handwriting.
Educating me
I went to college studying Psychology, English Language and Media Studies but I had been struggling with depression. At High school I was bullied. I was a bit odd. I went through a phase of using a brief case as a school bag as it stopped my books from getting tatty, I was sensitive to textures so I used a bed sheet instead of a towel after showering in PE and I was the sort of kid always putting my hands up for questions. I reckon if I was in the school system now, they’d probably regard me as mildly autistic.
On my first day of school some kid made a comment of me having chips in the canteen and thereafter I refused to eat at school.
Despite all the issues I had at school, including the huge crush I had on a girl called Emma that chose to sat next to me in a number of classes, I felt like I knew where I was in school. College was very different, I had more friends and people seemed to like and respect me. I found that very hard to deal with. I used to pass a homeless guy on the way in to college and I felt so guilty that I had all these opportunities and he had nothing so I used to buy him a soup and pasty when it was cold.
Eventually I stopped going into college in the second year quit. My lecturers offered to let me learn from home but by this point I was just completely withdrawn. I moved out of home and got my own flat, it was a lot easier to do in those days.
In my place
The flat was an interesting experience. For some reason I decided to paint my internal doors purple and the windowsills and skirting boards luminous lime green. Being clumsy though, I dropped one of the tins of paint on the pavement of the main road and it was luminous lime green for years.
The night I was painting the sills, I had no curtains up and the back of my flat backed onto the main road. I suddenly because aware there were three men looking in at about 1am. I immediately ducked to the floor, petrified, knowing the back door was unlocked and they could easily get in. They kicked in a window but luckily didn’t enter. It wasn’t a good start. Could have done without the flying ant and mice infestations too.
Despite all that, I had lots of good memories in that flat, both with my first proper girlfriend, Charlotte, and the woman that would later become my wife, Mandy.
Lady in red
Little did I know that I was living in the middle of a red light district. I got mugged by a prostitute early in the morning one time. She tried to offer her services for the money she just took before posting the money through the door of a house with blacked out windows, telling me I could come back for my money later. I declined. I wasn’t very streetwise, I had no idea prostitutes were about in the mornings.
Taxing work
My aunty found me a 3 week job doing filling and envelope stuffing at Inland Revenue. That three week job kept getting extended until the point I was working there for 6 months. Then I found out that they were hiring to fill a new call centre. I was a shy lad that wouldn’t answer the phone at home, but I took the chance.
The role involved 20 weeks training as we had to know a lot about a wide variety of subjects and the training made me realise how much passion I had for learning. I was the first member of my cohort to start taking calls and I stayed there for six years. A lot of that time I worked part time.
Accessing the ladder
The ability to work evenings and weekends meant I could go back to college and study an access course/ I always had a fascination with technology and computers so I started looking at University prospectuses and decided I wanted to study Computer Science, so I contacted the Uni and asked what I needed to do to get on the course and they suggested a couple of access courses.
I loved college life. It was tiring going between college and work, and also looking after my mum, whom was in and out of hospital at the time, by then I had given up my flat to move in and look after her, she had severe depression too, it runs in the family. My uncle killed himself when I was younger.
I had lost just shy of 10 stone in weight, looking the best I had ever done after going on a special very low calories diet called lipotrim. I was walking loads and learning to drive at the same time. I made friends at college and discovered a love for computer programming. I spend time at work creating visual basic macros in Excel to automate certain tasks and just for the fun of it.
At the end of my access course, I nearly lost my chance. For access courses, you complete modules in a portfolio of work, which was kept under lock and key in the college but some guy who’d hardly ever turned up stole my portfolio. Fortunately for me, he wasn’t the smartest tool in the box and handed in a piece of work that I had done as his own that was completed under exam conditions and had my handwriting. He got what he deserved, and I got my place at Uni.
I got through the first year at Uni with flying colours, bar the maths module. I’ve never enjoyed maths. In theory it was the easiest module as it was just computer based training with no exam but I only got 30% but was compensated as the rest of my units were good, putting me on track for a first over all.
I worked throughout and I was still looking after mum so midway through the second year the pressure of juggling everything just got to me and I had to take an interuption of studies. One year interruption became two years when I hurt my back. There were times when I didn’t think I’d go back and I looked into other options instead but after 18 months, I returned to complete my second year.
Building a career
I knew that it was going to be really important to get Industrial Experience. In the last six months of my second year I spent far more time going to careers fayres, writing CVs and covering letters and applying for placement years. I was getting through the first interviews every time, I had a couple of disappointments where I lost out to my friends (good students end up finding each other). I had arranged no fewer than 17 interviews including second rounds, the furthest away being in Staffordshire.
One job spec stuck out more than the others though, it was a digital agency and there was play hard, work hard vibe to it. I matched my cover letter to the section titles on their website and it got me in for interview. They were looking for 2 students, one to do more of a programming role, whom they’d already hired, and a second to do more front end stuff. I wasn’t really a fit for the second role but I had my two interviews, at the second one I was asked “are you clever” which is always tough to know how to answer, you don’t want to come across cocky but you also don’t want to be a wilting violet either. The interview felt good and at the end I asked what my chances were and they were positive.
It was a nervous wait. The same week I had an interview with the Odeon for a database role with no chance of a permanent role at the end of it. I didn’t want it but I was dreading getting the call from them first. It was more important to get any placement than no placement at all so I would probably have accepted it, but it wasn’t the one I want.
In the end I got the role I wanted. It was my cover letter that swung it, and years later at Christmas parties, the big cheese still remembered it.
When I started at Creative Lynx (now Havas Lynx), in truth I found it very difficult. I was not cut out for front end work, and it showed. At one point I thought I was going to get sacked. They asked me to set up a laptop ready for an important business trip with some software, and I did it but the software required a restart and I didn’t check. It was a silly mistake but it could have embarrassed my bosses in front of clients.
I took it on the chin, redoubled my determination and made a deliberate point of being available. The team was small and the other developers didn’t like talking to customers on the phone so I did that side of things and I did the internal support, setting up FTP links, making sure the server was backing up, fixing the printer. Anything people needed doing.
By the end of my placement year, they asked me to find a replacement. We got a wide array of candidates but none quite fit what we were lucking for and the company asked me to stay on, and were willing to pay my course fees so that I could go part time for my final year. I wasn’t earning a lot, the money wasn’t the important thing to me. I actually took a pay cut from my annual rate at HMRC when I joined but this was a guaranteed job with people I enjoyed working with at a company that treated me like I was important, not just an anonymous number as I was at HMRC.
The office parties were amazing. They even flew us all out to Nice for their 25th year anniversary with free flights, accommodation, meals and a bar. I’ve never felt part of something more than those days with Lynx.
I don’t know how I got through my final years at Uni. I was constantly travelling between work and uni. Our Uni lectures were all over the place on the calendar so the only way I could work enough hours to make it worth it for Lynx, who were paying me full time hours, was to work late shifts. Sometimes I’d be at work until 11pm then go home and work through the night on my dissertation and final year project. Me and my fiancée were like ships in the night at that point, as she got up, I’d be going to bed for a few hours before heading back to work.
One time I was in Uni when I got a call from my boss at work. One of our websites had been hacked. It was a police force website and the attackers managed to replace the home page with there own content with links to illicit and illegal material. I left Uni immediately and went straight to work. I worked with one of the senior devs until late in the night to restore the server and analyse the attack.
It was a strange time because we were simultaneously criticised for the incident happening in the first place and praised for staying as long as it took to deal with the issue and our CTO gave us a cash bonus to thank us for our efforts. Our immediate boss did not like the criticism, and offered his resignation, which was accepted.
After that work decided they needed to bring someone in with more experience to be the IT manager, which was essentially my role. I ended up interviewing a guy for my role. I was disappointed but at the same time I knew it’s what we needed and I really liked the guy so I gave the nod to bring him in, which also meant I could go back to a development role after quite a long handover period.
I got through Uni, I got the first I wanted to justify the time away from work and the hours I was putting in. My final year project was a content management system for wedding websites which included RSVP management, google maps directions and the ability to build your own content. I proposed the project myself and had to find a lecturer that was willing to take it on. It was great fun, I was learning and building something for my own upcoming wedding at the same time.
I invited about half of my work mates to our wedding evening reception. Work was my identity. I spent more time with these people than anyone else, so it made perfect sense to me that as many as possible of the Creative Lynx crew should be there.
It wasn’t all plain sailing at Creative Lynx. There was a point where I was at a bit of a cross roads. It was at the point where I was being asked to switch back to being a developer after spending quite a while on the IT side. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted then. I’d just lost a significant amount of weight for the second time, again doing lipotrim but with a chemist this time and I spent my Saturday afternoons walking around Dove Stones reservoir.
Teach First came second
I knew I really enjoyed working with younger people and helping train them up. Heck, I was training up experienced contractor developers but I was still technically a junior developer. I thought about switching to teaching and I went for an interview session with Teach First in London but I didn’t get in. In hindsight, it would have been a disaster, the kids would have eaten me alive and after the threat of leaving, I was soon promoted and really enjoying being a developer again and taking on a more senior role.
That’s how it worked at Lynx. You have to do the job of the next grade up for quite a while before they’ll promote you, and they’ll use excuses not to. The best way to get promoted is to threaten to leave. I’m not one for changing jobs if I’m happy. I never once asked for a pay rise, I did get them. I started on £12,000 but by the time I left Lynx I was earning £28,000. I didn’t know it at the time but this was a lot lower than other places. When you work for an agency, clients are billed for your time by the hour so you earn less than if it’s a product company but you get to work on a wider variety of projects too so it’s swings and roundabouts, plus the free bars.
I’ve had so many great night outs with Lynx. I spent seven years there in total and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I met so many great people, way more talented and intelligent than I was.
Things seemed to be going so well, I was on a team that I felt was performing really well and all of a sudden I was asked to join a different team that was working on much smaller adhoc projects. It was sold to me as I was being moved over to bring them up to our standards but it felt like a demotion.
A few months later, the plug was pulled on that bigger project and an entire room full of developers were made redundant. They were pretty much all contractors, and the risk of losing your job is just part of the course for contractors, it’s why they earn a premium in the first place. I realised that the move was really to protect me.
The fear factor
The move made me spiral. The difference between working in the civil service and in the private sector as a developer is that you have much more rights in the civil service. I’ve seen people being sacked on their birthday before. I’ve seen very good people with years of essential experience going into work in the morning for what they thought was just another normal day only to be immediately dragged into a meeting room and sent home minutes later. It’s a brutal world with no room for sentiment.
I was petrified of losing my job and not being able to get another one. I used to go to Sainsburys on the way to the tram stop after work and buy loads of junk food and beers and sit on a bench next to the Rochdale canal and just drink, eat and cry, contemplating throwing myself into the water.
I’ve never been a fan of recruiters, I see them as leaches, feeding off the talents of other people and when you’re a developer that’s banked a few years experience, you’re constantly getting badgered by them for a new exciting role, just round the corner (often hundreds of miles away) and sometimes even offered roles as the same company you work for now.
Almost signing for United
I did make an exception for one agency though. My name had been suggested by one of the contractors I’d worked closely with but it was the name of the client that caught my eye. It was Manchester United. That was something I could not turn down out of hand.
The job was for their scouting system, which was previously outsourced to a single guy but they were worried what would happen if he left so they wanted to make an internal role. I would have been reporting to Mick Court, the head of scouting, whom himself reports to Ed Woodward.
I had a phone interview with the outsourced developer and it couldn’t have gone better. I actually anticipated his hardest question just in conversation, a question nobody else had been able to answer. It was just chance that I had been reading up on that topic at the time.
My second interview was at Old Trafford. At the time the manager was Louis Van Gaal. I parked in the players car park, Luke Shaw and Paddy McNair acknowledged me as I sat in the reception waiting to be called up, the interview lasted a couple of hours and went well bar a styling (i.e. frontend development) task. If I got the role, I would have had access to the players canteen and I would have been working from Carrington.
I didn’t get the role, but they told me I came second and it was close. At the time my confidence was quite low. I hadn’t had an interview for years and the more senior the position, the more gruelling the interview so to get so close was really pleasing. To be honest, although it would have been a dream come true to “sign for United”, the role itself wouldn’t have been great for me. The technology was older than I was used to by that stage and I liked working as part of a team and I would have been the sole developer there. I would have taken the gamble had I been offered the role, but it could have gone wrong.
A few months later, Lynx had decided that they weren’t going to take on software projects anymore. I could understand, I’d seen some of the balance sheets. They had a habit of agreeing fixed price deals before actually analysing the clients requirements. The account managers were really bad at communicating with the developers. They were motivated by sales. It was easier to say yes to a client and keep the revenue coming in rather than checking the feasibility first. I worked on one project that essentially we did twice, because it was built originally in a technology that we no longer had any resources for but the client pulled the plug after we spent months rewriting it.
There were more redundancies, but I’d avoided it again. I think the company had a genuine affection for me and it was mutual. Instead, they wanted to convert my role back to an IT one. After spending a lot of time gaining skills, that wasn’t a palatable situation for me. They probably knew I would leave of my own accord.
On the Markit
I let the agent that found the United role send me roles. The way I looked at it though was much more picky. I wasn’t a junior looking for a foot on the ladder any more, I was a being paid a midweight salary for a senior role.
There was one role within walking distance from home that appealed to me but when I had the interview, it became apparent it was more of a security specialist position.
One of the roles didn’t sound particularly appealing, it was using an old technology but it was another role that was only a 20 minute drive away from home and had decent benefits so I thought I’d give it a try.
I got through the customary first round telephone interview, I don’t even remember it. I was nervous for the face to face round, it started with a nice and easy code printout where I had to identify faults and that put my mind at ease. Then there was a whiteboard exercise where I had to write sudo code for battleships. I had never actually played battleships so my interviewer had to explain it to me but it seemed to go well, the guy that interviewed me was nice and I went away feeling it was a worthwhile practice if nothing else.
I had another second interview with a company called Tyres on the drive that was more similar in terms of tech stack than I was used to. It was a little converted farm house in Cheshire. It was a longer commute but I felt a really good vibe about it. They had a frontend team but needed someone that could do the link work between frontend and backend and that felt like a good fit for me. I came away feeling very positive.
On the way back from that interview, I got a call from my agent telling me the first company, Markit Ltd had made an offer. I was really hoping to land the Tyres on the drive role, but Markit were offering me £10,000 more than I was earning at the time. It was a big decision. I asked the agent to speak to Tyres on the drive and get feedback. When you have an offer, you can stall for a few days but after that there’s a chance they’ll cancel the offer. Of course, the agent was keen for me to accept the role, it was paying more than tyres on the drive so that would have been a bigger fee for them.
They came back and said that they were impressed with me but one of the candidates was a recommendation from someone in their existing team. I would have been put forward for the next round of interviews but I decided to throw caution to the wind and accept the Markit position, the location and the pay were the key factors.
The shorter commute made a big difference, there were no more regular 11pm finishes. The vibe was completely different. It was as much of a family as Lynx was, there wasn’t the same drinking culture and social aspect but I made some friends, I felt ahead of the curve in some aspects and the pay was good.
A competitive Markit
At Lynx we used to get bonuses twice a year, in the summer, just in time for holidays, and at Christmas. The bonuses weren’t huge but to me, who had only ever known public sector pay, they were brilliant. After the company was taken over and we became Havas Lynx, bonus were only payable to those whom didn’t get paid overtime.
I was annoyed by the change because it pitted developed against account managers. Account managers didn’t get paid overtime, it was just an expected part of their job. For developers, we would get paid overtime if the client had a budget for it. So, for example, if they had a specific deadline to meet they might throw extra money at the project and we would get the additional pay but in reality, we were working extra hours for free regardless of pay anyway because that was the culture. Account managers would over-promise, and we would rescue them .
At Markit, we got a single bonus a year, normally paid around February or March but announced in December. My first bonus was over £6000, By contrast, Lynx bonuses were at most £1250. The biggest bonus I’ve had at Markit was worth £20,000, including £10,000 cash and the rest in shares spread out over three years, on the condition I didn’t leave in that time. That extra money has made things possible that I never imagined before. I’ve been able to get treat my wife to special holidays and a surprise 40th birthday party at the same venue we had our wedding reception. I’ve been incredibly lucky and I’ve tried to use that money to please the people I care about.
Before I’d even started at Markit, HR cocked up, sending me a contract for another new starter by mistake and it revealed he was earning £49,000. Unfortunately for HR, we both started within days of each other and worked closely together and I realised we had similar levels of previous experience. The main difference was I stuck with a single company and he had a couple of employers.
I wasn’t complaining, I was very happy with my £10,000 pay rise and I realised he was likely earning more at his last job. Companies will pay you the minimum they think they need to pay you to get you on board. I’m an honest person. They knew what I was on and it probably surprised them but I had no other point of reference. It’s a bit taboo to talk about salaries in the industry and to be honest, for me, the most important thing is happiness in the role rather than pay.
If I wanted to make shedloads of money, I’d pick a niche like pascal, and work in London in the banking industry, I could pretty much set my own price because few people know it anymore but it would be soul destroying work. I want a balance.
I have worked a 24 hour shift before for Markit but it was because I wanted to meet a deadline and it was entirely down to my professional pride, not force. Sometimes when you’re on a roll you don’t want to stop. We don’t get paid overtime at IHS Markit but they do generally look after us well with a range of benefits to choose from, including private medical and dental insurance and even the ability to buy extra days holiday.
Money and Marriage
I would like to be able to tell you that I’ve used the extra income sensibly and that I’m squirreling a nest egg for retirement like I should be but the truth is I pay about £1000 a month of my salary on long term debts. My attitude towards money is very different from my wife’s. She has a sensible fear of debt. She is a saver and I love her for it, her savings help when I’ve ran out of options and it kills me when I’m in that situation.
We bought a house together with her savings when I was a student. She paid the deposit and we took a 95% mortgage back in 2006 so that we still had some money for furniture. I promised her that one day I would be earning more and I could help out, There was a 6 month period where I wasn’t working at all while I focused on Uni and she supported me.
Provider Instinct
As a man you have this internal expectation to be the provider. When your partner earns more than you, you swallow it but the truth is it feels uncomfortable. You don’t like to be kept, you want to be her hero, assuming you’re heterosexual. My wife never used it against me and even when she earnt more, which only ended when I started at Markit, I would spend more on her at Christmas and Birthdays. I’ve been accused of being “sexist” for expressing my lived experience but combine being male and the instinct to protect and provide with the personality I inherited from my mother, a woman that has nothing but will give you everything she has, I have a desperate internal compulsion to help the people I love. I have little practical skills to express that love, but finally, now, I have the earnings, and if not earning, the access to debt to be able to express that deep seated desire to provide and protect.
I don’t want to be a show off or to have people feel indebted to me. I do not give for the purposes of signalling virtue, I normally give in private with no fuss. One time when my brother and sister in law were struggling, I posted an envelope with £50 inside it anonymously through their letterbox but they assumed it was a pay off from my sister in laws employers and caused a fuss, which just goes to show best intentions can sometimes go awry.
No Saint, just human
I don’t want to mislead you to believe I’m some kind of saint, I’m far from it. The truth is giving makes me feel better about myself, it’s a sense of purpose. Deep down I do not feel I deserve the income that I have and the only way to deal with that cognitive dissonance is to give it away, use my access to money for people whom genuinely deserve it.
Can’t buy me love
I hope that when I’m gone I will be remembered for the good I tried to do. It’s a selfish motive really, I buy hearts because I’m not worthy of them of my own merit. I’m addicted to that feeling of making the people I love feel important, feel cared for and lifting a tiny bit of that burden. Does this make me a narcissist? I give but it’s really all about me. I tell myself it doesn’t because a narcissist wouldn’t care what other people think. I don’t know what I am but I know I have always had cripplingly low self esteem, well hidden by a veneer of confidence and competence.
The longer you’ve been in the software industry, the less room you have to hide. People see a CV with 10 years industry experience and they expect a leader. Applying for jobs at senior level have a much higher expectation than junior roles. There is a severe shortage of competent senior professionals so I should be in an enviable position but I turn away people with better skillsets than me for senior roles. Would I hire myself? I don’t think I would.
A disincentive
The pressure and expectation cranks up with every year you have on your CV but my fear of losing my job only increases the more I earn. I’ve gone from a relatively low salary to a base salary of £52,000 plus bonuses. The number of roles out there that can compete with that are diminishing yet I’ve become dependent on those earnings. The fear of redundancy can be paralysing. Combine that with a death benefit scheme with no anti-suicide clause and a payment worth a minimum of 4 times my annual salary, there is a perverse relationship between the more successful I become and the more strong the suicidal instinct.
My death benefit would be enough to pay off the mortgage, our debt and still leave a substantial sum for the people I care about the most. What am I if not a provider? What identity do I have other than that associated with my work? My job itself may mean nothing to most people but being a person people depend on is. I can’t afford to lose that, I have nothing else. I have no intrinsic value as a person.
Love fool
I know my wife loves me for who I am and not what I earn but even she, put in a position where all that was taken from her would soon lose all empathy for the pathetic loser that lost it all. That’s reality. No love is unconditional. We might want to fool ourselves into thinking that is the case but reality is different.
I can’t talk about my life without talking about the people that have meant the most to me, the people I love. Despite being as fat as a whale and hideously unattractive, I’ve never actually had that much trouble falling in love.
First “girlfriend”
When I was just 11 years old, my parents let me take my best friend from high school at the time with me on a short Easter caravan holiday to Marine Holiday park in North Wales. Warren was a city fan, I was a United fan, but it didn’t matter, we both loved football and both liked being the goalkeeper.
One day at the park we were playing with a beach ball at the indoor swimming pool. At that age, whist self conscious about my body, I was still like a fish in the water, we were throwing the ball to each other when two girls decided that this was a group game and played piggy in the middle. It was really nice to have the attention of girls. They were from Merseyside, we were from Manchester. We got talking after swimming and naturally seemed to pair up. It was all innocent at that age, but the fact that they came to us was exciting.
The day before they were due to leave, I bought the girl I was interested in some Milk Tray chocolates from the shop and left a note with my name, address and landline (no mobiles back then) on the porch of her caravan.
I tried to arrange a meet up myself with her for a second “date” but our parent intervened and instead we met up at a petrol station near Heysham and she came with my me and my family for a “date”. We went to see a film at the cinema, she gave me a little model robin that she had made out of dough, which I believe I still have somewhere in the loft, and I think I gave her a rose. It was summer and I was in shorts and I remember her trying to touch me over my shorts and as an 11 year old prepubescent boy, I wasn’t really interested in that so I held her hand instead. We had a McDonald’s and I remember she had a hamburger with no onions, or gherkins or ketchup, just the burger and the bread (isn’t it funny the things you remember).
We also went to Heaton Park, although I can’t remember whether that was the same date or different. I remember putting myself on a diet, actually I tried to starve myself, to lose weight for Lorraine (the girl’s name) but it fizzled out, the distance wasn’t really practical.
First heartbreak
As I’ve mentioned already, later I had a big crush on a girl called Emma that lasted the entirety of High School. At Christmas in Year 7, the school was partially destroyed by fire and every day we would have our assembly in the morning before each year group was transported elsewhere. For year 7, we had a basement room at Castlebrook High School.
One break time, Emma’s best friend Lizzie asked me in front of my friends whether I fancied Emma. It must have been so obvious, but I lied and said no. A decision I regretted for the rest of High School. Not knowing was worse than rejection but I couldn’t pluck up the courage.
Emma lived in Lower Broughton, which wasn’t that far from me but on a different bus route that went to Manchester City Centre from our school in Prestwich. Once or twice, I avoided the school bus that went closest to my home in Crumpsall because of bullies, instead I’d get the 96 bus into the old Cannon Street depot in town and would change buses there. It took a lot longer, but it was worth it.
When I noticed that Emma got the same bus though and that this was a way to spend a little more time talking to her, it became a routine.
In the last year of High School I realised time was running out for me to tell her how I felt about her. I was just too shy to say anything directly. I knew her brother was a big Southampton fan so when Manchester United were due to play Southampton, I got two tickets, I think I paid off my neighbour whom I would normally go to matches with to buy his ticket.
I put the tickets in an envelope with a short note and wrote her name on the front of the envelope. It was a home economics (baking) class and I had my blazer flung over a stool and the envelope must have fell out. She must have found it and she gave it back to me. This was probably a sure sign she wasn’t interested but I didn’t put two and two together and I spent the last year wondering and failing to pluck up the courage to talk to her. It was very painful leaving school knowing I wouldn’t see her again. Even if it was only a friendship, I got on really well with her and it felt like she liked my company too but I will never know because we never spoke about it again.
I have this deep seated need inside me to give love. I have a big heart and my soul is very much a romantic one. All I needed was someone to love.
Online dating before online dating existed
At the age of 16 I found a cable TV interactive service called Leisure District. It had simple games like Noughts and Crosses, and a Library where you could submit short stories and poetry. Other users could send you messages or “virtual flowers”, it was very much social media before the concept even existed.
I was a morose poet at that age so I submitted a few and started to get messages, the vast majority from women and girls of all different ages. They wanted to talk to me and to get to know me and I was hooked.
There was a woman in her 30s (remember I was 16/17 at the time) called Mary Best who would ring me sometimes and wanted a relationship with me, she was attracted to the fact I was a virgin and would tell me about the things she wanted to do to me. This was absolutely compelling stuff for a shy and naïve 16/17 year old with hormones raging.
I’ll be honest, I would reply to anyone that would message me and you’d be amazed how many women and girls would send me sexualised responses. To me it was like a game, I was learning about the opposite sex, they would tell me things and I would learn how to use my writing ability to elicit a response in them.
There was one time when there was a woman from Yorkshire, old enough to be my mother that I let ring me and she was using a sex toy on herself and wanting me to touch myself. It was a strange experience, not entirely comfortable but simultaneously fascinating.
I started exchanging messages with girls closer to my own age, and I cyber dated one girl called Rachel. We agreed to meet in her home town of Warrington at a cinema, and she brought along her friends for support but there was no chemistry when we actually met, it was all just a fantasy. She would string me along and use me for her own purposes when it suited her but we only met once.
First true love
I courted a second girl called Charlotte that lied about her age and told me she was also 16. After the experience with Rachel, I didn’t want to leave it too long before meeting her in person. I didn’t want to fall in love with someone virtually to then find the feelings were not mutual after meeting.
She was from Stoke, so I got the Train down to meet her, then a bus. She came out with her brother for safety, which was fine by me. I can’t even remember what we did on that first date but I remember thinking she was gorgeous with her mid-length strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes and she let me hold her hand. She came back to the train station to see me off and I just needed to know if she wanted to see me again and to my astonishment and delight, she did. We actually kissed and it was the first time I’d ever kissed a girl on the lips.
She was texting me all the way home and I felt this strange mix of missing her and butterflies. I’d finally found someone that loved me back. We dated for about a year and I couldn’t keep my hands off her. One time we went to see the film Cats and Dogs at the cinema and I’m surprised we didn’t get kicked out for what we got away with doing in the darkness of the back of the cinema. I was completely besotted with her, and for a while she was with me but then she began to be more distant.
Normally we’d talk on the phone for hours at a time every single night, taking turns to call each other. One night she didn’t call, and then I just waited for her to call me the next day but she didn’t. The longer this went on for, the more devastated I got. I had bought her tickets for a top of the pops concert at the MEN Arena featuring Westlife, her favourite band, and she came and stayed the night with me and I just hoped things were back to normal but they weren’t.
My mental state was very fragile at the time and I ended up in hospital after taking an overdose. It turned out she had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a form of cancer. I was devastated. She pulled through but our relationship was over. In truth she had met someone else. It hurt like hell. She was the girl I gave my virginity to, my first sexual partner and I was totally in love with her.
Finding my soulmate
Sometimes things happen for a reason. There was one point where she wanted to run away and come live with me but it just wouldn’t have worked long term. I would eat really slowly in front of her and when I stayed at her dad’s, I was afraid to even use the toilet. You never forget your first and she was an important part of my life but throughout all this time on the Leisure District site, there was another girl that player agony aunt for me.
One night after the split up we were exchanging messages, as usual. I was drunk and the nature of the messages changed. We lived a lot closer together, we had a lot more in common and we just decided to go for it.
I met her in person on Saturday, 21st September 2002 next to the Queen Victoria statue in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester. I got us lost, then we went to the food court, and neither of us could make a decision before eventually settling on Pizza Hut.
Just three days later, we met up again at Parrs Wood. I remember having one eye on the football on a screen in the casino, Manchester United played Leverkusen away in the Champions League that night and I remember Ruud Van Nistelrooy scoring from an acute angle as I was kissing Mandy at the time.
Within the space of a week we had a third date. This was different, I felt comfortable with Mandy. I could be myself, I could relax. We had a weekly ritual where she would come to my flat on a Friday night and let herself in (I gave her a key). We would have pizza and WKD and watch a film together. Those were great times. I would come home from work Friday lunch time, taking an extended lunch, just so I could clean the flat up ready for her.
On the Saturday she would come food shopping with me or help me take my clothes to the laundrette. In December, I went away with my friend Michael to New York. The weather was cold and snowy and the whole time I just remember wishing I was there with her instead of Michael. I called her at what would have been the early hours of the morning her time, she was a little grumpy, but I just needed to hear her voice and I brought back loads of tat from New York for her. It took me 16 years before I managed to go back with her by my side. We had planned to do it sooner, but then we bought a house and priorities changed.
Ring, Ring, we’re engaged
On 23rd September 2006 we got engaged. I remember ringing her sister up to get her parents number a couple of weeks before hand so I could do things the traditional way and ask her dad for permission first.
Within minutes of me ringing her, the curiosity got the better of her sister and she rang me back to find out what I wanted the number for. I think she was the first to know. Then I told my mum, she came with me to look at rings. By this stage Mandy was staying over at my mum’s with me every weekend and I knew the ring was just a few metres away from her in the spare bedroom.
On the day, she carried her own ring without knowing it as she helped me with my bag. We went to the Printworks to watch a film then had a couple of cocktails in a bar called Norwegian blue before heading to china town for a Chinese via Piccadilly gardens.
I proposed to her close to where we had first met, almost four years to the day beforehand. I got her to close her eyes as I got down on one knee, which was quite a feet for me as I had back trouble at the time and for a split second when she opened her eyes she thought I did a runner. The answer was yes.
We got to the Chinese and she disappeared to the toilet to text sister, and mum and friends and to admire her ring. It was such happy day! She was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. 15 years on from that day and we’re still together, if anything our bond and understanding of each other is stronger than it had ever been. She is the love of my life, I was still a teenager (just) when I met her and now I’m just a year and two months shy of my 40th birthday. We have been very lucky to find each other and stay together for so long.
Memories
We have made so many special memories together and we complement each other. I love driving and she loves to read maps and navigate. We have been to Belfast, Dublin, the Isle of Man, Norway, we’ve done John O’Groats to Lands End in a circuit, Cornwall for a weekend, Norfolk and Inveraray (Argyll, Scotland) on honeymoon, Edinburgh numerous times, we have almost got to Skegness several times, but never quite made it, we’ve been to Nice, we toured 17 capital cities around Europe in a single driving trip. We’ve been to New York and Los Angeles. So many precious memories and tales to tell from the hotel in Budapest where we only stayed an hour because it was like a condemned nursing home before ending up sleeping on a boat on the river Danube, the En-suite Bed and Breakfast in Blackpool where you couldn’t close the door if you were on the toilet (and I was thin at the time) to five star luxury hotels with the most expensive laundry bill ever and a hotel at Niagara falls with panoramic views and a massage chair. We’ve been very lucky. Last year we had the privilege of taking Mandy’s sister and three children away with us to Banff, Aberdeenshire, staying in a beautiful house on the coastal waters edge after having spent six months, through lockdowns and adversity living with those very special people.
Jon and Mandy holidays are never normal holidays, they are planned to the nth degree/ I want people to remember how good I was at planning and how much I enjoyed it. Not just holidays but surprise parties, special Valentine’s gifts with clues dotted around the house. I might be a grumpy sod at times, but I’m a romantic grumpy sod and nothing pleases me more than putting a smile on the faces of the people I love the most.
Ultimately, this is what I’d like people to remember about me, all those pictures that I’m not in that hold special memories because I made them happen. I want people to remember that I was a gentle giant with a big heart that just wanted to please people. I had my flaws, I was never perfect but I was honest, probably too honest for my own good sometimes.
Unpopular opinions
I’ve always considered myself someone not afraid to stand up for the underdog. I was never afraid to hold unpopular opinions because I cared about being authentic more than I cared for what strangers thought about me.
I’ve always been political, even as a young boy but the inventions of Facebook and YouTube gave me a platform where I could vent my frustrations with the mainstream views of the time, and I found out that I was not alone in my assessment of feminism, social justice and what we’d now refer to as wokism but I would have called political correctness.
Men’s Issues
I stumbled into the world of men’s issues with compassion for homelessness and male mental health but I began to learn about other issues that may not have effected me directly but were big issues that were being ignored.
I started watching videos from people like Karen Straughan, then I discovered that there was a woman making a film about the men’s movement so I decided to support her on kickstarter. That woman was Cassie Jaye and the film was called The Red Pill. I joined a facebook group called the Men’s Rights Community and I would always try to be keep my points well balanced. I actually spent far more time arguing with extreme positions within the group than I did with feminists because we had to be different.
In the words of Fredrich Nietzsche, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you”.
It wasn’t long before I was invited to become a moderator, and shortly after, the group founder, inspired by the 2016 International Conference of Men’s Issues, announced plans for in person meet ups.
A meeting of minds, and bodies
I had no idea what to expect but I agreed to go to the first one in Mansfield and offered to pick up a girl that lived near me that wanted to go but had no transport. We talked the entire journey. She was definitely on the autistic spectrum and presented in a quite masculine way, when we got there I think there were five of us in total, we had a meal prepared by the host and stayed up all night watching films and chatting. I felt like I’d found my people, all weirdo’s just like me.
Thinking about it, our host took a bit of a risk allowing five strangers into his home, but it felt like we were part of something.
I went on to host a meet-up and then we had a meet-up at a men’s shed that was organised by another lady in the North East. I met some friends that I am still in contact with on a regular basis.
The shy activist
I’ve since been to a few marches and mini conferences. To be honest, I don’t particularly like marches, they always make me feel a bit awkward, I am still shy and quiet at heart in big groups. It didn’t stop me volunteering to help when the political party, Justice for Men, Boys and the women who love them organised an anti male genital mutilation protest with some intactivists in my home city outside the Conservative party conference.
I’m a quietly spoken, well mannered bloke and it took me time to get into my stride and actually approach people and explain what the problem was. I remember having a productive conversation with a Jewish lady, she ultimately believed that anything should be allowed in the name of tradition but she also complimented me on the way I engaged with her. There was a lot of anti-Tory protesters around at the time that were very hostile, so it made a nice change for her that I was wanting a discussion, not just to abuse her.
There was also an antipodean woman that saw our posters and decided she needed to tell us that we should become feminists because feminists care about equality, of course she quickly ran off when I suggested that she should take some leaflets to distribute to her feminist friends so they too could call for an end to forced infant genital mutilation for both sexes. It’s not my forte. I’m British, I can write you a strongly worded letter but I’m too polite for dealing with ill informed or disingenuous people.
In 2018, the International Conference on Men’s Issues was again to be held in London. I was a little bit jealous hearing the stories from the 2016 conference so I jumped at the chance. It was originally going to be held in Birmingham, but, as is usual with men’s issues, the press got wind of it and campaigned against it, labelling it as “misogynistic”, which is laughable when you actually attend one of these events and witness how many speakers and guests are women, and the high esteem to which they are beholden.
As a result of the change in venue and dates, I managed to double book myself. I’d already booked a trip to the Farnborough Air Show for me, my wife, brother in law and father in law. The air show was one day and the ICMI was 3 days. The ICMI conferences were not cheap to attend so I spoke to the organiser and asked if I could allow someone else to take my place for the day I had the air show, and he kindly agreed.
Losing Liz
The girl that lived in my home city, Elizabeth, who I took to previous men’s rights meet ups famously managed to gate crash the 2016 conference. She didn’t have a ticket, she didn’t really have any money, but she turned up, ended up being recognised and being interviewed by The Honey Badgers, a group of mostly female MRAs from Canada and the USA with youtube fame.
I decided to offer her the ticket, and pay for accommodation and travel. She was really excited about going, it’s such a big social event. I persuaded the organiser to let me pay extra so that she could attend all three days and also paid for her to go to one of the special meals with the speakers.
I was busy at work and she wasn’t easy to get hold of anyway, often having problems with her phone so I didn’t manage to speak to her before the event but I went to pick her up in the morning on the day of the event and there was no answer. Her boyfriend, who actually lived opposite to her flat, came out to talk to me and it turned out that she had committed suicide by hanging the week beforehand.
I couldn’t believe it. I made the journey to London on my own in complete shock. All sorts of thoughts were going through my mind like what if I tried to call her sooner. Was it my fault, was she worried about money? Could I have done something different?
When it comes to these kind of meet-ups, there is a sense of community and lots of familiar faces, and when I spoke to the organiser that morning, he asked if I wanted to say a few words about it. I hate public speaking like that but I had to do it for Elizabeth. The whole conference was very bitter-sweet. I lost a friend but had no time to grieve about it, I was meeting new people.
Yes, this really did happen
On one of the nights, after spending hours in a hotel bar talking to all kinds of people, social workers, mental health nurses, comedians, famous (to us) youtubers, I ended up being invited back to the hotel room of one of the youtubers with a few others. There must have been at least six of us in that room and it was surreal to watch him operating the puppets he uses in his videos, and taking a line of coke.
I don’t do drugs, well, other than alcohol, so I politely declined. It was another one of those moments where I wanted to look up to the ceiling and narrate to myself, yes, this really did happen.
A funeral too far
Elizabeth’s funeral was on a day that my wife and I were on holiday, I think in Wales. She let me leave her alone in the lodge we stayed in on her own, whilst I went to Mansfield to pick up one of my other good friends, to go to the funeral in Manchester.
It was a disaster of a trip. I set off ridiculously early to allow extra time for our journey but on that day a lorry went into a bridge on a section of the A1(M) and we were stuck in traffic for hours. I tried to get the sat nav to re-route us and it took us down what I can only describe as a farmer track in the middle of a field and to our dismay, back on the motorway further away than we started.
At one point, my car, which had a start-stop system to preserve emissions, refused to start again. Being stuck in traffic with the lights, wipers, entertainment system and heated seats must have drained it and I thought we were going to have to call out the RAC, and further enrage the traffic behind us. Luckily after a few minutes with everything turned off, the car did start again.
We missed the funeral but we laughed that this was probably what Elizabeth would have wanted, she hated a fuss. We did make it for the wake, however, and met her sister and family but I just wish it would have been a celebration for her 30th birthday rather than to say goodbye.
When good men do nothing
I am still proud to be an advocate for men and boys. I make no apologies for caring about a group that receives little political attention. It would be much easier not to have this conviction of heart, it has occasionally lead to fallings out with family members and I’ve had to develop a thick skin to accusations of being a terrible, woman hating person but I know the truth and I could live much better with being unpopular than I could live with being a coward and not speaking out. I know many people agree with me and I know helped people gain a better understanding, whether they agreed or not.
Many of these people will not risk putting their head on the block and publically acknowledging the issues, but they are listening because they have told me so. If I made just one person change their mind and have a little bit more empathy for men’s issues, then it will have all been worth it.
Rant Over 