This morning, I made my final mortgage payment to the bank. For the first time since 1985 – forty years ago – I am mortgage debt free. It all began with a three-bedroom former council house in Lichfield, where I’d just started teaching at Chadsmead Junior School. The house cost £20,000 – just shy of…
Absolutely! Here’s a longer, more thematically structured blog post with global flavour, references to cultural diversity, and your signature tone – warm, engaging, self-deprecating, and gently humorous: A little while ago, in a moment of mild hunger and major nostalgia, I turned to the oracle of our age – Facebook – and asked a question:…
Happy Founders’ Day and Thinking Day! It’s all about the apostrophe. Some would like one between the “r” and the “s”, to show possession by Robert BP alone. Others put it after the “s” to show possession by both Robert and Olave – which I prefer. Others leave it out completely, but the punctuation pedant…
There’s something about those of us born in the 1960s. A certain resilience. A knack for getting on with things. A way of navigating life’s challenges that feels almost second nature. We are neither Boomers nor Xers. We are Gen Jones. The Trumpton Generation. Looking back, I realise how much my approach to leadership has…
As the year draws to a close, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the past twelve months — a year filled with its fair share of challenges, surprises, and personal growth. This quiet time between Christmas and New Year feels like the perfect opportunity to pause and take stock of the lessons I’ve picked…
I no longer actively work with a Section, I do other things as a Scout volunteer, but I was a leader in UK Scouting throughout the 80s and 90s, when being gay in Scouting wasn’t something you admitted to. Indeed, the institutional homophobia at the time was palpable. Since then, things have changed for LGBTQI+…
I was chatting today to an old friend in Nairobi. We come from different backgrounds and different cultures. We disagree about many things, but we have remained steadfast friends since early adulthood. We started to talk about the advice we would offer our younger selves. We began to make a list. Here are a few…
For a whole host of reasons, I have become increasingly interested in the history of Teddy Bears – not something you’d normally expect of a balding, middle-aged charity chief executive. But, over lockdown, the adventures of Ben the Bear were chronicled on Facebook, as he helped me with shopping, eating and other tasks of daily…
When I speak to people in some parts of the world, they are very surprised to hear that I ride my bike to work. (Well, actually, I get the train from my home in the countryside to London, and then ride from the station to my office.) I’ve been told that riding a bike in…
