Single-mindedness

So now I feel like writing another blog. I’m starting this entry whilst sitting in a cafe, sited on the closest thing to Hallowed Ground in my world… Silverstone Racing circuit, in Northamptonshire.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a petrolhead. I love cars. I follow motorracing religiously, and there is nothing quite like the sound of a high performance engine to get me all excited. (I should point out at this stage that my own car has nothing quite like the sound of a high-performance engine… It’s a diesel. See, I’m practical.)

Why do I enjoy it so much? Well, apart from the obvious reasons… They look cool, go fast, get the blood pumping and so on… The thing I love most about high-performance cars is the sheer bloody-minded focus and sense of purpose they have. A Lotus Exige ‘S’ is designed to go fast… And not much else. There’s no glove compartment, no door pockets, no cup holders, not much of a stereo, no comfy padded seats, a boot (trunk, for my American friends) only just about big enough to fit a small pencil into, a fiddly four-point harness for each of the seats, and poor rearward visibility. There’s also very little soundproofing between you and the highly tuned (and LOUD) 220bhp Toyota engine located *directly* behind your head. It is a horribly impossible car to have as a day-to-day car. It’s awkward to get in and out of, expensive to insure and maintain, and nobody in their right mind would get one as an only car.

But…

That’s not what it’s *for*.

I love the fact that there is such a thing as a Lotus Exige ‘S’ in this world. Rather than saying, “ok… We’re going to make a car… How can we make it do as much as possible, be safe, comfy, practical, useful, economical, reliable…. Oh yes, and it needs a bit of forward movement too…” we’re saying simply “let’s make a car. It needs to go very fast. That’s it.”

Single-mindedness, stubbornness, narrowness of view… All these things seem to be viewed in a negative light by most people. However, most of mankind’s greatest achievements have been made by people who were singularly consumed by a particular vision… Edison with the lightbulb, Whittle with jet propulsion, and Colin Chapman with his unsold at auction cars, marked “lot U/S” at the end of the day. (hey, that name’s got a ring to it… Let’s call it a Lotus…)

Singlemindedness can be a good thing, folks. It drives people to levels of excellence that a less focussed individual would not strive for. Sure, it can also be tough to work with… And people who are that focussed are sometimes tough to talk to about anything else… But I for one am glad those people are out there.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m being called into my driver’s briefing…

…. Additional (after my laps)…

Yes, I’m still here… And very impressed with what singleminded dedication can produce! That car is absolutely amazing. I want one. I wonder if I can swap my nice comfy Ford for one…..:-)

 

Thoughts on family

Hello, fellow web 2.0 people.

So… I’ve decided to blog about stuff. I’ve called my blog “My Five Minutes”, because hopefully each of my blog entries won’t take you much longer than that to read. Thus, the hopefully very occasional “less than fascinating” entry will be mercifully brief.
Sadly, this also means that any gems of literary blogging genius will be over all too soon. However I’m quite sure we’ll all cope, regardless.

My first blog is going to be about family. Yours… Mine… We are all of us blessed in various ways with all sorts of familial connections and arrangements. Some people consider certain family members to be their inspiration, still others to be their strength, their love, their “reason”, their pride, their bane(!)… We are all connected in one way or another, and these particular connections always seem to create the strongest emotions and thoughts. It’s these connections that I wish to talk about today, if I may.

Let’s wind the clocks back a bit, to around Christmas 2007. I had just moved away from my home town for a new job at Sun, where I’d been trying to get a job for years. I knew nobody in the area, and I was a hundred miles from my nearest family. I was also living alone for the first time, having just moved out of the house I had been sharing with my best friend back home and into an apartment all by myself.

Needless to say, it was an interesting time. Full of the promise and excitement of beginning a career at Sun, but also sad because of the familial isolation I was suddenly experiencing. That Christmas when I travelled back to see my folks for the holiday, I genuinely regretted moving away.

Only a few weeks later, I met Holly. At the time, she was living a hundred miles away (in the opposite direction to my hometown!) but as luck would have it, headed to a university near my apartment later that year. We fell in love almost immediately… And then there’s her kids. Anyone who knew me before that Christmas will tell you, I was no “natural” around children. To be honest they made me feel nervous, uncomfortable and awkward. And I’m pretty sure that didn’t take long for kids to realise!

However, when I met Holly and her boys, I decided to really make a big effort to get over this child-fear issue…! They didn’t have much of a father to speak of. He had removed himself from their lives entirely, and prior to meeting me they were a single parent family unit.

Over the following months, the boys endeared themselves to me, and I got to share some pretty cool parenting moments with Holly too! The first time the youngest boy managed to pedal his bike properly (still with stabilizers though) was a great moment, and I caught myself feeling genuinely massively proud of him at that moment!

Things have certainly changed since those days. We’re all living together now in a beautiful house, and we have a new arrival on the way! Holly and I will be having a baby, which will be my first baby, due october 11th. The boys now look to me as their father figure… In fact I had to smile to myself a few weeks ago when the youngest introduced me to a new friend of his as his “ben-dad”, which was really sweet!

I originally thought that living alone would be cool… I had images of being some sort of attachment-free bachelor, living in a cool pad filled with gadgets and inanimate things… But all things considered, I honestly couldn’t think of anything more depressing for me. Family is definitely where it’s at! Being a parent is so much fun, seeing the world through a child’s eyes as you help them to make sense of the world around them is as much a learning experience for me as it is for them.

The connection I’ve found between myself and the boys is amazing. They recently went away for a week to visit their aunt, and I found myself really missing them. I was really pleased to see them yesterday when we went to get them, and they had both genuinely missed me loads! It’s the little things that matter in life… Like when your 3 (nearly 4!) year old comes and gives you a great big hug and a kiss, and says “I missed you, I love you!” – truly amazing, and really very special.