Lately I seem to have spent too much time in business meetings and on committees discussing and making plans. Now planning can be valuable – it helps us identify what we want to and can achieve, recognise our limitations and spot possible risks and how to deal with them – but it can also be a powerful excuse for putting off action: “We can’t do that until X does this, Y does that and Z has been completed.”

Planning takes place inside our heads, a comfortable environment where we control the results: A leads to B, which leads to our goal of C. Once we take a plan out of our heads and put it into the real world, F, G, H and Q can intervene, some of them completely unexpected. It’s much safer to run a plan in our heads than risk it all going wrong when put into action, but this means we won’t achieve our objectives.

I’ve never been happy just to sit on committees as I like to see action. So that’s my focus at the moment: getting plans out of my head and into the real world to achieve what I want and maybe encounter adventures along the way.

How about you?

Posted via email from z2zine

Pointing the finger is easy; it’s identifying the right target that is more difficult.

That’s why the rush to blame bankers, not only for the financial crisis but pretty much everything else that’s wrong with our economy and public finances, makes me feel uneasy. There’s no denying that the banks appear to operate in a fantasy world with little relation to reality, but then the government’s light-touch regulation let them get away with it. Consumers also happily bought into financial products that were very high risk. How many times I remember people talking about self-certification mortgages which bore no relation to their actual finances.

If the banks were wrong to develop risky products, no doubt identified by market research as what customers wanted, should consumers have been more careful in choosing them?

The culture of greed and something-for-nothing stretches beyond the world of banking. We wanted, or want, cheap everything. We moan about lost jobs, dying manufacturing, yet quibble over a few pence or pounds to buy something cheaper. This inevitably means manufacture in a country where employment conditions and wages would not be acceptable to us.

And house prices. How many delighted in accumulating wealth as the value of their properties rose to perviously unimaginable heights? Despite several years of being assured that the economy would have a ‘soft landing’, again I remember countless people expressing views that it was unsustainable and that a severe correction was likely: just ordinary people, not economists.

Perhaps responsibility for our situation is more widespread, but uncomfortable to admit.

I wonder what part I played.

Posted via email from robertz

. . . as Peter Fairchild loved to.

We came across this brass plaque on a bench while out walking with our dogs this afternoon.

We hadn’t seen Peter for several years as he had gone into a nursing home. Before that he used to walk his dachshund, Chalkie, up Hillsborough in Ilfracombe to a spot near where this bench is to sit and look out over the town.

He seemed such a gentle man and would always enjoy a chat. Apparently, he had been a keen sailor when younger, but could no longer manage to climb to the top of the hill. On Sunday afternoons he would be joined by two of his friends on the bench. It’s fitting that he is remembered on this spot where on a summer evening his parting words would be: “Enjoy your tea.”

We remembered him at tea this evening and will do whenever we walk past his bench.

Posted via email from robertz

The news that the M4 bus lane, so closely associated with John Prescott, is to be scrapped reminded me of a painting which it had inspired me to ‘create’. This was back at the turn of the millennium when I wondered whether I would be capable of producing anything with paint, brush and paper that could in any way interesting or entertaining.

With no training whatsoever but with the images of traffic on the M4, North Circular Road and M25 imprinted on my mind, the bus lane leapt out of my brain, down my arm and into the brush. Whether it managed to make the final step on to the paper, who knows?

I sort of like the result and so do some members of my family, but dreams of multi-million pound auction picture sales faded and my paints and brushes now lie gathering dust.

I did enjoy doing it and it reminds of long, afternoon art lessons at school when it was usually raining as we listened to art teachers who were interesting and eccentric. Perhaps I should get paint and brushes out again and just dabble for fun.

Posted via email from robertz

The welcome rain is giving everything a rush.

The apple trees need a summer prune, although the apples are coming along nicely.

The tomato forest in the shed is reaching the roof and fruit is forming and growing.

The runner bean wall is covered with flowers and beans are forming . . . I’ve pinched out the tops.

Raspberries are having to be harvested daily.

Approaching a delicious time in the garden as so much comes to fruition.

Posted via email from robertz

. . . even after a couple of glasses of red wine or maybe even because of them.

I can’t get enough of these long, light evenings . . .

. . . and we need to treasure them when it’s cold, wet and stormy and we think we haven’t had a summer, because we’re having it now.

Posted via web from robertz’s posterous

Posted via web from robertz’s posterous