He jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute

The headline you see above is a reference to a particularly dark-humoured campfire song enjoyed in my Scouting days. Despite its macabre premise, it is nothing more than a good old singalong, with its set-up refrain, “He jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute”, and its confirming “And he ain’t gonna jump no more”, followed by the equally delightful verse: "They scraped him off the tarmac like a lump of strawberry jam” (repeated three times). Ah, the innocence of childhood, eh?

I’m reminded of this song by what happened to me earlier this week. Let me clarify that you are not reading this post-mortem, a slightly icky posthumous missive released to the blogosphere on the instruction of my solicitor. No, the reason for citing this parachute-free metaphor is that on Monday I agreed to part company with my employer. I’ll spare you the exact details, lest their legal vultures descend, but it was an uncharacteristic departure for me. As several hours of talking therapy uncovered during the early years of my life in Paris (no biggie, I just had a lot of things I needed to process), I’m a creature of security, an animal of habit. Invite me out for dinner and if it’s Italian, I’ll order either the carbonara or the veal Milanese. Dining companions look across at me while perusing a menu and almost always say: “I know what you’re going to order”, predicting with 95% accuracy. It’s not that I’m unadventurous (well, I am), but I like stability. I cling to roots long after they’ve fed the trunk and branches with anything approaching nutrition. Which is what shocked me about Monday’s developments. Normally I would carry on flogging a dead horse, blindly hopeful that things would get better and I’d find happiness or whatever it was that was so sacrosanct that all other possibilities were counted out. But no. Pass me the revolver and the glass of whisky.

When you’re a young man you can probably afford to be cavalier while finding your way in the world, but when you’re almost 52, at the upper end of your working profile, in a world of shrinking corporate resources and the still-prospect of another recession around the corner, leaving a job might seem, at the very least, counter-intuitive. But if you’ve had enough, and it’s clear you’re no longer welcome, the noble way out is the only way out.

So welcome to the rest of my life. I don’t regret the last period of it, in professional terms. All working experiences should be of lasting benefit, even if they provide a better perspective of knowing where not to work in the future. Nor is there any shame in admitting when, ultimately, you just weren’t the right fit. We take on positions and build our careers with almost blind ignorance. We apply for jobs much as we choose holiday resorts from brochures. The pool looks nice, the restaurant looks nice, the taverna on the hill looks nice, and then you get out there and find yourself stranded for two weeks in the kind of hell that eventually turns up in a fly-on-the-wall series on Channel 5. I should point out that this last appointment of mine wasn’t that bad, but I have learned a valuable lesson in ‘buyer beware’ caution. It would be wrong to make disparaging remarks about my now former employer. They took a chance on me, I took a chance on them, it didn’t work out, move on.

With many things in life, I have a tendency to equate things to either music or football. On this occasion, it’s the latter. Not wishing to trivialise my situation - I am now unemployed, after all - I’ve seen football managers come and go, most frequently at my own club, Chelsea, where managerial job security is about as solid as porridge made with water and a minimum amount of stirring. Here, though, is where the comparison with my new circumstances gets flimsy: Chelsea managers usually depart with a decent payoff and the club’s glib gratitude beneath their wings. Under Roman Abramovich, the club has paid more than £90 million to managers as they leave and in May agreed to paying off last manager-but-one Antonio Conte £9 million after a tribunal. All of which means that Chelsea’s former managers enjoy a descent cushion and, usually, end up fairly quickly walking into a new coaching job, unless the filthy lucre of television commentary hovers into mouth-watering view. I don’t have such a cushion, savings and a handful of cashable stock options aside. My priority now is to return as soon as I can to work. Feel free to reach out if you know something or someone looking. 

Meanwhile, I’m spending the next few days sorting out my flat, a long overdue process ahead of me moving across London, finally, and in with my girlfriend. Perhaps these things happen for a reason. When I returned to London almost three years ago, I brought with me the proceeds of 17 years abroad, including the contents of a three-bedroom house near Amsterdam that had been then squeezed into a miraculously large apartment in Paris, before being stripped of non-essentials and mostly squashed into a spare room in Greenwich, laying untouched until now. The clearout now underway is providing much needed catharsis.

I now realise that some of it is long overdue, not just because of my career reaching a [hopefully] brief hiatus, but because it was only three weeks ago that we said farewell to my father. The day after his funeral - literally, the day after his funeral - I was sitting in a marketing ‘offsite’, looking at PowerPoint charts on sales ‘pipeline’. At the time it felt good to be going straight back to work after a defocused fortnight of meetings to discuss hymns and flowers. Perhaps, though, it was no more than a diversion, a distraction from reality. I’ve probably been too clinical about my dad’s death. He was 90 and had Alzheimer’s, which engenders a certain acceptance. There was grief - tears at the funeral when my nephew read the eulogy and recalled the things we loved about Dad, and again, at the end when we played Nat King Cole’s Smile - but then it was time to move on, to return to the relentlessness of corporate life. There was sympathy, genuine sympathy from some quarters, but there was also a sense of “enough of that, we’ve got things to do”. That may be the case, but then that’s also the nature of salesmen in a hurry. They’re usually in too much of a hurry to recognise the real world going past.

For a short time only, I hope, I’ve been gifted time for a clearout, and not just sweatshirts I haven’t worn in a decade. This is a time to exit things no longer of any value. Enabling the preservation of those things that truly are.

You can't win anything with kids

It is, of course, too soon to make even an educated guess as to how the 2019-2020 football season will ultimately pan out for anyone, let alone Chelsea, whose competitive record since the season began currently stands at Played 6, Won 2, Drawn 3, Lost 1 with not a clean sheet between them. But at risk of putting an over-positive spin on things, such a capricious start to Frank Lampard's tenure as the club's head coach belies what will no doubt become the core narrative of the Blues' season to come: kids.

Now, the likes of Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Christian Pulisic, plus Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek, when they are released from injury, are hardly children, at ages ranging from 18 to 23. But in the recent history of Chelsea Football Club, that Abraham is currently the Premier League's top scorer, that Mason Mount has just made his senior England debut, and on Saturday Tomori scored an early contender for goal of the season, is testament to the undoubted sprinkling of youthful stardust that has transformed the mood around the club like stormy weather and overcast skies being replaced by bright sunshine and a cloud-free vista. The football is still capricious: Saturday's 5-2 win over Wolves is not without the recognition that Chelsea still couldn't keep a clean sheet, despite Abraham breaking Eden Hazard's record for becoming the youngest Chelsea player to score a league hat-trick as well as becoming the first English player to score three for Chelsea since Lampard himself eight years ago.

There are more milestones to come, more records to be broken. The 11 league goals scored so far between Abraham, Mount and Tomori, five games in, have already beaten the previous best record of academy graduates (six scored by just Loftus-Cheek in the entire 2018-19 season), marking a first since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. That, alone, is a telling set of stats, even if they are a reflection of the situation the club finds itself in, unable to do the thing they've done most seasons under the Russian oligarch's ownership, and simply gone out and bought players. Thanks to the two-window FIFA transfer ban, the youngsters are getting match time that would have never been possible under any of Lampard's predecessors, a frustration that first found oxygen under José Mourinho, but manifested itself more prevalently under the progressively petulant reign of Antonio Conte, and more dangerously, under the stubborn Maurizio Sarri, whose eventual inclusion of Hudson-Odoi and Loftus-Cheek came across as something he was coerced into.

We have been there before, of course. The promise of youngsters like Jon Harley, Ryan Bertrand, Josh McEachran and Nathan Aké, joining Chelsea Academy alumni like Venables, Greaves, Bonetti, Osgood, Harris and, latterly, Terry, in breaking through into the senior squad and on to greatness is a well-wrought saga. To date, only John Terry in the club's modern era has gone on to see out his career at the club he joined as a schoolboy. That, though, is the romantic view of youth. Football is a serious business, not a careers advisory service, so the expectation of Academy products breaking into the senior team has been somewhat naive in the era of mega-money transfers for players from the European and South American elites. Even when the Chelsea youth squads train in a separate part of the club's Cobham training ground as the senior team, it has often sounded like they could be in a separate part of the country, for all the good it's offered (some weeks back the Daily Telegraph reported that Sarri didn't watch a single youth training session or attend any under-23 games during his year in charge, and once remained in his Cobham office while a critical youth championship game was going on barely 50 yards away).

Lampard's appointment as head coach in July may have appeared like a compromise, in the absence/reluctance of more experienced candidates for the job, but his open embrace of youth, which has already seen Academy players taking part in senior squad training sessions, is bringing a degree of feelgood back to the club. Even if defence continues to be a major worry, the goals-per-game from Abraham in particular is a genuine cause for celebration, even if the reality is that Chelsea this season are not expected to end it that high up the Premier League table, or progress in the Champions League, a campaign which commences tomorrow night against Valencia. But there is an acceptance - for now - that this will be a fallow year that, unless things go dramatically badly, will have us see homegrown talent putting smiles on faces at Stamford Bridge, something that was absent for much of last season and patches of the previous one.

Even more pleasing is that in these first few weeks youngsters have been going some way to entertainingly disprove Alan Hansen's infamous remark on Match Of The Day that "you can't win anything with kids" after Sir Alex Ferguson's then-young Manchester United side lost 3-1 to Aston Villa on the opening day of the 1995-96 season. United later went on to do the League and Cup double with that very same team, one whose average age was 26 years and 137 days. Curiously, only Chelsea has since won the league title with a younger squad - a side in 2005 featuring Lampard himself, Terry and Joe Cole with an average age of 25 years and 312 days. Perhaps you can win things with kids. Time, this season at Chelsea, will only tell.

Free fallin’

© British Airways/Stuart Bailey

I have been accused, light heartedly, I think, of pandering on these pages with my rants about air travel and, in particular, British Airways. It has been suggested that by having a moan I increase the chances of a cheeky upgrade next time I step aboard a plane belonging to what used to be known as “the world’s favourite airline”. Except that it no longer is, by a significant long chalk, and the odds of getting anything gratis out of BA under its current penny-pinching regime are next to nothing.

I write this while waiting to fly back to London from Munich with Lufthansa. I should have been flying with BA, but then they sent me an e-mail to say that my flight had been cancelled, due to the impending pilot’s strike, and that I needed to rebook with someone else. Which I did. And then, 24 hours later, I received another e-mail from British Airways saying that, actually, my flight to Munich was going to fly, after all. Except it wouldn’t have. As I arrived yesterday morning, Heathrow was a car park of BA planes. As far as the eye could see from the perimeter road there was tailfin after tailfin emblazoned with the airline’s red, white and blue motif. None of them were moving. The disruption caused by the 48-hour walkout will go on for days. In total, 1700 flights were cancelled, affecting 195,000 passengers and leaving 150 of BA's 278 planes - and 700 pilots and 4,000 cabin crew - in the wrong place, with other factors like mandatory rest hours likely to prolong the chaos. The whole affair has cost BA at least £100 million in lost revenue, which was probably the point.

Alex Cruz
© British Airways

At the heart of the dispute by BALPA, the pilots’ union, is a claim for better pay from an airline that last year made almost £2 billion in profit, the result of CEO Alex Cruz’s ruthless application of a profit-first philosophy which removed free snacks on economy class flights in a hope to compete with the likes of easyJet and Ryanair (and in the process, downgrade BA's brand value even further). Mr. Cruz, by the way, earns £1.3 million a year from his job. Now, pilots - as opposed to those who clean the planes between flights and load baggage - earn well. Pilot salaries start at £90,000 and rise to almost £170,000 for senior captains, but the union argues that pilot salaries were frozen at a time when BA was in financial recovery. On top of that, they get to book personal travel for themselves and their families for a fraction of what the travelling public has to pay. Not bad conditions. But when you see your employer not only return to profitability but make record profits on the back of a business model designed to profit even more, it is, perhaps, understandable to want a slice of the action. The upshot, however, is a two-day strike that has ruined honeymoons and wedding anniversary trips, and, crucially, disrupted business travel. Environmentalists will argue that we shouldn’t be flying at all, but this is not the point. People still need to go places, and the strike has made that significantly more challenging for those who already had plans in place.

BA's daily losses throughout the strike and its costs during the knock-on days is money it could probably do with to fix the systemic issues that have seen it plummet to 55th out of 65 airlines in global satisfaction rankings. That is entirely of its own doing and the net result of a litany of offences that have conspired to erode customer loyalty, from £4 Marks & Spencer sandwiches on short-haul flights to squeezing in more rows so that legroom (even in business class) is shorter than in many rivals' cabins; then there’s the atrocious rate of return for Executive Club members trying to build privilege tiers and Avios points - and, therefore, loyalty - and being pitifully rewarded on both counts; and, finally, simple breakdowns in operations, such as the disastrous data breach that cost it £183 million in a record fine, the two major IT outages in as many years, and the most recent debacle involving rogue cancellation e-mails. I’ll even add one more: the airline has just relaunched its iPad app, rendering it now with “limited functionality”, according to one official Twitter reply to a complaint from someone who’d launched it only to find that it now only allows users to book a new flight. No longer can it give you details of your bookings, what you’ve earned air miles for, or other useful information about your BA experience. Nothing.

These might sound like the gripes of an over-privileged individual with club class tastes and club class expectations. But as someone who has to travel a lot for work - mostly economy class, I might add - it’s been frustrating to the point of genuine sadness to see an air carrier like BA, that used to stand for something that felt that you were being treated like a valued customer and not a commodity from which to plunder for profit, go down this path of eroding customer quality. Fault lies squarely with BA’s management and that of its parent company, IAG. Their fanatical profit obsession has reduced the airline to one you'd only choose if there were no better alternatives. I will still have to fly with them on some of my regular routes, but when you look at what your loyalty is rewarded by (and access to a business lounge being about the only thing these days), I could go elsewhere and get a sense of better service all round. Flying Virgin across the Atlantic is still the more enjoyable, up to date experience it was almost 30 years ago when I made my first trip to America; the Middle Eastern carriers have long established themselves as the preferred choice for many destinations in Asia and the southern hemisphere. Even upstarts, like Norwegian, have found a business model that balances economy travel with a product you feel delivers value for money.

The recent report by reputation management specialists Alva which revealed that BA’s ranking had sunk to 55th made specific reference to passenger perception that the airline is all about cost cutting for profit. It has tried to respond by claiming investment in new aircraft like the Airbus A350 to replace shockingly ancient Boeing 747-400s and 777-200s, along with improvements to in-flight catering and, very slowly, the rollout of inflight WiFi (a technology I first experienced on an American Airlines flight 10 years ago). But these are all cosmetics - expensive, yes, but still cosmetic - when the core of the customer experience is still being eroded by simple, stupid mistakes like sending out erroneous e-mails, or allowing IT systems to collapse, stranding and severely inconveniencing hundreds of passengers.

Reputation matters, as people in my own profession are prone to incant, and when a once great airline like BA suffers such repeated fundamental failures, you’d expect Mr. Cruz and his boss, Willie Walsh, to pull their fingers out and do something about it. Worse, when people are driven to tweeting “I want my British Airways back”, it’s clear that there’s an awful lot to fix. They’d better get on with it. Fast.