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.