Pedn Vounder Beach

And an overdue update

I’m on holiday, invited by E to join her family for a week in Penzance. I needed to clear my head today so, with the weather set fair, I took myself off for a run from Mousehole to Land’s End, along the coast path. I’ve run the entire SW Coast Path (not all in one go, I hasten to add) but it’s mostly a blur in the memory now. Every headland has merged into every other. I was able to relive the beauty of our coastal landscape today, and also how tough the running is. I used to cover 30 or 40, even 50 miles at a stretch. Today, 13 miles was quite enough. My legs were wrecked at the end, not helped by taking a tumble down some steps at one point. Covered in a lot of blood, I had to assure the various walkers I passed that it wasn’t as bad as it looked!

It’s going to be good to escape from reality for a few days. The last couple of months have been difficult. My peaceful life, for one reason after another, first became a little unsettled and then got turned completely upside down. There’s always been an issue with Blip as a public facing journal. There are certain things that it doesn’t feel right to share. But it also doesn’t feel right to ignore those things and pretend that all is good. I’ve been finding it easier not to bother at all, compounded by not travelling very far from home and falling a bit out of love with photography. It doesn’t help when you keep losing cameras. 

Perhaps one day I will fill in some of the gaps here, to record the most significant events. The crux of it is that my business partner died, very suddenly, just over three weeks ago. Since my serious bike accident, I’ve been more of a comatose partner than just a sleeping one, no longer able to develop my software any further, no longer able to handle the stress of keeping it running. I passed the baton on to younger, sharper minds. It’s not going to upset anyone to say that my partner was a difficult and complicated man, with extraordinary talents and considerable flaws. He was a control freak and I knew he wouldn’t be happy if I leant away from my role as a techie towards the business and managing side of things. As people, we couldn’t possibly have been more different. I always seemed to rub him up the wrong way.

Since finding out about his death, I’ve needed to return to the office and reassure people that the business continues. It’s been great to meet old members of the team I’ve not seen since before lockdown. The new members of staff are similarly lovely and brilliant people. I’m committed to keeping the ship sailing until we can find a new captain. Our business is in the area of public health, managing cases of infectious disease on the ground, supplying decision support. I was so anxious about how the software (and the team) was going to hold up under the strain of the pandemic that I kept my head down. It was left that my partner would contact me if I was needed and he never called. It must all sound very strange and it is. I’ve chosen to prioritise my mental health over everything else since my accident and I know that’s been the right decision. The whole team has been very understanding.

I was hugely relieved to hear that our software kept running through the course of the pandemic, albeit with a lot of TLC from the team and our partners. The saddest thing of all was that PHE, as the organisation was called then, never got the funding to support all the ideas we had. Post Swine Flu, we were ready to develop our software in preparation for the pandemic that was inevitably coming at some point. No one was interested.

The biggest stress so far is dealing, or more accurately, failing to deal with the bank. It’s been a truly Kafkaesque experience. NatWest puts a huge amount of effort into preventing meaningful communication with anyone. Three weeks on, I’ve still not been able to have a conversation about our business account. I still can’t pay any bills nor even know how to begin the process by which I can. I feel like a shuttlecock being batted between the Bereavements Department and the Business Department, not a single person able to take any responsibility for my problem. Even the threat of moving our business somewhere else has made no difference. I guess they know that no other bank is likely to be any better. I’m currently preparing myself to take drastic and unconventional action. Watch this space!