Author Archives: Jonathan

S02E19: Self development

Moving on up

This has been a week. I even took a whole day off, and yet things kept happening. Here are some things that happened

1I booked an appointment with my GP to talk about my mental health. It’s taken me more weeks than it should have and a friend asking me repeatedly if I’d done it. I think it’s because I’m quite scared about the response. There are a number of possibilities floating about; not least that I’m still in the heartbreak hotel and it’s just how I’m going to feel for a little while. Other possible futures are out there, but at this point I’d rather know what shape they’ll be. Right now I’m blundering into them blind and it’s not sustainable. I’m also talking about it because holy shit guys, do we need to be better at talking to each other about this.


2I went to Voice & Vote at the invitation of all-round good person Sam Villis. It’s small, and it looks smaller inside the enormous hall, but it’s still very very good. Reflecting on how we’ve got to where we are, and how many steps it took, and the familiar battle of pragmatists against idealists was fascinating. Do go and see it. Get yourself a suffragette rubber duck.⁰

Suffragette duck

3I was invited to an interview with an organisation in Manchester. I’m still not sure how I feel about this. I’m frustrated by London, by its endless expense, by the noise and the pollution and the Central line. Manchester is a long way away, to be sure, but it’s cheaper, smaller, friendlier. I might be projecting. I might be trying to run away from things (see 1). I’m still going to take the interview and see how it goes. If nothing else, I like to have a sense of how much I’m worth.

4 I also applied to the Future Leaders Scheme, a development scheme internal to the Civil Service for people looking to move into the senior civil service.¹ The ever-inspiring James Arthur Cattell has published his answers, so here are mine if you’re wondering what it looks like when I big myself up. I’m not sure it’ll amount to anything — better people than me have been rejected — but if you venture nothing you gain nothing.

British SAS logo: who dares wins

5 I started writing a book. There is a book called ‘The Phoenix Project’, and is probably one of the worst books ever written. The storyline is appalling. The characters are wooden. The prose is thicker than porridge and simpler than a two-by-two sudoku. Despite this, it’s an absolute best-seller and is praised by many for the accessible way it introduces key concepts like flow, work-in-progress limits, and kanban boards.

(A note on Kanban boards: kanban is a Japanese word that means signboard or billboard, which makes kanban board a tautology. People who follow me on twitter make the argument that although it’s a tautology, it’s okay, because it’s in a different language.)

In an attempt to get the ideas of Wardley mapping across to a wider audience, I’m writing something similar. The current working title is “The Magellan Project”, because I’m literally incapable of creative thought. Please encourage me to keep writing, because already I hate every character I’ve written.

README

Just one this week. What if we worked a four day week?

⁰ Oooh, get me one too

¹ You may also have spotted that another reason I’m applying for things is because my sense of self-worth is tied up (in a deeply unhealthy way) with how much people value me, and points 2 and 3 are intimately tied up with being able to appraise that in a concrete way.

S02E18: Mission is go

New mission. New team. New challenges.

My new team at GDS has a smaller focus. I’m excited by this as it means I can focus on learning just one thing, rather than a multitude. I’m sad to be leaving my old team — but Steve Messer, the associate product manager, has just started weeknoting. So I’ll hopefully still get a sense of what’s happening.⁰

This week I’ve been reflecting on:

All models are bad, but some of them are useful. The trigger for this was talking Dan Barrett, who continues to role model for me values of openness, honesty, and kindness. We met up this week and talked about strategy and models. For some people, the direction of an organisation is like this:

Planets orbiting the sun in two dimensions

We’re moving around a fixed centre, and in some number of years we’ll get back to where we started. The point is to maintain the right speed and trajectory so that we’re all aligned at the end.

This is a terrible model, because the reality is more like this:

Planets orbiting the sun in three dimensions

We’re literally never going to get back to where we started. Even the gif above isn’t the whole model; the path of our Sun is not a straight line but a curve as well. Everything, everything, is in motion. We have to aim for where we’re going to be, and we’ve got to accept the world as it is before we can do that.

Security is hard: if you’re interested in cybersecurity you could do much worse than signing up to Michael Brunton-Spall’s newsletter. But in the week that we gained much more detail about the Democratic Party hack, and Apple rolled out 1Password to employees — including enough licenses to secure their personal devices — I’m reminding you to set up 2FA everywhere you can. If you don’t know how but would like to, get in touch with me and I’ll be very happy to help you. And if you’re excited about radical, decentralised internet security then consider donating to the Open Privacy Group. There are stickers in it for you.

What being a good ally looks like: In the week that a group of gross, trans-exclusionary, self-described feminists¹ ambushed Pride, you should watch Nanette. Nanette is Hannah Gadsby’s special on Netflix. It’s visceral and brilliant and has a lot to say about the state of the world. I’ve also been fighting with how to explain it to people without sounding “woke white guy”. It is funny and really important, and drives home a lot of truth about tension and comedy. Here’s a quote, but just — just go and watch it.

Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who exists, and always has done, in the margins? It isn’t humility. It’s humiliation. . . . I make fun of myself in order to make other people feel more comfortable with my difference. And I decided I don’t want to do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who may identify with me.

Emotional damage is like waking up to find your world has been seeded with mines: except you have no idea where they are. They just explode in your stomach when you unknowingly step on them. And nobody else can see them. It’s a lot like grieving again, and the only thing you can do with this grief-thing, with its claws in your brain and your heart and a weight that drags you, is just to lumber around with it. It just has to be until one day it falls off. You can numb yourself with alcohol or sex or alcohol-fuelled sex², or you can pour it out and get some brief catharsis from sharing that pain, but you can’t kill it off. More and more I’m finding you can’t kill it off. It’s like a mixed metaphor that started well but really got away from its author.

How do we know when to make a piece of code a commodity? There’s extra work in making a function a separate library. It can be used by other people, but at the same time it’s more complex to upkeep. Overengineering the solution to a problem is definitely a fault of mine — my early code is Rube Goldberg-esque³ in its unnecessary complexity — but saving a few minutes here for the sake of future me’s annoyance seems a good deal.

I’m consuming:

This is a masterclass in telling stories, and why the initial story — the first story — is the one we should avoid telling. Centring systems instead of people as the reason for failures enables us to run blameless retrospectives and frees everyone to be open and honest about what went wrong. This is valuable for everyone, not just devs.

Learning about Simon Wardley’s process of mapping was an epiphany. Conversation with Dan Barrett and Morgan Frodsham have reignited my interest, and I’m busy mapping anything I can lay my hands to. This talk is a great start if you’re interested in writing a strategy that might actually survive the real world.

⁰ They’re also only about 10 metres away, so if I get really desperate I’ll just walk over and ask.

¹ Excluding trans people is not, has never been, radical

² Hello mum, I definitely do not do these things

³ Yes, this is really just an excuse to post this video:

S02E17: Firebreak

Oh yeah, we’re going heavy on metaphor here

A firebreak is a path cut through a forest. It’s wide enough that, if there were a fire, it shouldn’t be able to jump across. It’s a deliberate act of destruction to guard against future calamity.

My organisation has regular firebreaks, for people to blow off steam and do side projects that improve the organisation in one way or another. For me, it was an opportunity to get back to where I started and do some work to improve the Fast Stream. I worked up a clickable prototype of a service that people could use to submit roles they’d like trainees to fill. I showed the thing every day, made content changes and tweaked what I was going to do. It got great feedback, so now I’ve got to figure out how to make a case for a proper team to turn it into a real service.

I ran out of time to put it on infrastructure, but if you’d like to play around with it you can download the code and run it yourself.

Screenshot!

I learned how to use Redis and how to drop a user into a variable-length workflow and then ping them back out. I used Docker, I coded in the open, and I managed not to publish any credentials.

As a sidenote, I’m so grateful that I’ve found a job where I get money to do something I love and can lose hours on. It’s wonderful.

This was my fun thing.

Despite this; despite having been doing this for only a month, I’m already looking ahead. There are good career paths in my area, and I’m planning mine out already. It involves a secondment to a cold, North American country at some point — preferably before my French gets too rusty. I don’t know if this is running away from emotional distress or trying to make the best of the situation: I am now freer of things that keep me here.⁰

And so I’m excited about next week: I’m seeing a couple of people to talk about how they got to the senior places they did in the hopes that I can emulate them. I’ve got breakfasts (including a potential return to #OneTeamBreakfast) and I might even make it to chess club.

A scene from Harry Potter. Queen takes knight.

This week I’ve been grateful for all the people meeting up with me. Company is immensely valuable, particularly at the moment, so thank you to the kind souls who let me word vomit all over them in various cultural landmarks.

Particular thanks to the individual who broke my “I’m an emotional mess, I’m not drinking” run with eight gins. I feel like a new person this morning, by which I mean my tongue feels unfamiliar and my skin is both too hot and too cold.

Finally: next week I’m going to experiment with intermittent fasting — only eating in an 8 hour window between 1200 and 2000. Join me on a journey of grumpy, hangry emails before devouring lunch at 1202.

⁰ I am choosing to call this “ambition” rather than “running away from your problems”. I’ve wanted to visit Canada for a while, and having fewer roots open up new routes to career success. No word on romantic success; indeed, if there is any nation in the world where being bilingual in French and English is unlikely to help you attract a partner it must surely be Canada.

S02E16: The week after the week before

Slowly getting there

Mental health update

Andy Samberg giving a big thumbs down

I am going through some stuff, so I’m going to mention mental health for the remainder of this season. It’s not sufficient, and I’m casting around for a therapist, but I want to get some of this stuff in front of me. Skip it if it makes you feel uncomfortable.

This week it’s been odd, seemingly trivial things that have triggered a drop in my mental health. At other times I feel like I’m doing better, until I catch myself feeling okay and worry that it means I’m a bad person.

I am trying to remind myself that bad people don’t generally worry if they’re bad people, because they think they’re good people. So I’m hoping that by virtue of the fact that I’m worrying that I’m a bad person, something bad people don’t do, I’m actually a good person. More or less.

Helena Bonham-Carter looking very confused

Eating has been better: I’m doing three meals a day again. I’m eating out more than I should, but it’ll be okay in the short term. And it’s for a good reason, good people have been rallying around me and encouraging me to do stuff and talk to them. Thank you good people. You are people and you are good, and you know who you are.

The week in brief

Monday was mucking around⁰ in a language called bash, with an aim to automating some of the tools we use.

Image result for automate all the things
AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS

I’m getting more comfortable in the team, and where I fit in. A good day.

On Tuesday I was working from home and did some remote pairing. Pairing is a process where two people work on the same thing at the same time. I was worried that it would be harder to pair without people able to see my pair’s face, but it actually worked out really well. My pair was really patient and helpful and I think I’ve now got a handle on how to solve a particular class of problem I’m working on.² I took the afternoon off to help a friend out.

London is the black hole into which all regional hopes and dreams tumble. The upshot of that is that on Wednesday I was asked by an old friend from uni — who now works for the same organisation as me! — to do a little video interview type thing. I hope I did well; everyone involved seemed happy. It was a nice little five minute session of being outgoing, which I do less of now that I mostly wrestle with computers. I don’t know if it’ll ever be published. If it is, I’ll put it in here somewhere.

On Thursday the community of technologists at GDS got together to look at the stuff we’re doing and where it sits on a spectrum of “we need to start doing this” and “we need to stop doing this”. It’s a “Liberating Structure” exercise, and looking at the page it looks corny as heck. That’s not to say it wasn’t valuable and effective, and I think the way it was adapted to the group helped. It gave us some good actions and reflections, and it’s certainly structured my thinking on where I want to start agitating for change³.

John Oliver waving a Pride flag. This symbolises my desire to agitate for change.

This sounds too aggressive, but it’s a fact that we always need to be changing. Deciding where to focus that is a necessary strategic decision because we can’t change everything.

I also saw fellow #weeknote-r Dan on Thursday. Dan is open in a way that aggressively breaks down typical masculinity, and I have a lot of love for him for that.³ It was helpful for me to listen to things he’s thinking/feeling/doing in a work context. We shared problems. I feel like I learned things.

Chris and Ben, characters from Parks and Rec, hugging

I also saw the ~secret~ underground passage from 1 Parliament Street to Westminster Palace, which was exceedingly cool. Thanks Dan.

Friday at last, and I had a brief objective setting meeting with my manager to talk about how we do things in my new organisation. I’ve got rough outlines and I’m immensely excited about all of them. I like objectives, or at least some structure around what I’m aiming for. It helps me keep my head up and prioritise my work.

In the evening I had an incredibly good dinner at Rosa’s Thai Café. Go, I entreat you. It’s absolutely delicious. In particular, try the ice tea: I’ve never had it before and it was a taste sensation. I was dining with a friend after doing interview prep; as before, my job was to ask tricky questions and imbue her with confidence. I hope it worked. She’d be excellent.

⁰ “Mucking around” diminishes and minimises what I do, and if I heard any of my peers or mentees talking like that I’d tell them off. I should do better at living my own advice.¹

¹ This was an extremely stream-of-consciousness sidebar. It’s meta, but I’m going to leave the original wording and this commend in for people to point to and remind me. And for me to point to and remind me.

² As an example of the mental health section above, I wrote “partner” instead of “pair” first. When I did that, it triggered lots of really unhappy connotations. So I changed it, and then I went for a walk.

³ I was nervous about using the word love, but fuck it. Loving your friends is a thing, a positive thing, and it’s a thing I feel we men should be more comfortable saying.

S02E15 : The hardest thing I have ever done

Hrrrrngh. Alright, let’s do this.

My partner and I broke up. There. It’s a thing that happened, and now it’s written down. And now I can talk about it.

It’s impossible to write about being broken-hearted without hamming it up, chewing the scenery like a Romeo who’s in it for the snogging. There’s such a weird depth of pain and loss and sadness that describing it properly needs music or arm movements or massive, unnecessary wars that will eventually spawn a movie starring Brad Pitt.


Describing it improperly is easy. I’ve been doing it all week. I’ve been “sad”, as if with three letters, with one syllable, you could express the feeling of walking through life with a hole where a person used to be.

It was, in the parlance, “amicable”. There’s a difference in where we see our lives. We did the right thing; the grown-up thing. The hard and horrible thing. I don’t recommend it. If you’re going to break up with someone, do the right thing. Commit some heinous sin. They will hate you, but they won’t feel like this. And that’s probably better. In the grand scheme of things, the amount of sadness will have reduced a little.¹

Other things happened this week, but I need you to understand that this was the screaming backdrop against which the following things happened.

2nd Troy GIF

I tried to learn Ruby as I’m in a team that works entirely in that language. Cue scenes of panic as I attempt to speed read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.

It is not a book you can speed read. It is barely a book that you can read. I am perplexed that anyone who’s ever read it can still speak English, let alone program in Ruby. Here’s a quote picked at random:

One day I was walking down one of those busy roads covered with car dealerships (this was shortly after my wedding was called off) and I found an orphaned dog on the road. A woolly, black dog with greenish red eyes. I was kind of feeling like an orphan myself, so I took a couple balloons that were tied to a pole at the dealership and I relocated them to the dog’s collar. Then, I decided he would be my dog. I named him Bigelow.

Perplexing.

I got a sticker at just the right time. I needed this reminder that being generous with myself is an a-okay thing to do, and I am writing this sentence weirdly because even expressing that sentiment makes me feel like less of a man so let’s get to the end of this sentence quickly thank you.² Credit and love to Sam Villis for the lovely sticker.


I finally got to meet Jess Neely, whom I’ve been coaching in the mysterious art of confidence. I come into this as a middle-class white man, so I’ve got an absolute lifetime of experience of people assuming I’m more competent than I am. I’ve done my best to spread this amazingly mundane superpower around. It’s too much power for one man to possess.

I organised many things, including exciting meetings with people I deeply admire. I had lunch with another former Fast Streamer, bumped into someone I went to uni with, and generally tried to fill my time with useful things. I’ve literally just lined up a meeting I’ve been trying to get for three years, and I’m absolutely over the moon. I’ve already got a corporate objective in mind. Watch this space. Watch it. Waaatchhhh iiiiiitt.

I wrote this. And it was really, really painful. A bit good. But painful. And you read it. Thank you for doing that.

¹ I really can’t stress enough that if you take advice from me, a guy with a shattered heart, you are in for a really bad time. Please do not do this.

² The patriarchy fucks up e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e

S02E14

Our house. In the middle of our street.

This week in funemployment news: my partner and I are going through the process of buying a property.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Buying a property is a good demonstration of how rich people stay rich. It’s also a great insight into a system that has a lot of moving parts and a user journey that looks like a rollercoaster had offspring with Escher.

It has also entirely validated my use of Trello. ORGANISE ALL THE THINGS.

We’ve been scouting a newly built flat for while, looking to prop up the London housing bubble by using Help To Buy. We’ve been shopping around and settled on a two-bed, so we can have a home office. With any luck, working from home is going to become more and more common, and it’s nice to be prepared.

Help To Buy ISAs seem like a con, by the way. You save in the hope of getting a 25% bonus from the folks in government, but you can’t use it at exchange when you hand over the deposit. The deposit, which represents 5% of the total value of the property (in London). This is easily the largest amount of money you part with, but you can’t use your ISA for that. You also can’t use it for anything else. The idea seems to be that you spend it on the property at completion. Which is…frustrating. The barrier to people buying houses is scraping together £20,000 for a deposit.

Anyway. The way round this we found was asking our solicitor to negotiate the deposit down by the amount we’d have in the ISA by completion.

PSA: You can negotiate everything when you buy absurdly expensive things. Nobody expects you to pay the sticker price. I would love to know where that line is. I wouldn’t negotiate a bar of Dairy Milk (£2.00) but I would negotiate a flat (£450,000). Somewhere between those two data points is “the line at which this item is so wildly expensive I feel comfortable calling your bluff and making a case that it cannot possibly cost as much as you’re asking”.

We’re buying “off plan”, which means “based on drawings”. That’s enough to make a person nervous, but there’s a mirror-image of the building already built that we’ve seen inside.

Then there’s the paperwork. It’s not a well designed system. I’ve clearly been spoiled by GOV.UK, but I’d really like a friendly page. Here’s one I made earlier.

NOT REAL. Made for fun.

The most difficult thing is choosing the right mortgage broker and solicitors. With a new build the developers will have set up one each of these, because of course it’s in their best interests for you to move quickly — they generally like to get to exchange, when you hand over your deposit and are contractually bound to follow through, within 28 days of reserving. Yikes.


So we’ve had to move quickly. There are plenty of comparison sites out there, and they do a great job. Somewhat too much of a good job, perhaps, since my partner and I were completely paralysed by choice. We’ve gone with companies that will remain temporarily nameless, depending on how well we get on with them. So far so good. Both our solicitors and mortgage brokers seem quite experienced, so that’s a bit of a relief.

There’s still a lot of paperwork to sign. I’m glad we’re now at the place in time when I can use my phone to scan documents and email them back, but I can’t help thinking that we’d be in a better place with an encrypted signature. I won’t get onto a soapbox about state-implemented public-key encryption here. Suffice it to say: there is a better way.

So now it’s Friday. Two sets of processes are crunching along. We’re going on holiday tomorrow and taking a laptop in case there are any last minute emergencies. We’re hoping to come back to green ticks, or thumbs up, or whatever measure solicitors use to tell you that everything is going to plan.

I have some recommendations for culture this week:

HAPPY! is messed up. It’s also the best thing Christopher Meloni has ever done. It also stars Patton Oswalt, whose stand up show Annihilation remains the only stand up show that has made me cry tears of sadness. Catch both on Netflix if you’ve got it.

Our little #weeknotes community seems to be expanding apace. Keep your eyes on that twitter hashtag. My favourite from recent weeks has been this, from Nour Sidawi:

View at Medium.com

That’s all. Next week will see beaucoup d’un lovely city, and hopefully a call from my new team. I’m so excited!

S02E13

Technically underemployed

Warning: fire-hose of consciousness coming at you below. Buckle up.

Monday/Tuesday

I didn’t have to get up for work today.

Instead, I read my sister’s dissertation. I made a spinach and filo pastry pie and, in trying to do both, emptied a quarter of a pot of cayenne pepper into it.


In the afternoon I went into town for a final interview with a government department. I don’t know how it went. I am naturally pessimistic, but at the same time there were points when I had to say with honesty that I didn’t know the answer to a question.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but I made sure to ask the panel for the answer. I’m hoping “ignorant but curious” is better than “ignorant”, and almost as good as “knowledgeable”.

I also did a code challenge which I’m still puzzling over and playing with between lectures. I only had 45 minutes, but I can still remember it well enough that it’s been on my brain all day¹. Like a brainworm.

It was modelling a checkout. NEVER HAS A CHECKOUT BEEN SO COMPLEX

Immediately after that I had a call from a recruiter, who said I had good feedback from an interview last week. I think I’ll have another interview this week, but I find the velocity with which recruiters want to move off-putting. I appreciate that what they’re selling is almost certainly a perishable good, and I think it’s fair to say I’d struggle selling an opportunity that other people were trying to sell as well.

All the same. Let me have a couple of hours to think about things?

The sticking point I’m finding with many of these calls is that everyone, as far as I can tell, wants a full-time worker. There is not as much provision for part-time work as certain sources would give credence.

I had a surprisingly enjoyable technical interview with a multinational professional services company, so we’ll see how that shakes out.

Wednesday

Hitting that refresh button on my inbox. Day three of purposeful unemployment and I’m climbing the walls, when I ought to be revising. I’ve secured a second interview tomorrow — Thursday — with an interesting organisation that is probably the most diverse I’ve ever had the good pleasure of applying to, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that.

A good friend of mine thought of me and passed on details for a young company looking to do data analytics: an exciting prospect so coffee has been organised, again for tomorrow. If I’m going into town I may as well go into town after all.

I’ve also received confirmation that I’m through to the second round for the multinational company, which means 4–8 hours of unpaid labour. It’s a bit frustrating, and deeply problematic. I’m entirely able to do this work because I’ve got no job, but for someone working a full-time job with dependents I imagine it would present a massive barrier.

It is an interesting puzzle that has been presented to me, though, so I will do it — even though it feels like a betrayal. Capitalism puts you in this sort of spot: principles are all well and good, but won’t pay the bills.

Thursday

Was offered, and accepted, a new position. Had a Nepalese to celebrate.

I’m trying to be cool because I don’t “have” the job until various things have been done. I also hope that my new manager is cool with these notes. If not — well, we’ll see.

I’m starting in June.

By the way, the offer was only the second proudest moment of the day. This most dad of all dad jokes was the number one:

I got him. I got him good.

Anyway. It was a day full of stress and minor anxiety as I fretted about turning down interviews. I am a hoarder, and that includes opportunities: I’m not as bad as Chidi Anagonye, but making big decisions is something you don’t really get daily practice in, unless you’re somewhere senior — which of course is the last place you want people who are practising making decisions.

To choose is to destroy an entire universe where I make a different choice. I can’t deal with that on my conscience.

Friday

Made quiche. Struggled with Java. Didn’t do the code challenge for the multinational. Did watch Thor Ragnarok. Feeling like this:


Java

I am learning it. I am aiming to finish the course this week and be awarded a shiny certificate, saying that I completed a beginner-level course in Java in French. I’m really genuinely excited about adding it to my resumé, but I’m currently stuck on modelling an employee.

Update: programming is the absolute most frustrating-slash-enjoyable thing in the universe, so I’m glad I’ve accepted a job to do that.

¹ If you give me a task and 45 minutes, it will haunt me forever that I didn’t complete it in that time. You can — and the interviewers did — stress that it’s about the decisions I make, about the way I communicated, and in absolutely no universe, discovered or undiscovered, can this task be completed in 45 minutes, by anyone. I’m still going to come away frustrated I couldn’t complete it.²

² Can anyone spell “massive overachiever with imposter syndrome”?

Version 4.6.0 released!

We have a new minor version in production. Minor versions mean new functionality: here’s what’s changed.

Setting prices for line items

Administrators can now set prices for line items. If there are items that you charge a lot, you can now set them up in your Office Settings with a pre-fixed price. We recommend also adding a “Misc” charge that you can set on a case-by-case basis. Don’t forget that you can “charge” negative amounts, if you need to offer discounts.

Expanded search function!

You can now search by last name, first name, email address and production/event company

Minor changes

  • clicking on the logo in the top left will now take you to “My applications”, rather than “Applications” as before.

A tragedy

Of three parts and two continents

This is a story a friend told me, and has given me permission to retell. I think there are a couple of ways to tell it, and I’m going to try them out. It’s an exercise in writing, but also an opportunity to share a very good story. I am deeply grateful to her for the opportunity to retell it.

Alice is a 20-something professional living in London. Work life is going great; all other aspects of life are in the bin. So when a friend offers her the chance to go to a party she seizes it. At the party they’ve hired a fortune teller, and although Alice is basically cynical she’s also had a couple of drinks so she steps up when the fortune teller asks who’s next.

The fortune teller is your basic Barnum effect generator, and lists off things that everyone already knows about people in their 20s in London: stressed, living in cramped quarters, looking for love.

-Everyone’s looking for love, says Alice.

-You’re going to find it, though. The fortune teller gives her a conspiratorial wink, and declares that Alice will go on holiday and be introduced to a tall, dark man by a female friend. They’ll fall in love, but –

-But?

-But there’ll be a period of separation. You’ll end up happy in the end though.

That was it. Forty quid’s worth of fortune telling, and it’s that she’ll be introduced to someone by a female friend. I don’t know if you’ve ever been introduced to your partner — I hope you have — but it’s highly likely you were introduced to them by a female friend. So Alice goes away feeling not entirely convinced. All the same, she’s going on a short break to New Zealand. Maybe there’ll be something in it after all.

She goes on the break. She meets up with some old friends, and one of them introduces her to Max. And they get along like a house on fire. The whole group goes out to lunch, but for Alice and Max the rest of the table doesn’t exist. After lunch they keep drinking, because let’s be honest: millenials fresh out of university with too much disposable income drink like there’s no tomorrow.

There’s a good chance that our tomorrows are running out anyway, so who’s to judge?

Anyway: after an afternoon of day drinking they go to a club, they drink a little more, Alice ends up at Max’s flat. Things happen. Artistic fade to black, etc.

The morning is embarrassment and hunting for clothes. In a flat in New Zealand there is a little piece of Britain; a sock that managed somehow to escape behind the dresser and is holding out for the return of its owner. A few words are exchanged and Alice flees into the glorious sunshine and the embrace of her friends. The rest of the week she puts Max out of her mind and sees the sights; goes to Hobbiton, hikes over the beautiful countryside.

At this point it’s a funny story about the clumsiness of being young and attracted to someone, when it’s easier to have sex than talk about feelings. Then Alice gets a text: Does she want to come for dinner? -Max

So she does. And it’s just the two of them, but it could have been a dinner party of every person ever born and it still would’ve just been the two of them. They had a single drink each and then, just as she was leaving, he grabbed her and kissed her.

Again: people are bad at talking about their feelings.

So they’re kissing, and in the background fireworks are going off and the earth is shaking and I hope someone’s filming this because it is literally straight out of a movie. And then they stop, and his face is flushed and her lips are tingling and he looks like he’s about to say something, and then he doesn’t. And then she gets in a taxi and goes to the airport and flies away.

On the way back she nurses a broken heart and a gin and tonic — how is it that gin at 30,000ft is so much stronger than at sea level? — and thinks about that fortune teller. How she got everything right so far, so maybe there’s a chance that she’ll be right about the last part. That there’ll be a separation, but then they’ll live happily ever after.

She thinks about this for two weeks after she comes back. For the two weeks after that she thinks about it less.

They never saw each other again.

Look, I think that fortune tellers are frauds. Nobody can predict the future because everyone can change the future. Finding a person with whom you’ve got chemistry is pretty rare, and quite frankly I suspect it happens at the wrong time for a lot of people. (Let us put aside for a moment the tragedy of there being a wrong time to find a person with whom you have immense chemistry).

Actions are easier than words. Love is more than chemistry. All the same, if you’re reading this and it remind you of a woman who might not be called Alice; if it reminds you of yourself even though your name isn’t Max, maybe you should reflect that a story about what might have been is the realm of authors. A story of how the two of you fell in love and made it work across six thousand miles of air and sea is a better story, and one that really only you can write and tell.

Maybe you should do that.