Personal

Went Well Transition to new role at work Restarted a weekly Thankful Thursdays feature on here, in a bid to build an attitude of gratitude Significantly increased my monthly run distance peaking at over 100km for July & August Came through my regular BP checks in August without any need to adjust meds etc Interviewed for AOC role, waiting to hear back on a potential offer, also waiting to interview for a senior M&C role at an oil major in the next few days. Didn’t Go Well Spiritual life is still out of sorts, Suffered occasional bouts of panic, negative self talk and lack of self confidence both at work and my personal life. Need to get a regular meetup and support set up with an older wiser head/ mentor (eg Pastor W?) Didn’t write as much as I thought I would. Need to establish a series of rituals to make this happen semi-automatically Relationship with S appears stalled, with us both living our separate lives and not bonding as well as we should, current living arrangements being the primary cause I believe. Year Objectives and Status The 11 things: ...

\\\* This week I am thankful for: The opportunity to travel for work, the starting point of which was a 3.00am wake up, final bag checks and then dragging myself into a taxi by 4.00am. For what it’s worth, taxi’s out here can be a bit hit or miss, thankfully this one was a big hit; a Sri Lankan national who had lived and worked in most of West Africa in the early 2,000s and had an opinion on the Jollof rice wars. All of that made for a very pleasurable, if slightly woozy 20 minute ride to the airport. Bliss. The flight itself - business class via work - reminded me of all the delights of not travelling cattle class. All told - from leaving my house and arriving at my hotel at the other side - it was the better part of 16 hours, including a lengthy wait in Bamako for the President of Mali to fly off. The relative ease in which I travelled was something to be grateful for, as was what appeared to be a deportation, a reminder that just over 10 years ago, I arrived in my current country as an intrepid student but now have the luxury of belonging to another country. Friendly faces on one of the assets I stopped over at which made my easing into that work day the easiest it could be, given the circumstances Although my room on the first FPSO was iffy, I am thankful for the comparatively plush lodgings I ended up in, on day 3.

\\\* Second week since I’ve restarted these, and the first in which I have been trying to keep a log in my notebook through the week. Here goes: Several times over the last seven days I’ve managed to bust out several good runs ranging from 5 to 10km. Given a mere three years ago, I could hardly complete 2.5km in a go, going the distances I now can is something to be grateful for. Meetups with people I have known through work dominated my social life this past week. First off was a catch up with R who I shared an office with when I first joined my current company back in 2011 and who I have stayed friends with. I have him to thank for making the effort to draw me out from the shy, reserved, headphones-in-my-ears-all-the-time guy I was when I joined. The other meetup was with M, at a Nigerian eatery in town. He managed the pepper OK, and we have notionally agreed to do this every quarter, if we can. The other big catchup was with S, whom I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time. It is always amazing to catch up with someone I haven’t in a while and then the conversation just seems to continue from where it stops. Grateful for friends! My relationship with my local church (and the big C church to be honest) isn’t the greatest at all. Having managed to drag myself there last Sunday, quite a few things said seem to hit right home and capture the moment where I am at the moment.

It has been a while I did one of these, life happened I guess, but recently I have come back to a place where mental health has come front and centre in the circles I roll in again. I suspect if you asked S, she would say I have been a terrible old git for most of the past year, which is where actively cultivating an attitude of gratitude comes in. The idea would be to document one thing per day that I am grateful for, and share on here on a Thursday. So here goes: ...

The year I turned thirty, I was a student battling to put finishing touches to my master’s degree dissertation and pondering what the future had in store for me. That the success or failure of that year, and the year before that, came down to that singular task was the result of an unanticipated turn of events which turned what was a leave of absence to return to full-time study into having to leave my Nigerian job. Grad school, my response to the year before that, had made sense in my head largely because it seemed a low risk, given there was a reasonably high likelihood of returning. I, as it would turn out was ultimately mistaken. ...

Highlights Broke 50km distance for the first time in 2019 Kept up my daily devotional streak, thanks to the CoE’s Lent Pilgrim app Completed a book! (James Clear’s Atomic Habits). Still behind on the year plan though Lowlights Habit streak tracking still patchy at best Finances ended up a mess - home improvements were unbudgeted for but perhaps add value to the house (not quantified though) Next Month Focus Area ...

All it takes is an extended patch of wet and cold weather for things to descend into chaos on these islands, this latest batch of snow, heavy winds and cold weather culminating in flight cancellations and severe weather warnings amongst others. For the most part, I manage to survive - extra warm clothing, walking gingerly to and from work in the wet slush and almost continuous heating being the sum of the adjustments I have to make. It is at the weekend when the rooster comes home to roost in a manner of speaking. Having turned up at the airport for my 8.20pm flight down to Heathrow, delays till almost 11 pm are announced until at a few minutes before midnight we are advised the flight has been cancelled. Remarkably, everyone who should be on our flight is remarkably sanguine about it all, helped I suspect by the sense that the weather ‘gods’ have been at it again. Between the final announcement of delays and the flight being cancelled, we find (from Flight radar) that the ‘plane designated to carry us away to London has made several attempts to land at the ‘Deen but has failed due to fog rolling in. They eventually get diverted to Glasgow whilst we make an orderly line at the front desk to get our flights rebooked. I move my flight by a week and then head home, not before I find out that the woman in front of me in the queue has family in the same area of Surrey that I’m headed to, and very much like me, she makes this trip every two weeks so. Joking about being four-day spouses, does have a ring of truth to it though. For me, it offers evidence that this thing - having a foot in two different countries - isn’t exactly impossible to maintain, mild weather-induced irritation notwithstanding. ...

Dragging myself out of bed to begin the motions that will end in my lining up at the starting point of this week’s Aberdeen Parkrun, it strikes me that it is just over a month ago that I shipped myself and a couple of bags out of town for an extended holiday season. In between there have been pit stops in various parts of Surrey, East London, Chelmsford, Kent and an extended traipse through several towns within the Valencian Community. A second full week of work has beaten any remnant of festivity out of me, which heightened the sense of finality of the park run. I have come full circle, back to the grind of life. Wash, rinse, repeat. The run itself was hardly memorable - three minutes slower than my PB from last year putting the surfeit of Christmas pudding into perspective. ...

Between a dull headache, rheumy eyes, a rasping cough and my –at the best of times – dodgy night time vision, I suppose it was inevitable that I would ride shotgun for most of our time in Benidorm. Inevitable or not, that did little to settle the simmering discontent that gnawed at my insides each time we had to hop into the car and go somewhere. To compensate I offered directions, commented on lane switches and approaches to roundabouts and generally made myself as obnoxious as possible, particularly when other road users came close enough to see me sat in the other, non-driving seat. In my mind, that (ultimately useless endeavour) made it seem to others that I was in control, orchestrating things from behind the scene rather than being the mere passenger I was. Patriarchal tropes and stereotypes aside, it offered a front row seat from which to observe first-hand all the little discourtesies female drivers endure on the roads. Away from the immediacy of the moment, memories of Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on the subject of learning to drive came to mind. Not that the fact that other men, far more intelligent than I, have struggled with this absolves me of blame here. ...

\\\* If I had to boil down the essence of the year of being thirty eight into one word, it would be coasting. It felt like I lurched from one crisis to the other, my actions driven more by the need to fight whatever fire glowed brightest than any form of plan or structure. As I stand here on the cusp of turning forty, I feel like something needs to change significantly - a fool at forty is a fool forever they say. That, and that t here is someone who is significantly affected by my actions only makes it more imperative that I get my SH*T together soon. ...