A Bit of Self-Identity.

I was never the biggest fan of managers. I didn’t mind the remote ones so much, the ones who worked in head office and so on. It was (with a single exception) the ones who were trying to manage me that I always had a problem with, and I fell out with them frequently down the years.

People tried to make me a manager a few times, or persuade me to set foot on the management track. They said I would be more prosperous and more fulfilled. They obviously didn’t know me. They didn’t know that one of my favourite jokes is ‘if all else fails, try management,’ or that I frequently saw them as evidence of that favoured maxim ‘every man rises to his own level of incompetence.’ Maybe that was why the only manager I ever really respected was a woman.

I was thinking on my walk tonight that if my core personality is not that of the manager, the teacher, the artisan, the labourer, the academic, the professional or the scientist, what is it? I decided that the closest would probably be the ‘poet-peasant.’ Not that I can write poetry, but I do seem to quite like writing words down in a wholesome, if not always polished, way.

And it was that time of day when I often recall the words of a real poet, even though he was not a peasant but an academic by profession:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

And if Thomas Grey hadn’t written The paths of glory lead but to the grave, I would have done.