Never Do This, It's Stupid And Dangerous

"Live every day as if it were going to be your last; for one day you're sure to be right." Harry 'Breaker' Harbord Morant

The young have no fear and think they are immortal, hence their propensity to do things that are stupid and/or dangerous.  I remember that when I was at school we would satirise the public safety films that appeared on TV and at the cinema by making up bizarre activities and saying, in our best Alvar Lidell[1] tones, "Never do this, it's stupid and dangerous." As we grow older we ought to grow wiser and more cautious, but how often have you heard people remark that age is just a number and that while physically they may be 40 or 50, mentally they feel the same as they did when they were 18 or 20? Naturally most people in their 40's or 50's become acutely aware of their actual age when they attempt some physical activity that they pursued with ease three decades before, but that does not stop those of us in that age group from still feeling relatively young. In fact people are generally "younger" today than they were fifty years or more ago and if that sounds odd, look around you.

Never do this, it's stupid and dangerous.

Back in the days when I was a child, people of my grand-parents' generation looked old and behaved old; their dress, their habits, their taste in music were of their time. Nowadays there is a greater democracy in dress and in musical tastes, in the hobbies people pursue. But as much as we may be wearing skinny jeans and playing Grand Theft Auto while listening to One Direction[2] there is one inescapable fact, one immutable law of nature that we cannot avoid; we are all getting older, although I have often remarked, somewhat flippantly, that this is preferable to the alternative.

50 in 1950...

...and today

Thoughts of my own mortality have come to the fore in recent months after a number of visits to the doctor and hospital. Personally I try to avoid going to either the doctor or hospital if at all possible, you never know what you might pick up.  Some years ago I went to my doctor, worried over some sharp pains I was experiencing in my left arm, and although I am by no means a hypochondriac, I do sometimes fear the worst when this sort of thing happens. Happily the doctor found no physical problems and told me it was stress related. In answer to my question as to what I should do, his answer was short and useless: "Eliminate the cause of your stress," he said. As I was not in a position to give up work at the time, his advice had to go unheeded, but proving that the physical signs were psychosomatic, once I realised that that this was the case, the symptoms disappeared.

Since then, the removal of my wisdom teeth and a wart like growth on my tongue apart (I admit that did give me some sleepless nights because it could have been a lot more serious; fortunately a biopsy revealed it to be benign), I have been relatively incident free on the health front. By the by, one does appreciate that one is aging when one's dentist says, "You have good teeth...for a man of your age," which gave me pause for thought as I had never thought of myself as a man of my age before. But anyway, to the matter in hand, which all began with a seemingly innocuous phone call from the doctor's surgery, who were targeting "men of my age" for health MOT's. Off I trotted, fairly confident that all would be well and that I would leave with a ringing endorsement of my lifestyle. Now I admit that I had had a recurrence of a somewhat delicate issue that I had been to the doctors about before, so perhaps I was a little stressed, but whatever the reason, my blood pressure was so high that I feared that I was going to be hospitalised there and then!  Admitting to my delicate issue resulted in more prodding and poking from my doctor than I was especially comfortable with, especially when she produced  a latex glove and some lubricant, and I left the surgery with instructions to make an appointment for a scan and to have a blood test.

Never do this...

Fortunately my problem cleared up (touch wood) because my doctor told me that the next investigative step would be a lot more invasive, and neither the scan nor the blood test had detected any abnormalities worthy of concern (apart from a cyst on a kidney and slightly enlarged prostate - like most men my age I would imagine) but my blood pressure remained elevated and my cholesterol level was similarly high enough to require treatment so I was given prescriptions to deal with both. In addition I was instructed to drink less, stop smoking and eat more healthily. I was tempted to ask, "Will that make me live longer?" to which the only appropriate answer is, "No, it will just seem longer." So the consumption of alcohol has been reduced, the smoking has stopped and I am trying to eat more healthily, although as I have always considered my diet to be reasonably good, this healthy eating regime largely entails trying to reduce the consumption of crisps and chocolate, with the emphasis on trying.   

...or this...

Now I am not critical of my doctor's advice, nor am I saying that the Amlodipine and Simvastatin that I have been prescribed are not necessary, but I am not convinced that all treatments are essential and that the benefits many people are gaining from life-long prescriptions may well be marginal. Take Zantac for instance, a treatment for ulcers produced by Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) which is prescribed for long periods of use. For purely commercial reasons GSK began marketing Zantac to sufferers of heartburn by condition branding their product to consumers on the basis that heartburn was a precursor to ulcers. According to many people (including my dentist, who explained this to me recently), a short course of antibiotics can clear up the problem without recourse to years of taking Zantac, but of course publicising that type of thing is not in the drug companies interests.

...or this.

Apparently around a third of the population of the England have high blood pressure, but around 5 million in the UK are undiagnosed, which if my doctor is to be believed, is 5 million people with increased risk of premature death from heart attack or stroke. No doubt many of these are the morbidly obese people I see waddling around wolfing down cheeseburgers, guzzling super-sized soft drinks and smoking like the proverbial chimney.

When I first started taking my tablets I must confess I felt a bit depressed about it, but having spoken to a number of my friends it would appear that I was in something of a minority when I wasn't taking them and everyone seems to think it is no big deal. The thing is that while it is wise to cut out or at least cut down on the things that are bad for you and sensible to do the things that are good for you, you can be the healthiest man on the planet and still walk outside and get hit by a bus.

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[1] If you are under 50 (or not English) you will probably need to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvar_Lidell

[2] Not me personally, apart from the jeans.

Tired, Possibly Emotional, Watching Badgers

Over the years while I was working, I heard lots and lots of differing reasons why people were unable to come into the office due to some ailment, illness or injury, ranging from the probable to the implausible, from the genuine influenza to the unlikely one day flu. But in all those years I never heard of anyone claiming that they were unable to work because they were too tired (someone once phoned to say they felt "too weak" to come in, but that was an exception). In fact the only profession that I know of where feeling tired is considered a reasonable excuse for not being able to perform is ironically one in which fitness is assumed, that is professional football.

England recently played a Euro 2016 qualifier in Estonia and Liverpool's Raheem Sterling might reasonably have been expected to play, but no, he warmed the bench before participating in just the final 24 minutes. England manager Roy Hodgson was quoted as saying Sterling was "complaining that he was a little bit tired and not feeling his best so we decided not to risk him." The old argument, whether professional footballers should ever be too tired to play, has been rehearsed many, many times over the years and all playing football at that level is a job, just like working in a bank or a factory is a job. I can just imagine how sympathetic the manager of a car manufacturing plant would be if one of his workers rang in to say he was too tired to come to work.  "Get your a@*e in here now," would be the likely response.

Raheem Sterling: Too tired to play football. Picture: The Sun

You can tell that professional football is just a job to many players at the highest level when you look at how many are happy enough to sit on the bench and pick up their wages and not actually play very often. Perhaps I am being naive, but I would have thought that being a professional footballer would mean that you wanted to play at every opportunity, but apparently not. Like many boys, I dreamed of a career as a professional footballer when I was young, although I realised fairly soon that I would never be good enough, however had I have been I'm sure I would have just wanted to play, play and play.

Just as "tired and emotional" is a well known euphemism for inebriation,[1] so "tired" alone has, I am certain, been used on more than one occasion within football as a roundabout way of indicating a player's unavailability for some other, perhaps delicate, reason. Many years ago I recall a story (which may have been apocryphal) of a player with a major club who picked something up following some Ugandan discussions[2] and whose subsequent availability was described as being due to a groin strain (so not too far from the truth then).

The late George Brown, for whom "tired and emotional" was coined. 

Euphemisms are a rich source of humour and two of my favourites are "watching badgers" which was an expression used by Welsh Secretary Ron Davies after being photographed on Clapham Common whilst engaged in sexual activity with a stranger, and "economical with the truth" which requires no explanation, but I digress.

All of us of a certain age look back and think that various aspects of life were better twenty, thirty or forty years ago (depending upon our age), so it is easy to look at professional sport in general and football in particular and, through rose tinted spectacles, pick out the parts that are wanting compared with the good old days. Today the clubs in the Premier League have squads of 25 players, many of whom train, pick up their wages, sit on the bench but play infrequently. Compared with their predecessors, today's players are fitter, better prepared and required to do much less so it is little wonder that complaints of tiredness are met with such scepticism, particularly when in Sterling's case it has been reported that just a day after he was too tired to play football, he was energetic enough to go out nightclubbing until the early hours.

Before anyone accuses me of picking on Raheem Sterling, or indeed of suggesting that there was anything dubious about his claim to be tired, I am not. I have no reason to suppose that his tiredness was anything other than genuine, although since he is not twenty until next month he really should be as fit as he is ever going to be. To put things in perspective however, when Manchester United's Bill Foulkes was that age he combined playing for his club and the England Under 23 side with part-time work in a coal mine. I doubt that Foulkes ever missed a game due to tiredness; there again I doubt that Foulkes ever saw the inside of a nightclub either.

Bill Foulkes, Manchester United legend and part-time coal miner. Picture: football365

Come Easter there will no doubt be Premier League managers bleating about the "punishing schedule" that requires the delicate flowers who play for them to participate in two games in five or perhaps four days. Back in December 2013 Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said it was "horrendous" that his team had to play six games in 23 days. It is fortunate that Arsene doesn't manage a non-League team, many of whom play as many as eight, nine or even ten games in the that number of days at the end of the season following a winter of postponements. And these are players who hold down full-time jobs outside the game too. Are they tired? Yes, probably, but they get on with it.

Thoughts of tiredness probably entered the heads of the Aston Villa players' heads when they won the old First Division championship in 1981, but that didn't stop seven of them playing all 42 league games. They didn't have a squad of 25, they used only fourteen players in League games that season. Their manager at the time, Ron Saunders, was very much of the old school type of manager who would have given short shrift to any of his players who complained of being tired. What he might have said about Raheem Sterling being tired in October would have been interesting!

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[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_and_emotional if you are unfamiliar with this term.

[2] Google it for more information on the expression.

The New Normal

Death: it's the ultimate elephant in the room isn't it? We all know that at some stage we must confront it, we cannot go through life without experiencing the death of a colleague, or a friend, a parent or a partner, but knowing we will have to deal with it and actually doing so are very different propositions.

When we are faced with the loss of a family member then our grief is shared with others in a very immediate and intimate way. Families may pass through the varying stages of grieving together, supporting one another, and although one or more may grieve more deeply or differently, family members will understand and support those who are most affected. When we learn of the loss of a friend or work colleague, however then the support that we provide is inevitably different.

I was thinking of this as Val and I recently received the shocking news that a friend of ours died suddenly at the age of just 42, from an aortic aneurism. She leaves behind a husband and teenage son, who were with her when she died. We were not especially close friends; our children are of similar ages and we saw a lot more of each other when the children were at junior school.  As with many friendships that start with the common bond of babies, the years had made the friendship more casual. Nonetheless it was one hell of a shock to learn of J__'s death and of course we approached her husband, G__ to offer condolences and support.

Supporting a friend in their time of loss is very different from supporting a family member. The initial shock that we feel when we learn of the death of a friend's partner passes more quickly for the friends of the family than for the family itself and that is just one of the issues that makes it important that friends and the bereaved understand how the other is feeling.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified five typical stages in the grieving process; Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.[1] While not everyone experiences all of these, nor necessarily in that order, they remain fairly typical of the range of emotions that the bereaved go through.  I write this from personal experience because twenty one years ago my first wife, June died of a brain haemorrhage; she was 33 years of age. From my experiences  I have identified six stages that are similar to the Kubler-Ross model, but which apply more to those who are more distant from the deceased, and to some degree deal with how they behave with relatives of the departed, but also how the bereaved can understand how their friends feel.

Disbelief:

This is similar to denial. Denial is common because the enormity of the situation is difficult to accept. It may manifest itself with the expectation that the person who has died is not actually dead at all. The number of times that I convinced myself that I would come home to find June doing the ironing was incredible. For the partner of someone who has died, thoughts of them are rarely out of their head, for friends it is only when they consciously think of that person that they metaphorically shake their head in disbelief. Losing your partner makes a lot of other problems pale into insignificance; for friends that may not be the case.

The Awkward Silence:

Once the initial shock has worn off (and it will for friends of the family, and more quickly than many people realise), comes the awkward period when the bereaved is still grieving terribly but their friends are coming to terms with events. The initial shock, the condolences, the sympathy have been played out and now we have to deal with someone who is still an emotional wreck. And how do many people deal with that? They pretty much ignore the person who is grieving because they don't know what to say, or think that they might say something that may make matters worse. Trust me, nothing you can say can make matters worse (well, nothing you would say unless you are a totally insensitive moron of course) but silence, ignoring, they are devastating. I remember being at work after June had died; conversations were batting back and forth but I seemed to be excluded. It wasn't unkind, it was just that people didn't know what to say. "I'm not the invisible man, you know," I said quite loudly, walked out and burst into tears. Whatever you do, include people who are grieving, but of course respect their right to opt out if they wish.

Getting Over It:

How long does it take to get over the death of someone you love? There is no programme of events, no schedule, it will take as long as it takes; some people never truly get over the death of a loved one. But however long it takes it will be much longer than for your friends. They will move on and they may expect you to as well; their well of sympathy is not bottomless and when it runs dry that is the time to seek professional counselling. At least, I think it is; other people go for counselling earlier, some not at all, but speaking from my own experience, after about three months the shock had worn off for my friends and counselling helped me enormously. I developed an ethos that I would try anything once to see if it helped; if it did, I carried on with it, if not I stopped.

Moving On:

Far be it for me to say to anyone who has suffered a bereavement, you must do this, or that. Just because something worked for me does not mean it would be appropriate for everyone, but one thing a lot of people agree on is that in the early days of bereavement, make no major decisions. It is not uncommon for people to say to someone who is newly widowed, "Oh, so I suppose you'll be selling the house and moving on?" And a lot of people probably do. Not wishing to create a shrine, they may move house to get away from bad memories and to start anew. And by doing so they just add a whole new set of stresses to the already stressful situation they find themselves in.

Time Heals All Wounds:

Rose Kennedy, wife of Joseph Kennedy and the mother of President John F. Kennedy, said, "It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone." I don't think that I can improve on that, and it is worth remembering it any time you feel inclined to say anything about time healing, or indeed any time you hear anyone say it. The pain is part of you and if you heal it completely then you will lose entirely your memories of the person you have lost physically.

The New Normal:

Sometimes people say to the bereaved, "Once things get back to normal..." forgetting that normal included the person who has died; there can be no normal again. For those who lose a loved one normal was going to the coast as a couple or visiting friends as a couple. Now you are one, not part of a couple and normal does not exist anymore. Everywhere there are reminders of normality, but they are intangible, they are out of your grasp, so you must create a new normal, new routines, new ways of doing things. Nothing will be like it was, not for you nor for your relationships with your friends, but you can have something new.

I am no expert on bereavement, I am not a counsellor, but like most of you reading this, I have experienced bereavement in my family and seen it in others, so I say this; if you have lost someone, remember that your friends are finding it hard knowing how to deal with your grief; if you have a friend who has lost someone, the best thing you can do is to continue being their friend.

Recommended reading:

This book helped me enormously; in time of need it may help you too. Healing Grief: A Guide to Loss and Recovery by Barbara Ward . http://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Grief-Guide-Loss-Recovery/dp/0091778395/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413286770&sr=8-1&keywords=healing+grief

  

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[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

Destination Star Trek: The Final Frontier

Star Trek is arguably the most successful sci-fi franchise of all time, although there are plenty of people who would argue that that accolade should go to Star Wars. Of the two my preference is for Gene Roddenberry's creation, but I am by no means fanatical about Star Trek. There are however plenty of die hard Star Trek aficionados, people who I have always thought of as Trekkies, but I understand that plenty are known as Trekkers. Is there a difference between a Trekkie and a Trekker? If there is, does it matter? There is a school of thought that a Trekker, while an enthusiast, enjoys the shows and the Stark Trek universe as an entertainment whereas the Trekkie is more full on. Some hold that the distinction is that while a Trekker thinks it a shame that the show came to an end, the Trekkie is sad that the Enterprise is being decommissioned and the crew reassigned.[1] Roddenberry himself favoured Trekkie.

Whatever the distinction, and I would say that it is a little more blurred, less defined than that and that there is plenty of crossover, Star Trek has spawned a number of series, characters and worlds of imagination that have brought pleasure to many people the world over. And that pleasure has extended to people attending Star Trek conventions, dressing up in Starfleet uniforms, or as Borg or as Klingons, or actually learning Klingon. I had never, before last weekend, come into contact with anyone who did any of those sort of things (although I may have seen someone in a Starfleet uniform at a fancy dress party), but having been offered some discounted tickets for Destination Star Trek 3, off I went to the Excel Centre in London.

To my surprise and slight disappointment, the concourse at Excel was not thronging with wannabe Captain Kirks or Mr Spocks, but there again I did arrive two hours or so after the event opened. In I went and again, initial impressions were not favourable. All I seemed to have got for my money was access to a number of merchandise stands. But initial impressions can sometimes be wrong; while there were a lot of merchandise stands, there was other stuff too. Like the display of uniforms and other props from the shows and films, the talks and the photograph and autograph opportunities, although these last two were another means of parting visitors from their money. I admit that we did spend some money on a signed photograph of Brent Spiner, but all told we managed to keep our spending to within reasonable limits.[2]

The talks were well attended; we caught the end of Bruce Greenwood's[3] talk, although I confess that the acoustics in the Excel, coupled with my notoriously flaky hearing meant that I understood little of what he was saying.  The talk given in the afternoon by Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby[4] was packed out; presumably it gave the merchandise stall holders a chance to have cup of tea and a sit down, with about 90% of the convention visitors in attendance (or so it seemed). It wasn't particularly insightful, but it was entertaining. Probably the most significant thing I learned was that Marina Sirtis is a Spurs supporter and that her accent is very North London.

Left to right: Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby.

What is unique about the Star Trek canon is its place in other fiction. Almost unlike any other show, Star Trek can be relied upon to pop up in other TV shows, either by indirect or direct reference. It has always amused me that if a character in a TV show is actually watching TV they always seem to be watching a wildlife documentary. I think that it was in Phil Redmond's soap opera Brookside that a metafictional soap opera was invented to give the characters a TV programme to talk about, after all have you noticed that in TV programmes the characters never, ever speak about programmes in general or soaps in particular? Hardly art imitating life.

Star Trek features heavily in programmes like The Big Bang Theory, going so far as to feature Will Wheaton (Wesley Crusher in The Next Generation) as himself. The Noel Shempsky character in Frasier was a big Star Trek fan and in one episode he asked Frasier Crane to obtain Scott Bakula's autograph for him at a convention. Shempsky was unable to do so "because of William Shatner's restraining order." Much of the plot of that particular episode turned on Frasier's failure to get the autograph, resulting in him making a speech in Klingon at his son's bar mitzvah[5]  but redeeming himself by obtaining Joan Collins' wig from the episode 'City On The Edge Of Forever' from the original Star Trek series. City On The Edge Of Forever was the second to last episode of the first season of Star Trek and is in my view the pinnacle of the original series. That episode was written by Harlan Ellison, just one of a number of eminent writers who contributed to the series.

Pic: NBC

Star Trek gets referenced in novels also. In The Electric Ant Philip K Dick refers to Star Trek by using "Captain Kirk" as a generic term for a science fiction TV show; 'They watched the captain kirk to its end, and then they went to bed.'  John Scalzi's excellent Redshirts, while not being about Star Trek by name, is about Star Trek, just as the film Galaxy Quest is really Star Trek.

Roddenberry's idea for Star Trek was that it be a "Wagon Train in space," Wagon Train being (as the name suggests) a Western series that ran for many years and that, along with his involvement in writing for Highway Patrol are clear influences on the early Star Trek themes, James Kirk being another in a long line of slightly maverick law men except that instead of a horse or patrol car he has a starship.

Of the six different elements of the Star Trek canon it is the original series and The Next Generation that have the most adherents, although these days I find the original to be very dated indeed. The most recent series, Star Trek: Enterprise, was great fun in my opinion, although it was amusing to note the obvious struggle the producers had with the fact that technology has advanced so much since Captain Kirk first took to the screens, yet the series had to be less technically sophisticated than Shatner's universe.

Kirk's uniform from Star Trek: Generations.

Many years ago, while I was listening to a radio phone in show, it became apparent to me that a caller believed that a character in a TV soap was actually a real person. There are plenty of people like that, the sort that send flowers when a soap character is killed off, or memorably the person who sent Granada TV a cheque to buy The Rovers Return in Coronation Street when the pub was put up for sale on the show, and there are obviously enough Trekkers out there who must know that Star Trek is a work of fiction yet treat it as though it is real. Roddenberry was a script writer who struck gold with Star Trek; had his series The Lieutenant (about the US Marine Corp) not been cancelled after one series, we may never have had the opportunity to boldly go where no-one had gone before. 

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[1] Thanks to Francesca Black for the definition: http://www.science-fiction-corner.com/trekker-vs-trekkie.htm

[2] Your definition of reasonable may differ from mine of course.

[3] Bruce Greenwood played Christopher Pike in the J.J. Adams Star Trek reboot and the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness.

[4] Deanna Troi, Dr Beverley Crusher and Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation respectively.

[5] In revenge for his failure to obtain Scott Bakula's autograph, Shempsky, who had agreed to translate Frasier's speech into Hebrew, translates it to Klingon.

Little Victories

"You can't do too much for a good boss" was something my Dad used to say on occasions; he would qualify it by adding"...if you can find one" implying that good bosses were rarer than a snowflake in June. My Dad was of a generation of Workers whose relationship with Management was very much a 'them and us' affair. To some extent it probably still is in some industries, but it was writ large in the days when my Dad worked his way through a whole series of jobs as a French polisher, both out and about in banks and shops and less peripatetically, in factories.

"Little victories," were there to be won by the workers in their skirmishes with management, whether it was skiving off early (and still being paid) or some overtime wangled where the workload didn't justify it. Management of course were only too keen to extract the maximum output for the minimum remuneration, so it cut both ways. Then there were the things that my Dad, like many others I'm sure, 'won' at work. Briefly working in a sweet factory he came home one day with a bag of confectionary that he had 'won.' On another occasion he liberated a golf club head (goodness only knows how or indeed why). It was all petty little stuff of no great significance or value; technically I suppose one might call it theft, but largely it was stuff that otherwise would have gone in the bin.

Useful...

...less useful.

There was never any leeway or opportunity for a little victory in terms of holidays when my Dad worked in factories, which shut down for two weeks in summer (last week in July, first week in August). Do factories still do that? Or perhaps the question in this country now should be simply, are there still any factories? The two week summer shutdown was still commonplace in the 1980's when I was working at Midland Bank in Barking when a whole procession of Ford workers would come in for their Spanish pesetas or Greek drachmae to take on their holidays. As Foreign Clerk it was the busiest time of the year for me and I spent most of my Fridays doling out currency and travellers cheques.[1]

Had there been any advantage to gain in the holiday stakes  then I'm sure my Dad would have taken it; certainly if he worked for Virgin Group he would be rubbing his hands with glee at their recent announcement that their staff can take as much time off as they want, albeit with the proviso that their work is up to date or won't suffer and that their absence will not hurt the company. It is a brave move by Richard Branson to introduce this policy, but one which a company could only implement if they have confidence in their employees to manage their holiday efficiently and effectively. From the perspective of the employees, you would equally have to trust your bosses not to use this to your disadvantage. For such a scheme to work there needs to be mutual respect and maturity, because I can imagine that in some organisations, a similar scheme would be fraught with problems.

In my days of paid employment, 28 or 30 days holiday per year were the norm; in later years it was possible to buy or sell five additional days, and in most years five days could be carried forward if unused. With holiday dates allocated either on the basis of seniority or grade, depending on where one worked, there was usually the need for a little horse trading to get anywhere near the ideal of everyone getting the time off they wanted. Add an extra five, ten or even fifteen days per employee into the mix and things would get complicated. But would the Virgin idea actually equate to staff taking more time off? Not all staff I would say; and that is why in some ways the Virgin idea is quite crafty; some staff may well take less holiday, some may end up with extra work. Let me explain.

A thing of the past?

Let's say Bob works in an office where his work load fluctuates, either seasonally or for some other reason. He might figure that he can afford to take an extra week's holiday or even two during the quieter periods, but if he does so his bosses might say, "Hang on, if he can take an extra fortnight's break, he obviously has spare capacity, we can give him more work." Meanwhile Joe, who is looking to advance himself thinks, "If I take a week less in holiday, management will see how committed I am; it can do me no harm." Sam, on the other hand plods along, taking no more but no less holiday than usual, resenting Bob for the extra time he has off (perhaps leaving Sam to cover) and equally resenting Joe for creating the impression that everyone could perhaps lose a week's holiday. Since I never worked anywhere that had a scheme such as the one Virgin propose I can only speculate of course, but I did work with people who had to be convinced to take their holiday entitlement, not because of any grand plan to ingratiate themselves with the bosses but largely because of a certain amount of control freakery and the conceit that the place would fall apart in their absence. Equally I worked with people who supplemented their holidays with casual sickness and who would, under this sort of scheme, spend more time on holiday than at work.

As I say, for a scheme like this to work, management must be enlightened; they must not use the fact that some people take additional time off as either a stick to beat them with come appraisal time, nor an excuse to lump more work in their direction, nor use the fact that some people take less than their normal entitlement as some indicator of  commitment and loyalty (they could actually just be inefficient). Equally staff must not abuse the trust placed in them and take time off that leaves tasks uncompleted or late, or piles additional work on their colleagues.

You can call me an old sceptic if you like (it would by no means be the first time), but I could not see this working in a lot of companies. Presumably Sir Richard Branson feels that his employees are mature enough and his management progressive enough to handle this sort of scheme; I have worked in places where I can imagine there would have been abuse on both sides had this been in force. While Branson appears to be a pretty benevolent employer, I can imagine there are some who might copy his idea with more cynical intent.

"Put that flippin' BlackBerry away, you're on holiday!"

Given that we hear so much these days about people being permanently connected to the office even when they are on holiday, proof that this idea of Sir Richard's actually works will be if his employees are allowed to switch off their BlackBerry before they hit the beach.

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[1] I was not popular among my colleagues if I took holiday myself around that time of year!