Job

When I was made redundant in October I said, on this very blog, that I thought I’d be okay and find another job reasonably quickly. Thankfully, I was right. I start that new job in four days, and I’m excited.

I won’t go into too much detail about it, but it’s the type of work I’ve always thought I ought to be doing, but never quite managed to get into before now. There’s a lot of optimism in my mind at the moment, which is especially amazing when the job I left had done a pretty good job of grinding all that out of me.

But. There’s always a but. It’s the law.

I’m going back to work full time. My previous job allowed me to reduce my hours so that I could share in the childcare duties with Mrs L when she finished her maternity leave. That meant spending a whole day each week with Cam. Just me and him, father and son time. I’ve had that privilege for almost exactly a year, and I have loved it.

As of next Thursday, he’ll have an extra day at nursery, and I will re-join the full time working parent population. I will see him briefly in the morning, briefly in the evening, and at weekends. I will, I think, be quite sad about missing the developments he makes, and the things we get to do, and all the hugs and affection.

I realise that the time I have been able to spend as a part-time SAHD marks me out as one of the lucky ones. Most men don’t seem to have the chance to spend time with their children as they’re growing up. It’s a massive shame. As far as I’m concerned, the more equally shared the parental responsibilities are the better it is for all parties. I’d love to think part time work will be an option for me again sometime in the future.

Still, mortgages need paying; it probably wouldn’t be much fun having lots of time with Cam if we didn’t have a house to spend it in.

I’m immensely grateful for the time I spent as a part-timer, and to any other dad reading this who is considering it as a possibility I say this: DO IT.

Redundant

It’s not a nice word is it? Redundant. Unnecessary. Superfluous. Disused. Outmoded. Unwanted.

All very cheerful terms, to describe a very cheerful thing.

I’ve been made redundant once before. In 2010, a couple of years after the banks all started imploding and collapsing in on themselves like dying stars, the resultant economic black hole had expanded from its beginnings in the City of London and reached such crucial financial outposts as Bristol.

Actual black holes are reputed to suck in everything around them. Nothing can escape. Even that speediest of speedy things, light, isn’t speedy enough to escape the clutches of the black hole. Its fiscal equivalent feeds on jobs. Thousands and thousands of jobs. By the time my job was “reviewed” and, ultimately, “rationalised”, the job losses at my company alone came to around 20,000.

I didn’t fear redundancy in 2010. I embraced it. Redundancy knocked on my door and I welcomed it in, made it a hot cup of tea and told it I would happily be made redundant. Because I was young. Because I was (in marital terms) single. Because nobody depended on the money I was paid. Because of course I would get another job, how hard could it be?

People who had worked at the company for decades were concerned. Their CVs had last been updated when MS DOS was but a twinkle in the pre-pubescent mind of Bill Gates. Some had probably been written on papyrus.

But I was convinced I’d be fine.

And I was, more or less, correct. I was unemployed for about two months.

Now, in 2013, the job I got after I was made redundant the first time is* making me redundant. Sorry, it’s making my ROLE redundant. A distinction I should imagine will keep my spirits resolutely afloat when I drag my arse into the Job Centre for the first time. At least I only have to go once every fortnight…

I'll have a new one of these soon. Mine won't be courtesy of The Telegraph though, like this photo is.

Anyway, yes, today I was formally entered into the consultation period which it is “more than likely” will lead to my exit from the company in somewhere between three and eight weeks’ time.

How do I feel?

Dunno.

Alright. Then not alright. Confident. Then scared. Sure of my abilities. Doubtful. It changes by the hour, by the minute, by the second. Changes when I look at job websites overflowing with “opportunities” which barely warrant the name. Changes when I think about the array of fixed costs I can do nothing to reduce, which zip from my bank account like electronic ghosts. Changes when I hold my baby boy and wonder whether, soon, he’ll be seeing a lot more of me than he currently does. Changes when I think about that black hole, which still no-one has managed to sow up and stop.

I’m trying to think of it in positive terms: a new beginning, a chance to do something I’ve always wanted (what have I always wanted to do? Nothing, I don’t think).

But it’s not always easy to be positive about something so overwhelmingly negative.

Pretty soon I’ll be jobless, and the best thing about it is going to be keeping my curtains closed all day and tweeting pictures of them to George Osborne.

*Almost certainly, although strictly it isn’t set in stone just yet.

Routine

Since Mrs L's return to work, it is largely my duty to sort Cam out in the morning and ensure his timely arrival at wherever he'll be spending the day.

On the day I am not at work this is blissfully easy. I get up when he does, do the usual morning things, nappy change, feeding, playing, etc. and if I manage to squeeze in a shower for myself then that's great. If not, I hope that no-one gets close enough to smell me.

The main thing is; there are options. Flexibility.

On the days that both me and Mrs L scuttle off to our respective offices things are a little different. Mrs L catches her train at 7am, so needs to be up at 6am. There is little leeway in her routine, so sorting out Cam is pretty much impossible.

I get up at 6:15am.

We creep around, trying our best not to disturb the delicate slumber of our son until seven. A still snoozing son means I get to shower without fear of my shoe being thrown into the bath to keep me company.

The remainder of the morning routine is finely honed. Change the baby. Get the baby dressed. Give the baby his bottle. Make my porridge and leave it to cool a bit. Entertain the baby. Throw work stuff in my bag. Pack bottles into baby's bag. Eat porridge. Bundle baby into car. Leave.

Because I hate being late to arrive at places I know exactly what time all of the above things need to happen in order for me to drop him off and get to work on time.

But there is a problem. Sometimes, the morning throws a curve ball. Routines don't allow for curve balls, but babies show little respect for routine.

This morning, there was a curve ball. Cam had been given his bottle. I was about to start sorting out my porridge when a noise came out of my son. A noise which made me wonder whether perhaps he had somehow managed to swallow an eighteenth century factory during the night.

The sound did not indicate a normal poo. The sound made me fear for my nostrils. I contemplated grabbing the Marigolds prior to dealing with whatever was inside that nappy.

I needn't have worried, since there was as much outside the nappy as there was contained within it.

(Question: when putting on a nappy, do you pull the elasticated leg bits out as far as they'll go, such that the evacuated excreta has the maximum possible room OR do you leave them contracted, in order for them to act as a device to SLOW DOWN the brown projectile as it comes out? Answers on a clean Pampers please…)

You know there's been some significant evil force at work when the poo looks like a Korma and has escaped from both legs and the top of the nappy. When the answer to the (rhetorical, rhetorical!!!) question "has this leaked" is answered by finding a wet patch on each of the baby's feet.

Still. Shit ain't shit. I'm used to this by now. I wrote another post about poo almost a year ago.
The clean up operation is quick. Deftly dealt with. Clean the bits you need to hold first. Assess the cleanliness of the various items of clothing. Remove as necessary (all of them in this case). Don't spare the wipes. Suppress the wince as Cam's (brand new, from his great gran) soft toy is deposited into the nappy while you're not looking. Dry the bum. Apply the Sudocrem. New nappy. New clothes. Wash hands.

Of course, you'd expect this tale to culminate in me being late to drop him off at his grandparents, but I'm a step ahead of the game. I've got enough contingency time for TWO nappy changes built into my routine.

Which will be fine, until the day he needs three.

PS: One poo post every eleven months, that's fine, right?

Career

When I was little, I wanted to be a Dalek. No joke.



Dream Job



I used to wander around the playground at my infant school during lunch times, my cagoule’s hood pulled tight around my face, exterminating fellow pupils.

Surprisingly, I was mostly alone in this pursuit.

If I wasn’t being Doctor Who’s most awesome enemy I would be pretending to be a plane. Arms out for wings, air forced through pursed lips for convincing facsimile of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine, interspersed with the staccato “ack ack ack ack” of my machine guns.

Needless to say, twenty-five years on, I am neither a Dalek or a plane. If I was the former you’d be dead by now, and if I was the latter I wouldn’t be able to talk. Or type.

All of which means, I suppose, that I am not one of the 15% of children who (according to BBC Breakfast) manage to end up being what they wanted to be when they were young.

Not exactly a surprising figure though, is it? They were asking eight year old kids. Even the most forward thinking eight year old isn’t likely to say “well, I’ve considered my options carefully. Given my relative academic strengths, and with due consideration to work life balance, plus of course the need for financial security, that ideally I’d like to become an actuary”.

Predictably, there were a few who wanted to be professional footballers (actually, they didn’t specify professional, that’s me putting words in their mouths) and some more who wanted to be singers (well done Simon Cowell, the youth are yours now). There were a fair number of proto-police officers (who, I bet, actually want to be Daleks, but think the dome shaped helmet of the police is the closest they can get).

No-one wanted to be a lawyer. Or a banker. Or a salesperson. Or work in a shop.

Back in the studio, the presenters wondered, were we perhaps allowing our children to be too optimistic in their goals? Should we be stopping their wild flights of fancy (No, junior, don’t be ridiculous, you’ll never be a police officer, now go to your room and reconsider your aspirations) and promoting a more realistic aim?

Not in my opinion.

If someone had told the five year old me that I couldn’t be a Dalek, once I’d finished trying REALLY HARD to exterminate them, I’d have probably been rendered unspeakably melancholy by suggestions of sensible roles. In reality, even now, I look at most job descriptions and pine for those days of care free ignorance about the need to make money.

Job hunting is a long way off for Cam, thankfully. I already know that I want him to be clever. I hope he is. The genetic building blocks ought to be there. I did okay at school, and probably could have done better if I’d been a bit more motivated. Mrs L excelled at school and university.

Ideally, he’ll have inherited the best attributes from each of us. That would probably put him in a pretty good starting position.

I don’t want him to grow up thinking in wholly realistic terms. I want him to aim high, to be something fantastic, something enjoyable which also brings in enough cash. I want him to do better than I have (I’ve helped him out here by not being terribly successful). I want him to be awesome, and I want to do everything I can to help him. I want him to be the best he can be.

More than anything, I want him to be happy.

If he could work out how to turn a human into a Dalek along the way, that would be great.

*does Dalek voice* EXTERMINATE!

Tax

So, readers, are we all a bit stroppy with Jimmy Carr?

I don’t think I am, but let’s see where this ends up.

Funny thing, isn’t it, tax? Does a pretty fantastic job of dividing opinion. For a long time I’ve held a pretty simplistic view of taxation. Actually, that’s a lie. It was a naïve view.

I thought that people worked, they paid tax at the appropriate level and there was nothing they could do to influence that payment one way or the other (discussions with HMRC excepted, as seen in this post by @glosswitch). That’s how taxation worked for me, surely it was how it worked for everyone else?

No.

My current understanding is that taxation is only that simple if you are an employee of a company, and your tax is taken directly from your pay packet via the PAYE system.

The moment you step out of that system, the chances are you’re not going to pay tax in the same way as the majority of people. PAYE no longer applies to you.

Once PAYE no longer applies to you, you may have options. Many, many options. How you organise your taxation is filled with choice. The fiscal equivalent of a visit to a Subway sandwich shop.

(A brief aside to illustrate the above, in case anyone hasn’t been to Subway. The first time I went to a Subway I was a student. I was a bit hungover. I was used to sandwich shops having a list of six sandwiches which you chose from. I walked in and looked up at the bewildering array of options on display. SIX types of bread! Roughly one MILLION filling combinations! TWELVE distinct sauces! My brain surveyed all of this and shut down. I turned around and left.)

Among those options are things called loopholes. A loophole is where the people who make up the rules aren’t sufficiently careful or clever and leave an ambiguity. This ambiguity is tracked down by clever accountant types who can then advise their clients of ways to reduce the amount of tax they’re paying.

This is legal.

This is what Jimmy Carr did.

Legally reduced the amount of tax he was paying.

The conversation (as described on Twitter by Jimmy) with his accountant went like this:

Accountant: “Would you like to pay less tax? It’s legal.”

Jimmy Carr: “Yes.”

Be honest. If someone put that question to you, you’d say yes too, right? I didn’t notice too many people falling over themselves to continue paying 22% income tax when the level was reduced to 20%. But maybe that’s different.

Maybe, because us PAYEers just do as we’re told and have no choice we are spared the task of having to make a moral judgement when it comes to our tax affairs.

The people who are angry about what Jimmy Carr has done (and, let’s be super clear here, I’m only using his name because it’s out there. I’m sure lots of other people are up to similar tax trickery) are, I think, angry that he’s not contributing to society in the same way as they are.

Which sort of brings me back to how I feel about taxation now, which is this: I pay tax because I have to. But also because I believe in it as a mechanism to provide support to people who might otherwise end up in really unpleasant circumstances. People who need help in any number of ways. People who are worse off than I am. I pay tax because one day I may need that support myself, and I’d like to know that it will still be there for me, or for Cam or for any number of other people who I care about.

So I'm not stroppy with Jimmy Carr and countless others for looking after themselves and taking legal steps to reduce their tax.

I am stroppy that we're all part of a system which holds personal wealth as the principal indicator of worth, which in turn encourages us all to think that the best thing to do is pay as little tax as possible. In a world where cash is king, how can we expect people to be selfless and voluntarily give it away?


I don't have any answers, but I do know that I'm not convinced that the scapegoating of one particular person is a good thing. Maybe if it leads to a more open discussion about tax avoidance in general. But it won't.


What say you? Are you squirrelling away untold fortunes in Cayman Islands based accounts? Do you not have two pennies to rub together because you gave your last ones to charity? Will our Conservative overlords be made to divulge details of their own tax affairs?

Sorry, that’s a bit long and not that interesting, isn’t it? Still, you’re all at Britmums Live anyway, not reading this :-)

Blues

Going back to work sucks.  There.  Simple.

I tried REALLY hard not to have to come back.  You know, did all the right things.  I bought lottery tickets for EVERY DRAW during my time off.  Euromillions and National Lottery.  Nothing.  Not even a measly tenner.

So I’m back.  Clocking in.  Logging on.  Reading through the multitude of emails sent to me in my absence.  Deleting seventy percent of those emails.  Trying to get back into the flow of the office.

But it sucks.

Two weeks is not enough time to get to know your new life, to support the mother of your child and to appreciate the cute squishy thing that now lives in your house.

Obviously, The Creature agrees with me.  He decided that the night before my return to work would be his worst in almost a week.  Nice one son.  It wasn’t too much of a big deal; Mrs L was her usual lovely self and dealt with all of the graveyard shift.

Sleep didn’t come easily.  A combination of not wanting to go back and crying (his, not mine) saw to that.  But I slept enough to wake up and go to work.  Enough to forget to spray myself with anti-perspirant.  Enough to leave my laptop at home; prompting an eruption of expletives when I realised, ninety percent of the way through my commute. 

I won’t lie to you all, I am jealous of Mrs L just now.  I know that her maternity leave will be hard work.  Harder work than if she was going to work.  Harder work than I will be doing at work.  But I still covet it.

Last week I posted about the range of things I’ve already noticed changing in our little boy.  Now, when I sit at my desk, I’m wondering what new things I’m missing.  I looked at him last night, he looked back at me, and he looked different.  What will have changed come the end of the week?

I now understand the plight of the working mum, who feels cheated when they miss the first words, or the first steps.  Perhaps this is dangerous grounds for complaint, but won’t somebody think of the dads?  Rare are those of us who don’t miss out on almost all of those fantastic firsts. 

I’m probably soppier than the average man when it comes to things like this.  Maybe most blokes just don’t care.  Maybe they all just want to go back to work so they can escape the screaming.  So they can talk about football and other man things.  I don’t know.  I just know that for every hour I spend at work there’ll be somewhere I’d rather be (frankly, it was ever thus, even pre-baby) and something I’d rather be doing.

No doubt I’ll get used to it.

This has panned out to be rather a whingy post, sorry about that.