Life

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.” I have never really understood the English class system. I’m English. Very English. I nodded to myself when Hugh Grant said we’re born one gin-and-tonic below par. And we all swim in this sea of class consciousness, whatever we might like to say about it being a relic of the past. For all we ignore it and pretend otherwise, it makes a massive difference to almost everything experienced by anyone, like me, who comes from a very obvious long-standing English background....

After I wrote a little essay about life being better without planning, one of those fortunate coincidences occurred, and I found a book called “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned”. I recommend the book. It may not convince you, but it presents a perspective that even sceptics could usefully consider. It makes the case, from a technical and practical base, that no ground-breaking achievement can ever be achieved by deciding on the steps to get there and working through them....

Here’s my immediate goal: to write an easy-to-read article about the downsides of planning. The correct thing to do is to gather my facts and the points I want to make, organise them. Come to that, given that this is my personal blog, I should fit the whole thing into my priorities for this week. Instead, here I am, just writing it. Which is how I do more things than we’re told is good....