Category Archives: Life

The Birthday Boys, by Samuel Thompson

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Summary: the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives

Sam Thompson’s first novel, Nights in Armour, a fine account of the lives of peelers during the Troubles, had something of the seminal 1980s cop show Hill Street Blues about it. The Birthday Boys brings to mind a rather different television series, thirtysomething … though the Birthday Boys of the title are now closer to sixty than thirty.

Marine Boy, Fred, Carp and Dougie were friends at school in Belfast and have kept in touch over the decades, making a point of meeting for birthdays. Their lives have meanwhile diverged, sometimes wildly. Through them Thompson explores everything from marriage and bringing up teenagers to homophobia to war. The opening chapter’s visceral account of combat on Las Malvinas during the 1982 Falklands War put me in mind of some of Norman Mailer’s descriptions of battle in The Naked and the Dead.

Inevitably, lives spanning nearly sixty years accumulate their share of tragedy. But even at its bleakest, The Birthday Boys holds to a hopeful idea: that apparently ordinary people can rise to moments of heroism, and even the most despairing life can be redeemed.

Potential eponyms

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Summary – an evolving list, because sometimes there are not enough words

  1. A lawrencefox – any man who uses the occasion of a toxic divorce to show the whole world how lucky his ex-wife was to flee. Usage: “Afterwards Anne reflected that she had a narrow escape from Henry, who, it turned out, was something of a pox-ridden laurencefox.”
  2. A mcgregor – an idiom similar to a “paper tiger”, derived from the idea of a braggadocio individual who finds it more difficult to fight trained men than to rape the defenceless. Usage: “Contemplating the impasse at the Strait of Hormuz, Netanyahu realised that Israel was now exposed as a mcgregor amongst the nations of the world.”
  3. Musky – a quality that means, no matter how much money, a person will always be too weird and repulsive. Usage: “After everything about him came out in public, Jeffrey was just too musky even for the DUP.”

Mastering the mind

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Summary: things I’ve learned doing Mastermind.

In the decade or so since I won Mastermind, not one soul entering the quiz has ever asked me for a word of advice on how to do well on it … even feckers I know.

And I have opinions! They may not be plentiful but, in case of use for anyone, here they are.

  1. Do your favorite subject first, because you may never get another chance.
  2. Study your specialist subject like your whole future depends on it. Because in Mastermind terms it does. It is the only subject area where you know the sort of questions that might come up, so you have to endeavor to max this round out.
  3. Questions usually have one or two word answers so try to spot likely candidates as you revise.
  4. If you don’t know the answer immediately, give yourself a moment to think. In my first round I passed on about 4 questions in the general knowledge which I recalled the answer to immediately on saying the word “pass”. I had thought it was better tactics to pass and move on rather than dawdle trying to recall an answer. It’s not. Fortunately I had done enough work on the specialist subject round to carry me through.
  5. Before sitting in the black chair I would have said that winning depended on hard work and luck, and that, in accordance with most things, about any one of 20% of the entrants could win the whole thing. I still think that is more or less right. But as Gary Player, I think, said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
  6. Winning also depends on staying calm when the chips are down. It takes as much energy to panic as it does to think, so try to think.
  7. And so, as with life, the rules are simple: work hard, hope for some luck, and try to hold your nerve at the moment of truth.
  8. Here endeth the lesson.

PS, from the legend that is Mr Dave McBryan:

4a Even if you know you aren’t going to know the answer to something, a speedy wrong answer is usually a better tactic than a pass.

And one more to add:
Listen. Focus for the entire question. It’s all too easy to zone out at the beginning because you’re still thinking about the previous q, or to to miss something crucial late on because you stopped paying attention once you thought you had the answer. Any thoughts about other qs or how well/badly you’re doing are distractions to be avoided – in the moment, nothing matters except the current q.

Life so far

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On turning 60, I thought I should take stock to ponder if have spent my years usefully.

So what have I actually achieved?

Tick tock
  1. I started my professional career working for a couple of years organising hand dug wells for water, and check dams for soil conservation, in rural Ethiopia and Eritrea.
  2. Then I designed a piped water system for a quarter of a million war-displaced people outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan.
  3. After pushing papers in Oxford for a year or so I led a water, sanitation and public health programme for a quarter of a million war-displaced people in the besieged cities of the Angolan interior for the best part of five years.
  4. During that time I caught a sailfish off the coast of Angola. Tagged and released it.
  5. After Angola I learned to dive.
  6. Then I earned a PhD.
  7. I was appointed director of Anti-Slavery in 2006 and immediately had to organise its financial turnaround.
  8. I successfully advocated for making slavery eradication a post-2015 development goal.
  9. I found a woman who’d put up with me.
  10. I contributed to the introduction of a new statute in British law proscribing forced labour.
  11. I ran a marathon, very slowly.
  12. I helped expose slavery in the manufacture of garments for Western high street brands.
  13. I won Mastermind with the specialist subjects Michael Collins, the novels of Dennis Lehane, and Abraham Lincoln.
  14. I helped develop the jurisprudence around “abuse of a position of vulnerability” as a means of trafficking in the case of Chowdury et al v Greece at the European Court of Human Rights.
  15. I helped obtain inclusion of victim protection and supply chain transparency measures in the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015).
  16. I achieved recognition of forced marriage as slavery in the International Labour Organization’s 2017 estimates of global slavery.
  17. I published my 1st novel – The Undiscovered Country about the investigation of a murder during the Irish war of independence.
  18. I learned how to take a better photograph.
  19. I played a key role in mainstreaming anti-slavery in a major UN migration and livelihoods programme in Myanmar.
  20. I published Ethical Leadership: moral decision-making under pressure
  21. I published my 2nd novel – Some Service to the State about the damage caused by partition on modern Ireland.
  22. I worked out how to end slavery. Wrote it down in a book chapter called “Justice against Power: Marshalling a credible response to slavery eradication.”
  23. I’ve been an expert witness in over 200 trafficking cases.
  24. I began writing a play on the life of Frederick Douglass.
  25. I’ve started writing my fourth book on the Irish peace process… which has given me the idea for another play.

I think, on reflection, I have not led a life of quiet desperation. But that doesn’t mean it’s been without crushing disappointments.

Still, once more onto the breach, once more.