Author: wilks

I called myself wilks when I first started blogging. The idea was that it would afford a measure of anonymity. For much the same reason, there was no photo. Times change, hence the photo, but I decided that even when I changed the blog’s title at the start of 2009, I should remain wilks.

Summer’s lease

It has been a wet and dreary August. There have been the occasional days of sun, and with it warmth, but otherwise rain and damp, muggy days. Bank Holiday Monday was promised fine and our plan was to walk the ridge west of Great Mis Tor, starting at the car park past Merrivale Quarry and climbing up to Middle and Great Staple Tors before round to Cocks Hill via Roos Tor and Petertavy Common. We should have known better, after a decade living on the edge of the Dartmoor, that the best laid plans . . .

At Merrivale visibility in the low cloud was little more than 50 yards, and although the route planned is easy, navigation in low cloud across a landscape with few distinguishing features is a challenge. We turned in the car park and drove back to Princetown, parked behind the High Moor Centre and walked out along the disused railway track to King’s Tor. Considerably tamer but just being out and walking was enough.

We stopped on the way back to climb up the lip of Swelltor Quarries and were rewarded with the sight of a Raven. Its granite quarries are one of the best places to find Ravens on Dartmoor, and the sight of one below us in the mist was quite magical. The low cloud may have restricted the view, but we found ourselves much closer to those birds we came across than we might otherwise have done. In particular we got within feet of a male Wheatear, which held its ground, looking at us, before flicking away, its white rump the last thing we could see as the mist swallowed it up. For me this bird is summer on Dartmoor, perhaps not surprisingly, as Dartmoor holds the largest population of Wheatears in southern Britain. By the time we got back to the Princetown car park the sun was out, and we drove home under a clear sky.

In a recent Slow Lane column for the FT, Harry Eyres wrote about the rightness of summer; and of summer as kairological time. You need to read the whole column, but in short he contrasted our expectation of summer, that ‘everything will be right, the sun will shine, the company will gel’ with the ‘bitter disappointment some of us feel when summer fails to materialise’. But, he goes on, ‘the essence of kairological time is that it cannot be programmed; those moments of rightness come from nowhere’. And such was last Monday.

Early August

Gatekeeper butterflies in the blackberry bushes along the road edge, and Housemartins low across the fields, skimming just above grass height hunting for insects: for all the signs of summer it was, nonetheless, a cheerless start to August.

And yet, between showers,  we walked our patch that first weekend: Mardon Down on the Saturday, and Sunday in and around the woods that border the Hennock reservoirs. There is always something to see and hear. On Mardon Down, Yellowhammers: first their unmistakeable song, and then we caught sight of three or four, heads as if dipped in sunshine yellow paint; and Redstarts, a first for us on Mardon. Sunday had us dodging showers. Looking back from the high road to the reservoirs, Fernworthy was half hidden in rain and the edges of the High Moor blurred by low cloud. We walked with the threat of a soaking but were back at the Land Rover before the skies opened, rewarded with seeing that the Great Crested Grebes that we had seen courting in late Spring had had at least one brood. There, at the dam end on Trenchford, the Great Crested Grebe parents and three youngsters, plus a slightly older one.

Cultivating the habit of optimism

Holiday (a week reminding myself why living in the South West is so much better than simply visiting it, although narrow lanes south of Padstow when the lifeboat is on a shout make for interesting driving) and transactions (yes, they are still happening – just) have left little to time to post; a late summer lull and a transaction gone away are prompts to return.

A phrase I read recently, and have been shameless in using since, is “the habit of optimism”. In the current position a lot of us find ourselves in, it is useful to remember things may not be bad as they seem, and even if they are, it doesn’t always do to say so (and it is not just about talking ourselves into recession: a concept that I do not subscribe to).

In my post Spending time wisely in early July, I picked up on some of the steps that we can take in our practices to see us through the slowdown, whether it be long or short, and in particular to those identified by Nick Jarrett-Kerr of Kerma Partners, in his article in Kerma Partners Quarterly 2/08.

Nick, when looking at ‘where partners should be spending their time during a market turndown’ sees motivating and developing people as a critical task. I could not agree more. For most lawyers, this is their first experience of a down turn in the legal services market. There are few days when the legal press doesn’t carry a story about lay offs and redundancies, and ‘on the floor’ it is obvious that there is less work around. Inevitably this may have a demoralising impact on people; even if they are not directly affected, they will know people who are. The old certainties are longer be there.

Optimism is important: one of the panel at a recent Exeter Business Leaders Forum, having first reminded us that the current economic turbulence was the fourth time down turn he had experienced, told us that one of the main lessons he had learned  is that, even in a down turn, when you get up in the morning, the sun is still shining, people are still going to work, things are still being built, goods are still being sold. Certainly times are harder, and life is more difficult, but this is what happens.

Optimism is not blind hope that everything will be all right; rather it is knowing not just that there is a way forward, but what it is and what it will take to get there. This is a message that needs to be got across to the people who work for us.

“Weary, pissed-off and despairing”

So says one senior Labour party official, reported by George Parker in the FT this morning, describing how people are feeling in the party.

I have news for this anonymous Labour loyalist. His words describe exactly how most of us in the country feel about Gordon Brown, and the shambles over which he is presiding. You cannot get more out of touch with reality than Brown’s repeated insistence that he is the best man to lead Britain. On current form he couldn’t lead us out of a paper bag.