A Day In The Life

3.36am Awoke, at home in Derbyshire. I had gone to bed at 9:30 planning to wake up early, but not THAT early! Shaved and dressed as quietly as possible.

Pre-dawn Derbyshire

4.45am Left home for York, for the second day of a conference on cybersecurity. There was a queue on the M1 already (!) so I took Speed Camera Alley – the A619 from Chesterfield to the M1, seven speed cameras in ten miles. Survived that.

Up the M1 and onto the M18. I’ve NEVER seen so many lorries at once. I was on the M18 for ten minutes and I must have passed at least a hundred.

Onto the A1(M) – the traffic finally stopped being busy past the M62 -- and into York. Parked at York Racecourse, where the conference is, at 6.15 am and promptly fell asleep in the car.

7:30am When I awoke I wanted breakfast and I wanted to see York. There wasn’t time to see the normal tourist sites (and they were closed that early) so I just walked to the edge of town looking for a breakfast café. 

River Ouse

River Foss 

 Google told me that most of the cafes were also closed. But The Hilton Hotel opposite Clifford's Tower was open, so I treated myself to a slap-up breakfast in there. Very nice it was too.

Clifford's Tower

On the way back, I found myself amongst the housing that must have been built by Joseph Rowntree for the workers in his sweet factory. Photos are of Rowntree Park, Terry Street, and a nearby Methodist church.

9:30am The conference was pretty good in content (with 8 parallel sessions, it ought to be!) and unusually well organised. First conference I’ve ever been to where the schedule arrived not in a website but in an app; first one I’ve been to where they scanned your badge to register you as having attended a talk or visited an exhibition stand; and first one where one of the exhibitors turned up not with a few posters and tables but with an entire bus! Photo below. (By the way, if your work has anything to do with keeping personal data about people, and you don’t know what GDPR is, you *really* need to find out…)

Oh, and on the unofficial measure of how good a conference really is – the quality of the freebies – it got very high marks. Adam was overjoyed when I presented him with a handful of mini torches, a multi-highlighter pen and an executive toy yesterday.

1:30pm I quit at lunchtime – the talks in the afternoon has interesting titles such as “What Cybersecurity managers can learn from an Olympic Gold Medallist” but weren’t directly relevant to my own work, and I needed to get away because I had to drive from York to Croydon! So it was back on the A1(M), and then the A1, and then a detour to avoid a traffic jam on country roads and the A606, and then getting stuck in a 20 minute traffic jam on the M11, and then over the QEII bridge at Dartford which I love driving over (photo below – no I didn’t take it!!!) and then more traffic heading towards Bromley and Addington in rush hour. It’s a trickier drive than taking the M1 – both the A1 and M11 are two-lane rather than three-lane in most places, which means that whenever a lorry wants to overtake another lorry, all the cars in the outside lane have to slow from 70ish to 50ish. There were times when I chose to drive in the inside lane doing 50 with the lorries because it was easier and safer than playing concertinas in the outside lane. But there are no ‘smart’ motorway restrictions to worry about, and the only speed trap I saw was an old-style one; when I did my detour, there was a country lane shortcut that was very straight, and halfway down it there was a police car parked among the trees – entirely invisible until you got close to it. No, I wasn’t speeding.

6:15pm I got to Mum’s house where she had provided me with an evening meal – but I had done so well at breakfast and at the conference lunch that I couldn’t eat much of it. Then I logged onto Facebook…

…and found that one of my long-term friends, who I remember as an enthusiastic Christian but who has political views far to the left of mine, had put up a post about the Manchester bombing that offered the usual far-left perspective on who is to blame for terrorism (Western governments) and then added comments from the Old Testament suggesting Christians/Jews were no better than Muslims at being people-destroyers.

It made me feel … ‘bad’ is way too shallow a word, but I can’t explain it. It was so far away from what we should be concentrating on, so ungracious, so… wrong. It made me feel attacked and wounded by someone who I would have expected to be supportive. Admittedly this friend now lives abroad so the most charitable interpretation I can give is that he has woefully misjudged the prevailing mood in the UK. But even so...

Last night I was at a prayer meeting at our church in Chesterfield which concentrated on the incidents in Manchester (which isn’t far from Chesterfield). At the end, our pastor encouraged us to be positive on social media this week, especially regarding this topic. So how do I respond to this?

I’d love to end this story on a strong positive note, but real life isn’t always like that. I wrote ‘goodbye for now’ on his post and used Facebook’s ‘unfollow’ button so that I don’t have to read anything more that he posts for a while. I figured that was at least better than using the ‘unfriend’ button; if I can't say anything positive, I won't say anything at all.

And now for an early night!