The Art of Not Falling Apart

New Statesman Books of the Year 2018

Christina Patterson

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786492760
• eBook ISBN: 9781786492753
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

New Statesman' s Best Books of the Year, 2018
Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year, 2018 We plan, as the old proverb says, and God laughs. But most of us don't find it all that funny when things go wrong. Most of us want love, a nice home, good work, and happy children. Many of us grew up with parents who made these things look relatively easy and assumed we would get them, too. So what do you do if you don't? What do you do when you feel you've messed it all up and your friends seem to be doing just fine? For Christina Patterson, it was her job as a journalist that kept her going through the ups and downs of life. And then she lost that, too. Dreaming of revenge and irritated by self-help books, she decided to do the kind of interviews she had never done before. The resulting conversations are surprising, touching and often funny. There's Ken, the first person to be publicly fired from a FTSE-100 board. There's Winston, who fell through a ceiling onto a purple coffin. There's Louise, whose baby was seriously ill, but who still worried about being fat. And through it all, there's Christina, eating far too many crisps as she tries to pick up the pieces of her life. The Art of Not Falling Apart is a joyous, moving and sometimes shockingly honest celebration of life as an adventure, one where you ditch your expectations, raise a glass and prepare for a rocky ride.

Part I

Falling

‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans’

Woody Allen

Kafka, eat your heart out

I have never had a heart attack, but I think I now have some idea what it’s like. For days after I walked out of that office on Kensington High Street, I felt as if I had something crouching on my chest. I’m normally keen to lose a pound or two, but even I was shocked to lose eight pounds in three days. The day after the editor threatened to call security, I got an emergency appointment with my doctor. I told her that I couldn’t stop shaking. My heart, I said, felt like a bomb that was about to go off.

I never thought losing a job would be easy, but I always thought so many things would be worse. I had been through quite a few of the things that are meant to be so much worse. They didn’t seem all that much worse now.

It was the psychologist Abraham Maslow who came up with the idea of a hierarchy of needs. He talked about life as a pyramid, where your need for food and shelter come first. After that, there’s a need for safety and then for ‘love, belonging and esteem’. Shelter I had, at least for a while. Food, for once, I didn’t want. And love? Love was a luxury I couldn’t worry about now.

When mice go through changes in status, it affects their immune system and their ability to move. No wonder humans can’t stop shaking when they’re suddenly pushed from a perch. One moment, you’re being invited to go on The One Show and speak in seminars at the House of Commons. The next, you start talking about work in the past tense. It makes you feel as though you have been knocked down by a bus, and are somehow still functioning even though you have been technically certified as dead.

In John Lanchester’s novel Mr Phillips, a man sets off with his briefcase, in a suit. Instead of going to the office, he sits on a bench in the park until it’s time to go home. He doesn’t know how he’s going to tell his wife or sons that he has lost his job. Not long after I shouted at the editor, I met someone who did something similar. After he lost his job as an executive editor of a national newspaper, Grant Feller rushed out of the house before his children got home from school, and then strode in with his briefcase, telling them that ‘Daddy was home early again’. It took him three days to pluck up the courage to tell them that he had been marched out of the office with his things in a cardboard box.

‘I can remember every single moment of it happening,’ he told me. ‘I can remember being approached by the managing editor and tapped on the shoulder. I can remember the walk. I remember being sat down. I remember the look on his face and the sun coming through the shutters on the window overlooking the Thames. He said, “The editor has lost faith in your ability and we no longer want you to work here.” I went cold.

‘It was,’ he admitted, ‘a brutal environment, but secretly I loved it. I loved being pushed to my limits. The adrenaline, the testosterone, the thing you feel when you get that great pat on the back when you’ve done a great column, or even when you’ve written a great headline, that’s the most amazing gift.’ Oh yes, that thing you feel. That terror. That excitement. That thrill. But the pressure mounted, he said, as the budgets were slashed. ‘I never, ever, ever put in a bad day’s work,’ he said, ‘but I just didn’t fit any more. My wife says, “Didn’t you see it coming?” And the reason I didn’t was that I was good at the job.’

When Grant walked out of that meeting with the managing editor, he found security guards waiting outside the door. Newspaper editors love the grand exit with security guards. It’s a way of showing the whole office that you have turned, on the flash of a whim, from friend to foe. ‘I said to the managing editor that I’d appreciate it if we didn’t have any security guards,’ Grant told me. ‘We shook hands. I left. It must have been about ten-thirty in the morning. I got on the train. It was a completely empty train, full of old people and students and tourists. There was a kind of numbness and a sort of feeling that you’re not quite in this world, almost as if all people had disappeared and you were just on your own, like in those westerns when that tumbleweed rolls across the desert.’

The next day, he said, was the worst. ‘I just couldn’t tell the children. I walked them to school, came home, did stuff in my T-shirt, then put my suit on at about quarter to five and went for a walk and then came back when I knew the children were there. And they said, “Daddy, home early again?” And I said, “Easy day.”’

Grant took another sip of his wine and then he gulped. ‘When you don’t have work, and you look into your children’s eyes at breakfast time . . . they don’t quite understand what losing a job means. But when they start worrying about money, it’s just the worst thing. Being the provider that society deems a man to be, that was right at the core of things for me.’

I nodded, as if I knew exactly what he meant. I knew I should have thought that I was lucky not to have had to worry about having other mouths to feed. I didn’t feel lucky. I felt as if worrying about my own livelihood, home and future was something a woman’s magazine might tell you to do when you’ve had a hard day with the kids. Like a bubble bath, with a scented candle and perhaps a tiny glass of wine. ‘Me time’. Because I’m worth it. Even if I now have a horrible feeling I’m not.

‘I was fortunate,’ he said, ‘to live in an affluent part of London, but it makes things difficult. You start to measure your life in terms of what you possess or own. And also how you define yourself: I am a doctor, I am a lawyer, I am a journalist. And then there was a time when it was: I’m looking for something else to do, and you can’t walk into a room and say that.’

Well, you can, but the trouble is that other people don’t know what to say. I am an ex-journalist. I am a recovering journalist. I am a journalist who may no longer be able to carry on living in my home. ‘There was a period,’ said Grant, ‘when there was a “for sale” sign outside the house, two or three months after I lost my job. That was awful. One morning,’ he said, and he seemed to be half wincing at the memory, ‘I pulled it out of the ground. I looked at it and thought “no way”, and told the estate agent, “It’s not for sale.”’

I first met Grant at a professional networking dinner organized by someone we both knew. We were each asked to say something about ourselves and he said that losing his job was the best thing that ever happened to him. At the end of the dinner I rushed up to him and told him that for me it had felt like one of the worst. I couldn’t understand how he had managed to be positive and upbeat and all the things the self-help books tell you to be when you lose your job, while I had been staggering around as if I was carrying a corpse. When we finally met for a drink to swap stories of newspaper battlefields, he set me right. ‘I was monumentally depressed,’ he said. ‘And I was angry, so angry and so bitter and so full of poison. Honestly, there were days when I wanted to do the most terrible things to the people I felt had wronged me.’

I poured us both another glass of wine and had to fight the urge to cheer. I had been talking to a radio producer about making a programme about compassion, following some work I’d done on nursing and the NHS. ‘To be honest,’ I told the producer, ‘I’m currently more interested in making a programme about revenge.’ I was joking, and was quite surprised when he said it was ‘a great idea’. We put together a proposal. We would, we said, look at the history and psychology of revenge, from Medea to the contemporary armed forces and the judiciary. We would ask whether the import of ‘honour’ codes from the South and East had affected Britain’s traditional Christian/liberal humanist idea of turning the other cheek. But all I really wanted to do was plunge The Independent’s management in boiling oil.

The producer’s bosses weren’t, it turned out, very keen on compassion or revenge. But the producer was so upset by what had happened to me that he cancelled his subscription to The Independent. His act of loyalty cheered me up when not all that much else did.

Ken Olisa sounded very cheerful when I heard him talk at an event on ‘finding your balance’. I was invited to it by someone I met at a conference, one of many people I bored with the tale of my dramatic departure, and who listened and was kind. The event was in a wood-panelled hall. There were candles. There was champagne. But there was not very much champagne. Like most journalists, I have been programmed to expect a nice glass of something chilled to be quickly followed by a second. So when I listened to three leading businessmen talk about a turning point in their life, I was a bit distracted by my empty glass.

It was Ken Olisa who broke through. He is short. He wears a bow tie. I’m usually filled with irritation at the sight of a man in a bow tie, but after a while I didn’t notice the bow tie because Ken Olisa is very funny. He was telling us about the dilemma he faced when the company he worked for collapsed in ‘internecine fighting’, the boss he liked got cancer and died and his new boss was ‘as close to evil as I’ve found’. I’m rarely gripped by tales of corporate infighting. In fact, when the earlier speaker talked about his struggles to ‘make partner’ in a major accountancy firm I had to hide my yawns. But Ken talked about his childhood as the mixed-race son of a single mother in a two-up two-down in Nottingham with an outside loo. He told us how the head teacher of his state junior school had played his pupils Mozart and given them each a tiny taste of caviar, so they would know there was a world beyond the one they lived in, a world where the appointment of a black bus conductor made the front page of the Nottingham Evening Post. He talked about the thrill, after Saturday jobs doing night shifts at factories and painting toilets, of getting a job, and university scholarship, with IBM. He talked about his time at Cambridge, where he ‘initially didn’t know how to use the array of knives and forks, but sucked it all in’. And he talked about getting fired from the international computer company Wang.

Ken made getting fired sound like fun. I did not think that getting fired was fun. I thought getting fired was less fun than a cervical smear, less fun than a biopsy, less fun even than foreplay with a man who has just made you a lovely stir fry, but unfortunately got bits of chilli stuck under his nails.

‘I couldn’t work for him,’ said Ken, when I met him in his office in Regent Street to find out more. He was talking about the ‘evil’ boss at Wang in America. ‘I decided to think about how my mother would handle this, and you don’t just say: well, that’s it, I’m going to get another job. You go with a bang and not with a whimper. So I conceived this idea of a management buy-out, on the principle that you either get fired or you get to run the business. I got a promise of the money in the City and made an offer – and he fired me.’

Ken still sounded jaunty. I think he nearly always sounds jaunty. But he didn’t, it turns out, feel jaunty at the time. ‘It was awful,’ he said. ‘It was a very low moment. He fired me in his office. I remember seeing images of my children and the garden in England floating before me.’

He was offered a job with another software company. ‘Same salary, same car, same everything. I sat looking at the offer, and thought: that’s great – self-esteem saved! The neighbours will never know that I was fired. I’ll just say I moved to another company. So I’m looking at this job offer and I’m looking out of the window. I’m still at Wang doing my gardening leave bollocks, so it’s a terrible time and I look at this piece of paper and my inner imp – the one that only appears at moments of great importance – said, “So, you’re going to spend the rest of your life working for great businesses that someone else has started?”

And I think: if I’m ever going to start my own business, it has to be now.’

Ken started a boutique technology-focused merchant bank, as you do when you’re a hotshot City type who knows about things like computers and banking, which make money, and not things like poetry and journalism, which don’t. He got a string of board roles and chairmanships. He was the first black man to serve on the board of a public UK company and has been voted the most influential black person in the country. But the strapline he chose for his current enterprise, another technology boutique merchant bank, is ‘Entrepreneurs never travel smoothly’. After talking to him, you can see why.

From 2008 to 2011 he was a director of a mining company controlled by Kazakh oligarchs. I was tempted to swap stories of oligarchs and tell him that I’d had a nice chat about Russian poetry with the one that owned The Independent, in the days when I was part of the editor’s inner court. But my own falling out with an oligarch, or at least an oligarch’s puppet, wasn’t plastered all over the Sunday Times. ‘It’s a really tragic story,’ said Ken. The short version of it is that ENRC, a Kazakh-based multinational focused on mining and metals, wanted to be listed on the Stock Exchange, which meant it had to conform to British governance. Ken and some of the other non-execs helped launch ‘a really big due diligence exercise’, but somebody produced a dossier accusing them of ‘all kinds of dodgy things’ and sent it to every British newspaper. ‘The Sunday Times published a full-page article on us and how evil we were,’ said Ken. ‘It was a terrible story.’

Ken managed to persuade the board to undergo an independent governance review. The reviewer concluded that it was the worst board it had ever seen. On the week of the AGM, the Kazakh government, which owned 11 per cent of the company, said it would support the directors. On the Tuesday, it changed its mind and the oligarchs followed their lead. Later that day, Ken became the first non-executive director of a FTSE 100 company to be publicly fired at its AGM. Ken published his farewell letter, saying that the whole situation was ‘more Soviet than City’.

Even when being publicly ousted, Ken kept his sense of humour. But it was, he said, ‘a horrible experience’ and for a while he felt his reputation was in shreds. In an interview a few weeks after it all happened, he said that ‘technically’ everything the shareholders did was ‘completely correct, like all great show trials in Moscow in the Communist regime’. Everything, he said, ‘is done according to the book, it’s just that the book wasn’t fair. Kafka, eat your heart out.’

It’s surprising how often Kafka comes up in stories of redundancy. You don’t have to be a big fan of German literature to recognize the feeling he describes of a man arrested and put on trial, but never told what crime he is meant to have committed. You don’t have to have read his novel The Castle to have that sense of reporting to officials whose jobs and actions are never explained. You don’t have to have read Metamorphosis to know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a creature that no longer recognizes its world.

Most people I know do not found boutique merchant banks. Most people I know work in the arts or journalism, because these are the fields I have worked in. They are not professions that make management buy-outs a good option for going out with a bang. They are not, in fact, even professions. Most of us feel proud if we’ve raised the cash to buy a sofa. Most of us get redundancy deals that would make a business person laugh. But our managers seem to be as keen on Kafka, or on re-enacting Kafka, as everyone else.

It’s quite a few years since I worked with Claire. She is kind and funny and conscientious and has always been very good at whatever job she has done. Claire is not her real name. Because of the gagging clause in her poxy redundancy deal, I can’t give her real name. But when Claire told me about what had happened with her employer I felt like calling a big strong friend of mine who was once banged up for GBH.

‘There was,’ she told me, in the café where we nearly always meet, ‘talk of a restructure. The seed of anxiety was sown four years ago and it continued to build and build. So there was this anticipation that we might all have to apply for our jobs or lose them.’ Ah yes, that HR favourite, ‘restructure’, which nearly always seems to lead to all kinds of other pseudo-scientific words. ‘There was a sense,’ she said, ‘that what had been before was wrong, and then there was talk of being “fit for purpose”. From very early on, there was a sense of those people who were safe and those people who were unsafe, and those people in the unsafe camp were set up to fail.’

After the talk of being ‘fit for purpose’, there were appraisals. But not the kind of appraisals that were meant to make you better at your job. ‘Basically, within those appraisals,’ said Claire, after taking a bite of the mini biscuit they give you free with your cup of coffee, ‘twelve months before the redundancy, a narrative was being created. You could be told, for example, that you were over-conscientious, that you panicked. Or somebody who questioned was seen as resistant. It was clear,’ she said, and the hurt was still written on her face, ‘that the narrative from those appraisals was something that would be used to get rid of you.’

After four ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part I – Falling
• Part II – Gathering
• Part III – Fighting Back
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements