The 49er – Six months to go…
Well, it’s official – six months to 5-0, Day Two of getting the podcast back up and running, and my body feels like I need a sit down! Whilst the episode focuses on my knackered knee and the mystery that is the ‘Phantom Finger Bruise’; the ‘Milk of Human Kindness’ is what I should have […]
The 49er – The Countdown Begins!
Turns out that tomorrow I will be exactly six months from my 50th birthday. So…what am I going to do about it? Cry? Cheer? Buy a Brazilian Butt Lift? The true answer to the question that I’m going to get creative as a means to strike up a conversation. And what better way to do that than […]
Social Mobility and Television
It’s a peculiar thing to grow up in thrall to your television and then realise you’ll probably never get to be on it. Whether it’s the programmes you enjoy or the adverts you love (go on, ask me to sing the Bird’s Eye Steakhouse ad with the workmen in the van… I dare you!) research […]
Social Mobility and Money
How do you feel about money? Confused? Scared? You’re not alone. The SmartPurse video where women share how they feel about money is a powerful illustration of how a lack of direct and practical conversations about finance leads many of us (women especially) to lack confidence around money. Happily, it also talks about how we […]
Social Mobility across the Generations
One thing that working in the social mobility space has brought into sharp focus for me is how the different generations of my family have experienced social mobility in different ways (as I always say; just like investments, social mobility can go down as well as up!). It has also prompted me to be acutely […]
What is Social Mobility?
The topic of Social Mobility is rapidly rising up the C-Suite agenda and forming a key component of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments for many organisations. But what is it? What is Social Mobility? According to the OECD: “Social mobility refers to how a person’s socio-economic situation improves or declines relative to that of […]
Absolute Scenes Working Class Stories: Mental
I don’t know why, or how, it has come to be that a partially disused psychiatric hospital is hosting a rave. How an enormous sound system could be set up in a vast hall that once previously played host to wounded soldiers during both World Wars and people with mental illness during peacetime. One that, […]
Social Mobility: Let’s Mobilise!
When I was introduced to Jon Hering at Blackbullion, I knew I had met a kindred spirit. Whilst we grew up in different countries (Jon is from the USA) in a different social demographic (where I come from a working class background Jon would say he was born into a middle class household), we have […]
Absolute Scenes Working Class Stories: Leaves
It is late on a winter’s evening. Dark, but easy to see thanks to the sodium street lamps that cast a comforting orange glow along the roads we must walk that take us from our local, The Three Barrels (of which a trip to was always referred to as “Goin’ dahn the Barrels”), to my […]
Absolute Scenes Working Class Stories: When Music Came to Maths
It’s Wednesday morning. And Wednesday morning means one thing: maths. And while I struggle with the subject, I’m now at least in a class with my friends. Being in top set English initially put me in top set maths but it was soon clear I was a words rather than numbers person. So I’m now […]