April 1 2017

LET'S THINK IT THROUGH.

I do apologise because the last entry in this section was over 6 weeks ago. Such is my life, that, yet again, something changed and that change required more work, more planning but, in my mind, an improved final product.

In that post 6 weeks ago I mentioned about my previous travels and said that I had now be static for over 7 years and I felt the urge, the need, to set out once again. Of my previous journeys some have been successful, some very successful, some failed and some never even made the starting line.

I thought, over the next few weeks, partly for my own benefit, I would examine those previous escapades and see what went right, what went wrong and why. I would use three headings, one each week. I would look at the planning, the finance and the personnel and then come up with what lessons I feel I have learned and how to put those lessons into my future plans.

Those future plans will then be revealed on May 13. Can you wait? You're going to have to do so.

April 8 2017

PLANNING.

One of the joys of being young, though we may not be aware of it at the time, is that so much is new in life. Things change so rapidly. You have plans but they are fluid, something happens to swirl you off in a totally different direction. As we get older plans are more concrete. We work out a career plan, we take on a mortgage that means we will own a home just before we die and we are less prone to impulsive decisions.

Obviously, to me, this is all based on hearsay. I have never really planned for the future because something may happen today that sends me galloping (well cantering – ok trotting) off in a new direction. That is me, that is how my life has unfolded and I wouldn’t change a thing.

However, there are things I have planned and some I should have planned. Planning for that first coastal journey, the family adventure in 1985, started in 1982. As a result everything went very smoothly. The second journey, in 1994, took about fifteen months of planning and again, despite the unfortunate death of my own mother two-thirds of the way through, was still achieved with the minimum of fuss. The third journey, which only lasted a month,, still had two months planning and did what I set out to do.

I then began planning a journey through Europe but, halfway through I was joined by another person and we started to head off in another direction. This resulted in time in Australia, time in New Zealand and a journey through some Pacific Islands, none of which were really properly planned. They failed, and the lack of planning, of having a clear vision of what you were trying to achieve, or even just one vision, was one of the main reasons for the lack of success.

Then, in about 2011 I had plans to travel again and I hung on to these until early in 2015 when I finally gave up. This time it was not due to lack of planning but the reason is for another blog, planned for two week's time.

This next journey then came into my mind and so planning has been going on for over two years. The journey won't start until September 2018 so I still have almost eighteen months left. I am happy that, with that amount of time, it will be able to emulate those first two trips which also were a considerable period of time in the planning.

I actually believe that this will be the best planned journey and project I have ever undertaken. There is, according to my beautiful daughter, a certain amount of amusement in a 67 year old making such plans for the future but the facts are that in my youth, and indeed in middle age, things would go wrong with the plans and I would blindly go on, hoping, nay expecting, that all would be well and then making the best of the fact that it wasn’t. Now, with the wisdom age can bring, I know that it is only once the event has started that you can adjust your plans; they must be in place and fully met prior to the start.

There is, however, a slight problem here in that I have failed to even approach old age, in my mind, and so I may still be tempted to swirl off in a different direction. Don't let me; someone. It is our minds that we affect the way we behave so if I don’t think I’m old, I’m not. Just remind me that I have got some experience. That should do the trick. As George Bernard Shaw said, “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”. Let's play.

April 15 2017

FINANCE.

It is not possible to undertake the sort of venture, project, that I have done without some sort of supporting finance. Either you charge for what you do, you obtain sponsors in some form, you do it almost part-time while having another job or you somehow fund things yourself.

My first coastline journey was a family adventure and basically we funded it. We sold the family home and used the proceeds to fund the trip. I did a small amount of work while travelling but it was nothing significant. The beauty was that I had a job waiting for me on my return and so, getting a new mortgage and buying back into the property market was quite easy.

By the time of my second journey, three years later, I didn't have a house to sell as I had given it all to my first wife as part of our divorce settlement. I took two of the other options I mentioned above. I made a small charge for the project, £25 a term or £66 if you paid for the whole year up front and I convinced some sponsors to help out.

The third journey was a mistake as far as financing went and came back to haunt me later. My own stubbornness didn't help matters either. I agreed a fee to write the articles and take the photos for the US magazine but they took an age to pay. In fact, by the time they did, I was no longer in the UK and never saw the amount they claimed they sent. What happened I don't completely know but a chance remark by somebody would seem to indicate it went elsewhere.

From then on it became far more difficult to get funding. I spent several years talking to the EU and other sources within Europe about my plans for a European journey but the wheels of bureaucracy within Brussels move very slowly. By then I was working with someone else and they convinced me to move my plans elsewhere. Sadly, elsewhere, didn't know about me, my reputation, my previous work and we never really got anywhere.

Since I have returned to England I have been talking to sponsors but I had a major problem. I believed I needed people to work with me on this project and they needed salaries. In fact that was, in most cases, their priority. Then sponsors wanted to know who I was working with and, again in some cases, were unimpressed. As time went by, so was I.

And that is where I am now. Thinking about a project I dearly want to do and wondering how to fund it but knowing that funding must be in place before I even think about starting out. In a few weeks I will look at how I think I can solve this dilemma.

April 22 2017

PERSONNEL

And this is where my problem has always been. Before look at those problems, I will tell you the obvious solution: travel alone. I know many people who do this but they do not have such a structured approach or the need to deliver an outcome at an agreed time that my work requires. It is an option. I will consider it but it would, undoubtedly, have a downside too. It will come down to being a question of balancing the pros against the cons.

I can honestly say that I have not totally enjoyed any of my journeys, or attempted journeys, as much as I felt I could and it has always been the people I have chosen to travel with who have tempered that enjoyment. Please note the admission in that previous sentence. I used the word “chosen” deliberately. Obviously that first journey, and to a degree the second one, were partly, at any rate, family adventures. I didn't choose my travelling companions, they were part of my family.

On that first journey we took two other people. I needed someone to type up the material I was writing and I felt it wouldn't work with just one “outsider”. Sadly, it didn't work with two. Also the relationship between my wife and I was not as good as it had been.

The second journey made me feel even more isolated. I was pretty soon convinced that, apart from my 3-year old son, no one else really wanted to be there. I remember climbing up to Capstone Hill in Ilfracombe with my little son while the others sat in the car because they didn't want to do the climb and it was overcast. This was shortly after we had broken the trip to return home and I could see my mother shortly before she died.

The third journey was probably the best but it was short so less time for problems to appear but there were hints and I wish I had heeded the warnings.

Over the following seven years I worked with someone on various attempted projects. These I will be detailing elsewhere in these blogs over the next year or so. Let's just say they did not share my vision of what we were trying to do, they did not understand the difficulties of such a venture, they did support me when I tried to solve these difficulties and they basically only had their own interests in their mind.

Once I had put that behind me and returned to England, and after my meeting with the teacher I had worked with in 1994-95, I decided to do things again. Wanting to use video as well as photographic and written material, I felt extra hands was essential. Sadly, again, I went through half a dozen or so of the wrong people. They either didn't understand the vision, were too self- centred on building their careers and, when I put some of them together, totally failed to be able to work in a team. It taught me a lot and in a few weeks time, I will tell you where these lessons have sent me.

April 29 2017

LESSONS

Having written it all down, it seems a lot clearer even if some of these lessons come from a time over 30 years ago. It is obviously vital to have planned well in advance. Those first two adventures went remarkably smoothly and the planning for each of them took a minimum of 12 months. Later trips sometimes happened more than being planned and suffered as a result.

Financially it becomes much more difficult if you have to rely on sponsors, who may change their minds, disapprove of your staff choices and even go out of business. However hard you try in many cases the actual finances can be taken out of your hands.

People are strange, at least the ones I have worked with or tried to work with are. In fact, the very last person I attempted to work actually opened my eyes to this when, having told her some of the stories from those I had involved in the past, she asked why I seemed to attract strange colleagues. I don't think she included herself in this and, to be honest, she was the only person I have interviewed and then met and even done some work with and not felt a foreboding. MY problem has always been I want to give people a chance. I see faults but believe they can be overcome. As you may know, sometimes it then takes me almost 7 years to extricate myself.

The problem is that the work to be done is not a job. Its a dream, a passion, even a lifestyle. You can't work out employment rules for such a job; can you even call it a job? You probably can't have a boss/employee relationship but what is the alternative?

That, I think, is a question for next week so you will have to wait.