Parkin' some thoughts by Nick Hazell
Choices It’s strange what crosses your mind while all around you are sleeping. It’s 3am in the morning and I’m wide awake. I often find myself in this situation these days. Sleep doesn’t come easily to us Parkys at least not when convention dictates that it should. During the afternoon in the middle of a meeting I can often find myself drifting off, sometimes mid-sentence only to jolt awake and contribute something, usually quite random, to the conversation. Night time presents more challenges. Invariably my brain recognises my attempts to sleep and offers up a selection of memories, to do lists and unresolved issues stamped “urgent” that need to be dealt with in the early hours or my medication prompts the premier of Hammer Horror style dreams. On this occasion the thing that’s on my mind is this article. It’s getting late in the month and I’ve suddenly realised that don’t know what to write. The amount of thought I give to the task is inversely proportionate to the number of ideas I have. I’ve enjoyed writing over the last few months. When starting I often don’t know where I’m going to end up, but the experience of getting there has usually been cathartic. I also write because I sometimes don’t know what I think until I read what I have to say. It helps order the thoughts in a brain which has a few problems with its wiring. At the moment though, the loose connections have the upper hand.
Having experienced my life scales tilting downwards precariously on one side, I’m keen to ensure that my children don’t endure a similar fate. I’m often asked whether I would encourage the girls to take up the practice of law. I don’t normally take long to answer that in the negative. It’s so hard to get a good offer with a law firm these days. When I started, it was enough to show you were not a murderer, had reasonably intact social skills and could survive several all-nighters in a row without disintegrating into a dribbling mess. The modern recruitment process is, to say the least, somewhat more demanding. If you haven’t climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, spent a year saving Orangutans, crossed the Atlantic on a bicycle or swum with Polar Bears you won’t even get a first interview. I’d never get the job now. That’s not to say I’ve no confidence in the abilities of my children. It’s more that I want them to be happy in what they choose to do even if that means taking a less traditional path, a fact that I need to remind myself of from time to time.
There was a time when I had ambitions to become a journalist, but the thought of the long and unsociable hours, deadline driven existence and strained family life put me off. Instead, I became a lawyer and embarked upon a deadline driven existence of long and unsociable hours that put a strain on my family life. I’ve often wondered whether that career choice and the resulting burning of the candle too much at one end contributed to my condition. I really didn’t have much balance in my work/life. Now, I just struggle with my balance.
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