A Journey Shared is a Journey Halved

On flights of any length if you are travelling alone and are lucky enough to pick up a conversation with the passenger next to you before take off then you will probably have a good conversation for the rest of the flight.

A journey shared is a journey halved.

This happened to me on a recent flight from Manchester to Aberdeen.  I don’t know the name of the passenger who sat in 10A, the window seat, while I sat in 10B on the aisle.  No doubt he does not know my name.  To avoid the trap of de-personalising him and calling him ‘fellow traveller’ or ‘my neighbour, I will christen him as ‘Mike’. 

During taxiing out to the runway, the safety talk and wheels up I had found out that he was travelling to Aberdeen where he was staying overnight before travelling to Peterhead further north.  There he was going to join a ‘flotel’ which is an accommodation and support centre for offshore work.  As far as I could tell from his really thick northern English accent he was working as a deck supervisor on an offshore project to build a wind farm in the Wick area of the North Sea just off the coast of Aberdeenshire.

Once the plane had finished it’s gravity defying strained climb to a cruising height and the cabin noise dropped I heard Mike’s work history from leaving school to the present day.

After leaving school in one of Britain’s northern steel towns he went into work at one of the local steel mills following in his father’s footsteps.  At the time he joined the steel industry it was still nationalised draining funds from the public purse to maintain its share of the globalised steel market.  To join the steel industry then represented a way of life and a job for life.  The steel industry had always been there and at the time he joined it there was no reason to believe it would ever die there but die it did.

The industry was privatised and without public funding lost its comparative advantage in an international market being dominated by economies in the Far East where labour was cheap, resources were cheap by comparison to the UK and there was a burgeoning domestic economy to support the industry.

He and his father were made redundant along with thousands of others.  A community had been close to mortally wounded when the culture of jobs for life was wiped out taking with it a way of life.  his father left the industry with a generous redundancy package and rights to a generous pension so despite the loss of pride and identity that are the companions of redundancy he did not have any financial worries.

He however had not been in the industry long enough to accumulate the same benefits, was still quite young, had to earn a living and did not look forward to doing nothing.  After leaving the steel industry he then worked with the demolition companies contracted to dismantle the very steelworks where he had hoped to make a living for the rest of his life. 

A few years ago I was in South Wales in an old mining town where the pits had been closed for ten or fifteen years. The valley was green and the water in the stream was running clear.  I sat on a bench looking over the valley and I was joined by a man and his dog.  The man had worked in the mining industry all of his life and was made redundant when the pit closed.  I asked him if he had any regrets about the closure of the industry.

‘No, absolutely none.  I will never have to see any family of mine work in the pits again in this country and look, this whole valley was black not so long ago.  Look, now it is green and we can see the sky.  Regrets? No.’

I asked Mike the same question and got almost the same answer.  He knew that with the closures none of his children would have to risk their lives or get injured or get sick through having to work in dangerous environmets.

Once the demolition work had dried up Mike’s next move was to work on the oil and gas rigs in the North Sea.  He admitted that it was dangerous work but the pay was good if you could put up with working a roster of four weeks on doing twelve hours on and twelve hours off.  He felt the most dangerous part of the work were the helicopter transfers back and forth to the rigs.  His coping mechanism was that once he had gone through the safety briefings, donned his survival suit and embarked on the helicopter was to go to sleep while all his colleagues stayed awake in a state of nervous anxiety.  After all, as he said, if the chopper goes down you really don’t have much of a chance so you may as well go peacefully in your sleep.

The oil price started to crash in 2014 and Mike left the oil and gas industry and migrated to working on projects building offshore windfarms around the shores of the North Sea.  Holland, Denmark, Norway and now Scotland. 

From heavy traditional industry, to demolition, to hydrocarbon energy and then into renewable energy.  In many ways Mike’s career moves were really a type of summary of how Britain’s own economy was changing.  Changes forced on to the economy by the ever shifting levels of comparative advantages in different economic sectors interlinked across an increasingly globalised world.

Although Mike was born in on the north east coast he now lives in Yorkshire with his wife and daughter. That is when he is back home on shore leave for two to four weeks at a time. As he confessed, he would rather be back at work after two weeks than four to be earning and out from underneath the wife’s feet.  He also has a son who is completing his law degree.

Mike then told me that he very rarely went back to his old home town.  It was too depressing.  The site of the steel mill he worked in and then demolished, despite beliefs that developers would build light industrial units and businesses would move into them to employ the local workforce, was still a derelict brown field site.  The most recent steel mill to close in the last couple of years still stood abandoned by its private sector owners as memorial to the town’s heavy industrial past. 

What he also saw in his old hometown was colleagues from his days in the steel industry who had lost their jobs when he did.  They were still living in Middlesbrough.  Still living in the remnants of a once close knit and thriving community that was now a moribund brown field site.  They had not moved on from the past by adapting and accepting the inevitable change in world economics that came home to Middlesbrough.

When Mike told me how he found returning there ‘depressing’ after describing it I think he may have really been trying to say that he was heart broken and could not find a reason to return there anymore.

There was no self-declaration of pride in the fact that he had moved on and that he was surviving economically while Britain’s industrial landscape has been undergoing huge changes.  ‘It’s what I had to do to keep the money coming in.  I can’t do any sports now.  Loved martial arts and football but if I got injured and couldn’t work there’d be no money.’

His declared pride was in his family.

His wife works in the care sector looking after young people with learning difficulties who were just about to slip into a way of life on the wrong side of the law.  Her mission in life was to give them a chance to escape from that seemingly irreversible vortex with its own negative internal energies.  That was her mission, to make things better for those who had their lives ahead of them no matter how awful their individual starts in life were.

To make a difference.

His daughter also works in the care sector looking after the elderly.  And, as he told me, her mission in life was to make life better for those who may not have a very long future but nevertheless had a future and a right to a better life no matter how much longer they had life.

What really upset Mike about where his daughter works is that there is a lady who is 106 years old who has been in care for 91 years.  She still had all her faculties and was never tiring to be with.  Then Mike asked me a rhetorical question that I could not answer.

‘Do you know why she has been in care since she was fifteen?’

‘She had a baby at fifteen.  Fifteen! That was all she did wrong and got locked away for the rest of her life.  What sort of society would do that?’

He blamed religion.  He went on to say that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the bible that said ‘Thou shalt banish the woman who has child beyond the bounds of wedlock’. If there was then the whole of Christianity would be cast into doubt.  As far as his reading of the Koran went there was nothing in there either.

He couldn’t change what had happened to her but just by visiting her when he was on leave with pictures of where he was working and telling her about what he had been doing was enough to make her happy.  He was making a difference to her life in his own way.

As far as his son was concerned he was immensely proud.  During his time at university he has been first in his cohort for most of his law exams.  His tutors had told him that with his academic record his future career paths were unlimited.  Corporate law, criminal law, civil law; all the doors to these high earning specialisms were open for him once he finished his finals.

‘I don’t care what he does as long as he is happy and does it well.  Do you know what?  He has paid most of his fees himself.  He has a weekend job near the university and a seasonal job during the breaks.  On top of that he runs a martial arts club for kids near the university two nights a week to give them a chance to try it out.’

Mike’s son has shunned all of those high earning career paths.  He still wants to go into law and has decided he will specialise in family law and the law and the protection of children.

To make a difference.  

Our conversation was interrupted when the background noise of the airplane changed.  The trailing flaps grumbled out from the wings and the undercarriages slipped out of their casings in the engine pods. A gentle thump as the main wheels hit the runway and then we levelled as the front wheel touched down.  This was followed by a deceleration that pushed me forward into my seatbelt and we had arrived in Aberdeen.

The scheduled flight time was just over an hour.  When I stepped off the plane Manchester only felt two minutes away.

A journey shared had certainly been halved and Mike had made that difference.