A Week in Scotland

It’s a bit funny, being temporarily separated from the person you love. I keep thinking of something that Heather Armstrong at Dooce wrote – I think she was traveling and I think she said something like, “it’s nice to miss my husband”, but I can’t find it now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But it is nice. It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there thinking of you; it’s nice to collect thoughts and experience to share upon his return. It’s different from the time I had to leave for Boston and we didn’t really know when we’d see each other again and we had a massive time difference (and an ocean) between us. That hurt. I wouldn’t want to do that again.

On Monday he went to Scotland for a week. I was speaking to someone the other day whose girlfriend is in a South American jungle somewhere for six months. Next to that, Scotland for a week is pretty manageable.

When you live with someone, and you do all these daily-life things together, there’s an inevitable period of alienation when you discover that it’s evening and you’re home alone. How long has it been since you had a week of nights like this? Years. You cook pasta for one and watch something you know he wouldn’t enjoy – Gossip Girl or Foyle’s War, depending on your mood. You eat the sort of ice cream he might find boring (no bits of chocolate or cookie dough to break up the smooth monotony).

And the main thing is that suddenly you appreciate things you’d forgotten to appreciate, like your entire relationship, and that’s nice. That’s necessary, in a way.

You also remember important things. Like this: I remember that I do at least know who I am (as much as one ever can) apart from him. That’s always a worry with a man, but even more so when you’ve lifted yourself from your home country to reside elsewhere. The potential problem in this case is that you might allow yourself to be washed out by new experience – to become, in other words, a creature entirely dependent upon habitat, whose behaviour, likes and dislikes, daily life, is based only on The Man. What else would root you? – not childhood, or history, for in the eyes of your new countrymen, you did not exist before you came here, fully grown and adult.

But I’ve always cooked pasta and watched historical dramas that made me wish my hair was curlier and my dresses vintage. I’ve always liked walking to bookshops, spending hours deciding what to buy, impulsively stopping in at art galleries, eating lunch in parks. Nothing I do here is disingenuous. On my way home I keep running into people I know; and they know me although I am, at the moment, on my own. We still have things to say to each other. There’s chitchat, gossip, we make plans to meet up.

So in the end he and I discover that we miss each other’s company. It is not just habit or convenience or, worse, an unhealthy dependence, that keeps us together. It’s something much better. And for that, a week in Scotland is probably worth it.

The Art of Being At Home

1.

In the introduction to George Monbiot’s No Man’s Land, I read: “Humankind was born on the road. Our brains…are those of the migrant. The restlessness which, in one corrupted form or another, is felt by every human being on earth, is incurable.”

We’re far from Africa and we’ve lost our roots, but there’s still an everyday restlessness, corrupted by centuries of evolution and years of education, skulking in the dark corners of our consciousness.

Friends of ours have just bought a boat to live on. They like the idea of portability; their boat gives physical form to an unspoken desire to periodically migrate. They can float up and down the Thames with their possessions and their love. It’s more a metaphor than anything – in rainy England, confined by villages and narrow rivers, by family homes and local pubs, we’re hardly the Turkana, traversing inhospitable desert lands, setting up temporary camp after temporary camp – but I’m not immune to the temptation of just…picking up. And going.

Why do I like the idea of a floating existence, the ability to suddenly pick up my life and simply shift it elsewhere? The reality of it – the friendships lying fallow, the swapping of time zones, the stress of every mundane detail – is not romantic, and an anxious person is not naturally suited to rootlessness. But still.

In 2007, during the floods, we helped a man called Rob prevent his houseboat from running adrift. It was my first summer here, I had just met the Man, and everything looked bright and strange. I was surprised by the power of the river, swollen and purple in its malleable banks, but I understood intuitively what it is to have one’s home threatened by a force bigger than oneself. Years of fretting over the smell of fire in the California hills had taught me to respect the fragility of a man-made structure; I still had dreams (nightmares?) of choosing, methodically, ruthlessly, which possessions to flee with. That boat was Rob’s home but it could as easily be carried away, or “dash’d all to pieces”, as Shakespeare’s Miranda put it, on the rocks.

Later, we sat in the boat and shared a bottle of wine. We felt a million miles away from Port Meadow, which glistened in the murky twilight, a galaxy away from Jericho with its cocktail bars and boutiques. Rob’s self-sufficiency (he even had a set of solar panels on the roof) captivated us completely, and when we did eventually meander back into town, we sat in a hot pub stunned by the brightness of the lights and said very little.

A few weeks ago, a friend emailed me to say that, almost exactly three years on, Rob had passed away. This will go down in history as a hot summer, a happy time during which the sky burned blue and children ate ice cream and young people got slowly drunk on champagne as they punted down the Cherwell; no floods this year, no boats needing rescue. And when we next visit that spot on Port Meadow, what will we see? Not Rob’s boat, moved a hundred times since we sat near the fire in its belly, hungry for warmth and company on a cool midsummer evening, now ownerless, adrift in spirit. No; the landscape changes constantly.

2.

So you could say that maybe it is not as easy to be at home somewhere, anywhere, as it might seem.

We wander down long roads towards manor houses. I read that the English have this fixation on the home; and maybe these vast estates were built, I think, to allow their owners the illusion of wandering – a harrowing journey down a dark corridor, a flitting between huge empty rooms.

My home is more the man I live with than the walls around us; it’s my books, not my post code. But for us, the constant movement of the summer has made me crave a period of stillness. The backstage passes, the train journeys, the forays into the exotic, the picnics and punting. It’s been a kaleidoscope period, a beautiful whirlwind.

Now we’re housesitting for friends on the edge of the Cotswolds. And what I feel here is maybe the opposite of Monbiot’s corrupted restlessness. Late in the afternoon, after too many hours with my legs folded up against a wooden desk, I go for a walk with the tiny brown terrier who has attached himself to me like a miniature shadow, who follows me from room to room, who curls up at night beside us. The sky is full of puffy clouds, a grey mist on the horizon (I’m caught a mile from the house at the point at which it evolves into a downpour). I walk down bridleways, past fields of wheat edged with a lace of white flowers.

In the evening we go to the pub for our dinner, or else we roast a chicken and eat it sitting in the lounge watching an unexpectedly good film starring Helen Hunt and Colin Firth, with an appearance by Salman Rushdie as a obstetrician. We drive to the train station and back in a big green Land Rover; I feed the pigs in red wellies, denim shorts, one of the Man’s old button-up shirts. I tell the dog not to pee on the poppies that grow in bunches by the fence, though I don’t know why, as I’ve let him pee on every hedge between here and the next village.

A frail rain falls; the sun comes out.

Fez, 26 June

This time Fez is much less about us and much more about the place itself, the people here. Now I think it extraordinary that we came here when we did – only six weeks into our relationship, the future (our future, that is, he being English, me being American) only a cloud through which we could not even imagine passing. But we trusted each other completely here, and lay on our hotel bed taking photos of our sweaty, hairy, unclean selves.

Now we are staying with friends. But it is also different because three years of living together has made it so. It is lovely but also, weirdly, lonely. If you are no longer getting to know each other in such an active way (now I can make jokes about his past and he knows the geography of my history and there is much less exclaiming over a tajine: ‘oh, I didn’t know you’d done that!‘). It is sometimes almost like travelling with oneself. If he knows, now, that I like to wash my hands more than strictly necessary, and I know without thinking about it that he will smoke almost twice as much here, then there is little (nothing!) to try to hide, and even less to be grateful for the revelation of.

And this is such a sweet thing, but also scary – suddenly here we, this one thing that is a “we” but also an “I”, are, in a foreign country. Perhaps in a way this is why I slept badly last night – for, in spite of him being beside me, loving, handsome even in sleep, smelling and feeling more familiar than anything, than even myself, I felt a sense of being also alone. And perhaps also this is why people (eventually) have children – I had this thought yesterday, as we were discussing the merits of trans-national relationships: that at a certain point you become so close that you almost need someone else – who will be like him and like you but different and constantly, forever, surprising – again. Is that a strange thing to think? But then, everything is strange here.

Summer Things

The problem with Sundays is the inevitable slow march towards Monday. You can feel each moment sliding past like an adder at your ankles; dangerous, slimy, fickle. Hang the laundry to dry outside and already you are halfway through the day before you’ve even begun it (or so it feels). It always starts with such promise and then suddenly you find yourself deeply asleep on the couch while the sun beats down hot outside, too weary from the effort of trying to preserve each instant and enjoy it to stay awake any longer.

Today I find myself in just this position – prone, one arm flung across my forehead – when the Man walks in. I find myself shooting up through the black waters of sleep and am unexpectedly awake-but-not-awake. And in this tiny space – only a second, really, perhaps two – I find myself thinking how funny, or maybe how extraordinary, that there is another person who lives here (not just here in this house but here, in my life), who says as I sit up with my face creased and my eyes full of terror (the way I pop up like this reminds him of a meerkat, he sometimes tells me) not to worry.

Yesterday we did summer things. It was a sweet, slow day. We went to the farmer’s market and bought eggs, a free range chicken, vegetables, an old copy of an early P.G. Wodehouse novel. We sat in the shade drinking homemade elderflower cordial and snacking on lemon cakes. Later we did the thing which we often do on Saturdays – we have brunch (salad, sausages, flatbread, orange juice, coffee) and read the Saturday Guardian (I read aloud Tim Dowling’s column to him, he reads Lucy Mangen’s to me). Then we went out into the garden and picked cherries and watered the potatoes and sat in the grass and I tried to do the crossword but gave up on it. We ate brownies and raspberries in a pool of sunshine.

We brought the cherries to the pub and I had more homemade elderflower cordial, this time paired with champagne, because, well, why not? On the way home we stopped by Sylvesters and impulsively bought lavender and rosemary to plant in the garden, and some ropes with which to hang the hammock. I had half a nap on the couch and we heated up some pizza before going into town as darkness settled to listen to some music. At midnight we sat upon the hammock, the two of us, limbs folded, watching the star-drenched sky until some neighbors called us over, so we brought red wine and glasses and climbed the fence and met them for the first time, and a few hours later we were in bed with the heat of the day still palpable in the walls of the house.

From My Journal, 1st July 2010

We have been, we are, travelling. We are in a state of travel. Dispossessed, half-asleep, gripped by other worlds (Moroccan spiced coffee, of which my bag now smells, and the distant Irish troubles of the 1920s, of which I have been reading), totally and utterly outside the moment and space we’re actually in.

We are however capable of looking towards the future: what will we have for dinner? Probably Chinese, or else pizza – and someone will deliver it swiftly and practically wordlessly to our house, and we will not say shokran, nor will the man who delivers our dinner expect anything, or see any disparity (class, colour, religion) between us and him. Our street will seem miraculously wide and the drunks exceptionally loud and we will for awhile miss (or at least unconsciously feel the lack of) the five calls to prayer, particularly the one just before dawn. Perhaps we will wake then, each of us, silently, without even knowing the other, too, is conscious of the quiet hour. We will hear the yelp of bicycle wheels or the moan of an errant car alarm, and then, comforted by this intrusion of noise, we will sleep again, through the dawn, too late, wake bathed in hot light, angry, minds elsewhere.

There is no possibility of jet-lag (no time difference, not that I was ever even vaguely aware of the time as we traipsed through the medina), but we will pretend that we’re travel-weary and in doing so, convince ourselves that we are travel-weary and jet-lagged after all, and people will know how to interpret the haze in our eyes, for we will say, ‘Oh yes, we’ve been in Morocco’. I despair of how that will sound – arrogant, perhaps? Though we hardly mean for it to.

It’s just that the way time moves alarms me. On the way to the airport, we say glibly that it hardly seems a week could possibly have passed since we were on the way to the medina, and I’m reminded of a dream I had shortly before we left, in which we departed and then suddenly I found myself returning, thinking, ‘but that was so quick, and we hardly did anything we said we would!’

Everything, really, is a variation of that dream – how else did I arrive at the age of 23, when just yesterday I was 20, and travelling back from Fés with a newfound lover, making lists in the back of my notebook of the furniture I would have to buy in order to furnish my apartment in Boston when I got back in September; and crying at the ending of John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, when really I meant to cry at my predicament, at the seeming impossibility of being parted by an ocean (not to mention a thousand yards of red tape, a thousand pounds, a thousand moments of yearning and wishing and resenting) from my love. Three years ago? No, that was three minutes ago, or else three centuries ago. We live always on dream-time, moving through molasses, or being propelled at the speed of light through our own experiences.

…and here we are now. Replicating the journey physically at least, though now I make no lists, because the house in Oxford is already full of our things (mostly our books), because I have a visa that makes my life there valid. “Oh September, where did you go?” is the refrain of the song I’m listening to, and oh how often I find myself thinking that! Without even knowing which September I mean. Perhaps I mean the first September I ever saw – how would I know? And what difference could it possibly make? It was September and now it is not and soon enough it will be again – this is an inevitable, unvarying truth. Leaves will fall again from the cherry trees in our garden and I will sit mournfully in my study and say, “Oh June, where did you go?” – wondering how the green could fade so fast.

Speaking of which, where did June go? For already it is July and Wimbledon is nearly over and soon our friends’ son will celebrate his first birthday, when this time last year he was only an idea, crouching in his mother’s body, a being who both did and did not exist as we took a break from our investigations into the life and writings of P.G. Wodehouse to eat cold fruit and watch the tennis, while outside on Plantation Road the elderly shuffled past, gasping in the heat, sweat forming in the ravines of their facial wrinkles. September indeed!

(Later I think how funny: for although we’ve been travelling all day, I am now inexplicably, unexpectedly, in England, at home, as if I had been moved like a chess piece from one place to another, as if the time and space between there and here had been erased.)

Shared Geographies

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time – T.S. Eliot

I want to say that I don’t believe in fate. Coincidence, maybe. Yes, I’ll accept coincidence–this happened and so did this, what a coincidence. But then in a certain light, from a certain angle, things start to look ridiculous and too improbable. There’s that whole funny thing about me meeting a man–the man–my first day in Oxford, and then it gets even funnier when you learn that before me there was another American girl called Miranda with the same initials who studied the same things in college and it’s almost as if we were literally meant to be and maybe he’d got the wrong one the first time round–but really, who believes that? I don’t believe that. I’d like to, but actually what I believe is that we happened one night to meet in a pub and we got along. And later it turned out that he happened to once have had a girlfriend who shared my name and initials and nationality. Maybe it says a lot about him—that he’s consistent, that he has a type–but more likely that’s just the way things are.

But then this: this street. This street that I’ve been working on for more than two years. In my life, my twenty-something life, that’s a lot. I’ve held this job longer than I’ve ever held another and now I’m leaving it. It was not an arbitrary appointment, either–no more than anything else is arbitrary. Because it’s where he went to school (and also where she–the other Miranda–went to school). Because he had good things to say about it, I applied for a job there. You can’t even say I applied for a job there. More like: I wrote a desperate email and they responded saying yes, what a coincidence, we do have an opening, would you be available for an interview next week?

And that street. What a funny street. Tucked away in North Oxford where I would never ordinarily go. Except that I did go there. My first week in Oxford, three years ago, long before I was hired. Because just around the corner is where my tutor’s house was. And we would sit and drink tea and discuss the political history of the situation in Iraq.

And then it turns out that Pico Iyer went to school just down the road. The Dragon School. Once I had to go there to deliver some errant post. Pico Iyer has been one of my favourite writers for a long time and I’ve always felt this stupid sense of connection–because he lived in Santa Barbara, where I’m from, because he was schooled in Oxford, where I love–and then to think that he walked down this street where I have spent five days a week for more than 728 days. Well, that’s funny enough.

Then tonight. Arbitrarily, because if you remember this is all arbitrary–I look up the name of an author I once wrote an email to. I’d loved a book of his and I had a question–who knows what it was, I was in high school–and he wrote back within hours and I thought it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I remembered his name tonight, for no good reason at all. It popped into my head as I watched an episode of Dr. Who so I typed it into my computer and pressed “search”. And you know what? Paul Watkins went to the Dragon School too.

How do I express the strangeness of this? I can’t tell him–can’t say, retrospectively, I’m writing to you and in ten years I will share a very specific geography with you . I don’t write it to him now, because the time has passed for that sort of thing. I wouldn’t write to him now, I couldn’t, because I am an author too, and the letter would be tainted by that–no longer an innocent high school girl seeking advice and giving praise, but a bloodsucking competitor trying to network. And yet–

And yet–

And yet here we are. We share a street. We have that street in common. You know who else lives there? Roger Bannister. Who was the first man ever to run a sub-four-minute-mile. 3′ 59.4″. And my first year in high school that was the name of my favourite album–Four Minute Mile by the Get Up Kids, who, if I listen to them now, sound like noise and nothing else and I feel very little except for some obligatory and very vague nostalgia. I used to listen to that noise coming through headphones every night. Four minute mile and Roger Bannister, and I played with the idea of being a track star myself and I listened to Belle and Sebastian and thought idly, though I never imagined it would ever actually happen, that when I was free of the shackles of high school I would move to Britain and set up a life there which was a million miles away from where I knew, and it would be good–

–And it is good, and feels spontaneous. But then if you really look, everything points to it. Everything points to that one damn road–the road where I’ve spent hours making photocopies, constructing files, answering phones–I share a knowledge of that road with other people–and maybe Four Minute Mile wasn’t so much about the noise but about something else.

But then I don’t believe in all that, do I? Do I? On nights like this I’m tempted to say yes. Yes I do.

And that’s the magic of it–that you never know. All the signs point to this–whatever this is. This moment in East Oxford with the ever-evolving draft of my first book in a special folder on my desktop and the knowledge of that road with the Dragon School at the end, and the man who sleeps beside me every night with his heavy breath and his soft beard. But the signs could point anywhere if I wanted them to. It’s like that film Pi where you start to see 3.14 everywhere, and the more you think about it the more it appears in obscure places. It takes over your everyday life.

And here is everyday life. Early mornings, muesli drenched in organic milk from the farmer’s market. Cups of tea and pints of cheap cider. Kisses across the table. A street, another street, another, all the way to and from work. A bicycle locked up in various places all across the city. Everything is arbitrary. You love every minute. Things shift at the back of your mind–maybe this was meant to happen, maybe this just happened, but definitely it doesn’t matter which. You curl up with the window open and the duvet up against your chin and a warm body beside you. Never mind all that. This is now.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you

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Today, I seemed to be continually stumbling on different materials that conveyed two separate, but interrelated themes: Firstly, that being thankful is very, very good and, secondly, that letting go is super dooper healthy. (This repetition was probably not entirely haphazard in the context of my last post, a kind of Brazilian footballer’s dive after a light ankle tap.)

First, I clicked on The School of Life and found Alain de Botton’s post on gratitude. Big Al, who loves a wistful line about a the shade of piece of fruit or the sad quality of the weather, here reflects on the meaning of the secular world tendency to not say thank you. He asks whether this is because saying thank you seems undignified and unambitious, an acknowledgment of our mortality; a recognition that what we are thankful for may not come again, that we are at the mercy of something beyond ourselves. He says:

To say thank you for a glass of wine or a piece of cheese is a kind of preparation for death, for the modesty that our dying days will demand. That’s why, even in a secular life, we should make space for some thank yous to no one in particular. A person who remembers to be grateful is more aware of the role of gifts and luck – and so readier to meet with the tragedies that are awaiting us all down the road.

There is, in this way, something about letting go of your bigness in being grateful.

Then one of the academic articles I read before lunch (which was about mortality – not my area, but a nice touch so far as the coherence of this post goes) headed down a surprisingly didactic path, advising the reader that it is important to only use theories if they illuminate social reality, and that it is better to take into one’s own work the flashes of insight that scholars have to offer, rather then get stuck serving some ‘inflexible theoretical edifice.’

Then I spotted this poignant post from A Literal Girl on the miracles of being in a place without the weight (and comfort) of the having had a childhood there; how being without a past, while frightening and lonely at times, allows a certain light openness to the present, what I had only earlier this morning been thinking, as I reflected on an argument I had recently, was a kind of willingness to be a quiet nobody for a while, to sometimes just succumb to transition and linearity, rather than impress oneself onto others, or an illusion of oneself and others.

Then a new, lovely friend sent me a link to thx, thx, thx, a blog devoted to posting a thank you note a day. (Check it out and find her thank yous to the future, people who don’t get it, and pianist. Gold.)

So, yeah, I guess, essentially, the hidden curricula of today’s thesis writing, if I can pull it all together very quickly (I’m hungry!) was about: 1) not holding on to stale, fearful things, including the desire to be big and immortal; 2) being receptive to fresh experiences and intuitions; and 3) being grateful to no ones, as well as ones. So, as a sort of homework exercise, and do mind the tone-shift, I end this post with some thank you notes of my own:

Dear Friends (fleshy and online), Thank you for being such cards. You complete me.

Dear Toblerone Genius, Thank you for coming up with that triangle idea.

Dear College Room, Thank you for being so teeny that it does not take a long time to tidy you, and for being so patient with me.

Dear Most of the Old People at the Nursing Home I spoke to When I was 23, Thank you for nervously laughing or changing the subject and offering me tea and a dry biscuit when I asked you what the point of life was. It has saved me a lot of time and hassle.

Dear Lavender, Thank you for being able to be used in soap, bubble bath and misty spray.

Dear Wales, Thanks for having lots of castles, craggy cliffs, medieval-themed key rings, and towns that just sit there while flocks of black birds and muscly seagulls rule.

Any thank you notes of your own to share? I’d like to hear them!

Past

I’ve written about this before, but a blog post I read earlier today made me think of it again.

It’s to do with Javier Marias’ All Souls–a book which I selfishly maintain paints one of the most stunningly accurate portraits of Oxford I’ve ever come across. It’s not about the city; it’s about my city. And here’s why: his narrator and I share a space. We both inhabit a world where, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.”

And I almost can’t tell you what that means, because it means so much. It is, stripped of context, what it means to live somewhere else. It means that when you meet friends for a drink and you look back, through the cider haze, what you see and what they see exist in parallel universes. This is the lonely side of it.

The happy side of it is that sometimes, just walking down Broad Street or cycling past the gaze of idle pedestrians, you have the strangest feeling: you’ve become weightless, your skin translucent like a fish, your mind lucid. Time overlaps with itself; Georgian architecture with Classical and Norman, Wren, Wolsey, Aldrich, a collage of names and periods. And your name? Unknown. You float down Turl Street, past the mouths of three colleges, each one guarded by a stiff porter in bowler who watches you without interest, who has seen a thousand just as young, and as possessed with the charm, beauty, and blamelessness of this youth, as you are. Oh, but this is freedom. Terrible, beautiful freedom. You are separated from your own history and yet at one with it. You can be things, where everyone around you must pretend.

So you become like a candle: self-contained, brief. I feel abbreviated here, and if I didn’t enjoy that feeling, I wouldn’t have stayed. It’s been nearly three years, and I can still pinpoint the moment at which I shed my history–which is full of wonderful things, ranches, farms, children, family, laughter, freshly picked fruit, waves and hills, sunkissed cheeks, but also of anxiety, selfishness, selflessness, a paralyzing shyness and a destructive self-pity. But then one day in May I stood in Christ Church Meadow and watched some little boys in stained cricket whites jogging across a field and thought: I’m not my past, my past is me. And then– is it coincidence?–that night, I was free and light enough to appreciate an encounter that could have been as tiny as an atom in my memory, and now here I am and that encounter is sitting across from me, and our past begins at the point where I felt for an instant that I had no past.

No one here knew me as a child. It’s the greatest blessing and also the greatest curse you could possibly imagine.

Notice to Childish Ego:

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I was wondering whether you’d mind please taking a ticket and lining up behind other customers in the queue – like thesis, outstanding publication resubmissions, job applications, exercise regime, relaxation and enjoyment, family and friends, balanced diet, regular sleep, and, right at the back there, healthy perspective. This meats and cheese counter is pretty busy right now, and I would ask you to honour the system in place, even if it’s pedal powered and steaming.

When (perfectly lovely) ex boyfriend informed me that he is seeing someone else (a reasonable, natural thing), you saw it as some sort of invitation to bolt down the aisle, barge past everyone else (don’t think I didn’t see that neat elbow in the head to healthy perspective), and start firing your mid-late 90s-style questions about the past and my self-worth, and then you tried to distract everyone by setting up some fancy video montage of their meeting and happy moments together. It will take me some time to forgive you the video – that was low – though I recognise that you get bored sometimes, and that I don’t let you run as freely these days.

Anyway, I may deal with you at some point, but, for now, you’ve had a good day’s run around, and I’d like you to take a ticket or, preferably, step away from the counter and scamper back to the sugary cereals.

Right. Next? Thesis?

Dating, compatibility and jobs

This is going to sound horribly vain, but I’m pretty good at what I do.

I have noticed that before they come to me, quite a few of my clients have used other consultants – many of whom, it would seem, are not quite as careful as I am.

Thing is, I talked to a number of my friends in the same line of work and they have all said that they have had similar experiences.

One commonality between all these cases is that the previous contractor was found either through a job site or through an agent. On paper the contractor looked rather good, but when it came to the actual work their skills (and in rare cases their personality) was found to be somewhat lacking.

With many people focussed on just ‘getting the gig’, in both these cases there seems to be no real incentive to put across wholly accurate information.

Clients too often ‘big up’ the project in order to make it more attractive, often promising options in lieu of immediate payment. All too often enthusiasm for the idea trumps reality.

To my mind, the problem that people are trying to solve here is almost exactly the same as the one you’re trying to solve when dating… basically that both parties have a set of requirements and are looking for mutual compatibility, but there is a strong incentive to exaggerate.

This got me thinking.. could it be possible to use the dating paradigm to improve success?

Perhaps the algorithmic approach employed by OKCupid could be adapted to this domain?

OKCupid is interesting because it asks seemingly unrelated questions which betray some aspect of the user’s personality. It is hard to game the result as results are averaged over a very large dataset, and a user is encouraged to add to this set all the time by means of making it feel like a game (and as Ben pointed out in his blog, this can be used to provide an incentive for much).

That said however, most of my clients have been found by word of mouth or from meeting face to face at events. So, like dating, I suspect that while the internet is a handy tool the real results are going to occur in the real world through social interaction.

So go to the next tuttle!

Image “Endless love” by Ali Nishan