Today our domestic help called around as a change from her usual day on a Wednesday and it is always good to see her and to have a chat. Last night, Meg had a rather disturbed evening so the night’s rest was not as restful as it could be. I had recommended our newly found cafe, ‘The Lemon Tree‘ to our domestic help and she had taken along three of the residents of the home where she works for a treat in the form of a knickerbocker glory. We met up with our University of Birmingham friend, as we did last Friday and our conversations are always something to which we look forward. However, we shall not be seeing him for about ten days as he has some family obligations this weekend and then is off for a continental holiday to do what I suspect is some delightful walking in the mountains. Our son and his wife are also away for the next ten days so I will feel a little bereft so I must find other some diversions to take my mind off the absence of a holiday. Meg and I used to have a holiday in late September to coincide with our wedding anniversary and Meg’s proximate birthday and then a winter holiday in late January in the inter-semester period when I was at work in the university. Our last holiday was planned to be in Porto in Portugal at just about the time that the pandemic struck us all down so I suppose it is the best part of five years since Meg and I actually holiday together, abroad at least.
With the Olympic Games approaching their end stages, I have been thinking about how the athletes cope with success and with failure. One of the lessons that must be very hard to learn is that success or failure is not always due to one’s own efforts but what is happening around you. This was dramatically illustrated in the case of Josh Kerr, the British 1500 metre runner who had his sights solely set on securing a gold medal. He was so intent on beating his long time rival (which he did) and actually ran a personal best, securing both a UK and European record, that he failed to notice an American who made an amazing last few seconds sprint to secure the gold medal and beat Kerr by 0.14 second. My point here is Kerr achieved a silver despite putting practically a ‘gold medal’ performance. Similarly, in many Olympic sports a medal might be secured, even a gold medal, because a very near competitor made a critical error which cost them the ultimate title. The gold medal winner in these cases is unlikely to say that possession of the gold medal was not due to his or her own performance but was due to the failure of a rival. So the wider point I am making here is the behaviour of others around you may help to account for ultimate success or failure. After I had submitted my PhD thesis and was waiting for the critical three month period in which the thesis was being tread and evaluated, I typically walked to the college where I worked at a distance of about a mile. So I had plenty of time on my own to contemplate whether I was going to succeed or to fail and so I had to keep asking myself, as someone who has enjoyed a modicum of academic success in my lifetime, how I was coping with the prospect of failure. After all, it is easy to cope with success but for how many of us is it difficult to cope with failure? At the time, one of my best academic colleagues, a much younger but brilliant young scholar who was just on the point of submitting his own PhD, gave me an excellent piece of advice. I must confess this colleague had a very wise head on young shoulders and he advised me that it was not unusual after a PhD had been submitted and examined that some additional work had to be done, for example a particular chapter to be rewritten. So it proved to be in my own case as my examiner towards the end of what I thought was a successful ‘viva voce’ defence of the thesis mentioned that he had looked in vain for evidence of ‘Fourth generation evaluation methodologies’ Of these I had never heard (nor had the other two examiners either) so I did undertake an additional piece of fieldwork, wrote a chapter incorporating the aforementioned methodologies and was duly award my PhD after a total research time of only about 2-3 substantive years. I was subsequently to discover from a lecturer at Birmingham University who I knew from my conference circuit days that this particular External Examiner invariably asked his examinees to go the extra mile as they say and to make revisions and or augmentation of the submitted viva. In some ways, this made me feel better once I learned this as I am of the view that the quality of a PhD is of the Chief Examiner who approves it rather than the actual university which awarded it. But I have known some excellent colleagues in my time who have had a setback in their ‘viva voce’ examination (as indeed I did) but who subsequently did not go on to complete their PhD although I am sure they were both very worthy candidates. Earlier in my life, I had attempted to climb the Three Peaks of Yorkshire; (Pen-y-Gent, Whernside and Ingleborough) where you are regarded as competent by the Leeds and Bradford hiking club if you can complete the entire three mountain ascent/descent and the distances between them within a twelve hour period. My first two attempts to do this ended in failure but I was successful in my third attempt. I think the choice of a good walking companion was crucial in this respect because I was a fast starter but a slow finisher whereas my companion (best man at our wedding) was the reverse. Consequently, I got us around the first part of the trek and my companion the second half so again, this reinforces the point that success may depend upon the people around you as well as your own individual efforts. For the ‘Thee Peaks’ of Yorkshire, pone had to sign in with a starting time to a log book in a little cafe in Horton-in-Ribblesdale which was the starting point. Hence, it could be judged whether you had completed the round maintain trip within twelve hours and, if so, could purchase a little plaque to hang somewhere in one’s house if so inclined.
© Mike Hart [2024]