URSABLOG. A Change in Space and Time 6: Time Redeemed.

One of the things I find most fascinating about shipping is the relationship between time and space, and how markets adapt to it. If trade is the buying and selling of goods over time and space, and shipping is the mechanism that services it, and if shipping cannot exist without trade, then intellectually – philosophically even – time and space are at the root of it all. Was it shipping that taught me this, or have I become so thoroughly immersed that it informs and influences all that I do, and think, and live? And why hadn’t I realised it? And why did it take moving house for me to see this more clearly?

I had a text the other day on LinkedIn from a random browser:

You read Irish Studies and ended up in S&P. I’m on a fellowship in Madrid heading the same way with Stopford read and nothing else. How does a humanities man get from the library to the broker’s desk?

I smelt the dread hand of AI in the question, but I also found it mildly preposterous. Yes, my Masters was in Irish Studies, at the University of Liverpool if you really want to know, but that was because I wanted to prove to myself that I had it in me to succeed academically having spent my undergraduate days educating myself in wine, women and song.

I was accepted on the course and moved back to Liverpool to find a job to fund me and my studies for the two years that the part-time course would run. After some months of idleness – spending what money I had revisiting my previous extra-curricular studies – I started looking for work, and after some further months of real and sobering unemployment, I bullshitted my way into a job at a container shipping line in the city (long since swallowed up by consecutive mergers), as an ‘Assistant Chemist/Shipping Clerk’. It will not surprise you to know that I was not a chemist, had no chemical qualifications, and I knew nothing about shipping.

I finished my Masters, and without the focus of my studies I got bored. I made it known to my bosses that I was looking for something else, and – probably because I was talkative and disruptive – they transferred me to another group company and made me a ship sale and purchase broker.

What was I to say to my LinkedIn correspondent? That I had bluffed my way into shipping in order to undertake a completely unrelated academic qualification?

Although some of the methods I learnt during my degree did prove useful in my later career, I told the truth: that I became a shipbroker by accident. I gave him some advice and wished him well. I was tempted to say: “Don’t start with Stopford! It will give you unrealistic expectations, and maybe ruin you for life,” but I didn’t have the heart.

I also did not say that I didn’t start off, like so many other brother and sister brokers did, with a burning desire to become a shipbroker, or was guided that way by friends and family already in the business. My friends then had no interest at all in shipping – not such an uncommon thing in Britain at the time – and my family and their friends knew next to nothing about business, let alone shipping.

I notice – with some frustration and regret I must admit – that the pivotal points, the big changes in my life happened mostly in reaction to events rather than because I was driving the change. I may have become a shipbroker because I was bored and canvassed for a change, but shipbroking was offered to me as a solution to that particular problem. It involved a change of time and space: different working hours, and a different office across the street, as well as business travel and different and more difficult challenges. Nonetheless I grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

Moving from Liverpool to London was a jolt to the system: the pace of life was faster, the place was richer, more expensive, more interesting. Life itself speeded up. But – even though I had become unhappy where I was and was looking around for the next thing – again it was a matter of taking the opportunity when it came, although I must admit I was not remotely prepared to take advantage of this brave new world when I arrived. I thought things would just happen; it was a rude awakening.

And Greece! Again, both the first and the second time I arrived, it was because of a reaction to events, rather than the pull of the climate and the people. I did feel that when I joined Yiannis at URSA I had a point to prove, but to whom I was less clear. And I have to admit – to myself if no-one else – that I still do.

But what? What was the point? Not just the point that I had to prove, but the point of a life? In shipbroking, in shipping, in general?

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I love my new home, and care for it as if it were my own. I love my new kitchen and my new home office.

The kitchen is small, at the back of the flat, and I spend a lot of time in there and not just cooking: there is a small table in there where I can read and eat, and in the evenings when I am home, I do both, usually with a glass of wine to hand.

My home office is connected to the other living spaces, with a window onto the balcony and the city beyond. My desk however faces inwards, so the window – and the view – is at my back; for inspiration I look up to an ink painting of a lotus flower I bought in Shanghai many years ago, or to my right at the monumental bookshelves I had built on my arrival here, and the books in it.

Not only do I look forward to coming home to this space every evening, but I enjoy the journey home: the drive up the hill as the breeze blows away the dust of the day and the city below. When I am home, even if I am doing things, I still feel as if I am resting, recharging.

This does not mean however that good, productive things will magically happen, and immediately, just because I am in an agreeable space. It requires action to fill space and time productively, and the choices made on what to do with that time become crucial.

Just spending time in a place – whether at home, work, or elsewhere – is not enough. They say that 80% of success is showing up; that’s true as far as it goes, but being present is more important. I can’t expect to just show up and expect the magic to happen by itself, or blame a lack of success on the place where I happen to be; being present means doing things, and therefore the most important decisions involve how I choose to spend my time. I can’t just delegate it to the space, and hope for the best.

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I moved in around the time of the summer solstice, and as we tilt towards the equanimity of the equinox, the sun rises at a point slightly further east, slightly later, as each day passes. I am no longer awakened by sunlight insistently trying to chisel its way in through any available cracks; as the season progresses, raising the shutters has ceased to momentarily blind me. The morning colours of the trees on Lykavittos are less insistent now, but whether this is a result of a coating of dust that is waiting to be washed away by the autumn rains (which still feel a long way off), or the thirst of the trees, or a different reflection of light from a sun rising in a different spot, I cannot tell.

Lying on my sofa, looking up from a book, I feel I see time moving – imperceptibly, but implacably – through the room, from left to right, from the interior rooms and out through my windows, across the balcony to settle on the never-ending hustle of the north of the city. There is a sense of ceaseless urgency in this movement: it cannot be stopped, or even paused. Not only must life go on: it is going on without me.

All the boxes have been unpacked, and everything is in its right place, for now at least. Not all of the ghosts of the old flat were expelled: some remain – if not so prominent as they were – attached to certain objects. They flutter intermittently – a weaker signal from an old transmission – in reaction to certain gestures and movements – in the kitchen, in the bedroom – as I go about my daily life.

These are not just memories — brief flashes of conversations stirred by preparing a dish, finding a long-forgotten slip of paper, or noticing the look, smell, and sound of a particular bottle of wine as it is opened — but a residue of a life once lived, a film that cannot simply be washed from the skin, however hard I scrub.

I was, I now see, foolish to think that moving house would eradicate the memories I no longer have any use for; we might think we are through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us. It’s not just the past that I have lived, but that of where I came from, and of those that peopled it. Whilst it may be possible to live a life that ignores this, or even totally rejects it, it is impossible to completely erase the things that make up who I am. I can change – house, clothes, country, manners, opinions, lovers, friends, partners – but I cannot change who I am.

That does not mean that the change was not needed; it was necessary. The way it happened did not come from a single moment of decisiveness after the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I now saw how pointless it was to carry on the way I had been. No, it seemed as though time itself had nudged me: kindly, gently, but insistently. Time may not be on my side all the time, but nonetheless time turned out to be more forgiving of me than I was of it.

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It was only when I had been living here for a couple of days that I noticed the graffiti on the wall of the entrance to my building. Graffiti is everywhere here, in fact in some cases it seems that it’s the only thing that’s holding some of the buildings together.

I hope death comes soon

But not sooner than love.

I first saw it on my way out one evening: it made me smile, and then it made me think.

It was written with a simple marker pen; the writer was not an artist, let alone a graffiti artist. The handwriting leads me to suspect that Greek was not their first language.

It is a curious statement, and it is curiously phrased. I asked Claude to check out whether it was famous, or from somewhere, whether in English or other languages. Claude said it had the feel of a translated line, from something that Cavafy or Ritsos might have written, but otherwise drew a blank. I thought it sounded like something Morrissey would have sung in the early days of The Smiths.

It is something between an epigram and an epitaph: it combines hope and despair. It suggests that either death or love is the solution to that writer’s particular existentialist problem, but that love is more desirable. Maybe they want to die knowing that they are, or have been, loved? Or that it will make the pain of dying more bearable? Whatever, they don’t seem to think too much of the joys of life itself, wanting it to be over – loved or unloved – soon.

Who wrote it? What inspired them? And why here, on my building?

I have spent my life looking for a home, a place to belong. It seems – for now at least – that I have found the best version of it. And I find it hard not to take the graffiti as a personal message to me, not as advice, but as a reminder that there is still much to do. I do not hope that death comes soon, but I also believe that love comes in many different packages; we just have to ignore the packaging to make sense of it.

The point of life is to live, in the time and space given to us. All that happens during the business of living – whether planned, spontaneous or by accident, or luck, alone or together with others – provides meaning. We are not eternal and we are redeemable. All in good time.

Simon Ward