URSABLOG: I Am Blessed And Honoured

I am blessed and honoured to once again be writing this blog. After so much pain and struggle, laughter and tears, joy and frustration over the last two weeks, I am back again. It was a cruel and bitter time for me, an empty and desolate fortnight, when my life held no meaning, no aim or purpose. But now, as I write these words, I understand why my life has been so desolate and empty: I am possessed with the overpowering desire to achieve the dizzy heights of professional ecstasy, and I am so blessed and honoured to share these dazzling gifts with you, whoever the hell you are, and wherever in hell you are reading this.

I am humbled and proud to be a competitive ship sale and purchase broker in one of the, if not the most challenging and competitive markets in the world. I am harassed daily by higher mortals than I – my clients mostly – to find the impossible: the perfect ship at the best price delivered in the most fortuitous place, just as the freight market is turning upwards. If I rarely achieve this it due to mysterious powers beyond my control, but nonetheless I bear these existential burdens cheerfully. I am humbled – on a daily basis – by the awe-inspiring marketplace I practice in, and I am proud that I am still alive with some of my sanity intact.

I am – truly! – both grateful and overjoyed to work with the most outstanding and loyal people anywhere on this planet. They daily put their own personal worries and concerns aside to act with the utmost dedication and effort to move us all further and upwards to the highest pinnacle of professionalism that shipbroking, shipping nay the whole business world can reach, as well as asking me whether I want anything from the shop downstairs. Such devotion to the cause! They do this whilst maintaining both a cheerfulness and passion that others now in bed, or in other less fortunate companies than ours, will think themselves accursed that they are not here with us, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters) to fix or buy and sell ships. I am so grateful for their pain and tolerance (or is it tolerance of pain?) and overjoyed with their good-humoured forbearance of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that the inhuman and stormy markets throw at them. I also love mixing metaphors indiscriminately.

I fall prostrate with adoration and affection to those co-brokers in the market that I am proud to call friends, who have resisted the deep and powerful temptation to go direct to our clients, or use our information – charitably and selflessly gathered and shared – against us in order to get new business for themselves. I am affectionately prostrate with adoration with those that come to us with business – even after trying ineffectively to screw us – knowing that, after all, we are the best channel for a particular client. I adorably and affectionately prostrate myself before those that continually try to broke the broker. Without them I would not be where I am today.

I would like to thank, with the deepest sincerity and honesty, all those that have helped me to achieve the goals and targets I have set for myself, however readjusted, downgraded and minimal they appear now compared to what I originally had hoped, planned and strived for. Their help, however small and insignificant (in fact especially the small and insignificant help) have made me the small and insignificant shipbroker you read today.

I am eternally in debt to those people, platforms and systems that allow me to communicate – mostly through various forms of social media – my sense of self-importance, self-entitlement and aggrandisement to the world. Without their selfless devotion to connecting the world together, with scant reward from angel investors, share issues, IPOs, and mergers and acquisitions, I would never have been able to shamelessly promote my own brilliant intelligence, sparkling yet wickedly cutting sense of humour, and selfless acts of charity at the same time as having no sense of self-awareness and irony whatsoever. A special thanks also to those that knew what they were doing and how it would affect human relationships: the world is certainly a more interesting place now! Kudos!

Finally, I would like to grudgingly acknowledge all my family and friends who know who I really am, and raise their eyes to heaven – like that funny emoji! – whenever I write, say or do something that is literally beyond the pale. According to some of the many self-help, self-care and self-improvement books I have ravenously consumed, they have held me back and caused more harm than good, but nonetheless I grudgingly acknowledge them in the hope that they will not disappear when the shit really hits the fan, again. I just ask them to remember, always, that my achievements are always mine alone, and my failures are always somebody else’s fault.

The world is a wonderful place, the people in it are fantastic. I am energised and inspired daily by all that I see and hear on the various screens in my life. But at the end of the day, who am I? What am I? Really?

Best regards,

Simon Ward