URSABLOG: London Calling

I’m writing this blog from my brother’s house in London, where I am staying over the weekend in the middle of a short business trip. I’m not a frequent visitor to London; I don’t come from here (although I lived and worked here for eleven years) and I always have mixed feelings when I come. Don’t get me wrong, I like London, but it’s too big, and too full of memories to get my arms, or head, fully around it.

First stop on my arrival on Thursday was the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers Prizegiving ceremony and dinner, preceded by a Global Leader’s forum. Both events gave me much food for thought, as well as much pleasure, partly because I was simply attending, and not giving speeches or moderating panels, so I was able to absorb a lot from the background.

The global range of the ICS is one of its great strengths and I was able to meet colleagues from all around the world and engage in various conversations on diverse topics, meet new people, forge new connections as well as observe and watch. Most importantly I was able to congratulate our Greek students who had excelled in their studies, and to feel that vicarious pride that in a small way I, and we, the Greek branch, had contributed to their happiness and success. I was also glad that I was not tempted to go for the after-party drink; the City after eleven o’clock is not the best time to be out, and maybe maturity (or previous experience) preserved my head, and liver, for the next morning’s work.

And on Friday, after meetings and a lunch with different shipping friends around central London, to catch up, gossip and explore new opportunities and possibilities, I made my way to my brother’s house to catch up on emails, write some reports, and get myself up to date with work and news before the weekend. I ended up dog sitting as my brother and his wife went out for dinner with friends, and I saw my nephew off as he went with his new girlfriend with two boxes of beers to some friends’ house nearby. But I must correct myself: she is not his girlfriend, they are not officially together, they are just hanging out together for now. The language of relationships increases my bafflement as I get older, but she certainly seemed to be something like his girlfriend when she turned up again with him to carry on the party here. My sleep was not interrupted too much by the noise downstairs; I would actually say that the noise of my nephew having fun with his friends somehow soothed me to sleep. And sleep I did.

Saturday morning I went for a walk with my brother in one of London’s many parks whilst his wife and her friend went swimming – outside, in an unheated pool! – to enjoy the low autumn sun, shining through trees that are beginning to shed their yellow and orange leaves, before sitting down to watch the football on the television, and see Liverpool win. We went for dinner in the evening to an excellent local Korean restaurant (as good as those meals I have eaten in Korea).

This morning I went to watch my nephew play Sunday league football in another park, and found myself enthralled with an under-18s game played with passion and desire, and not a little skill either. This evening I have a dinner appointment with a shipping friend, and will spend tomorrow in meetings before dinner again in the City, with friends who are flying in from Canada. And then on Tuesday: home to Athens.

Why am I telling you all this uninteresting, banal stuff? This is so dull, so mundane that I wouldn’t even post the pictures of it on Instagram, even if I was still on it. This is hardly the life of a jet-setting international ship sale and purchase broker, and I don’t even think I would mention all of it to any of my friends when I arrive home.

A friend this week sent me a link to the parable of the blind men and an elephant. This story describes a group of blind men who, not knowing what an elephant is, come across one, and try to learn and imagine what it is just by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe to each other what they think the animal is, based on their limited experience and their descriptions, different as they are from each other. In some versions of the parable, the blind men suspect that the others describing the elephant are being deliberately misleading and dishonest, and start fighting each other over their version of what they believe to be true.

The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience, and worse that they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which are equally true, but from a different perspective.

Both shipping, and London, are elephants, big ones. One of the roles of the ICS is to broaden the knowledge of professionals so that they can see how all parts of the shipping world connect with each other, and don’t just remain fixated with their corner of it. This means that those involved in shipping education, or any education for that matter (at least as far as I am concerned), have to be broad minded enough to realise that there is no such thing as one idea, or one viewpoint, but many, many different working parts, influences and perspectives which makes shipping such a fascinating industry. Just because one part of the industry does something one way, and has done it that way for some time, does not mean it is the only way, and has to continue to do it that way in the future. One part may influence, and improve, another.

My experience of London is uniquely mine: both my parents were born and raised there, and whilst I visited both my grandparents there when I was a child, I never considered it somewhere where I came from. I was more connected with the Midlands and the north, where I lived for the first twenty-nine years of my life, and had the usual accompanying prejudices against London. Moving to London however broadened my mind, liberated me and educated me, but was also the theatre of many difficulties and traumas too – nothing spectacular, just the usual things that happen to a greater or lesser extent in most people’s lives – so this colours my thinking too.

And what was the London I knew? As I walk down streets, and take public transport around and about, memories keep popping up, but there are whole swathes of the city that I have never visited (I have explored afresh on this trip too). How can my view of London be the only truth when every person passing me, sitting opposite on the train, or standing next to me watching their children play football in the park on a Sunday morning (including Raheem Sterling as it happens) has their own, valid, valuable truth?

Elephants are famed for their long memories, and as it happens shipping and London have long memories too. But one of the reasons for the continued success of the shipping industry, and London for that matter, is the constant search for new connections and business across both of them. Why is London a hugely active and important city, in fact one of the few truly ‘world cities’? I think it is because it is a product of such scale, diversity, history and energy that not one person can ever have a complete view or understanding of the whole place. The same goes for shipping too.

I think that my appreciation of London has increased the longer I have been away from it; it looks, feels better from a distance, and then can be experienced afresh every time I visit. Even the areas where I used to live and work – with their attendant memories – seem new in the low, clear autumnal sunshine, certainly different from how I had experience them before. Shipping is another thing: I am immersed in it, I live in it, breathe, eat, speak and write it on a daily basis. But coming to London to see a different side of it, or even the same part of it from a different angle, is refreshing and motivating too.

As the parable of the blind men and the elephant wisely points out, there is no absolute truth that one man or woman can see, experience or understand from their point of view. We have to keep on the move, accepting that different points of view and different ways of doing things exist and – I believe, for myself at least – adopt a Socratic humility (I know what I don’t know) in how we approach shipping and life. I don’t know all the answers, in fact I don’t even know the right questions.

Samuel Johnson once said “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” I am coming to appreciate this viewpoint, even though – maybe because – I don’t live here. But even so, what Johnson said of London may also apply to shipping too. And I’m certainly not tired of it yet.

Simon Ward