William Shepherd

My survey of soccer balls for sale in Hastings puts Pakistan’s market share in the town at 0% and not 85%...see the last weblog of May. The soccer balls in Lidls were made in Germany and Woolworths get theirs from China. Aren’t market surveys wonderful? While on the subject let me dispute the claim that David Beckham is the best crosser of a ball England has ever had. He’s good but Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney and Bobby Charlton could all cross a perfect ball into the goal area while moving at speed...and Finney and Charlton could do this from either wing.

England and Germany might meet up in the quarter finals if one wins and the other comes second in the group stages. Both goalkeepers play in the English Premier League and both expect plenty of goalkeeping errors in this World Cup. The special balls made for the tournament do strange things in the air…particularly in wet conditions. The old leather balls I grew up with were like cannonballs when wet and bear little resemblance to the beach balls of today. The state of the ball is becoming as crucial to soccer as it is to cricket. How long before a Football Commentator says: ’Chelsea will be taking the new ball in five minutes’. The World Cup started today and carries on for a month. But you’ll be hearing no more about it from me until England win the tournament or get knocked out.

Thinking about football brings back memories of my misspent youth at Christ’s Hospital. These include many fun-filled hours playing Asphalt Soccer...with a tennis ball. Ian Jones of Maine A was the best stopper of a tennis ball I ever saw and the rivalry between my house Barnes A and Maine A…two houses away…was always intense. They had Sutcliffe and Jones. We had Simpson and myself. We played at every opportunity and in all weathers.

Death has been on my mind a lot this week. First there was the discovery on Sunday that David Goodstein had died nine years ago. Then Susan e-mailed me the transcript of a talk she had given to the Jackson Historical Society about her uncle Jake May, who I remember wheezing away his final days chiselling away at a staircase in Susan’s Beacon Hill house at 26 Garden Street while I was dossing down on her sofa...and hiding from Rachel Kowalczyk.

With this week’s re-opening of my onboard office following the disruption of my electricity supply a new internet-free agenda was cobbled together that includes re-writing my will. The current version is too complicated as it incorporates verbatim the conditions in Connie’s will. Now enough work has been done between Vance Harris and Walker & Walker for me to regard everything as my property and to prepare a new will on this assumption.

My other concern is to ensure that my heirs can find my will when I drop off the twig. So I am thinking of depositing it with some official will-lodging service like a solicitor rather than trusting to my ability to keep it in a warm dry place for the next thirty years...a mean average of the 10 years of the biblical four score years & ten and the 50 years of the oldest man in England who celebrated his 110th birthday this week.

I was also thinking of including some funeral directions to make sure I get a Green Burial under the auspices of the Natural Death Centre founded by my colleague Nicholas Albery. But I am backing off this idea after the Daily Mail reprinted an article on green burials that first appeared in The Guardian. The thought of lying in Tawney’s Wood where John Papworth buried his wife Marcelle now seems more appealing so I will sound John out on the idea of turning his woodlands into a Fourth World Graveyard when I am in Purton in two weeks time.

Finally most of today was devoted to giving thanks for the life of Dr Catherine Elizabeth Hollman at the Parish Church of St Mary and St Peter in the Village of Pett. I last visited the place on foot in the winter of 2005 when I walked all the way from St Leonard’s to Rye for an article for Rye’s Own that has yet to be written up and published.

For many years Catherine was chairman of the Winchelsea Singers who were invited by the family to sing Mozart’s Ave Verum at her Memorial Service. As one of a select group of Journeymen Tenors in the county I was asked to swell the ranks which meant putting on a suit and tie for the occasion. What with the rehearsal beforehand and the reception afterwards at Pett Village Hall I found myself away from my cabin desk from 10.30 to 3.30.

A terrible shortage of money has recently hit Britain’s politicians. Their traditional sources of income have dried up overnight thanks to a change in the climate and investigations by the police. There is only one way they can survive this cruel downturn in their fortunes and that is for the Great British Public to rally round and dig deep for the pounds in their pockets to provide the funds so desperately needed to ensure power to the politicians and not the people.

£10,000 will buy a nice new tie and haircut; £250,000 will buy a new specially-equipped battle bus; £1,000,000 will buy a peak-time TV election broadcast and £2 million will buy a peerage. Please send donations to Party Funding Account at the Inland Revenue. Payments by PayPal should be made to gordonbrown@tendowningstreet.org.uk. Failure to pay on time could result in imprisonment or death. By order: Man of Straw; Leader of the House of Commons; Minister for Lords Reform and Advocate-General for State Funding of Political Parties.

David Goodstein has been on my mind all week. He died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 49 but I only found out about it on Sunday when I inserted the fateful lines in my weblog ‘working partner for the commercial development of a system dynamics model for Canadian printing firms (Interconsult, Cambridge)’ and went looking for a good hyperlink by typing “David Goodstein” +Interconsult +Cambridge +Massachusetts into Google.

The search engine returned with a number of items including The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems Vol 27, No 6 - November 24, 1997 which was given over entirely to a reprint of David’s obituary in the Boston Globe written by Clive Goodacre, chairman of the Bespoke Agency of London and editor of World Graphic Arts Technology.

I remember well the feeling one morning in Welwyn Garden City in 1976 when I turned up for work at Norton Company and walked into an atmosphere of hushed reverence instead of the bustle of a Customer Service Department busily sorting out the problems that had come in by telex overnight. Colin Brooke was the head of Customer Service and the first person I turned to when the Welwyn or Belfast factories missed a delivery to the Rotherham Warehouse for on-shipment to the Sheffield Steel Industry. He had died of a heart attack during the night. He had been his usual self the day before.

It did not matter to me that David had died nine years before. The news struck me as if it had happened the same day...with the intensity of that Colin Brooke moment. I felt haunted all day as the memories of David in my life surfaced into consciousness and refused to be dismissed. These thoughts have taken my mind off my work all week.

With any death comes regret...and guilt. I still have these feelings years later with my mother and with Connie. Then there are others who deserved my thanks but never received it...my primary school teacher Mrs. Norman at Deansfield in Eltham and Eric Littlefield my House Master at Christ’s Hospital...teachers who acknowledged and encouraged me so I became the person I am. These feelings of regret and guilt can only get worse as more and more people who have touched my life take their leave of this life. Yet when somebody goes before their time lost promise is added to the regret and the guilt.

David was a brilliant and charming man who loved his work, his family and the Jewish faith he had inherited. He was a compelling raconteur whether on the podium as the keynote speaker at an international technology symposium, in his living room or in a few snatched minutes by the copier in the hallway. David Goodstein understood Peter Drucker and the Boston Consulting Group, Boston’s Route 128 and California's Silicon Valley long before Wall Street got to grips with what this meant for America.

Already by the mid-1970s David’s radar was locking in on people and technology as the key to the future. He saw that far-flung open networks of cyber citizens would emerge to challenge the closed world of Corporate Man. David did outsourcing and globalisation before they had been named.

David Henry Goodstein was an international information technology executive and strategic consultant whose only formal training was as a computer programmer at MIT. Before founding InterConsult in 1978 he had been a research affiliate at the Visible Language Workshop of the MIT Media Lab. We worked closely together in 1980 and 1981.

When David invited me to join Interconsult he had great plans for what we could do for his firm. It was shortly after my arrival from England in the summer of 1980...with charming Swedish wife and two blond blue-eyed children in tow. Eighteen months previously David had started up Interconsult. He had landed its first big fish in the spring of 1980 with a $39 000 contract from Xerox to report on the future of Computerised Typesetting.

Interconsult was working out of a tiny cramped residential apartment...and a broom cupboard or two along the corridor. I moved the family into a house on Lakeview Avenue off Huron Avenue...a short walk from Harvard Square and the Fresh Pond Reservoir. Interconsult’s apartment block was at the end of my road of Victorian New England timber houses.

I have been a disappointment to many people...it goes with the territory...and I know I was to David who saw in me what he wanted to see and chose to disregard what I was and what I might wish to become. David had grown up in Worcester Massachusetts...Small Town America...so he was programmed to believe in progress and corporations walking hand in hand into a glorious American future. He wanted to sign up...howbeit on his own terms...and he saw my future playing out along similar lines. But he knew little about the things that really mattered to me.

I was recovering from low-level brain-washing after my five-year prison sentence in Europe with the Worcester-based Norton Company. The paternalistic corporations of the 60s and 70s burdened their high-flyers with outmoded expectations. I knew I would only ever be part of their world on their terms...and Hazel Henderson had taught me that it was possible to create an alternative future for myself on my terms.

So the task at hand was to make myself unemployable. Some might call it a Mid Life Crisis but labelling is not explaining...and the age of 33 is quite early to be afflicted. I prefer to believe that I had been educated to live a decent life. I am not sure whether I had invented the concept of A Life as a Work of Art by this time. But I started behaving as if it was my purpose in life. Oscar Wilde would have approved.‘Man’, he insisted, ‘is complete in himself.’