Insights

“I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling, travelling”

When I began working at Hawthorn, Theresa May was the prime minister, Donald Trump had yet to face his midterms, and Keir Starmer (presumably) bought his own clothes. While this is all very well in a Have I Got News for You kind of way, it might be more relevant to say that when I started working at Hawthorn, the company was five years old, our current Analysts and Consultants were still at school, and I was thought of as somebody who was quiet and wouldn’t pipe up on the shop floor. So, not much has changed, you’ll agree. 

Boarding at Heathrow I felt like the hero of a heist movie, unable to believe that I was about to get away with such a scam. A month! Fully paid! Surely some mistake! But as we took off and I left Hounslow clouds to somewhere become rain, not even the five year old child sitting next to me could dampen my spirits.

I had a tremendous time – genuinely, not in that arch, ironic, unable-to-feel-joy way I usually engage with and remark upon things – and have nothing but praise for Hawthorn for providing such an opportunity. Don’t worry, I didn’t “find myself;” enough of you have found me over the years to be able to advise me that it’s not worth the effort. But I did have a month (more, actually!) of experiences that I simply wouldn’t be able to have in a standard two-week holiday. Now it’s time to make like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner and tell you: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe:

• I watched ducks waddle across lily pads in the Melbourne botanic gardens on my first, exhausted morning.
• I looked out from the top of Mount Washington, Tasmania and saw the harbour bridge I’d run across that morning recede into nothing, with nothing but clear blue sea between me and Antarctica.
• I encountered a Victoria Street in the Hawthorn neighbourhoods of both Melbourne and Sydney. Australian place names often have the feeling of a child playing with a jigsaw of the UK, slamming down the names of grim mining towns of Scotland into hilariously inapposite settings, but sometimes the stars align.
• I hiked for hours into the interior of Fraser Island on my own, which I was later informed is an exceedingly dangerous thing to do, given the dingo population, although the ones I met seemed friendly enough.
• I walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, toured the MCG, and saw kangaroos and wallabies amongst the hundreds of miles of bush on the train from Sydney to Brisbane.
• I saw more of one of my best friends in the past month than I had in the previous five years.
• I, somebody for whom going on holiday is so uncharacteristic that whenever I do go away it becomes a sort of meme for colleagues and clients alike, managed to do some of that famous “switching off” you hear so much about. 

Years of discussion with my friends at other (worse) companies and industries have convinced me that the extra month off for five years’ service is a genuinely unusual offer, even before considering the fact that it is fully paid. There are few sweeter feelings than sitting on the beach staring into the Pacific as a paycheque hits your account in return for doing literally zero work that month, believe me.

On my last day I took advantage of a delayed flight to revisit the Botanic Gardens and reflect on what I’d thought when first there, and how things had turned out, but when I got to the same bench, somebody else was sitting there.

Not everything has a perfect ending. Fortunately it’s not too long till my next sabbatical.