long story

My father, the son of a wealthy industrialist, was sent to England from Russia to escape persecution following the revolution. My mother was the daughter of a West Country farmer. Her mother was an opera singer.

boarding school

At eight years old I was sent to boarding school at Henley-in-Arden and on to follow in my father's footsteps at Oundle. This childhood held me apart from the world, and from my early teens, looking out through the school railings, I have looked for the path back.

sprirituality

My questioning led to my spiritual education being placed in the hands of a teacher we called: "James Bond". He looked a little like Sean Connery. On principle he always left the keys in his Lambretta, in case someone needed it. That impressed us, especially as it was never stolen. Instead of girlfriends, I found Blavatsky, Alan Watts, The Story of San Michele and Yevgeni Yevtushenko.

personality testing

At 15 I could not see how to choose one occupation over another so my mother took me to Vocational Guidance in London. After hours of testing and counselling I understood that a career in architecture would mean that I could continue to wear jeans and listen to Jimi Hendrix, while being paid for sketching urban centrepieces on the back of envelopes.

drugs and learning

After Oundle, university seemed oddly simplistic and sterile. Perversely, marijuana seemed to bring social inclusion, a feeling of contact, adventure, bravery and escape. Surprisingly, considering my total inexperience, I found other students seeking me out to help guide them through LSD "trips".

Visiting lecturers from London offered me places both at the Slade and at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, so after a year of frustration, I headed South with two friends, into the creative maelstrom of the AA, under the wing of Dave Green of Archigram. Freed from a university syllabus I searched for relationships between peoples and society, power and money, between the environment and what it contained. I listened to Fritzjof Capra lecture on the Tao of Modern Physics. I was invited to Paris to work on Richard Rogers' and Renzo Piano's Centre Beaubourg and pushing for answers was elevated to study with post-graduate students. There I battled with Zaha Hadid, read Black Elk Speaks, and discovered Montessori through: "Look at the Child". I designed aeronautical bicycles, wrote my technical thesis on cremators, and was published in Martin Pawley's "Ghost Dance Times".

suicide

Shortly before I graduated, my father, in the words of my mother: "blew his brains out with his service revolver". I left London and headed for Colombia, in search of Carlos Casteneda's Don Juan.

intercultural affairs

En route to South America, perched precariously on top of our circular planet in a Chilean banana boat running out of Le Havre, I learned Spanish, and for nine months after the two week crossing, I tried to make a new beginning in "downtown" Bogota with a young black folkloric dancer and single mother. With a naive self-confidence, blind to danger, I wandered through the back streets of Cali in a fake fur coat and a belief in my Tai Chi. Despite living in Paris and having close friends from the West Indies it was my first experience of living within another culture. I lived in the brave new world and imagined nothing reckless about living with the married daughter of a national celebrity and her four year old son, in a Catholic country. We flew on a tiny plane, the controls held together with rope, deep into the Amazon. I stayed behind when she left, living among the forest peoples around Mitu, in a hut in the jungle, with her son, and the flying doctor. He was his father. It was far too many bridges far too far. I returned to England in a bright yellow jump suit and a shaved head, in despair, and enrolled into Graduate School at the AA.

politics

In London, still drunk on the jungles of South America, I moved from a penthouse in the Barbican into Brixton, and into the home and lives of a Ghanaian woman and her three year old daughter. It was the time of the riots. I discovered feminism and autarchy, and 18th century architectural visionaries, and I dreamed building a new utopia. We plotted to overthrow the AA's governing body, but our inexperience instead succeeded in handing them an electoral landslide. I discovered Iyengar Yoga with Penny Nield-Smith, and The Society of the Spectacle with new anarchist friends. I was awarded the Diploma of the Architectural Association. But disillusioned now by the reality of the architectural world, I dropped out. Instead of seeking a glittering career, I taught myself carpentry, worked on a Welsh sheep farm, and, encouraged by the 70's oil crisis, squatted in a huge abandoned Victorian corner property and awaited global transformation. It was decades too soon.

process management

My spiritual journey continued from Yoga into Tai Chi, first with Paul Crompton and then with Pytt Geddes. I returned to working on building sites, started a design and build company, and slowly moved back to construction management, then architecture, project and programme management and finally organisational development. In the years before I came to Finland, I had found, much to my surprise, that people far more skilled than I, were willing, and sometimes even grateful for this prodigal son to lead them on projects worth tens of millions of pounds. To me it seemed somehow a simple thing, bringing together bankers and lawyers, builders and designers, politicians and communities.

mediation and facilitation

I trained as a mediator with Mend, a neighbourhood group in Hackney, working on racial and age related cultural disputes, and there, in facilitation and mediation I found something to truly engage with. I became a facilitator with the Environment Council. I trained and worked with Alan Hickling. I gained a diploma in environmental mediation and facilitation and qualified with CEDR. I trained with and worked for Victim Support and Crisis.

love

Then, in 2001, at the wedding and, one week later, at the funeral of a close neighbour who had died from Parkinsons and cancer, my life was transformed. I met Tarja, a Finn, who, unknown to all, was on a desperate quest of her own. At the house where she had stayed, she left behind only a tiny handwritten note, in case, she told me: I chose to look for her. In it she thanked me. She invited me to visit with her in Finland. I could feel myself beginning to fall. And I fell, helplessly, hopelessly, and profoundly in love. I have never stopped falling. But back then, even as my plane took off from Heathrow to my first holiday in seven years, in Helsinki she felt a small new lump on her body. Two weeks later the tests came back. We sat in her car outside the hospital, our finally found heavens, our worlds collapsing on top of us. The cancer had returned.

teenagers and cancer

I resigned my consultancy job as an Associate Director at Cyril Sweett in London, moved into her small flat in Lappeenranta with her two barely teenage daughters, only to discover that, in the fearful young minds of her most treasured posessions, I had become a usurper and an ending of hope.

I found myself scarcely able to keep pace with the incessant speed and depth of the changes that swirled in and around us. But it was a time of Grace. Tarja fought every day for three years. She called me: "miun ritarini", my knight. We were married. Her struggle is over now.

Two years later, almost to the day, my mother died in Scotland, also from cancer. But then, death and dying were familiars. I had learnt the language of drugs and equipment but more importantly I had learnt the language of doctors, and nurses, and the way of priests, of family, and of friends. My mother's passing and my sister's grief were both eased through Tarja.

single parent family

But the end of Tarja's fight was not the end of the battle for her family. Visible social workers and invisible psychologists had to be fought with and won over for us to earn the right to stay together. The right to grieve, the right to mourn, the right to peace, unjustly I found, none given but all needed winning.

The years have passed, my girls have set up their own homes, both have begun their own successful forays into partnership, and both have won their way to college. We have stayed a family. We won, battlescarred. But we have learnt a little of how to win for all our futures.

~~

As an old Persian friend of mine used to say: "There you have it, there you have it not".

Now I am a member of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, an Associate of the Coaching Academy, and sponsored as an Affiliate of the British Psychological Society. Everything happens for a reason, even though we may never truly know it. And part of that reason is now you!