Archives: Work

I’ve not been quite so grateful for flexible working as I was today. Struck down by the lurgy (a really nasty cough with nothing to shift off my chest and no streaming nose to be able to call it a cold) and hardly sleeping, the prospect of a 5am alarm to get me into Bromley for the various meetings and epic To Do list that faced me this morning wasn’t a good one.

So I switched things up, slept in until 8am and worked from home taking all my meetings over Lync (the rubbish Microsoft “official” version of Skype) and cracking through my To Do list like a demented giant-omlette-making chef gets through eggs.

Flexible working FTW!

The highlight of my day was not (surprisingly) the 6 hours I spent in the car driving to Bristol. I do love long car journeys, especially when it gives me a chance to listen to some of my heavily-stacked Podcast queue, but even 6 hours is pushing the enjoyment factor when I’m in the car on my own.

I did however, love chatting to BBC Radio 5Live Breakfast and BBC West Midlands Drive about the rising CF population and the predictions that it could almost double by 2025. Not sure I agree with the numbers entirely, but we know the number of people being born with CF is relatively stable, so the prediction suggests a definite rise in longevity, which can only be a good thing.

This week on Tuesday it was Kerry’s birthday, then Emily’s, then Jess’s. All three of them no longer with us, all three of them succumbing to the ravages of CF and the complications it brings. The fact that we could be looking at a future where no one is dying from CF is incredibly exciting and definitely brought a smile to my face. What better way to mark their birthdays than helping spread the word about our fight to beat CF for good?

If you missed the announcement (why, aren’t you following the Cystic Fibrosis Trust?) I’ll soon be joining them in an exciting move to a more central London location in Aldgate.

I had a meeting with the lovely people at the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme today, finding out how we might be able to assist people with CF to undertake the award and also how we might be able to support them and all young people taking it on to complete their volunteering section. CF is still a young people’s condition, so it’s vital that we support young people with CF as much as we can, a huge part of which is helping them do things that everyone else does, as well as raising everyone else’s awareness.

It wasn’t until I was sitting across the table from my colleague at lunch just outside Victoria station that I realised the meeting would be in the same building as World Vision UK’s London office – they’re all in the same charity office complex there – and it made me smile to walk the familiar roads up from Victoria to Belgrave road and into the familiar surroundings of the slightly dowdy-building with the always almost friendly security guards.

It did cause me to reflect on the downside of an overly-scheduled day, however, knowing that straight after the meeting I had to head back to Victoria to get back home in time for another meeting in the afternoon. With a little more breathing room in my schedule I’d have had time for serendipity to jump in and lead me back up to that familiar fifth floor to drop in on my old colleagues and catch up. My day was missing the Big Orange today and although the building made me smile, my inability to take advantage of the visit made me just a tiny bit sad.

For many reasons I can’t go into much detail about today’s smile moments (yes, more than one), but I can say that I walked from work to the station home with a smile on my face the whole way tonight.

A nice work-related smile today as we presented some initial creative concepts for a big piece of work that is rapidly descending on us.

Any creative will know presentation of concepts to a senior leadership team is always slightly nerve-wracking as you face that awkward “what do I do with this if they don’t like it?!” thought process.

Luckily they not only liked it, some of them even mentioned that when they first heard the concept they really didn’t get it and thought it would be a dead end, but seeing the execution and possibilities they got almost excited.

Score one for the creatives today!

It never lasts long, but following a fit of cleaning, clearing and moving-stuff-around frenzy at the weekend I managed to create myself a fresh, light and new space to work in my study at home.

Flexible working is a wonderful thing, but I do need my own space to shut myself away from everything else and get productive. Every now and then I need to refresh it to clear my desk and my head.

Rather pleased with the result.



When I started this blog it was about trying to keep on top of things, those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Shakespeare told us about. It was about charting my journey up to and beyond transplant and all the weird emotions and exciting opportunities it brought.

Now, though, I want it to be more than that. Partially because I’m now blessed to have a life that’s much like anyone’s: I have a full-time job making a real difference in people’s lives, I have a loving wife and a beautiful home to come home to every night, I have everything I ever wanted from my extra time in life, bar a few of the more outrageous and/or longer-term goals I came up with beforehand.

So I want this blog to be about more than just me and my journey, but to stay true to the principals under which it began.

This year, I’m going to set out to make Smile Through It a place where you can come for inspiration and education of all kinds. (Except the bad kind of ‘education’ that just made you suddenly wonder if you want to come back here at all, I won’t be doing any of that stuff.)

I want this blog to become a place where you can discover and share stories of living life in the most honest way possible. That doesn’t mean people going on crazy adventures: an honest life is simply about living authentically to yourself. And if that’s a little too ‘new age hippy’ for you, think of it like this: happiness comes from living the life that fits you, nothing more.

This, then, will be a period of adjustment for me as I work out how best to make all of this happen, but it will involve lots more storytelling (because I’ve not done nearly enough of that on here in recent months), it will involve a lot more of other people’s stories, and it will hopefully involve more than just reading.

I’d love to hear from you to know what you get out of this site and what you’d like to get from it. What posts really inspire you and make you want to do things, what bores you to tears and never makes you want to come back, and what would you love to see more of from me?

Please get in touch however you’d like: you can email me (or use the contact form on my personal website to be sure of passing spam filters), you can Tweet me, you can even find me on that weird and lonely place they call Google plus (however amazed you may be that it’s still going).

Smile Through It is a philosophy on life that I’ve let slip in recent weeks and months, and it’s time we got back to what mattered. So here’s to a 2015 full of growth and development for me, for this blog and, hopefully, for you, too.

This time in 4 weeks I should hopefully be nestled in my bed starting two days of recovery from the 3 Peaks Challenge and right now I’m hopeful, a little fearful and very, very tired.

Training has stepped up a notch, there’s all kinds of logistics to organise, a team-meeting with 5 of apparently the busiest people on the planet and I’ve still got to fit in work, quality time with K and a trip to Durham for a fundraiser for this years’ CF Week in aid of the CF Trust, a cause you’ll all know is close to my heart.

Today, though, that all blurred into fairly frank insignificance following Tor’s latest post on her blog following her seventh false alarm call for transplant.  I’ve written before on here about my false alarms, but also about how Tor inspires me to want to do better, to push myself harder and to achieve everything I can while I’m able.

One quote from her post today stood out for me, when she talks about her fears for the future, post-transplant:

I [am] worried that I … could never live a life that was enough to honour my donor.

This is a fear that lives with me every day. It’s not a fear that overwhelms me, but rather motivates me and gives me my ultimate drive to succeed, whether personally, in business or my personal life.

If my donor is looking down on me now, I want them to be proud of me. I want them to feel that they made the right decision in letting me live after they died. I want them to know just how much I value the gift I’ve been given and how I live each and every day in their honour, under their guidance and with their presence always around me.

That’s why I’ve started chasing the dream of the 3 Peaks and it’s why I want to keep pushing myself to do more.