Life | Christopher Phin

All posts filed under “Life”

October 31, 2014

Thank you

Today is my last day at work. Having gone straight from school to university to work, I don’t remember a time when I haven’t woken up every day and travelled to an institution where someone else had dibs on my time. It’s likely, once I have stepped back, gained some perspective and regained some drive and creativity, that I will want to go back into full-time employment, but today at least feels like I’m closing Vol. I of my life – and so I’d like to say thanks to some of those people who mattered to me in it.

Thank you to my wife for being endlessly inspiring and for always being in my corner.

Thank you to my teams for helping me make good stuff, and especially to those colleagues who’ve become friends, for making the bad days tolerable and the good days glorious.

Thank you to everyone who took a punt on me – and to anyone who does in the future!

Thank you to my parents for instilling in me some good values, and to them and my wider family for support, encouragement and love.

Thank you to the community in technology and publishing who have proven time and again to be some of the best, smartest and most exhilarating people you could hope to meet.

Thank you to those who’ve read my words, bought my magazines or otherwise engaged with my professional output – and not just because you indirectly helped pay my wages.

Thank you to anyone who challenged me to think more, to prejudge less, to be kinder, to empathise, to care. And to up my game, explicitly or without you realising it.

And thank you for reading this. ☺️

My last day is Hallowe’en, but never fear; I’m still around to write frightfully good copy to scary deadlines. If you need a terrifyingly experienced writer who understands better than most what a nightmare freelancers can be, just yell!

October 14, 2014

Biscuits, Big Shots and bad puns: a Phin guide to self-promotion

Because I’ve worked as a journalist for over 12 years, I can tell you first-hand that nothing gets a journalist’s attention quite like free chocolate biscuits, so when I wanted to come up with a way of reminding commissioning editors at the company I still currently work for that I’d be leaving and available for freelance writing at the end of the month, giving them chocolate biscuits as I told them seemed like an obvious choice. Today I’ll be handing out the above little packages, and I thought I’d talk a little about how I put them together.

Taking my leaving date of Hallowe’en as the starting point, I did the design itself in InDesign (shamelessly stealing Matt Gemmell’s idea), and printed them, just as dark grey rectangles with the reversed-out white lettering, onto sheets of magnetic-backed glossy inkjet paper. I then picked a suitably gothic Sizzix die-cut and ran the roughly cut-out rectangles through a Big Shot (a deeply satisfying experience; I can’t recommend it enough) to punch them to the final shape. Then it was a simple case of punching the magnets and the bags of chocolate biscuits and threading through some gauzy ribbon and cutting the ends into inverted points.

The fact that I printed onto magnetic paper means that if I’m very lucky the relevant commissioning editors might just stick the little summary of my details to a filing cabinet or something, keeping me in their eyeline.

Or, you know, they may forget I ever existed as soon as the last crumb is swallowed, but at least I gave myself a chance!

September 28, 2014

What’s next?

“What are you going to do next?” is something I’ve been asked often by friends and colleagues since it was announced a few weeks ago I’m leaving Future at the end of October. It’s a fair question, not least because it’s one I’ve been asking myself a lot, and the answer is simple: I don’t know.

Make no mistake about it: this is terrifying. At some point I’m hoping it will start to be exciting at least as well, but right now it’s mostly deeply disconcerting; I am constitutionally not well suited to not having money arrive regularly in my account on the 28th of every month.

Still, it feels like the right thing to do; there are two reasons I’ve decided to leave now despite having no other job to go to. The first is to do with me; since I started 12 years ago I’ve been steadily (if not always deliberately) climbing the ranks in magazines to my current position of editor-in-chief, and the more senior I’ve gotten, the more I end up merely administering rather than creating stuff. And I miss that. I miss writing, I miss researching, I miss communicating with an audience. I’m excited about being excited again, and stepping off the monthly grind of a regular magazine will be a balm. Some of that, to be sure, is to do with how I feel about a situation rather than the situation itself – which brings me on to the second reason.

The job in the current climate has frankly become too challenging for me. I’ve faced – and not shied away from – a few significant challenges in my career, but had I stayed I would have faced some especially tough ones. They don’t sound to me like the fun, get-your-teeth-into-them, let’s-all-make-something-amazing kind of challenges, so – and I am a little ashamed of this – I’m not prepared to take them on. If you’ve read Jason Snell’s announcement or Serenity Caldwell’s similar note you might get an inkling of the context; certainly, since I read them between handing in my notice and it being announced, I read them both with a mixture of amazement and weariness at how familiar the stories were. I’ll leave behind some wonderful brands and some astonishing people, and I wish them nothing but the very best in meeting the challenges the next six, 12 and 18 months will bring. Nothing about my decision saddens me more than knowing I won’t be working in the same room as some truly inspiring colleagues and friends.

So, what am I going to do next? In the short term, I’m going to get back to writing, speaking and consulting, and while I’ll be pitching ideas to technology and lifestyle brands in the coming weeks, I would, of course, love to hear from you if my expertise sounds useful to you.

Longer-term, I frankly don’t know. I have a nebulous aspiration that once I disentangle myself and my brain from the overhead of my current job, I’ll get some clarity on what I do want to do next, and it might be something completely unrelated. I’m very lucky that my wife supports – indeed, is delighted by – my decision, so while we have a rocky few months ahead, financially, I fervently hope that we’re building towards a happier 2015.

If we’ve worked well together in the past, I’d be most grateful if you would let me know if you hear of any opportunities you think I would a good fit for.

I don’t know what the next chapter will be. Let’s turn the page and find out.

June 26, 2014

There were three of us in this marriage

It takes a certain hubris to give relationship advice, and that’s no less true for me; for sure, my wife and I have to work, sometimes very hard, at our relationship, and despite us both being articulate, empathetic human beings, we can fall into having the same old arguments.

But we’ve been together now for nearly fifteen years (married for nine), and we have come to notice that at our best we have a process, a trick, even, that makes our relationship strong. So fuck it; for what it’s worth, here’s the one bit of advice we’d feel confident enough to offer up.

(It’s not, despite this article’s title, an open relationship, infidelity or threesomes. Sorry.) We talk about ‘The Team’.

We’re not flatmates. We’re not two independent human beings who happen to occupy the same physical space for 10 hours a day. We are The Team. (Of course, another way of saying that is ‘a family’.)

Sometimes, sure, I’ll do things based on what’s best for me. And sometimes my wife will do things based on what’s best for her. But usually those are only for small things — for anything big, anything even moderately important, we do things based on what’s best for The Team.

This isn’t about compromise, about doing ‘what she wants’ or ‘what he wants’. It’s not about subjugating your own wants and ambitions and so building resentment over years. It’s not about only doing dull, grown-up things and never having any fun. It’s just about switching your priorities.

Your marriage, your relationship, is important. For me at least, my family — just my wife and I at the moment — is the most important thing in the world. It deserves respect. It deserves attention. It deserves to be seen as a third person in your marriage. There’s you; there’s your spouse, who you think is every kind of wonderful; and then there’s The Team.

The Team, this third person in your marriage, is its own thing. You need to take care of yourself, your partner and it. It has its own wants and needs. The decisions you jointly make on its behalf might not be things either of you realised you wanted, and yes, sometimes you’ll both decide to do things for The Team that are not easy, or not things you’d choose to do if you were on your own or even dating. But it works.

This isn’t generic ‘make time for your marriage’ advice, nor a platitude about putting others before you. For us, it has become an important and practical tool in keeping us grounded and keeping us pulling in the same direction. Keeping us happy and happily in love.

Do things for The Team. Try it. Put The Team first. Every time you do something selfish, check yourself; I wasn’t working for The Team there. You’re not flatmates. You’re a family. You’re The Team.

(Actually, we have one more piece of advice: buy loads of paper plates. Especially for food prep, they bring a measure of calm and ease rare outside prescribed pharmaceuticals. Recycle them, sure, and buy paper plates from a sustainable source, but buy them.)

This post originally appeared on Medium.

January 9, 2014

Car loss

Our car — our beloved first car, which I crashed on Boxing Day — was picked up to be recycled today, while my wife and I were at work. It wasn’t in our driveway this evening when we came home.

Even I am surprised by how much this has affected me.

It’s surprising because we never use the pronoun ‘it’ when referring to our car. We named him Carlos as soon as we got him (he’s a car, and he was in Tango Red; clearly Spanish), and we loved him. We loved the freedom he gave us. We loved his cheeky face. We loved that we took care of him and that he took care of us. We loved that he was ours.

So I ought not to be surprised that I could have been charitably described as stoic this morning when I splashed some whisky on him and said goodbye. But I was.

I am perfectly aware, of course, that he was no more than a clever collection of metals, silicates and plastics put together by a company in an order so particularly pleasing that we’d buy it for more money than it cost to produce. He was mass produced. He was a small but notable financial burden. He was damaging to the environment. He was an it.

He served us. His last act was to protect us — essentially flawlessly — as we skidded off the road on black ice.

I went to check the mileage for the insurance claim when he was sitting, carefully taped up with bin liners, in our driveway, and when I turned the key in the ignition, he sprang to life like nothing was amiss. From one side, it looked like nothing was; so much of him is utterly unscathed. It was like a dog, with a broken leg and an angry row of stitches on its flank, wagging its tail, ready to play when you picked up a tennis ball.

This is all, I know, an artefact of the structure and cultural conditioning of my mind. Knowing it, though, doesn’t make me any less sad.

This post originally appeared on Medium.

May 6, 2013

Boys will be boys

“But my son doesn’t like anything pink!”, they say. “But my daughter wants a Barbie for her birthday!”, they say.

They say this if I talk about gender roles. They say this when I suggest that science kits in shops being aimed at boys, and bejewelled vacuum cleaners designed traditionally to appeal to girls, are quietly evil. They say this as a defence, a kind of “I’m not racist, but…”, an attestation that they’re fully-evolved, sensitive and societally valuable members of the species.

They know that men and women should be equal, even if they can’t disentangle ‘equal’ and ‘the same’. If challenged on it, they’d even acknowledge that ‘men’ and ‘woman’ aren’t especially useful phrases here, that gender identity is both much more fluid than society has hitherto acknowledged, and that it’s not something that society should, in fact, bother much about. And still. Still they persist. And they don’t appreciate the power of the tiny.

The reason your son doesn’t want anything pink is because through a hundred phrases, a thousand reactions to his choices, a million barely perceptible cues, he has gotten the impression from you that to want pink things is inappropriate. I’m not blaming you; that’s what society taught you too. You know by now, intellectually, that this lesson was fallacious, yet still you can’t help reacting in the way you were schooled to. (In its own way, that’s worse; being aware of your prejudices is wasted if you don’t fight against them.)

There is nothing wrong with your daughter wanting a Barbie. There is nothing wrong with your son not wanting anything pink. But please recognise that these choices are almost certainly not solely theirs; would you seriously assert that your child’s personality and preferences are fully formed at three, five, ten? I’m 33, and mine aren’t; I don’t expect them to be as I draw my last breath.

We are all children of a society, and we pass its mores on in turn to our children in a billion barely perceptible actions and reactions. The act of imposing gender roles on our children is both infinitely more subtle and wildly more pernicious than you think; this is true for something so fundamental as gender, and it’s true throughout the range of human differences. People, ladies, gentlemen and everything in between; people is what we should be celebrating, despising, criticising and idolising. The only time biological sex – not gender – is important is when you want to have a child.

And by all the gods, in every one of the trillion interactions we all have with him or with her, we should let that child know that it should do anything it can do and be anything it wants to be.

This post originally appeared on Medium.