2021i1, Friday: Start over.
A new year. Time to do better.
Short thought: Nothing much today. 2020, by common agreement, sucked. If we work together, and listen humbly to one another, we can make this year better. Let’s.
Someone is right on the internet: Hui Chen, former compliance counsel to the Department of Justice and now Chief Ethics Adviser to the Attorney-General of Hawaii, is an ex-boss and an old friend. She has a post talking about this past year. In which she lost her father - not to the Bug, but to an aneurysm. She writes wisely about what’s gone wrong, and where, even in the dark times, light can be found.
Hui became my boss in July 2014, as she became Standard Chartered Bank’s first ever global head of anti-bribery and corruption. I became her deputy. We hit it off in days. Less than three months later, I lost my dad. And she went from being a good boss to an amazing one. Her kindness and goodness to me - and my family - as we dealt with this were unparalleled, and her encouragement thereafter was a huge part of how I found the guts to take a risk and become a barrister. I can only hope, and pray, that she and her family have been surrounded by equal kindness and goodness as they’ve dealt with their loss.
Things I wrote: A new year is a chance to look back. So I thought it might be amusing to travel in time almost two decades to my reporting days at the BBC, and a piece I found in the archive describing my first experience with ADSL as opposed to dial-up, hooked up so far as I recall to my TiBook. Not sure it’s aged terribly well as a piece of writing, but oddly it brings back fond memories of the Series1 Tivo box I owned around the same time. Those were the days.
