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David's Mental Meanderings
29th October 2002

re·dun·dant (ri-dun’dunt) adj.
1. Exceeding what is necessary or natural; superfluous.
2. Needlessly wordy or repetitive in expression

Whilst the second definition has always applied to me, as all my readers can attest, it appears the first is now applicable as well. This is the British term for an employee who no longer fills a productive role.

Mrs Holford and I had talked about this possibility for some time. Revenues in my department have not been what the upper management had envisioned. However, if like a Tudor wife one fails to produce the right result, when the axe falls it is still a bit of a shock. (This is even true when the newspaper management is as clueless about the Internet industry as the Tudors were about genetics.)

I have to say that my immediate management have been quite kind about the whole thing on a human resources level. They have even let me keep my company car for a couple of weeks after my termination so that I have time to find another set of wheels. My boss has always been a nice bloke and has been especially understanding with time off and other considerations related to surviving the first few months of parenthood.

The last time I was let go occurred in 1986. Because I walked into work one morning and was jobless by noon, that time was a bit of a shock as well. (It was a further blow when I tried to claim unemployment benefits and found that my boss had never paid the required contributions. How he weaselled out of that is a story for another time.) But I was 22 years old and single. It is different when you are 38, married, and have a child. The up side is that there are statutory redundancy rights related to severance pay.

I know I'm not the first middle-aged family man to lose his job, so I'm not on some woe-is-me trip. I also know that God is the real Provider and will always provide as He has done, so I'm not fretting about whether we will eat. I'm mostly just looking at this as a new experience and an opportunity to see what God has next. Who knows, I might actually find something where I can realise my full potential.

As word of my change in employment status has begun to circulate, the first question is always, "Do you plan to go back to America?" I'm not sure why people immediately assume that I somehow ended up here by accident and that I'm waiting for the first boat headed across the Atlantic. Virtually every Briton I meet is amazed that as an American I choose to live in the UK. I usually tell them I just prefer a lower standard of living, higher taxes, and waiting for months to see a specialist on the National Health Service.

Sure, there are things I like about living in Britain, and I can rattle them off like a shopping list. But there are things I like about living in the United States. At the end of the day, in either case it comes down to exactly that: things. Jammie Dodgers vs. Starburst, fish & chips vs. Taco Bell… Well, apparently "things" means food.

Why do I prefer to live here?

The other evening I was in my wife's hometown, driving from her grandparents' house to the local kebab shop. The doner kebab is the most delightful Turkish contribution to British cuisine. In case you are unfamiliar with this treat, you may know the Greek version called a gyro. The best kebabs 'round these parts are in Abergavenny. Better than any I had in Turkey. It is just understood that when we go visit the in-laws, I'm having a kebab. But I digress…

As dusk of a grey autumn evening began to settle in, I looked up and saw the clouds settling on the top of the Blorenge, one of the seven mountains that frames the town. It was one of those epiphanic moments. I no longer questioned why I live in this country, but rather why my ancestors ever left. I live in one of the most wonderful places on God's earth. It's not just the Welsh hilltops or valleys. We live across the border from Wales, and here the words of John of Gaunt in Shakespeare's Richard II ring true. They seem almost trite after 400 years of overuse, most recently in television ads:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,--
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

A couple of years after my first visit to these shores, I was living outside Gonzales, Texas (with a few of you on this mail list). At night I would walk up and down the dirt road that was our driveway and look up at the stars while I would pray and think about where I would be and what I would be doing in the then-distant future. Some nights the breeze would come out of the southeast and the atmosphere would take me back to the first time I went for a walk in England, not to far from here in the very nondescript Birmingham suburb of Solihull.

In just a few days, I will have lived here three years. It has long ago lost any novelty or traveller's romance. The moaning and complaining in many of my other Meanderings should be evidence of that. But for twenty-two years, it has felt like home.

And now a few housekeeping notes:

If you are a regular reader of David's Mental Meanderings, you may have noticed that you are receiving this from a new e-mail address and in a slightly larger file size. This has made organizing my address book easier and the formatting of the Meanderings a little nicer and more readable. Plus, as the mail list has grown, my Meandering feedback was filling my very limited Yahoo! mailbox.

If you find that the format of this Meandering is less readable, you will need to either set your e-mail programme to read HMTL or send me a note and I will put you on a separate mailing list for a plain text version, which I am quite happy to do (another advantage of the new e-mail system).

If you are not a regular reader and you have never seen this newsletter before and have no clue why you got it, consider this a complimentary sample issue. (Of course all issues are complimentary, but that's beside the point.) I've always tried to keep the Meanderings on an opt-in, rather than opt-out, basis, so if you would like to continue receiving them, just hit the Reply button and note something of an affirmative nature. If you've seen this newsletter before and you don't know why you continue to receive it, then unfortunately, I've accidentally opted you in. If you'd rather not use your delete key on the irregular occasions these ramblings arrive in your inbox, feel free to send me a polite reply, suggesting in the kindest possible way that I get lost. Suggestions that I spend eternity in perdition or insert my computer into my anatomy will be ignored.

I must also offer the caveat that this is not a particularly good issue upon which to base your choice of remaining on the Meandering mail list. This has mostly contained personal news and a few harmless observations. I often offer my perspective as an American in the United Kingdom. However, like my liberal readers, you may find yourself subjected to vociferous social and political commentary which is which is decidedly conservative in perspective. You will also join agnostics and atheists in reading devotional and theological content which is evangelical and Eastern Orthodox, often at the same time and invariably too evangelical for some Orthodox and too Orthodox for some evangelicals. But that's why the good Lord and the manufacturers of your keyboard included the delete key. And the beautiful thing about it? You can delete the whole thing, and I'll never know.

However, if you join the ranks of the many satisfied readers, feel free to forward Meanderings to your friends, acquaintances, relatives, in-laws, or whoever else you think might enjoy them. And remember, I like to hear from you. Keep those cards and letters coming in.

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