And so the wheels turn and time marches on: remembering our mentors

As I write, to think of the future still seems very difficult. Although vaccines are being rolled out at a faster rate and with more effectiveness than we really could have imagined a year ago, we still don’t know if they will reduce transmission and be taken up by enough people to achieve herd immunity, or whether there will be sufficient access in less well-off countries, or if we will need regular boosters to defend against new variants.

Amidst lockdown, I’ve been tending to look backwards rather than forwards, wistful for pints in a pub with friends or enjoying music in a room full of people. Perhaps it’s also just the age I’ve reached that I find myself scanning the “with regret” listing in the National Grid pensions magazine to see if there’s anyone I know who has passed away. This time, there was.

Actually, I’d already heard about David Coates being ill, a couple of years ago. To my shame, I never tried to get a message through to him. I then heard from a former colleague a few months ago that he’d died, taken by cancer at the age of 72.

I really should have told Dave what he meant to me. I had a desk next to his in the System Strategy and Development department of National Grid Company between early 1999 and something like 2002 when Dave was among the set of older employees and middle managers who were offered packages to get them off the books of company (and onto the books of the pension scheme) in that year’s big re-organisation. He would still have been in his early 50s just as – shocking as I find it – I am now.

I had joined NGC in September 1998 after a long association with the company, both in its pre-privatisation guise as the transmission network bit of the old CEGB (which sponsored me as an undergrad) and then as sponsor of my PhD. I’d also had two years as a post-doc working on a project co-funded by NGC and the research council, with advice on project direction from an idiosyncratic, sometimes contrary but ultimately caring system planner. I’d applied for a lectureship at the university where I was a post-doc. I didn’t get it – quite rightly; I did a rubbish interview and wasn’t ready for that step anyway – but I was actually quite appalled by the way senior people in the department treated the process. Perhaps it was now finally time to make a deal with mammon and get some industry experience.

It took a few months before I found my place both in the organisation and in the office. Dave was an avuncular presence on one side of a desk partition; highly influential others sat nearby included Nasser Tleis and, after a little while, Cornel Brozio. Compared to what I’d been picking up in my PhD and post-doc studies, I initially felt that things were very slow and I wasn’t learning much. I was right that much of what we were trying to do took an age but, looking back, I now realise that I was very wrong about not learning much. Every little conversation with Dave, Nasser and Cornel, in particular, and others besides, was giving me insights I would never have got if I’d stayed in academia.

Some nuggets have stayed with me, such as Dave’s reservations about a market for reactive power and his observations about the value of working with universities: “they help you to answer questions you can’t answer; they also ask questions you didn’t think of asking”. People who know me would suggest that I picked up one at least one bad habit from Dave, such as his views on filing: “I just put things on the pile until it becomes unstable and things slide off into the bin”. (Actually, others’ filing systems were often invaluable: people who made a point of stashing old reports in whatever cupboards there still were in the office, or in their lofts at home, just in case they proved useful. There were indeed occasions when one of my colleagues would hear me floundering on some particular subject and proffer an old report: “perhaps this will be of interest”. Yes! Thank you!)

In those days, we had quite well-defined office hours: sometime between 8.30 and 9 until sometime between 4.30 and 5. Many of the most interesting conversations with Dave only started when I was gathering up my things to head out to get my bike for the short ride home. He would start musing out loud on some work-related question that was bothering him. I would inevitably be drawn in, as he probably knew I would. Nasser would usually still be there – there would always be certain stalwarts who would be in the office after most people had gone – but had strong powers of concentration. Sometimes he’d be drawn in as well. I would arrive home an hour or an hour and a half later than planned, perhaps after the chat had veered away from work and onto other things. (Dave – tall and lean – was a keen, and very fast, walker who was interested in the wildlife he could see. I remember his vivid description of coming face-to-face with a griffon vulture in the Pyrenees). “You’re late,” my wife would say (quizzically rather than accusingly; those were the days). “Yes, I got Coatsed”. It was said with affection then and I mention it affectionately now.

I’m glad that I got “Coatsed” so often. If some of my colleagues or students get “Keithed” now, it’s just because I like to chat, and I like to hear their views as well. I’m glad to say that I’m still learning things; I hope the conversations I have are able to make that a two-way process.

In my last couple of years at National Grid, we were in a different office and working hours were very tightly and strictly constrained by needing to get the only bus of the day that would get you home. Days became very task focused and random chit-chat was increasingly squeezed out. Now, in my university role, I have multiple meetings and deadlines that put many of us under a similar squeeze.

When we emerge from the pandemic and ponder new ways of working, I hope we’re able to make space in the working day, and in social environments outside it, for random discussion, to talk shop, let a little creativity flow and be mentors for each other.