There are three things I don’t get about The Apprentice (Wednesdays, BBC1), even if it is the must-see show on television at the moment.
One: how do the candidates on the losing team have the gall to hug the person who’s just been fired after they’ve stuck the knife into them in the boardroom? (I suspect they’re checking to make sure it went in deep enough.)
Two: how does everyone manage to fit their stuff into such ridiculously small suitcases?
Three (and this is the main one): when the phone rings at 6.00am and the PA says, ‘Sir Alan wants to see you in half an hour at Piccadilly Circus’ and they’re all either asleep or wearing towels, how do they manage to get there on time looking so smart?
As far as I’m concerned, coming up with an advertising campaign for a new brand of trainer would be a cinch compared with the stress of the pre-dawn dash to bag the bathroom.
Promotions, I can do. I speak with the authority of someone who once worked with a woman just like Harrogate hopeful Kristina Grimes (she was equally as ruthless, too) creating advertisement features, a short-lived career that peaked with a chaotic photo shoot for Chunky dog food that resembled One Hundred and One Dalmations.
It’s getting up early that’s outside my comfort zone.
Still, going beyond your comfort zone is supposed to be good for you. One of the tenets of life coaching is that clinging to old habits can prevent us from attaining our full potential. It is only when we step outside of them, to a place that’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable and sometimes stressful, that we acquire the skills we need to grow.
That is what I told myself on Monday night, after the daughter and I had had our first practice session with the band. We’ve been learning brass instruments for five months now and I thought I was doing OK until I found myself attempting to play second trombone on Annie’s Song and getting hopelessly lost.
By the time we got to the Gay Gordons I was so far out of my comfort zone it was all I could do not to bolt to the ladies’ and hide. The daughter, meanwhile, was plugging away on her baritone without turning a hair, as were the two other ten-year-olds in the cornet section. Imagine how big I felt.
One of the reasons I really like being in the band is because it is totally different to what I normally do, and it does challenge me. It’s the same with ballroom dancing, which I also take lessons in. Learning new skills has a scary way of throwing you back on yourself, but when I get something right, be it a chromatic scale or a heel turn, the sense of achievement is all the greater because I’ve previously struggled with it.
The problem is that as adults we tend to think we ought to be able to do things perfectly straight away. Children, on the other hand, tend to go with the flow. Also, their uncluttered young brains pick things up faster. The daughter, who normally hates doing music practice, has been helping me all week, albeit wearing a faint air of triumph (‘I thought it was easy’).
I think I’ve finally cracked my part in Annie’s Song. So long as no one else joins in . . .
Something else I’m not used to doing is documentary film-making, but I’m doing that next week, too, in the form of a video diary for the BBC. I’ve also been asked to chair the Climate Talk public seminar at Northallerton Town Hall next Thursday (7.00pm) which is about climate change and travel. Comfort zone? What comfort zone?
The husband, too, has agreed to test unchartered waters. The mid-life crisis signalled by the red Converses (I saw another middle-aged man wearing them last week; this could be the start of an epidemic) has prompted a nostalgia for his festival-going youth and, inparticular, Peter Gabriel concerts.
The upshot of this is that the husband is now talking about the three of us going to Womad, a three-day World Music festival, because the former Genesis singer is headlining.
The husband has always refused point-blank to go on a camping trip with us, so this should be interesting. We’re hoping to hire a campervan, Scooby-Doo-and-the-gang style, which I’ll have to drive because he doesn’t. (Rikes! Another first.)
Still, what with all these exciting new challenges, I’m cool with anything. Smelly toilets, knee-deep mud and all-night drumming? Bring it on.
Actually, I’ve checked the rules and drumming isn’t allowed between 8pm and 8am. They don’t say anything about trombones, though. I’ll be dead good at Kumbaya by then. I might take it with me.