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After a gig one night, I was sitting in a chip shop with the lead singer of a band. We’d come here because at the time there were very few late licenced venues. All of London would close at eleven – remember that? Madness. That will be one of those things that generations to come won’t believe. Just as I couldn’t believe it when my great aunt recounted to me the introduction of electricity in her house. She had been alive before you had electricity in your house – unbelievable.

Anyway, this chip shop would sell you cans of beer to drink at the table, so we bought a stack and sat down. The lead singer wasn’t from the UK, so there was easy small talk about how things were different here than back home.

She talked about some of the more obvious differences between Iceland and here. Finally I decided to ask her, what was her favourite thing from the UK? She thought for a second, and then I could see that she had decided.

Her favourite thing was the History Channel + 1. The channel that shows what was on the history channel an hour ago. “Why,” I asked, “is that your favourite thing?”

“Because,” she said, “it’s the history of the History Channel, live.”

We currently don’t have an Italian restaurant and it worries me. Well, of course, that’s not exactly true. Senor Grilli on Goodge Street in central London has been a regular haunt of mine since 1998. At our old flat, we had a great one, Aldo’s, but we moved away and it went out of business – this may be related. But since we’ve moved – nothing local.

Why is this important? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but it is to me. All of my life there have been places I’ve been where people know who you are when you walk in the door. And always these places have been Italian. Perhaps this is related to spending some of my formative years in New Jersey.

If I go into Signor Grilli, John asks me how I’ve been. Aldo and I are friends on Facebook. There’s something comforting about it. It’s related to that line in the Billy Joel song, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”.

“I’ll meet you any time you want at our Italian restaurant.”

There’s something homely and comforting about it. You can meet somebody there and just have a beer while you wait, nobody is going to mind. And somebody might even keep you company.

There’s a place down the hill that we’ve seen but haven’t been to yet. Maybe that’s the place? I’ll let you know.

There is something I love about random management phrases. I mean obviously I don’t like to actually use them, because they sound totally mad and often they really confuse the issue. However there are two words to do with the areas of your control and expertise that I really like.

The first is wheelhouse. It’s the name of the room where the captain of a ship stands. Literally, I guess, the room that houses the wheel of the ship. And this one is something you want more things in really. People say, “hey that’s right in Alex’s wheelhouse”. Well they don’t because they don’t use any of the cool phrases at my work, they just ask me to “action the pre-meeting”. But that’s what they would say to mean, “that’s right up Alex’s street”. It’s sort of about it being in your comfort zone, but comfort zone sounds a bit too wimpy. It’s actually used in baseball a lot to suggest that the ball was thrown to the place that the batsman really likes to hit from. So I guess you want more people to think that such-and-such will be in your wheelhouse.

Now bailiwick is the other word I like. Technically, this comes from the world of bailiffs and still exists in that world today. It means essentially ‘area of jurisdiction’. And of course, you might think, you as a young thrusting person would like to have more things under your control, the phrase is seldom used that way. It’s really used to explain what you aren’t in control of. Somebody says to you, “hey Alex, can you take this broom and sweep up the kitchen?”, you have to turn to this person and say, “I’m sorry Sir, but that’s not my bailiwick”. Basically, it’s a fancy way of telling somebody to shove off while also explaining that it’s “not my problem”. Of course I have never really used it [not at work, anyway – Ed] because it would make you sound like a mad person.

So while I fear those who freely use phrases such as, “We need to pro-actively seek to add value going forward”, I secretly also want the freedom to pepper my dialogue with these really cool words. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Perhaps saying such words isn’t in my wheelhouse?

People have been asking “What if?” questions since the dawn of time, I imagine. My guess is that the first time two amoeba existed, one turned to the other and said, “What would happen if you did that again?”. It’s human nature.*

When you were a kid, you were able to spend the time to play the game properly. You really got the chance to put the effort in, you got to milk the apparent turn by turn nature of history. However when playing with my brother, Just as I was trying to get him to consider just what would have been different if Caesar hadn’t quite got around to all his veni, vidi, vici-ing, Pete would say, “But what if the whole universe didn’t exist?”.

Of course as adults it easier to see that it’s very rare that the world turns on a single decision. Most things that we do are cumulations of decisions. Things conspire together. It’s closer to the gathering storm, as Churchill had it. A lot of times, a single attempt to buck the trend doesn’t achieve very much.

There is a more serious point to some of this which is to do with regrets. Oftentimes I hear people talking about their regrets and I wonder what they really mean. Very few things are closed forever.

People who wish they had learned to play the piano when they were kids but don’t do it now are kidding themselves. They could learn now but the same thing that made them not want to put in the effort when they were kids is the same thing stopping them now. Just go and do it. But remember that Myleene Klass is disapointed that, because of her media career and kids, she doesn’t get as much time to keep up with her piano these days. Nowadays, she can only manage to practice for one hour a day! Being good at something takes a lot of effort. So you’d better get started.

The other side is that people regret things that are part of what makes them who they are. You are, to an extent, the product of the decisions you’ve made. So instead of wishing you could go back and change something (and unless you’ve invented time travel, you can’t do that), you should take the information you learned and make sure you aren’t making the same decision again. Remember that most days you decide to do the same thing you did yesterday. You don’t think you are deciding, but you are.

I was reminded of all of this when I met a friend’s three year old son. Lukas was just at the stage of incessantly asking “What if” questions. He just wanted to understand how the whole world worked. Those simple things that children all learn, how do these things fit together?, what happens if they don’t? We all start learning it. Some of us just stop. Anyway, at the end of our trip, we were getting on the plane and Lukas was trying to come up with things that might mean we didn’t have to go.

He tried several versions:
“What if they have no fuel?”
“They’ll get more fuel.”

“What if they’ve forgotten your bags?”
“They haven’t forgotten our bags, look they’re there.”

And then he had it, “What if the pilot talks nonsense?”.

And what, I thought to myself, if the universe doesn’t exist?

* And from the sounds of things, amoeba nature too.