About Me — Mike Zeidler
From 0 to nearly 60 at 6.5 years a minute
Age 0–5 (1965–1970): The Swinging Sixties
The nursing home where I was born in Wimbledon was kept open just for me. I was the last child delivered there and soon afterwards it was demolished to make way for a new mansion block.
Memories begin in a house in Flackwell Heath, 28 miles West of my parents childhood homes in London. Looking for my mum in a terror when big brother and his mate warned me of monsters at the end of the garden. Throwing a dart at a dartboard hung on an apple tree, but the dart going into my brother’s calf. My mum looking like a stranger when she once wore a wig. The excitement of a sixpence to spend in the local shop. The wonder of a Punch & Judy stall in our own house.
Age 6–13 (1970–78): The Feral Years
The Punch & Judy stall was a gift from my Dad’s mum. Grandmama was the funny one who rode a motorbike in her youth and taught us card games with gambling for smarties. There was an ice rink just along the way, and we also learned to skate. Granny & Gramps were on the other side of Richmond Park. Theirs was a quiet house with an enormous Grandfather clock that tick tocked in the hall. Good manners were appreciated, and I did my best to be well behaved.
Favourite trousers. White flared ones with the red cheque (think Bay City Rollers). LOVED those, but they were for ‘smart’.
We moved to Beaconsfield with it’s two towns, huge annual fair, model village and Film school. Ours was a modern house in the New Town, opposite ‘The Spinney’, a patch of trees where kids from the neighbourhood would gather to play. Sometimes football, sometimes tag, often just ‘hanging about’.
We went to Sunday School, played mini-rugby and had fantastic freedom to wander between other kids houses. ‘Hanging about’ range grew wider and wider, from riding bikes over ‘the big dippers’ in Walk Wood, to roaming the whole area.
I got a paper round, loved getting out early when nobody was around, and was alway first to arrive at the shop. I didn’t mind cycling with the big heavy bag but felt sorry for the last delivery, whose paper always got smudged by the journey.
School was neither good nor bad. My attention wandered a lot and I dodged a bullet, failing the test to follow my older brother into a boarding school at the age of 8.
My parents worried about my lack of attention and took me to a child psychogist who told them I’d grow out of it. So they enrolled me at Little Hampton Manor. I loved the Green and Gold piped uniforms, doing archery and building ‘dens’ in the woods, running, rugby and swimming. An older boy blocked me from running to the loo when I was desperate, so I punched him to avoid wetting myself. Got hauled into the headmasters for a beating.
The school was miles from anywhere, and I was a day boy, but I still decided to run away. Not sure how long I hid in the woods down the drive, but it wasn’t long before I changed schools again. Aged 12, I visited my rather distant Great Aunt in Jersey, little realising that she would be the benefactor who paid for my later schooling.
Age 14–21 (1979–87): The Student Years
Back home, Dad extended the house and built a 00 scale model railway in the loft with foot long carriages and engines. Meanwhile, I started to enjoy classes. My form mistress was lovely, the English teacher quirky, the Latin teacher fascinating, the science teacher interesting and the maths teacher formiddable. Between them they got me through my Common Entrance exams to follow in my father’s footsteps to ‘big’ school. The maths teacher in particular was amazed and dad, braced for disappointment, was overjoyed.
At some point around here we moved to a big house in the Old Town with a huge garden, snooker room and swimming pool.
Big school was Haileybury & Imperial Service College, a mosh pit of 700 odd boarders. We were divided into ‘houses’ — mine had fifty two beds in a single long dormitory, 25 per side with wooden partitions at hip height between each. Studies were as regimented as the Cadet Corps, and free time limited by the endless demands and opportunities a 500 acre school can afford to offer. I had absolutely no idea how incredible my privilege was.
I showed little talent for fencing, metalwork, trombone and guitar, debatable acting skills, and only glimmers of fair ability in Ceramics. I left with sporting honours being Captain of Cross Country and on the school’s first teams in rugby and golf. University was expected, so I worked as hard as I could to get the grades I needed.
At home, things had fallen apart. My dad left for his new love in Canada, leaving my mum in tatters. Both parents leant on my older brother, my younger brother lived through the distress, but I went to Nottingham and didn’t look back.
My main achievements were to take two field trips abroad where only one was meant to be allowed, act in a couple of plays, and became an elite oarsman, racing for the university’s first eight. I was also one of the six ‘Week One Coordinators’ who organised all the fun stuff for the freshers in our final year.
That last university summer, I was meant to do the fieldwork for a 30,000 word thesis. What I actually did, was visit my dad in Monteral, where I had 6 brilliant weeks getting to know my four new stepbrothers. I aced the fun, fluffed the study, and ended up with the only 3rd Class degree in the Geography department. I felt sick about it for a day, but knew it was fair, and by the next morning I was just full of joy at the prospect of moving on.
For the first time in my life, nothing was expected of me. The only plan I had was to row on an Ancient Greek Warship, a commitment I’d made at the Henley Royal Regatta in 1985.
I ambled around the careers fairs, surrounded by graduating students eager for waged work, but was competely uninspired. I wanted to explore the world and find out what life was all about, not get settled down. For the sake of interview practice, I did chat to the people from the British Ports Authority who were promoting some kind of fast track leadership thing which sounded unusual. Amazingly, I got invited to a very full on selection weekend with psychoanaysis, exercises and port tours, which was fascinating, but not for me.
Age 21–26 (1987–92): The Footloose Years
I applied for a role with an exciting company called Bladon Lines. I didn’t mind what I did as long as I got to learn to ski in the Alps. It was more of a lottery than a ‘job’ application, and I got a peachy role as a Maintenance & Building Officer (aka Muscle Bound Oaf) in Zermatt, Switzerland. From here life unfolded entirely by chance, the path set by chatty curiosity and the people I happened to meet.
In two years I worked short term roles that incuded a summer season in Corsica another half season in Zermatt, helping set up a Doughnut machine franchise across the UK, work as a recruitment consultant and in advertising sales before landing a job sailing a 65 foot yacht from St Lucia in the Caribbean to Tahiti in the South Pacific.
Then I fell in love. I don’t know about ‘fate’, but in a tale of coincidences taller than Jack’s beanstalk, I met my wife to be in Darling Harbour, thanks to cockroaches. I’d been searching for something without knowing what it was. It’s a hackneyed phrase, but she completed me — filling in all the pieces I didn’t even know where missing.
Within a couple of months we’d set up a business and moved in together, cramming about 7 years of experiences into the next seven months when our visas ran out and we had to leave. There are lots of great stories to tell about these years, but too much for this one now.
Age 27–37 (1993–2003): The Growing Up Years
We chose to settle in Bristol where we had our first child, bought our first home and got married all within 6 months. The internet and my career launched at the same time — both did quite well. Eight years of plenty followed, with good jobs in PR, Fundraising, Placemaking and Business Leadership. Both of us earned masters degrees, mine in Responsible Business Practice, and Liz in International Development.
Then, with children aged 5, 7 and 9, we decided to head off around the world. All five carrying our own backpacks, we travelled across Northern India, up and down Thailand, the East coast of Australia, bouncing through California on our way to Mexico and then Guatemala. I wrote a diary every day and our family grew stronger in countless ways.
Age 37–52 (2003–2018): The Creative Years
On our travels we’d decided to set up our own consultancy to promote sustainable change. The aim was to help people protect life, making the world a healthier, safer, fairer place whilst making a decent living.
In 18 years, Liz and I did a lot of good together with lots of brilliant colleagues, but as this is ‘about me’, I’ll just share a few personal highlights. I LOVED running Walk Your Talk events, Coworking Spaces, and creating workshops and talks for ‘changemakers’, but the big achievements were the startups. Besides modoto, there were four — all of them pioneering groundbreakers.
They were the Association of Sustainability Practitioners (ASP), The Hub Bristol, the Funky Spaces Network and finally the Centre for Thriving Places (CTP). I’d seen too many great initiatives get torpedoed by ‘founders syndrome’, so in every case, I ‘held things lightly’ with succession in mind.
That said, and in spite of planning to leave, it was VERY hard stepping away from the day to day action of Centre for Thriving Places. I thought I’d be fine, having inched my way out of ASP’s leadership with the pleasure of a job well done. But CTP was different — it had taken up as much space in our family lives as a fourth child. The emotional undercurrents ran deeper than I’d realised, and my feelings for CTP caught me unawares. They surfaced as waves of sorrow and loss that washed over me for more than a year. I hadn’t expected to be in mourning.
Age 52–58 (2019–2024): The Reset Years
We decided to sell our house and downsize. The kids had all left home so we wanted to free the space for another family and move to something better suited to reduced needs.
Our combined earnings were less than the national average, but we were very rich on paper because we’d ‘done up’ run down houses and re-sold them three times over 25 years. One, an exquisite, but very neglected Georgian house of bedsits was both exciting and terrifying. We won it at auction with sitting tenants — a massive risk, but it had paid off big time.
It was time to realise our dream of living by the sea. So we bought a bungalow and stuck another one on top of it.
I’ve gained a whole bunch of new tools, learned a huge amount about building a home, and half wrecked my body. For the past 18 months or so, kindly people have looked into my exhausted, dust covered face and said ‘It’ll all be worth it in the end’. Most of the time, I was too tired and too conscious of the overwhelming size of my ‘to do’ lists to agee. But we’re nearly there now, and they were right.
By this time next year, I hope we’ll be welcoming friends, family and changemakers in need of a rest to come here and recharge their batteries. Here’s to the upcoming Restorative Years.
