So I arrive home, the house is quiet; outside there is a faint smell of burning as the gentle dusky rain dampens someone’s bonfire, the smoke tinged with what? Burning plastic? I think so. Oh dear, someone’s being environmentally silly, again.

I dump my bags in the living room, climb upstairs, and there is a cat waiting to be tickled on the bedroom windowsill. Another soon joins the first, vying for attention.

Life is pleasantly simple.

Tonight I shall feed the cats, read a little, read and experiment with recipes for making fresh aiolis and mayonnaise, scan-in the photos of my recent Swiss/Italian vacation, perhaps blog a little.

However my friends and colleagues – not that there is much difference between the two sets, given that they intersect heavily – provide a sizable counterpoint to the simplicity that is my life.

Nominally I am my region’s Chief Architect for Security in the consultancy and integration wing of my company; I provide technical oversight for projects and deployments, constructive (or sometimes swingeing) critique of system architectures, and I make it my business to find out what everyone is doing in order to ensure that everyone else knows what everyone else is doing, too.

My job – or perhaps two or three of my several hats – requires me to be a people person; one who knows how to hack networks, how to defend against hacking of networks, one who can put any one person in touch with any other person in order to make both more effective.

I am pretty good at my job.

What I hadn’t counted upon was the side-effects.

Although an unbaptised Anglican (and, I admit, an irritating little sh^H^H smartarse at age 10) I was schooled at a Catholic boys’ school which had much that you would expect from the movies: guys in collars & black, singing at weddings and Latin masses, an avuncular Irish Headmaster (Amer: “Principal”), lots of (to me) unfamiliar prayer, a rigid work ethic and an even more rigid disciplinary cane…

If you follow links from links from links from FriendsReunited there are even dark hints of now (let us say) media-friendly activities with a previous headmaster in the decade prior to my arrival.

To this day I suspect that all the on the closed side of the confessional mentality must have rubbed-off on me; I have a tendency to refer to my 80+ security architects (of varying ability, some wisely do not even think of themselves as security architects although they are) – I tend to refer to them only half-jokingly as my flock.

But I don’t give absolution. Oh no.

I listen. I represent. I go to bat for them. I let – no, let’s be clear about the responsibility here, I invite – people to dump on me. Death. Family illness. Cancer. Ulcers. Heart conditions. Being up all night with baby (fortunately, that one’s usually a happy story). Being elsewhere at work, away from baby. Autistic children. Marital strife. Stress. Relocation. One-night stands that provide/d momentary escape from a sullen marriage[1]. Consequent regret.

I ask. I care.

Managers who need slapping, I arrange.

Reorganisation, which we all await together.

Change.

After all that I come home to an tidy house, some toys, some motorbikes (which are in fact just bigger toys) and two lovely, lazy, but not smug, elderly cats; and I do wonder.

I wonder if I am not subconsciously avoiding responsibility – if I am not (by blessing of genes, brain and circumstance) opting-out from a burden that everyone else is partaking?

I have my space. I have my cats. I have my toys. I did the co-habiting thing for several years and that imploded violently, but eventually cleanly. Now several years later shouldn’t I be partaking of similar misery to my colleagues to balance-out the simple pleasures, discovering what compensation to their pain my schooling implies there should be?

I suppose it depends whether you believe.

Pete, this evening, by example, made a simple observation that hit me like a sledge; you can’t be Peter Pan forever. At 36 it may just still work. At 45 it will be tragic. There’s no avoiding that.

Maybe it is time to pull my socks up and put away the childish simplicity that is the backstop for the people who depend on me.

Then I take a step back, review my week to date, review what I know, and decide.

No. Not yet. Not quite.

[1] …believe me, whatever mental image you have of that one, it is certainly wrong…