Alan Barnes

Everyone has a CV. Nobody keeps the other list: things you did for free because you wanted to see what happened. Mine has a documentary about New Zealanders in London. Nobody paid for it. I'm still making things nobody commissioned.

Ken Robinson's point: lives grow like trees, branching, mostly a mess. We draw the straight line afterwards because improvisation looks bad on a profile. Mine branched through a milking shed, a video duplication plant and unpaid music videos. Not one of those was a plan.

People don't take the sensible job as part of a plan. They take it because: The mortgage. The school fees. It was a Thursday. Then twenty years later LinkedIn makes it look deliberate. The job you did before you got sensible is the more interesting one.

Most LinkedIn profiles are improvisation with good formatting. Mine says Executive Producer. It leaves out the milking shed, the duplication plant and the music videos nobody paid for, which is where most of the improvising happened.

Most LinkedIn profiles are improvisation with good formatting. Mine says Executive Producer. It leaves out the milking shed, the duplication plant and the music videos nobody paid for, which is where most of the improvising happened.

A CV reads like a career someone chose. It's mostly a series of moments where you needed the money.

Weekend reading: Is That You? A near miss with an old face, and a longer look at my own. faarkihopeitsnottoolate.com/…

I caught up with an old friend from way back recently. Same but different. I imagine I am too, to him. That's most of the point of going.

End of the week. My suggestion for the weekend: message someone you lost touch with years ago. No agenda needed. "Saw someone who looked like you" is a perfectly good opener.

Ten-minute exercise. Write down what mattered to you at twenty-five. Then tick off what's still true.

I keep a very specific picture of people I haven't seen in decades. Same hair, same jokes, same everything. It's almost certainly wrong on every count.

Write down what mattered to you at twenty-five. Then see how much of it survived. I'd bet the list gets shorter and stranger than you expect.

Mistook a stranger for someone I knew thirty years ago. Wrong person, obviously. What stuck was realising I'd been picturing the original with a full head of hair. Memory doesn't age people. It files them.

I've mistaken a stranger for an old mate a few times lately. That full-body jolt of recognition, felt in the gut before the brain catches up. Then a beat later: no. Wrong person.

If you've got time this weekend, this week's Faark I Hope It’s not too Late is a short one about borrowing and lending stories. faarkihopeitsnottoolate.com/…

Every job, move and ending you've survived is a story sitting on a shelf somewhere. Most of us never take them down because nobody asks.

Worth asking this week: whose version of this would I actually like to try on? faarkihopeitsnottoolate.com/…

I used to think reframing was a bit of self-help fluff. Then a friend reframed our house sale for us and the whole thing got easier. I've gone quiet on the fluff accusation.

Your headache isn't the facts. It's the version you've been telling yourself. Same week. Two tellings. Mine: this is all falling apart. My mate's, who lived through the same week: this is what it costs to build something.

Thirty years in one house means thirty years of stuff. Every box wants a decision. Selling a home is an archaeology dig with a deadline.