Fantasy CEO - Round 5 Annual Report

A number of the people who commented here have been kind enough to answer my questions about how they are playing Fantasy CEO, and I plan to write them up for the Round 6 Annual Report. I’ve been brutally short of time this week, or I’d be doing that now.

I ended up feeling rather sulky about this round. I couldn’t get the decisions to come good and I was working against the clock which added pressure. I pride myself on being able to track cause and effect across the width and breadth of complex systems so it is a bit of a blow to find that I can’t track the consequences of changing so few parameters in my head. Mind you, I thought we only had a dozen or so decisions to make but actually it’s about 50 - it seems I can’t add up either. As I said, ended up in a sulk with the whole thing. It seems I’m not the only one who’s willing to have a bit of a whinge about it all.

I’m finding it harder to stick to my strategy and I cannot tell if that is because it’s inherently flawed or if my early investment in new products, marketing, new plant and so on will in fact come good and start looking after themselves, making the next rounds profitable. I’ve been rattling around between the top 25% and the top 20% for most of the previous rounds, and I have a horrible feeling that I am about to slither down into the lower reaches of the league table. I am also aware that I am driving my strategy based on positioning my product in the market and then taking my financial decisions to pay for everything and so it’s not surprising that my financial outcomes such as stock price and bond price are all over the place. This is because I don’t really understand them and the game is ruthlessly exposing my ignorance.

As the game’s creator pointed out in the Times last week, being able to talk the thing through really helps, but like a lot of people I’m playing alone. In fact I feel like the Ancient Mariner, with wedding guests hurrying off as fast as they can when they smell the stench of albatross carcass. If you play this in a business school environment there would presumably be a session at the end of each round for discussion and analysis, and I know that I am missing out on lessons I could be learning because of that. It would help immensely if the Times had put up a discussion board at the start of the game.

Whinge, as I’ve already said. Moan.

I’m finding the complexity baffling, to be honest, and it is giving me a greater respect for the other functions in a business. For example, I absolutely see the necessity for 5 year plans, and this has increased my respect for those who run public companies and manage to balance the need for long term investment with throwing bloody gobbets of steak to the stock market in the short term.

All in all, when I hit “submit” at the end of Round 5 I just wanted to wail “it isn’t fa-ai-ai-air” and bugger off for a riotous weekend. In the end I did better than I expected: my balanced scorecard for this round was better than predicted though worse than last week’s and much worse than the game’s leaders are achieving. My forecasting was better too - I had a couple of dozen units left of one item, and only just sold out of the other three. Luck or judgement? I still have a horrible feeling it’s luck. I’ve still got a lot to read and get out of the reports we get at the end of the round, but I was interested to see that the stock market price of one of my robotic competitors has peaked and fallen, though mine is still gradually climbing.

In other news - I’m still not commenting on the scores as they compare against each other, because the Times’s published tables still seem very odd.

Suffering fools

As I get older and crankier, I am less patient of people who refuse to trust my professional judgement. It would be nice if I was growing more tolerant of human insecurity, but I’m not.

My former team’s new boss put a meeting in my diary so that I could explain one part of my previous job, planting sunflowers, which apparently I had failed to include in my handover.

Now there is nothing to planting sunflowers - you bung the seeds in the ground, water them, and a few months later you’ve got twelve foot tall bright yellow daisy-things tapping on your bedroom windows. My former team member knows this well enough. On top of which, there was nothing to hand over. I’d picked up an action from a previous meeting (buy the sunflower seeds and put them in the kitchen drawer until the spring) and done it: the packets of seeds were safely in the kitchen drawer. The only thing I missed was telling anyone I’d done it, and I only missed that because I’d done it and crossed it off my “to do” list a month or so before the handover. I forgot to tell my team I’d wiped my nose on the third Thursday in August too.

Instead of ringing me up and saying “Aphra, I went to a meeting the other day and they asked if you’d bought any sunflower seeds, but I didn’t know whether or not you had” we had a meeting request followed up with emails using words like “very embarrassing” with stuff underlined in red, and using phrases like “all aspects of the sunflower project”. Eventually we got to “even so” and “at any time that’s convenient to you”.

You know things are tense when you get to “even so”. “Any time that’s convenient to you” is Defcon 3, really, isn’t it?

I refuse to spend an hour of my one and only precious life-time in a meeting explaining that the packet of sunflower seeds is in the kitchen drawer, topping and tailing it with a 15 minute walk to their site and a 15 minute walk back. Instead I’ve taken them at their word and booked a meeting which makes them do the walking. And I am going to get my former team member to explain to his boss that the way you grow sunflowers is to put the seeds in the ground and water them. You see, this is the thing that annoys me: he already knows how to do it because I taught him how, and the whole thing is a bloody great drama over nothing - so much so that one, single, ten minute phone call sorted it out with my former team member, but his boss “had a meeting to go to” both times I phoned him. Which is how we arrived at “even so”and “any time that’s convenient to you” and the 15 minute walks.

I don’t mind being asked to explain things. But I really dislike being asked to explain myself.

---

The image is by a photographer called Leisa Hennessy. I am so glad I chose sunflowers as my metaphor.

Fantasy CEO - Round 4 Annual Report

Scores

The Times have improved the way they report the scores with separate tabs for each round. They are still not ideal in various ways - not least in that the 4th round results aren’t up yet - but I have spent too much time this week staring at spreadsheets and daring them to blink to comment on scoring this week. Shane has sent me the aggregated scores and I’ll send them to anyone playing the game who emails me at astrea_gw at yahoo dot co dot uk.

Fantasy CEO or Fantasy Marketing?

It occurred to me this week to wonder if this is a game of Fantasy CEO we are playing, or is it Fantasy Market Research?

The analysis you go through and decisions you make in Marketing and Finance are relatively detailed compared with what you do in Production. It is also glaringly obvious that IT is taken for granted. Now I find this interesting. This implies Marketing, Production and Finance strategies matter but that IT strategy is irrelevant, that it is not a business activity even. I live and work in IT so I find that rather depressing, and wonder if it’s a home truth.

There could be any number of reasons for this. Maybe business studies teachers and management lecturers don’t understand IT. Maybe market analysis can be simplified in a way that production can’t. Maybe MSI’s main customers in business schools are more interested in Marketing than in IT, Production, Engineering and the other Techie stuff. In fairness the Times haven’t enabled the Total Quality Management and concepts around production could be worked through there.

In the late1990s, the netgeist started claiming that IT strategy is the strategy: this can be argued very strongly in the case of companies like Amazon and eBay, and it is often forgotten that decisions around IT were a sub-plot in Enron’s final chapter. I get my veggies online from an organic farm and the rest of my groceries are delivered by Tescos  which shows the wide range of businesses who have moved into on-line sales. So I buy into the idea that IT strategy is the strategy, but I’ll admit that I’m biased.

A lot of IT decisions seem doctrinal anyway: some advocate getting all your software and hardware from one vendor such as, say, IBM, to pick the one remaining candidate at random. In theory everything works together and it’s the vendor’s problem if it doesn’t. Others believe you should cherry pick the best and then mix and match, getting your HR software here and your Financial software there and stitch it all together. Some believe in “off the shelf” and others believe in “bespoke”. Yes, in some circumstances one approach is better than others but you get my drift.

It is tempting to come to the judgemental conclusion that we are losing our manufacturing edge in the West because our business studies classes and business schools focus on Marketing at the expense of Production and we are turning into a hemisphere of shop-keepers. I think it’s got more to do with sweatshops and containerised shipping myself, but losing our expertise in Production does not help. We should be automating and manufacturing locally even if the factories are run by half a dozen people and we won’t be able to do that if all we know is how to spend a promo budget.

All of this is irrelevant to the Round 4 Annual Report, but having spent the first couple of weeks thinking how complicated and detailed the simulation is, I thought it worth noting some of its limitations.

This week

Well I was rather cocky when I pressed the “submit” button on Friday, but I’m feeling a lot less smug now I’ve got my reports for this round.  I’m still pants at forecasting it seems - so much so that failed to predict how much cash I’d need and ended the round needing an emergency loan.    Having been overly cautious in the first three rounds, I wasn’t cautious enough this round and I significantly over-estimated how many of my main Low Tech widgets I’d sell.  How annoyed am I?

I thought I’d pushed through a barrier this week. When I looked at the pro forma balanced scorecard I found that my predicted score was much better than before, based on sensible decisions on forecasts I had worked out rather painstakingly. It is frustrating to find I am actually less skilled at the process of analysis and decision-making than before.  I think it’s not just poor forecasting though, I think it is poor contingency planning too.  Hey ho.

So what else have I learned so far?

I think I’ve finally realised that the advice about forecasting is just that - advice. I was trying to follow it as a process and getting frustrated with the vagueness of it all. Once I realised that they describe an art not a science I felt happier.  Mind you it’s an art I obviously haven’t mastered. In real life I’d like to think it’s nearer a science, otherwise how can I possibly take people who work in Marketing seriously?

I’m getting more comfortable using the tool itself, which makes using it quicker and slicker.

More usefully, I’m getting a more intuitive understanding of the balanced scorecard, (see previous post) and beginning to understand the pros and cons of the different ways of financing a company.

Or at least I thought I was doing all these things until I got this rounds results.  Still, I’m buggered if I’m letting one bad round put me off.  It’s worrying that I am going to be so extremely pushed for time over the next two weeks.

Next Week

Next week I plan to email some of the visitors to this site and asking them how they play the game - how long they spend on it, how much relevent experience they already have, how much is new, stuff like that.  If I get any replies I’ll pull out some extracts and publish them here, though possibly not until the week after next depending on other commitments and time.

Aphra’s top tip…

Aphra’s top tip…

… if you want to retain any degree of respect and professional credibility among your colleagues, don’t tell them that you store you dirty clothes on the floor. They will look at you, but say nothing.

Stray cat

I have a visitor each night who comes in to see if there is any spare cat food.

There is, unless he’s eaten it all already, because I make sure that there always is. He eats his way steadily through great full bowls of the stuff but runs out of the house if I move and make eye contact. Nervous as he is, he was considerably worse at the start of the year. He no longer bolts the food down though he doesn’t waste any time either, and he now sits on the kitchen steps for - oh - 15 or 20 seconds after he’s finished eating instead of shooting off as soon as something spooked him. Tiger ignores him completely.

I’d assumed for a while that he was an opportunist trying his luck away from home the way that opportunists do, and in fact I used to clap to get him to go home. But he was so persistent and seemed so hungry that I lost the heart to do that.

However, it was only this week that it finally dawned on me that he is most likely either feral or a stray; sometimes I can be very stupid. He doesn’t have the tatty look I associate with entire toms - he certainly doesn’t spray in the house even though I know he beds down in the living room of a night sometimes. His coat’s shiny and he looks to be in fairly good shape, but then again he should be - he’s getting through a bowl of IAMs a day.

Oh my goodness - awful thought - maybe the reason SHE is so hungry is that she’s pregnant?

Fantasy CEO - Round 3 Annual Report

How worrying is it that I was exchanging emails and spreadsheets with a complete stranger called Shane at 5.50 on Saturday morning? Hopefully he was emailing from Hong Kong or Sydney. He has harvested the first two rounds of results from the Times website. (Only registered players can log in - everyone else is limited to the table of averages).

A couple of unexpected things appear to come out the data.

Firstly there were only about 470 participants in Round 2, but not everyone who dropped out of Round 1 did badly: the drop-outs are spread remarkably evenly throughout. The chap who had over $5m profit in the first round has left us - maybe he decided to take the virtual dollars and run. I’m curious why people who were doing well dropped out - didn’t they realise how well they were doing, or did they decide their time was better spent being good at their real businesses? Or maybe their partners had had enough and unplugged their PCs.

Also, scores can go down as well as up: the people in the top 10 places at the end of Round 1 who are still in the game scored as follows in Round 2:

Round 1 Place	Round 2 Place	Dropped out
1st	191	-
2nd	39	-
3rd	1	-
4th	458	(dropped out)
5th	463	(dropped out)
6th	55	-
7th	75	-
8th	466	(dropped out)
9th	3	-
10th	16	-
11th	20	-
12th	51	-
13th	468	(dropped out)
14th	467	(dropped out)
15th	44	-

From 1st to 191st is a pretty dramatic drop, and you see what I mean about the drop-outs being evenly spread? The top 10 scorers in Round 2 came from all over the field and their scores in Round 1 were:

Round 1 Place	Round 2 Place
3	1st
47	2nd
9	3rd
63	4th
152	5th
18	6th
132	7th
290	8th
190	9th
100	10th

The ranking in the early rounds may be volatile but it’ll stabilise pretty soon I’m sure. If it was actually raining outside I’d be tempted to analyse the data to find out what the average change from Round 1 to Round 2 was, but there are weeds in the garden which need pulling up by the roots.

I’m not saying where I am in this whole thing, but I went into Round 3 feeling rather pleased because my ranking in the league had improved even though I’d fallen behind one of the five robot players I’m competing with in the simulation.

The Times tell us the final league table will be based on the Balanced Scorecard, which is how Shane and I have been ranking the players.

A brief aside here: the Balanced Scorecard was devised by Robert Kaplan and David Norton to help companies tune and track their progress in ways that aren’t just dollars and cents. For example, if being green is important to a company and it uses recycled paper even though it is more expensive, then its “sustainability” score goes up balancing out the fact that the “profitability” score goes down. The Balanced Scorecard is there to stop the lunatics, sorry, to stop the accountants taking over the asylum. In practice, I think it may just give them a wider range of beans to count.

So I spent most of Friday plonking my way through the tutorial to discover how to predict which way my customers will jump. In the end it still seemed to come down to licking my finger and holding it up in the wind so I am not convinced they were hours well spent, though I may have been using better informed lick.

Then on Saturday I checked my decision-making against the Balanced Scorecard. This forced me to undo various decisions I made last week - for example I’d made the production lines too big and I’m clearly not going to sell all the product I can currently make. I’m glad I’d doing this on my own, I’m not fond of recriminations and acrimony. I reached the point a couple of times where my decisions all seemed to balance out - if I spent more on marketing my “awareness” score went up but my “profitability” score went down. After bringing it up from about 34, I stalled with a predicted score of 43 until I realised that borrowing is good so long as your profits outweigh the interest charges, (think “buy-to-let”) and after that my predicted score climbed to the mid 50s where it stalled again.

One thing this has reinforced is the danger of relying on assumptions and not planning for things to go wrong. If you assume you will sell 1000 widgets and leave no room for selling fewer or more, then you’ll end up in deep doo-doo if your customers only want 500 or if they want 1500. It’s intuitive enough that you’ll be stuffed if you make 1000 widgets and only sell 500 because your fixed costs like staff, rent and insurance stay the same and your income’s gone down. However it’s not as intuitive that only having 1000 widgets if your customers want 1500 will stuff you too, in this case over-time will eat up your profits and if you run out of stock completely as I did in Round 1, you’ll just hand your competitors over to your customers on a plate - in real life you’d never get them all back.

So how did Aphra Inc do in Round 3? AT first sight it looks as if I’ve been over-cautious again; I am certainly solvent, but I could have sold more widgets than I made. This is often described as “a nice problem to have” but in reality it’s still a problem and it means I’m not accurate enough with my forecasting.

My investment in marketing and sales activities is paying off, and the decisions I make are doing a good job of making my original strategy happen. I am pleased to know that I can have a vision of what sort of company Aphra Inc should be, and make the decisions that makes that happen in our little simulated on-line world.

The differences between my predicted results and my actual results this Round show that my financial decisions and marketing decisions were better than predicted, but running out of stock damaged my overall score. The Times have not yet updated the scores published on their results page, so it’s impossible to tell where I rank among the remaining players.

The phrase “could do better” is ringing in my head.

Onwards and onwards.

PS - I’m not the only one focussing on the Balanced Scorecard, The Times today have written up the Balanced Scorecard up in today, with a mention of this very blog!

Alan Bean - fourth man on the moon

Alan Bean is a really lovely guy. He’s witty. He’s fun. He’s funny. He’s impish, which seems an odd word to use about a moon-walker. He was and still is a painstaking professional, but I like the fact that some of the guys on the moon liked to play about and kick back a bit. The humour is only part of it though: he was changed by walking on the moon, changed in profound ways it seems, but he wears that profundity lightly and with grace.

There were a few hundred of us in a shabby, battered, over-lit, over-heated school hall. It was grubbily mundane. I liked that though because it threw the focus of the evening firmly on the man and what he had to say. I wonder what he made of it.

He spoke for about an hour about our place in the universe, about NASA and the Apollo missions, about the fact that the first man on the moon could have been Pete Conrad or David Scott, Thomas Stafford or Gordo Cooper, James Lovell or John Young, that NASA simply pushed for the next step and the next step each time, and the fact it was Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 was hapenstance. He spoke about the training they did, learning to become geologists and rehearsing all the tasks of each of the EVAs in Iceland, Mexico and Hawaii. He spoke about training to be in 1/6th gravity and what is is like to be there. He suggested that the Olympics should be held on the moon, simply because it would be such fun for the athletes to jump around in 1/6th G. He spoke about fear and how he handled it, about being so very far from home. He spoke with enormous generosity about his fellow astronauts. He told us about the work NASA is doing, on a shoestring, to try to get us back there.

The Apollo 12 team were close, closer than many of the Apollo crews perhaps, and one gets the feeling that Pete Conrad and Alan Bean in particular, as well as being supreme professionals, were … naughty. The painting which moved me the most was Bean’s fantasy of the three of them, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon and himself, together on the moon. Dick Gordon was the most experienced pilot of the three and never landed on the moon - instead he flew the command module which was their only way back. In Bean’s picture, the three of them are posing for an official portrait on the surface of the moon - a fantasy which allowed his friend to share the experience. If you look closely you can see that Bean is holding up two fingers behind his friend’s head, as goofy pals have done since people started taking snapshots.

His art is interesting. It is strongly narrative and highly figurative; chocolate box art telling specific stories. He strives to convey emotion as well as to record events, which is difficult when you cannot show faces and when all the space-suits look the same. His colours are becoming more impressionistic as he develops as an artist; the skies are softer, the moonscapes redder and browner as he conveys the emotions of the event. But what he portrays is - well - alien. Our planet has an atmosphere and is covered in vegetation, so we are used to landscapes in pretty colours. Turner experimented with painting night scenes and Whistler experimented with compositions in black and grey, but most artists deal in light alone, not light and darkness. I suspect that Bean would seem to be a better artist if his subject matter were not visually so bleak. But it is a matter of astonishing serendipity that one of the dozen test pilots who walked on the moon had it in him to transform the experience for us into art.

Bean spoke of the wonder of being here; the wonder and beauty of our day-to-day world. He said that he had come back and never complained about the weather again. He walked on a different world, it was an experience which he has spent the past 37 years coming to understand, he describes it (amongst other things) as “fun”, but while he was in space it seems he was agonisingly homesick too.

He took questions, and distracted himself into answering them fully and at length. We queued for a while for an autograph, the one I went with and I, but the hall was due to close at 10:00 and the queue had not moved at all - I believe it was because Bean was chatting away at length with the first few people who reached the table.

Of all the moon-walkers, I am glad to have seen Alan Bean and heard him speak.

(Apologies for the quality of the photos - it was a large hall and I was using my mobile phone. However they are important to me, which is why I have posted them here.)

Sorting the sheep from the coats

For reasons I am too tired and too crotchety to go into, I have to devise an exercise to kick-off a workshop at work.

The workshop is to define categories of data and the exercise is to intended to make the peeps really feel that there are many different ways to label and sort information. For example, the father of the one who turns up here occasionally organises his books in order of the date first published. I’ve already told you that my former friend Catriona used to arrange hers by colour. Reed tells us that the British Museum rules for sorting anonymous books are “stark staring bonkers“. I group mine by subject so Heinlein sits next to books about the moon-landings. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.

So I have put together two large tupperware boxes of stuff from various drawers, cupboards and shelves, not to mention the garden, for the group to sort. I don’t even know what all of it is, so it should be fun for the peeps to categorise. I wouldn’t like to sort it myself, so I am glad that the whole thing was my idea.

Here is a selection:

Oil paints, fridge magnets, a stone apple, a bit of plastic that broke off my TV, indoor sparklers, an empty tin of peppermints, a full tin of air gun pellets (I’ll probably remove that one because it may upset people), turbine blades, a rusted nut and bolt (that came out of the garden), padlocks, peacock feathers, some pieces of haematite, a hair scrunchy in the yellow and green BP colours, a length of silver coloured cord, a jar of tarragon from Sweden enticingly labelled “dragon”, a thermometer, a compass, a broken mobile phone, ach… you get the idea.

It will be interesting to see whether or not getting the folks to sort them into categories works as a warm-up exercise. I haven’t yet decided whether to give, say, 20 items to each person and get them sorting individually and let the others work out what categories they’ve used, or whether to give the whole lot to the whole group and see what happens. The first will be more controllable but the second might be more instructive.

I still remain slightly startled by just how eclectic my miscellanea are though.

Fantasy CEO - Round 2 Annual Report

First of all, Aphra Inc. very nearly didn’t make it into this round. There was a power cut in the middle of the final “board meeting” (me, my PC and a bunch of printed spreadsheets) and the lights were still out when I got up on Monday.

An emergency board meeting was convened on Monday morning (me, my work PC and the faithful printouts) but it was uncertain if the board were going to be able to implement their decisions (the security guys at work have implemented fearsome controls over downloading and installing stuff). In the event the disaster recovery plan operated smoothly (it was ok, the Excel file is only a file so it made it past the security policies) and the board communicated its decisions successfully. Less flippantly: a word of praise is due here to the help team at MSI - I emailed them in a panic about the power cut and they said they would enter my decisions for me. This is the second time I’ve contacted them and I am genuinely impressed.

I’m nowhere near as far in front of the notional pack this time, but that is not such a surprise. (Remember “the pack” comprises the five dummy hands being played by the computer simulation). I am the third most profitable, in a field of six.

My strategy is to match the products very closely to the customers’ needs, and new products take a while to develop so I was without a High Tech offering until “November”. For the rest of the time I was making do with only one product which was de-tuned especially for the Low Tech market. As a result, I lost market share this round because I missed out on almost all the High Tech market sales. To be honest, that was no surprise - and hopefully it will be worth it to have perfectly pitched products. However, I also underperformed against my potential market share in each segment, which suggests that I missed a trick and should have spent more on marketing and sales.

The main thing I’ve learned so far is the importance of accurate sales forecasting - there’s a limit to how much you can protect yourself with decisions such as how many widgets to make, how much to invest in your factory or in marketing, how much to borrow and where. It’s really clear that if you get your sales forecast wrong you’ll either be deep in red doodoo, or you’ll not manufacture enough and miss sales that way.

Despite these good sales in the Low tech sector, I was the third most profitable company in the group because I invested so much time and money on developing the perfect product for each sector. Next round is key - I really do need to maximise sales and start reaping the rewards.

One good thing about the kerfuffle with the power cut is that I have discovered a whole extra set of results on the Times website. I’m not doing very well on the balanced score card - my scorecard score was 42 out of a possible 82 in Round 1 which is a slither above average and considerably lower than the front runner who’s score was 52. In round two I got 46 out of a possible 89. It is the balanced score card which is used to determine the final results, so in these terms I am depressingly average.

I can see that if I am going to gain real insights then I am going to have to get stuck in to forecasting sales properly and also make the effort to understand how the decisions I make play out against each other and against the balanced scorecard.

In the meantime, here is the Times’s own commentary on the results of Round 1:

The good news is that most people have made a profit. In some cases, quite an impressive profit – the top of the table goes to a player whose $5,209,959 is more than $1,000,000 ahead of the next in line. Towards the bottom end of the table, a handful of people earnt less than $100,000 while one player scraped together only $31,343. Almost a quarter of players went into negative numbers, with the worst loss being $14,201,485

Well, I wasn’t the one who cleared $5,209,959 profit in Round 1 or the person who made over $4 million either, but I did scrape in $2.5 or so which has kept me at the table. Incidentally the field appears to have dropped to about 630 from the 3880 who signed up. Many thanks to “Shane” for converting the Times’ Round 1 spreaddie into something sortable, informative and useful and then emailing it to me.

Man on the Moon

I’m going to hear Alan Bean talk.

Alan Bean is one of the 12 men who have walked on the moon. Only nine of them are still alive.

I was looking on-line for an exhibition which I’d heard mentioned on the radio and couldn’t find it; instead I found that Alan Bean is talking to our local Astronomical Society in a school hall in a medium sized local town. I rang up and - yes - they still had tickets.

I am going to be in the same room as a man who has walked on the moon.

The moon landings are part of who I am and how I think - my mother made me watch them on television and then took me outside and pointed to the sky. “Look” she said, “That is where they are - so very far away.” She fell silent for a second. “I hope they are all right up there”, she added quietly. Lovell, Swigert and Haise of course, very nearly weren’t all right.

Bean walked on the moon for two days in 1969. He was 37 at the time. He was deeply affected by the experience and has spent many of the intervening 38 years creating paintings in which he strives to convey both something of the experience and meaning of being in space. The original paintings include grains of moon dust from his mission badges and are textured using his rock hammer.

When I heard I’d got a ticket to go and see him, I had trouble breathing. I have found it hard to concentrate all afternoon with the giddy excitement of it all.

The moon-walkers were two in a billion, and there are only nine of them left. One day fairly soon there will be one, and then there will be none.

They may be the only members our species to walk on another world; they may be the only creatures in the history of our planet to do so.

To be in the same room as one is a privilege beyond compare.