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“My last year at BP, I made 52 round trip flights – 45 of them outside of Europe. I went to China three times without staying overnight. It was a way of life which required great stamina. You have to look after your health, and of course, you have to be lucky too,” he says. “The second thing you need is total application, and you can forget about work/life balance. I worked at least six days a week and most evenings. You have to love it to do it. It’s back to what I learned at Dame Allan’s, you have to generate community around you. The biggest achievement was that I kept my wife and family together because there was an awful lot of people who didn’t. “You also need a lot of courage to get to the top. You have to force yourself to go into very uncomfortable places, such as if you’re having to make cutbacks and jobs have to go. It’s not a nice thing to do but it has to be done.” Reflecting on advice he would give pupils thinking of their next steps, he says to choose a career that they love. “Don’t do it because there’s a lot of money in it, because you’re going to be doing it your whole adult life and you have to look forward to going into work in the morning,” he says. “It’s going to be miserable if you don’t enjoy what you do in an area which interests you.”
Today, Sir Bryan still lives in London with his Finnish-born wife, Sirkka, and loves nothing more than spending time with children, Peter and Christina, and their five grandchildren, alongside tending to his beloved garden. At almost 85, he is incredibly active still with charitable and board work (and watching too much football, he says), and, of course, is President of the Allanian Society. And while he’s come a long way from his Boldon roots, it’s clear he remains incredibly passionate about the North East. “The North East has that sort of identity to it, you’re just born with it and when I return to it, I still feel at home there. I’ve had the same sense of humour and the same contempt for upper class southerners since I left,” he says laughing. “It’s deeply ingrained!”
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