Julian Le Good
Speaker Topics
Motivation & Performance, Entertainment & Comedy
Locations Covered
- South East
Fees
<£75
Availability
Short Notice
Profile Bio
My name is Julian Le Good, I am a sixty something-ish retired architect. I consider myself fortunate, I trained and spent my early years during a golden age. An age without fax machines, email and mobile 'phones. An age of "double elephant" drawing boards with ebony edges, drawing pens which forever gummed up and erasing machines which burned holes in our drawings.
Coffee breaks, tea breaks ( with trolleys and buns) and Eric's excuses for never coming in on a Monday.
The Royal Institute of British Architects told us that we had five days in which to reply to a letter or respond to a request for information from the builder.
The fax machine reduced that to five hours, the email to five minutes and the mobile to five seconds.
In 1980 Architecture was a profession for gentlemen and gentlewomen, we all knew our place in the construction industry, RIBA stood for "remember I'm the bloomin' architect" . By 2020, what with "Design & Build" and "Novation" it was "Really inferior builders' assistant".
I was one of the fortunate ones, I witnessed the evolution from drawing boards propped up on brick samples, yards, feet & inches via "draughting machines" to Computer Aided Design and 3d Modelling.
I donate all of my fees (less expenses) to Macmillan Cancer Support
Talk Description
A Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man
My talk "A Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man" comprises a stroll back down the corridor of time, pausing briefly to meet the bricklayers who couldn't count, the setting out engineer for whom Pythagoras, the 5,4,3 triangle and the right angle remained a mystery, the Nasty woman who married the Ugly man ( at Buntingford registry office), how to tell the difference between 3 day old concrete and 3 hour old concrete via the foreman who called me "sir" but spelled it "cur".
And what of the office bike, or the rusting Ford Cortina 2000E, Ken's "fornicitorium" , the geese, the dog and the bunnies and the day I met the Queen.
Tony Blair and Tony Blair again, and how we nearly changed the course of history.
I am best contacted on julianlegood59@hotmail.com since Jeoffry Le Chat chewed through the telephone wire.
My life as an architect was one of laughs, misadventure and the absurd. Come, listen & weep.
Other Talks
Surviving Cancer, Surviving Hospital
I first encountered cancer when I was 20. A friend twice my age was dying from it, he made no secret of it. I recall the last evening I spent in his company, he’d long stopped worrying about how many “chasers” he had with his pints, because he wasn’t going to be seeing Christmas.
A week later I said to his brother-in-law, David, how sad I was that Angus had cancer.
David bit my head off “how dare you say he has cancer, Angus has no such thing”.
In my shock and surprise, I rapidly retracted, I apologised, I must have misunderstood.
I realised later that denial, calling it “a long illness bravely born” or “the big C” ( probably worst of all) was just how some people deal with it.
My talk takes a light-handed look at what it’s like to discover you have it, how I dealt with the diagnosis, how I told my friends and family and what hospital was like for me.
I offer some well proven tips for making the hospital experiences as pleasant as possible, how to learn to say no, how to learn to say yes, and what it feels like when treatment ends.
I finish by talking about “second time around “.
Being somebody who laughs in the face of the seriously annoying, and that includes my cancer, my talk is not without humour and my tone won’t appeal to everybody. If that’s the case, just don’t come?
I donate all of my fees (less expenses) to Macmillan Cancer Support