LOVE, LAUGHING, LISTENING AND LUNCH

I have predicted that 2012 will be the year of lunch, of that forgotten art of eating together, playing with ideas and feeding the mind and soul as well as the body. For too long Gekko’s words from Wall Street have coloured our lives. “Lunch is for wimps” he said and sales of Prêt sandwiches soared. We now, typically, stare at screens and don’t talk. We are prepared to embrace the philosophy of the Valley of Austerity just as the prohibitionists embraced moral austerity in America in 1919. My first picture defines that neatly. Although this is a finely wrought spoof it manages to capture the world we could create if we chose this path. No love, no listening, no lunch.

In the party time of the ‘80s we went the other way, as we see, in the “Feast of the Gods” by the wonderfully named Renaissance painter Johann Rottenhammer. This reminds me of the legendary parties we had at the advertising agency FCO when we were producing our most creative work. Odd coincidence that. Lots of love, lots of listening (and talking), lunch never stopped and the work was courageous and alight.

The joy of lunch was best epitomised by Roy Jenkins who revered the ceremony. Our best ever Home Secretary and one of our best writers, he’d down a large amount of claret, captivate conversationally and stroll home to write 5,000 words on Asquith, Baldwin, Churchill, Gladstone, whoever. Without lunch Roy Jenkins would have been a lesser person. So here is a vision of lunch in the sun about to happen. Eighteen people about to sit and eat, laugh, love and listen. And do one other thing. Think.

I give you the lunch party as an altogether better way to run the world than the introspective structures we currently have. And if you believe creativity is what really makes the difference (”the last legal way to gain an unfair advantage” as Maurice Saatchi put it) start filling the 1230-230 slots in your diary. It may make you a little rounder and a lot more cheerful; it’ll also, make you a better person. Bon appétit or if you prefer mahlzeit, pofta buna or smaklig måltid.

HAVE YOURSELF A VERY TERRY CHRISTMAS

Racial abuse is big news right now. Luis Suarez, the Liverpool footballer, has been banned for eight matches for calling Patrice Evra “negrito” (a neutrally factual term in Uruguay he claimed). John Terry has been charged with racial abuse by the Crown Prosecution Service for calling Anton Ferdinand a “black c***” – but note it’s not the “c” word that’s provoked the storm. Be very careful not to argue with the Times leader on Thursday which said “Kick racism out – racial abuse cannot be countenanced”. Look at Sepp Blatter’s battering (battering Blatter though is fair game) for downplaying the whole concept. A post-match handshake would sort out any misunderstanding he suggested. Flogging, crucifixion, disembowelling would not be too bad for thoughts expressed so vilely. And now Aidan Burley Tory MP is going to be prosecuted in France for going to a party where people dressed as Nazis. What a prat. Why bother the lawyers? I want to describe the two occasions when I was racially abused. The first was when I played cricket for a team where I was one of only two white guys playing for my team. We played against another team that I think was totally Afro Caribbean and Asian. I batted three. As I walked out early to bat the mutter went round “watch out for dat honky bastard”. As a succession of quick, short pitched deliveries peppered me accompanied with cries of “murder de whitey” and so on, something strangely powerful happened to me igniting my competitive instincts. It was one of my better innings because I had fun, irritated them and I felt I’d been put on trial and survived. Bruised and laughing. The second was in Osaka when a colleague and I were unceremoniously ejected from a “no-gaijan” bar. He being South African was especially outraged and described my phlegmatic response as being “Uncle Tom-ism”. I felt slightly irritated but glad to know what it felt like being discriminated against for having a big nose and smelling of cheese. We need to be intolerant of racism but careful not to let words change our world. The 1955 film “The Dam Busters” still earns plaudits apart from Richard Todd’s final words addressed to his Black Alsatian “Come on Nigger”. My uncle, Walter Mycroft wrote the screenplay. He’d be sent to gaol if he wrote that now, unless of course he was black. Happy, diverse, tolerant and racism-free Christmas…oh and make that New Year and forever too. Ice Cold in Alex Man Friday

DING DONG MERRILY - ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

I sent a Christmas Card this year produced by Private Eye which had a group of snowmen sitting around a boardroom table one of whom was gloomily intoning “Gentlemen I think we’re heading for a meltdown”. Thus we read in the Sunday Times article “Nightmare before Christmas” all about the retail bloodbath with rucksacks and thongs in the news…..Black’s Leisure and La Senza apparently on the brink. Meanwhile the Foreign Office is working on advanced plans to evacuate over 1 million Britons living in Spain and Portugal who may have their savings frozen in failing banks and be thrown from their mortgaged villas on to unswept and potholed streets because yes, the end of the Euro-world is nigh. Tragedy was heaped on tragedy as the rumbustious polemicist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens handed in his dinner pail and got two double page spreads in the Times. The Queen Mother didn’t even get that. Hitchens was quoted “The four most overrated things in the world are champagne, lobster anal sex and picnics”. All of them are highly rated here in Brighton – although it’s agreed here that lobster is, perhaps, a bit over hyped. None of this is very Christmassy all this is it? Yet I’ve heard more good singing in the past few weeks than for a long time and I’ve laughed more. I laughed at the story in Stephen Pile’s story in his Book of Heroic Failures about an opera in Wexford thirty years ago on a sloping stage covered in marbled formica. This proved so slippery that the first singer slipped fell and slid rapidly towards the orchestra pit but hung on to be swiftly joined by another singer who suffered the same plight. Locked in embrace on the brink of the stage (not in the script) they carried on singing. The moral of that story which made me laugh out loud was their professionalism was not daunted by the minor mishap of a stumble. The show went on. As our show will. And I realised as I was laughing why the whole Euro farce has been pissing me off so mightily. No sense of humour. Have you ever seen a Belgian laugh? Name a comedian from Luxemburg or Lithuania. And satire’s role in France died with Voltaire. The last words, as they should, belong to Christopher Hitchens. “Alcohol makes people less tedious and food less bland and can help provide what the Greeks call ‘entheos’, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing”. Cheers and Happy Christmas.

SPLENDID ISOLATION

Presumably this shows why the debate in Brussels was so important….incidentally Paris came 24th
 The top twenty financial centres in the latest index (GFCI 10) which was published in September 2011 are:

	GFCI 10 Rank	GFCI 10 Rating	GFCI 9 Rank	GFCI 9 Rating	Change in Rank	Change in Rating
London	1	774	1	775	-	-1
New York	2	773	2	769	-	+4
Hong Kong	3	770	3	759	-	+11
Singapore	4	735	4	722	-	+13
Shanghai	5	724	5	694	-	+30
Tokyo	6	695	5	694	+1	+1
Chicago	7	692	7	673	-	+19
Zurich	8	686	8	665	-	+21
San Francisco	9	681	13	655	-4	+26
Toronto	10	680	10	658	-	+22
Seoul	11	679	16	651	-5	+28
Boston	12	678	12	656	-	+22
Geneva	13	672	9	659	+4	+13
Washington DC	14	670	17	650	-3	+20
Sydney	15	669	10	658	+5	+11
Frankfurt	16	667	14	654	+2	+13
Vancouver	17	661	22	626	-5	+35
Melbourne	18	656	24	621	-6	+35
Beijing	19	655	17	650	+2	+5
Montreal	20	652	26	615	-6	+37

HOW SPLENDID IS ISOLATION?

We all get a warm feeling being elected to a club or being picked to play in a cricket or football team. It’s good being wanted. Winning the struggle to get a good job because they prefer you to the other guys or quite simply being a popular person matters.

Don’t be embarrassed.

We all want to be liked.

So what happened in Brussels last week was very uncomfortable. We were cast out. Like Judas. We were the lonely 1 out of 27 - although I do wish that David Cameron had swaggered more instead of looking apologetic and sorry for himself. He needed to look as though he was right and they were wrong which for month after month they have been.

Trouble is it keeps on happening to us. A few months ago it was FIFA kicking dust in our face with Sebb Blatter asserting his corrupt right to rule and now this.

But the 5th biggest economy in the world is Germany, followed at joint 6th by the UK and trailed by France at 9th and Italy at 10th. Yes we are that important.

So the real tragedy here is for the EU who, in not wooing and, yes, making concessions to the UK, the second biggest economy in greater Europe, and thereby persuading us  to play a big front of stage part in solving the Euro-crisis, has now almost certainly led to the crash of their doomed currency. Especially as France who seemed pretty pleased about (as they saw it) seeing off Britain, are rumoured to be likely to lose their triple “A” credit rating this week.

It’s important to realise that Europe contrived to exclude us not vice versa.

You will gather I am not an entire fan of France but to be fair their President has just four more months before elections that look likely to unseat him and he’s tried to play the “see how I beat Britain” card as a desperate political stratagem.

But it still feels lonely and rancorous for us today. It’s not nice being blamed and being told, as Paddy Ashdown did, that forty years of foreign policy had gone down the plughole in a single night and being told off by the Lithuanian Prime Minister.

But how isolated will we be in the end?

The last words on that go to Terry Smith CEO of Tullett Prebon the broker…
“…as isolated as somebody who refused to join the Titanic just before it sailed”.

ISN'T IT TYPICAL?

From time to time I sound off about negative thinking and that idiotically masochistic desire for failure. Austerity Britain’s icy fingers beckon us towards the lost decade of misery. At least that’s what the media says. Great headline – “Lost Decade”….

But it was a friend who’d been so ill she’d spent a week in bed to make me realise Radio 4 has to go or just has to be sorted out (Chris Patten are you listening?) She said she had to switch to the cheerfulness of Radio 3 to escape the sneers and sardonic pessimism of the Today programme. And it’s contagious. I listened to the Archers the other day. They’re all candidates for Dignitas.

Yet the rest of us are fine.

The News of the World’s used to claim “all human life is here”. Apparently not, nor in the Sun, Mirror, Mail, Express and the rest (all being daily spanked in the Leveson enquiry with worse to follow for them) because the office for National Statistics have just published “life satisfaction” figures for April-October 2011 of 7.3 out of 10 (with a slightly higher score for a sense of “what I do (overall) being worthwhile”) and for “satisfaction with personal relationships” being a quite storming A* 8.3.

Either these figures are being cooked, which I doubt, or a tranche of would-be opinion formers are doing what they do best “whingeing”. And to borrow from Jeremy Clarkson what we should do is shoot them because such doom-mongers are dangerous.

But as they whinge we are all pretty cheerful. And here’s how to get even better.

Swear.

Not a lot (too much swearing is self-neutralising) but do it with emphatic rage when you do. Research at Keele University proves swearing (in moderation) is a “stress-induced analgaesic” – so every time you say the “f” word equates to taking a Nurofen.

Another reason to be cheerful, I’m told, is the long overdue reduction in University applications – down in England by 15% - but also down in Scotland where it’s still free - by 16%. So it might not just be a fee related decline then whingers ? Prod, prod!

It’s time to stop the complainers confusing us with their misery and time to enjoy our personal relationships and the joy of reflecting on how to simplify our lives, spend a bit less and a bit better.