WHAT'S NEXT?

I once worked with someone in advertising whose philosophy was that nothing ever changed much and, if it did, the pendulum would pretty quickly move back. A lot of clients found this conservatism reassuring. Meanwhile I preached apocalyptic visions, disruption and dystopia which some clients viewed somewhat warily.

My visions have mostly turned out to be in line with what’s actually happened but, of course, being right is only half the story. So when my son-in-law said he’d been at a conference where a famous economist with a name ending in “-inski “ had given a riveting presentation about the Armageddon we’d be facing by 2030, I was intrigued. I glanced at it – it was long and full of numbers and graphs. Principally it focused on our collapsing under debt and a remorselessly adverse demography of more older people. Like all economist his models were based on extrapolating trends.

It was clever stuff for sure and well-argued but something clicked in my mind. It was my disruption button.  I have this distaste for the belief that bigger is better or that you can persuade people to do things through financial incentives or that the numbers tell much of the story.

First of all the demography myth. We live in a world where the best medical minds are stymied. All antibiotics have lost their mojo. Ebola is sweeping the Congo and Uganda and a mystery illness in East Anglia is striking down old people. I suspect it’ll be the old who get whacked by all this hardest. I talked to a medical journalist about this who said grimly “don’t go anywhere near a hospital; that’s where these new bugs thrive.” 

So let’s reduce those population extrapolations. Chances are there’ll be some natural pruning.

Next politics. Not really politics so much as culture. The Green Movement, a bit like Me-Too or the anti-tobacco lobby, has acquired an unstoppable momentum, most obviously amongst the young but now older people are changing their minds too. This is not a one-off.  Everything that happens in Europe – currently the second biggest economy in the world -  will be determined by green thinking over the next decade.

Finally where does the future lie? Asia and Africa currently account for ¾ of the world’s population and they, not the USA or Europe, will drive the global agenda. We in the West are like the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Persians over 2,500 years ago. We’re running out of runway. We’ve had our day. Neither yearning for past glories or hoping radical change won’t continue, will be much use. Disruption? You bet, a big disruption but not necessarily a disaster.

Our next decade should be the most interesting for a very long time.

Meanwhile listening to our current politicians is increasingly irrelevant as they seem determined to build debt and revert to Victoriana.

But if we become greener, cleaner, less obsessed with money and more focused on building a kinder, better society we’ll be on the right track.

CRISIS. DISASTER. DOOMED

It’s Wednesday and there’s no electricity. The pubs are shut. There’s no TV. Half the country is in revolt.  They’re talking about martial law.

What was it like? In the early months of the Miners’ Strike of 1972 it was actually rather wonderful. We sat around, drank and talked by candlelight. In the background we listened to the Stones and were glad to be alive in a civilised world.  The media were in paroxysms about the impending Armageddon but all else was relatively calm. The art of conversation reached new heights. We demonstrated nothing could blunt our appetite for living, loving and laughing.

So over 40 years ago I realised the three-day-week-crisis was not such a big deal after all. We even survived the inflation rates of 27% a few years later when there were typically two or three price increases a year and wage rises to match. Out there the world had surely gone mad but we all survived cushioned by friendship and our self-belief.

In 2002 when the Firefighters went on strike and the Green Goddesses manned by the armed forces were called into action it seemed like the world was falling apart (again).

It was then at a cocktail party at Lambeth Palace I ended any chance of ever working with or speaking again to the then Conservative MP Archie Norman who declared “I fear Britain’s now ungovernable” at which I burst out laughing and said “don’t be ridiculous”.

The point is that life moves on and as Churchill recognised so vividly you have to be patient and keep going. Alistair Campbell when Communications Director in Tony Blair’s office said wisely when yet another crisis blew up…”it will pass”. And of course it always did. What history cannot teach us is just how terrifying and raw these crises seem at the time. How do human beings recover from the loss of a partner or anyone close; from  injury or bankruptcy; from the loss of their job? Well they do (generally) and they do because human beings are very resilient. But they are also extremely dramatic and avidly seek out headlines or, in the case of our favourite Commander-in-Chief, create their own.

I have been a rather blasé spectator to decades of life-changing crises, almost always “the most important/dangerous/ruinous/catastrophic in the history of our nation/mankind”. We all thrive on it. In Italy they used to have a paper called La Domenica del Corriere  the raison d’être of which was disasters – train crashes, horrible murders, death by foul and unnatural means. It was very popular.

But very few of these crises have actually been life changing. A government falls, a President is replaced, a financial meltdown is averted, a union becomes disunited yet the sun rises and we try to do something extraordinary again. Whatever happens we’ll  be OK. And as Leonard Cohen said:

“When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.”

GET OVER IT - IT'S JUST A BIT CHILLY

I don’t know if you ever saw “The Day After Tomorrow” a 2004 film about a superstorm that engulfed the Northern Hemisphere in a second ice age.  North America is evacuated  and its population flees south to Mexico which, in delicious irony, closes its borders. Apart from Dennis Quaid the cast is pretty well unknown and looks convincingly chilly…that’s a post- apocalyptic New York below.

I was gripped by the plausibility of the horror when I saw it…at least the first part… as the storm did its work.

Last week I thought about the film again as the Siberian weather swept across Britain in what seemed like a kind of divine punishment for prevarication on Brexit. There was a photograph of the snow clouds hitting London that CGI couldn’t have bettered.

My first pragmatic reactions to all the fuss was to behave like Dennis Quaid – called Jack Hall in the film – a great name for a hero – and get out and teach the beast a lesson.

Life had to go on as usual. But then I slipped on black ice near the house and in a graceless pratfall landed on my head on the tarmac. A real banana skin moment when your life flashes before you accompanied by a symphony of bad language. I limped home to sympathy and a ban on going out until the ice had gone.

So life has slowed down and I’ve been thinking about how much better we’ve got at dealing with disaster. There’s a myth that amongst we overly self-critical  Brits that we can’t cope with a bit of “weather”. Just go to Germany or America when the weather turns nasty. They stay at home apart from the odd intrepid skier. Their world stops. I’ve been impressed by our weather forecasts , by the frequency of updates and by how hard the transport system has tried to keep up with the game.

Maybe we should all take stock.

We are such a miserable bunch sometimes. Yet we are one of the most resourceful and independently minded countries in the world. Let’s use this climatic hiatus to plan what our business will do that’s amazing this summer. Or what painting, poem or novel we’re going to create.

The prospects for tomorrow are so amazing that my head hurts…or maybe that’s just the tarmac speaking to me.

Storm Emma  is on the way and all I can think about is that irritating minx Jane Austen’s heroine Emma Woodhouse whose sickly father Mr Woodhouse is one of my favourite, ghastly, self-obsessed characters in literature. His attitude to alcohol is especially irksome:

“… what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half-glass, put into a tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you."

But there isn’t anything that weather can throw at us – we Jack Halls – that we can’t deal with – after all this is just a bit chilly. Nothing to worry about.