SUNSHINE, LOLLIPOPS AND RAINBOWS...

This 1965 Lesley Gore song kept on coming into my head this week on my relentless crusade to cheerfulness. But even I have to admit the next line was rather cheesy

“Everything that's wonderful is what I feel when we're together.”

Provided, that is, there aren’t more than six of us. I thought this rule of six was sensible by the way – six is the perfect number for a supper. But…big but… we have a daughter and son in law with three children. I plan on sitting in the car outside their house waiting for my wife (or Number Six as she is now known). 

We had a glorious week. I’m reading again, at last – John Le Carré’s latest ‘Agent Running in the Field’ and ‘Hamnet’ the prize winning novel about Shakespeare’s son who dies when he was 11 by Maggie O’Farrell. 

I’ve walked – not much but the armchair is beginning to regard me now as something of a stranger. We’ve flirted with the idea of a lightning visit to Venice but the risks, as Covid spikes suddenly all over Europe, just seem too great and too unfair. Anyway what’s Venice like right now? 

Clear water in the  canals, emptyish squares. Venice as it was 50 years ago. But public feelings are running high. We read about a young German tourist who tried to board a vaporetto at San Zaccaria near San Marco…without a mask. Here are the rules in Venice and all Italy: “In Italy, masks are mandatory on all public transport, as well as in enclosed spaces. They must also be worn in outdoor spaces between the hours of 6pm and 6am.”

He was seized by outraged passengers and thrown off. Three times he tried to board and was beaten up each time until, bewildered, he fled. 

So instead of us going to Venice, Venice came to us. I decided we should have Fegato alla Veneziano – Venetian style calves liver strips in onions. If you don’t like liver you just won’t understand. Cin Cin. Yum Yum.

We also went to the glorious Leonardslee at Lower Beeding and drank in the tranquillity and glory of their trees especially those glorious Redwoods. So tall they put everything into perspective. It was like giving your soul a languorous, hot, soapy bath I suggested. My wife eyed me suspiciously at this with a “have you been drinking again?” look. So I modified it to “Pleasant here isn’t it?” Suspicion allayed.

My joys of the week were, first of all, the threatened prospect of the Shetland Islands declaring UDI and leaving Scotland. With a population of just 22,000, GDP over £1 billion, per capita income over £38k, rated the 3rd most desirable tourist destination by National Geographic Magazine, having a huge fishing industry and oil reserves shoving it up alongside Norway this is such a great story. Not for Nicola though.

My second was to learn very belatedly that John Lennon had a lengthy affair with Alma Cogan singer of songs like ‘You must never do a Tango with an Eskimo.’ Imagine! 

My week like all weeks had its lows as well as highs. The first was the reaction to the US election with so many people lamenting even the possibility of Trump winning again.  Why I asked if you all cared so much did you end up with a potential loser like Joe Boden, nice man as he may be? I felt vindicated as, in the polls the Latino vote in Florida seemed to be slipping to Trump. But I also felt sad and irritated. With the lead they had months ago this is the Democrats election to lose. And it’s getting closer.

Secondly it was the horror show of Philip Green in shorts on his monster yacht. Men in shorts seldom please the eye. Philip least of all. 

ONLY 36 INCHES FROM REVIVAL

I have been working on and thinking a lot about managing risk over the past week. I recall the wonderfully acerbic H.L. Mencken‘s words:

“the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Life is risky. If we try to eliminate all risk we’ll stay in bed. Don’t drive – 27,000 die or are seriously injured every year on the roads.

Don’t go in the kitchen – fires, fingers sliced off, slipping on spilt liquid – the place is a death trap. Don’t play football – as many as one in five suffer a serious injury sometime. Don’t be born – 600,000 people die in the UK every year.

To be alive is to be at constant risk. Yet our human strategy has always been to manage risk not to avoid it. If there were no risktakers there’d be no new products, new companies or discoveries. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit that makes being a human so worthwhile . Yet…back to Mencken… this global pandemic globally reflected his cynical observation.

A culture of risk aversion, almost comic indecisiveness and panic interviewing of anyone who has the willingness to appear on radio or TV and say something different especially attacking the government (not that they deserve any praise, just a bit less mindless kicking).

OK smartarse so what would you do?

Mostly not pretend there was one foolproof plan (how can there be when no one really understands this virus?) nor would I let clever but uncertain experts divert me from one key strategy.
We have got to get the economy moving much faster. To spend so much money just putting it into hibernation has been perverse.

OK how?

One thing I’d do is abandon that two metre rule. The WHO recommend one metre and only two countries advocate two metres. The UK and Spain (the 4th and 5th worst performers in terms of deaths per million). So that didn’t work too well. Current risk aversion would suggest we extended not reduced it.

If instead we reduced it by 36 inches to one metre we could open pubs, restaurants and the tourist economy might start purring into life. Is it a risk? Of course it is. It’s a manageable risk and one we should take.

Unless the towns come back to life it’s hard to start the rest of the economy. And if they do revive a strategy of awakening a dozy, just-had-a-lovely sabbatical workforce is easier to achieve.
The fear and alarm about Covid19 needs to be cooled and proportionate – here in Brighton the incidence has been low. The hospitals have not been and are not overrun. We have to balance risk and reward.

I am not advocating recklessness but we cannot nor should we try to exclude all risk. If we do we shall give up our humanity, our economy and our children’s future.

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

There aren’t many reasons if you read the Guardian, the paper to read if you want to know what’s wrong with the world and why it’s a disgrace, and in which we read last week that we must steel ourselves against the likelihood that a vaccine will be discovered or the other gloom merchant who suggested this was all a rehearsal for “the big one” as in the Spanish Flu epidemic when the second spike in 1918 was much worse and much more deadly than the first one.

We are all doomed and if we don’t behave as though we are, we should be very ashamed. Pubs, clubs, churches are all closed and the sound of laughter is quelled. And we say we are following the science – as Matthew Parrish noted putting “the” in front institutionalizes it and gives it a phoney importance. The Law. The Church. The News. “The” makes anything it’s attached to more formidable hence “the wife” is more fearsome than “my wife”. Well the science is very different in three countries all with comparable death rates. In Sweden the science says ‘no lockdown’ and saunters off to the pub for a
beer.

In Belgium the science says ‘let’s stop the lockdown very soon’ and gets dressed up for a night out...roll out the barrel. In the UK the Scots and Welsh declare scientific independence because they want to show they can (their science) and England says the science says stay put and no giggling or having fun. But why can’t we be cheerful?

We ‘re having a record Spring ... forget Chaucer’s ‘sweet showers’ this is very bliss.

The birdsong is a harmony few of us have listened to before.  Consumption of alcohol has boomed by over 30% and according to the Sunday Times casual sex has peaked and Fifty Shades of Play has become a new norm amongst the young. Working from home has many unthought of benefits “Sorry Tom I’ll have to call you back I’m a bit tied up at the moment”.

Food is high on our agendas helped by the enterprising Mr Oliver, “rip it up, bung it in use a carrot or a tomato just use what you’ve got in the Fridge”. Just try his sausage, apple, onion and shaved parsnip melange – it’s scrumptious. Jamie makes the word caramelized sound so erotic.

As regards work I cannot believe command-and-control organisations with huge open-plan offices can survive.

Perhaps the most cheering thing has been to hear the O2 has been taken over and dressed up as a hospital in which 1800 people are being trained to be ready for work in the new Nightingale Hospital.

Inspiring I’m told.

Perhaps we truly are reaching towards a better world, one less travelled in which people are more respected. And of course if you’ve just lost someone or something dear to you I’m deeply sorry.
One thing’s for sure. Time doesn’t travel backwards so we cannot go back. Just forwards – positively.

TALKING 'BOUT MY GENERATION....

I noticed something about four weeks ago. People whom I met would stop 10 feet away cock their head on one side and murmur “how are you dear?” And as I bellowed that I was tremendously well they’d shake their head pityingly and walk away saying “do take care”.

If you are over 70, you’re  going to die and probably quite soon. Grey hair is a giveaway like a facial rash of livid red spots once was. That’s why I’m thinking about buying a Harley Davidson. To make a point.

This iconic and successful brand in the early days thought its sales success was owing to hairy biker and ravers like Pete Townshend (the Who – now 74). But research showed the most important purchasers were middle-aged accountants who wanted to drive noisily through towns, crouched over the handlebars, frightening people.

The Government is thinking of easing the lockdown in cohorts ending with the 70+ and those who are very vulnerable until well, possibly Autumn 2021, when a vaccine may be available.
I’ve always deplored antisemitism (or racism of any kind). But I’m now a victim of ageism and I don’t like it. (“Don’t you dear? Sit down – you’ll feel better.”)

I particularly deplored an article by Philip Collins in the Times who advanced the argument roughly thus: we boomers had, through house price-inflation achieved extreme wealth  through doing nothing and should jolly well move out, give back the money and go into a care home.

Sorry Philip …I struggle for the right word . Not sure but I think it’s bollocks.

We are the same age as the US President, his likely opponent in the forthcoming Presidential election and the Pope. Warren Buffett for goodness sake  is 89 and he’s not exactly a slouch.

We must look at history to see what our lazy generation achieved.  In 1959 our Prime minister Harold MacMillan said “you’ve never had it so good”. But let’s face it the bar was very low.

We were pretty well bankrupt.
Top of the Hit Parade was a piano piece by Russ Conway called “Side Saddle”.
Our banking sector was fragmented and parochial.
Advertising was controlled by the Americans.
The money spent on house improvement, self-improvement, fashion and fitness was negligible.

But things changed. We spent wealth we earned on improving things. Here’s a glimpse of the growth post 1959 we achieved.

Output adjusted for inflation and measured in 2013 prices

World leaders in advertising,  creative writing, comedy and in  theatre,  (briefly) in fashion, world leaders in grocery retailing, European leaders in banking, global top capital city, top football league our Premier Division, four of the world’s top universities and in civilisation.

Don’t say we were lazy. The last half century has been the sweatiest and most creative in our history.
Today we are back, maybe nearer to 1959 than we’d like to believe. The new generation has to do what we did all over again.

Hopefully with our help - unless we’ve been put in care homes of course.

This could be an adventure. And we know how to do it…..because we’ve done it.

SPRING IS SPRUNG, THE GRASS IS RIZ....

The current lockdown is creating problems. Government, and through them the police, have powers not seen since the Second World War. Sometimes this goes awry as when a police constable, surely not destined for early promotion, was recorded in York rebuking people for sitting in their own front garden and when park benches have been taped up.

My own recent experience in our private, communal garden has thrown up two, differing views. Most stridently, the need to rigorously enforce government guidance, limit the time people can spend outside and restrict the extent of children playing.

Less stridently but just as insistently the need to apply common sense, respect for one another and to enjoy the weather and the beauty of Spring. Freedom first. Control second.

Everyone I know has applied social distancing, social isolation and caution. What’s impressed me most  is the speed with which a large number of retailers have adapted their businesses to home delivery services.
Points of view from Mark Ritson, a former professor of marketing and a writer for Marketing  Week, are usually insightful and useful. He consistently and punishingly puts social media in its place. He praises well-thought-through brand strategy. His weakness is he swears so much. Saying fuck a lot isn’t very professorial.

He’s written recently to say nothing will f**** ** change after coronavirus ends. We shall revert  – as ever –  “back to normal.” This is not an academic reflection it’s a self- opinionated thinker swotting a fly. Mark is the Nigel Farage of business thinking. Sometimes right, often wrong, always abrasive. But things will change – not for everyone, obviously -  but enough to create a seismic trend to society. Here are a few possibilities:
- The economy – the worst recession since 1930. Some say a “scale disaster.”
- Our attitude to the environment. A big bonus.
- Our shopping habits.
- Commuting behaviour and attitudes to working from home.

- A boom in start-up businesses (partly because of unemployment increases.)
- More businesses thinking the unthinkable and pivoting.
- Less marketing or as it’s now described “colouring in” (sorry again Mark).

I was recently asked if I thought the surprising surge in the FTSE might be caused by markets anticipating a postponement or cancellation of Brexit.

I said that I thought Brexit was irrelevant but, more importantly, so increasingly  was the EU. Rich and relatively Covid-free Germany is proving intransigent to the pleas from Italy, Spain and – increasingly – France to help their neighbours. As a one-time ‘remainer’ and Europhile I’m sad to see this. Unless the rich can help their struggling partners and act like part of  a  ‘Union’ the EU seems rather pointless.

Do I sound grumpy?

Tom Stoppard noted that social distancing legitimised the way he always wanted to live. Part of me agrees with that. But it’s been such a gorgeous Spring I’ve forgotten how awful it must be living in a city.

And isn’t Spring amazing?

It’s dem birdies.

1 + 1 = BANANA

I read a teasing piece about poor Diane Abbott this week. I find now as Labour party regimes change that I miss her good heartedness and her arithmetical loopiness. She once missed out some noughts in describing how much a proposed recruitment of police officers would cost annually allowing her interviewer to splutter:

“So you’re going to pay them just £300 a year each?!”

The piece I refer to said:

“Diane Abbott says she has symptoms of Covid eleventy eight.”

We are living in arithmetically lunatic times. Imperial College who’ve been in the forefront of mathematical modelling for Coronavirus, overruling the government experts and winning the  battle for data salience have come out with a variety of numbers.

Their estimates that really hit the headlines with a bang were 500,000 would die unless the strategy changed; then  20,000 would die if it did change and now that  2,000 might die adding that was because the strategy they’d urged was working.

Let’s put this into perspective. Annual deaths in the UK are some 550,000 of which some 17,000 on average are from ‘normal’ flu.

If the current catastrophe is less devastating than ‘normal’ flu by that margin why am I incarcerated, forced by fear to drink my wine supply as rapidly as I can. What a ghastly epitaph this would be: “He left most of the wine he had untouched. His last words ‘bring me a very large bottle of claret’ were unheeded as he was judged delirious.”

Delirious?  I was furious.

But arithmetical insanity reaches new depths when it comes to money. Our new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak (a winner if ever saw one) pulled off an astonishing coup in delivering a budget, an update a few days later and then a further two updates with numbers as I recall of borrowings from £12 billion to £200 billion to £500 billion to “Infinity billion”.

He was trumped by the American President a few days later with a two trillion dollar bail-out for America and a demand that the country got back to work by Easter.

Biden is still ahead in the polls but the results are volatile and Trump keeps on slipping closer or, more likely old Jo will slip behind. If he wins he’ll be 78 – I’m younger than that and regarded as “at risk” and if the truth be known probably gaga – “fetch me my claret nurse”.

Not to be outdone China will doubtless come up with a quadrillion bail-out next.

A quadrillion looks like this; 1,000,000,000,000,000

Yes guys it’s roll-over Saturday.

In the UK, for laudable reasons,  we are taking on unbelievable debt. But do we realise what follow?
Well someone soon  has to pay for all this, and that someone is you and me. On my shaky calculations (I’m in the Diane Abbott league arithmetically) we’ll need to find just over £23,000 per working person in the UK to pay that off.

Arithmetic? We are heading for capital ‘A’ austerity again. Capisci?

WHAT'S NEXT?

I constantly hear people saying “when things get back to normal…” but normal is history now, there is going to be a new-normal not an old one.

Coronavirus is forcing us to re-appraise our relationships, our behaviour and our attitudes. And as we do this there’s one thing that deeply worries me. Most people are not going to die prematurely, especially if they’re young and healthy. The sun is shining and we’re on holiday…an enforced one for sure but think about it as a holiday.

My concern is the mix of terror, depression and hopelessness not least when experts say this could last months or even years.

Let’s see what could follow in the aftermath in our brave, new world.

Working from home. Tell me the commuters from Britain are going to accept back-to-normal commuting. Big office blocks will be redundant. Crowded city centres are going to  be less appealing. As London – the world’s number one city – is destroyed as we knew it – are all those shops going to re-open fast or ever? Levelling up the UK economy will be done in a way that few people had expected. Everyone who can will work at home.

The economy. A new economic economy. Fewer flights. Smaller airports  (doesn’t a third Heathrow runway sound ridiculous today?) Anyone for a cruise? Don’t be silly. A sabbatical year travelling. Nope. A year working in a hospital instead. An economy of less and better. Am economy designed to crush poverty by awarding everyone a basic living wage. Will people stop working if given this – of course not. They’ll work because they want to. Work won’t just be for money.

Ageing. For years we’ve applauded the increasing length of people’s lives. Deaths from coronavirus are relatively small and are unlikely to exceed 20,000 in the UK which is horrible but still only 3.6% of the normal annual mortality rate. I loved the view of an old person I met who said smoking and drinking  heavily was the way forward for the aged.

Shopping. There’s been too much buying of “stuff”. We all know that. Hearing about a man being violently mugged in Haywards Heath for the kitchen rolls he was carrying is comic (unless you were the bruised and bleeding victim). Supermarkets and especially those out-of-town hypermarkets seem like dinosaurs. Markets and corner shops, your time is now if you can rise to the challenge.

Going out. Cineworld, that cinema-multiscreen complex has of course closed but was closing for business anyway in normal times. Small comfortable cinemas yes, big ones no. Big is going to become an old-world word. Big companies; big targets; big shops; big salaries; big offices; big houses. John Lewis closed all their stores last week. How many will ever reopen? Going out is more likely to be into the country or to the seaside not to towns.

Education. Will we see any more GCSEs or SATS being held? Will we (maybe) start to educate children rather than constantly test them? Will using Skype or Zoom become the most important teaching aid? We can now think more about how we can revive arts teaching and discover how to, as that genius educational expert Sir Ken Robinson begged for, liberate rather the crush creativity in the young.

Health. It’s been a really tough time for germs. 60,000,000 people in the UK are washing their hands constantly. The nation’s health (coronavirus apart) has never looked more promising. Ditto air quality. (Go back to school, Greta, when it opens. Your work is done)

Home. Everyone I know is tidying up and throwing away all those things  they’ve squirrelled away for ages. They’re also redecorating and investing in new things they’d meant to replace ages ago. Good news for anything to do with cooking, relaxing sleeping. We can anticipate a run on beds soon. We’re all going to get to know our homes rather well and feel how important they are and not just a staging post. People won’t want to sell and the value of houses will plummet.

Holidays. No. Not for a while. Except at home.

Entertainment. Netflix, Amazon and the best of BBC,  ITV, Channel 4 and others. Take-home food will be increasingly appealing. Get merry at home. Pity the poor taxi drivers though.

Our town/village/street. Local community will trump everything. We now have Sussex Peasant, the Sussex farm produce on sale around Sussex from renovated horseboxes. 

Milk and More allows the home delivery of milk to revive. Local pubs will be the ones that open that look nice and  have great local beer (there are 70 odd local breweries in Sussex – who needs the Anheuser-Busch InBev, SABMiller, Heineken International, and Carlsberg Group? Blimey – doesn’t that name tell you everything that’s wrong with this stupid global fiasco of a world we’ve created?)

Think small. Think local. Buy from those closest – but they must be good enough – there are no excuses any more for local and bad.

The pieces are here but we are not yet recovering from this chaos.

We should surely now that there has never been a better and more important time for “Start Ups” – read the Sunday Times Business Section for their view. Enterprise, resourcefulness and resilience are part of the recipe. Do not try to restore the Global Economy as it was. It’s over.

We can do better.

Above all restore our good spirits . We can’t build a Camelot on gloom.

CRASH OF THE GIANTS

Am I being melodramatic in suggesting that 2020 will go down as one of the moments in recent history when everything changed?

Coronavirus, apart from the obvious epidemiological stuff, has caused a financial collapse but more importantly a collapse in confidence in the interconnectedness of the globalised economy.
In the 1960s I was persuaded by a friend to go to a meeting proselytising the concept of world government. I thought then that they were completely barmy. And they were.

The relentless quest to centralise, merge businesses and delegate strategic decisions to procurement departments who buy only on price is coming to an abrupt halt. A major whisky distiller was allegedly eager to move production out of Scotland to lower cost Hungary. Insanity. Our clothes are mostly made in impoverished parts of Asia. I am sitting in Bangladeshi underpants right now.

It gets worse. Around 50% of our food is imported and most of the best stuff we produce especially meat and fish is exported. We are in thrall to a few supermarket groups - the top seven of whom account for 90% of UK sales. Big is beautiful or is it? Pundits are pretty well unanimous in dismissing our farming and fishing industries as of inconsequential economic importance.

But that isn’t true.

Big hospitals are better, bigger schools are better, bigger accountancy firms are better (the big four have all the FTSE 100 tied up between them), bigger advertising groups create better ads, fewer bigger banks give better service and so on and so on.

But that isn’t true.

Process and purchasing power dominate and people come way behind in the consideration. Irrational as Brexit seemed to those of us well educated in the MBA ways of thinking, it was the way the majority’s  instinct led them. They were not so much anti Europe as against big, bureaucratic EU wanting to have more as part of their empire. Too big, too unwieldy and past its sell-buy-date they told Westminster and voted leave. A few years later in a city called Wuhan something happened that suggested perhaps they had a point.

I wonder if those smaller dedicated businesses like Harveys the brewer, the Cambridge Satchel Company, Cook – the food retailer, Alfred Brown weaver and tailor, Handlesbanken, the local relationship banks, Naked Wines and Charlie Bigham, the ready prepared meal business may not hold a key to a smaller, more controlled economy.

Because the current Covid 19 crisis is not the last nail in the interconnected coffin.

Read Oliver Letwin’s Apocalypse How? which came out on Thursday. In a cross between documentary and dystopian fiction he argues the internet is the infrastructure on which every major system and utility depends. He describes what would happen if something took it out.

We need to think smaller not bigger.

We need to simplify and stop the technocrats taking control.

Small may indeed be beautiful, you’d be excused for thinking. if you’re on one of those marooned mega-cruise liners right now.

AAARRRGH!!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our most quoted writers, said: “Fear defeats more people than any other thing in the world.”

There’s something disagreeable about seeing people panic. Something futile. Something demeaning. But fear can also be also something enormously powerful. Fear fills Shakespeare’s tragedies, fear of the unknown, fear of betrayal, fear of failure.

We are currently on the verge of an era of fear. The past few months in particular, has been full of fear and fearful with bush fires, floods and other disasters. Real gut-wrenching fear. The Covid 19 story is different. FOMO (the acronym meaning ‘fear of missing out’) currently fills our pampered lives; fear of missing out on holidays, business travel, the Olympics, parties, shopping and so on.

When I told a mother with several children that Professor Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, had said if the virus intensified schools might have to shut for two months, she went white and groaned “having the children at home for that long that would kill me quicker than any virus”. She displayed genuine fear as she might at the prospect of an invasion by an implacable and ruthless alien force with insistent cries of “mummy!!!”

But fear of your savings and earnings being reduced, enforced time with your close family and of your life undergoing upheaval is not quite a fight or flight situation.

Fear was in the news more prosaically when a plan was announced to level up the red squirrel population at the expense of the larger, more aggressive grey squirrels originally introduced from America. How? By introducing pine martens to their environment who’d kill either species at random but whose prospects against red squirrels were less good than against grey. Why? Because grey squirrels are fearless and stepping out cockily to greet the pine martens would be promptly slaughtered. Red squirrels are terrified of nasty, bitey pine martens and flee uttering the squirrel equivalent of “mummy!”

As with red squirrels, fear is a perfectly healthy emotion – part of our defence system. It’s how we cross roads safely and avoid the perils of life.

But more mysterious is our wanting to feel fear through horror films or attractions like The London Dungeon where the success of the experience can be judged by the quantity and volume of screams. It is indeed horrible especially the experience, too real for laughter, of the ‘long drop’ when being hanged, the proximity to Sweeney Todd and the macabre descriptions of the Black Death. You are herded through nastiness where actors perform their roles with melodramatic relish. Fear can only usually be dispelled by laughter which is why those screams are usually punctuated by giggling.

But the threat of Covid 19 isn’t funny. It’s unknown. Welcome to globalisation which means there’s nowhere to hide. We’ll end up poorer and may have been briefly housebound but think of the reading, tidying and DIY opportunities. And think of the time we’ll have to reflect on the sort of interconnected world we’re creating.