STANDING OUT

I’m a traditionalist. I love books, the smell of them and being surrounded by a lot of them. My wife noticed as we walk along a street in Brighton I’ll say “lovely house” and she’ll look and always through the window there’ll be a wall full of books. I love libraries and their protocol of whispered conversation and the rustle of a turning page. Libraries feel like places discoveries are made or a new insight revealed. They are full of unspoken ‘eurekas.’ That silence of reading is wonderfully deafening.

Over 180,000 books are published each year in the UK, more books published per capita and available than in any other country in the world.

And it gets worse. Nearly everyone I meet nowadays says they have a book in them. Should we be unlucky enough for it to get out and be published we should hold that wannabe author down and push it back in as fast as possible.

The problem is being noticed let alone read. The huge Waterstones in Piccadilly is daunting for any author and should help cure their urges to write. So a series of authors have put swear words in their titles to stand out:
Here are just a few:

Humans – a Brief History of how we F*cked it all up
Poems for a World gone to Sh*t
Get Sh*t Done
Everything is F*cked
The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck
No-one gives a Sh*t about your product
How to be f*cking awesome

I’m depressed in the same way the late David Abbott, that most urbane of advertising professionals, was with the emergence and laddish launch of FCUK – ‘nudge , nudge wink, wink’ they seemed to be saying – ‘I swore in the High Street’.

I much prefer Jane Austen’s Emma to its possible rewritten version for the 2020s ‘F*cking Supercilious B*itch’. But stop. Am I being eccentric and just antiquated in my views?
I think the occasional imprecation has a brilliant, electrifying and redefining effect. If - in the midst of the recent Royal furores - the Queen were to have been overheard to snap “F*ck it!” it would have been understandable and, because so shocking, have perfectly and concisely reflected her pent-up frustration.

In Mrs Brown’s Boys, recent winner of the British Comedy Awards (not a popular win amongst the literati that one) the word ‘fecking’ is in such constant use it seems like a form of punctuation and has no shock-value at all. Whilst in 1963 when Kenneth Tynan said ‘f*ck’ on National TV it was akin to Brexit, coronavirus and an earthquake all at once in terms of nuclear impact.

Originally I’d wanted to call our recent book ‘Start Ups, Pop-Ups and Cock-Ups’  which was deemed too risqué by the publisher. Craven? Mistaken? Maybe but a least they were taking a view about manners.  The writers who announce themselves with F*ck and Sh*t are taking an unpleasant short-cut.

Being noticed is one thing. Being any good is something else.

LET ME HUG YOU

Roger Scruton was talking about “kitsch” today - you know that kind of self-regarding sentimentality that happens every Christmas. Oscar Wilde clearly got (and despised) kitsch when he said:
“A man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell.”

Yet in the past week I experienced what could have been kitsch but really wasn’t.

David Abbott’s Memorial Service first. David was co-founder of Abbott Mead Vickers, Britain’s largest advertising agency. In his eulogies people said things like “we shall not see his like again.” And in truth we probably shan’t. One of his co-founders, Peter Mead, has written a book called “When in Doubt Be Nice”. And they were nice. They created a business with real values. The AMV brand, more than others, really understood branding and here’s how in a speech David himself made:

"You care about two things.  You care about quality – in everything you do. From the chairs in Reception, to the way you answer a phone, to a piece of Typography, to the ideas you have, to the research you put your name to, to the meetings you hold, to the way you hang a picture, to the way you crop a photograph or write a line.

Quality is always possible and always under threat, but if you don’t seek and defend it you won’t be satisfied and you won’t be happy. The second thing you must care about?  That’s easy.  It’s each other. Take care of each other and nearly everything else will take care of itself.  It’s pat, but it’s true."

And the second bit of kitsch (only it wasn’t either) was the Aldrington Primary School Carol Service - that’s where our grandsons go. I recall a guy whose credo was the need to tell the truth regardless of the consequences. He visited a Primary School, went into a room where all the recent art was pinned up and said “but this is, well this is just rubbish - all of it. Kitsch rubbish.” Well the concert by any standards wasn’t kitsch. It was great, lusty, joyful with a few astonishing “I can’t believe they’re only nine” moments.

Whilst all this was going on I was working on some stuff about winning, you know zero-sum-game, alpha male stuff, “let’s do it to them before they do it to us.” And I’ve been wondering if being nice and trying to be a good, kind person isn’t a better strategy. In the end the world in which we live is about people it’s not about stuff. It’s how we empathise with each other that matters.

I recall Rodney King - the guy who was brutally beaten up by the LA Police in 1991 with the event caught on incriminating camera. King was no saint but he said something quite saintly.
“Please can we all get along…I mean we’re stuck here for a while…we can sort it out”

This is a kitsch picture though! Sorry.