HOW ABOUT BEING FRUGAL?

Recently I was sent an article from the New York Times which suggested Britain had been virtually destroyed by eight years of austerity. Examples were drawn from some blighted parts of the North West highlighting some specific examples of human misery that Dickens in his pomp could not have bettered. It concluded:

“Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty”

You can look at virtually anything through either end of a telescope and you can guess through which end the gloomy chap who wrote this was looking. I see things differently. The cities of Britain are flourishing - not just London, which few would question is the greatest city in the world. The others like Manchester, described by the cantankerous Jeremy Clarkson as the Berlin of Britain, Birmingham , Newcastle, Leeds, Glasgow, Belfast – all of them are  shining examples of renovation and new hope.

Am I a cockeyed optimist? Well maybe but the dystopian vision of the New York Times is wildly removed from my perception. Except in one respect. ‘Austerity’ has a bitter price to pay. The word that is. The attitude it conveys. Since 2008 that word has preyed heavily on the needy, hopeless and vulnerable. It gets the blame for everything wrong in our lives.

Yet the reality of 2008 and the years after is we were living beyond our means. The correction that was needed at every level was to adjust that. ‘Austerity’ however is  a humourless, Victorian workhouse term to describe a necessary process. ‘Austerity’ doesn’t  laugh or listen. ‘Austerity’ is the implacable bank manager. ‘Austerity’ is cruel.

There’s a better word and a better strategy.’ Austerity’ derives from the Greek word meaning “severity”. Frugality derives from the Latin ‘frux’ or fruit  which seems a whole lot better to me.

Frugality is about simplifying, moderating and decluttering. To that end the data protection nonsense (death to entrepreneurial businesses by the way if not for me, the consumer) means I’m being unsubscribed from all that bother left, right and centre. Frugality in action means less of everything, books, papers, appointments, clothes … STUFF!

Being frugal is about being good humouredly ruthless. Like Richard Madeley interviewing hapless Gavin William Secretary of State for Defence.

After avoiding  answering a question several times about whether he now regretted saying “Shut up and go away“ to the Russian State after the Salisbury drama, Gavin was taken aback to be told “All right you won’t answer -  so interview terminated”.

Frugal may be the way forward for all of us. Frugality has a more obvious impact on the rich than the poor whose lives are pretty frugal already. But frugal connotes a more natural and fruitful process.

First we had Google taking over our lives but now we have Frugal as the new and much more controllable zeitgeist. I may sound like a Brexiteer but being frugal means getting back control.

WHY I STILL BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS

“Bah! Humbug! Don’t be daft…you can’t.” But I do… I completely believe in the idea of Santa Claus…of sleigh bells…of “Ho! Ho! Ho’s!” and of Rudolf. Like all great, timeless stories it has evolved and gathered a patina of stuff like the elves, North Pole, chimneys and that red Santa costume. I really believe in the spirit of Christmas that this projects.

And that’s why I abhor the idea of telling children at a certain age that it isn’t true, that the whole idea is a piece of childish garbage. A friend told me that when his mother told him aged 10 “the truth” he told her insouciantly “yeah I knew that.” But he didn’t and just went away sobbing because an idea had been broken and a trust destroyed.

Imagine the guffaws of laughter provoked by the Rubens painting of St. Francis at Christ’s crucifixion. …spoiler alert …Francis wasn’t born for another 1200 years so the whole thing is a lie. Ho. Ho. Ho.

In a year which heralded the arrival of post-truth my support for the idea not the literal truth being what matters may seem dangerously avant-garde.  But Christmas like love is not something we can just reduce to facts.

Fact or fiction? Whenever we read a totally engaging story we lose ourselves in the truth of that story. A Christmas Carol, Pickwick Papers are both in the bubble in which we read them, totally credible. The skilful storyteller can induce what Samuel Taylor Coleridge 200 years ago called a “suspension of disbelief”.
In the car recently the Archers came on the radio and our grandsons listened…there was a long silence. When it finished I heard that carefully phrased question: “Grandpa are those real people and why do they talk like that?”  The Archers and those funny “old people” - step up Joe Grundy - have become a new truth which they and other soap opera stars are for many people. Just  as the Shire has its own reality in Lord of the Rings.

Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe the incredible can happen? You’d better after 2016. But miracles need a little help. Like great magic the more we’re predisposed to accept the implausible the more wonderful the trick becomes.

Sadly as we grow up and become more rational and hardened against play we lose a little of our humanity. We become cynical about the stories that can make the world so beautiful a place.

I believe in goodness, in human beings, in generosity of spirit and in Christmas not as a factual thing but as a completely brilliant idea and story. A story that is timeless and which bonds us together. And what better way to start a story could there be than this?

“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.” 

WALK ON BY

Dionne Warwick sung this in 1964. Bill Baccharat and Hal David wrote it.

“Foolish pride…that's all that I have left….” Those lyrics floated round my head as I walked and walked and walked last week.

Walking isn’t anything new.  We used to walk vast distances across continents.

Dickens walked 25 miles through the night from London to Rochester creating plots and giving birth to characters. Bill Sykes was conceived on the A2. Wordsworth who trudged over fell and dale in the Lake District was reckoned by his substance-abusing friend Thomas de Quincey to have walked 180,000 miles during his lifetime. Oxford Dons used to walk alongside the River Cherwell talking, thinking and debating.

Ferris Jabr wrote a piece in the New Yorker in 2014 entitled “Why walking helps us think” in which he said:

“Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.”

We live trapped in front of PC screens in air conditioned offices thinking in an air conditioned way. Recycled ideas collide in our dulled, aching minds.

Last week a client-friend and I walked through London. We didn’t walk that far, just six miles give or take, but for a sedentary chap like me that seemed a long way. A long way in retrospect because at the time it seemed like a gentle stroll being constantly stimulated; an agenda-less conversation with intellectual diversions as they occurred. We even walked into a couple of churches - the Brompton Oratory and a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens. On our journey we needed peace which we found in both, as well as inspiration.

We wandered through Hyde, Green and St James’ Park. We admired Nile Geese in the latter, the Ove Arup exhibition in the V&A - “the Philosophy of Total Design”.  How wonderful to find an eccentric genius who made a fortune and made people laugh. His lyrics and doodles are funny and insightful.

So we discovered walking? No we rediscovered the joy of discovery. Here’s Jabr again:
“When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps.”

We made a series of mental footsteps in puzzling over a series of issues and stumbling over a set of possible resolutions. We wrote nothing down, although I was able afterwards to produce a pretty well word perfect version of the discussion just by recalling a place - Harrods - or a situation - the Black Swan or an incredible, buzzy, joy overflowing early supper in the Wolseley.

It felt like a particularly happy time.

Walking liberates thinking, creativity and peace - try it.

DECK THE HALLS WITH BOUGHS OF HOLLY

It’s hard for us not to smile when hearing this carol. The line “most highly favoured lady” from the Basque carol “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came” which on the lips of many choristers becomes “most highly flavoured gravy” has the same effect.  Christmas is a time of amusement, excess and fun. The pagans stuffed themselves in the hope that this would help get them through the vile chill of January. And looking at the old Brueghel paintings of typical Dutch weather one can see that need. Yet today in Amsterdam it’s 13C.

In this fast moving world, Christmas is a time for nostalgia, for remembering Christmases past. I recall three evocative smells from my own childhood Christmas: tangerines, the shiny pages of the Eagle Annual and the rich aroma of Macanudo Cigars. It was the only time of the year I recall seeing my father slightly pissed and being the comedian we never normally saw. I remember a brief sense of plenty and unlikely confections like Green Chartreuse. It was when people let their hair down and the Queen’s speech was a must-listen-to event.

As our doorbell rang today at 7am - Parcel Force with more Amazon parcels, I realised the brutal Christmas crushes in the shops were things of the past. Last week was like any other week in London thanks to e-commerce.  Meanwhile the Christmas Turkey has been getting a bad press. Johnny Ray of the Spectator described it as a” dire bird.”  Well ours is hand reared in Kent and was probably called Gwendolen. We’ll meet her in her glossy coffin - a neat box - on Wednesday. She had better not be dire.

Ours will be a family affair aged from 93 to 1 ½; it will be Christmas as it’s been for over 150 years. But what has changed, and it’s ironic in what I’ve already called this “fast moving world”, is that Christmas now lasts from December 18th to January 4th.  And we don’t really regard this as holiday so much as a time of “no one else is going to be in anyway.”

But are we this year just a little more imbued with Christmas bonhomie than in the recent past as a friend of mine tentatively suggested? I think we are. We are living in (for now) a reasonably stable country. London rocks, the Northern Powerhouse is more of a reality than ever - Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and the others are doing brilliantly. Ghastly events are happening elsewhere but for better or worse Britain has become a cosier place than I recall in the recent past.

Here’s Dickens on Christmas:

“It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”

I love that idea of Christmas as a “noble adjustment of things.” Drink deeply, eat well and laugh a lot and Happy Christmas.

HOW CAN HUMAN BEINGS BE SO UNKIND?

I was walking back from Waitrose festooned with bags of balsamic vinegar, olives, pretzels, hummus and wine - all those essentials in my life when a guy said “can you spare me some money?” I gestured at my hands trapped by the bags and he smiled and said “sure”. He was certainly civilised and on his uppers. At least I gave him eye contact, at least I tried but my failure to slip him a few quid has been  making me feel lousy ever since. Why are so many people down on those who are already down about as far as they can get?

I’ve heard people saying about the Syrian and Libyan refugees  that in their midst are terrorists using the cover of human misery to sneak to our shores and blow us up.  Most of the people fleeing are women and children with no credible other option than to make a risky and expensive sea crossing. Maybe surprisingly it was Jeremy Clarkson who compared the refugees with a neighbour whose house was on fire. Do you shrug and say “not my problem mate” or help put it out and put them up until things are sorted.

Which brings me to Greece.

The last time I took a view on Greece I was heavily criticised for being soft on debt and soft on the causes of debt. They must be punished. It’s the only thing they understand.

If the ”they” are the ordinary population of Greece and not the oligarchy I couldn’t disagree more. The sheer unkindness of the EU, IMF and ECB has made me uneasy about the whole ethos of the EU. Do we really want to remain part of such a beastly cadre? All my strict attitudes about good governance and prudence are blown out of the water by a swift study of the Greek situation. It’s the sort of thing that Dickens would have written brilliantly about. We need that sort of passion now.

The reality is the debt mountain was not built by the average Greek. It was created by the “generosity” of the EU and the banks and the smiling corrupt barons at the top of Greece.

The trouble now is, as some are saying, “we might just as well vote “no” and preserve a bit of dignity; we have nothing left to lose except that now.”

I feel as though I need to fly to a Greek island and throw a party for them. I love the Greeks and I have done since 1964 when I first went there. They are generous, good humoured and mischievous. I love the scenery, climate and the food. I love their swagger and sense of pride. I love their appetite for life.

I loathe what the Troika has done and we as passive spectators are doing in letting this being quenched.
Whatever they vote on Sunday we have a collective responsibility to be a lot kinder to them than we have been so far.

UPDATE:  60% + saying ”no”….amazing. Wish Greece well

SOMETHING'S ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DORSET

It was “Broadchurch” that got me thinking. You know the Dorset Noir TV series that got such astounding ratings on ITV. I was given the box set for my birthday and we’ve spent the past week glued to it.
It got me thinking that Michael Douglas was right when recently he said that the long form TV series like Games of Thrones, the Borgias, Wired and so on were the future of film.

Their publishers said the same to Dickens and Trollope …”look Charlie just write an 800 page cliff hanger with lots of characters and weave a really complex plot. Just remember big is beautiful”
.

After a week in which they held the smallest penis competition in Scotland – I’m serious – and EF Schumacher the economist who wrote “Small is Beautiful” was on my mind, this may seem a bit of a surprise.

After all our attention spans are reducing…aren’t they?

We’ve got 20:20 in cricket, speed dating, speed interviewing, snacking and in Pecha Kucha the 7 minute presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each) which is designed to be twice as good as TED speeches  which last twice as long.

So short is good. We’re all obsessed it would seem by the “quickie”. When I got sent a 25 minute YouTube piece I found myself feeling my time was being stolen. ..”where do I find a spare 25 minutes?”

When I read anything now I think “get to the point PD James, stop prevaricating.” Given this logic the greatest crime novel title would be “The Butler Did It”.

But the return to the Aga-slow-cooked plot where the complexities and weakness of human behaviour get played out and twists and turns happen with tantalising unexpectedness,  is not a sign of a fashion change. The appetite for good stories just never went away. Ask JK Rowling, ask Ken Follett, just as we asked Dostoevsky or Wagner….well… imagine the abbreviated Ring Cycle. No actually now I think about it, speed Wagner should be mandatory.

The reason the Reduced Shakespeare Company is so funny, apart from brilliant performance and scripting, is that it’s mad. Hamlet in 30 seconds is a hoot. Whilst performed over three hours it’s harrowing. Probably even the Petra Kucha (or 20:20 version) of World War II would be pretty funny too.

Only comedy works in the short form - hence PG Wodehouse. In our noir world you need time to eat, digest and discover.

Me? I’m now off to create “Mad Men Noir”. It’s long. It’s brutal. It’s going to be terribly depressing. It’ll involve heavy drinking, the serial killing of competitors and the most complicated marketing plan ever.
As to whether these blogs are too short read next week’s effort which will be 800 pages of unremitting misery all in black and white.

www.colourfulthinkers.com