NOBODY LIKES US

When our entry “Bigger than us” came last in The European Song Contest on Saturday with just 16 points I was not surprised. We’ve been placed in the bottom five out of twenty six entries, an astonishing nine times, since 2005.  Either we are terrible musicians or we pick the wrong songs or we are just extremely unpopular.

In November 2018 Music Week trumpeted – that’s what you do in the music business – that the UK was a global leader in music: growing to an annual £4.5 billion turnover; exports up 7% to £2.6 billion. Receipts to the UK treasury just under £1 billion. So it’s not that.

When it comes to popular votes by which we choose our entry to this competition we have, let’s just say, a slightly uneven track record. As I watched poor Michael Rice giving what was described by the UK press as a “very solid performance” – could there be a worse accolade? – I knew we were doomed. Extremely solid performance. Extremely flaky song.

The answer then is an extraordinary feat of mediocrity, almost as though we didn’t really care. I fear we have become the global Millwall FC whose fans’ match song as you may know goes like this:  “nobody likes us, we don’t care".  And they don’t and we don’t.

We have become the stroppy kid who decided to walk out and now they’re all sniggering at us and making us very cross.

In the midst of all this confusion and self-pity I find an increasing sense of personal resolution because I have a funny feeling this is all going to work out OK in the end. The EU is a bit of a mess, which we knew. Mess is a constant in life. It all depends on how you deal with it.  If you consider Orban (Hungary) , Kurz (Austria), Salvini (Italy) and the presence of Le Pen (France), the AFD (Germany) the Union part of European seems open to question.

Yet we know young people, pretty well across Europe, mostly believe in collaboration, sharing, liberal values and quite soon, as they flex their muscles, they won’t put up with the playground behaviour of the right wing here or in Europe. They know, and let’s face it, this is all they’ve ever known, peace and success is achieved through compromise, listening and a determination to look after each other.

I find myself thinking that Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate change activist is altogether more wholesome and well principled in her ambitions for humanity in general than, say Nigel Farage, although I think he believes what he says. It’s just that,  as with Michael Rice, I don’t like the tune he’s singing. Old fashioned. Separatist. Hostile. Cruel.

We have to grow out of this belligerent Millwall tendency. In a democracy we must, of course, let this play out. But we need a better story for it to end well and we need to tell it better. It seems as though some think this is the Game of Thrones. It isn’t and we need to grow up and start being kinder to each other. It’ll just take a bit of time, calm and common sense.

FAKING IT

The “F” word has been in the headlines ever since Trump coined it. It shuts off all debate. When something indisputable is dismissed scornfully it’s hard to be rational in response. As someone who spent much of their life in advertising I wasn’t immune to fake claims many of which were just funny - a joke shared with a more than willing public.  Of course Heineken didn’t refresh the parts that other beers couldn’t reach. It’s a fake claim. But an entertaining thought.

In the UK we’re living through a less entertaining playground fight over Brexit. The claim we are paying £350 million a week to the EU which even Nigel Farage admitted was a “mistake” still lingers, fake as it is. The remainers’ claim that the result was so close you really need a replay is just as bogus. England (excluding Northern Ireland and Scotland) voted 53% to 47% to leave. If you exclude London which somehow feels above and outside the argument then the shires and counties voted 56% to 44% to leave. Not a landslide but a decisive rejection of EU membership.

And I have a genuine not a fake emotion about all this. Whilst I’m an ardent Europhile and hence an ardent remainer, I cannot and will not ignore a democratic poll even if flawed. It’s patronising to say you voted wrongly let’s do it again. Sadly I believe most of the English would vote the same way second time round. What about the lies? Well every election contains lies - always has and always will.

In the news last week. Exams. Apparently they are causing a lot of stress and are really difficult now. Worse than that boys do better at exams and girls are really sad about this. As I remember if you were clever and well prepared exams were a great opportunity to show off. And if you weren’t an even better opportunity to fake your intelligence. Exams were about concealing your ignorance. But in my day they weren’t taken overly seriously. Much more important things were how we thought not how much we remembered. Much the most stressful exam I ever did was my driving test. No faking there.

Which brings me to gin. There are hundreds of gins on the market. A new exotic brand appears every week. Chilli Gin, Soy Gin, Chanel Gin – no those are all fakes or as Kellyanne Conway, Counsellor to the President and Trump’s most vociferous apologist would put it “alternative gins”. But it’s about alternative gins I want to talk - Seedlip and Ceder’s. No alcohol gins. After a summer of pasta, prosecco,  Campari spritz and pie I need to diet.  Most diets are fake. The best diet is to reduce calorie intake. Booze is high in calories so booze is out. Seedlip and Ceder’s with a slice of lime, Fever Tree Slimline Tonic and lots of ice musically clinking do very well as an adult gin taste-alike. Sometimes faking it is the only way.

WHY I LIKE SPRING AND EASTER SO MUCH

I have spent the past week feeling refreshed.

Originally the word “Easter” comes from the Saxon ‘Eostre’, the pagan Goddess of Spring which in turn came from the Germanic ‘Austro’ - the Goddess of Dawn. From its outset Easter was always magical. The Christian story of the risen Christ made it much more so.

Something magical still happens every year. Welcome to spring flowers; to plucky battalions of daffodils; to some experimental bursts of sunshine and lambs gambolling.  In April we put on walking shoes to go on pilgrimage like Chaucer.

Change is in the air and, of course, more sunlight makes life easier. This and a degree of gastronomic restraint as opposed to the mandatory, bloated excess of Christmas means this season of celebration leaves us feeling ready to get going.

So, yes, I feel terrific and my good humour even extends to the bunch of jokers who’d been making me rather grumpy recently.

What do this lot have in common? Trump; Putin; Farage; Johnson.

And of course you’re right.

Extravagant egos; wrong people to run anything; irresolute yet dictatorial; will do/say anything to get their own way. They make Kevin Spacey acting the part of Frank Underwood in “House of Cards” look very electable.  They have all pandered or are currently pandering to a vision of the present and future forged entirely out of a nostalgic image of former glory. But to be fair they have the capacity to entertain us as well as baffle.

Hence my good humour. I suddenly realised I was taking what they said much too seriously. The best way to debunk is to deflate with laughter. And anyway the premise of an argument solely based on rationality will inevitably fail. As that supple brained Ad Man Rory Sutherland recently noted, on issues like the EU or the America Presidency or which house to buy or whom to marry, emotion rightly plays a large part.

When I turn on the news or I read the paper I often find I’m reduced to frothing rage.
But then when I see a front cover of Private Eye like this one….

….or I see the cartoon of Paul Daniels’ funeral at which someone is sawing his coffin in half saying “it was how he’d have wanted it” , I feel much better.

So a diet of roast lamb, minted potatoes and Cote de Beaune plus walking in bluebell woods (soon) plus a lot of good old fashioned, squirm provoking and sharp satire plus a resolution to be much nicer to people will do me well enough.

We live in uncertain times said billionaire Warren Buffett. Well yes, but what fun that uncertainty creates. Every day is a cliff-hanger. And the great thing about spring is it signifies the end of a winter of discontent

So I’ve resolved to start listening more and laughing a lot more.

Join me - a very happy spring and Easter to everyone.

APRES MOI PLUS CA CHANGE

Wherever I go people tell me that times are terrible, unprecedented and that le deluge is on the horizon. And they tell about a whole load of extraordinary conspiracy theories.

That The Duke of Edinburgh had Diana killed, that the Malaysian Airline was brought down by the CIA, that the Ebola epidemic is the result of a Chinese biological warfare experiment gone wrong, that Nigel Farage is being funded by Qatar, that President Bush arranged the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, that there was corruption in the Scottish Independence Referendum and the result should have been a “yes” win and that yes indeed the moon is made of cheese.

Nothing is normal in many people’s minds because normal is a bit boring. The human brain is ingenious and complex and loves making up stories. There’s a theory known as Occam’s Razor which states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words the least convoluted simple story is probably right; accident, hard luck or human error - that kind of thing.

The reason we are such a melodramatic bunch is that it feeds our fascination with the macabre. Our brain’s default mode is in fact wandering about not being a forensic Sherlock Holmes’ organ of investigation, problem solving and decision making. We are hardwired to like storytelling and surprises.

Yet the prosaic truth is we have despite the shocks along the way managed to create a well-ordered world where most systems work pretty well with occasional misfiring like an unnecessary war or a deposition of a dictator (hurray!) but with unforeseen consequence (ahh!)

What we find it harder to do is learn from experience and  accept that ordinary can be OK .

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014

WHY I DECIDED TO READ THE DAILY MAIL

It had been a strange week what with Clacton and the prospect of the Stroud and Rochester by-election at which the Tories promise (threaten?) to send the Cabinet several times to drum up opposition to Reckless. It’ll be ghastly for the voters.

Ghastly is how I felt as I saw a lethal Panorama report by softly-spoken Darragh MacIntyre on Nigel Farage. As I watched Nigel’s brazen contempt for the EU and his embarrassing behaviour I remembered that great advertisement which the Democrats ran in 1960 against Richard Nixon.

Like Nixon, Farage has a slightly sleazy and flaky look about him - definitely a “nice little runner only one careful owner and because I like your face I’ll knock off fifty quid. OK?” sort of person.

And then, I thought, I must read the Daily Mail and see what’s going on. It was 88 pages long with some 42 stories in the first 40 pages (before we hit travel, property, lots of ads, TV, Sudoku and sport) of which 7 dealt with sex - mostly rape and paedophilia - 7 with politics, mostly anti Tory establishment, and an astounding 14 on health, many lambasting the NHS.

A sample of these

• “Air Passenger in protective suit as ebola fears start to grip the west”
• “Filing your nails daily does more harm than good”
• “Run off four miles to burn off just one bottle of Coke”
• “Piling on the pounds? Blame it on Jet Lag”
• “Don’t call 999 until you’re unconscious, dying man is told”
• “France to curb binge drinking”

But on page 35 - immigration rears

• “Adult asylum seekers pose as teens to get school places”
• “Our right to be here by Park Lane migrants”

What was the overall effect of the paper?

There were some rather grumpy arguments between my wife and me about how the paper seemed to use consistently just one ‘typical’ story to stir up general anger about immigration, the NHS or government.

I was very conscious of the Taxi Driver grumble - “and another thing” - and I noticed this, for instance, in the leading article when Cameron’s team were accused of being in danger of making “a mistake they’d made all too often in the past”. Expressions like “All too often, not for the first time and how typical” are key words of negative thinking.

How did I feel? I felt shocking to be honest. This is not company I want to keep or a country I recognise or would want to live in. It’s sterile, cantankerous and permanently discontented. The sun doesn’t shine in Northcliffe House the Mail’s HQ.

And another thing - they really do think “Voting for UKIP will hand keys on No10 to Miliband” (p.19) - source: Lord Ashcroft. And you know, I think they actually want this.

Because then they’ll really have something to complain about.

“That Miliband made a right balls of it - typical!”

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Andreas Moelzer, until recently leader of the right wing Austrian Freedom party, said the EU was in danger of becoming a “conglomerate of negroes”. His party did pretty well in the MEP elections as did the French equivalent of the NLP, Marie Le Pen’s Front National Party. In a world that we’d hoped was becoming a little more liberal in attitude and caring, all this is a little sad. But the very PCness of the EU had much of this coming to them. Nigel Farage isn’t my idea of a thinking politician but José Manuel Barosso doesn’t inspire me either. The EU is a mess but electing a squad of lunatics to clear it up is insane.

In case you missed it I enclose an insight from the Huffington Post.

And the point it makes is the values attached to Ukip are brutishly out of date. They belong to a world of smoking, halitosis, turn ups and Butlins; a world of unblinking certainty and a lingering sense that slavery was not all bad. They are egged on by nonsense like this though, the recent decision for the BBC to edit out the word “girl” from a programme called the “Queen’s Baton Relay”. In it a TV presenter thrown to the floor by a teenage judo star says “I’m not sure I can live that down - being beaten by a 19-year-old girl” in case “using the word “girl” caused offence”.

That’s not liberal that’s lunatic.

Beauty was lost somewhere else last week. Anyone who worked in adverising will know that David Abbott, the co-founder of Britain’s largest advertising agency, Abbott Mead Vickers died a week ago.

His work as a writer on campaigns like Volvo, Sainsbury’s and the Economist were examples of clear thinking and intelligence. When David wrote, advertising really mattered as opposed to being sensationalist for its own attention seeking ends. It was that attitude that made him dislike the vulgarity of FCUK so much.

David ‘s writing had a calm and contented but never a complacent tone. He represented the best of the writer’s craft. Here are just three examples of his work which lift advertising to the plane of a serious business and one I was prould to have once been part of not least as a one-time colleague of David’s.

The Economist idea, which was David’s, ran and ran. It had witty headlines and was incredibly noticeable.

After David’s advertising finished, Sainsbury’s never seemed the same. He positioned the brand where consumers want to be, not quite where they are right now.  But my favourite piece of writing was in this ad for Chivas Regal. You’ll need a glass after reading this. It can serve as David’s epitaph too.

(if you can't easily read this, here's a bigger version)

I don’t think he and Nigel would be best friends somehow. And he’d be disappointed by, and even angry at, how bad and clumsy all political writing has recently become.

Finally then, to intelligent thinking, beautiful writing and to David Abbott.

IS YOUR GOOD MOOD SWITCH ON?

I’m an unashamed optimist. Not that being cheerful come what may always makes sense – the First World War was full of optimistic generals. But clicking on the “let’s go for it” switch – click - usually results in a better result than wrenching at the “aagghh! How typical, I feel awful - I expect today’ll be another shocker too” switch.
Is it too much to expect there’ll be more good nature than bad? Is it a surprise that crime, teenage pregnancy, house fires, drug abuse and alcohol consumption have all massively declined in this country over the past decade. Don’t believe me? Go check.

 

Is it a surprise that we have a bigger manufacturing industry than France, that we make more vehicles in the UK than we did in 1980 and 50% more than we did 4 years ago?

In a developed world increasingly dependent on service industries is Germany with its relatively old fashioned industries and high labour costs concerned about its lagging service sector – only 2/3 of its GDP compared to the UK’s 80%?

Are we all doomed in the UK?
If you listen to the hail-fellow-well-met Mr Farage you’d think so.

I saw a bit of Question Time on Thursday. He was on the panel. It was in Boston, the one town in the UK where immigration is a particularly tricky issue. Well in the part I saw our Nigel was murdered by a reasonable “immigration may be difficult but it’s an integration issue and as much our fault as theirs” audience. They were brilliant, open minded and kind.
But especially encouraging was Benjamin Zephaniah, the Birmingham born Rastafarian poet who is best known through his brilliant poem “Talking Turkeys” which starts, but you’ll remember it…

“Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas
Cos' turkeys just wanna hav fun
Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked
An every turkey has a Mum.”

The panel was talking about the closure of the Portsmouth shipyards. Grave faces all round.  Farage “it’s a crying shame”. There was talk about our strategic vulnerability as an island and the prospective invasion of the Falklands. And Benjamin quietly said:- “I just wonder what would happen if peace broke out worldwide. I mean would we need these warships? Mind you I worry about all those jobs. Can’t we make nice cruise ships there instead?”

Click. On goes that switch.

And finally a great quote from the American writer, William Saroyan:

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

Click. Click. Click