WHERE DO WE LIVE?

What interests me is how we feel; where our true north is. Where we live, live in our head as opposed to where we physically sleep or where we work are different things. I know people who think nothing of commuting a thousand miles a week, or who camp near their place of work before driving home.

After the wall came down in East Germany someone hailed a cab to go home. He said to the Taxi Diver:-
“Can you take me to …”
“No need to ask,” replied the Cabbie “I know where you live.”

Apparently most of the Stasi became taxi drivers when their security role ended. But where they lived had changed in their heads.

I was talking about football to my grandson when he said there was a boy at his school who was exceptionally gifted at it.  In talking about this success he said that this boy came from a different country.

“Oh where does he come from?” I asked. To which he replied without missing a beat.
“Manchester”.

Yes, Manchester a different country,  all on its own, full of great footballers - nothing to do with the rest of us.

It was Christopher Marlowe in the Jew of Malta who said “The past is another country”.  And you realise the truth of this in listening to UKIP. This other country is one of nostalgia, when summers were always sunny, when steam engines drove our trains, when cricketers wore white flannel, when business lunches were fuelled with claret and cigar smoke.

I simply don’t do nostalgia. I think the future is a different country and, if we choose to make it so, a better one.

I am currently doing work across Europe. Sweden, Poland Germany, Greece, Italy, France, Britain, Ireland are all terrific, bright, different but united (in the English language and in in an attitude to doing business). These people are not defined by where they come from but by where they live in their heads.

Unashamedly I’m pro EU albeit anti-Euro bureaucracy. My philosophy of life is the same as one-time US President Lyndon Johnson’s (cynical as it may sound). He was talking about an obstreperous colleague who was thinking of resigning:

“It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

That’s how I feel about Europe - the biggest economy and most civilised in the world. The more I work in Europe the more I think of it as one country.

The most changed country is America whose view of the world swung eight years ago. They gave up on old Europe and swung their attention west to the Asian powerhouse. I don’t blame America - that’s probably right for them.

But it leaves an opportunity for us. We can and should be the key portal for the rest of the world into Europe…it’s something we do really well - because it’s where most of us working really live and do business intellectually.

Colourful Thinkers

RETRO TAKES ON TECHNO - A SIGN OF OUR TIMES

Globally the battle is between the past and the future.

In the Middle East and Asia, some Islamic values are at loggerheads with modernity. By the same token some traditional Anglicans find the idea of a female bishop bizarre. Someone said apparently:

“You might as well ordain a pork pie as ordain a woman bishop”

I rather like pork pies. But they are a little old fashioned and reminiscent of summers past.
As is the UKIP argument that the EU is sucking us dry, that immigrants are a drain on the economy and that fings aint wot they used to be.

Yet UKIP is doing well and we need to understand what their problem really is (not as some do hope it’ll go away). All traditionalists of whatever persuasion are saying in slightly different tones of voice “can’t we go back to things as they were?”

The trouble is that “the way things were” wasn’t really as good as it is today. Nonetheless stick with that nostalgic urge and try to empathise with it.

Jerusalem, green and pleasant lands, steam trains, pipe smoking, bosses and workers, Nottingham Forest, flat caps, Bill Hailey, Hancock, ‘O’ levels, Aberdeen Angus Steakhouses, Max Bygraves,  capital punishment, Watney’s Red, Jensen Interceptors, Woolworth, corner shops…..

The struggle between past and future is playing out in the marketing arena too. This is not just Farage v the Westminster Bubble. This is the High Street fighting back against the monolith out-of-town warehouses. Small shops trumping Tesco; big companies being attacked vociferously for being bad citizens; Jamie Oliver’s “Comfort Food” suggesting a retro-trend in diet (like the resurgence of pies); the revival of the fountain pen; an old fashioned, Midnight Mass, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen-type Christmas; the return of the epic story….has anyone reflected on the resemblance the long form TV series has to Victorian novels (which were also serialised, cliff hangers and all). This is Brave New World v Nostalgia.

There is nothing new with retro-marketing but there’s an increasing groundswell of opposition to new-fangled technology and, of course, Indian Call Centres and the “press 1 for accounts, 2 for complaints, 3 for other services” style of customer service. We increasingly call for personable, well- brought-up human beings not remote call centres.

Just as the UKIP, Tea Party, and Golden Dawn factions of this world tend to be vociferous minorities so too the retro-entrepreneurs are unlikely to usurp the Goliaths of the retail, energy, financial or fmcg communities. But they’ll bite their ankles very nastily and make them take notice.

This is a world where the entrance price for a troublemaking new brand is low. A website, a storytelling champion, a bit of news, a cacophony of tweets does it.  And one of the marketing strategies working well right now is based on authenticity and nostalgia.

So yes, the past, it seems, is alive and surprisingly well.

Technology moves on but traditionalism has a powerful voice too.

A PLEA FOR RECOGNISING REAL TREASURE

I am not one for nostalgia. The allure of steam trains, pipe smoking and warm beer seems to me massively overrated. UKIP may look fondly backwards but hankering for the past doesn’t create a useful platform for developing the future. Indeed almost everything about the present seems to me a massive improvement - from restaurants to transport to houses everything has simply got cleaner, cheaper and more efficient.

But three times this week I felt a little twitch of affection for long lasting treasures which were they not here we’d be really sorry.

The BBC is obvious enough but the way this organisation is currently reinventing itself is astounding. Dr Who was always good but now it’s reaching Shakespearian levels, similarly Sherlock which has an intellectual power and narrative drive we see seldom except in Stoppard.

And it stretches to C-Beebies - in my days the poncy-voiced lady said accusingly “are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin”. She terrified me. Even John Humphrys has become human on the Today Programme as Cherry Owen in Under Milk Wood asking Mrs Cherry Owen (played by Cerys Matthews) to “give us a kiss”. This, after being called a “silly sausage “by Johnny Rotten in an interview. What fun. What a brilliant apostle for change “Auntie” has become.

And then the Co-op dubbed a joke company following the escapades of the Reverend Flowers and the departure of top management. But you know something? Following the Tesco story and the way the city is walking all over our grocers something stands out. The Co-op may be flawed and foolish but at least it’s authentic in its foolishness. It’s like the Archers full of humanity not behaving like a crooked MBA. Its latest advertising for its bank (proof its feet are made of damp clay) - “ethics, values and a tattoo parlour” is dreadful.

Beware a person who says “...trust me. I’m honest”. But beware a London ad agency for leading the good old Co-op down the smooth ad campaign route. The Co-op is authentic, real, has values and some great products. Focus on the facts and the stories but not in glossy ads. The Co-op is not nor should ever be glossy. But I still it love it warts and all.

And finally people: the diversity I recently saw in Shoreditch which more resembled New York than the London of cosy Soho. Or the laconic conversation I had in a Brighton Lidl about the weather with a quite large lady whose basket seemed alarmingly full of pies.

The Treasury has confirmed what we lovers of immigration have always known (immigration, by the way, creates what has always made the country we live in what it is- a brilliant mish-mash of talent, diversity and resourcefulness.) The Treasury news is this: immigrants bring a net £20 billion to the economy.

£20,000,000, 000 - thank you.

The BBC, the Co-op and our people - human, imperfect and brilliant. We are so lucky.

WHY I LOVE EUROPE

The remarkable thing about the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles was the teamwork Europe showed in this most ‘teamly’ of golf formats, the foursomes, which we won 7-1. I shall no doubt reflect more and deeper on how it is four Englishmen and representatives from eight other European countries came together as one cohesive synchronised unit. How it was that even suspiciously UKIP looking spectators were howling “Europe! EEUURRope!!!” How for one glorious weekend we all felt as one.

And yet we are increasingly Eurosceptic with 51% saying they’d vote to exit and only 40% voting to stay in in a recent MORI poll.

I suppose if we exit we’ll no longer be part of the Ryder Cup which will be very good news for the USA. Just as it was for us when an always-beaten Britain in golf joined forces with Europe and the miracle started because of that alliance. Do we detect a possible lesson here?

But that would be less sad than the loss of what feels like an increasingly natural link. I actually feel more European than at any time in my life. Do I hate Brussels bureaucracy? Of course. Do I admire the Euro economy? Not particularly, no. But do I think we have a huge and necessary leadership role in the Europe of the future - of course I do. Without the UK I really do suspect Europe may not make it.

And I’m influenced by UK business leaders - a hard headed bunch - 80%+ of whom say we should stay with Europe. The CBI spell out the numbers saying that at around £70 billion a year EU membership is worth nearly 5% of Britain’s GDP.

The desire to leave is less well founded by far than the Scottish “yes” votes’ argument was.
Back to golf and that astonishing cultural harmony we saw. It was more than golf. The US team were statistically on average slightly stronger but the star spangled banner didn’t have the clout or the passion of that star-circled device for the EU.

I felt as though I was watching the possibility of “Europeness” as German embraced Spaniard and Dane embraced Scot. Unlike the World Cup or the European Song Contest Britain seemed happy to be in close company with its neighbours.

The mood in Britain is pretty well anti-everything at present. We have become a nation of “Doom Dabblers”. Given this I am not hopeful of a referendum on Europe.

I am (I recognise this) irrepressibly and even irritatingly optimistic.
But there are two guiding principles here though not just a bucket of warm Bonheur.

The world needs more collaboration. Being small may be beautiful but things are too complex to do them solo.

Learning to be in and loving being in a team needs strength of will and empathy. Opting out is always the easier choice.

Little Britain could be great in a united Europe which it helped lead. Or we could be proud, independent, little and ignored.

Our choice.

I KNOW EXACTLY HOW YOU FEEL

The trouble is that just isn’t true. We talk increasingly about empathy but when it comes to understanding Isis or Al Qaeda we simply don’t have a clue.  Actually, we often don’t even understand how people near to us really feel. It’s ironic isn’t it that those of us who spent our lives in advertising were, much of the time, guessing about how our ads were going to work?

But soon all that’s going to change and marketing, as we knew it, is going to be pretty well redundant. As neuroscience becomes front page newspaper stuff and not arcane and academic we are going to be embarked on a journey that will let us unravel moods and feelings and our ability to detect, predict and manipulate them.

And I think this is really exciting because it takes the finger-in-the-air-ness out of not just marketing but behaviour in businesses and specifically things like negotiation. How much time is spent trying to outwit and double guess each other? Eliminate business poker and we can spend more time on innovation and pure problem solving.

I’m writing this on holiday in Dorset – grandsons outraged that I’m tapping away when there are trees to be climbed and monsters to be caught. Outside although it’s drizzling I feel that curious contentment about this green and pleasant land that is pure gut and not rational. Yesterday I had a pint of Palmer’s Best Bitter (the Bridport Brewer) slightly flat, slightly warm, mildly hoppy and bitter sweet. It tasted to me of village cricket and memories of steam trains. But my wife said it tasted to her of “disappointment” not that it was disappointing but that it reminded her of “something not quite fulfilling what she’d expected it to”. I reflected she was probably right; it was a sort of UKIP taste – slightly discontented and mildly aggrieved, happy to put up with chipped cups and white bread.

A taste can do that as can a smell. Summer holidays are evoked by the smell of sun on old stones and of a BBQ aroma.  Mansion polish: just one sniff of it and I think of Oxford.

We can only guess at people’s memories, at what is stored in the brain ready to go off at any time. Yet “mood-barometrics” – the study of how to measure mood – will take us a long way down the road of disentangling the mysteries of feelings and human instinct.

The smartest business people are recognising the need to engage and inspire the emotions. The art of storytelling, creating a compelling narrative,  is the stuff of the C suite. We are on the verge of an era where emotion plays a much bigger part in business than spreadsheets and facts.

Einstein once said: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

But that was then. The world is changing and quite soon we’ll be able to count the things that really count.

LOVE YOUR PRODUCT

The sun was shining in Brighton on Saturday. People were smiling. Street musicians  were strumming and singing. As a friend said me: “you’re just so lucky living here…what’s not to like?” Quite a lot (I thought) if you’re a follower of local party politics. Quite a lot as the “what’s-not-to-like-ness” of Brighton gets translated into a surprising level of backbiting and discontent. Quite a lot if you travel an hour or so west and encounter a contrasting upbeat optimism in Portsmouth where the future is in  sight and the upside of ceasing to be an industrial town is beginning to dawn on everyone.

Someone once said to me Brighton that is a bit adolescent - yes, I suppose in a kind of “whatever; yeah but it’s not fair… why me?” way. But, in fact, it more resembles a bunch of UKIP supporters dressed up as hippy Greens. In other words Brighton has an identity crisis.

Or it used to have one. Because on Saturday the sun was shining and I saw some self-confident innovation that I’d not seen before.

First there was the Flour Pot Bakery in Sydney Street. Open for just two weeks it looks and smells fabulous and the people working there look excited…here’s how they describe what they do: “We ‘re creating an energizing atmosphere for an authentic and modern boulangerie experience, using natural ingredients”.

What’s not to like?

Pen to Paper opposite - my favourite shop - they say “We hold one of the largest ranges of Moleskine journals in the UK, complemented by a wide selection of notebooks from Clairefontaine. We stock Vergé de France writing paper from Georges Lalo of Paris with its matching tissue-lined envelopes and from Italy we have picked the deckle-edged Fabriano blank cards and envelopes.”

What’s not to like?

And then 64 Degrees. The best restaurant I’ve been to for ages. It’s a blinding revelation of both taste and service.  They say “the philosophy is that the food rules, the kitchen is the heart of the restaurant”

The result is there’s a great deal to like.

Interestingly the chefs serve the food they’ve just cooked, they talk about it with passion and they seem to spend their lives trying out new ideas. This is a University of Food.

Finally on the seafront I found “Hire a Poet” - a creative looking guy sitting at a desk with a typewriter. He was there to compose your very own personalised haiku. Two roughnecks were talking to this increasingly uncomfortable wannabe Keats. “I’m a racist bastard mate - can you get that in your poem.”

I loved the products I’d seen and I found I loved Brighton. And if you love your product lots of good things flow from that. This is sometimes easy to forget in a world of marketing. Remember what the guys at 64 degrees said: “the philosophy is that the food rules, the kitchen is the heart of the restaurant.”

The sun was shining in Brighton on Saturday and I was smiling.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

"I'M NOT TOO BAD ..... CONSIDERING"

This miserable response to the question “hi, how are you?” invites an invitation to ask to know more… and more is what you usually get. A torrent of misery about health, injustice and ill fortune. The only responses to the hi-how-are-you question that are worse are “fine” which = fucked-up, insecure, neurotic and emotional. Or “could be worse - musn’t grumble”… but you are going to mate, aren’t you, aren’t you? … any second from now.

(The lion on the left has just asked that “hi how are you” question by the way.)

When life in Britain gets sunnier every day, when the weather is heading towards a possible heat wave, when wherever I walk I see vibrant street theatre, investment, new art and enterprise why do I detect the whiff of “fings aint wot they used to be” UKIPism? Well actually I don’t see it amongst the young so much as the middle aged and elderly bewailing the dismantlement of Old Britain. Overall the young seem pretty fine to me. For the first time in years I even like and appreciate some of their music and some of the recent advertising…Look at the current World Cup McDonald’s ad which is pure generous genius

http://www.mobiledia.com/

And last week when Rik Mayall died and we all rushed to You Tube to watch the astonishing tour de force of his Lord Flashheart in Blackadder we appreciate the joy of “tour de force” rather than grumble and mutter. And what a tour de force this was. Deliciously we learn he didn’t do it quite like that in rehearsal so this is also a piece of glorious upstaging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKfbSHW9uGA

The tired old cliché is that life isn’t a rehearsal either. Why Mayall and his various characters struck a chord is they weren’t careful, they weren’t sensible, they were just full of ranting life. Alan B’Stard was not admirable in any way bar one. He too was enormously full of life. Just like that old boy with his unforgotten football skills in the McDonald’s ad. Because this isn’t about age it’s about attitude.

Wake up, feel glad to be doing whatever you’ve got to do that day, do it with vitality, energy and laughter. The world really is a better place than it was and more than 50% of what happens is great (which means, if my arithmetic is right, that we’re winning). So what do we do about those whingers and grumblers - the “not too bad considerings”?

Do a Rick Mayall and say loudly “not too bad? … Bollocks….you are so, so lucky…the sun’s shining and life is great” and then laugh. They’ll think you’ve gone mad but you’ll have achieved an important thing. You’ll have communicated that how you feel depends on how you see things. There’s a phrase I hear more of now than the dreaded “whatever!”.

 “What’s not to like?”

Apart from that football result….but look on the bright side….we might be Spanish.

THE POISON OF XENOPHOBIA

No, this is not an attack on UKIP, who will carry on muttering their stuff regardless of me and be very happy, on their own, in a pub with locked doors.

No, it’s a reflection on the dangers I see in isolationism and resistance to change.  It seems entirely possible that we could soon have a resignation and a divorce pretty well all at once with Britain saying goodbye to Europe and Scotland saying goodbye to Britain.

All done and dusted, we’d be proudly on our own.

But why stop there? Let’s ditch everything apart from London and the South East. We’re roughly 40 % of the UK and twice as rich as the rest. A £1.5 trillion gated community of an economy and no need to worry about Labour or Liberals anymore or those strange Northern accents or greyhounds or pies or the Co-op. Burn the cloth cap and build another runway or two at Heathrow and who needs HS2? We’ll spend it on skyscrapers instead.

Increasingly we’ll retreat indoors behind our PCs and read about the Bulgarian invasion of Scotland and laugh drily.  But weren’t we born to huddle together, laugh, drink and tell stories?  Weren’t we born to exchange views and change minds?  Aren’t we hard wired to work together?

I was asked today if I thought travelling broadened the mind. Not exactly, I reflected, it’s bigger than that. It explodes boundaries. Go to China or India and you see unimaginable scale, poverty, wealth, growth and a sheer sense of wonder and discovery in their eyes and through your own. These are places that are devouring a diet of change. They have infinite  horizons just as extraordinary and wide as Columbus saw.
Caitlin Moran lamented her London being stolen by a new rich foreign cadre who’ve taken it over. Yet I rejoice to hear people describe Mile End as trendy and smart. I’m amazed (happily) that Park Royal is cool – a sort of South Ealing without the ponce and that Clapham is the Chelsea of today.

Because there is only one poison more toxic than that of hating abroad and that’s the small ‘c’,  conservative resistance to change and hostility to ambition.

You know, the view that we can’t afford to do whatever it takes to get to the next level when all the evidence of history has consistently shown ambition, investment, drive and change has, nearly always, led to a better life. Isn’t that the lesson of the Olympics?

I realise how much I like being part of Scotland and how refreshing, foibles and all (and we’re good ones to talk) Europe is (from Greece to Sweden) and how good it is being a European citizen…..because here’s where I live.

Maybe we’ve got bored or gone mad but as Tom Peters once put it “you can’t shrink into greatness”.

Here’s hoping lots of people hear that.

HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH?

I keep on meeting ex colleagues and so-called marketing experts who rather like defrocked priests seem to want to confess they’ve lost the faith. They look at me with embarrassment and confusion on their faces and say “it’s all bollocks isn’t it, isn’t it?”

A career in advertising and brand management and they’ve lost their belief, all those years in brand prayer and suddenly they’ve become marketing atheists. But of course it’s always been all right to have doubts especially when the language of marketing has been purloined by non-marketeers and especially the media.
Anyone would be confused to hear people talk about the UKIP brand or brand Russia or the Linda Barker brand – she used to talk about herself as LB  not as a person at all, an image, a brand  – for heaven’s sake – an icon.

This week I happened, in the interests of curiosity rather than penury, to visit Poundland and Lidl. Both are doing brilliantly right now and deservedly. They’re great value and they have brilliantly clear positioning. “We are cheap” they say and they are.

 But in either you learn the value and reason for brands, those products with the swagger of superiority like Innocent or Apple or Dom Perignon. There is, of course, no problem with these stores or Aldi which increasingly cater for the Waitrose shoppers in us when we awaken lean, hungry and overdrawn. Our left brain guides us to smoked salmon, napkins, ketchup and chocolate which is just fine and does the job. Eat it and your self-esteem, health and complexion will not suffer.

But there’s more to life than crisps from Estonia at £1.09 rather than £2.50 from a start up in Stoke Poges where the owner has dreams about potatoes and would kill you if you teased him or her.

Earlier in the week I was in Selfridges trying to get my Mont Blanc pencil mended. To my horror I see it’s more than doubled in price from the ridiculous £130 it cost a few years ago. I’m told it cannot be mended here but has to be sent to Germany where it will be assessed and a quotation phoned to me. This whole diagnosis, estimate and complex restoration process (should I care to comply) will take four weeks.

 This is contemptuous luxury brand marketing at its best. But despite myself I can’t resort to a W.H. Smith pencil or a Bic….despite myself I love my Mont Blanc in the way others love their iPhones.
The real truth about marketing and the creation of brands is they cost more because they are better and, more importantly, although they are not that much better, they have a better story to tell about why, how, where and when they are crafted.

Most marketeers have their focus wrong. They need to worry a lot more about the quality of their product than their marketing.

But they also need to remember that in shops like Lidl, brilliant as they are, there are no stories, there’s just stuff.

WHAT THE HECK'S GOING ON?

We’ve been going to the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show for over fifteen years. It’s a season-defining thing, July, usually sunny and a day of unalloyed pleasure. When it started it was precocious little sister of Chelsea, a bit more burger than Bulgari. 

 

But now it’s three times the size and massively bigger in the last year alone. It’s changed a lot. From flower show to the biggest outdoor living show imaginable. It’s packed with UKIP voters, members of the National Trust and the sort of people you meet on cruises – charming, educated and a little bit deaf.

What was that? Yes, me too to the last of those.

But the biggest change was a strange one. It was a failure of creativity over common sense. One of the highlights (after the floral Marquee) has always been the show gardens. I recall dozens of brilliant ideas in the past. Often a real sense of delicious green and original solitude.  This year was full of brilliant planting, lots of meadow flowers but then there was something irrelevant as the focal point.

You know – a man in a gas mask, a leather recliner with a broken glass and a bottle of Bollinger, a rusting piece of sculpture, a plastic table with a teddy bear astride a watering can. It was all most odd.  There were screens of orange, blocks of wood and piles of old fridges. One called Ashes to Ashes with lots of burnt ash trees and RIP tombstones in memory of ash dieback seemed refreshingly normal.

So what the heck was going on?

It was the stands selling stuff that won most of the attention – the next Farrow and Ball called Little Greene, Estribos selling brilliant hats made from wild Argentinian hare pelts (nothing PC about the Country Living stand) and a new sausage brand to replace Debbie and Andrews – the brand bought by private equity and gone legit. Welcome, instead, Heck the North Yorkshire brand created by the Keeble family whose motto is, allegedly, “what the heck!” Everyone in the family’s on the board and it says on their website:

“Making damn good sausages is in our blood and we have been doing it for years. ….working together on the family farm to bring you sausages packed to the skin with quality, flavour and inspiration. We use fresh herbs instead of dried, processed ones. We do small-batch production instead of mass-production……“

It was good to see someone doing their best to do what they do well better.

It’s time for the gardeners to get back to gardening.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

IS IT WORKING?

In the late 1970s a poster appeared with the headline “Labour Isn’t Working”. This idea of the Labour administration failing and especially failing in the area of employment resonated so powerfully that Margaret Thatcher won the election.

The other day I was sitting in the train from Brighton thinking of the rose tinted past, a kind of UKIP moment. But it wasn’t as special as some like to pretend.  And life today puts me in so much better a mood than life in the past. Except for the unemployed… especially if they’re gifted…. and stuck….and playing to the rules of the past.

In the seats just ahead of me I heard this conversation. Two young guys just into their twenties speaking that “whatever, you know, excellent, awesome “  language as unfamiliar as French to older generations, meaning I got some but not all of it.

They were talking about getting employment…”I like the sound of that …. they’ve  got no deadlines and you get lots of time off… it’s a three month fixed contract… I can do it blindfolded.” Of course they were from Brighton and as they say down here well Brighton is different.

Whilst they seemed happy enough they’re living in a world where employee rights have diminished, work for many is a necessary means of getting by for now not about creating a future, where you only have fixed term contracts not jobs and terms of employment are unknown.

Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Because change shakes people up;  because the entitlement society (a mostly bad thing) is dying; because energy and application are in fashion and because I smell the whiff of an emergent, enterprise culture.

But the trouble with change is that some people get hurt. And we aren’t educating young people in the scale of this real change…probably because we don’t get it ourselves. But overall is it working? For parts of the service economy, yes.

Aldi, for instance, is now the Oxbridge of employers paying graduates £40,000 a year, plus a new Audi A4– nearly twice the £25,500 offered by lawyers, banks and Marks & Spencer. But you are expected to work all hours, do everything (“clean those lavatories”, “learn all the prices”, “do everything.”)

I used to joke that to get a job in the Pizza Express at Brighton you needed an Upper Second.  I don’t think that’s a joke any longer. So why am I so optimistic? Because in the middle of the mess I can smell the whiff of enterprise and adventure. The young people I heard were more savvy than they seemed.
They were behaving like consumers not employees. And in the end consumers drive up quality.

WHAT AN AMAZING STORY THIS IS

From Eastleigh to Beppe Grillo in Italy to the Vatican shenanigans the script has twisted with turns and oddities. Life is increasingly a comedy.

A friend of mine described joining a group of singers to go and perform in at old people’s homes. They bounded in singing the Sondheim lyrics:
“Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!”

An old man in a wheel chair shouted “why don’t you just shut up and go home – I hate this!”

Bet he was a UKIP Member, talking of which have you looked at their manifesto?
Now I’m going to be unfairly selective but in essence it’s 75 parts anti-immigration and anti-Europe – the “they-come-over-here-and-take-our-jobs” party – and 25 parts ant:i

• Global warming warnings, 
• Employers National Insurance Contributions, 
• the ban on smoking and hunting.

And it’s pro-defence, wanting a 40% increase.

But Nigel Farage is hugely entertaining (for as long as he lasts because UKIP has had, in the past 20 years, no fewer than eight leaders.)

We British love whingeing and saying “and another thing”.

We were really pissed off that the Olympics was a success. We hate bankers but hate the EU limiting their bonuses even more. We blame the Romanians, Turks, French and any Johnny foreigners for horse meat contamination and anything else we dislike.

The influx of foreign wealth is driving UKIP and their followers insane. One Hyde Park – the Candy brothers London development (with apartments selling on average at around £20 million (although you can top £150 million if you really go for it) has been snapped up by a cocktail party of Ukranian, Nigerian, Russian, Taiwanese and Malaysian plutocrats.

But I love influxes of wealth. It feels like the Renaissance. Anyway would you want to live here?

The ranters are currently having a field day with the NHS, our schools, young people…..bah humbug – to hell in a handcart…

Our divine scriptwriter is on a roll. Private Eye can’t keep up. But there’s one issue that I predict will gain momentum (and enrage UKIP) the increasing campaign against alcohol. The banning of smoking slipped in and was, despite forebodings, immediately embraced – it’s time was right. And doesn’t smoking look old fashioned now?

Next stop booze. We’ll be like California. “Two glasses of wine? Are you some crazy, out-of-control alcoholic?”  You read it here first.

I’d be in favour just to tease Jeremy Clarkson.

And a 20mph speed limit – that’s already here in Brighton as of the end of March.

Life really is a comedy and I love it.


www.colourfulthinkers.com