A Ukranian Spring

Thank you, Justin Webb, for reminding me in Friday’s Times of what Trotsky said:

“You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

Friday was chilly but with a brightly blazing sun in Brighton. The stridently yellow daffodils fluttered in the breeze muttering: 

“all’s well, Spring is coming, relax …. all is well.” 

The daffodils were wrong.

In Kyiv it was raining, cold and about to get much colder. War was being declared. No, not “declared” so much as “visited upon us” and the world was waiting aghast as the missiles flew. We were living in a world gone mad. After 77 years Europe was once again a warzone.

I recalled Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy written after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819.  The second stanza stuck in my head, now slightly re-written (sorry Percy):

I met Murder wildly shooting 

He had a mask just like Putin

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him.

The most unlikely people have suddenly become militaristic. Quentin Letts, political sketch writer, observed with astonishment that the Liberal Democrats, of all people, were in the Commons with a bellicose “Come on Vladimir let’s be having you” attitude.

How did we let this Russian thug and our own greed get us to this ultimately predictable point? Chelsea football fans lament your ownership. Estate Agents in Knightsbridge be very ashamed. But despite my initial horror and anger something else has replaced it. The courage and the spirit of the Ukrainian people in slowing down and in places thwarting the Russian advance made me feel just a bit better. There was something epic about the tragedy of Snake Island in the Black Sea where 13 Ukrainian Soldiers and their families were slaughtered after refusing to surrender to a Russian Warship … “Go f*** yourself Russian Warship” were their last words. Courage and resilience are an enviable epitaph. And it’s their resilience that heralds the Ukrainian Spring because it is Springtime that characterises resilience.

Keats didn’t manage an Ode to Spring. Pity. The best we can find is, nonetheless, terrific.  Either the beginning of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales – “sweet showers” - or Gerard Manley Hopkins will do – just these glimpses from him:

    “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

    When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush” 

  

And “the racing lambs too have fair their fling….”

     

   

 And then     

“What is all this juice and all this joy?         

     A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

     In Eden garden…..”

“Long, lovely and lush …all this juice and joy” – yes that does it for me …that’s my kind of Spring. And this year’s Spring is delivering already – primulas and violets vigorously doing their thing and tiny tête ά tête daffodils laughing in the chill.

Spring is about innovation, new beginnings and a simple celebration of growth. A blitz of Russian missiles can’t change that. Spring cleaning is one of the most useful of occupations discarding the unused and unusable, simplifying our possessions and cleaning our shelves, our cupboards and our minds. 

I for one have spent too many seasons worrying about newspaper headlines about which I can do nothing. My mind is full of “stuff” -  much of it negative. Time for a good Spring-Clean. Time to think positively. Time to walk through woods where buds are bursting and birds are finding their voices.

It's too late to stop the stupidity. But never too late for hope. Nature always helps our perspective. Flowers grow out of rubble. Juice and joy cannot be blown away by a bomb.

INCREASING THE SPEED LIMIT

Recently the police in Germany decided to prosecute a speeding driver despite there being no speed limit. He’d driven his Bugatti supercar at 260 mph down an autobahn doing a selfie of himself and a passenger and cheering . Maybe they’ll do him for being an arrogant idiot instead. 

Speed has been one of the topics of the week. There was the launch of Uptime the app which reduces 3,000 non-fiction books down to 1,200 words each and provides three-point key insights. It’s a tool to reduce the time needed to appear being well-read. It got a lot of coverage. Ann Treneman in The Times said she thought it was an embarrassing idea but was gratified to find that she’d read half of the top 16 books Uptime has filleted. But she said, thinking back she couldn’t remember a thing about any of them. How, she lamented, could she have forgotten every single habit of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But then she recalled this quote: 

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

I don’t feel well after that. But I feel worse when I hear University students proclaiming they never read a whole book – just the first five pages, five pages in the middle and five pages at the end this plus the copy on the cover and you’ve nailed it. Sorry Jane Austen – you are just “too slow.” Lectures? “I get a friend to record them and then listen to them at three times speed.” Films? “The same.” Music?  “Yeah, that too.” 

Yet whilst everything is fast – speed dating, fast food, speed interviews - something’s missing which meditation is providing. Three people have recently told me about a five-day meditation course they’d been on in Herefordshire with 150 others. Two said it had been life-changing. I gather the third  felt it had changed him - but from being benign into feeling murderously antagonistic.

One obvious way slow comes into its own is cooking. If I never ate fast-food again in my life that wouldn’t be soon enough. In Bra, Italy where the slow-food-movement started in 1989 it was the result of Macdonald’s trying to open a branch. How splendid a rebuff to relentless speed and dollar signs. Ragu to you Ronald. Meanwhile how sad that a much Michelin starred, much feted Paul Bocuse restaurant has closed in Lyons and is being replaced by a Macdonald’s.

I can empathize with young people being in a hurry to gorge themselves on life; I was there myself once. I created an idea to make visiting an art gallery more fulfilling. It comprised selecting the 10 best, most interesting paintings, directing the visitor just to them and for each one writing a reader-accessible commentary and background (none of your Brian Sewell.)  The idea was to intensify the pleasure rather than save time. For many of us a long, comprehensive A to Z visit to a gallery can be like an exhausting and indigestible tasting menu. However, relishing just a few masterpieces can be life changing. 

 Technology has helped make our lives in many ways simpler but also in many ways somehow shallower. The onset of age makes physical speed less comfortable, but we still try to “keep up”. I think it’s time to reinvent the “Slow Movement” but as the “Savour Movement”. Enjoy less stuff but enjoy it more and take much longer doing so.

Life should be less about how many things we do and more about making the experience much more intense …. that’s the main thing.    

A MIDWINTER NIGHT'S TONIC

It’s a long time since I wrote about Shakespeare. I’m doing so because consistent with my resolution to widen my horizons I went to a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Thursday. It was at our Grandsons’ school and our 13-year-old played Demetrius.

               The ability of the performers to remember so much verse that must have seemed as alien as Latin was remarkable; Shakespeare is hard unless you are schooled in iambic pentameters. 

                

Secondly the spirit and joie de vivre of this cast of young actors was infectious. Amateur productions generally make me feel a little uneasy but as time passed my disbelief and skepticism were entirely suspended. This is exactly what theatre should do.

The play is rather silly. In Theseus’ Athens, where it’s set, daughters who ignore their father’s wishes as to whom they marry, must be executed. That is the law. One felt a certain parental ripple of approval for this through the audience. So, Hermia who’s instructed to marry Demetrius but who wants to marry Lysander instead is immediately in trouble. Helena, Hermia’s friend, is in love with Demetrius but he cannot stand her. Wake up at the back…pay attention. 

Meanwhile (‘meanwhile’ means there’s going to be more complexity) Oberon and Titania – Fairy King and Queen have a tiff and Oberon decides with his acolyte, the naughty nymph Puck, to teach her a lesson and, at the same time, sort out the love quadrangle of Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena. (With me so far?) 

The enchanted wood which Oberon and the rest inhabit is, of course, where the star-crossed lovers get lost, Demetrius pursuing Hermia who’s with Lysander and himself being pursued by Helena. (Now is that clear?) Meanwhile a team of “rude mechanicals” – that’s a posh way of describing down-market workmen like Bottom the Weaver – are planning to play a version of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in Theseus’s court.

Back to that magical wood where the dopey quartet of lovers continue to get hopelessly lost and keep lying down to have a snooze. (I’ve never come across so many naps in so short a time.) Puck gives Bottom an ass’s head and puts love potion into Titania’s eyes so when she wakes so she’ll fall for Bottom. But he screws up the other mission by putting love potion into Lysander’s eyes instead of Demetrius’ so Lysander falls for Helena and rejects Hermia. (Got it? Do pay attention please!)

 I remembered why I’d always loathed this now-he-loves-her-now-he-doesn’t stuff and that blasted ass’s head…it’s just so… what’s the word? Insufferable will do. 

But in this production, several popular ‘80s songs (and why not? Shakespeare would have loved it) sung by a vigorously dancing and tuneful cast were belted out with such spirit and energy that it cheered me up. That was one thing. Another was those rude mechanicals who played their high comedy to much better effect than I’d ever seen before, better than in any professional productions. For once funny. The Wall and Thisbe were pure comic delights.  Finally, this is a spectacular cheer-you-up pantomimic comedy and the young people got that 100% right without a hint of the sometimes-dreary Royal Shakespeare Company reverence.

It was enormous fun. Our grandson cool and wonderful (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?) and his opposite number Lysander also spectacular, Puck is obviously destined for theatre later in life. Overall, it was an uproarious, funny event. 

This was proof, as if we needed it, that laughing, clapping, letting-your-hair-down, discarding restraint and having a ball is just the sort of tonic that all of us need.

 

THE GRUMPY GARDENER

Have you noticed the irrepressible cheerfulness of TV gardeners? Carol Klein  on Gardeners’ World gurgles inexpressible wonderment about her burgeoning blooms. Others take optimism to yodeling heights.

 

Last week after months of idle self-pity I decided to start gardening again. Whilst we and our neighbours share a three-acre parkland full of mighty elms, our own little gardens leading on to this are more a thing of nail scissors than shears.

But gardening of any kind is serious so I must be prepared. I put on my crumpled gardening trousers and my gardening jerkin with its multi-pockets for secateurs, string, spare gardening gloves and a small but lethal trowel. I open the door and squawk…it’s freezing out there…..!!

I retreat indoors to do some research. It makes gloomy reading; “clean out, clear, remove, repair and tidy.” Most of all there’s the caveat “prune but not too soon.”

The next day it’s sunny, so I try again. I adopt the random-inspect-and-ruthless-remedy technique, favoured by dilettante gardeners. It comprises surprise attacks on areas of weeds or degenerate perennials. I fill a surprising number of refuse sacks with floral detritus quite fast and reflect on the philosophy of gardening. There’s the current fashionable vogue for wilding and pest balance. There’s the ‘if-you-can’t-eat-it-don’t-plant-it’ Vegetable Fanclub.  But I belong more to the school of striped lawns and immaculate herbaceous borders and, failing that, a less-is-more strategy.

After two days of work I have two tidy garden cupboards packed with impressive array of nuclear-powered pest-killing products and all those plastic pots, old seed packets and out of date stuff have been binned. The garden has a new layer of top-soil – have you any idea what damage 30 litres of that stuff can do to your back? The worst of the straggling overgrowth has gone and the plant-corpses of the past season have been removed. To give hope for the future a few about-to-bloom bulbs have been strategically placed to please the eye and cheer us.

Finally the garden is tamed. I am a bit grumpy because I ache all over but escape my wife’s reproachful glances when our garden is neglected. It’s only early next morning, as I walk around this fresh canvas on which nature will paint its colour, that I realise how nice being  clean and tidy is.

So I decide on two final touches. Karcher is a second-generation, family-owned German business. They make various excellent products but my favourite is the pressure-washer for cleaning paving. Our muddy paving slabs are transformed to a sparkling, clean, grey blue. It’s pure magic. Danke schön Karcher. 

 

The second is to prune the dead wood in the awkwardly located lavender bushes which have got a bit out of control. Balancing on one leg I get along splendidly until I overbalance, slip and fall into some viciously prickly Teazel plants. Gardening is dangerous,  I mutter, with 115,000 accidents a year in the UK when they last counted. No wonder I’m a grumpy gardener. But like fishermen -  not grumpy for long. Gardeners always hope for a great year, huge marrows, wonderful roses and spectacular displays. Gardeners know there’ll be growth and we’re heading towards the growth season. 

 

Man-made artifacts are less predictable, as the past week or so has shown. Cryptocurrencies (which have a gardening cousin in the Dutch Tulip Bulb Bubble of the 1660s) have declined by 40% compared to their November peak.  More dramatic, in many ways, is the recent, colossal share price tumble of Meta (aka Facebook, Instagram et al).

 

 

Maybe it’s best to leave growth to gardeners and rejoice in seasons.

LEARNING TO LISTEN AGAIN

There’s been a poem tumbling around in my head through the period of lockdowns and Covid disruption. It’s called The Listeners and it was written by Walter De La Mare. It’s a haunting story of non-communication. It’s the lament – it occurred to me - of an Amazon delivery man. Most of all, though, it captures the perplexed feeling of being stood up.

 

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,   

   Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   

   Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,   

   Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;   

   ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;   

   No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,   

   Where he stood perplexed and still.’

 

 

Throughout these past, quiet months we seem to some extent to have lost the art of communication but, particularly, of listening – not just listening but eavesdropping too – in empty rooms it just isn’t possible. The lifting of restrictions can change this, but we also need to relearn how to do it. As I did last week.

 

All were Zoom calls.  The first was on a train, a man arguing with an HR Consultancy or some such, getting angry and then being apparently being calmed down and smiling. It was like listening to a fight that ended up kissy-kissy. 

The second was in a café and Mr-I’m-In-Charge was attending a meeting but not doing so attentively, gloomily munching toast and throwing in lines like “well, there’s only one answer to that isn’t there?” I concluded he was not as in charge as he’d thought. The third one was on a train from East Croydon when I heard the following: “what we need is a competency framework” What is that? It sounds important. What followed in quick succession was a further need for a “resilience model” and “a check on the number of modules on the data link.”

What did I learn? That Zoom calls seem not to bring the best out of human beings or that I’m rather out of touch. I recalled years ago having one of those informal, exploratory chats with a company Chairman sounding me out about a possible senior role in his company. I found myself as perplexed as that traveller because after he said “the current synergy syndrome” I realised that I was listening to a foreign language of which I had a very shaky command. 

I went for a long walk with my wife on Saturday through woodland and by lakes. Being a much better walker than me I encouraged her to march on as I sat on a bench and listened to the argument some ducks were having as they gathered boisterously, waddling to some kind of party (political ducks!) This was interrupted by five Canada Geese flying in formation who  joined the party landing in the water with a tremendous honking. The sound of waterfalls in the background was soothing yet insistent. It was all wonderfully simple. How seldom I thought do we all really listen and let nature’s sounds calm us. Eavesdropping on nature surely beats doing it to “businessmen”.

Listening is one of the arts lost over the past two years. We have become deaf to all but the monotone of the news. Since last week I’ve been listening to the chatter of children, the barking of excited dogs and the rowdy, end-of-the-pier rude shrieking of the seagulls.

I’ve become a listener again. 

ARM ROUND THE SHOULDER OR BOOT UP THE BUM?

There’s increasing discussion about management style. In the past there was an arm-wrestling aggression and bullying in management depicted still in the “The Apprentice”. It seems to bring out the worst in everyone. It gets good ratings (over 4.5 million watch it) but it’s a bad advertisement for management.

 

In football, tough managers like Sir Alex Ferguson and now Pep Guardiola and Jűrgen Klopp are admired. Many want disciplinarians controlling the prima-donna footballers earning £20,000,000 a year. 

But it depends on the footballer whether it works. Some will respond to praise and encouragement, others to putdowns.  Contrast the tough, “call me Boss, son” approach with that of Gareth Southgate, England Manager, and Graham Potter, the Brighton Manager. Both gentler people, good at getting the best out of their players.

Some managers seem genial until you work for them. Sir John Hegarty – the founder of advertising agency BBH - always seems relaxed and charming but some of those who worked for him said he was unreasonably demanding.

Jeff Bezos – the spectacularly successful founder of Amazon – is allegedly a scornful and hard taskmaster with put-downs like “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”  The results of his company speak highly for this approach.  But could it be out of date? By the same token Steve Jobs was very successful but with little to applaud in the way he treated people. His successor Tim Cook who has a quieter more democratic style of management has lifted Apple to entirely new levels.

Being a bully is completely unacceptable nowadays, yet in politics bullying has apparently become endemic. The Tory Whips Office has become increasingly intimidatory; politics is a nasty business. Ask the Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district. She was recently reviled with shocking language by a Republican politician. 

Bullying in business has negative effects. Talent can be squashed by snide dismissiveness. We can all recall moments when self-confidence and creativity flowed away like water out of a bath.

Management of people is a real skill too few people think about or learn. It’s about getting the best out of others and there isn’t a simple formula for that because few managers and few employees are the same. But when we read about the poor levels of productivity in the UK blame poor management of people. It’s not easy but great managers are usually great controllers of results, of numbers and of which levers to pull to achieve desired outcomes. 

It's interesting that sometimes it needs a hands-off approach when management needs to stop being in charge and to start to behave like absentee managers. One of the best managers in my life just let me get on with it. I wonder if the companies I know that did so well during the various Covid lockdowns benefitted from people being left alone to do their work rather than having someone breathing down their neck and putting them on some time consuming training programme. 

I also wonder if the restrictions of the past two years may not have changed our expectations of and our need for great management. What we need is a mixture of inspiration, integrity, enthusiasm, and energy.  Most of all we need to believe in and trust our managers. Abraham Lincoln said something interesting about what making a person a manager can do to them. 

His observations are wise and raise the question that we should consider about all managers. Their effectiveness may seem great but what of their influence in the longer term. What of their character?

GO ON. BRING ME EXCITEMENT.

OK, I’ve changed my mind. Now the time’s right for some excitement. A surprise. A bit of spontaneity. Perhaps a bit of danger. In cricket that series in Australia sums up how most of us feel: lethargic, disengaged, disappointing. Depressingly the effect of nearly two years of Covid has been to make many of us rather dull. 

I had underestimated the importance and the effect of travel and adventure. I realised I was missing the frisson of excitement of being in an airport, the anticipation of airline food (isn’t that crazy when that food is generally dreadful?) and the thrill of taking off. I understood I had aged wearily and become a housebound Victor Meldrew (that geriatric misery of an antihero from a bygone BBC TV series.)

Yet the world is providing us with plenty of excitement and drama. At home we have the impending defenestration of a Prime Minister in the pantomime of British politics (“behind you Boris”.) The sort of thing you’d expect in Patagonia or Ecuador not the UK.  In France an election in April which Macron is determined to win. When he called our own Prime Minister “a clown” he showed the sort of restraint and insight a President needs. 

In America the mid-terms are impending and as far as the world is concerned the contest will be dramatic and potentially tragic. It’s something we can’t keep our eyes off. In Australia, or as someone described it “the biggest prison in the world,” the politicians are playing their own version of tennis with Novak Djokovic or Mr Forgetful as he’s also known. 

Sweep around and in China there’s incredulity at the news about a lady of theirs. MI5 sent out an alert and picture of the woman named Christine Lee on Thursday alleging she was "involved in political interference activities" in the United Kingdom on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Barry Gardner, a Labour Shadow Minister, was allegedly paid £400,000 by Ms Lee over the past years. A spy in plain sight…bizarre. 

We are spectators of non-stop high drama and life changing events. But it’s making us even more stressed and depressed. 

Yet on Saturday I read about a 19-year-old who’s just broken the record for being the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe. Her name is Zara Rutherford, she took 5 months to do it and she accomplished it in a Microlight. What an adventure. What enterprise. How refreshing.

We have been fed a diet of rules, restrictions, health scares and statistics which has turned many of us into scaredy cats and bores. What a catastrophic cocktail. I met a bright young person who lives nearby waiting to cross the road on Saturday. We talked about how strange the world was. She told me she was supposed to be going to a local comedy club but that she’d probably give it a miss - “too many people crammed together laughing” she explained. I told her to go. I wouldn’t have done that two weeks ago.  

It's time to change the way we behave and look at things in a variety of ways. We need to:

• Get busy

• Get talking on the phone to several friends or better still face to face

• Go to one event next week – gallery, cinema, theatre

• Go for a long walk

• Go out to a restaurant

And then plan a series of “adventures” like going to places you’ve never been before.

Check your adrenalin levels, happiness index and sense of energy. Excitement and the thrill of the unknown are needed. Kerpow!!!