Category: Me

Why don’t you…

The infallibly interesting Seth Godin has a post today about why he doesn’t watch TV any more and lists all of the things you can do instead, now that there’s so much more choice of things to do in your spare time.  I was struck by the fact that all but a couple of his “new” choices have existed for years – I admit that running a store on eBay or starting up an online community do depend on a degree of 21st century connectivity, but most of the others are just slight variations on things my mother used to tell me to do when I was loafing around the house as a teenager and she thought I should be doing something more productive.  (This might mean my mum is a visionary marketing guru who was  years ahead of her time, but I doubt it.)

I don’t watch a lot of TV when it’s broadcast now because I’m working/my kids monopolise the remote in the early evenings and there’s only so much Hannah Montana a grown woman can take (Phineas and Ferb is good, though)/I’d rather read a good book/I watch stuff I like on DVD when I can watch it in satisfyingly long chunks rather than rationed and with adverts an hour a week.  But most importantly because I don’t find most of what’s on that interesting.   Even when I worked in TV ten years ago it was clear that the really creative, bright young things were gravitating much more towards what might be possible online than what could be done in a TV studio.  So not only is TV suffering from an increase in competition for its audience’s time, for me at least, it’s also suffering from a lack of  really strong content to fight back with.  So, all together now, why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?

Don’t just sit there – write something

This week I have mostly been feeling ill.  Not hovering at death’s door ill.  Just out of sorts and sorry for myself and unable to concentrate.  This is the worst state for a freelancer – too bad to want to work, not bad enough to give in gracefully and take to bed; just guiltily hovering between sofa and desk nostalgic for the days of proper employment, when being ill meant the novelty of being home alone in daytime (and you still got paid).

Anyway, I have work to do hanging over from last week which can’t be allowed to get in the way of next week.  So I’ve been sitting here for two hours on a Saturday afternoon and I have:

  • spent quite a lot of time on wordoid trying to find a new name for the business
  • spent more time on LinkedIn searching for old friends from university and deciding whether I want to get back in touch with them or not
  • ditto Facebook
  • marvelled yet again at the vacuousness of most of Twitter, and looked at lots and lots of tweets to prove  that I’m right
  • repeatedly put work-related search terms into wonder wheel to create ever lovelier and more complicated networks than I will ever have time to do anything with
  • changed the theme of the blog – bored with the old one, not sure about this one, might change it back soon
  • written 263 words of this blog post (in about ten minutes) which is 144 more words than I have managed to put into the piece of work I’ve been doing since 3 o’clock
  • found the procrastinators’ blog 

Art, history, dentistry

Staggering back from the dentist with a face full of novocaine, I found myself yet again pondering the world’s greatest mystery – why do people become dentists? 

Lord knows I’m grateful that they do.  My juvenile CurlyWurly obsession coincided with the dark ages of British dentistry and I’m grateful for how much better it’s got every time I go to get a substandard filling repaired.  But still, why do they do it?  Want to help people feel better and remove pain?  Be a doctor.  Get off on seeing people gibbering with fear and drooling when they come to see you?  Become a tax inspector.  At least then you won’t have to listen to a drill all day.  Fancy the idea of sculpting very small things in a confined space?  Go to art school.

Anthony Gormley: Field

I’ve been trying to think of heroic dentists of the past who might act as role models,  but nothing comes instantly to mind from life or the movies.  Heroic doctors galore, of course.  Even tax inspectors have that guy in The Untouchables who helps Kevin Costner nab Al Capone.  But dentists?  The first film featuring dentistry that most people could name off the top of their heads is Marathon Man, and if you’re encouraged to take up the probe after seeing that, there are probably laws to stop you.

The only dentist-hero I can think of was created by the late and much missed Alan Coren.  After a dashing spell in the foreign legion, azure-eyed, blond-haired Garth Genesis fixes the Prime Minister’s teeth and eventually becomes Foreign Secretary, while lovelorn beauties queue up in his waiting room for the chance of a consultation.  But apart from him what’s the attraction?  It’s not a question I feel I can  ask while I’m there.  It might sound as though I think they’re doing something shameful and slightly weird, which is not a good position to be in when you’re there with your mouth open and they have an armoury of pointy metal things in easy reach.

Note to self

Stooging around the web this afternoon looking for nothing in particular I found this, which links to this site, which is a really useful idea and something I should do soon.  And so should you.  Now, excuse me while I go and sort out that hippo.

Five ingredients of a perfect Friday

1. Kick off meeting (with doughnuts) at one of my favourite companies to work with,  on a fantastic new project which could keep us absorbed, challenged – and gainfully employed – until Christmas.

2. Children off to spend two weeks with their grandmother in Scotland.  No washing, wearing, chivvying, tidying, snapping, snipping, squabbling or Spongebob Squarepants UNTIL AUGUST 10.

3. Husband delivering children to Scotland and staying ’til Sunday.  London at my disposal for the weekend.  Control over the contents of the fridge and use of the remote absolute. Only fly in ointment is continuing need to care for cats, who have deposited a dead bird in the kitchen in protest at being abandoned to me.  With luck they will leave home…

4. Large pile of newly bought,  sweet-smelling books beckoning me from the side of the bed.

5. The sun is shining.  And I intend to make hay.

My dear! The noise! The people!

In what feels like the equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing loudly, I’m not blogging about the Labour party, the economy, the loathsome emergence of the BNP from under its stone, or indeed any of the other things that have been keeping me awake at night recently. Instead I’m  trying to recapture the euphoria of watching A Little Night Music in the West End on Friday.  Just, please, go and see it. You’ll thank me.  It has wit,  it has intelligence, it has charm.  It has fabulous frocks and Maureen Lipman being grand underneath a very big wig.  Its central conceit is that the fresh-faced charms of youth just can’t compare with the allure of an intelligent, mature woman (an argument I find completely persuasive). 

Floating out of the theatre I was even reconciled to the horror that is the West End now.  Being out on a Saturday night these days increasingly makes me feel like an easily shockable maiden aunt up from the sticks for a spree.  Why is the music from all the bars so LOUD? Why do all those nice young girls wear clothes that are two sizes too small?  Why is everyone so drunk? (and how the hell do they afford it at those prices?  £7.60 for two cups of coffee.  £7.60.  For coffee.) And where did all those bicycle-rickshaws come from?  When I used to go out regularly  – some time back in the late Jurassic – there were one or two of them hanging about near Leicester Square tube and they looked quite cute.  They have evidently bred like rabbits in the intervening years, turned ferral, and now infest every street in Soho.  If you just give me a minute to lace my stays and button my boots, I shall write to Boris. Something Must Be Done.

Passionate about communications solutions

David Mitchell got in before me (and is infinitely funnier than I could have been) about the use and abuse of the word “passionate”.  I feel much the same about “solutions” – as in information solutions  (1,060,000 examples on Google), communications solutions (1,180,000), new media solutions (550,000), security solutions (3,260,000), technology solutions 6,860,000). There is now an event called Procurement Solutions Live “the annual event for buying solutions”.

Last summer when I was trying to find an events company to deliver some conferences for a client, I refused on principle to invite any company to pitch whose website promised that they could deliver “event solutions”.  It’s as good a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff as any – and we found a brilliant company to do the job.  I was almost inspired by this to re-name my business the No Solutions Communications Company – but felt in the end it might be misunderstood…

Peace at last

My email system has died.  I can send stuff out but no-one can get stuff  to me  – which suits me temperamentally rather well.  I will have to fix it, in fact it has prodded me into sorting out a proper  domain name/website for the business which I have been putting off for reasons of incompetence and sloth for about a year.  But,  Lord the relief of turning on the system and not finding hundreds of offers to “increase my manhood”, sell me a fake Rolex or an MBA, or do whatever it is those guys who write to me in Russian want me to do.  It can’t last.  But surprisingly the answer to that perennial question “what on earth did we do before email?” is “coped really well, actually.”

Nostalgia and armadillos

Stewart Lee ranted about modern TV and in particular the current state of Channel 4 (a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home) on his show a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I have been nostalgic for the days when I worked at C4 and we did good stuff.  Arts programmes about the arts, that made you think ; documentaries that changed the law , added to the gaiety of the nation, and that were fought over in court.

Of course, it might  be that Channel 4 is just the same rag bag of good stuff and tripe that it always was and what I’m really nostalgic for is being 27 again.  But what the hell.  It’s my birthday and I’m allowed to have the odd madeleine moment about TV  programmes of the 1990s if I want. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, here’s a tribute to the only armadillo in history known to have introduced an arts programme (and subsequently to have died of a broken heart). 

Why I will never be rich

… but will never have to apologise to  a Select Commitee:

He who is ridden by a conscience /Worries about a lot of nonscience;  

He without benefit of scruples/ His fun and income soon quadruples                                                                          

(Ogden Nash, 1931 – when they also had a spot of bother with the banks.)