Say no to the nay-sayers

According to Thomas Paine, ‘That government is best which governs least’. Paine was no fool. He knew a thing or two.

Sabina Buzzanti’s pretty smart too. She’s an Italian comedian who recently told the Guardian, ‘in a democracy, there’s no right not to be offended.’ She said that because the authorities in Berlusconiland had tried to prosecute her for a tasteless joke she had made about the pope.

That’s feels like a bit too much government.

I get fed up with being over-governed. I get fed up with being told what I can do and I get particularly fed up being told what I can’t do.

That doesn’t mean the sensible things. Why should I drive at speed past a school? Why should I blow smoke in my neighbour’s face? Why should I watch a pirated copy of a film? Well, actually, I might be inclined to reply ‘why not?’ to the last one, but you get the general point.

It’s the senseless, meaningless restrictions that grate on me.

Take Maggie. People used to call her the ‘iron lady’. I used to think of her as the ‘iron lady with the wooden head’. She decided that I shouldn’t read Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher. It was freely available in every country except Britain. I went to inordinate lengths to find a copy of it. My friend Alasdhair got me one in the States and posted it to me. It was one of the most turgid books I’ve ever read and I can’t remember a word of it. Honestly. It was worse than Proust. Worse than The Bostonians. Why, it was worse than Dan Brown. It took me for ever to finish but I struggled on, partly because Alasdhair had taken so much trouble, partly just to spite Maggie. I like to think that I really got under her skin.

And it didn't stop with Maggie. Now we have an Italian comedian ‘guilty’ of mocking the Pope. Hey, this Pope used to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which in a previous incarnation used to be called the Holy Office of the Inquisition. He was the inquisitor in chief. And he gets offended by some off-colour remarks?

Of course, the remarks really were off colour. It’s just like the Danish cartoons of the prophet. Why did they publish them at all? What useful point did they make? Who on earth needed them? Being gratuitously offensive is just bad manners and it isn’t funny. To say Bush is stupid is just rude. To say that he’s a shining illustration of just how far a C grade student from Yale can get, is funny because it dresses up the same insult as an apparent compliment and has the advantage of being incontrovertibly true.

It’s also directed against a powerful target. The cartoons were directed against a minority already the butt of worse than humour. It’s like kicking a man who’s down: not attractive, not funny.

On the other hand, I deeply resent anyone preventing me seeing the cartoons. I mean, apart from myself. I was perfectly happy not to read them, I just didn’t want anyone telling me I couldn’t and I get sick of the people who try to. You don’t like the cartoons? Take another paper. You don’t like Buzzanti’s mockery of the Pope? Don’t go to the left wing rallies she addresses. You don’t like Spycatcher? I respect your literary taste. Write a blistering review of the book.

But let the rest of us make up our own minds.

Idling away the time to Paris

Flying is pretty boring, so it was good to be shaken out of my dullness by the sight I saw on the Edinburgh terminal bus as I waited for a Paris plane the other day.

At the back was a man in his thirties wearing – get this – a tweed suit with plus four trousers. You know, the kind Tintin wore, ending just below the knee. It was a good quality suit, a solid green herringbone wool with a subtle yellow stripe. Underneath he had a shirt and tie: clearly a man for whom ‘casual’ wasn’t to be taken too literally. From the knees down he was wearing woollen socks in a pleasing chocolate brown – and here’s the bit that was odd – no shoes.

The only other thing he had was a slightly battered wicker basket. The kind you might buy for your picnic from Harrods, if you were to stoop so low, or maybe from Fortnum and Mason. Although judging by his upper class brogue – he was talking on the phone, to a friend called ‘Sandy’, and saying ‘I’m safely on the bus. It’s all gone smoothly so far’ – I imagine he’d shop at the Edinburgh equivalent of Fortnum and Mason, assuming, that is, that Edinburgh has a shop that good.

It probably does, on balance. I expect.

Can you imagine the picture? Plus fours? Who wears them these days? And a friend called ‘Sandy’? It’s a name for a character in a John Buchan book. If you don’t know John Buchan, don’t bother, unless you like your swash buckled with a fair dose of snobbery and a seasoning of anti-Semitism. Just think ripping yarns about wonderful white men who’ve been keeping the Empire safe from the dastardly Boche and like to do a spot of hunting and fishing in the Highlands, unless they’re keeping the Kaffirs in their place with their Afrikaner friends in the Transvaal.

He was obviously called Algy. I mean, I don’t know that for sure, but it’s the only name that really fits the character, isn’t it? Algy and Sandy. Shouldering the white man’s burden. I suppose ‘Collum’ would probably do but I prefer Algy.

But why was he travelling to Paris without any shoes?

A narrative began to emerge in my mind.

He and Sandy had been fishing for salmon somewhere on the Tay or the Earn or some other less pronounceable Scottish river. Not just fishing: poaching. On the lands of the Marquis of Gleninverloch, the ancestral enemies of their clan. Algy had his great yew rod in his hands, the very rod with which his grandfather had landed a hundred pound fish a century earlier. It was said of that rod, an heirloom in his family, that no fish hooked by a line it held, had ever been lost.

Today, however, he had nearly met his match. The great beast he had hooked showed no sign of giving up the fight. Struggling to hold his footing in his waders, with the water streaming round his knees, he fought the beast. Sandy was holding him by main force to stop him being swept off his feet.

In the end they outwitted the salmon, driving him into shallows where they caught him, gaffed him and dragged him ashore.

But no sooner had they begun to celebrate than they became aware, oh perfidious fortune, that coming down the bank towards them in their velveteens (what are velveteens? I’ve never known but in those old books gamekeepers always seem to wear them) were none others than Gleninverloch’s men, come to put an end to their poaching.

Men of courage though they were, Sandy and Algy had no choice. Pausing only to discard their waders, and to grab the wicker basket in which were concealed the remains of their salmon paste sandwiches, made to a recipe passed down from generation to generation from time immemorial and ever kept secret from the men of Gleninverloch. Never would Algy be the one to reveal to them this ancient and close-guarded secret.

By dint of hitching, taking buses and catching trains, they shook off the pursuit. Finally, Algy arrived breathless and shoeless but his heart alive with the excitement of the chase, at Ingliston and Edinburgh airport. He knew nowhere in the kingdom could give him refuge from his ruthless foes. He decided to make for his uncle’s chateau on the Loire, attracted not just by the prospect of protection that it gave him but also by the opportunity it would provide to renew his acquaintance with his lovely cousin Liselotte there. It was a matter of minutes to purchase a ticket and make for the gate.

No wonder he was telling Sandy that everything had gone smoothly and he was ‘safely on the bus’. I marvelled at the calm with which he spoke, the self-confident smile on his lips.

What a curious, twisted path had brought him onto the same bus as I! Like Wilde in Reading Gaol, I knew what hunted thought quickened his pace and why// he stared upon the garish day with such a wistful eye. As the bus sat by the gate, the engine idling peacefully, I shared his trepidation and his excitement. Would we get away? Would even at this late stage his enemies catch up with him? As we moved towards the aircraft, I shared his growing relief. As the plane rose into the air and set course for the liberty that was Paris, I felt an elation which I knew was a pale echo of his joy.

At Paris airport, he was at the urinal next to mine. On his feet he had expensive, leather walking boots. Just the kind for a bit of a hike in Highlands. And they looked new. New enough to give you blisters if you hadn’t previously broken them in. Just the kind of blisters that make you want to take your boots off at the slightest opportunity.

Better to have dreamed and lost than never to dream at all, but what a shock shattered illusions are.

Still, my disappointment wasn’t total. As well as the boots on his feet, he’d also put a cream-coloured flat cap on his head. A real toff’s cap. The type that screams out to every observer ‘I know I look like a wally, but I’m a wally who can afford to spend more on clothes than you.’

It made up for a lot. He may not have been a swashbuckling hero from a Buchan yarn, a Richard Hannay or a John McNab. But at least he was Bertie Wooster. The upper class drone with more dress sense than common sense. Maybe not a figure of adventure, but at least a figure of fun.

And a nice interruption to the monotony of air travel.

Time flies when you’re having fun

I hadn't noticed till today that on 3 January of this year I completed a quarter century in business. It may have taken a while to remember, but hey, at least I got the year right. It reminds me of when I went to Dublin in 1988 with my family. It was the time of the city’s millennium celebration and we went to several events associated with the celebrations. Everywhere there was talk of things that had happened in the tenth century, but at no point did I see anything about the year 988 specifically. So eventually I asked:

‘If it’s the millennium this year, what was it that happened in 988 that’s so special?’

‘Nothing,’ I was told. ‘We just didn’t think of celebrating the first thousand years of the city until Cork celebrated its eighth centennial. That was such a success we thought we’d better have our own party. We promise not to be late for the next one.’

So late or not it’s time to celebrate my silver anniversary in business. Or perhaps not exactly celebrate. I had, after all, spent most of the previous 25 years determined that whatever else I became, I would not go into business. Probably the best way of marking the moment, in keeping with the public spirit that has led to my publishing much invaluable advice on a wide range of subjects in these posts, is to share the distilled wisdom of my twenty-five years in business. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. It can all be summarised in five useful principles and three telling jokes, as well as one expression which is pretty useless but I include it here because I like it.

If your back’s against the wall, you can’t see the writing on it. That’s probably not true. Most companies in trouble know it very well, but who cares: it’s a great line. It’s like the old one about ‘last year we stood on the edge of a precipice, but since then we’ve taken a great step forward.’

Forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission. Your partner, or the police, may find this one a little difficult to go along with. Apply it judiciously. I find it an invaluable justification for doing those things that you know are right (or which you believe are right, which to you is exactly the same thing) and which you don’t actually have the authority to do. If you don’t get fired, they’ll finally give you the authority to do it, just because they get tired of telling you not to. Remember to be ready to say ‘Oh, I’m really sorry to have done that. Again.’

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. It’s a real bore to have to make up for a bad first meeting (as I know from personal experience: just because I’m familiar with the principle doesn’t mean I always live by it). A related notion is that nothing matters more than preparation – and that’s true all the way down the line, for the tenth meeting as much as for the first.

A little learning is a bloody useful thing. What was Alexander Pope thinking of when he described it as dangerous? With only half an hour to present, a real expert can only give you a taste of how much he or she knows. So basically you only need half an hour’s knowledge to sound like an expert. You just have to hope you don’t get asked to keep talking for forty minutes.

A similar principle underlies the following story:

An American businessman was on holiday in the woods with his Japanese friend and colleague. While out walking, they were surprised by a bear who started to lumber after them. As they ran back past their tents, the American was amazed to see the Japanese stopping to put on his running shoes.

‘You’ll never outrun the bear, you know,’ he pointed out.

‘I don’t need to outrun the bear,’ replied the Japanese, ‘I just need to outrun you.’

You don’t need to be the best, just better than your immediate competitor, or just better than you’re expected to be.

You probably know the next one but it’s still worth repeating because the underlying truth highlights one of the most common business problems.

A man walking through the woods suddenly heard someone swearing profusely. He walked through to a clearing where he saw another man sitting on a tree trunk which he was trying to saw, while turning the air around him blue with his curses.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked the first man.

‘It’s this damn saw,’ replied the second, ‘it’s blunt.’

‘So why don’t you sharpen it?’

‘I don’t have time.’

It never ceases to amaze me how often my colleagues waste hours and make exhausting efforts doing work the wrong way, where just taking a little time out at the beginning would allow them to do it much more effectively and much more quickly. To be honest, I’m amazed how often I do that myself, but I tend to draw attention to that a bit less.

The next one highlights a point that’s as common as the blunt saw problem.

A tourist stopped a passer-by in a village in Ireland and asked whether he was going the right way for Dublin.

‘Oh,’ he was told, ‘if I was going to Dublin, I wouldn’t start from here.’

How often do people say 'We have to do this but can't with the team we have/the resources we have/the company we have'. That’s just a way of saying that we need to get to Dublin but we can’t do it from where we are.

And here’s my useless expression, drawn from the time when the guru-followers were all saying we should never talk about problems – there were only opportunities. A speaker at a conference I attended mentioned the concept of the ‘insurmountable opportunity’ which I thought was a great antidote to happy-clappy thinking.

I suppose the final principle is never to underestimate the importance of salesman. They may sometimes be arrogant, even deeply obnoxious, though some – particularly any who happen to read this – can be thoroughly charming. They’re also absolutely essential. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, without an effective sales force you’re heading for the scrapheap. But a lot of good companies have gone to the wall because they’ve preferred to have outstanding engineers, building great products, than to put up with the necessary – the essential – evil of salesmen.

And that’s about it. That’s all it takes to achieve success in business. As they used to say at Lehman Brothers.

The things we say

Do you want evidence that the human mind works in tortuous ways? Do you need evidence of it? Either way, look no further than the structures of that most human of activities, language.

Take the sentence ‘it was cold’. It’s something I’ve had plenty of call to say since our move back to England, along with ‘it is cold’, ‘ it will probably be cold tomorrow’ and the variants with ‘wet’.

In English, I just say ‘it was’ (simple past) and ‘cold’ (simple adjective).

In Japanese, however, you have to say ‘it is’ (present) ‘cold-in-the-past’.

Who on Earth dreamed that up? Or who dreams that up-in-the-past?

Funny how things work out: Leeson and poetic justice

I'm delighted with the way things have worked out for Nick Leeson (so far).

He’s chief executive of Galway United Football Club.

What do you mean you’ve never heard of them? They were runners up in the Irish League in 1985-1986.

But in 1995, Leeson’s name was known around the world. He had displayed a certain carelessness with money that had cost his employer, Baring’s Bank, £827 million and then its existence. Baring’s, the biggest investment bank in Britain, had lasted nearly two and half centuries. It took Leeson little more than two and a half years to finish it off.

He did spend some time inside, and not just anywhere: he was in Changi gaol in Singapore, once made notorious for the mistreatment of Commonwealth prisoners of war interned there by the Japanese.

It’s easy to imagine the dreariness and thanklessness of his existence. Even so, it must be preferable to his time in prison.

According to tradition, Attila the Hun died of what would have to be called the mother of all nose bleeds: a massive internal haemorrhage. The man who had drowned nations in blood ultimately drowned in his own. Many delighted in the scourge of God being struck down by God, or perhaps by the gods, depending on theological preference.

Attila was a bloodthirsty warrior and Leeson was a derivatives trader. Attila wiped people out, Leeson wiped out their probably ill-gotten gains. Attila’s weapon was the sword, violent, simple, chillingly comprehensible. Leeson’s was a series of financial instruments, where even the word ‘instrument’ is pretty obscure (I like to think of him as a financial sousaphone player) and certainly they caused no-one’s death (or at least not directly).

Attila drowned in blood. Leeson vegetates in Galway. There are times when there seems to be measure and justice in the universe after all.

Learning to dive with Bill

Sport does you the world of good. However, you have to treat it with the proper respect and minimise the risks: after all you want it to improve your health, not undermine it by causing you injury.

Scuba diving in particular is a high-risk sport. Properly organised schools ensure that you learn about them in a controlled environment and train you in the skills required to avoid the inherent dangers.

For instance, it is extremely dangerous to remove your mask while submerged. It may lead to your lungs filling with water and most experts agree that this can be career-limiting. Similarly, if you surface too quickly from depth without taking the proper precautions, you may bang your head against the bottom of the dive boat. As well as being painful, this may, if the damage to the hull is substantial, involve you in significant expenses for which you have not allowed.

So it makes sense to get properly trained first.

Most dive schools start their training in a swimming pool. This has got to be a good idea since it provides a completely controlled environment. Unfortunately, I have to admit to my shame that it doesn’t really do it for me. ‘Controlled’ is the only good thing I can find to say about that environment.

One of the two main things I loathe about swimming pools is the noise. Do architects have to take special acoustic qualifications to be allowed to design swimming pools? Have you noticed how they invariably design them in such a way that they just ring with noise, an echoing, reverberating, dinning noise which moves beyond simple sound to become pure discomfort?

The other thing is of course the smell of chlorine. Who on earth wants to spend time in those conditions? It’s a vile stench. How on earth can that be conducive to health?

But I could overcome my dislike of swimming pools if it weren’t for the actual content of the training. Often they start you off, in full kit, lying on the floor, next to the pool, not in the water at all. Well, I know safety and health are important, that life is nothing without them and all that, but frankly dignity too is not without its value. What dignity is there in flailing about on the particularly unpleasant surface they always seem to lay alongside swimming pools, with a tank on your back and a wet suit on your body? Honestly. The expression ‘a fish out of water’ to indicate inappropriateness and unsuitability wasn’t invented by chance, you know.

Then they get you in the pool itself and you swim up and down in there. Great. When did you last see any old wrecks in a swimming pool? Actually, I have to admit I was invited once to the house of a friend of mine – an acquaintance, really – with more money than taste and watching him reclining in his inflatable water armchair would certainly fit the description ‘an old wreck in a swimming pool’. But I have to say I wouldn’t go diving to see such a sight.

All this swimming pool stuff seems a bit over the top.

Fortunately, it isn’t absolutely necessary. You can learn to dive the Bill way.

Bill was an American in his 70s living in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. He had a superbly athletic body, tanned to perfection, with a shock of white hair. He could have stepped straight out of a Hemingway novel: you could imagine him battling for twenty-four hours with a marlin.

He used to drive bunches of tourists out to the reefs in a battered old motor boat. Once we were at the diving spot, he brought out two crates of Coke bottles which he deftly uncapped, tipping part of the contents of each bottle overboard. Then he brought out a plastic jerry can of industrial-strength rum with which he topped up the bottles again. He offered these basic Cuba Libres to us all. Of course, safety comes first so there was a strict limit on how much we could drink before we went diving – I think it was a maximum of two each although I suspect that we would probably have lost count after two anyway.

He then gave us the safety briefing and basic instruction. He told us to keep breathing, though not too fast. If we ran out of air in the tanks, we should head for the surface. The surface was upwards, in the same direction as the sunlight.

Then we went over the side and had a glorious initiation to the joys of diving. No swimming pool racket, no smell of chlorine. Just a reef, flamboyant water plants and fish you could feed with pieces of urchin. The sense of freedom that movement in three dimensions gives, like flying over an enchanted landscape, was indescribable. A moment in paradise, in other words.

Who could want for more? And though his teaching methods were unconventional, casualty numbers were low. Our losses were minimal.

That’s what I call sport that generates real well-being.

Enjoying a taste of sophistication

More and more people are becoming knowledgeable about wine. And many of them are getting caught up in the trend to take it all terribly seriously. They attend wine tastings and as a result they buy wines that are much more expensive but which they enjoy almost as much.

Precisely because wine tasting is becoming so much more common, I felt I would be doing a public service to note down the few tips and guidelines that I’ve picked up down the years on this subject. Following them can make the whole experience far less daunting than it might seem, particularly when attending a tasting with people who have an already firmly established track record for sophistication in the field.

The important thing is to prepare a list of adjectives. In particular, you should remember the names of various fruit, such as strawberry, raspberry, redcurrant etc. as well as some of the sweets that kids enjoy so much, notably liquorice.

In the first stage of the tasting you have to stick your nose in your glass and mumble incoherently. Then you swirl the wine about a bit, something I’m told helps it oxygenate. Personally, I just think it’s fun to watch a real expert do this, especially with red wine, because it makes lots of pretty patterns as it trickles back down the sides of the glass. Then you stick your nose back in a second time and spend a while ostensibly inhuming the bouquet – don’t forget, wine doesn’t have a scent, far less a smell.

Now you have to place your first adjectives. Try something like: ‘Ah! Light and delicate, wouldn’t you say?’

It doesn’t matter if they reply ‘I’d be more inclined to say rich and full-bodied.’ All you do is take another noseful and then say, with a nod and a smile, ‘ah, yes, I see what you mean.’ You’ll get credit for having offered an opinion in the first place and even more for having agreed with them: the agreement shows real intelligence and understanding.

Next comes the actual tasting. Take a small amount in your mouth and swirl it around, as noisily as possible. You have to form your lips into a pout and try to look as though your mind was on higher things, with your gaze fixed on the middle distance. Now you can use your fruit and sweet adjectives.

‘Ah, I think I detect a hint of raspberry, with a touch of liquorice in the background.’

You can demonstrate even greater sensitivity to the finer points of the subject by speculating about origins. ‘I wonder if we're not talking about a south-facing aspect here and perhaps a shaley subsoil?’ South-facing's a pretty safe guess and no-one cares if the ground was nowhere near any shale, or even that you have only the vaguest idea what shale actually is, to say nothing of the likely effect on the taste of the wine. It's enough to seem to know that sun and soil have some kind of effect on wine to establish your reputation as someone with natural gifts.

Once again, you may find yourself contradicted by the experts, but as with the bouquet all you have to do is agree with them.

When it comes to identifying fruit flavours in wine, it doesn’t actually matter what fruit you select. After all, in my view what wine mostly tastes of is wine. In so far as I can ever taste any fruit in it, it tends to be grape, but that’s far too banal to mention.

It would be fun, though I have to admit I’ve never yet dared do it, to push the boat out a bit and try some unusual fruits. ‘Uhm, a touch of cassava, wouldn’t you say, with perhaps a little pineapple, and I rather suspect an after taste of toffee fudge.’ It would be interesting to see whether anyone agreed.

In any case, following this advice should give you hours of harmless fun. And as long as you’re prepared to dent the credit card and buy a few crates from time to time, you’ll quickly establish yourself a reputation as a budding connoisseur. And you should have the pleasure of drinking some good wines.

But if you’re after the flavour of liquorice, my advice is to stick to Allsorts.

A cheaper alternative to a fine vintage?