Self-exposure

Less than a week to go before I give up my current London-based job. 

An end to commuting will be a huge relief. On the other hand, there are a few aspects of travelling into the capital that I shall miss.

At the end of the journey, for instance, I walk past the front of Selfridges with its flamboyant and (as I’ve remarked before) sometimes startling window displays. So it was quite fun this morning to see the window-displayers making a display of themselves while a colleague waited with a camera outside to record the.

It was a wonderful case of exhibitors exhibiting themselves, what I’d like to call self-exposure, though not perhaps in the sense usually meant.

I liked the staff’s air of joy, of celebration. Why, they even had bottles though, by the look of them, sadly empty. Nine o’clock may be a little early for a drink but I’m of the school of Dorothy Parker: ‘three be the things I shall never attain, envy, contentment and sufficient champagne.’

Display staff self-displaying

The sight that struck me most this morning, however, came at the beginning of the journey. 

Anyone who expects rigorous respect for the truth at all times had better be ready for disappointment. The most you can generally hope for is to have the more egregious lies exposed from time to time. Say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s contributions to the feminist cause or Tony Blair and Dubya’s irrefutable intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

So it’s lovely to see a lie – well, OK, an untruth – displayed with its own refutation right underneath it. Not for the first time, the platform display at Luton station provided a wonderfully revelatory sight today.

The deceiver exposes the deception

The 8:15 running on time, it told us. And just below, even more prominently, it declared the time to be just short of 8:18. Tell me that’s not another glorious example of self-exposure.

Wouldn’t it be great if politicians came equipped with similar displays?

‘When I say protecting essential services I actually mean all services except the ones I’m cutting and on which you depend.’

‘When I say I’m willing to seek a compromise with the President, I mean a compromise that he makes to me.’

‘When I say I want to guarantee peace and prosperity, I mean I want to wage war in poor countries.’

Wouldn’t that be useful? Perhaps the people who run Luton station could help them choose the right devices.

Disappointment and the Church of England

When Danielle first moved to this country from France, with a view to eventually becoming my wife, she went through a crash course in English culture.

A key event came during the journey back from a conference in Colchester, out in deepest Essex, one of the counties out to the East of London. We’d travelled down by train but were offered a lift back by another delegate, who happened to be Jewish and from Golders Green in North London.

As soon as he told me where he was from I felt on familiar territory. The Jewish side of my family lived not far from Golders Green, and I’d come to associate the Jewish Community of that part of the world with a series of attitudes with which I identified strongly. My view was probably sentimental and may have been out of date even then, but I saw the Jews of that area as usually left of Centre, more likely to vote Labour than anything else, certainly liberal in outlook, respectful of intellectual achievement and as likely to include among their ‘Jewish’ books works by Freud or Kafka as any commentaries on the Torah.

So I thought ‘this could be a fun trip back to London.’ And I wasn’t disappointed.

He quickly established that Danielle had started out in life as a Protestant, of the relatively gentle tendency represented by Zwingli, the main reforming influence on Basel in Switzerland, the closest city to the French village where she grew up. But then she’d converted to Catholicism, for no better – but equally no worse – reason than a desire not to be isolated from her friends at school, all of whom were Catholic. I’ve never been opposed to the idea of assimilation, and the desire to be a full member of the community in which you live strikes me as nothing that has to be excused.

Later on, she had let her Catholicism lapse but maintained as lively an interest in religious matters as any of us. That was immediate grist to our kind driver’s mill.

‘Well, if you’re not in a hurry, let’s take the back roads and I’ll stop in a few villages and show you some extraordinary churches.’

He did just that. He obviously knew Essex well and he took us to three or four village churches each of which was a jewel of its kind. While we were admiring their beauty, he explained to Danielle – and, to be honest, to me: he was much better informed than I was – all the intricacies of the low, middle and high Church within Anglicanism, the impact of Methodism, the nature of an established Church and the role of the monarch as its head.

It was fascinating, but particularly delightful because it was a Jew doing the explaining. And that’s when I understood something absolutely fundamental about the Church of England: if you’re an Englishman, it’s your Church. It doesn’t matter that you follow another religion or none at all, the Church of England is yours. Just like the Royal Navy is your navy, even if you’re a dedicated pacifist, and the Queen is your monarch even though you’re longing for the introduction of a republic.

Like it or not, the C of E is part of our common heritage.

And that’s why when it decided last week not to ordain women bishops so many more people felt it as a body blow than one might have expected. Fewer than three people in a hundred attend a Church of England service even once a month, but far more of us were deeply disappointed when that decision was taken.

It immediately made me think of that happier time all those years ago. I remember the weather as good that day, though one always does when one’s indulging in nostalgia. And I delight in the irony that a casual acquaintance from the North London Jewish community made me feel much better about Anglicanism back then, than rather too large a minority of Anglicans made me feel about the Church last week.

I don't take Communion anyway,
but I can't why anyone who does should be shocked by this picture.
Or want to block the obvious next step.

Ikea style the Toyota way

It’s so passé to build up stocks of goods long before you need them. These days, ‘Just In Time’ – the Toyota way – is very much the holy Grail of production techniques. So I was delighted to live by Toyota principles this weekend.

At Christmas, we’re being joined by a relatively large number of friends and relatives. Actually, they’re all relatives if we count out-laws as well as in-laws, and I very much do: the company will include one of my charming daughters-out-law and her parents.

The only problem is that there isn’t enough space around the table kindly passed to me by my mother. A beautiful piece of teak from the days before we knew not to use tropical hardwood for furniture. But it really only seats six and we’re likely to be seven or eight.

So we needed a new table. It was therefore opportune that old friends from Edinburgh came to see us this weekend, and were joined by other friends, and sons, and partners.

That focused the mind. The call of Ikea came loud and clear, and we answered it yesterday. This morning we had set to work to put the table together. Not too early, given that we’d had a few drinks yesterday evening: we started at 11:30 and the meal was due to be served at 1:00.

Just in time production became not so much desirable as absolutely essential.

And we knew it could easily turn into just too late.

Those watching us were openly sceptical.

‘It’ll never be done in time.’

‘Should I ring the others and tell them to come later?’

The amazing thing about assembling Ikea furniture is that, like tying a bow tie, the magic only happens at the end. Have you ever tried tying a bow tie? You pass one end round the other, you make a bow, you loop round it and suddenly you’re faced with a final tuck-and-tighten and it’s perfectly obvious that no knot is going to form. Then you do it and – lo and behold – the miracle occurs and a beautifully formed bow knot appears.

So it was with the Ikea table. At 12:50, what we had was a nondescript wooden framework with various protruding bits which didn’t seem designed to fit with anything else. Most suspicious of all, we had four dowelling rods left with nowhere to put them. Had they supplied too many? Had we fitted too few? Would the whole thing fail to form or, worse still, fall apart as soon as the meal was placed on it?

The ambient scepticism level was palpably growing.

But we persevered. My friend Hakim voiced the unfortunate question, ‘why don’t you hold, this time, while I screw?’, but fortunately the Ikea context was obvious to anyone who glanced up, shocked, to see what we were talking about.

A few more washers and bolts, and we were ready to turn the thing over from where it was lying, top down, on the floor. As it came upright it was revealed to be – slightly astonishingly even though it was what we’d been aiming at – a table. We pulled the two ends apart and inserted a leaf and, hey presto, the trick was done: we could sit nine to eat the fabulous Tajine Danielle had prepared (in both a meat and vegetarian version, to accommodate all tastes), followed by the excellent cheesecake brought by Brenda, one of our guests.

And Brenda knocked on the door just as we secured the table leaf in place. OK, so it was 1:03, but since our aim was to complete as she arrived, I regard that as Just In Time and not an instant too late.

The table that provided much pleasure this afternoon.
And it was ready just in time.

So we enjoyed a great meal in congenial company. And provided a striking vindication of the Toyota way.

As for Christmas – we’re ready with positively weeks to spare.

Lively English

The young woman was pleasant and polite. At the counter in Costa’s, she stood back to let me through, laughing off my apology.

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘please. I haven’t made up my mind yet. You go right ahead.’

She was dark-skinned like many of my compatriots, and spoke perfect southern-British English with a slight hint of the lilt that betrays a West Indian background. A long way in the background.

I found a table and slumped at it, exhausted. Despite decades of doing them, I still fall apart after a presentation, brought down by the aftermath of the adrenalin rush. In this instance, it hadn’t helped that I’d only discovered the day before that I was expected to talk for an hour, not twenty minutes; the extra work on my material had left me little over five hours for sleep. I stared at my coffee oblivious to my surroundings and concentrated on getting my breath back.

Until I heard voices from the table next to mine, and realised that the woman from the counter had joined a friend there. They were chatting – and I could have been in Kingston, Jamaica. The West Indian accent is magical, and I was getting it strong and rich from those two women.

And that got me thinking. English is becoming rather too homogenised for my liking. There are no real dialects, except perhaps in West Africa. The lack of variation is underlined by the way people insist on referring to the differences one comes across in Yorkshire or Louisiana as being dialectal, whereas in reality they’re just regional accents.

It’s true of course that American do have their quaint little ways. Calling a lift an elevator, for instance. While you may need to lift something to lower it, how on earth do you get downstairs in something designed to elevate you?

However, those little quirks to one side, there’s little to choose between British and American usage. If I ever have trouble understanding Americans, it’s not usually a linguistic problem but sheer amazement that anyone can make that kind of statement in any language – you know, references to legitimate rape or to 47% of the population living on benefits.

The same thing happens in England, when I hear the language of rights in the mouths of politicians who have done so much to limit them. It’s worse in their case, since they speak standard English. I hasten to add that ‘standard English’ is, naturally, the language spoken by us standard Englishmen, in case anyone in the colonies is still labouring under any confusion on the subject.

What astonished me in the café was to realise that the two young women at the next table had no trouble expressing themselves in standard English, and then switching to something far more Jamaican when talking to each other. And it wasn’t the first time I’d come across the phenomenon: I know at least one other West Indian who speaks very differently with someone from the same part of the world than with a monolingual standard-English speaker.

It’s just like a Frenchman speaking English in London, but switching back to French with a compatriot. Or more to the point, a Dane: I was astonished by the quality of English in Copenhagen.The more I heard it the more I realised that the Danes don’t speak English as a foreign language, they speak it as a second language. Their mastery of it is quite as good as good as many a native speaker’s.

Copenhagen, great English-speaking city

‘Can we get a meal?’ I asked, in English, of a waitress who’d addressed me in Danish.

‘I’ll check if you like,’ she replied in my language, ‘but this is a restaurant.’

I’m not used to having my stupid remarks put down with swift banter by anyone with only a foreigner's grasp of the language. Which is what made me realise I wasn’t dealing with a foreigner. Sure, technically she was, in that she held the citizenship of another country, but she belonged to the same speech community as mine. The Danish accent is a regional accent not a foreign one. The difference is only that Danes speak another language too, and use it among themselves.

Just like the two West Indians in Costa’s. They’ve mastered two linguistic codes and know which one goes in which context. OK, unlike Danish, the code they use to each other is close enough to mine for me to understand them with ease. That wouldn’t have been the case had they been speaking Danish. 

But still what they have is a dual code. And in poor sad dialect-impoverished English I found that fascinating. At last – evidence of that variety that Italian or Portuguese, German or Spanish take for granted. That can only enrich the language.

So my visit to a plain old West London Costa’s turned out to be rather more interesting an interlude than I’d expected.

Which in turn was a good tonic to help me recover from the presentation.

Hopeful halfway point

Since a friend told me that British politics is double-Dutch to people sensible enough to belong to other countries, I should start by explaining the context to this post.

Rousseau once said that Englishmen – by which I suspect he meant the British – are free for one day every five years. There’s some truth in that: every five years, we exercise our right to elect a superlative government, and then spend the next five years seething impotently as we watch the desperate doings of a government superlative only in its incompetence.

This is a contrast to the US system which elects a president from one party and a congress from another, ensuring that nothing gets done at all. I’m not convinced that this is any the less exasperating, but it’s certainly different.

In between votes, and we’re half way through our current parliament with elections due in May 2015, the only time we can administer well-deserved correction to our politicians is at by-elections. These can be triggered by various developments such as a Member of Parliament going off to higher things, or at least more highly-paid ones, or simply dying in office. 

The latter is naturally an event always greeted with widespread and heartfelt grieving, because we always mourn dead politicians. It’s as though the grave converts them from infuriating delinquents whose corruption is only matched by their depravity, into towering figures of statesmanlike virtue. ‘Never shall we see their like again’ we’re regularly told, which always seems odd to me, since I generally find them more or less indistinguishable from the guys who step into their shoes.

Last week we had three by-elections. Two of them were caused by Labour Members of Parliament standing down to go and run for election as Police and Crime Commissioners, positions at the head of local police forces for which no-one wanted elections (they’ve achieved new records for abstention in national polls: well under one person in five bothered to vote at all).

My biggest concern with these new positions is whether they’re about police or about crime. If the latter, then the offence has to be a fraud against electors, designed to convince them that this apparent extension of democracy, compensates for the fact that spending cuts have reduced the number of police actually out there stopping crime.

Both by-elections in the safe Labour seats returned new Labour MPs with comfortable majorities, though on low turnouts.

The third by-election was caused by the resignation of the Conservative Louise Mensch from the bellwether seat of Corby. Really, Corby is like Ohio for US presidential races: no government gets elected without Corby, and none ever has since the seat was created.

Mensch resigned after just two years in parliament, a position most people would find an extraordinary honour to hold. She, however, recently married the manager of Metallica, based in New York and then decided that she had to go and join him and therefore resign the mandate she’d asked for from her electors.

The Conservative Party likes to sing the praises of qualities like perseverance, loyalty and self-sacrifice, but generally demands them of those, like the poor, it’s sacrificing on the altar of wealth preservation. With its own, it tends to be rather more indulgent. So it's not that surprising that it said little in criticism of Mensch; the voters of Corby, on the other hand, showed their disapproval by giving the Labour candidate a large majority to replace her as MP. The bellwether constituency has just been lost by the government.

What’s even more interesting is that the proportions of the vote won by the major parties in all three seats were very much in line with the opinion polls, which show Labour 10 points clear.

Cameron looking concerned. As well he should be.

So – even if British politics remain as much double-Dutch as they were before I started this outline, there’s just one simple message from last week: half-way through the present parliament, the odds have to be against the present government getting a second one.

That isn't a prospect that leaves me particularly upset.

A sock in the eye to OCD

What a great gift my latest sports socks are. They come marked ‘L’ and ‘R’. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s not altogether clear to me how left and right-hand (as it were) socks differ from each other – it’s not as though these ones have toes after all – but I just love it that anyone can go to extent of making the distinction.

Not that this is the main reason I like them so much. Oh, no. What I appreciate about them is that they confirm that I’m making progress in my lifelong struggle against Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

My particular variant of OCD is probably common in Britain and takes the form of excessive respect for the written instruction. For years, I’d wrap the cord around a hairdryer, until I bought one that had a label on it saying ‘do not wrap cord around dryer’, at which point I learned to make a careful little coil to one side before packing it away.

I used to find positively uncomfortable to wear a seatbelt in a car until the day it became obligatory. Since then, I’ve belted myself in on every trip, to the point that I now feel positively under-dressed if I’m not wearing one. Why, I’ve even caught myself looking around on buses or boats for a seat belt. Once, even, in a theatre seat.

Now, I never got quite as bad as the young man I came across the other day whose mother gave him a set of day-of-the-week pants (underpants, for colonial readers). He, it seems, is incapable of wearing Tuesday pants on Monday. Do you think he might regard them as not fair of face enough?

So I was delighted to discover recently that I was completely ignoring the ‘L’ and ‘R’ markings on my socks. I was perfect capable of reversing them completely. And, surprisingly, going to to play and hour and half’s badminton without suffering unbearable agony in either foot.

Could I at last be overcoming my OCD?

Well, today I had the confirmation of it.

When I got home from badminton, I realised that I was wearing two ‘L’ socks. 

A bigger blow for emancipation than might be imagined

Now that’s real emancipation, isn’t it? Freed from the tyranny of the printed word. Or the stitched letter at least. Which has to be a start, doesn’t it?

The words that exalt the private sector

It is a truth not so much universally acknowledged as monotonously repeated, that they order things better in the private sector.

It was a case forcefully put in the recent US elections, where many Romney supporters argued that a tried and tested private sector executive was just what was needed for the most powerful public sector post on earth. 

Not forcefully enough, as it happens, but that wasn’t for want of trying.

Mitt teaching a less which, fortunately, not too many learned

Nothing supports a claim to competence better than evidence of clarity of thought, and nothing proves clarity of thought so much as precision in expression. It is therefore with the sense of fulfilling a public duty that I put before you today some linguistic gems that I’ve been collecting from senior private sector executives in recent months.

Marvel at this small selection of words and sayings:

Antidotal: ‘I only have antidotal evidence for this.’ Some day I hope to hear this said in connection with behaviour described as poisonous.

Harbour: ‘I don’t want to harbour the point.’ Presumably because to do so might lead to our being wrecked at the labour’s mouth.

Plassate: this is a useful word describing the process of calming someone, perhaps a client complaining about poor service. ‘We should do what we can to plassate him.’ Though not, of course, if we have to push the shop out too far.

Amiable: used of someone who has no objection to a course of action. ‘I told him our suggestions and he seemed perfectly amiable to them.’

Catharsis: occurs when an obstacle leads to a momentary halt in progress. ‘They were moving ahead quite quickly, but they seem to have hit a bit of a catharsis.’

It turns out that certain fears tend to justify themselves if you spend too much time worrying about them: they become, in effect, ‘self-proclaiming’.

Sometimes a message can be hopelessly distorted if it passes along a chain of too many people. If trainers train trainers who train users, what they present at the end of the line may bear little relationship to the starting point. This phenomenon, I’ve been assured, is known as ‘Chinese Walls’.

That appeals to me, because it’s a phrase often used by such organisations as the big Consultancies, to explain how they can work with competing companies without a conflict of interest. We might say, in the spirit of this post, hunting with the hare while running with the haddock. Call me a cynic, but I’ve always suspected that things can’t be kept that separate and there are Chinese whispers through the Chinese walls.

And finally, of course, we have the old chestnut: ‘I don’t like the message Peter put out because it inferred that we were doing something wrong.’ Just like this post might be taken to imply that certain managers couldn’t tell a bark from a bite.

Not all of senior businessmen mangle language like this, of course. Many are as limpid in speech as they’re far-sighted in vision. I wouldn’t want to tar them all with the same pencil: that would be like tossing out the baby with the ball court.