5 years ago I wrote a post about how the world of 15 years ago, the age of indifference and ‘meh’ had been replaced by outrage, fury and, well, more outrage. I referred to a review of journalist Jon Ronson’s book about social media shaming, which discussed
…a scuttling crowd of people who want nothing more in life than to be offended. Offence, for this lot, is not a straightforward emotional response, instinctive and heartfelt. It’s a choice, something they actively seek.
Rachel Cooke, The Observer, 15th March 2015
Well, dear reader, this past weekend I encountered part of the scuttling crowd on Twitter, and it wasn’t pretty. The algorithm decided to show me a post from Kirstie Allsopp in which I thought she was actually trying to Do The Right Thing rather than shouting her mouth off. There’s quite a bit of nuance here, perhaps the sort that could get her abused by both sides, but I was on board. She wants to elevate the conversation away from different groups attacking each other.
So like a naive liberal lunatic I chipped in. Thinking of David Mitchell’s line about everyone stepping up to make a difference because “what is an ocean if not a multitude of drops?”. I was trying to illustrate the point that many trans- people are just trying to live their life, they want to be happy, they don’t want to hurt anyone. I deliberately made it only about our family to try an humanise it, but also to not claim I’m speaking universally, although I accept that “the phrase”utterly lacking empathy” probably didn’t help…
Anyway, I posted that on Thursday evening, which led to an interesting set of notifications by Friday morning, and indeed over the weekend. Here’s a pretty representative sample…
It was a relatively small group who responded, but they were tenacious. A couple were more ‘reasonable’ in that they did agree to disagree with our choices, and had the grace to wish us well, and hoped we would all be OK (even though they kind of doubted it). But the majority were not like that. I’d characterise them in three ways.
They’re right and everyone else is wrong. They truly live in a binary world, and deny the entire concept that a person could be ‘Trans’. Every aspect of Trans is false, dangerous, a scam, a lie, evil. They’re not really Trans-phobic, because in their world it is simply impossible that Trans people can exist. Any so-called science that affirms, accepts or even acknowledges it is wrong and bogus. Their feeds and posts often include the same images and links as ‘evidence’ but often this is a very ‘particular ‘generous’ interpretation of that term.
For instance, the book “Time to Think” by Hannah Barnes is a damning indictment of institutional and clinical failure at GIDS and The Tavistock & Portman Trust, documenting at best problematic but more likely unethical and damaging practices on children, driven at least partly by an agenda that excluded alternative approaches. This is now used by the people who responded to my story as ‘evidence’ that Trans- is a myth, and anyone in the medical establishment who disagrees is a danger to children.
They seek out the things they abhor. I have narrowed my Twitter Universe over time to professional cycling, film and marketing strategy types. I want to read and post positively, sharing ideas and experiences – especially about topics I love with other people who share that passion.
The Trans-deniers I encountered seem to actively immerse themselves in stories and news that will offend and outrage them, exactly as Rachel Cooke described. They’re not looking for uplift or inspiration, but validation that they must continue to be vigilant and angry. They rarely seem to post original opinions, almost entirely retweeting or replying to what other people have said. They only discovered me because they follow Kirstie Allsopp, whom they mostly despise. It’s an endless cycle of outrage, shock, anger and attack. It must be exhausting to exist in such a constant heightened state of almost existential fear and threat created by the very posts with which they choose to fill their news feeds.
Anyone who disagrees becomes an enemy target. Anything short of complete rejection would imply an acceptance of the concept that some people can be Trans-, so everything I said was challenged, ridiculed and attacked. Every response referred to ‘she’ when I’d clearly stated ‘they’. They were absolutely and utterly convinced they knew that I was wrong, deluded, cruel, and dangerous. There was no way anything I said could be true, and I needed to be shot down and shut up.
I know that these insults are far less serious than many people face every day on social media platforms. But even these ‘mild’ jibes would be unacceptable in our schools or workplaces; the offenders would be taken to one side and reminded about values, mutual respect and courtesy. But Twitter operates in a parallel universe where that social contract does not apply. I did report a couple of the more direct messages to Twitter, but apparently they didn’t break any of their codes of conduct. If I don’t like the people calling me ‘pure evil’ or ‘child abuser’, I can block them, while they can carry on attacking any number of other people in the same way.
Let’s get the Hell out of Dodge… And so I have shut down my Twitter account for good. I have no intention or desire to offer Elon Musk and his platform any of my time or energy when it actively condones that sort of behaviour. I Reckon Twitter is worse than other platforms, because while I can choose my friends and whom I follow, it’s much easier and faster to see a whole lot more content on Twitter than I’d like. It’s very hard to control what you see and don’t see.
I will lose a lot; just in the few days since the weekend and deciding to close my account, I’ve had great interactions and chat about cycling and films, but I know I will gain a lot more; time, for one thing. All that cycling bantz takes time, especially when there are races on. I’ll also gain calm. I’ll not miss the sinking feeling of resignation anytime I see J K Rowling or Glinner or Eddie Izzard trending, knowing what’s behind that link; a cess-pool of rage and hyperbole.
I’m not judging people who want to keep using Twitter for the ‘right’ reasons. And I know that most / all(?) social media platforms have their problems, but this to me is just about how we treat each other. Twitter doesn’t give the first sh*t about how people behave, in fact I Reckon it revels in it. It knows that offence provokes outrage, that negative news evokes stronger responses than being nice.
I like people being nice. I believe in nice.
I want to leave those bigots behind, because they can deny our non-binary child and millions like them with all their spite and fear, but they continue to exist, and thrive, and make our world better for their presence.
30 years ago, three friends bought a hotel together in a pretty unfashionable, out-of-the-way part of The Lake District. It’s not so much off the beaten track or down the road less travelled as being consciously hidden away from prying eyes.
25 years ago Rachel and I were preparing to get married, and when I mentioned to a friend that we were thinking of going to The Lakes for part of our honeymoon, she immediately recommended this ‘hidden gem’ of a hotel. Her parents lived in Cockermouth, not too far away, and the hotel’s restaurant had already gained quite the reputation in the area. And on that recommendation began our relationship with Overwater Hall.
‘Our room’ is #3, the 1st floor turret
After our first visit we returned twice in 5 years, then again in 2009 for my 40th Birthday. And that was the last time until last week. This might not seem like a lot, but we’ve only been to The Lakes once and not stayed there, and we’ve never been back to the same place anywhere ‘as often’. So when we discovered that the owners, Chef Adrian, Front of House Angela and Restaurant-Bar Manager Stephen were planning to sell the hotel, we were delighted to return, a double celebration of Rachel’s 50th Birthday and our 25th Wedding Anniversary (in August).
Even when we first arrived in 1998, Overwater Hall felt like a place out of time, almost determined not to sway to the latest trends or fashions. In fact, it stands in complete contrast to the identikit phenomenon I discussed in my last post. It is the very antithesis of average. When we returned last week I’m not sure if I could easily pinpoint anything in the public rooms that has changed much since our last stay in 2009. Of course it’s beautifully maintained, but more it felt completely familiar and in an entirely good way. Angela and Stephen’s service is immaculate, quiet, understated, and friendly. Their small team of staff are the same, and it says quite a bit than more than a couple of their team have worked at Overwater for decades.
The morning view from our room to the Skiddaw fellsThe stream that flows through the hotel grounds
Overwater is absolutely distinctive. It’s not that easy to get to, at the Northern end of The Lake District, and tucked away in an idyllic setting. There’s no mobile phone reception, and the hotel wifi is ‘basic’, creating a timeless, mindful feeling. We read a lot here, or gaze at the views, listen to the birdsong and (right now) the excited bleating of new lambs. It’s an antidote to the always-on overload of modern life. Perhaps it could be used to teach kids what it was like before the internet and phones and all that.
And then there’s the restaurant, the focus of our initial recommendation. We were absolutely thrilled to discover that, like the wallpaper and service, this too hasn’t changed. The meals we ate at Overwater Hall last week are as good as anything we’ve eaten anywhere. Unfussy but perfect service brings dishes full of imagination, beauty, wit and wonderful, powerful flavours.
The small cylinders of beef tartare that accompanied our cocktails were melt-in-the-mouth amazing. I could have eaten a whole plateful. Rachel’s salmon starter was a work of art and tasted fantastic. I had quail and smoked pork belly that was breathtakingly good. The lamb fillets were rich and tender, and the strips of fat had a crispy bite to them that was almost like lamb-crackling, while the wild garlic foraged from their grounds was subtle and delicious. My chocolate dessert was fantastic while Rachel had Rhubarb three ways (panna cotta, sorbet, crumble). It’s all exquisite, and frequently moving; it’s a privilege to eat like this.
Dinner at Overwater Hall; as good a meal as I’ve eaten anywhere
But don’t let me neglect breakfast, which is just as good (if less complex!). Ingredients are as locally-sourced as they can be, with black pudding and sausages better than anywhere else I’ve been. This is a place where you definitely don’t need to eat between breakfast and dinner, even after walking up a fell or two and taking a bracing dip in Crummock Water…
As we were approaching the end of our 2nd dinner, and then again at breakfast on our last morning, I felt a wave of melancholy. This will probably be the last time I experience Overwater Hall. While they are currently taking bookings to December, the new prospective owners are engaging with the local planners about their intentions. And while they look impressive (to say the least!), Overwater Hall will not be the same.
To be honest, I Reckon that in many ways it will be objectively ‘better’; more rooms, updated facilities, a pool & luxury spa. It will be sculpted, beautifully designed by top-grade architects. But as Adrian showed us some of the early concepts, it felt ‘calculated’, designed to appeal to a certain clientele (I’m guessing considerably pricier than the current version), with all mod cons. Just like the luxury hotels they’re used to in London or New York or Dubai or, well, anywhere. And that’s fine, of course it is. It’s just not why we love it.
We’re laughing because Rachel’s phone’s selfie setting has a 10-SECOND timer…!?
It will be familiar, but not in its current distinctive way. It probably won’t evoke the very specific and light-hearted joy we felt while walking the wooden boardwalk through the grounds, or from the daffodil clumps that have evolved over decades, or the birds on the feeders, or trying to spot the hotel’s resident red squirrels.
I Reckon we should treasure places like Overwater Hall: they are wholly professional, and absolutely expert at what they do, but they don’t conform to corporate values or functionalism. I will certainly miss it and them when they’re gone, and treasure my memories of a very special and distinctive secret.
I was convinced that I’d used this R.E.M. lyric in a previous title: I’ve written close to 320 posts over nearly 14 years and I couldn’t believe this hadn’t come up. I mean, if you’ve read more than a handful you’ll know there’s plenty of existential angst and righteous-frustration with the world, as well as (futile? misguided?) attempts to reconcile the personal and the global.
Anyway, as in many things it turns out I was mistaken, and as the trigger for this evoked the lyric so immediately, I’m almost relieved I can use it. It was during a morning take-off session with the lovely people at FLOWN (yes, them again). The prompt for our morning journalling exercise was
“what do you struggle to accept, that you have no control over?”
Well, let me count the ways…
This came after a a double-rarity in my world, of two dreams that I actually remembered, on consecutive days. I probably remember a dream no more often than every few years, and when I do they’re usually reflective of an anxious state of mind or something specific. These both fitted that description.
In the first I was in some non-descript near-future (I think I felt older than I am, but not too much), and there was just evidence of the world going to pot; news reports about crop failures, flooding, natural disasters, social media being even worse than now, political strife etc. Quite a bit like Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. It was amazingly simple and on-the-nose, almost nothing out of the ordinary or surreal at all.
On the other hand, the second one was a conversation between me and our cat, Todd. I don’t recall what I was saying, but he was reassuring me. He often ‘talks’ to us in squeaky, expressive miaows – seeking attention, food, someone to attack (or all three), and his mouth was moving like that, but there was a human voice talking quite calmly, encouraging me not to worry, that things will be OK. I’d love to say he had the voice of Tom Hanks, but that would be an embellishment too far. Still, if you need someone to reassure you that the world is going to be OK, you could do worse than Todd, right?
So while my morning Flock were thinking about what challenges us, we also considered a short poem…
Clearing – Martha Postlethwaite
Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.
This is about acceptance, the grace to accept that world may well be going to Hell in a Handcart, but it’s not my responsibility to stop it. Sure we can all do our part, because every little helps…
what is an ocean if not a multitude of drops?
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
…but we have to work on ourselves first, how best we can contribute, and on what scale we can. I Reckon that I mostly struggle to accept the fact that I don’t have any control over stuff that matters to me, like the moral qualities of politicians, or so-called journalists who write sh*t and get paid for it. It’s so important to create pace in rhe dense forests of our lives where we can be quiet and calm. And then make a difference close to home, for ourselves, our family and friends, our community. And if at some point the song that is our life reveals itself to be greater, broader, deeper than that, so be it.
I’ve often wondered about our cats and what they are thinking. I’m 98% certain that most of the time they are entirely in the moment, their immediate surroundings. Where am I? What’s the basic state of things? What can I do to get the most of that? What can I do to change it? What do I need right now? Yes, pretty self-centred, but absolutely not entirely. Todd (and Whiskers before him) makes a significant and postitive difference to my / our mental health, and I Reckon he knows it. He knows how much we both enjoy him sleeping on my lap, or playing like a lunatic with his toys.
I can’t always carry the weight of the world, and he definitely relieves my burden.
So, in my short series of Reckons about Beginnings and Endings and Things having an order, it’s time to have a look at things that don’t necessarily do that.
The ‘cut-up‘ literary technique is said to originate in the early 20th century, and was perhaps more publicly ‘invented’ by writer William S. Burroughs and writer/artist Brion Gysin, by which they assembled random fragments of text, often from multiple sources including newspapers, in order to create a new text. David Bowie is perhaps the most famous proponent of the technique, as he explains here, but Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke are also known to have experimented with it. In this clip Bowie talks about working to create a software tool (the Verbasizer!?) that he used to input materials to create many different options and outputs. Perhaps in the same way Bowie famously predicted the upsides and downsides of the internet in 1999, I Reckon this is an early foreshadow towards AI writing tools like ChatGPT, except without the intelligence to create its own lyrics…
I Reckon Quentin Tarantino’s best film is probably Pulp Fiction, and it was certainly pretty revolutionary at the time, in that its interwoven stories among various strands of the (criminal) underbelly of Greater Los Angeles in deliberately fractured, jumping backwards and forwards in time, so that it actually ‘ends’ where it ‘starts’ in terms of the assembled scenes and sequences. But this is far from the final scene, and it’s not the chronological start either. It must be pretty great to see this film for the first time to have the WTF moments as you realise what Tarantino’s script is doing and how it’s manipulating the audience’s understanding.
Kaleidoscope is a 2023 Original TV Series from Netflix that tells the story of a heist and the characters involved over a period of more than 25 years. Its concept is pretty intriguing in that each episode has a colour rather than a number and viewers are encouraged to watch the show in any order (although Netflix recommends you watch the actual heist last). Netflix randomises which episodes you get to watch next, so even with their recommended constraint about the final episode, the previous seven could be watched in any one of over 5,000 orders. This nifty use of technology evidently requires a different approach to storytelling, in that end-of-episode cliffhangers won’t immediately be resolved, the plot cannot rely on the audience knowing everything about a character before a new twist or detail is revealed, and so on.
Each episode does have a place in time relative to the main event of the actual heist…
Violet (24 years before the heist)
Green (7 years before)
Yellow (6 weeks before)
Orange (3 weeks before)
Blue (5 days before)
White (the heist)
Red (the morning after)
Pink (6 months after)
Non-Spoiler Comments… When I peruse the reviews on Letterboxd, what strikes me is that they seem remarkably similar to any other thing that get an overall 3*** rating on the site. It’s good, but not great. Some of the reviews mention characters or storytelling, quite a few mention the ‘gimmick’ of the random / self-selected episode order, but not everyone, and it’s clearly not the main thing about it.
We saw the episodes as follows: GREEN – YELLOW – BLUE – VIOLET – RED – PINK – ORANGE – WHITE (saved for the end)
Ultimately, I Reckon Kaledioscope is … fine, but not much more than that. Jumping around the timeline offers up some nice reveals and twists, especially smaller details like why a pink cuddly toy might matter, or how someone got that limp… but these could and would have happened in any non-linear storytelling that was structured and shared by every viewer. The producers and writers here have given themselves some significant constraints, and to be fair to them they have committed to them pretty well. But there are reasons why structured narratives have worked for so long, in that the creators can control the story, and they’re usually pretty good at doing that. I like books or series or films where they can surprise me, where something can happen that compels me to find out more, immediately.
That didn’t really happen in Kaleidoscope, because they cannot know in any given episode what people have already seen, so the reveals or twists are often more generic tropes of the genre (who’s the potential mole in the gang, what happened to ____?) and they have to use those smaller details, allowing viewers to piece things together for themselves. Again, this is often quite rewarding for the viewer, but they have to telegraph things more obviously, so that whether we see the reveal or the setup first, we can make the link between two shots possibly hours apart in the drama. So the camera dwells, meaningfully, on something apparently not meaningful, except now we know it is, and it’s distracting us; maybe not a lot, but more than not at all. And this is all because of the decisions and constraints they have set for themselves.
I mostly liked the order we watched because GREEN & YELLOW are both nice set-ups for most of the characters and for the heist itself, so it was good to get them first, before jumping around a bit more. I Reckon it’s also a good idea to have RED and PINK later on, closer to the end. For me this is partly because the ultimate finale is pretty underwhelming, so if I’d seen PINK first I’m not sure I would have cared to watch all the details of how they got there. It is a good idea to leave WHITE until last, as they do knit various plot strands together pretty well, and as it’s the heist it is a pretty dramatic episode.
The series, as seems to be increasingly common, has a pretty A-List soundtrack, but in this case they use it as a battering ram to remind / inform us what might be going on. This is especially egregious towards the end, as Judy and Bob (separately) are listening to Lynrd Skynrd’s ‘Freebird’ (even though it predates both of them by about 10 years) and the same lines ‘Lord, I can’t change…’ come on repeatedly. All right, we get the point. This starts off as noticeable, and by the end (especially the PINK aftermath/conclusion) it’s really annoying. With the reveals thing, they created a rod for their own back; these music choices are, I Reckon, just badly done.
So, after all that, I don’t Reckon Kaleidoscope got close to being the vanguard for a new format of TV series and viewing. Stories do need a beginning, middle and end. Yes it’s possible to muck around with things; bards and elders and writers and oral histories and stand-up comedians have been doing that since the dawn of civilisation. This ‘choice’ doesn’t, IMHO, make a big enough difference, even if the creators had executed their story better. If you have 8 hours to spare to watch something on Netflix, I would heartily recommend the amazing and epic Indian film RRR, the very tough but terrific All Quiet on the Western Front, and the wonderful Marriage Story.
And now, if anyone cares for some more details and reactions to specific episodes, or the way we felt in going through Kaleidoscope, please do read on, but consider this Fair Warning that I will talk about the plot.
GREEN (7 years before the heist) Ahhh, quite a Shawshank-y vibe going on. Is he deliberately trying to channel Morgan Freeman in that voiceover? Hmmm – don’t trust that Judy; she seems way out of Stan’s league. I mean, his name isn’t in her league, let alone his nerdish curls… surely she’s playing him. And who’s BOB? I mean, he’s an obvious dickhead who will probably die badly by being either irretrievably macho or stupid later on. But I Reckon he’s much more Judy’s type… OOH! Good escape sequence… who’s the estranged daughter – why are they estranged, and hey, isn’t that Rufus Sewell. He must be a baddy, that’s his Thing now… Overall, a decent start – I will watch on!
YELLOW (6 weeks before the heist) BIG time jump, although [checks] this is actually the next episode. OK, so this is about getting the team together. Hannah and Leo seem ‘no-longer-estranged’… she’s the insider on the job then? So what DID Roger Salas do? God, but Bob is still a dick. And I knew he was Judy’s type… Oh – GOOD LINE about ‘the Die Hard thing’… So far, still OK. The Die Hard line definitely lifted it a little…
BLUE (5 days before the heist) Ahhh, now we’re getting the How-We’re-Going-to-Break-Into-The-Impregnable-Vault. Sorry, but George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Steven Soderbergh did this MUCH better in Ocean’s 11, but kudos for ttrying… Clearly they’re trying to make us wonder who is double-crossing the rest, or if anyone ISN’T doing that. Whatever. I like RJ, but I have my worries something bad will happen to him. Beginning to settle into this, ho hum.
VIOLET (25 years before the heist) WHAT the Actual F**K is going on with that CGI and hair to make Leo look younger. Except Young Leo is apparently Ray. Of course Roger Salas starts out as a lowlife thief called GRAHAM, with a bit of ambition… Ooh – setting up a fear of small spaces, and I AM CERTAIN (not just a Reckon) that Where Are You Smart / Brave (etc) thing will come back at the end somewhere. They’ve been watching Gallipoli or, more likely, Face/Off… But again, WTAF is that hair and CGI…? The anti-aging-CGI cream is SO distracting, even though the story got me back…
RED (the morning after the heist) GOOD START – half the gang on a boat (that wasn’t in the exposition planning?!) and they’re NOT happy. What went wrong? Where are Bob, and Ava, and NOOOOOOO – where’s RJ? Hang on – why did Judy leave behind the bag with all the passports and documents in? That’s just STUPID. OH – HUGE PLOT ALERT – the bloody bonds aren’t ‘gone’, they’re in those FedEx delivery boxes. What uber-high-tech security company FedExes a trolley load of boxes anyway? That should be a MASSIVE red flag right there… Perhaps my favourite – I like that it went wrong. I like this is only 35 minutes. I like that there are loads of questions left.
PINK (6 months after the heist) Yikes – has Leo had a stroke or something, he’s really not well. IS that how Parkinsons works? Almost no change in symptoms for 7 years then a massive collapse in a few months? Or has he had a stroke? Are they going to explain this? Bob’s alive?! Well, of course he is, but how exactly? Although he’s quite fun with the phone and almost no voice. So in the end, nearly everyone dies. Ho hum, not sure that’s especially rewarding? Was that RJ taking out Leo? Surely we should know who it was – I’m guessing we’ll get to see the t-shirted assassin in the heist or an earlier episode?Where is RJ? Maybe it wasn’t him, he must be dead… Bob goes down in a blaze of not-glory, Judy runs off with whatever money there is, and bloody Stan is left eating his f***ing lengua tacos like a sad sap. He’ll probably hand himself in accidentally… even the FBI lady gets taken out (ouch!). And Hannah gives back the money to the Nazis after all, while Roger sits in prison to get out on parole in a few years. Not sure this is the ending I was looking for – did I miss something though? How is Hannah affording her gorgeous clifftop mansion? She must have creamed a few bearer bonds off the top as a commission for the Triplets? Is that it? All the open questions have been closed in a bad way. I actually felt for Bob, which says something.
ORANGE (3 weeks before the heist) Ooh – quite like the focus on Nazan the FBI lady, and her addiction history. And her cuddly toy that got tidied off her desk in the PINK episode. Ouch, that hurts. Not so sure about the unecessary love interest with her younger agent – as I didn’t even get a hint of that from the later scenes with them. Hmmm – that’s nonsense. Ahhh – it WAS Ava who informed the FBI… but I thought she was a Good One – she stays with Leo to the end…? Wish I’d seen this before the aftermath.
WHITE (the heist) Nicely done, like the idea with the bees… NOOOOO RJ! I knew Judy was a wrong ‘un from the start. OOH but she did shoot Bob, which is understandable after she’s put up with him for at least 7 years. I assume the sex was great, but that is a Very Long Game she was playing… LIKED that Ava’s ‘cooperation’ with FBI included sending them on a wild goose chase, and left them Roger Salas’ business card with a hint… I do not believe that Bob (a) knows the word ‘tracheotomy’, (b) has the first idea how to perform one, (c) would be capable of even standing up having been choked, windpipe crushed, and being unconscious, let alone performing a tracheotomy ON HIMSELF, before almost instantly running off into the night…!? Hannah and Liz might be very smart with dextrous young-people hands, but they did NOT have time to switch out the bonds from those boxes, even just a few on each box, in the time they had. Thise boxes were stacked several layers deep, and were heavy (noone seemed to carry more than two at a time) – that’s some serious lifting there…
So there it is; a lot of planning, in the writers’ room and in the heist. It was fun along the way and pretty entertaining, but I don’t think I’ll ever consider rewatching it, or probably not anything like it. I like to be in the hands of the story-tellers, let them tell me what they want, give me hints and clues, throw in ambiguity for me to interpret, but I like the shocks and surprises, the twists and reveals, and I Reckon the option to let people choose the order in which things happen weakens those moments.
Having a storyteller in control makes it easier for us humans to listen, pay attention and understand, it makes us more likely to engage and get what you’re saying. Have a story and tell it your way. Start where you want to, but make it make sense, and when you get to the end, stop.
Way back at the start of the first COVID lockdown in 2020, I remember seeing a short clip by the BBC journalist Feargal Keane, reading a poem by John O’Donohue, and it completely floored me.
This is the time to be slow, Lie low to the wall until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let the wire brush of doubt scrape from your heart all sense of yourself and your hesitant light.
If you remain generous, Time will come good; and you will find your feet again on fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind and blushed with beginning
John O’Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us (2008)
I wrote it out in full and have had it pinned prominently in my then-spare-bedroom-now-home-office ever since. It’s a reminder that it’s OK to not be OK, that some days my best might not be as good as I might hope, and that, as Tom Hanks would say, this too will pass.
It’s possible these days to know the answer to almost anything in a matter of seconds; how tall is ____? what film did I see her in? what’s the weather like in ____ in September? When did ____ die? What might these symptoms be? How do I make ____? And increasingly, I’m finding that sometime I actually quite like NOT knowing for a while, especially if it takes me away from what I was doing; having dinner with my family, watching a film, trying to do something else. The age of distraction is real, and yet our brains aren’t really very good at multi-tasking.
Even longer ago, I heard the lyrics to a great song that encouraged me to
Abandon your ambitions, you’re overwhelmed by what you haven’t done
Roddy Woomble – A New Day has Begun
This isn’t about lowering expectations, or not setting goals, but about not being defined by action and pace and relentless achievements. Living by values can be immensely productive, and is hugely rewarding if your actions have a sense of purpose.
Have a break It’s also about recognising that doing nothing is a conscious action and choice. It’s not an absence or abdication. It feels like in recent times we’ve at least partly abandoned the ads of yesteryear promoting cold+flu remedies that would mean you never had to miss that presentation. Because when we get sick, our bodies need rest, and it should be OK to take that rest, rather than ‘struggle on’ into work, where we might end up infecting our colleagues. In the same way, athletes recognise the importance of rest in their training schedules – the drive and motivation to train ever harder, faster, longer is real, but as friends of mine have experienced to their cost, over-training is real.
And in my working day (almost always at home these days), we need to remember, and be kind to ourselves and others, that we can’t always be 100% ‘on’ all the time. In the office environment, breaks are easy to take naturally – walking around to see other people, making coffee and chatting while the kettle boils (etc). At home, especially if you’re alone, we have to be more mindful about these things. This is what Kit-Kat has been banging on about for 65 years.
Kudos to J Walter Thompson for originating the line and sticking with it for so long…
Don’t just react, reflect and respond There’s a lot of talk about operational agility and being able to better react to changing circumstances. Many people and businesses (including me) had to ‘pivot’ during the lockdowns, not just because they could but as a matter of survival. But in less extreme times, speed isn’t always good. A single tweet or complaint does not necessarily mean your marketing strategy needs a rethink. Knee-jerk reactions are so-called to describe an involuntary reflex, not a mindful, active choice.
And so in 2023 I’m intending to (re)build and sustain better working habits. I know I’m not alone in diving down internet rabbit holes or scrolling mindlessly to occupy myself for a few minutes. This year I’m going to be more conscious, with a bank of alternatives that I can do for anywhere from 5-15 minutes that I can use if I’m feeling less than fully focused, or bored, or distracted. They won’t necessarily get me back on task immediately, but they will be more refreshing than what I tend to do now.
I’m thinking I might create a small deck of cards that I can choose at random (or not), to include things like
walk around the garden and closely notice 4 different flowers or plants
That’s a start – I would welcome more ideas. I’m definitely wanting to avoid ‘jobs’ like washing up or preparing food or other household chores; they’re important too, but not part of this.
I Reckon that the more time I spend at my desk, working or especially not working, the more the wire brush of doubt starts to scratch and scrape at me. The fresh pastures of promise aren’t here in this chair, but they’re not far off, and if I seek them out they will bear me back blushed with beginning to respond more positively.
So I watched three times as many films for the first time that were NOT released in 2022 as actual brand-new films. This is the power of the streaming services. What follows here are 14 features, a concert film, two documentaries, a made-for-TV drama and two TV series that really, really stuck out for me during this past year, not in any specific order of merit or chronology, but perhaps with some themes kicking around.
David Byrne’s American Utopia is not your average concert film, but then he was the singer of Talking Heads, who made Stop Making Sense a generation ago, so I suppose we shouldn’t expect a ‘standard’ concert from him. He is perhaps the coolest musician I can think of, given that Bowie died a few years ago. Byrne was nearly 70 when he developed and performed this show, a stunningly simple concept yet highly intricate and complex, amazingly talented collaborators and choreography, and trying to present reasons for and rays of hope despite everything.
Last year I loved discovering Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, reimagined for the poverty-stricken end of Bradford. Ali and Ava is in the same milieu, but if anything it’s even better. Astonishing central performances by Adeel Akhtar and Clare Rushbrook are surrounded by a terrific cast, a heart-healing story amidst so many reasons to walk away, and characters who are neither angels nor devils, despite evidence to the contrary. And it’s only 90 minutes long.
Ready or Not is a terrific, simple concept horror film. Girl marries into a rich family, who play games to initiate newcomers. Not just any games. Again, this is short, in a really good way: 95 minutes of tightly plotted mayhem, a marvellous lovechild of Knives Out and Cabin in the Woods. Samara Weaving (the incoming bride) is fantastic; there’s a moment, later on, when she finally tools up and sees herself in a mirror, pauses and whispers “fuck”. And after everything, they really, REALLY spot the landing.
I’ve long been a fan of Elizabeth Moss, and in The Invisible Man she has a film in which she is in virtually every scene, frequently acting against noone and nothing. And the camera, sound and tension-building are also top-of-their-class, with a number of sequences that are as good as anything I’ve seen in ages.
You do it to yourself, you do… After those women-in-peril-but-in-no-way-needing-a-knight-in-armour, a number of stories about men under pressure, often of their own making, often in extreme circumstances, all featuring some stellar performances by the central characters…
Half Nelson is an early Ryan Gosling vehicle, in which he plays a High School teacher who’s not-so-secretly also nursing a drug addiction, and it’s right up there with his very best performances. This indie film was made on a tiny budget but has really-well realised characters.
Two mentions now for Ben Wishaw who, despite being terrific as both Paddington and Q, is waaaay better than those performances might suggest. I’d go as far to say that he’s like Carey Mulligan or Saiorse Ronan – they make everything they’re in better, they have an amazing range, and I’ll watch anything they’re in. But even with all that, Surge and the TV series This is Going to Hurt are not for everyone.
Surge is a traumatic unsettling spiral of shaky-cam and blurry-cam all in one. Wishaw plays a lonely airport worker with significant but unspecified mental health issues (autism? adhd? bipolar?), and the film depicts a breathless, adrenaline-fuelled, out-of-control episode/breakdown in which Wishaw is truly terrifying and often terrified. He’s a long, long way away from the voice of Paddington here.
Adapted from the very funny and bestselling memoir by Adam Kay into a short TV series, This is Going to Hurt is both a promise and a threat, dramatising the jet-black humour that is necessary to survive life as a Junior Doctor in the underfunded, understaffed NHS. Wishaw’s character is spiteful and bullying, sarcastic and cruel, but he’s also deeply caring, a committed professional, and vuolnerable to the point of being absolutely broken.
Another actor who is utterly compelling and always great, Stephen Graham stars in Boiling Point, a stunning one-take feature about a very long night for a restaurant chef-patron,where it seems everything might collapse around him (and perhaps because of him) at any moment. Exhausting and tense in a similar way to Surge, this is a fantastic achievement, with the whole cast being amazing, even some of the absolutely AWFUL customers…
Stephen Graham is also tremendous in two supporting roles in made-for-TV dramas. Help is a powerful, heartbreaking and enraging (at least for me) dramatisation of the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and specifically the experience and impact on care homes for the elderly and long-term sick. He plays a resident with early onset dementia, whose young nurse, played by Jodie Comer, has to try to hold herself and indeed everything else together in the face of almost impossible circumstances. Jodie Comer gives a performance for the ages, as good as anything I’ve seen, ever.
The NorthWater is a short one-off series directed by Andrew Haigh. His short filmography (Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Pete) should speak for itself, but this is exceptional ‘film-adjacent-TV’. Set in the world of 19th century whaling, this features almost exclusively men doing Bad Things to each other (and seals, and whales), either in the near pitch-darkness of cellar bars or ships’ holds, or in the blinding brightness of arctic ice floes. SG is part of a fabulous ensemble including Jack O’Connell, Tom Wilkinson and Colin Farrell, who is barely recognisable as a feral, savage harpoonist.
Another period piece from a film-maker with a short but stellar CV so far, The Lighthouse is a stunning example of craft in all departments, with performances to die for, even by the stellar standards of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. A terrific blending of 19th century dialogue and classical mythology, dream-hallucination sequences and drunkenness as good as there’s ever been, I’m not sure I knew WTF was going on some of the time, but I felt that in a good way.
More drunkenness, this time in contemporary Danish classrooms, Another Round tells the story of four teachers each suffering their own mid-life malaise, the sadness that comes with affluence. They decide to try out a theory they read online somewhere that asserts that humans function better and are happier if they maintain a low(ish) level of alcohol in their blood at all times. This is at once a disaster waiting to happen, and also an ecstatic catharsis of joy. There aren’t any easy answers, but it explores the possibilities with enormous humanity, and it stars the wonderful Mads Mikkelsen.
Unbow your head, sister After that series of men (often) behaving very badly, a documentary and two stories about how state-sanctioned bad behaviour impacts on individuals and communities. Steve Mcqueen’s Small Axe anthology of films about the Black British experience in London from the lat 1960s through to the early 80s was some of the very best things I saw last year. And in Uprising, three fearsomely well-structured hours of documentary, he retells the factual context for those narrative films, focusing on the appalling fire at 439 New Cross Road in the early hours of Sunday 18th January 1981, which killed 13 people directly, and one more soon after. The average age of those killed was 17. There’s too much that’s great in this to single it out, except perhaps for the first-hand testimony of people who experienced the party and survived the fire, often by jumping from high windows in pitch darkness, hearing the screams of their friends behind them. And then there’s the way the families were treated in the aftermath, by the racists they felt had probably started the fire, but also by the police, media and politicians. In the same way as McQueen illustrates the violence of the British State against Irish Republicans in Hunger, it’s even more egregious here, as their victims haven’t actually done anything wrong, except for not being white.
Across the Atlantic, If Beale Street Could Talk is a beautiful but often harrowing of a story by James Baldwin, directed by Barry Jenkins. Unlike many, I didn’t really go for Moonlight by the same director, but loved his long-form TV series The Underground Railroad. I Reckon this is a near-masterpiece. I fell for this story and its world and every character in it from the opening scenes, Nicholas Britell’s score is simply outstanding, and there are a collection of wonderful soundtrack choices that swept me along on a tide of joy. Kiki Lane and Stephan James are perfect in their central roles, but Regina King, Colman Domingo and Teyonah Parris are at least as good in support. There are so many beautiful scenes and moments.
And more up-to-date, Queen & Slim also features a stunning score and soundtrack and pair of central performances. Queen starts elegant, almost aloof, tall, clad in white. Slim is hunched, stooped, as if he’s trying to dissolve into his surroundings. They are thrown together in terrible circumstances, forced into running and hiding for their lives. They transform slowly and sometimes suddenly, both personally and in their relationship with each other. Until they stand tall to become each other’s legacy.
I’m not a real person yet Four films now about women in entirely different circumstances trying to fit in, to be themselves against all manner of societal and even their own personal self-disapproval…
Frances Ha is a Noah Baumbach film about affluent white people who talk a lot. But in a good way. This stars Greta Gerwig in the title role (the ‘ha’ part is revealed at the end), and she’s not an easy character. It would be easy to be harsh on Frances, because I very nearly was. But that’s the point: she sweeps the truth away or seems oblivious to things others notice, but she’s funny as hell and sweet and the performances are so fantastic, even the bit-parts, and the dialogue is so, so, so good, with so many excellent one-liners and throwaway lines that are really great, that I stopped noticing which were my favourites, because ALL OF THEM. And it features one of my all-time favourite monologues that made me gasp and laugh and cry all at once.
After Love is short and subtle, with probably orders-of-magnitude less dialogue than Frances Ha, and is dominated by a beautiful, layered, restrained, repressed performance from Joanna Scanlan, whom I’ve previously only know from supporting comedic roles in great TV series. Here she’s at Olivia Colman levels, playing an English woman who married a British Muslim and converted to Islam 15 years ago, who makes a shocking discovery about him.
I’m not ashamed to admit that this year I have become fully signed-up to the Church of Taylor Swift, having been already ripe for full conversion, but helped along the way by Eleanor and by TS’ terrific new album. And Miss Americana was also a part of it. Taylor Swift is f***ing awesome. I love everything about her in this documentary. Actually, the film itself is anything but groundbreaking, but by having such great access to such a subject, it’s gold. The sequences in the studio are fabulous, her political awakening is righteous. Her humanity is real, and she seems able to pull zingers out of a hat on demand.
In Promising Young Woman, it seems first-time-writer-director Emerald Fennell’s thesis is “it’s not even enough that a woman dies to make men think about their actions, but she literally has to engineer her own death and the means of telling people about it”. This angry, provovcative, darkly funny and tragic film takes up the mantle where The Accused left off a generation ago, and covers itself in rainbows and pastels to lighten the tone, until it stops bothering to do that, until it says ‘enough’ to audience sensibilities. Ultimately, all the men are terrible, even that lovely Bo Burnham who dances & lipsyncs unironically. Except Clancy Brown, who used to be the savage prison guard from The Shawshank Redemption, but here he’s an absolute sweetie. And at the heart of it all is Carey Mulligan, who is (obvs) brilliant.
I feel like I’m losing all my leaves… Two films about aging, with two wonderful leading performances among an equally-great supporting cast. Pain and Glory is only my second Pedro Almodovar film, and it’s a beautiful, intimate, personal film, about an aging film-maker who may or may not resemble the real-life director in one or more ways. Antonio Banderas is fantastic as the crumbling, almost dissolving aged film-maker and, like Mark Kermode’s quip about there being a lot of Slumdog before the Millionaire, there’s a lot of Pain with only fleeting glimpses of Glory, until the final scene, which looks like a Rembrandt and might as well have come with fanfares of Seraphim for the way it made me feel. I don’t want to say more as I knew nothing of the plot beforehand, and I loved every discovery that Almodovar revealed to me. The more I think about it the more it moves me. I will certainly watch this again.
In early 2015 I saw Still Aliceand recognised a vast amount of Julianne Moore’s astonishing performance in my wife’s mother’s decline with dementia. Around the same time I also watched Michael Haneke’s stunning Amour, and also saw so much of my in-laws’ relationship in those characters. But neither of them shook me quite like The Father, which is unsettling in the extreme. In a similar but more profound way to Surge, it plunges the viewer inside the mind of a man wounded and diminished by dementia. The screenplay and production shook any sense of confidence I had in what was happening, what and who was real, in what order events were happening, IF they were actually happening at all.
Those other films were great (also not forgetting AWAY FROM HER) at depicting dementia. But this really broke me, because it immersed me into the real fear and confusion that can come with dementia. and it was overwhelming. I can’t think I’ll watch this again. But I recommend it wholeheartedly.
You have to leave, for us… While these last four films are probably my top tier of first-time watches for me in 2022, perhaps the first among equals is My Life as a Courgette. In barely an hour this French-language animation will rip out your heart, make you despair for the banal and ignorant cruelties of the adult world, and, almost simultaneously, heal those injuries with childish innocence and strength and love.
John Lennon famously sang another year over …and what have you done? (not in that order, but go with me). Bit of a challenge, John, especially as you then spend quite a few minutes declaring that war is over, if you want it. Except I do want it, but it’s not over. Anyway, this is not a review of all the things that I’ve done (hmmm…that’s catchy, could be a song in that too), but a reflection on the way that I’ve done things in 2022, how that has felt, and how I hope to take that into 2023.
My last post was extolling the benefits and value I was getting from being part of the FLOWN Flock. And this one will talk about that service and experience a bit more, because at the start of this week, they sent me an email encouraging me to reflect on this past year, but not in the way many businesses tend to do that sort of thing. It’s not about SMART objectives or stretch targets or performance optimisation, and not even about work-life balance, but about three things
Connection, Craft, and Growth
If this appeals to you, there’s a handy guide and downloadable template (which, being Old School, I ignored and just used a pen and paper). Please note: this is neither rocket science nor new-age-floaty-wafty-nonsense. It’s about reflecting and responding to past experiences, in order to make future experiences better, more rewarding, more motivating, more nourishing. When you distil what makes you happier, you can then set intentions to do more of that, more often, and similarly to eliminate, avoid, or reduce the impact of whatever is more challenging…
CONNECTION This is the act of recalling experiences where you connected with other people, and how they made you feel; which ones were positive and enriching, and which felt more negative or draining. Don’t try to be exhaustive or comprehensive, start with what comes to mind – but I did go back over my calendar to remind myself. These are the positive ones: I have done the negative things for my own purposes, but you’ll get the drift.
Shared Activities: my virtual work FLOCKS, orchestra rehearsals and concerts, Spin & Yoga classes, Live Music gigs
Family Time: our trips to Bruges, Belfast, and Cornwall/Devon, but also an Escape Room, meals out, and watching our favourite films and TV
Working with people: in-person workshops, getting creative, the positivity and enthusiasm of clients for my work, and especailly when our work becomes real, more than words on a page.
CRAFT This is more about what you’ve done, but again it’s not just about work or numbers, but about how it makes you feel. Apparently we’re three times more likely to stick with a job when we get a sense of meaning or value from it. What skills, knowledge, abilities make you feel better? For me, this year, it’s been
Mixing up my exercise: TBH, I’ve cycled less on the roads this year than the past few years, and I do feel a sense of loss about that (watch out 2023), but I’ve really enjoyed doing more Spin and Yoga classes (see above), which has helped build a different type of fitness, and I’m trying to ignore the Strava numbers.
Getting sh*t done: in my previous agency-corporate world, I did a lot of work that took months (years) to see the light of day, and too many times great ideas or campaigns died in committee. This year I’ve worked with clients who have asked for my guidance, listened, challenged, built and then actually done at least some of the things I recommended. Trust me, this is enormously validating and rewarding, just to get something done and see how well it works.
Mobius Works: it’s been more than 2 years since I was made redundant from a job I loved, and 21 months since I started trasing as a limited company. And so far, it’s going better than I thought it might. I work fewer days in the year, but earn at least as much as I did before. I was able to take most of August off. I’ve worked with ex-colleagues and new strangers, and with one exception, every one has either been an extended (3m+) contract or they have asked me back after the first time.
Celebrating Jamie: I’ve written before about aspects of their journey, and this year really has been the start of the rest of their life. Jamie had top surgery in the summer to give them the flat chest they’ve long desired, and in September they started a degree course in Film at Falmouth University, and they are thriving. It’s not easy, but they are beginning to see just how much they can do and they’re enjoying it.
Celebrating Eleanor: Ella is perhaps overlooked on this blog, and I don’t think she minds. By contrast to Jamie’s more turbulent experience, she is a more typical teen; except she’s not typical, I Reckon she’s bloody exceptional. Outstanding GCSEs and a first term of A-Levels have been matched by working part-time, rediscovering singing, discovering a love of weight training, (starting) learning to drive, and educating me in the brilliance of Taylor Swift, Lizzie McAlpine, beabadoobee and others in our daily school-run commutes.
Celebrating Rachel: after a long time (since the first lockdowns) of really tough working conditions, as well as some ‘difficult’ colleagues and persistently draining health worries, I’m delighted that Rachel is now enjoying her job, and has ‘remembered’ that she’s really, really good at it. After dogged determination, the health issues seem resolved, and we’re busy planning a Big Year for the Moodys in 2023 (she has a Significant Birthday, Jamie is 21, Eleanor will be 18, and it’s also our 25th Wedding Anniversary)… ouch.
GROWTH So this isn’t about achieving more, faster, further (I’m looking at you, Strava), but about how you feel you’ve learned, grown, progressed in 2022, (or not – think also about ways you might have felt constrained or stunted).
New ways of working: I may be an old dog, but I appreciate new tricks. I’ve been fortunate this year to work with people who have different ways of presenting and thinking about the work they do, and it’s been great for me to learn that from them. For all its waffle, there are excellent people on LinkedIn; I just have to choose the right ones to follow.
Better at working from home: this year I have probably worked remotely 90% of the time, perhaps more in the second half of the year. Which is why my new FLOWN community has been so invaluable. At times I have felt stale and ineffective at home, but the structured sessions, mutual support and generally amazing positive vibes from these groups have been tremendous.
Self-Belief: hopefully everything from the previous section illustrates this, but the feedback I had from running a strategy workshop recently was immensely rewarding, and TBH I’m also pretty happy with the way my 50-something inflexible frame has responded to practising yoga. I’m nowhere near what you might call bendy, but I’m better than I was, and I can feel the difference.
After reviewing these themes, the key now is to set intentions for 2023. These are not resolutions, they are not necessarily SMART goals. They are intentions, fleshed out with specific practices, ways of behaving to get more Good Stuff into my life and less Bad Stuff. This is not about measurable achivements but about ongoing practice, living by the values I hope to embrace and promote, and by doing the things that make me (and hopefully others) happier. And always note, this is relative; happier, better: there is no end-goal (not everything that matters can be measured), but instead a direction and a feeling that will develop.
So, while I’m still formulating my specific intentions, a few themes and pointers include
Live music (performing and spectating)
Working and exercising with people (workshops, classes, Flocks, collaboration)
Cherishing Family moments (like the school run commute)
Working with people I can learn from
Road cycling – this might include a tangible goal, like a specific long ride…?
Caretaking my days; not taking on the weight of the world, less aimless scrolling, checking.
That’s what I’m going for – this process has been great so far, and I Reckon it’s worth an hour of your time to ignite your thinking. This isn’t about perfection, but about progress; about accentuating the positive and eliminating (or reducing) the negative. And its aim is to FEEL better, which I Reckon would do us all good.
After my last post I felt a bit grubby; partly for ranting in a way I haven’t done for a while, and partly because I’d immersed myself in the grimness of our current world, which inevitably provokes a toxic mixture of detachment, hopelessness, and an involuntary urge to retreat, hide and protect myself that I felt so persistently in the period I was depressed.
So instead of repressing frustration, I Reckon it’s time for something lighter. After working at home, mostly in a solo way, for the past two years, I’ve increasingly found myself challenged by the forces of distraction, and so I recently signed up to FLOWN. Among the many ways it hopes to make me and its other users happier and more productive are daily morning TAKE OFF sessions. I’ve practised Yoga and/or meditation most mornings since the first COVID lockdowns in 2020, and these are complementary to that.
Create rituals that make you feel better Each 20-minute Take Off session comprises of three rituals to set us up for the day (i) A short guided meditation to bring us into the moment and settle ourselves (ii) A journalling exercise, which can be Free Association, or there’s usually a prompt provided by the facilitator – more of these below… (iii) In mini-breakout groups, we make a commitment to ourselves as we share our intentions for the day; what we want to get done, how we’re feeling, and so on.
The best type of loaded questions The journalling prompts are often loaded with positivity, and they’re so much the better for it. The facilitators will always offer up free-writing as an option, but I always follow the prompts, because I Reckon that my free-writing could frequently be ranty, impotent outbursts that don’t help anyone, least of all me.
So instead, I enjoy the prompts, and I’d encourage anyone to try these out some time. Each exercise usually lasts around 6-7 minutes, which is enough for me to get into a flow and explore more than one angle on things, but not so long that I’m running out of steam. There’s no pressure or ask to share the results, but I really enjoy reviewing mine.
A few examples from the last few weeks…
Write about your future self in the present tense: this is a great visualisation; if you can see it you can believe it.
What makes you smile?: this sparked so many little things, and big things; people, feelings, music, films, places, sounds and smells.
Describe something that makes you sad, as a thing for which you can be grateful: so this took me a while to get my head around, but I started off with the feeling that WFH means I miss working with people. But on the other hand, it has afforded me flexibility and other things that I almost take for granted now compared to my ‘Old Normal’ of working in an office, a long commute and frequent travel to London.
Tell yourself what you’d most like to hear: this came up earlier this week when I woke up with that urge of flight / retreat. So I gave myself a pep talk in the way perhaps Rachel or a good friend would, and it rescued my day before it could slide downhill.
It’s OK to be grateful I’m often reluctant to write or post about feeling grateful. I know I’m very fortunate to be privileged, comfortably well-off, with a lovely family, good friends, a well-paid job. When I do post about it, it’s invariably only after a good deal of self-doubt and anxiety. I don’t want to offend anyone, nor seem like a smug sh*thead. Social media seems to frown on ‘sharenting’, virtue-signalling and whatever other behaviours have been labelled as ‘woke’ this week. It’s as though unalloyed optimism or positivity is no longer allowed, either because it’s clearly Fake BS or because, I don’t know, people are just angry these days.
To be fair, they have a right to be cynical when companies and brands declare their Purpose with a Big Capital ‘P’, that they’re more than just crisps, or toilet cleaner, they want to save the planet. Only this week the deeply problematic FIFA World Cup in Qatar has been attacked by, of all brands, BrewDog. In the spirit of trying to keep this post positive, I’ll just leave this here.
Pay It Forward: perhaps my favourite twist on the theme was the day that I reflected on how I might be able to spread more gratitude around. I can’t change the world, but I can make a difference to some people. You may well have read this before somewhere in a previous post, but the final lines of David Mitchell’s epic Cloud Atlas are a fabulous call to arms for people trying to make a difference. and to sustain the energy and motivation to do so in the face of resistance and criticism
…only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 2004
And so, I started occasionally messaging people I follow on Twitter (or other places) to say Thank You for them being positive, informative, funny, friendly, insightful. Mostly it’s people I don’t actually know, but have followed for a long time, and interacted with from time to time. I keep the messages short but sincere and hope that they make the other person feel just a bit better about themselves. And maybe, just maybe it might bring a drop more gratitude and positivity into the world.
If you like the idea of trying FLOWN, have a look at their site. They offer a 30-day free trial which comes with absolutely no obligation.
Full disclosure: I have told FLOWN that I’m writing this, and this is a bespoke link they have provided. I am not being paid in any way for this post.
I first came across this cartoon in my late teens, when I discovered the surreal world of Gary Larson. I like the turn of phrase, my brain is full. It used to strike me as a whimsical, playful idea, back in the day with 4 TV channels, not that many more radio stations and no internet. Now, not so whimsical.
I’ve written before about the prophetic book “The Shallows”, by Nicholas Carr, written in 2010, which predicted the internet would change our brains in how we were able to concentrate, recall facts, and so on. He suggested the internet would become our long-term memory, because its instantaneous and ubiquitous access to information would replace the need for our brains to retain that information. He also foresaw the internet becoming increasingly unreadable, and accelerating the decline in our attention span, as ‘helpful’ links to related content would increase exponentially and forever distract us from what we had originally set out to do.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And he didn’t even include all the pop-up privacy and cookie opt-in notices in that analysis.
Nicholas Carr has subsequently built on his arguments: the problem we face when interacting with the Internet and our gadgets isn’t as simple as information overload (although we are definitely overloaded). We’re no longer searching for needles in haystacks: instead, we now have filters which are so adept at finding things they know we’ll find interesting, we’ve ended up with “haystack-sized piles of needles”.
Last month, the American writer and academic Scott Galloway wrote some disturbing truths (well, they’re disturbing to me!) about TikTok.
I recently vacationed with friends. As we were wrapping lunch one day, my friend said, “Watch this.” His 11-year-old son walked to the couch and lay on his side. With his arm extended in front of him cradling his phone, he … went vacant. For the next hour, he was comatose. No signs of life other than his open eyes and an occasional finger swipe. “We have to make him stop, pull him out, every time,” his dad said. My head filled with images of opium dens in China. Something about the stillness, the lying on his side.
He explains, clearly, coolly and with almost crystal inevitability, that TikTok could be the defining media presence of the next decade. It has hundreds of millions of people creating clips on every subject and topic imaginable. It has 1.6 billion active users each month across the planet, and it has the technology to know what each of them likes; what they watch, like, skip, comment on, share, and what they create. It can know more about you than you might be conscious of yourself. But it certainly knows enough to show you all the needles you might be looking for. And it has access to a LOT of needles.
TikTok chooses what you might want to watch. Unlike Netflix series or movies, its ‘episodes’ are, on average, barely 30″ long, so even if you don’t skip, it’s hardly an investment of time or mental space before something else comes along. And then another. And another.
Prof Galloway’s central point, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is something that every brand and marketer should remember.
The biggest mistake we make in marketing is believing choice is a benefit. No, it’s a tax. Consumers don’t want more choices, they want more confidence in the choices presented.
Making choices is hard for our brain; it requires energy, it takes time. We would prefer not to keep making choices all the time, especially over things that aren’t exactly life or death.
Do you remember Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker? Having faced unimaginable dangers and made life-or-death decisions in an instant as a bomb disposal expert in Iraq, he comes back to America, and in a supermarket is faced by a 30-foot wall of cereal boxes, and he freezes, paralysed by the choice between things that don’t actually matter.
Red Wire or Green Wire?
The world is complex AND complicated. But it’s feels even worse for us now, today, this week, this year because we have so much more access to so much more stuff. And often we have to make choices between stuff that doesn’t really matter, which places a stress on our brain. Over time, the cumulative stresses of all these choices, let alone all the information that’s available, build up and fill our brains, but not in a good way. TikTok aims to ease this burden of constant choice, but in doing so, it makes me think of something else.
…but it wasn’t in our house (or hundreds of thousands of other houses around the UK last weekend. The combined assaults of Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin proved too much for trees and power lines, meaning that on Saturday lunchtime, moments after my Mum had arrived and a veggie lasagne had gone in the oven, our power went off and stayed off until the early hours of Monday morning.
For the first few hours we were in a positive frame of mind. We put aside the uncooked lasagne and feasted on the ice cream Mum had brought for dessert. We enjoyed the daylight to play a terrific game of Ticket to Ride (Europe), and lit our wood-burning stove. We discovered that ‘stove-top cooking’ is so-called for a reason, as we first boiled water and (on Sunday) made toast and reheated things we had been able to cook at Mum’s house.
Next time we’ll try jacket potatoes in the embers…
It became apparent by the evening that most of Tetbury had their power restored in the early evening of Saturday. We noticed lights coming on in the town centre, which soon made for a very dislocated experience. As I drove Jamie to their evening shift at a local hotel, the world was continuing as if nothing had happened, while a few roads on ‘our’ side of the town were in complete darkness, but for flickering candlelight evident in a few windows.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m writing this on 28th February, several days after Russia has invaded Ukraine and millions of people there areliving in far worse and more hazardous conditions. I know our experience was a short-term, first-world problem. I do not mean to infer or imply equivalence or anything close with the horrors being felt in that country. This is a personal blog to remind myself of my experiences as close to when they happened. If this bothers you, please stop reading now (and probably don’t read the next post about our short city break to Bruges (also before Russia invaded).
And as night fell, we reduced our activity to the room with the stove. We read, played cards by candlelight. We went to bed early. We switched off our phones. There was a low level of anxiety and resignation as it became apparent this might continue until Monday, but we had ‘get-out’ plans to visit my Mum on Sunday to cook the lunch we had planned for Saturday, and use her internet to upload documents we required for a trip to Bruges, as well as a session at the gym, using their showers afterwards. See? First-World Problems easily resolved.
Sunday came and went as we packed for our trip while we had daylight. Our dislocation from the rest of Tetbury was peculiar as we went to the gym and shops but returned to a street and home without power. Having gone to bed very early by our standards, I awoke at 1am on Monday morning when the lights came on, fully 24 hours earlier than expected. The SSEN engineers must have worked a near-miracle to make the repairs in the terrible weather that raged all day on Sunday and into the night. Teams of men and women were working around the clock, all over the country, in dangerous and deeply unpleasant conditions. They are real stars and we owe them deep gratitude.
And so a weekend filled with complications about our upcoming trip was made a bit harder by a loss of power. At the time it seemed massively important, and occasionally overwhelming. But in the end, it wasn’t either of those things. But now I’ve written this, I’ll better remember its highlights; indoor camping, playing games in near-dark, a sense of the four of us being more together and present, not on four different screens in different rooms; and all the things we can be grateful for – this was temporary, and even then we had easy ways to better ‘cope’ with its inconveniences.
In the context of what has followed, I think I’ve reacted even more strongly to the scenes and testimonies of Ukrainian families seeking safety from the Russian invasion. We felt dislocated and anxious with no imminent threat or real difficulty at all. So I’ve made a donation to the Red Cross, and I would urge you to do so.
What I Reckon 