In the weeks before our trip, Rachel surprised even me with her film geekery and determination to seek out the key locations from the film. We chose our apartment on Rue Lepic specifically for its position in the heart of Montmartre, within walking distance of Sacré Coeur. But she went much, much further, checking out various unofficial ‘walking tours’ and chatrooms. I was shocked, but not a little impressed.

And so to enter into the spirit of things, I acquired (secretly) a gnome of our own to take to Paris. We revealed him to Rachel as the Eurostar train emerged from beneath the English Channel into France, and from then on he was a nearly constant companion as we explored Paris for the next three days.

We went to Gare de l’Est to get passport photos…

We managed to visit most of the main locations from the film, and I’ve created a Google map here. You’re welcome!

Film geeks ahoy! Spot the reference…

And here are some snaps of those locations and our gnome in Paris…

What is it about businesses that they seem determined reduce everything to groups of three? Three core strategies, the top three business priorities, three-letter-acronyms (TLAs)… even the buzzwords they use to talk about keeping things simple are in threes; “fewer, bigger, better”.

I don’t believe this is a fundamental human behavioural trait: indeed, more often than not humans have a tendency to reduce issues to a simple binary: man or woman, gay or straight, freedom-fighter or terrorist, when in fact there’s almost certainly a continuum or sliding scale. It is, as Ben Goldacre asserts, a bit more complicated than that.

BUT WAIT! LOOK WHAT I DID – I GAVE YOU THREE EXAMPLES OF BINARY DISTINCTIONS! WOW!

This isn’t a new phenomenon – it’s been present through pretty much every company I’ve worked for or with in the past 20 years. But I will say that it feels like something that is on the increase. Companies spend an awful lot of time talking about how they present the results of their marketing and other activity to their Executive Boards. Let me reiterate – they spend time (and money) discussing how they present their results internally; not actually doing things differently or better to improve their business performance, not even discussing what they could do to improve their business performance.

They can be obsessed with reducing the entire sum of their activities, often encompassing millions of pounds of expenditure and the behaviour of thousands or even millions of consumers, to three key numbers. Apparently it is essential to keep things as simple as possible, so the Executive Board have a really clear picture of what’s important. So we reduce the collective brain-power, imagination & creativity of whole departments of highly-paid staff to three numbers on a Powerpoint slide. Because apparently the Executive Board aren’t capable of handling anything more complicated than that.

Really?

Are the Executive Board of Directors, supposedly among the most able in their respective functions, the best leaders of their people, the most commercially or strategically aware, really unable to cope with anything more complex than three key numbers?

I Reckon that’s either wilfully negligent or woefully incompetent. In reducing the entire sum of their business to a trite set of so-called KPIs, they will almost certainly misunderstand or miss entirely the nuanced reality of increasingly fragmented and complicated relationships between brands and consumers, and the roles of different communication channels. The Executive Board are in charge of serious and complex businesses, responsible for the livelihoods of up to thousands of employees, agencies and suppliers, not to mention shareholders. And yet within their teams, people often spend as long re-inventing the wheel, re-presenting what they re-presented last year, simply to find a new way of saying the same thing, when in fact they should be working on what would make things better, what could really make a difference.

I recently attended a presentation by Kevin Beatty, CEO of the Daily Mail Media Group. Those of you familiar with my views on his parent company’s politics and approach to its so-called journalism (sic) might be forgiven for wondering how and why I didn’t spontaneously explode. However, I was (begrudgingly) struck by the clarity of his business thought and how his company has adapted to the changing media and digital landscape.

He asserted that (I’m paraphrasing)…

…it can be a big mistake to constantly attempt to simplify everything in business. The world is complex and we have to acknowledge that we cannot know everything. We have to learn to live with constantly shifting sands, with ambiguity, and with uncertainty.

The world is complicated: understanding it takes time and effort. Trying to force-fit it into a Powerpoint template or fixed 5-slide presentation does everyone a disservice.

Rachel and I recently enjoyed a terrific evening being entertained (and more than occasionally challenged) by the terrific stand-up comedy of Marcus Brigstocke. During more than two hours on stage, he makes a point of encouraging interaction with the audience; he coaxes and even goads us into getting involved.  During the show, I responded aloud to three of his questions with the following answers…

“Michael Gove”

“Release the hounds”

“Is it Tuesday?”

You can find out what the questions were later…

I’ve liked Marcus Brigstocke for several years; his all-round righteous anger during guest appearances on The Now Show, his more eclectic turns on the CBBC sketch show “Sorry I’ve Got No Head”, and his hapless character Giles Wemmbley-Hogg. He’s definitely posh, a similar age to me, probably less bleeding-heart but definitely liberal.

His show The Brig Society takes on David Cameron’s supposed ‘project’ that supposedly aims to roll-back the role of Government in our day-to-day lives, replacing it (somehow) with individuals and volunteers spontaneously coming together to fill that void.

Brigstocke is clearly sceptical about both the actual progress made by the government on this, but also about the UK population’s willingness to get involved in performing tasks previously undertaken by the State. So the central thread of the show is his attempt to engage his audience in towns all around the country into actually doing something, or at least having ideas as to what they might do. In between this, he relates jovial anecdotes from Leeds or Nottingham or Chorley or Scotland to reassure his audience that they can’t be as insane as a previous town. He also intersperses the present-day discussion with tales from his childhood and everyday observations about our society today.

He clearly understood Cirencester and its middle-class conservative heartland, full of quiet reserve. But just as he lulled us into a deceptively comfortable place, chuckling along with his stories from Boarding School, he erupted with proper rage, getting very sweary and seriously challenging as he repeatedly decried George Osborne’s comparison of the murderous Mick Philpott with all Benefits Claimants as “F***ING UNACCEPTABLE”. The audience didn’t know whether they should laugh, applaud or just take a long hard look at themselves…

Throughout the evening he asked for volunteers to serve as Cabinet Ministers in his Brig Society, asking them for their policies. We had

• Chancellor: John, a teacher from North Swindon, who wanted to hunt down personal and corporate tax evaders
• Health:  Mary, a health visitor, who wanted to recruit more front-line staff for the NHS to improve standards of care
• Education: Amy & George, both teachers, wanted to hire more teachers to help keep class sizes down
• Transport: Rob, a train driver, who wanted to simplify the ticketing process for travelling around the country, and longer trains to improve the customer experience at peak times
• The Elderly: er, that was me. Eventually my loudly vocal interjections got noticed, and he picked on me for putting my head above the parapet…

However, having made such an impression that he called me “a very funny man” (among my proudest moments!), I then seemed to freeze. I had no idea what policies I might employ for The Elderly, whether funny or serious. I wish I might have said something along the lines of free toffees or designated ‘slow-lanes’ in supermarkets or on pavements. In the end I tried to be serious and claim that young people are in more need of help than the elderly.  Luckily he realised quickly that he should move on, but thankfully he chose not to mock my dullness.

What that embarrassing 90 seconds brought home to me is that while I might be capable of a solid one-liner retort, I’m much less good at being spontaneously funny…

What was also clear from the policies on offer was that his audience, even in the compact-but-bijoux Sundial Theatre in Cirencester, seem not to share the world-view of the Tories. We seemed to want the government to take the lead in running the country and providing public services.

Perhaps the highlight sequence in the show was when he brought the Banking Crisis to life, walking among the audience, taking money from their hands and pretending to lend it to others, paying off credit agencies for giving AAA ratings, taking insurance both for and against the borrowers defaulting, then demanding the money back from them at a second’s notice. Most compelling and hard-hitting was the conclusion in which (acting the role of the bankers) he blamed his customer’s greed for wanting a home loan, all the while pocketing the money he had gleefully accepted from both other people and the government. Most amusing was watching several audience members squirm as he seemed to ignore any suggestions that he might actually return their actual money…

For a combination of self-deprecating tangents,  good-humoured rants and observations about the world, and genuine anger at the hypocrisy and paucity of thinking within the Tory Government, I Reckon you could do a lot worse than Marcus Brigstocke.

And for those of you who’ve read this far, the questions that inspired my interjections…

“What is acceptable to find hanging from a railing?” (Michael Gove)

“How would you deal with the tax-evaders?” (release the hounds)

“What would you do to support the elderly, who’ve worked hard all their lives, paid their taxes…” (is it Tuesday?)

It’s recently taken on a very prominent role in our household, but for more positive reasons than the world is completely sh*t (more of that later). Having not watched it for a couple of years, I must have seen it five or six times in the last couple of months, and become even more familiar, but without losing any of its charm or personality for me. When I checked what I had said about it at my Facebook/Flixster review page, I discovered this (rather pithy) review…

The most perfect imperfect film… it’s quirky beyond belief, stylish and stylised, deliberately, knowingly odd.

And I love every moment of its fabuleux, wondrous, charming, touching run-time. The ensemble cast are fantastic. The red-green art direction is lovely. The visual effects are brilliant. Watch it, watch it again.

Marvel at the details, bask in its glorious humanity, enjoy its foibles and flaws. This is beautiful.

…and I was right. But because it’s become so ‘important’ to us this year, indulge me. Here are three reasons why I love Amélie, and why I Reckon you should seek it out and watch it if you have an ounce of humanity. To be honest, I could probably work out thirteen reasons why I love this film. Give yourself up to its magical realism and quirks, and feel better for it.

This will contain spoilers, to both the plot and other aspects of the film…

The Importance of Seemingly Insignificant Moments…

From the opening shot on Rue St.Vincent in Montmartre, Amélie is filled with details that other films would leave on the cutting-room floor, or more likely would simply get cut out during the writing process. These give the film and its characters great depth and real humanity, that we can relate to. that we can care about. The quirkiness of characters is brought to life explicitly with “he likes…she dislikes”, celebrating very personal pleasures. There are countless moments like the beggar who declines Amélie’s offering as he “doesn’t work on Sundays”… Character flashbacks are wonderfully drawn and often incredibly rapid, giving us barely a glimpse, but even that glimpse is enough. The montage of orgasms lasts just a few seconds, but is utterly hilarious, better than 90% of jokes in other (ahem) comedies. We are told Amélie likes to skim stones on the canal, which the film then reinforces occasionally as we notice her stop to pick up and pocket a stone off the street. These details are priceless to us identifying with her.  The opening sequences, in which we are introduced to Amélie‘s childhood, are simply gorgeous, from taking photos of animal-clouds to her cherry earrings and eating 10 raspberries at once…

It’s about people, not plot…

All those rich, nuanced, vibrant character details would be left out of most films, because writers and studios are usually obsessed with plot, with action, with the progression of the protagonist towards their goal, and how they will overcome their antagonist and other obstacles. The basic linear plot of Amélie is almost ridiculously simple, and spans just a few days. She’s a quirky young woman, who seems unable to form a lasting relationship, until she meets a young man in a train station. Will she make that connection with him?

But Jean-Pierre Jeunet uses this storyline as the carrier to encompass a whole milieu of characters from Montmartre, and explores them constantly, with tangents galore and flights of fancy. We become immersed in the world of the Café des deux Moulins and its staff and regulars. There are layers of ‘stakes’ in the film that apply to the different characters at different moments. Many of these people are hardly the stuff of Hollywood rom-coms, as in fact many are at best quirky, if not downright outsiders or ‘marginal’ in terms of a Hollywood society.

The romantic hero pf the film, Nino Quincampoix, works two jobs, one in a sex shop, the other on a ghost train, and seems to have little motivation except his collection of discarded passport photos. Joseph is basically a bitter misogynist who records conversations in the café. M.Dufayel is a failed artist, Hipolito a failed writer. Amélie‘s father is a withdrawn widower who barely ventures beyond his garden. M.Collignon is a crass bully and Lucien has more than a hint of being a bit pervy.

M.Bretodeau is (by his own admission) a bit of a loser, estranged from his daughter and grandson. But when, through Amélie‘s intervention, he recovers the tin box from his childhood, we are swept up in his bittersweet memories, and the final shots of the film give him and us wonderful redemption, yet he gets less than 5 minutes’ screen time. This richness and affection for all the characters is a joy to experience, and something virtually unique to Amélie.

It’s fabuleux for a reason. This is a fairy tale, wonderfully told…

I Reckon Amélie is one of my favourite examples of ‘magic realism‘. The sound design, camera movements and colour palettes are distinctive, definite and deliberate, and Jeunet repeats things throughout the film. The camera swoops in on faces, the narrator plays a huge role as an omniscient presence. Household objects even come to life and talk to  Amélie. Meanwhile, she’s not afraid of breaking the 4th wall with abandon, whether it’s a glance, a smile or actually talking to the audience.

The relentless use of red and green makes Amélie look like no other film; it’s obsessive. From her clothes to the lighting in almost every scene, from the suitcases that go past in a station, with barely seconds on screen, to her Father’s beloved gnome, everything is red and gree. These details, like the characters’ humanity, reward multiple viewings: they’re a real treat. The score is fantastic and utterly French, filled with both jaunty tunes and bittersweet melancholy. The film is filled with discovery and adventure, from Amélie‘s childhood to the truth about the man in the red sneakers to the word-pictures she paints for the blind man.

I love love love this film. Just writing bout it has made me happy, which is something the late, great critic Roger Ebert also acknowledged in his review, describing it as

…a delicious pastry of a movie…You see it, and later when you think about it, you smile…

It is so hard to make a nimble, charming comedy. So hard to get the tone right and find actors who embody charm instead of impersonating it. It takes so much confidence to dance on the tightrope of whimsy. “Amelie” takes those chances, and gets away with them.

This last week, it was my turn. I had thought about film clips or scenes, and even tried to make the technology work to play 20 sound clips. But in the end I opted for a more linear narrative approach, relating moments from my life that still resonate with me now, and/or have seemingly changed the course of my life, even if I didn’t realise it at the time…

You can view the full set of slides on slideshare, together with extended speaker notes (there’s no way I could tell all the stories I wanted to in 20 seconds per slide!)… but to give you a flavour, a couple of selections…

Monday 11th January 1988
Between school and university, I went to the States for 6 months on a school exchange, and this boy from the Cotswolds discovered the world…

I had no baggage, I found I could break out from my own self-imposed teenage constraints – clever, not ‘cool’, awkward in conversation – especially with girls(!). On the very first morning at school in the US, I was invited to skip a class by other guys in the Senior Year, and we went out to get ice cream (it was January and about 5 degrees below zero!), then one of them drove his car around the icy carpark, spinning and wheeling in all directions, before ploughing into a snowbank. This seemed a long way from Gloucestershire.

I played in a jazz band, started to write a screenplay, skied in Colorado. I travelled on my own from New York to Seattle and San Francisco and back again. I was refused re-entry to the US at Niagara Falls. I gambled in casinos in Reno. I thought I was Don Johnson on top of the World Trade Centre…

Thursday 7th June 1990

At the end of my 2nd year at university, I signed up for an ERASMUS exchange to study in France, without consulting anyone, let alone my parents. A real snap decision. It was a brilliant and far-reaching decision, as I got to go skiing in the French Alps A LOT, even buying my own boots and skis. We travelled down to the Mediterranean for a weekend, we took a trip into Italy. We met and studied with multi-lingual French, Italian, Dutch, German students.

Most far-reaching of all, it was in Chambéry that I studied marketing & market research for the first time, and discovered more human, practical, real-world ways to apply my thinking beyond the more abstract, macro-economic aspects of my degree course.

Even more so, if I’d not gone to France for a year I wouldn’t have been at Exeter in my 4th year, and almost certainly wouldn’t have met Rachel.

Thursday 12th March 1992

I’ve played the horn since I was 12. In my Final Year at University, I’m playing 1st horn in Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. It’s 90 minutes long, with 10 French Horns in an orchestra of over 100 and a choir of approaching 200. The Great Hall at Exeter is packed with up to 1,000 people (?certainly hundreds?). After the massive final chords, the audience erupts. Section by section the orchestra is called to stand by the conductor. Still shaking from the effort, the concentration, the exhilaration, it’s the turn of the Horns.  There are cheers, people are standing. We nailed it. I nailed it.

It’s still my happy place moment.

Friday 30th January 2003

I’ve only ever actively resigned from one job, and that was back in 1994. I’ve been sold once and made redundant twice – and all of them have been Good Things, especially this last one. On 30th January 2003 I was finally set free from the politics at Barclaycard. I was sent home on gardening leave while Rachel had Post-Natal Depression and Hannah was still only 7 months old. It precipitated our move back from Oxfordshire to Gloucestershire, and my career shift from client to agency, as I came to TRA.

My life, like all our lives, has featured many important and properly life-changing moments. But even more, there have been countless fleeting moments, or events that might seem like nothing, but are often a lot more than nothing.

Many of these moments don’t matter, are forgotten and lost forever. But many of them really do matter. For longer, and in ways we couldn’t begin to realise at the time.

I Reckon he must be desperate to stay in his post, despite the brickbats and criticism from virtually every corner after this week’s lacklustre budget, because for one thing he’s never worked outside of the Conservative Party in his entire adult life, and for another thing, by all sane measures and criteria, he should never be able to get a real job in the private sector he so brazenly idolises.

Here are a few reasons why not…

Performance

Osborne seems to want doctors, teachers and all public servants be judged on their measurable results. A coruscating article by Mehdi Hasan lays George’s results out in the open. It also wins points for the best title I’ve seen in a while. Along with the rest of the neo-Con Right Wing, Osborne often likens running the economy to the same principles of running a household or a company. But it’s not just George’s results that would see him sidelined out of any halfway decent company.

So… quite a bit worse than even the 1980s

Inability to forecast

Companies and markets like certainty, they like to hit targets. A key trait of many successful businesses is the ability to manage expectations. Osborne has patently failed to even get close to his forecasts.

If you can’t forecast, the business can’t plan and perform…

I’m prepared to give him one year’s grace, that the world economy was even worse than expected after the Government took charge, but the ongoing performance is so weak, and so far away from his previous forecasts that in most plcs the shareholders would have taken action long ago. But in the marvellous UK system of democracy, that ability to take action seems more limited to us mere voters. Osborne is as hard to remove as the mythical ‘coasting’ teachers, school governors and other public servants he and his colleagues decry at every opportunity.

No Plan B

The US comedian Stephen Colbert assaulted George W Bush’s Presidency at the White House Press Corps Dinner in 2006 with a series of astonishingly barbed and brilliant gags, none more so than this one…

The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady…You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.

George Osborne has convinced himself that his way is the only way, in the face of so much evidence from around the world. Any company showing the results he’s delivered would be crying out for a new approach, anything to get things moving again. But there’s nothing.  The paucity of thinking, of anything that even resembles creativity, is disheartening to the point of being downright upsetting. The British economy deserves better.

Not Learning from Mistakes

One of the very few “positive” actions in the Budget this week was an announcement to try to stimulate growth through the housing market. Having failed to deliver the export-led economy he previously promised, Osborne is throwing money at house buyers. But this is the same man who last year declared

This country borrowed its way into trouble. Now we’re going to earn our way out…

Has he forgotten that the current recessions were largely caused by banks lending too much money to people who couldn’t afford to keep up the payments for over-priced properties. And yet here he is promising money to subsidise banks to lend money where they wouldn’t otherwise. In short, people who can’t afford houses will be lent additional money to be able to afford them. So now it seems even the Government is getting into sub-prime lending, but at least 7 years after it stopped being a good idea. The economicshelp blog lays out with brilliant simplicity and simple brilliance why this is a bad idea. Houses are still too expensive.

Good luck keeping this job, George. You don’t deserve it, and we don’t deserve you.

I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but the trouble is I don’t know which half…

In the 1960s William Bruce Cameron, an American Sociologist, first coined another seminal phrase

It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do.
However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

But today it seems we live in a world where the media like to reduce complex issues to their most simplistic, where League Tables are all-important, and politicians live (and die) on policy-by-sound-bite. A pithy, punchy statistic is worth more than nuanced arguments that acknowledge the inter-dependence between issues or subtleties within an analysis.

My daughters’ primary school recently experienced an inspection by OFSTED. The previous inspection a couple of years ago had been classed as satisfactory. That report highlighted lots of positive aspects about the school, including comments from parents and children, about how they liked going to school, that the atmosphere was friendly and supportive, and that the school was well on the way to improving its rating to good.

Since then, there has been a change within the Department of Education. Just weeks before taking up his appointment as the new Chief Inspector of Schools in January 2012, Sir Michael Wilshaw said

If anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’ you will know you are doing something right.

Really… that’s not a style of effective management I’ve ever had recommended to me.

The most recent OFSTED report on our primary school has felt the full force of the changing framework and moving goalposts for school inspections. Before I get started on this, let me say that I am in many ways delighted with some of the tough lessons the school management has had to learn in recent weeks: there are clear areas for improvement and I’m already confident that they are addressing them.

But the report has changed in tone, style and format. The grading ‘satisfactory’ has been renamed as ‘requires improvement’. Its opening lines are not accentuating the positive; quite the reverse. Lest anyone be in the slightest doubt, its opening gambit is

This is not a good school…

…by which it means the official OFSTED rating of ‘good’. But don’t try telling me they don’t know exactly what they’re doing…

The report focuses in the starkest terms on what OFSTED regards as the failings and shortcomings in the school. Positive comments and recent improvements are noted, but almost in passing. Many positive aspects of the school that seemed valuable 2-3 years ago don’t even feature.

There seems to be an enormous focus on management systems, data and measurement, as though they’re only interested in the things that can be measured and quantified, such as “what’s the absentee rate among children with SEN? how has that changed since last year?”  I’m not saying this isn’t important, in fact it’s probably a hygiene factor, and the school’s weakness in this respect is to me an annoyance, an unnecessary distraction. It needs fixing, but it should never have been a problem.

Because now the OFSTED report about my daughters’ school is online and official, and it doesn’t read well. I know that it doesn’t reflect our full experience of the school and omits all sorts of positive elements. But new or prospective parents don’t know that: the OFSTED report is a major influence on what they think. All the positive word of mouth and community goodwill can only go so far.

In the same way as children are tutored to pass the grammar school entrance tests, schools are now focusing, at least in the short-term, on data-capturing and reporting. I hope it does improve the outcomes, I genuinely do. But I’m not especially confident.

During the last General Election campaign, David Cameron pledged to drive the education system to do more teaching and less testing. But I Reckon he’s achieved the opposite. SAT tests appear ever more important, league tables are still published in most major newspapers as the be-all-and-end-all for parents to judge their schools. My younger daughter was tested on her phonics aged just 6, despite all sorts of evidence against that approach.

There is more testing and measurement now, and on pre-defined criteria that are not always based on the weight of evidence, but on a political agenda. Moreover, this testing starts sooner, such that we could soon be testing and grading our children from a very early age, when they develop differently with different types of intelligence and skills. We could marginalise those who do not match the profile of what Michael Gove regards as a Model Pupil; rigidly academic, with a prescriptive curriculum, based on facts and memory.

I Reckon a one-size-fits-all set of criteria for measuring children is flawed, and the current obsession with quantifying and counting everything is at best imperfect and at worst could suppress children’s personalities and creativity. I’m no expert, but Sir Ken Robinson is, so if you I haven’t convinced you, maybe he can.

• In 1997, having seen a colleague run the London Marathon in a ridiculous fancy dress outfit, and witnessed the heroic personal achievements of people of all shapes, sizes and ages as they crossed the finish line, I committed to match them. And so, having never run more than 3 miles in one go, I came upon the start line of the 1998 London Marathon. I had pulled a hamstring barely 5 weeks before the day of the race, so my final weeks of training were shot to pieces. I was doing fine at 14 miles, on course for a 4-hour finish. But by 17 miles I had hit The Wall and bounced off. I was walking. But with the help of the crowd and fellow runners, I started running again and finished in just under 4½ hours.
• In 2004 I walked The Three Peaks, an event taking in the most amazing natural scenery in the UK, even if half of the time I was walking in darkness. I practically skipped up and down Snowdon under a lovely moonlit summer sky, then basked in a gorgeous day in the Lake District as we climbed Scafell Pike. We started up Ben Nevis at 1am, and there was a heavy, low cloud and drizzle throughout. Getting up was fine, but on the way down my knees were struggling and it took me longer to descend than to reach the summit.
• And now, almost on a whim, together with colleagues, I’ve taken on a shorter, but probably more insane challenge…

This is clearly me fulfilling some deep-seated desire to participate in the volleyball game from Top Gun…

The reasons why I’m madly excited about this are exactly the same reasons as why I’m more than a little bit scared.

• The average age of our team is under 30, making me and one other colleague The Old Men, as I’m 44 on Sunday. My knees and hips aren’t what they once were…
  …but I feel fitter and healthier now than I have done for years
• I’ve still got 6 months to adapt my general gym/fitness regimen to be better ready for this…
  …but if you put me near a set of monkey bars right now I would willingly just plunge straight into the muddy, icy water beneath
• I’m counting on the fact that the UK event in a field somewhere in the West Country will be slightly less self-consciously macho and chest-pumping than the US promotional video…
  …but there is no way on earth I want to actually be ‘prepared’ for something called The Arctic Enema

• With both colleagues and strangers, this should be enormous fun (like the marathon and Three Peaks were) and another great experience to chalk up, with a huge sense of achievement. It’s not a race, it’s a challenge. Mudders help each other…
  …but there is still enormous potential for total sense-of-humour failure, physical and/or mental humiliation
• And just on a practical note, I’m basically partially-sighted without my glasses, but there’s no way I’m happy wearing these very expensive things around that course. I do have some daily disposable lenses, but there are loads of people online advising against contact lenses, as they can get muddy & gritty, and there’s a fair chance they might come out in the many watery-based obstacles…

Anyway, I’m up for it. I’ve paid the pretty substantial entry fee, we’ll kick off some fundraising efforts in the coming weeks, and I can already do a few more press-ups than I could a few weeks ago. It’s a start…

I’ve missed the times when I wake up early, and instead of getting up or trying in vain to go back to sleep, I listen to something quietly, warm, still in bed. I’ve missed having my iPod at the gym, where I could listen to whatever I liked, drowning out the noise of Kiss FM or The Hits! that inevitably seems to be blaring from the speakers. I’ve missed the serendipity of the Shuffle setting, when Bob Dylan can follow David Gray, or ELO precedes Boxer Rebellion.

Most of all, I’ve missed my favourite, regular podcasts; especially The Bugle, Filmspotting and This American Life. I’ve missed the introductory theme music to the first two, and Ira Glass’ laconic tones. They are my weekly routines, and with good reason. They are my friends, I trust them, I enjoy their company, I miss them when they’re not there. They accompany me to and from work every day.

One reason I’ve missed them so much is that, especially in the morning, the radio stations simply don’t cater for a 45 minute commute. The rolling news of BBC Radio 5 Live is just so much repetition and perilously close to the sort of What I Reckon phone-ins that inspired the title of my blog almost four years ago. Radio 4 features extended interviews with politicians that just make me cross, and after about 10 minutes I can’t listen to Chris Evans any more.

Nevertheless, a light in the darkness of most radio output is Simon Mayo. He has been one of my favourite radio presenters ever since the 1980s, when his personality and wit shone through despite some of the godawful trite pop he had to play on the Radio 1 playlist. His current drivetime show on Radio 2 carries on in much the same vein. He’s an excellent interviewer, he has a great team with whom he has a great rapport, and he is a terrific judge of people, able to speak warmly and freely with everyone.

I’ve also taken increased solace (at home – where we have digital radios) in The Joy of 6Music. Despite a voting mishap that led to Coldplay becoming its ‘best song of the last 10 years’ (don’t get me wrong, the Coldplay song is fine, but (a) 6Music simply don’t play Coldplay any more, and (b) it’s NOT the best song, not by a long shot…), this station is a music-lover’s paradise. Populated by presenters who really care and know about music, who aren’t afraid to declare their eccentricities or ‘uncool’ favourites, virtually every hour brings new treats and surprises. Of course there are things I don’t like, but almost everything is either new to me, or a long-lost gem I hear only rarely.

My last coping strategy has been the classical symphony. Sibelius has accompanied me in the car for the last few days, and it’s been an uninterrupted joy. The 5th Symphony, the violin concerto, Night Ride & Sunrise… all masterpieces of orchestration and control, of dynamics and tone.Having played several symphonies in orchestras over the years, I realise that generally it’s more fun to listen to than to play, as his compositions are often dense and abstract, richly layered constructions where ‘tunes’ are more like short motifs than anything you’d sing to yourself later. But they are wonderfully rewarding, and I love the way he writes for horns, with subtly shifting harmonies and chorales, and the triumphant call in the finale of that 5th symphony…

Sibelius’ music lifts my mood in a way few things can. I may well miss him while I catch up on my podcasts.

I already knew that in the *coughs loudly* 21 years since I graduated that plenty of things had changed on the campus, in terms of new buildings, state-of-the-art hi-tech facilities and so on. I knew I had to restrain myself from banging on about hand-written essays and having to actually read books. But in the few hours I was there, so many differences leaped out at me. But then again, quite a few things were still reassuringly familiar too…

I actually do remember when all this was just a field…

It weren’t like this in my day…

• The scale and quality of new facilities is pretty impressive. It makes me think how the whole place back in 1990 must have looked unbelievably shabby compared to today. Everything is clean and shiny.

Is this really the shabby place I played orchestra concerts, sat my exams, saw The Wonderstuff & James…?

• It feels so much more corporate and professional. The Forum is tremendously impressive, combining the library and main student building in a large complex with workspaces, shops and offices, including a huge internal atrium…

• The students seemed to have a more sober, professional attitude. The library was heaving with people when I walked past. Most of the people I saw in the coffee bars were actually working, and the ubiquity of laptops and tablets still surprised me even though I knew what it would be like…
• I tried to revisit my old Hall of Residence (Hope Hall), but (of course) the buildings were all locked, only accessible with a swipe card. The lack of security 20 years ago seems almost naïve to me now.

Missing, presumed lost…

• Among all the new signage and smart new paved areas, a few things are notable by their absence… with all the slick organisation and professionalism there felt like there was a bit of a personality vacuum; there’s precious little charm. For all its glass and cleanliness, The Forum could have been a shopping centre. It certainly didn’t feel like something the students could ‘own’.
• Exeter was never the most diverse campus in the world; it used to feature in The Sloane Ranger’s Handbook! But there was still a sense of youth, of at least some political awareness, even in sometimes trite things like The Nelson Mandela Room, or a strange metal sculpture that went up almost overnight to commemorate the students killed at Tianenmen Square in Beijing. These have gone. It seems older, somehow.
• The building where Rachel spent her first term-and-a-half, a residential annex of Hope Hall, the rooms where we first talked about Monty Python, first kissed, has gone. It’s been replaced by a modern block of self-catering apartments.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

• The streets around the campus were still reassuringly familiar. Rows of terraces with resonant names for me; Jubilee Road, Old Tiverton Road, Monks Road, Mount Pleasant Road. Cambridge Terrace, where I spent my final year, was almost delightfully grotty compared to the renovations that have gone on elsewhere, with the same down-at-heel takeaways, and a very unwell-looking tramp slumped on the steps that led up to our old front door
• Similarly, many of the pubs still look the same (at least from the outside), and the local shops are mostly all still there
• Parts of the campus are unchanged, and look like something out of the East German Government’s Things to do with Concrete catalogue. Best of all of these is Cornwall House, always the lesser of the two main student buildings, but also home to The Lemon Grove, the legendary (sic) student nightclub on campus. It was inside these hallowed doors that I first met Rachel, and from where I first walked her back to the now-non-existent residence…

They don’t put this bit in the admissions brochure

• Best of all, when I walked intoThe Ram bar on campus at 2.30pm on a Thursday afternoon, it was packed.