Everywhere is walking distance, if you have the time…

I’m lucky to live in Tetbury, a bustling (sometimes) market town in the heart of the Cotswolds. Within a few minutes of leaving my front door I can be chatting with our excellent butcher, enjoying a pint at one of several different pubs, taking my daughters to the library or school for new discoveries, or striding across open fields. And of course despite being blessed with a richness of opportunity on our doorstep, we realised at the end of last year that we didn’t seem to ‘get out enough’. We visited friends all round the country, went camping and so on, but we didn’t seem to ‘get our boots on and just go for a walk’.

So that has become our unofficial family resolution for 2012: or, at least Rachel and I are making a conscious effort, and the girls so far have been eager to join us (perhaps the relatively mild weather and promise of hot chocolate and cake when we return has something to do with that!).

As is often the way with New Year Resolutions, we got off to a good start. We were staying with friends in Harpenden, and on New Year’s Day set out along a footpath that follows an old railway line. Perhaps because it’s Harpenden, this path was properly tarmac-ed, a perfect route for our younger daughter to try out her Christmas Scooter and practise balancing on two wheels.

The very next day we really shrugged off our Christmas routines by actually leaving the house before noon. In fact, we were striding towards the edge of the Cotswold Escarpment before 11am as we left the carpark at Dyrham Park, a stunning National Trust property between Tetbury and Bath.

We followed paths very familiar to us from previous visits down to the house, but then walked back up the hill through the trees and the deer park. We didn’t see any deer up close, but it was a really lovely walk with marvellous views across to the River Severn. The weather was closing in, which kept us focused as we climbed the hill back to the car.

This route is part of a whole series of National Trust ‘one-mile-walks’. I think this is a pretty ‘long’ mile…

Image taken from http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/walks

The National Trust has long been championing the natural beauty of the UK and the benefits of getting outdoors more. I reckon they’re bang on the money, and their website and social media feeds are well worth a look.

And then this weekend, after a marathon but rewarding session of decluttering virtually every room in the house, and re-felting the roof of our garden shed (!?), we went out closer to home, down what we know as The Old Rope Walk in Tetbury, out into Preston Park. Again the girls had their scooters, but the path was a bit muddy for generating any real speed… On the way back we were able to scavenge in the woods and come home with a massive sack full of twigs and fallen branches for firewood kindling.

We’ve already got our eye on a tramp around Woodchester Park for next weekend. In the meantime, I’m enjoying parking a bit further from the office each morning. I get to walk down the hill into Bath along part of The Cotswold Way and across Victoria Park; not too shabby at all…

Expect further updates during 2012: I reckon this is a resolution that will be pretty easy to keep.

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You’re very very nice people…

I just learnt that the phrase ‘the devil’s in the detail’ is actually an adaptation of something attributed to the 19th Century French author Gustave Flaubert, who asserted that

Le bon Dieu est dans le détail

To me there is a world of difference between the two phrases that reveals wildly different outlooks on life and the world. At the start of this year I resolved to be more positive. Flaubert’s assertion is that there is beauty in even the smallest thing, in the tiniest detail, that there are countless reasons to be optimistic and awestruck. I’m sure that Richard Dawkins might challenge the presence of God, but he would not deny the wonder and delight to be discovered in the intricacies of an orchid flower or the synapses of the human brain.

The alternative mindset seems to suggest a dread or a risk inherent in every action, a fear of failure. There are problems and difficulties in everything, and no matter how hard you try, you will always miss something.

Frankly, life is too beautiful and (sadly) too short to sustain that kind of world-view. Revelling in and celebrating the positive things to be found in the details makes things simple. The little things matter. If we can remember the seemingly insignificant experiences that have lived with us, if we can start to pass on those experiences, we can treat others in the way we would like to be treated, and shape the future for everyone.

I’ve blogged plenty of times about poor customer service and experiences, but I very rarely remember them spontaneously. I do think often about Tetbury’s fantastic butcher, in fact every time I walk past or, more often than not, into the shop. I recall quite fondly the surprisingly terrific service we had last summer from Easyjet. It has long been a rule of thumb about marketing and customer experience that a happy customer will tell one other person, but an unhappy customer will tell ten people. As much as I know about complaining and ranting, I believe that it’s better to promote and champion my positive experiences. ‘Reward good behaviour, ignore poor behaviour’ is a good approach to parenting (apparently!). Don’t give poor service or attitudes the oxygen of publicity.

The little things matter (did I mention that already?!)…

I spent last weekend felling trees to make charcoal for The National Trust at the Dudmaston Estate in Shropshire. There was a lot of talk among the rangers and wardens about ‘visitor engagement’. They spend a good deal of time thinking about how to help visitors have a better experience when they visit Dudmaston, and they know that sometimes unexpected details can make all the difference…

• Being able to see dappled sunlight through the trees from a woodland path can be a ‘magic moment’ for visitors: hence we cleared lots of trees away to open up the canopy, improve visibility and encourage butterflies and other wildlife to return
• The carparking experience on arrival is really important to people being in a good mood before they even reach the ticket office: get that wrong and all the period features or landscaped grounds are wasted
• Making sure there is still a decent choice of cakes left in the cafe at 4pm…

Almost 20 years ago, Tesco recognised that ‘every little helps’. Among a myriad of seemingly small gestures or changes, they took sweets away from the checkouts and created parent/child parking – effectively setting the agenda for what is now the norm in practically all UK supermarkets.

More recently, a café in Bath started to sell its own home-made baby food, and introduced a ‘corkage’ charge for mums wanting to bring their own baby food, which provoked a pretty immediate backlash. The charge has since been dropped.

Lastly, and perhaps self-indulgently because I’ve always loved this campaign, Yellow Pages. Starting in the 1980s, Yellow Pages had a long-running ad campaign that focused on ‘the little things’, on scenarios where people were using Yellow Pages for very personal, immediate, emotive things (not just sorting a blocked drain, or looking for a taxi or a takeaway).

Perhaps one of the most famous executions (and one of my favourites) is the one from 1990 (when I had bouffant student hair) that gave me hope that men with heavy eyebrows could get on the telly…!

Some of these have not dated especially well, and feel amazingly nostalgic. More recent ads are definitely edgier. Some, like ‘French Polishers, it’s just possible you could save my life’, have entered into our cultural language.

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End of a Century…it’s nothing special

It’s almost exactly 19 months since I opened this WordPress account and started blogging. Recently I suggested to another blogger that for his 100th post he should list 100 things he had learnt since starting his blog. He gamely accepted the challenge, so some similar list is the least I can do…

So, looking back so far, a ‘York Notes’ version of What I Reckon (May 2009 – December 2010)

1. Aiming to post 2-3 times a week is a noble aim, but not at 600 words a time.
2. It’s about people (not data segments or clusters or whatever).
3. Don’t try and surf if you can’t easily and smoothly stand up from lying prone on solid ground.
4. Fish are friends, not food.
5. Sometimes sitting down with an icecream is more fun than flying a kite.
6. I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
7. The smell of Birds’ Custard makes me think of Sunday lunch when I was a child.
8. Businesses should stop centralising and get closer to their local communities.
9. Dr John Mislow was a friend of mine a long time ago. His death at 39 is a tragedy.
10. Arthur Honnegger’s ‘Pacific 231’ is a brilliant evocation of the power of the steam train.
11. I really don’t want the BBC to tell me what other people reckon about the news. I want the BBC to tell me the news.
12. Advertising can sometimes produce very moving, powerful campaigns for good.
13. There’s skint, and there’s middle class skint. I know which I am, and I am grateful.
14. The Wire is the best TV series I’ve ever seen, even better than Mad Men.
15. The menu découvert at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons is expensive, but astonishingly good value.
16. I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
17. Man on Wire is a fantastic biopic, documentary and heist movie all at once.
18. The Merlin Entertainments London Eye is a stunning way to see London, but it was also a soulless corporate experience for me.
19. Stuff takes longer when you’re camping, but in a good way.
20. Marketing is usually the application of common sense.
21. U2 are a brilliant band, and their live shows are tremendous.
22. One of the best things about my week is listening to Filmspotting.
23. Most products can be easily and almost instantly substituted for a functionally identical alternative. The difference is in design, experience and how it makes you feel.
24. Margaret Thatcher was wrong. There is such a thing as society, and it’s not David Cameron’s ‘Big’ version either.
25. This American Life, presented by the peerless Ira Glass, is a marvellous radio show.
26. Queen were a terrific band, and Freddie Mercury the greatest front man of all-time.
27. The mound above Tarn Hows is a wonderful spot to have lunch, looking across to the Langdale Pikes.
28. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a masterpiece.
29. Social Media isn’t complicated. It’s a conversation. Be interesting, and listen to what other people are saying.
30. Revolutionary Road has much to praise, but ultimately I found it hollow, considerably less than the sum of its parts.
31. The problem with most brands is that they want to talk about themselves all the time.
32. Andy Goldsworthy is a tremendous ‘natural artist’.
33. Sometimes my iPod shuffle command seems to know what it’s doing, and creates playlists of real beauty.
34. The PCC  seems pretty toothless to me.
35. Watching a film on a train can be dangerous. It can leave you utterly unprepared for the real world at the end of the journey.
36. Orange seems to take me for granted. And yet I stay with them. What does that say about #23?
37. The end of The Graduate is the least triumphant happy ending in cinema.
38. A Gary Larson cartoon and a Jack Johnson quote have driven more traffic to my blog than any other post…
39. Real mail is at least as important as email.
40. I wish I was half as cool as Christopher Walken.
41. If you want me to care about you’re supposedly trying to sell, at least pretend like you care about me.
42. There’s something very empty about the same sort of people drinking the same drinks sat at the same tables listening to the same music in ‘chain bars’ all over the country.
43. Did I mention that The Wire is the best TV ever made? Ever.
44. The opening paragraph of Jim Crace’s Quarantine is as good as anything I’ve read in years. The rest of the book is pretty darn great too.
45. Bono learnt a lot of what he knows from Freddie Mercury, except the bit about not taking himself too seriously.
46. ‘Company Policy’ is usually the death-knell to allowing staff to treat customers decently
47. Men, as a rule, hate indiscriminate shopping.
48. Anyone who thinks It’s a Wonderful Life is schmaltzy sentimentality run riot hasn’t been paying attention.
49. In Rainbows is as close to a perfect album as pretty much anything I’ve heard.
50. Everyone wants to be where someone loves them best of all…
51. I got tired of writing about poor customer service, because it doesn’t seem to change anything.
52. Corporate car adverts need to be less boastful about how good their cars are, and pay attention to #41 above…
53. Let us all be Dinosaurs and Lovely Other Dinosaurs together. For the sun is warm. And the world is a beautiful place.
54. The Cluetrain Manifesto is as relevant now as when it was written 11 years ago.
55. I need to review my old posts more often – several video embeds are now defunct…
56. PT Anderson is a brilliant director, probably the best around.
57. I laugh more in an episode of Green Wing than in a whole series of most comedy shows.
58. John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road is a fine film, but not quite a masterpiece.
59. Keeping a written record of significant experiences is a lovely way to remind myself that my life is pretty darn fine, actually.
60. Many businesses swing wildly between a plan based on pie-in-the-sky assumptions with no foundation, and analysis-paralysis.
61. BBC 6Music packs in more variety in a day than most commercial stations do in a month.
62. I hoped the UK General Election in May 2010 would lead to positive change. I was half-right.
63. Devon and Cornwall have beaches to rival anywhere in Europe.
64. Many of my favourite songs are under 3 minutes long; perfectly-formed pieces of beautiful art.
65. I truly hoped the Conservative / Lib-Dem coalition would be a progressive force for change in UK politics. I was naive.
66. 2 of my Top 3 films of the last decade are not in English (City of God and The Lives of Others).
67. Sometimes traffic to my blog comes from the most unlikely sources (Lady Gaga?!).
68. Cate Blanchett is one of the most interesting actresses working today.
69. Companies need to care more about their agencies.
70. Uncovering decades-old diaries can be both uplifting and uncomfortable.
71. When you are dancing and laughing and finally living, hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly.
72. Usain Bolt is a greater role-model and champion than any English footballer.
73. The salaries of the 24 players in England’s dismal World Cup squad would pay for over 3,300 British Soldiers.
74. Martin Luther King never spoke in terms of SMART objectives.
75. Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows…
76. Volunteering for The National Trust enables me to meet great people and do some good. Nice.
77. (Despite the doping scandals) The Tour de France is a sporting spectacle like nothing else.
78. There is no political violence, only criminal violence. But this can be state-sanctioned too.
79. Natwest Bank’s ‘Helpful Banking’ campaign is depressingly cautious and underwhelming.
80. Gifford’s Circus is brilliant old-school entertainment.
81. I am incredibly proud of the way my 5-year-old daughter deals with her  nut allergy
82. Anvil! The story of Anvil is as wonderful a love story as you’ll ever see.
83. There is nothing worse in life than being blind in Granada…
84. Roald Dahl is my favourite author for children.
85. Does our ability to overcome nature make us immune to its danger and challenges?
86. It’s really important to believe in your own abilities: you can be better than you’re currently allowed to be.
87. The 24-hour-news cycle means we make mountains out of molehills and forget very quickly.
88. Easyjet are not as bad as they’re made out to be.
89. The Bugle is the perfect antidote to the 24-hour-news-cycle
90. The shared experience of the Twitterati watching Strictly Come Dancing or X-Factor proves that appointment TV viewing is not dead.
91. The Cove is a brilliant and shocking documentary that does for (part of) the Japanese fishing industry what Jamie Oliver has tried to do for battery chicken farming in the UK
92. There is such a thing as too much choice.
93. Long live Jesse Smith’s Butcher in Tetbury and all those like it.
94. Movember is a terrific charity, and it brought our team at work closer together. The power of the Mo is real…
95. Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen is another near-perfect album.
96. I grew a moustache and I liked it (for a month anyway)
97. I’m a French Horn player and proud of it.
98. I’m also proud of this blog. Thanks for reading.
99. Struggling now… as it’s nearly Christmas, can I point you in the direction of my recipe for a lovely festive season?
100. Trying to plan ahead with posts, especially when my blog is reasonably wide-ranging in scope, is important. I get distracted easily and lose focus. Outlining is important, and writer’s block is real.

I hope I can continue to feel proud of this for another 100 posts, and that you can continue to find it interesting. Thanks for reading and supporting my little blog.

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Ask what you can do for your country…

A couple of years ago I volunteered for a week with The National Trust, working on their Monk Coniston Estate in the wonderful Lake District. It was July, and it poured with rain almost every day. This year I chose a shorter weekend stint on the stunning Golden Cap Estate on the Dorset coast. We were based at the Stonebarrow Basecamp, about a mile from Charmouth.

Seven of us arrived on Friday evening, having slogged through the traffic from as far afield as Cambridge and even one volunteer from Tarragona! But when the first bottle of beer was opened and we enjoyed views like these, we were reminded why we wanted to volunteer…

The National Trust has been undertaking a long-term (15 years+) project to rid this Estate of meadows and farmland of ragwort. Our task for the weekend was to continue this project and remove as many of the newly flowering plants as possible. I’m delighted to inform you that the long-term plan has worked. We were truly standing on the shoulders of giants, as across many fields, we struggled to find (m)any mature plants like the one in this picture…

Indeed, for much of Saturday we were scouring the fields to identify smaller specimens.  All the time the resident NT Rangers were talking to us about the history of the area, the geology and wild-flowers. Their knowledge was fantastic, and we were constantly amazed by the often bizarre names, especially the Corky Fruited Water Dropwort (seriously)…

More importantly, we became only too aware of the incredible coastal erosion along the Jurassic Coast. Apparently these cliffs have been eroding by almost 6 feet every year. Every storm brings the serious threat of further landslides, and the coastal path itself has disappeared close to Charmouth. Some of the fields we were working simply ‘end’…

Volunteering gave me a terrific weekend away. The facilities at the NT Basecamp are fairly basic, but we all mucked in and produced a pretty fine BBQ on Saturday night, and even had time on Sunday to yomp up to the top of The Golden Cap cliffs, the highest point on the South Coast at almost 200m, from where we could see Devon and the Tors of Dartmoor to the West, and Chesil Beach and Portland Bill to the East.

This coastline has a limited life expectancy in its current state. Possibly in my lifetime The Golden Cap, or the cliffs above Lyme Bay may suffer a significant collapse. I’m delighted and privileged to have helped maintain this countryside, even if only in a (very) small way. I shall be volunteering again next year, and would recommend it to pretty much anyone. On my two experiences I’ve met and worked with people aged 18 to 60+, from all parts of the country and many different backgrounds, united by a common love of the outdoors and a desire to do some good. Doing good feels good, especially in a country as beautiful as this one.

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Happy Birthday…

I started this blog 12 months ago this week. At that time I was very anxious that it didn’t turn into some kind of mid-life version of a teenage diary, ranting and rambling about What I Reckon,  and had concerns that no-one would read it.

I’m fairly happy that neither of those things have happened. I know that my audience is small (but I like to think at least a teeny bit devoted!?), and I’m also delighted that they’re spread around the globe. I know that a handful of my posts have attracted most of the visitors, through their bizarrely high rankings in Google. If you don’t believe me try Googling…

“I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell”… (page 2), or

“it’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win”…(page 1!)

I have Lady GaGa to thank as well. A few months ago she tweeted that very Bruce Springsteen lyric without any further explanation to her gazillions of followers. Many of them doubtless pasted the line into Google and somehow stumbled across my piece about small-town communities in Northern England. Oops – the power of the ‘long tail’ of Search Listings…

So, one year in and going strong. I’m very proud of some of my writing. I’ve had a couple of film reviews ‘published’ on LeftField Cinema and I still enjoy reading older posts. So much so, that after a year and 60-odd posts, this is my first cheat, my first ‘clips show’ with a few links back to (ahem) unfairly neglected posts that for whatever reason haven’t been as widely read as I might have liked.

“me and my important thoughts”
The inspiration for What I Reckon – the terrific Mitchell and Webb sketch that is years old but still a frighteningly accurate parody of ‘interactive news’.

“and they say that we’l have fun if it stops raining”
We got lucky last year, in that our first family camping trips (with a borrowed tent) were blessed with fine weather. This coming weekend we’re going to buy our own tent, stove, tables and so on. We are definitely fair-weather campers, but this is surely the kiss of death for the British summer…

“it’s not going to stop”
My last post listed my favourite films of the past decade. P.T.Anderson featured twice in the Top 10. He’s a fantastic, daring director. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

“take a step outside”
In 2008 I spent a tremendously wet and almost as rewarding week volunteering with The National Trust in The Lake District. 12 strangers coming together to do Just A Little Bit of Good. I’m volunteering again for them this summer, clearing and maintaining the Jurassic Coastal footpath in Dorset.

Normal service will resume next week. If anyone wants to ‘get me started’ on something, I’ll do my best to oblige. Leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do. That aside I do have tentative ideas for future posts about BHAGs, Cate Blanchett, Retailer Marketing, Sunset Boulevard, Experiential Marketing and Angelina Ballerina. Oh yes.

Thankyou for reading.

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I will follow you if you’ll follow me…

Marketing teams spend millions of pounds in manangement time and agency fees developing briefs, tone of voice guidelines, and executions for every single broadcast message they put out. Every comma becomes a trauma, is that wardobe choice dynamic enough, does that font project our innovativeness? And once they’ve fine-tuned these messages and filmed them in glorious technicolour, they seem to sit back, their labours complete, and rest.

I prefer to think of marketing in human terms. It’s about the people. People buy stuff, not data segments or clusters. To me, this behaviour by brands and their owners is the equivalent of seeing someone across a crowded room, falling in love with them from afar,  going home and crafting a perfect declaration of my love and why I am the ideal person for them, dispatching this missive, then sitting at my open bedroom window, gazing at the stars, sighing wistfully.

Marketing teams and companies talk about developing relationships with their consumers, when in reality they ignore their consumers for months at a time, then expect them to sit up, listen and applaud whenever the brand chooses to put out an advert. The time and resources devoted to building relationships between brands and their consumers is often achingly inadequate. People who make an effort to find a brand and try to engage in conversation often go unrewarded, faced with impersonal automated email systems or glossy brochure websites.

But this can be easy: it certainly doesn’t need to be hard, or even expensive. But it requires a change of mindset: it requires brands to think of their customer relationships more like, well, real relationships; which need to be 2-way, they need maintaining, they need work. Otherwise, they’re not really relationships.

And increasingly we, the people (it’s about people, remember), are starting to expect brands to be better at this stuff. If you (a brand) dip your toe into the stormy waters of Twitter or Facebook or just generally on the web, you’d better be ready to make an effort. What are you going to bring to these communities? A community implies some sense of shared purpose, some mutual benefits, some common interests. How are brands going to interact and make a positive difference to the rest of us?

I recently tweeted about this blog to @nationaltrust, hoping they’d be interested in my post about volunteering. I hoped it might be useful to them. But there was silence, no acknowldegement. Hmmmm.

On the other hand, @mayoroflondon has been a bit of a revelation to me. Boris Johnson may be a bit of an a*se, and his profile may be run by a PR team, but they tweet like a person, and they respond and say thankyou. And that makes me like him more, even if I’d rather poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, than vote for him. He seems to get it. I just hope it’s making a difference.

I realised when I started writing this blog, that it’s all about me. And so are social media and websites. I will read and engage with people and brands who are interesting to me. I hope you (dear reader) are interested in What I Reckon, and that it resonates with you, makes some kind of connection. Brands need to think like this, really think about why I would want to spend time with them. What’s in it for me?

 

If you like What I Reckon, please share it…

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Take a step outside…

It’s barely 8.30am, and the rain is lashing down, again; stair-rods spearing out of a leaden sky. Twelve of us are squeezed into a minibus, already steaming through waterproof jackets & trousers, boots not quite dry despite the drying room’s best efforts.

Soon we will arrive at Tarn Hows, the astonishingly lovely yet largely man-made lake above Hawkshead. Hopefully the rain will have stopped, or we’ll get even wetter. And we will load up with tools and enter the woods that cascade down from Tarn Hows towards Coniston Water, all part of the Monk Coniston estate, managed by the National Trust. We are a volunteering party. We have chosen to be here, we have paid for the privilege of being here. And despite the best efforts of The Weather in July in The Lakes, we’re having a terrific time. We spend the week removing old unwanted fences, rolling up yards and yards of chicken wire, seeding new grass and protecting paths that shouldn’t be paths, hacking back and removing Rhodedendrons from the native woodland, laying new gravel paths in the Monk Coniston gardens, planting trees and constructing protection for them.

We age from 18 to (ahem) over 60. Some of us (like me) are novices, some are completing their Duke of Edinburgh Awards, others are seasoned ‘professional volunteers’, with tales from Lundy and North Wales, from The Peak District or Dorset. We muck in to cook and clean, we sleep in rudimentary dorms, we take turns to shower.

And mercifully, on our day off mid-week the weather clears. A group of us march up The Langdale Valley, climbing the Pike o’Blisco and across the Crinkle Crags. It is a glorious experience, and one I will not forget. In the evening we get fish and chips and a couple of beers.

Thanks to Adrian Porch from eee.bham.ac.uk for this image

That was 2008, and this Spring I revisited The Lakes, where in the woods around Tarn Hows I noted the absence of several fences and rhodedendrons. I admired the completed gravel path and was slightly underwhelmed at how patchily the grass seeds had taken. And I sat once more on top of the mound above Tarn Hows, drinking in the 360° views down the lake, South towards The Old Man of Coniston, and across to the Langdale Pikes.

I’ve done a few days volunteering at Westonbirt Arboretum since then, and want to do more. It’s a good feeling to be doing something active, physical and practical, in the outdoors. I’ll wager that hardly anyone notices paths are no longer crowded or overhung by hazel saplings. But however seemingly unimportant, it does make a difference.

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