Madness

I think the world has gone mad. Not, roll your eyes back, stand on the table and do a jig to Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5′ on a Friday afternoon mad, but elephants at a tea party juggling cheese fish bowls while slowly undressing a warbling Stephen Fry with their eyes mad. As in, bonkers.

Or then again, the world has always been mad. I’ve just been in denial. That’s the thing, denial always partners madness. Firstly denial that life can actually be mad – and then, when realisation dawns and our trust in the logic and rationality of the world around us diminishes, denial that it actually is mad.

It’s the middle phase that’s the bugger.

We have a green button at work. It is placed before a very conventional door that is our exit from our bar area. The door has a handle, one which you pull to open. Nothing remarkable there. But the thing is, this door, one we’ve got quite used to across all aspects of our lives, only becomes a door when this green button is pushed. Otherwise it looks like a door, but is in fact a door shaped wall. Unmoving.

No one knows why we must push a green button to convert what looks like a normal door into an actual fully functional door. No one knows we we can’t just pull the door open as the design, it seems, intended. After all, if one can enter a room without constraint, shouldn’t the same be expected of leaving?

But this is the thing about madness. Up until recently I would have been in denial about it all. I would have presumed there was a perfectly rational and sane reason for its existence. Maybe health and safety, or the foiling of criminals. And in the near future I’ll fall happily into that stage in which denial means that I’ll chose to ignore this madness and look upon this green button as a perfectly logical extension to opening the door while balancing three cups of freshly brewed coffee on my nose.

But right now, and for the forseeable future it seems, I just think it’s mad.

I am the cause of the recession – I think

Been looking through some bank statements. Normally a depressing experience at the best of time, you would presume in the present climate of ‘hell hath no fury as a credit crunch’, one’s normal resigned mental state to the ever decreasing numbers would be magnified to apocalyptic levels.

But I’m not. Indeed, I’m struck by the bland continual normality of my bank statements. The numbers just seem to all look the same. Clearly I haven’t reigned in my spending, despite job insecurities; clearly I’m not hoarding, or nesting or stuffing bank notes in my mattress.

Am I defying the recession? Is that second pint on Friday night my miniscule contribution to quantitative easing? Or, more likely, if people had the same spending habits as me, far from continuing a happy, bliss filled existence of boom time spending we’d all be in a permanent state of depressed stagnation.

Which worries me, simply because most people I know manage their money like I do. Was our last 10 years of economic growth built upon a tiny fraction of the population whose spiral of borrowing and spending has been the catalyst upon the whole post millennium boom?

I think that it was. And without them, you’re left with people like me. And I’m dull. And I don’t spend much. And I’m convinced that my contribution to financial security of the western world is to close my eyes, dig my heels in, and do all in my power to stop the inevitable force of progress.

For which I am sorry

Israel / Gaza / Angry chaps etc

I’m not sure this is the forum to delve into such a complicated and emotive subject. But I liked this post so much from James Berillo at The Onion that I really had to share.

“For as long as I can remember, the Israelis and Palestinians have been in conflict. And for as long as I can remember, there have been myriad opinions about who is right and who is wrong. They are often convincing opinions—passionate, personal, and eloquent. But the violence, the bloodshed, the senseless intractable hatred, is far too complicated to be explained by one newspaper column or a single on-air commentary, no matter how well composed. The names and dates in the latest violence are new, but the scars are from wounds that reach back more than a century—countless families across many generations, each with their own deeds and stories, all with their own reason to carry on the conflict.

Opinions can be dangerous. They can provoke a people to take action, when that action might not be just. Opinions can be powerful. They can shape the way a nation sees a problem, when that one perspective might not be enough. Opinions are imperfect. They are based more in politics and preference than in facts, though facts are what matter most. And those facts remain, buried beneath the rubble in the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem. Facts and truths that only the men and women at the heart of the conflict can uncover for themselves—not professional journalists on a tight deadline or amateur bloggers with an ax to grind.

No. The skirmishes fought in the desert are as ancient as the mountains that loom above and as complex as the eddies that swirl in the rivers below. The world must address this struggle with a measured approach that takes all sides into account and acknowledges the decades of conflict.

It would be far too difficult—and far too arrogant—to attempt to sum up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in one op-ed.”

Here here. I wish I could articulate such a eloquent riposte when confronted by the types of sweeping, often mildly anti-semitic, statements I encounter most days.

In future, I’ll just show them a copy of this.

Blog etiquette

I re-post a lot of other people’s work. I justify it as contributing to the distribution of what I believe are quality peices of content. It is, in truth, stealing. Recently I posted/stole Faris Yakob’s excellent little PDF on mobile futures on my work blog. Faris, kindly, left a small comment of gratitude. I, in turn, want to do likewise, something along the lines of; ‘Hi Faris, I am a huge fan of your blog and will continue to leech your content at will’.

But where do I do this?

Doing so on the original post on Faris’ blog would make no sense, being as it would, completely out of context. Similarly, I would be enormously surprised if Faris reads my work blog, so leaving any note of appreciation there would, I am almost certain, fail to be registered.

So I’m stuck. It is a far too minor issue to warrant a direct message, or general blog comment? Yet I feel, for the sake of my moral compass and genuine goodwill, that I must make a small gesture of appreciation.

Any ideas?

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The health revolution..

The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers 2009 brochure is totally ace. Have a look if you have a spare few minutes. We’ve all been enjoying the comms revolution for some years now so it’s interesting to see where the next explosion will occur. Graeme Douglas highlights a couple that impress him, and for what it’s worth, my prediction is personal medicine. Also, possibly, energy. But everyone has been saying that for years. Some really interesting health related technologies in here, Graeme Doulgas’ favourite includes biodegradable micro chips in medicines which then send a raft of data to patches on the skin. This is then transported, through the user’s phone, to their doctor or whoever.

The possibilities would be endless and provide almost real time data about how a body reacts to a treatment. Exciting, no?

Why I love Howies

Not too many mornings ago I found upon my door mat a copy of the Howies winter catalogue. It’s something I always look forward to. Yet, I own only a small number of Howies items, have no interest in biking down muddied hills in the freezing rain, and do not see myself as a vigilante eco warrior. But when it comes to that warm fuzzy feeling of affinity you feel towards certain things, that feeling all advertisers crave, few brands come close to Howies.

Why? Well, I like the catalogues because it’s beautifully made and filled with a wonderful selection of great, interesting content – most of which is provided by friends and employees. And it’s not just clothing, I should add. I like their ethics (although not all). I like their clothing (but not enough to spend £50 on a shirt). Most of all, I like that I was recently sent an email invite to brews and Welsh cakes at their Carnaby street store so they could ‘get to know me’. And I loved that, especially when I think that they genuinely do want to get to know me. I love that when I bought a t-shirt from a Howies sample sale, I actually believed that I was buying it from the man who had single handedly been responsible for that t-shirt’s adoring creation.

I think it’s truly brilliant that they invite you to a piece of cleared woodland to listen to inspirational lectures on all manner of things. Oh, and I have always loved their visual identity.

Yet could I put this together into a coherent comms plan? Could I write a strategy, with dedicated media channels and achievable goals? No, I couldn’t. And I really like to think that those at Howies couldn’t either. But then again, maybe that is their beauty – that they fool naïve people like myself into believing all of the above.

And of that is the case, my God, I would like to know how they have managed it.

A little late..

But genuinely, there are few greater things than this..

I love him. I do

Heaven is..

Tenby, South West Wales.

The older you get, the more you crave solitude.

And I’m not even old….