Leftovers, watching your language & living the dream

13 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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10 Food Commandments, 3 for 2, BOGOF, Fearnley Whittingstall, Fod Thrift, Jay Rayner, Kardashian, Knit Your Own Yoghurt, landfill, Leftovers, Living The Dream, Maslow, Sustainability, Truck Stop

We keep being told that the food that we eat, why we buy it, how we buy it, how we cook it (or get someone else to cook it for us) and how, ultimately, we dispose of it speaks volumes about us.

I’d like to make one small addition to that: the language of why, when and how we dispose of it speaks volumes about us and our broader concepts of thriving, success and prosperity.

I’d like to focus us specifically on the subject of food thrift and particularly, leftovers.

Now if you’re that way inclined or have a grandparent who puts you straight about profligate waste and showing off with food, the topic titles are just fine. But be aware that you are in the minority.

For most people, grinding through the weekly job, making ends meet and trying to rise above it all, thrift and cooking with ‘old food’ just isn’t going to roll. In fact, their response to the kind of language I’ve used above is probably slightly more of a DOUBLE ALERT. GO TO DEF CON 3. KLAXON WAIL. WHOOP WHOOP nature. With a massive warning of impending Tree hugging and shirts knitted from mung beans not far behind.

For most people the first massive language klaxon is the phrase Food thrift. God alive. Save us all from sack-cloth-and-ashes cooking. A trip to the supermarket, even with a price checker in hand, is an exercise in thriving, culminating in a trolley overflowing with goodies, some with the wrappers already off (profound evidence of our new found right of entitlement – no more do children get sent to the work house or have their hands cut off for pilfering what they haven’t paid for – we’re civilised goddammit).

Food is meant to be joyous, piled high. An ‘eat all you can buy, buy all you can eat’ algebraic equation of y= 4in1x3for2+BOGOF to the power of XtraFill mountain. 36 pack of pre seared barbecue burgers only £1.99!!

Or if your tastes run a little fancier, food is an exercise in sumptuous delights via plates of tantalised veal and gizzard cuts in jus de truffe and beluga-drip-drenched jaune Tuna slices, three rib of beef, salt and rosemary rubbed, amidst curlicued cures of pork, slices, rips and knuckles of lamb savoury seasoned, steamed and sugared pudding syrups running with sweet blood, an avalanche of oaten crackers and thick sourdough crusts decorated with glancing blows of soft and hard sharp cheeses, iced sponges, jam schmeered and chocolate vanilla’d delights. A Captain Bligh-scale of Bounty.

Whichever; whatever: food is meant to be plentiful and a sign of ‘we’ve made it’.

Food thrift?! We’re standing on the shoulders of Maslow, mate. And you can stick your hierarchy where the sun don’t shine.

As an aside, I think Sackcloth & Ashes would make a fabulous new and urbane food establishment somewhere very mauve and happening – given the current popularity of ashes and charcoal in leading edge bread baking, cheese rolling, beast searing and the higher order philosophies of brutalist retro-cooking circles. I see the interior of Sackcloth & Ashes as having a faint whiff of the medieval Cistercian façade – the odd weathered sandstone gargoyle: and a large blackened stone-mantled fireplace (obvs). There’d be a little light Gregorian House Chant muzak for a Clash of Cloths (as I like to call the collision between one elevated Christian house and another). And of course we’d frame it as a post-modern tapas (main course size dishes) – and fill the world with all manner of sackcloth slung ash-rind cheeses and charcoal cured meats, coal bleached fish, charcoal-truffled beast cheek bricquettes (though I am uncertain as to whether the truffled briquettes can double as a sustainable fuel source or whether they are a sustainable fuel source doubling as a main course).

Anyway, I digress. Food Thrift is a complete turn off for most people chasing a shiny life and, as a phrase, is best avoided if you’re trying to appeal to those who simply wish to live the dream and tie one on in life.

Second Klaxon: the word Leftovers. Oh here we go again. More bleeding heart student stipends and stories from the back of the fridge. Leftovers is a poisoned chalice of goodness to the average person seeking to Live the Dream of a prosperous and socially advanced life.

Leftovers are for losers and food geeks.

In his book, The 10 Food Commandments Jay Rayner points to the issue directly in his chapter helpfully titled Though Shalt Eat Leftovers.

‘There is only one problem with leftovers. The word. Leftovers. It speaks of expediency and second best.’

Not a dissimilar issue to the one where people view the words Ethical and Organic as euphemisms for sub-standard – a trade-off between higher morality and lower quality.

Jay goes on to write that ‘As history has shown us, excess food should simply be thought of as an ingredient rather than something left behind.’

As always our desperate, socially-climbing, gene-pool-elevating selves play an enormous role in there somewhere.

Toffs and Nobs use the act of leaving a plate, meal or table still laden with uneaten food as an act of social and genetic exceptionalism.

I can afford to not scrabble for crusts. And my largesse knows no bounds.

Leaving food behind is a mark of not starving. The American Dream was a relentlessly infinitely rotating buffet of food, and a never empty plate (more specifically, one that required some form of funicular to get from the top to the bottom of it). Because the American Dream represented the journey from Nothing to Something. And Somethings don’t scratch for food.

And the post-meal gesture of ‘hey ,can I have that to go’ – that throw-back to the pioneer settler thrift of nothing is wasted – is just code for I’ll take it home, pop it in the fridge for a few days; then landfill it.

Leftover food is a slightly twisted sign of prosperity. Yeah. Eat my trash. I’ve eaten my land-fill. The clue is in the language.

Leftover is short-hand for lacking utility; the debris and detritus left over from the functional and precious act of preparing and then eating food: food that is unwanted, or worse, unneeded and therefore devalued (as if anyone doesn’t need food or the money it took to buy it to throw it away).

Leftovers are Ex-food. Like GFs and BFs, leftovers are destined to turn up on MyExF[ood] revenge sites and Landfill Porn.

The language is the issue. As always, what some view disdainfully as fluff and word-smithing can make the difference between dismissal and engagement in a rather fundamental way.

LivingTheDream are a team of people seeking to shift the narrative of sustainable living and prosperity in a more ordinary and meaningful direction – from the likes of the glass half empty reduction language of Sustainable Living Plans to the glass half full aspiration language of Smarter Lighter living – and as one of them I think that perhaps we need to sort the language of Leftovers and food thrift while we’re at it.

The whole language of leftovers needs a restart. An Extreme Makeover.

So what should we do?

A national school’s competition perhaps; to rename Leftovers so your Mum and Dad actually take an interest because its socially cool to do so?

(And when I say Mums and Dads I don’t mean the 7-12% of the Luxury of Conscience brigade who embrace every purist green and sustainability trend in much the same way a fading actor might clutch a new script, as if it every one might be their last, the most precious fragile cornerstone of their identity.)

We could give them some buckets or examples to start them off.

Perhaps we could start by looking at the physical geography of it all.

Leftovers, either at the ingredient stage – off cuts, scrapings, tops and tails, bones, etc. – or the post cooked stage – on-plate, on-table scraps – find themselves at the ‘edges’ of the cutting board, plate or table – pushed to the periphery of the working or functional space. So perhaps we could get windswept and interesting and introduce peripheral cooking or Peripherique Cooking as a whole new movement – or ‘food at the edge’ as we’d get the critics to call it. Who knows, given all that empty shelf space left by the dear departed tomes of Clean Food, perhaps we can sneak in with a small volume on Peripherique cooking.

Then again we could look to word play, opposites, antonyms and synonyms – Left Over replaced by the idea of Right Under. Right Under recipes are those recipes that are right under your nose and you can’t see them for the left overs. I would class Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Spag Bol Omelette as one of these sublime moments of ‘ under my very nose’ stokes of genius.

Or we could leap headfirst into Kardashian land and talk trash. We could go junktrunk cooking or we could go the whole hog – Truck Stop Trash Talk Cooking – because we all love trashy.

#eatmytrash as a movement of pure self-celebration – even my food trash makes exceptional dinner party cuisine – cue Instagram.

And admit it – #eatmytrash could be so much fun, mainly because it’ll get hijacked and turned into some bizarre sexual euphemism eventually – and a website after that.

But if, in the meantime, it reignites the mass populace’s interest in divesting themselves of excess and waste in favour of taking every piece of left-over food and turning it into something, that would be, well, something.

So Leftovers are a beautiful thing, but there is an element of Boy Named Sue about them. Their name has forced them into a life of having to fight their corner – stand up for themselves – but in this case, it ain’t making them stronger – not any more at least. Quite the opposite.

So let’s relaunch Leftovers – unfetter them from their current name and give them a chance to be their fabulous agile and resourceful and mostly delicious selves.

Who knows what fun we could have.

Brent, Bowie, Prosperity & living a very British dream.

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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A life On The Road, Alan Bennet, Alan Milman, Amish, Awkward, Banality, Barrat, Bowie, Dad's Army, David Brent, DAVOS, Extras, Father Father Burning Bright, Frozen, It's a Wonderful Life, Kaiser Chiefs, Lady In The Van, Life On Mars, Living The Dream, Multinationals, Navy Seals, Pilkington, prosperity, reality tv, Ricky Gervais, Rock N Roll, Rolos, TEDx, The King's Speech

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I have just painfully struggled my way through the film David Brent. A life on the road. Struggled because I was meant to – this format of comedy celebrating its own ability to raise the desperately bleak uncomfortable human truth of our everyday mediocrities, misfits and mishits to artistic degree. Struggled because it is ferociously painful and cringe-worthy on purpose. Struggled because his character is mostly so repellent.

(I also struggled because in comedic terms it over eggs the point, over cranks the cringe and over renders the desperate side of Mr Brent with less finesse and subtlety than I had hoped for. The original series of the Office through which David Brent entered our cultural consciousness was for me a far subtler and richer human stew. This felt like a side gag escalated to movie length. A back story narrative thread built into a one and some hour screenplay.)

I am not a massive fan of Ricky Gervais. His sneery cheap shot approach to ironic belittlement and provocation sometimes just leaves me a little cold, its cruelty only ever saved and salved by Merchant, Pilkington and the whole surrounding cast of Extras.

BUT.

Saying that and having almost switched it off at so many points, the gift for my patience (or stubbornness) came in the last 5 minutes (as I am assuming they’d planned).

At the final gasp, with his perfect shiny dream of rock stardom in tatters, the uncomfortable Brent is saved by the until then unnoticed and desperately awkward affections of the lady in accounts; his silent admirer for so long. She has looked through and beyond his vulgar and desperate showboating and seen insecurities run riot in a man who perhaps deserved a second chance. A real one. A flawed, awkward, imperfect diamond of a chance perhaps – but in spite of and because of its clumsy nature – a real human and ordinary one.

David Brent is blind to his real dream state. His notion of prosperity is rooted in social status and the trappings that come with it – rock n roll – the irony being that he impoverishes himself in pursuit of it (cashing in various pensions to try and realise it).

Prosperity is defined as something that encompasses wealth but in reality includes other factors such as happiness and well being. But we seem to have lost the ability to comprehend and measure the balance of material riches with those of a more emotionally fulfilling and human kind.

A concept of Prosperity that balances emotional and spiritual contentedness with material security and pleasure seems just beyond our ken, destined to see saw from one extreme to the other. Achieving that balance is somewhat akin to the parlour game challenge of patting our heads while rubbing our stomachs at one and the same time.

David’s painful journey to realisation and possible redemption for me is a beautiful summary of the state we’re in. Much like his enthralment to rock n roll stardom and public recognition as the source of his happiness, we are distracted by the Kardashian model of prosperity – a very American model of perfection. Perfect teeth, cheekbones nose and ass: a magazine home, a windswept and unusual partner, a face-book page crowded with a multitude of cool and just so ‘friends’ – a model of prosperity that is the antithesis of what might actually make us happy. An impossible dream that leaves us feeling lesser and unsatisfied. A model built to relentlessly disappoint.

The flawed awkward joy of his second chance is a very British thing. As a nation we are truly at our happiest amongst the flawed and the awkward. We are enamoured most by the almost and the not quite. Perfect things leave us wanting and dislocated. We rarely trust perfect.

But, we seem to be transfixed by the pursuit of it, to the degree that like David, we will impoverish ourselves in our pursuit of it. (Credit card debt in the UK is staggering.)

Watching David Brent coincided soon after with the annual Yuletide Curtis-fest of Love Actually. Love Actually is the closest we get to a very British sense of imperfect lives rendered perfect in film – and every one of them, though pulped through the Daily Mail filter of mawkish sentimentality is thankfully still slightly flawed and awkward and uncomfortable.

Unlike its US counterparts, the characters do not always square the circle. The cheated upon wife doesn’t turn into a vengeful super woman, have an extreme makeover, sleep with the football team, take up firearms and beat a horde of Russian special forces or become the new police chief on a mission. She simply gets on.

The hopelessly smitten friend of bridegroom doesn’t get the girl. He doesn’t transform into a lothario or a serial killer. And he certainly doesn’t find a cure for cancer and global recognition as some astonishing cosmic recompense for the loss of his one love. He simply says – that’s enough now – and gets on. He is still the loser in this. But we don’t care.

The irony was that the screening of Love Actually was repeatedly interrupted by a commercial for a viewing App that offered thousands of hours of reality TV. The scripted ugly slutty buttered shiny kind – delivered for what are presented as Fuck You It’s All About Me people.

We like to pretend that our reality TV is so different to the US kind – that it is in some way more real – but we are just aping every piece of Real Housewives, Real Teenagers, Real Truckers, Real Dentists Real Vets fodder that creeps across the Atlantic. Hyper reality is a US confection. And like all of the more recent US dream factory propaganda there is something unpleasant and slightly toxic about them. More importantly there is something unreachable in them – and not in a good way. We are bingeing on these boxed sets of Krispy Kreme content to the point of becoming spiritually obese.

Shiny is the American way. I am uncertain as to whether it is born of an immigrant nation desperately trying to expunge the dark sigh of bleak want and soiled existence that their ancestors lived under; or whether it is simply that the staggering output of the dream factory has all but obscured the less shiny truths of everyday life. Regardless, there is a chasm of difference between the perfect screenplay of It’s a Wonderful Life and Frozen – stories of perfect redemption – and our British kind. The Kings Speech and Wallace & Gromit come from a very different sensibility. The American ‘Awkward’ is a very different creature to the British one: theirs rooted in eye rolling teen embarrassment saved by a trending catch phrase; ours just rooted in, well, the awkwardness of awkward.

We take a run at shiny but really, our heart isn’t in it – we like people who are not quite 100%. We quite like a bit of a shambles and a rough edge. When all is said and done we’d take dusty Dad’s Army over sleek Navy Seals any old day.

And it strikes me that when we try and engage Brits in embracing a reimagined prosperity – one where we eschew the shiny for something more within our material, environmental and spiritual means – we need to remember this truth.

We need to remember David Brent.

The corporate Davos schtick of Millennials saving the world all by themselves with a smart phone and a face book page, and the hyper intellectual nirvana of Sustainable Living Plans may work at a CEO keynote level. BUT they are simply too perfectly rendered and presented for the ordinary people we are trying to reach – not a hairline crack in their purpose and their intent. They are quite simply unhuman. More importantly, they lack any sense of the banal – the most precious, present state of being we have. Banality. The beautiful kind. The flawed and awkward kind. The silences and shuffling kind. The kind we measure the original, the fresh, the remarkable, the uncommon and the brilliant by.

In the UK we need our prosperity to be aspirational, yes. It needs to make us feel smart and satisfied. But not self-satisfied. And it needs to allow for our flawed and imperfect selves.

It needs to allow for us to fail at it and be OK. To slip and re-offend and be forgiven. A humanity that the US approach to Better sometimes seems to deny.

I am reminded of sitting in a working session in San Francisco with a group of astonishingly intelligent, mission minded and highly driven entrepreneurs and business leaders with a scattering of social entrepreneurs and innovators amongst us for good measure.

In a discussion with a woman who was trying to re-engineer public school meals away from the fat and salt riddled fare that had previously been on offer to one packed to the gunnels with organic greens, fruit, meat substitutes and pulses, the startling difference between the ‘no quarter no leeway‘ approach and the ‘muddle through, get there in the end’ kind was demonstrated in all its glory.

She felt the solution was to create a brutal and absolute transition. Burgers, pizza and donuts one day – tofu and vegan-cheese lentil burgers and multiple greens the next.

My concern was that this absolute approach might create an extreme equal and opposite reaction from both children and parents that would negate all her best intentions and objectives. There was no room for dissent or manoeuvre. Not a breath of stumbling or conflicted self. No cracks no dents no imperfections. No flex.

So I suggested that she perhaps set aside a corner of each box – and call it ‘the naughty step’ – that place where fundamentally good but sometimes flawed and mischievous children get put from time to time. And in this corner would be a portion-controlled treat – an echo of the old school meals and less healthy fare. Naughty but nice. And a lot less Amish in its intention.

The expression on her face was a sight to behold. I may as well have been speaking Old Pennsylvania Dutch for all sense this seemed to make to her.

My suggestion that she allow for the human flaw of failing and people’s desire for something other than her perfectly modulated, highly strung and calorie and sodium controlled solution was an anathema to her. All or nothing. Black and White. No fringed and frayed edges. Old diet and food stuffs equal death. There was no leeway in her solution for those who might struggle towards a better solution in their own good stumble-tumble-and-trip time and way.

A big ambitious destination can be an onerous one: daunting and overwhelming when seen in isolation – but as long as the journey to it has some light and shade; some play and humanity with the best interests of our flawed selves at its heart, we’re far more likely to embark on it. But I sense this a very British thing.

Being a bit almost and not quite. Imperfect. Flawed. This is the British way. Saying and doing the wrong thing every now and then. Making ourselves look a prat. Failing. Getting through. The universe of the underdog is our universe. We love them – because they are relatable. This is very different to the knowing and snarky failure of Family Guy and Ted.

And in the universe of the underdog, banality is one of the most undervalued states of our existence – and the most profound. Truly universal, it is one we can all relate to.

Banality and the poetry of its daily occurrence is again very British. The perfunctory observations and recordings of the minutiae and mundane are written into everything from high culture to low art – from Syd Barratt’s ‘I’ve got a bike you can ride it of you like’ and Bowie famously singing ‘there’s lemons on sale again’ in Life On Mars – his paean to the banality of Britain in the 1970s – to the Matchstick Men and Women of Lowry’s town-scapes to Alan Bennet’s forensic interrogation of the very British nature of relationships played out in Father Father Burning Bright and The Lady In The Van: microscopically dissected renderings of uninvited friendships and still-born familial love. There is little to separate the knowing observation of Bennet and the Kaiser Chiefs as they sing ‘I tried to get to my taxi. The man in a tracksuit attacks me. He said that he saw it before me.’

In the awkward truths of hum-drum, everyday rituals is where this very British humanity lies. Bennet captures fireflies of human emotion amidst the ordinariness of shopping lists, bed-socks, Camden Traffic Wardens, NHS hospital porters and the sweet & cigarette shop plying emphysemic pensioners with Benson & Hedges and multipacks of Rolos.

Unsurprisingly, banality is the point where another character from Brent’s creator, Ricky Gervais, and David Bowie, the Glam troubadour of British hum drum collide. The moment is captured in a comedy scene that is, for me, the most perfect distillation and summary of how flaws and banality are celebrated in the UK.

The scene, from Extras, involves Gervais’s star-struck character Andy Milman trying to get into the tiny roped-off VIP area of a club to buddy up to David Bowie. On being beckoned over, Andy finds himself making a heart-wrenching admission of his own mediocrity and failure only to have it thrown both to the crowd and in his face by Bowie with that song:

Pathetic little fat man;

No-ones bloody laughing.

The clown that no one laughs at

They all just wish he’d die.

He sold his soul for a shard of fame

Catch phrase and wigs

And the jokes are lame

He’s got no style,

He’s got no grace;

He’s banal and facile

He’s a fat waste of space.

And suddenly there is a quiet alchemy at work. Suddenly, we find ourselves beginning to consider the unpalatable – we find ourselves starting to like an unlikable character a little bit. Because his flaws have been writ large for all to see. Cruel perhaps; but human nonetheless.

Banality of this kind and the flawed lives it is rooted in – this is where we need to test the new model of prosperity for British people. This is where we need to find its insights and its language. Not in the boardrooms of multi-nationals and TEDx talks.

So here’s to banality. And flaws. And human stuff. Messy, imperfect, uncomfortable and awkward human stuff – and their role in a new and more deeply connective narrative and model of prosperity. For the UK at least.

Speaking loudly in a Public Place & The art of conversing sustainably.

28 Monday Nov 2016

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80s Casuals, BREXIT, cars, Class War, Education, fashion & Beauty, Fotball, gene Pool, Genetics, Golf, Harry Enfield, Hilditch & Key, Holidays, Identity, Living The Dream, Llandeilo, Macclesfield, MAMILs, mobile, Notting Hill, Petworth, Prince Regent, Rugby, Semi Detached, Sex, Skiing, Sustainability, Tacchini, Tech, Trainspotting, Trump, Withal & I

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Love us. We just can’t help ourselves.

For all the homespun wisdoms and studies around how being more socially aware of, sensitive to and inclusive of those around us creates a more resilient society, we just can’t help banging on, sounding off, shouting out, and blahing about – loudly, relentlessly and shamelessly – about us, us, us.

There’s a touch of Blackadder’s Prince Regent’s about us.

In Blackadder the Third, Sense and Sensibility, Rowan Atkinson’s eponymous butler is trying to coach Hugh Laurie’s roaring roistering and very shouty Prince Regent in the art of public speaking, unhelpfully aided by two ‘actors’.

‘Unaccustomed as I am to speaking loudly in public place…’.

Yup. That’s us.

We’re simply oblivious to the cascade of fog horning we actually do. Or simply don’t care.

Perhaps it’s all part of our genetic makeup. Not happy with our messenger genes working furiously, invisibly, silently on our behalf, perhaps we need to openly trumpet our superiorities and assert ourselves on something, anything, to demonstrate our fitness for gene pool ascension. A sort of oral chest beating. A belt and braces approach to social assertion.

We’ve certainly got plenty of topics to choose from with which to do it:

Holidays (boutique off beat long haul 6 star glamp “please find me interesting” and package all-inclusive entertainment included “… but it’s great for the kids…” meets the urbane city break couple with an ironic burlesque trapeze in their suite)
Homes ( and the whole region meets post code fascism thing that goes with them -you know who you are London)
Fashion & Beauty (naked stripped back Paraben and orang-utan free meets hi bake crusted fake slathered super gloss with a centre ground of super-drugged over doses of buy 3 get none free )
Cars (muscle car versus hot hatch versus electric versus petrol head versus bike versus Classic versus Zip)
Sex (socially this is open season – from “euughhh no thanks!” princesses and the blank-eyed cote d’Azur lizard lover to semi-detached Tudored, Tweezered and GoPro-ed all-in wrestling and Breezer bus-stop procreation)
Education – (Toffs going state-side leaving the Publics to the oligarchs and bankers , the rise of the Old grammar, and the Churchy state scrum versus post code lottery shitsville Secondary in an over-pressured catchment area kind of thing)
Sport (especially things like Golf and Formula 1 – but Rugby versus Football is good for a class fight – but then so is Union versus League – yikes – and cycling’s for MAMILs)
Technology (is that the latest super triple upgrade diamond encrusted razor thin i-phone meets digital poverty and second hand devices with digital dementia)
Drugs (council estate pill heads, skunks and suburban speed freaks rub up against school study stoners and coke horse fashionistas – with a sprinkle of Withnail and Trainspotting for good measure)

There is endless fun to be had for anyone with a Class calibrated slide rule and an eye for an accent, a shabby cuff, an overturned trainer instep in whitest white and a social smoke machine.

All of the above and many more subjects besides can offer multiple signposts to our ability to secure, protect and expand the gene pool – as a mate and provider – and more importantly, where we think we currently are and hopefully wish to land on the great ladder of Life.

But many of these subjects are impenetrable to most of us in the flow of our accelerated lives – and carry a complex and subtle range of degrees not immediately obvious.

Impact demands some quite bloody and explicit sign posting and you’ve got to pick the right ones if you’re going for the ‘speaking loudly…’ option.

If chosen properly, to suit both the environment and the audience, the best ones can be a source of endless amusement for the seasoned observer are the ones where our social anxieties, bombast and terrors come rolling boldly into view unmasked and unfettered.

Now before we go on and just to clarify, on the technology front, there is of course a whole sub section beyond the basic noisy snobberies and tribalism of who’s got what “look at my device” technology, rooted in a whole new behaviour – that of a Life lived like an open wound on mobile loudspeaker.

Who has not had the unmitigated pleasure of listening to someone blah on in full voice about riveting subjects such as the process of returning the cardigan they bought on sale for £7.39 …but I had to return it but then I find out that the sticker bar code had rubbed off so I had to go to the second counter, yeah the one across the other side in charge of bar codes, who’s that?…in the background?….ahhhhhh….how is he….anyway, and you wouldn’t believe it they only sent me back to the first one…ooh…he’s always dropping things that boy….and anyway that snooty cow was there you know the one and anyway…bip bip….oh sorry thought the bus was being re routed so anyway they put a bar code on it and scanned and then the machine woudn’t w…

SHUT UP!!!!!!

Why anyone thinks that listening to the utter banality and mundanity of them honking on about everything from Cheese and Onion crisps to their bunions holds the slightest bit of interest for anyone else within 20 yards of them beggars belief. Do they care. No. On and on they go. At top volume.

Perhaps fog-horning into our mobile while staring listlessly or sometimes cluelessly out of train or bus window makes us feel more alive, or alternately, less dead, or inert.

Or perhaps we all blah on because we’re afraid of the silence. Silence is very scary. Especially in the glittering noise of our conspicuous consumption world. The Silence gets filled up with stuff like thinking about over-drafts, and unpaid bills, and the car we can’t afford: the person we aren’t. And the fact that your other half seemed to pay far too much attention to old slippery bollocks with the ‘hot hatch’ at the pub AGAIN. Oh no. Fill that silence RIGHT NOW.

Or maybe it’s just a sign that we are lonely creatures relentlessly reaching out with any excuse to just talk to someone about something anything. Nail clippers. The benefits of GREGG’s foot long sausage roll (which to be fair does demand quite a lot of conversation).

Who knows. Anyway. Ear plugs in. Crack on.

So where was I? Oh yes. The deafening hawk, crackle and scrape of social laddering grinding across the room at full volume is a wonder to behold, especially in England, that bastion of crippling class consciousness and the emollient cold eyed Cheshire cat smile of its courtly Norman culture.

Now whether these conversations happen in a semi in a cul-de-sac in Macclesfield, a terrace in Llandeilo or a townhouse in Petworth, the broad trajectory and oath is the same.

I – the fog horn – being of sound mind and body – shall peak loudly in such terms as to clearly communicate to those gathered within ear shot what level of lifestyle I have, the laissez faire with which I take or leave ‘work’, the shade quality or quantity of leisure time I have and how I spend it – and ultimately – really really – whether I am, to quote the great Philosopher, Harry Enfield, “considerably richer than yaow”.

(NOTE: This dynamic becomes doubly interesting with couples who might in the secrecy of a closed conversation or room be accused of marrying ‘below’ or ‘above their station’: as this creates an explicit external dynamic – between the individuals and those outside around them – and the implicit internal one between two people in intimate contact and with an intimate knowledge of each other’s foibles and failings in the class department)

So, for example: hands up who’s sat in a restaurant or bar listening to the rallied ranks cawing about a skiing holiday they have just been on or upon which they are about to embark?

Amazing. It is such a perfect storm of social drama. Which resort? Which slope? Drive or Fly? What grade? Mogul? Age of Youngest on Skis? (since he was 3 months old…Obvs). dangerous off-piste-er? French skier? Snowboarder?

And up diddly up up it keeps going. Heli Skiing. Cloud skiing. Rain Skiing. Skiing across a killer whale’s back juggling a bottle of fizz and a Grey Goose chaser.

“Ohh Jasp, you ARE a just SO fucking OUT THERE”.

The ratcheting upwards of who’s the biggest cock in the skiing conversation is a great example of a topic hijacked by our social and genetic need to assert ourselves and is a miracle to behold.

And when I use the word ‘cock’ please do not think I am removing the female gender in this. Social climbing and social fog-horning reaches its apogee in the open mouths of some of the women in these conversations in much the same way with the men.

Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoy skiing. I am not terribly good at it. But I have fun. Moving from bar to bar at high speed across snow is a right laugh. But life’s too short to spend more than 15 minutes talking loudly about it. Isn’t it? And let’s be clear. I am not referring in this piece to people who actually really do LOVE skiing. The die-hards any-weather, can’t live without it addicts. I could listen to their stories all day long.

No. I am talking about the people who haul themselves and their families up a collection of slopes every year, more out of social terror for what not doing it might mean to their school run dinner party schtick than the actual pleasure of doing it.

Golf has a similar schtick. Come on. We’ve all witnessed it. The arcane yet very loud golf-speak followed shortly after by ‘the swing’ with invisible iron finished off with a tongue on roof of mouth ball ‘TSCHH” sound effect. Marvellous. And what’s interesting in the social malaise is that someone using Golf to publicly assert themselves socially may not even realise that someone else might be judging them silently for the fact they actually pronounced the word GOWLF instead of saying GOFF.

(Careful out there. The issue with social ladders is once on them, there tends to be people both above as well as below you. And the same rules apply. ‘Betters’ are like Bosses – everyone has one – somewhere – somehow – even if they are not immediately visible. They are there.)

Christmas is also a mine field of social fog-horning as it allows the social fog-horner to draw string together a whole host of levers and pulleys.

Consumption and exotic gift purchasing. Rare party invitations. Travel – preferably long haul. Higher order experiences. Exceptional distance from ‘here’ (everyday life)

Witness in a Notting Hill coffee shop three women, all American, just at the ordering point, a casual collision while all on their different morning threads – to work, to yoga instructor, to next coffee shop – living the dream, replayed in coffee shops up and down the country at every rung up and down the social ladder. (You do not need to have a banker for a husband or as a job to pretend that you can live like someone who does. What are credit cards for!)

So the first asks the second:

“So hey, when are you heading out?”

“Oh gawd, we HAVE to go to New York first, some dull party but then up to the Cape, and then straight to Vale as soon as his mother lets us escape. How about you?”

“Yeah pretty much the same. He’s on his got to get away tip at the moment. Dunno. Might go to St. Barts over New year but that’s about it.”

The deafening silence of the third woman is palpable. Both turn to her and one speaks.

“Hey what about you guys?”

VERY LONG PAUSE.

“Well, think we’re going to have to stay put this year what with John’s work …”

BIGGER PAUSE – SILENCE – and she turns to the server.

“…can I get a Grande decaf cappuccino please…”

SHUT DOWN – SMALL COMPRESSED SMILE – OUCH.

The pause and silence is deafening. All the signs are big: really, really BIG – and not in a good way.

The two ladies look at her, shuffle a little, small smiles to each other.

This is uncomfortable. Not this is AWKWARD.

Three large klaxons have sounded above the lady’s head accompanied by flashing neon.

STATUS ALERT – might not be able to keep up/social death/slightly embarrassing

MONEY ALERT – might not be able to afford shiny life this month or year – do we invite her?

JOB ALERT – husband shaky job position or worse – NO ONE stays in London over Holidays.

Hopefully her remarkably over-priced hot, wet frappecrappachaiccinolate will take the edge off the moment. Nothing says Everything is Awesome quite like an over-priced coffee.

That much cow product in one over glazed cup would put most people into a cow coma of dairy proportion – something that I think she may well appreciate at this very moment.

Sometimes things scream louder in public than any raised voice – or should I say sometimes the world of logos and marques SCREAM louder in public that any raised voice but to much the same effect. And of course there is the collision of semiotics and invisible gesturing that needs to be folded into this. Social sign posts come in all manner of variants

In one conversation with a very sartorially obsessed man, I noticed the usual scoffing at a large bloke in a Tacchini sweatshirt – 80s Footie Casual FLASHBACK.

The gentleman pointed out that it was a larger than life example of crass status making –vulgar logo bright colours – gaudy etc.

When I mentioned that he and the Tacchini man were no different he looked aghast. The higher order pomposity of him was firmly pricked.

My point to him was this. I ‘knew’ that the shirt he was wearing was from Hilditch & Key. I had one in a similar fabric, French cuff, cut away collar. His shirt SCREAMED Jermyn Street – in much the same way that Sergio Tacchini man’s screamed Wembley Market.

This stuff matters – to everyone. No-one is immune. This stuff – this pointless scrabbling for identity and the scatterings of ‘things’ that prop it up – it’s part of who and what we all are – whether the ascetics of the Sustainability world like it or not.

(To be fair our ability to wield the Luxury Of Conscience as a day job is a massive assertion of status, identity and educational favour in itself – one that few on this planet, even those in the emerged western cultures, can dream of let alone afford to pursue.)

We need to be really careful when we incite people to stop consuming shiny things they can’t afford and that damage the planet.

So, when someone tells me they’ve developed a new sustainability methodology, garnered some new insights or developed a campaign that involves the words or sentiments ‘stop, reduce diminish, lessen’ and all of the other reductive words we use in sustainability communications, I think of all of these people speaking loudly in public places – sometimes shamelessly, sometimes unconsciously but always slightly desperately asserting their social ascension or at its very least their social survival on the ladders of the ‘look at me’ gene pool.

If we stopped trying to mitigate and compress their competitive genetically fuelled need to assert themselves in the world – and equally stopped trying to erase their ‘terrible’ world view (good luck with that) perhaps we might be quicker to find a language of human resilience in which we can all share and take part – and somehow get more than the usual 7-13% depending on your think tank or academic referencing to give half a crap about how we live and what we consume.

NOTE This piece was sparked by my reading yet another recent and of course exhaustive Sustainable Lifestyles White Paper Report while sitting in a pub in East Sussex populated by a rather noisy cross section of society.

They were all outwards and upwards – celebrating their very survival in the game called life. They were all at the end of their week, sweeping grumps and whines away with pints and wine and thoughts of pies, curry, pizza, pork scratchings, or clubbing and gear followed by lie ins, golf, swimming, mountain biking, shopping, shooting (birds not films), movies, football, rugby and then what form of Sunday they might have before the shitty bitty day job and weekly worries heaved back into view.

I can safely say that not one of them was at any juncture discussing climate change, acidification of the oceans, human suffrage or equality and diversity – and until we find a way or theme or thread that brings these conversations into the pub meaningfully and without sounding like the Vibe Killer has just turned up – we’ll stay on the margins wondering how ‘terrible’ things like BREXIT TRUMP and the rest of the sorry shower of deniers and their master plans manage to get the thumbs up in this world

Clinique, Morgan Freeman & a search for Certainty.

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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Baileys, Bruce Almighty, certainty, Christmas, Christmas Sales, Clinique, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, face Serum, ferrero rocher, Frasier, gogglebox, Gucci, John Lewis, Life On Earth, Living beyond Our Means, Living The Dream, Morgan Freeman, orang-utans, Pam Oil, Shawshank Redemption, Simon & Garfunkel, Social Contract, The Holidays Are Coming, Warren Buffet

I was trapped at the roundabout at the bottom of Fulham Palace Road, going nowhere. This gave me ample time to admire the sharpness and surety of a Clinique Bus Side communicating yet another miracle creme.

It was a master class in the art of communicating Certainty.

It was less the actual nature-defying aspect of the crème itself and the certainty of what promised and more the surgical certainty of its sense of self – its absolute right to be on the side of a bus telling me everything’s going to be OK. The precision and fixedness of the way it looked and felt – the production values – and the voice with which it spoke that seduced me.

Everything about the bus side, the clarity of the type face, the exquisite finishing on the photography – the meticulous attention to detail and the inherent balance carried a confidence and absoluteness that screamed Certainty. Even the white background was more certain of its whitest whiteness than any white background around it.

Surely nothing bad can happen in a world where Clinique exists. Not really. Clinique exists in a world where YouTube beheadings don’t happen. Where the Far Right is merely a reference to which end of the Front Row you’re seated at when the GUCCI show comes to London fashion Week.

The CERTAINTY which the bus side imbued me with, even just fleetingly, was mesmerising, desperately delusional but boy it felt good.

Thankfully the news on the radio reminded me that I do in fact live in a world where places like Aleppo exist, along with the pain and human suffering and outrage that seem to accompany our species on our journey to self-determined extinction.

In Clinique World Baby Orangutans don’t get ripped from their dying mothers in a rain forest and sold for a couple of dollars – all for the want of some palm oil to grease the palm of western vanities. You can be certain of that. Not here. Not us. Not Right Here Right Now.

But that’s escapism for you. It doesn’t always have to be a movie or a song. Escapism comes in many forms. And at the beating heart of Escapism is certainty with a dash of hope. Hope of better. Hope of something else.

Certainty can be consumption; even the toxic kind. Especially the toxic kind. The kind that helps me forget even just for a second that I am simply surviving with stickers, unlikely to ever reach the giddy heights of just Being, free at last to unclutter my life of all the ballast of Certainty I’ve been propping myself up with along the way.

Hiding inside a lifestyle we couldn’t otherwise afford without racking it up on credit card – and living the dream of Having It All seems to be the order of the day. Shiny skin creams are Us. Gorgeous smells and not thinking too hard about stuff.

Kind of understandable now that our always-on news feeds relentlessly bombard us with the exceptional output of human madness and cruelty.

As long as I can use my swipey app to order EXACTLY what I deserve in the take away department and be certain that it will arrive, piping hot, aromatic, and with a roll on reward offer – as long as I can treat myself because I’m worth it – hell I’m alive aren’t I? Give me a break.

Certainty is one of those things that acts as a much needed corrective for ordinary people in an increasingly volatile world – a world Warren-Buffeted by collapsing and soaring markets and share prices, the death of the social contract, strange political shifts (has no one noticed the correlation between the rise of tyrants and the exercising of the Populist Vote – or is that just me?) and the onslaught of some rather crazy weather.

The future is indeed bright – the future is Donald not going out for a duck; the near future at least.

I have a theory that there must be a set of scales somewhere – scales that will illustrate that the more screen time Donald gets, the more people will (in the absence of God) crave and stream Morgan Freeman movies.

In times of trouble, Certainty can also be a voice – like Morgan’s, or that of David Attenborough. When the day closes in and stuff gets dreadful, and the reassurance of watching Frasier re runs isn’t working anymore – cue Attenborough’s salving voice and his pictures of beauty – of a world where we are still richly interwoven into something more sublime and greater than ourselves, rather than hovering above it like the sword of Damocles above its head.

As Simon & Garfunkel might one day sing:

“When you’re weary, feeling small

When tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all (all)

I’m on your side, oh, when times get rough

And friends can’t be found…

Watch Morgan in Bruce Almighty”

Certainty can also be a season.

As Christmas roars towards us – having started its mighty yawp on November the 1^st, we all start to feel a little more certain; because Christmas is certain.

Christmas lights up the darkest night in the deepest black of the year.

Ping! Gorgeous.

Year in and Year out. Unwavering. Immutable. Unmovable. Christmas allows us to embrace the certainty of it and all that comes with it.

The world lights up (the western Christian one specifically). And life is good.

Who cares if the brands get to milking the Purse of Human Kindness, ferociously pick pocketing every ounce of insecurity in us and replacing it with a rather shiny bauble to give or receive. Love that.

The certainty of Christmas doesn’t just start early because the brands and businesses make more money out of it.

Christmas lasts for two months because we need a new super charged amount of its glorious twinkling certainty to off-set the all the awfulness we have to consume the rest of the year.

We simply aren’t capable of crawling the last few yards to something like a more respectful December 12 or 13^th Christmas start.

We would fold into a despondent mess way before then. We are ravenous for the exquisite promise of Certainty that Christmas begins. (And its Sales – because they’re different to all the other all year round sales aren’t they? Of course they are!!)

Even the commercials that the big retail brands produce have become a pillar of that Certainty. John Lewis. Thank-you for redeeming me with a gold plated you-tube film featuring furry creatures on a child’s garden trampoline. Bless you for that.

A sugar coated filmic hit of Certainty.

In a world where a boxer dog’s ears flap up and down with merriment as we ding dong our merrily on high – what could possibly go wrong?

Who cares if there’s a shed load of brands and businesses out there relentlessly reframing their value as some salve ‘in an uncertain world’. We’ve got formation dancing, leaping creatures, red Starbucks cups and for chrissakes, THE HOLIDAYS ARE COMING.

In fact, even in this volatile roller coaster life of ours, of one thing I can be almost certain. Christmas is the bomb when it comes to CERTAINTY.

If I find myself on Christmas Day parked in front of the telly, my face soaked in Clinique For Men Anti Ageing Serum, the milky sweet of Bailey’s buttering my lips, a scatter of walnut casings and Ferrero wrappers peppering my technicolour Ted Baker gilet, watching the Shawshank Redemption, followed by a Life On Earth Double Bill, all to the accompaniment of the chirrup grunt squeak boing of a quality-street assortment of furry creatures bouncing up and down on the trampoline outside my triple glazed bullet proof conservatory windows – I may just explode in a cascade of tinsel twinkling Certainty.

Heaven. (If you happen to believe in that sort of thing.)

Love, labels, shopping & Living The Dream:

24 Sunday Apr 2016

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3DS, B&Q, beyond Our Means, british Virgin Islands, Commercialism, Credit Cards, Disneyland, facebook, Holidays, i watch, i-phone, Living The Dream, Low Profile Tyres, Ocado, Oculus Rift, Shopping, Sonos, supermarkets, Tesco Finest, Thomson Holidays, Valentines Day, Westfeld Shopping Centre

Shopping Labels: love ‘em. And I’ll have as many of them as I can get. And I don’t care what they’re pinned, popped, stapled, taped or tied to. Face creme. Hipsters. Phones. Washing Machines. Waiters. Sun-loungers. Crappafrappaccinolates.

Labels are the living proof that I’m living the dream. Or should I say shopping it. And loving it.

I’m perched on my individually reclining sofa, planning my buy now pay later holiday on an Oculus Rift. Got my very dramatic instagramatic liquid screen life looping on the SAMSUNG. Got my look-at-me-apple-i-watch playlist hooked into the Sonos. Even got my kids hooked on five hundred quid smart phones. Result.

Love my hyper connected super stylish self.

The more kit I have the better I feel. Because I’ve got kit. Shiny new smelling kit. Look at shiny me! Shining is all I want to do as a stand-up living, loving human being. Shiny means my love is cutting the mustard in the world: I’m providing.

I’m buying like and love at a check out and it feels great. I’m buying branded hotness, smarts, and friends.Seriously, look at my slidy swipy interface app. I’m nailing it. I’m searching for love through an animated Gif. Nice. Add to Basket. Go to Checkout

Got stuff. Give stuff.

Sorry, hang on; let me just put you on speakerphone so every one can hear how on it we are. “Where? The British Virgin Islands? Surprised they let you in babe! Bahh ha ha ha. See you Friday. LOL. XOXOXOXOXO”

Stuff is how I spread the love. Christmas. Valentines. Mother’s Day. Birthdays. Love is a huge pink heart made up of bar codes with a matching card and wrapping paper.

Shop unto others as you would shop unto yourself!

Super Market Super Me. Veg isn’t just veg. 3 for 2 salad bags isn’t just 3 of their 5 a day – its a protestation of love. The cheese. Those breaded fish pieces. Olives with the little red things inside. The lot. The smell of the Ocado bags. Smell my love. The air is heavy with it.

That detergent, the super citrus one I use to wash their clothes, that’s liquid love in a tumble dryer. I could give a serial killer a run for their money in the detergents, bleaches and abrasive disinfectants department. Every one of them is an individual price marked gesture of my love for my family and the squeaky gorgeous life I want them to have. How could I not remove 99% of all germs? What kind of people are you? How could I allow my carpet not to smell of the perfume of a thousand roses. Those roses died for our home to smell like this! Have some respect.

Breakfast cereal? Its more than a bloody cereal. Check out the advert! It’s a highly nutritious hug is what it is. Just because I don’t have time to give one, at least the cereal can. Each one of those boxes is a proxy for my love. Snap crackle and hug that’s what I say. And while we’re at it: send my children out into the cold without a glowing defence shield of warm loving oats? Murderer.

My love is infinite. Resealable. Refillable. Recyclable.

And I can prove it. Look at the balance on my Nectar card and tell me I am not the most loving person around.

I’m a goes around comes around kind of person. Always happy to, you know, do our bit for the planet…just don’t charge me extra! Love the planet. And that Attenborough chap. He’s lovely.

Hang on… feels a little rubbish with everyone’s face stuck in a screen. And feeling a little lonely if the truth be told. Need to update my facebook status. But it means having to check out their third set of holiday pictures this year…I mean its only bloody May. Does he work for Thomsons or something?

Right. Family outing.

OOhh I feel a quick weekend turn around Westfield coming on! Come on every one, in the car, I want to check out that new home cinema set up and your mum wants to nip into Kurt Geiger to try on some post-modern, highly ironic stripper shoes (and I don’t mean the decorating kind!).

3DS? What d’you need your DS for? Oh go on then … quickly.

Westfield.

LOVE the screech of my low profile sports spec tyres as I one-finger-turn in their car park – the sheer weight of those oh so safe tyres turning on my lighter-than-air super-computed steering system. Hell, the car parks itself.

Tell you what though, think I must try harder, I’m slipping. Look at ‘em. Is it me or have all the kids permanently got a face like a slapped arse?

Not even sure if they like me. God, they must like me. We’re bezzy mates. Shopping together and everything. We even have the same face book friends.

You OK? School’s OK? Isn’t it? I’m sure they’re OK – aren’t they? I think I might buy them an education just like the one in Harry Potter – well, they loved the films and you know, always a little space on a credit card somewhere…!

Pricey? Yup, but you know, as the saying goes ‘Short time Living, Long time Debt’ – stick it on a card. Cant take it with you, it’s your credit, you’ve earned it.

Blimey, where was I – holiday – better not mess up the booking. I’ve so booking nailed it. See the love in their eyes when they enter the resort. That’s us that is.

Well I felt like a criminal – when she said that her mate at school didn’t just go to Disneyland – she was actually IN the Disney holiday advert; in it; you know the one where all the children screech and scream when the parents reveal they’re going to Disneyland.

Well I couldn’t say no after that. OK, you’re going to drop three grand but look at their little faces – I couldn’t not. Where’s the Barclaycard? No, thats the VISA, the Barclaycard… it was with the MBNA one – I used them to get the sofa and those garden chairs.

Just got to face it – you spoil them, don’t you. And I quite like a few treats for myself. I’m worth it. Nan says we’re soft and need to get over ourselves. She gets a bit worked up about our spending. So we bought her one of those Tesco Finest Chocolate Mousse things to cheer her up. Not cheap. But it is Finest. Says it on the box there.

I’m a lover not a fighter

OK, so I’m a bit soft. I want them to have nice things (that bloody nursery paint cost a fortune but you know, first ever bedroom!!).

Sure, I could save up, but you never know what’s around the corner. Could be dead tomorrow. And Pensions! Don’t talk about pensions. Your pension’s just as likely to go down in value once that lot in the City have had their way with it.

House is our pension love. So best get yourself down to B&Q sharpish and get some power tools and fix all the stuff needs fixing then.

No, I want my lot to have the best. I don’t want to feel like some penny-pinching tightwad, especially with old ‘smug as you like’ over the road with his shiny new everything. Sure he nicks it all.

Mmmn. Not sure what to do with all those txt alerts from the bank though. Delete. Wait till the letter turns red. Then I’ll worry about it. Sunny. Haven’t used them. Look alright in the advert. Like that song. Wonder if they still send you a red final demand in the post if you’ve gone paperless?

Oh, well. Sure it must be about drink o clock by now.

Living The Dream – LTD Org – is dedicated to finding a new narrative and framework for an aspirational yet affordable UK lifestyle that doesn’t bankrupt us, our children and the planet we live on. Until then we’ll just have to put up and make do with the under-whelming, over-stretched, highly-conflicted muddle-along one we have now.

The fantastic Mr Foxes, Living the Dream & re-imagining UK prosperity

08 Friday Apr 2016

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Andreotti, Fantastic Mr Fox, Iain Makintosh, Leicester City, Living The Dream, Premiere League, Reimagining Prosperity, Sam Diss, Shortlist Magazine, Social Conscience, The Foxes, Thrift

In a world that only seems to celebrate the gold-plated, flush away consumption of Kim and Kanye, Wayne Rooney’s shopping potential and the gold-plated Lamborghini collection of a playboy oil billionaire, trying to Live the Dream of smarter, lighter life might seem a rather hopeless task.

Why find meaning within your means when everyone and everything seems to be screaming ‘Go Large!’ regardless of whether they or you can afford it or not.

But hope springs eternal. And the odd shining example of how to make the most of what you have to both individual and collective benefit without bankrupting yourself in the process does pop up in the strangest of places.

The world of football for example.

If what’s going on at the moment is anything to go by, football is in danger of becoming a metaphor for the societal benefit of turning away from vulgar money fixations and look-at-me consumption to something a little more meaningful and precious. Something we seemed to have lost along the way.

In a world riddled with corruption, larger-than-life living, vulgar displays of wealth and riches and a blatant almost criminal disregard for the everyday people that the sport should belong to – we have Leicester. The Foxes.

If anyone is currently Living The Dream it’s Leicester.

Andreotti has proven himself to be the shrewdest of the Mr Foxes, thriftily shaping one of the most balanced teams in the sport, and for roughly the same amount of money as Wayne Rooney earns in a couple of months.

The Reaction. Remarkable. Suddenly the football collective voice is being heard. Sam Diss of Shortlist Magazine recently reported hearing a Crystal Palace fan tell a Leicester fan to ‘Win it for us’ when their teams met.

Us. There it is. Shining like a beacon. Deafening in its quiet criticism of a beautiful game turned ugly by greed and profligacy. The collective voice of the everyday football fans who believe that football is bigger than any one footballer. Bigger than any club ‘brand’. And who hark back to a time when watching your favourite game enriched your life not bankrupted it.

Once football was the perfect pleasure – a joy to play or watch at any level – and wholly in the means of the fans who made the clubs what they are today. But far from enriching them, football now seems only to enrage and impoverish them – and not just financially. The game is becoming increasingly spiritually bankrupt. Morals and ethics seem to disappear out the Transfer Window. Money talks. And everyone else has to shut up and listen – and swallow it regardless of how patently twisted it is.

“Boof. Eat my Goal” said Alan Partridge.

But now “Who Ate All the Goals?” might seem a more appropriate chant from the terraces towards the ‘fat cat’ players, managers and owners that seem to openly mock the average working football fan with their displays of wealth.

There is little to separate the vulgar disparity between the salaries of CEOs and those of their employees and that which exists between footballers and the communities they are supposed to represent and entertain.

So whether Leicester ‘win it’ it or not is less about a football game and more about hope. A hope that the money doesn’t always win. And it doesn’t always make things better. And that a collective spirit can change things. And do the impossible.

My hope lies in this collective spirit wishing and willing Leicester on in the belief that some things are more beautiful and more important than ugly money.

Just imagine – if football can turn away from its current vulgar grasping and increasingly ill-affordable guise, perhaps other aspects of our everyday lifestyle and how we consume it might change too.

Living the Dream might start to mean enjoying life in a construct that isn’t loaded onto 5 credit cards and backed up with a payday loan; and riddled with disappointment even at that.

In the close of the same article Diss cites Iain Mackintosh, die-hard UK football writer, as saying that Leicester City pulling this off will change everything – and not just the Premier League. “This could change the dynamic of humanity itself”.

Here’s hoping.

Academic Lag, Advertising Jag & the task of Socialising the Genome

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

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Academia, Academic Lag, Acclimatisation, Advertising, Advertising Jag, andy lamb, big data, Brian Cox, conversation, Creative Action Research, Decompression, Demand, desire, DNA, Evolution, Genome, Genomic Science, Guttenberg Press, Hadron Collider, Health, health Screening, Human Behaviour, human essence, Identity, Insight Ladder, Intellectuals, Language, Living The Dream, marketing communications, networks of academic collaboration, NHS, Populists, Sanger Institute, social networks, Socialisation, Syntax, utility, wellbeing

LAG:

A period of time: a noticeable delay between action and reaction – Failing to keep up with another or others in movement or development

JAG:

A short period of overindulgence in an activity: a shopping jag: a crying jag A stab; an intense and concentrated movement or action

I increasingly find myself at a very particular and exciting intersection.

I find myself there not by accident but by design: having helped build a methodology that reaps its greatest rewards at the point where applied science and commercial creativity collide.

(The creativity is commercial in that the point of collision is designed to generate pieces of communication to a specific end and utility – functional with tangible benefits – as opposed to a piece of pure art or some material assemblage generated to no end other than to create feeling and effect through its aesthetic – experiential with intangible benefits.)

Over the last year and a half I have been working on a project that seeks simple answers to some quite complex questions rooted in deep science:

How do we scale the ‘everyday’ conversation around genome science and DNA beyond the scientists, academics, clinicians and the rare interested civilian party?

How do we illuminate the scientific mysteries and wonder of our DNA in such a way that everyone can understand them, embrace them, engage with them, and reap the rewards that come from them?

And ultimately how do we help the greatest number of us to enhance the nature, quality and duration of our human tenure through informed choice and enlightened action in regards to our DNA?

This search for a more compelling narrative and conversation at the point where science and everyday humanity meet is not an isolated pursuit.

It is also true of the ‘Living The Dream’ project I am currently helping to steer. The project also seeks to scale the conversation around what constitutes a more enduring model of prosperity and sustainable consumption by finding a more ‘human’ narrative to replace the existing one, rooted as it is in the science, engineering and ‘reason’ of sustainability as opposed to human emotion of it.

In both cases we need to find a way of communicating complex concepts and constructs in the simplest way possible to the largest number of people without destroying the integrity of the scientific truths in the process.

In both cases there are untold rewards for society and humankind both individually and collectively if we can scale these conversations.

So I find myself working at this intersection of multiple collisions: between scientific integrity and human sociability: between depth and structure and lightness and elasticity; between applied science and commercial creativity.

MAKING CONVERSATION

To reap the untold rewards we simply need the communities of science and academia to meet the man and woman in the street and have a good ‘chat’:

And boy do they have some great stuff to talk about: life changing, existence enhancing stuff.

In the case of genomics, simply put, if enough of us embrace the advantages that the advances in the science offer in our everyday lives, using the revelations of DNA in an applied manner both individually and for the common good, we could eventually move ourselves from the old curative model of health care to a new and far more dynamic preventative model: one that will not only just change the way we live but also alter the duration of that living.

Making smarter and easily comprehensible lifestyle choices informed and underwritten by a deeper and more intimate understanding of what makes us who we are can help us to embrace a more positive approach to the lives we lead. Those choices made en masse will equally inform and illuminate how best the health service of the future can better sustain its ability to continue to serve our society both systemically and financially.

Now logic would predict that given the enormous impact and beneficial nature of those potential outcomes, everyone should already be ‘all over that conversation’: chatting away furiously, listening intently, sharing the conversation with friends and reaping the rewards of a better life.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

The problem is – we’re not.

Why?

The greatest barrier seems to be one of simple comprehension and understanding.

The scientists and academics simply communicate in a different language to the everyday people they are trying to reach. Their particular languages have different vocabularies, inflections, idioms, energies and vernaculars – which is unsurprising given that both parties live in very, very different worlds.

In one world we have the ‘splendid isolation’ of existence required to nurture intense, interrogative and highly rational scientific thought and action – and the codified, particular language and almost impenetrable texts, dissertations and white papers that accompany and support it.

In the other world we find the hyper-connected and hyper-socialised immersion of our emotionally charged everyday existence, fuelled and accelerated by smart devices and sprawling digital platforms of human interaction filled with billions of TXTS, tweets, emojis, memes, slang and banter.

One exists in a mode of hyper dislocation; the other in a mode of hyper socialisation.

And it seems that each speaks in riddles as far as the other is concerned.

A chasm exists between the world of academia and the sciences and that of the everyday person in the street. And as with all worlds of such different ‘atmospheres’, there needs to be a process of acclimatisation when travelling between one and the other.

In the context of Socialising the Genome (and my Living The Dream project) it is the conversational ‘syntax’ – the framing, structure, language and phrasing of these arguments – that needs to ‘acclimatise’ to the atmosphere of everyday needs and desires and the language they speak.

The highly tuned language, intense qualification and proofs of the scientists and academics need to ‘decompress’ on the way up into the ‘real world’ – otherwise they will suffer a bout of the communication ‘bends’ – where they either over compensate and try to hard – become too ‘matey’; the NBF of the person in the street… : ) : )

Or they simply come across like a geek at a fancy dress party – awkward, uncomfortable and so wrong on so many counts.

Putting deep science and academic concepts and truths through a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process can of course be undertaken as a one off – but realistically, if our ambition in this instance is to ‘socialise’ the conversation, we have to assume a fluid and escalating dialogue of increasing and expanding value and reach – and for that to happen we realised that we needed to keep the findings, revelations and insights of the academics and scientists constantly ‘in flow’; moving seamlessly and effortlessly between one world and the other: elastic and evolving.

To achieve this they need to be ‘sensitive’ of, keep pace with and be true to the everyday shifts and nuances in the behaviours, attitudes and language of the people whose existence they seek to improve. To be resilient and meaningful they must remain ‘relevant’ at all times.

(There is little point in deep diving for a populist answer only to find that on surfacing with one 2 years later, the question has changed. Herein lurks the danger of the academic lag.)

So, in the process of designing the methodology that would facilitate this we found ourselves with two acute questions to answer:

How do we create an offset strategy for the academic lag – one that allows the worlds of academia and the deep sciences to remain ‘present’ – to exist both in the accelerated and socialised Now while still mining in splendid isolation?

How do we design a ‘decompression and acclimatisation’ process that enables a smarter simpler flow of ideas and findings – a ‘conversation’ or dialogue – between one world and the other?

CUE ADVERTISING JAG.

To reap the ultimate rewards that the advances in Genomic science offer us, the screening and storing our DNA as would have to become an everyday part of our health profile: it would have to become second nature to every one of us: a common place behaviour: something that we do without ‘thinking’.

But we’re a long way from a chirpy chat along the lines of:

‘hey Trish. Sorry. Can we say 7.30ish now? Running a bit late at the DNA screening clinic – mines a large glass of DWW! ; ) Jax xxx’

Genomic science tends to only enter our conversation either because we are forced to engage with it or by an accident of revelation.

Even when the more moderated conversations do occur they can quickly tip into ethical minefields around data storage and security, commercial abuses by insurance companies and self interested corporates, elitist tiers and eugenics, socio cultural stratification and the Police Database. There issues around identity privacy and confidentiality are staggering in some of their complexities and contradictions.

The complexities of genomic science are simply not ‘everyday’, not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’ and are at best incomprehensible and at worst quickly controversial.

But Advertising & Communication people spend their whole life not only trying to decipher what someone’s ‘cup of tea’ might be but also how they might get them to drink more of it

The nature of the models and frameworks used by marketing communications specialists to mine and shape insights, propositions and narratives – the intensity, speed and use of both broad stroke universal consumer insight and atomic data modelling – is driven by the voracious desire in corporates to ‘keep up’ with the fluid and ever changing nature of consumer demand and desires. These models have grown ever more agile due to:

The direct impact of technology and the social networks across the value chains and markets of the big corporate consumer brands:

The age of data big bang: an ever-expanding viral surge of relentlessly dividing and multiplying data on every aspect and dimension of how we live, act, interact and transact.

It is in the intensity, approach and most importantly the creative storytelling aspect of this ‘jag’ of activity that we believe our off set strategy can be found.

ADVERTISING SCHMADVERTISING

One of the greatest tension points in the new methodology we have engineered in Socialising The Genome is the point at which advertising exclamation collides with academic exposition.

There are fundamental and quite combative points of difference between the worlds of the Sciences & Medicine and the Humanities & Arts – in nature, methodology and application; and in their concepts of what constitutes integrity and substance (especially when the latter are of the populist persuader type – the advertising and marketing agencies and their kind).

Many wholly reason-based intellectuals and practitioners harbour a quite fixed (and many would say hugely justifiable) sense of distrust in what they regard as a moral and intellectual vacuum in the marketing communications agencies, institutions and organisations that manipulate and leverage ‘emotion’ and a lazy populism for commercial gain.

To allow the conversation around something as precious and fragile as genomic science to be driven by base desires pumped up on the wisdom of the crowds with no form of enlightened filter or curation, might well be perceived as not only risky but also irresponsible.

“Fine, if you’re just pushing another million or so 6-bladed, swivel-hipped funky junky disposable plastic razors” but matters of this level of human importance are quite a different thing entirely.

Alternately, on the other side of the conversational fence, we have the champions of ‘everyday’ people, the populist movers, shakers, creators and commentators who celebrate them, their language, their culture, their leisure and their past-times, and who shape, shade and distribute the myriad simple pleasures that they enjoy and engage with. For these people, unless science, like technology, is wrapped up in a Brian Cox-like, ‘whoops that’s my Collider’ approachability or celebrity, they are quite disdainful or disinterested in what they see as arcane and impenetrable conversations. They see no point in a dialogue that seems circular and closed in its nature and not of any use to anyone without a PhD.

Their attitude broadly runs along the lines of:

“don’t care – all a bit to serious and arch for me – lighten up, get over yourself – short time living long time dead – if you cant take the banter we’re not listening – and while you’re at it, mine’s a highly-advertised pint of unexceptional lager please!”

BUT, in a balanced world and all things being even – somewhere between the two polarities lies an answer – midway between the extremities of emotional populism on the one side and high-minded rationalism on the other.

Neither one nor the other can develop the conversation by itself in isolation. Each needs the other to create a full and robust conversation that is both substantial and sociable.

In our particular instance, we needed to go on a journey from the clinical utility of the genome conversation as it is now – closed alienating isolating and impenetrable in large tracts – to a one more rooted in concepts of positive identity and improved existence – open inclusive socialised and empowering.

We realised that to do that we needed to decipher how we could use the tension that exists between the worlds of science and society to most positive effect – to facilitate and accelerate that journey.

MIND THE GAP

To be clear, the absence of accelerated improvement in our human existence through Genomic science is not an issue of supply. (There are a lot of brilliant minds moving the science forwards). This is an issue of demand.

While ‘everyday’ people continue to not understand the real and substantial benefits of that science, they will not demand its benefits as a standard and inextricable part of their everyday lives

Communicating the inspirational, revelatory and highly beneficial impact of embracing our DNA to the greatest number of people in their terms in their world is central to all of this because it will fuel and fire ‘demand’ for better.

TWAS EVER THUS

Demystifying and popularising rare knowledge of a scientific, political, economic or theological nature has always been a critical step in the march of human progress (whether the scientists, politicians, economists and the theologians like it or not).

‘Dumbing down’ as some elevated minds like to think of it is actually humanity’s way of smartening up. And inspiring and wild-firing everyday conversation is a vital lever in that smartening up.

So first things first: we needed to accept that the challenges to easy conversation are substantial – the impenetrable nature of the science; a very human, provincially minded fear of the unknown; the conflicted nature of our feeling towards ‘disease prediction’; a general fear of ‘science going too far & meddling with the cosmos; the primal compulsion to ‘move away from’ any form of human flaw (our own or anyone else’s); either in the form of disability or crippling disease; or those flaws as might potentially be revealed by DNA screening.

We need to accept that none of the ‘conversation’ generated so far has enabled us to move very far beyond our current audiences – and that we have so far failed to present a set of positives that outweigh the existing negatives.

Genomic science and the subject of DNA need to be lightly dealt with or presented in such a way as to find their way into pub banter framed and informed by a ‘did you see? Did you know?’ Intelligence Lite, fuelled by lifestyle magazines, Sunday supplements and the Discovery Channel.

And given that film is the most shared currency in the socially networked world, film needs to be the base currency of our highly socialised cultural economy.

So our key objectives for success were:

to create a methodology that enabled us to look up through the emotionally driven human and the everyday insight – not down through the rationally driven science and the clinical language

to develop and distribute the seeds of a new and scaled conversation through the power of shareable film.

CREATIVE ACTION RESEARCH

My work over the last year or so with Dr. Anna Middleton of the Sanger Institute focuses solely how we reconcile the perspectives of our two worlds to shape and scale the conversation around DNA and Genomic science to greater human benefit.

And it is in the circular and iterative nature of the interaction between her world – that of the Academic Lag – and mine – that of the Advertising Jag – that we believe will deliver the language and framing for and therefore the scale of conversation that we need to transform the way people see DNA in their lives.

With CAR, we have constructed a methodology where, even when in the midst of the deep dive nature of her qualitative ethical research process, Anna is able to utilize my and my collaborator’s ability to reframe, rephrase and represent science or research fact in more populist social storytelling terms and framings to play beck into and inform the more academic process she is undertaking.

CAR – TESTING THE EDGES OF CONVERSATION

CAR combines traditional qualitative research, rooted in group discussions and in depth interviews and discourse interpretation with quantitative research that introduces fresh creatively-framed seeds of Genome and DNA conversation into the social networks to provide a simple speedy test of whether those seeds have the ability to inspire and engage people in such a way that they might in turn share it amongst their own social network both real and virtual.

The method we have devised for creating the simple seeds of a new conversation revolves around taking an existing piece of knowledge or scientific fact and creating different types of ‘conversation’ or story telling around it.

We then use these seeds of conversation as foils and flash cards in both a quantitative socialised environment and the more in depth and metered qualitative research groups and in-depths.

To ensure that in the migration from science or clinical insight to creative idea we did and do not fall foul of confecting, manipulating, misrepresenting and ultimately distorting or twisting the knowledge or facts we are using, every creative idea has to be rooted in an insight ladder.

The Insight Ladder is a simple proprietary tool that I have developed for this project that aims to lock the more creatively framed seed of conversation to the scientific fact truth or insight that inspired it: a sort of plumb line of integrity that runs through each ‘conversation’.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

A number of traditional qualitative research group discussions and some in depths will begin to explore some of the everyday language and insights around genome science and DNA.

A dry Discussion Guide takes each participant in the qualitative groups from a condition of lowest point of knowledge – do you know what DNA is? – through a natural arc of expanding conversation – knowledge of DNA – benefits or not to the individual – its role in improved healthcare – moral and ethical issues around the science – data privacy and security – and at its most extreme – and ultimately, the nature of improved DNA and genome science on a thriving UK PLC as a mark of global leadership in the advancement of improved human existence through scientific and social enlightenment and application.

Once the open and freeform discussion has come to a close we will use some of the seed ideas that we have developed from existing insights to see how opening doors to the subject using more creative everyday storytelling potentially changes or alters people’s disposition, perception and appreciation of the subject.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

Once the qualitative groups have been transcribed we will then select the most potent insights and creative storytelling and framings so that they may be turned into simple animated pieces of film storytelling.

We will use an online research tool to see which film inspires the most attention and why with a representative UK sample, as well as sharing them in the social networks to the same purpose.

Both actions will seek simple responses and opinions through both closed and open data capture.

Ultimately we are seeking one or two ideas with the potential to develop into a greater scale of everyday conversation using socially dynamic communications and advocacy strategies to wildfire those conversations.

BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES

The creative jag in CAR endeavours to act like a repeated finger tap in the centre of the academic ‘chest’ – a way of bringing the science into the moment, connecting it in visceral emotional and social terms to the everyday Now – an intense injection of populist framing and storytelling for those somewhat consumed in the Academic Lag.

In that way, the advertising Jag acts as a form of ‘Mindfulness’ for the scientist, academic and clinician deep-diving into the world of the genome – providing a ‘Look Up’ orientation strategy for them to use while potholing in the caves between what is know and unknown.

Therefore Creative Action Research aims to use a complimentary fusion of:

Academic Lag – Reason – utility, interrogation & measure – resilience – the individual

Advertising Jag – Emotion – identity, expression & impact – desire – the crowd

to scale the conversation and socialise the Genome.

CAR accepts that there is no simple black & white answer here. It will take time and the attentions of both the Laggers and the Jaggers to get to the scale of conversation this deserves and needs.

In some ways, as with our DNA, it might just prove that the things that unite us are greater than those that divide us.

In finding a way to socialise the Genome we might just find a way to both educate the populous and socialise academia. And perhaps that is not a bad thing at all.

In the meantime lets pop on our Bordieu T Shirt – and be a great destroyer of Either/Or.

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