Drivers: please stop with the abuse. You are warm and dry; I am soaked to the bone. You are in your cosy pod of laziness and I am being buffetted by forty-mile-an-hour winds. You have a horn, indicators, seatbelts and airbags; I have a polystyrene hat, two hands and a grass verge if I’m lucky.
Perhaps you are on your way to the hospital. Perhaps you have an important appointment. Perhaps you are running five minutes late for work because the au pair wouldn’t clean up Tarquin’s sick. No matter: you are all in a rush. If a lowly cyclist such as myself happens to elect the same route as thou, please, beep at me and shout out of your window; this will not alarm me at all, in fact it will make me disappear so you can continue unimpeded on your journey.
Be sure to overtake me on a blind corner or coming up a hill because you cannot stand to drive another second behind such an inconsiderate road user. Should you meet a vehicle coming the other way, just swing in to avoid it. Bikes are so slow you are probably about five miles in front of them by now anyway. Don’t worry if you crash into anything because your car is so damn expensive and shiny it will flatten anything in its path and YOU will be fine, darling, that’s what matters.
It sounds incredible but about a quarter of the drivers I encounter are aggressive or inconsiderate towards cyclists. It doesn’t take much to check your mirrors before you turn left (especially when you can just OVERTAKEN somebody on a bike), to wait until it is safe to overtake, to take a wide line when overtaking, or to anticipate a cyclist’s speed and not pull in or out directly in front of them.
Rant over.
I remember reading endless Enid Blyton books when I was little. It was a world of toadstool houses, pantries and fairies, shillings and sixpences and picnic baskets with crab paste sandwiches, where people are called Jock and Joan and Prudence and Mummy puts coals on the nursery fire. When I found this 1951 first edition in a charity shop (Maidenhead has half a dozen excellent ones) I just had to get it.
I’ve got memories of this one too; a yappy dog chewing off a cat’s whiskers and a golliwog toy coming to the rescue, Will and Won’t, Prick-Ear the imp and the seven Crosspatches. Sober moral tales, riddles and wordplay mixed with fantastical and wholesome fairy stories.
I didn’t appreciate the beautiful drawings the first time I read this; simple line drawings by Dorothy Hall, with mono-coloured fill which must have been quite exciting at the time.
As I read through I couldn’t help noticing parallels with how I write now. Simple sentences, twee poems, over-use of hyphens… These books haven’t just affected my writing style; reading through these tales again at an age where I can see them more objectively, it’s clear that they played a huge part in shaping how I saw – and continue to see – the world. Nostalgia for the lost values of the past, wanting to believe goblins and imps live at the bottom of the garden, and a tendency to imagine toys and creatures have secret lives.
The Goblin’s House
I went into a goblin’s house,
It was a funny place.
The table had a missing leg,
The clock had got no face.
I counted quite a lot of things
That really were quite wrong;
Just see if you can find them too,
It shouldn’t take you long!
It’s strange to think that so much affects you in your formative years; determining what you’ll be interested in later and how the world will appear to you. I think I learnt more from this than I did from English grammar and creative writing lessons at school. Enid Blyton books, along with other childhood delights like Fingermouse, Greenclaws, Meg and Mog, Just William and Letterland, had arguably more of an effect on my blank slate of a mind than anything could now.
Bilderoo is coming
“Bilderoo is coming!” shouted the little pixie, as he ran down the streets of Twisty Village. “Bilderoo is coming!” Everybody ran out of their houses in dismay. “Oh! Do you hear that? Bilderoo is coming!”
It was no wonder that everyone looked dismayed, for Bilderoo was a real nuisance. He was a powerful goblin, hard and mean, who thought a great deal of himself. He travelled about the country, staying in this village and that – and whoever he chose to stay with had to give him an excellent supper and breakfast – and then give him a very fine present.
Now, nobody minds having visitors they like, and giving them good meals if they can – but if the visitor is somebody you don’t want, who boasts all the time, and makes himself most unpleasant, well it’s a perfect nuisance to have him.
“Who will he stay with this time?” the folk of Twisty Village wondered. “He stayed with Millikin last time, and poor Millikin had to give him his lovely new clock for a present.”
Soon Bilderoo’s little servant came running into Twisty Village. “Where does Pippin live? I’ve got to tell him that the great Bilderoo is doing him the honour of spending the night with him! He must make ready!”
Poor Pippin! He was cross, because he already had a visitor, his best friend, Poppin. Now he and Pippin would have to turn out of their one and only bed, and let that horrid, boastful Bilderoo have it! Bother! Blow! And Bother again!
It’s the antithesis of communication. The desire to simply say something, anything, just for the sake of it.
By definition, communication has to have an object – and, while we’re at it, a subject. You have to communicate something to someone. Well, maybe you don’t. It depends who you ask. In this age of ecommerce and social media, we’re riding on a wave of communicating, collaborating, driving traffic, optimising conversions, consumption… but that’s not going to last forever. Humans, users, customers – we’re all the same, from our days of candles and cave shadows to twittering and googling. Pare it down, take away the gimmicks and the hype and it’s simple. You have something to say, say it. You have nothing to say, don’t say anything.
You can’t say something when you have nothing to say, surely? But there seems to be such a desperate drive towards the act of saying, reaching out to people, being digital and proactive – that brands often do. They’re so eager to grab opportunities that they lose sight of the true purpose of communication.
“We’ve got to get an email out,” they say. “In fact, make that three. We know emails drive traffic and we have to boost sales.” So you sit there, chewing at a splintered biro, wondering how to write something about nothing, and make it engaging so perhaps 1% of 1% of people will click on something in it, and minimise the damage that sending three purposeless and contentless emails in a week will cause to your dwindling mailing list. Oh, and use a stock image and no more than ten words of copy.
I’ve had briefs from product managers that don’t even cover the benefits of the product. It ends at “Encourage busy mums to buy” or “Create sense of fun around product”. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told that “all these sections will be filled with content”. CONTENT? It just leaves me speechless.
People can tell when you’re jabbering on about nothing. They’ve got no time for it. They’ll switch off, and once your captive audience has gone, they’re gone for good – no second chances. But hey, at least you’re talking, right? Wrong.
It is so simple to fix. Take a step back and decide what you want to tell people. Who are you talking to? What will convince them of what you’re saying? What will keep them listening? Why will they want to know more? How can this brand add value to their lives? Save your voice for when it matters; for times when you’ve got something enriching and compelling to say.
Horrendous. This is flashmob gone wrong. What happened to all the normal people, would they have spoiled the effect? And look at an incredulous Oprah sharing it all on her T-Mobile phone, even though IT IS ALL BEING FILMED FROM A HELICOPTER FOR HER OWN SHOW. Oh well, at least Chicago’s backing dancers all got work for a day.
In a world in which very little stays the same from day to day, I am proud to say that my Nikon D50 has been my absolute favourite possession for four whole years. I got it around this time in 2005, when I was just settling into life in Paris. I remember shooting my first ‘roll’ on it: autumn trees on Chobham Common, tiny swathes of fairy mushrooms and golden sunlight on satin shoes. Back when I thought shooting Medium at JPEG Fine was extravagant. And since then it’s travelled everywhere with me.
From Paris, the Loire Valley and Deauville to carnivals in Brighton and Notting Hill, a summer of bands, gigs and promo shots across London, Woking, Jersey, Barcelona, a year of welcome distraction from finals in Oxford, back to Paris and a flying visit home for Tim’s wedding in Barnet, Paris, Paris, Paris (my hands can still feel it aching for that city) Woking, Melbourne, Sydney, New York, Woking, Brixton, Budapest, Toronto, Mexico, Windsor, Boston, Cyprus – and now, what may be its final resting place – Maidenhead.
42,745 shutter releases later and it’s a little worse for wear. I protected it like a relic at the start, but I’ve given it quite a beating over the years. It’s survived forty degree heat and a sandblasting on St Kilda Beach, being propped up on improvised snow tripods in Portsmouth and being vainly sheltered by a soggy scarf by the banks of the Thames. It’s been hung precariously inside a lift shaft on the eighth floor of an apartment block in Voltaire and jammed between railings at the top of the Empire State Building.
The eye protector thing is in a hedge in Aldershot. Someone who didn’t know their own strength pulled off the plastic hole protector on the side. Autofocus seems a little more indecisive than it used to be. But everything still works perfectly.
It has served me well. Sensor grot levels were starting to get a bit beyond acceptable (think at least ten minutes of clone tool work for every shot with block colour) so there had to be a little MOT work. I repaid its loyal service with a blast of compressed air to the insides – exactly what all the sensor-cleaning sites tell you NOT to do, and I found out why – so now I really do have to send it back to Nikon for a refurb.
Or I could save the money and put it towards a new camera. This isn’t a case of throwing your socks away instead of washing them, like rich people do. I’m not getting rid of my D50 just because it’s got propellant all over the sensor. It’s just made me wonder whether – brilliant though my D50 is – the £150 I’d spend fixing it would be better put towards a snazzier camera with more megapixels and more advanced controls.
The quest begins…
“And before, there was this soup, called “soupe primordiale,” this first soup — bloop bloop bloop — sort of dirty mud, no life, nothing. So then — pshoo-shoo — lightning — pshoo — arrive — pshoo-shoo — makes life — bloop bloop — and that dies. Some million years after — pshoo-shoo, bloop-bloop — ah, wake up! At the end, finally, that succeeds, and life appears. We was so, so stupid. The most stupid bacteria. Even, I think, we copy our way to reproduce, you know what I mean, and something of — oh no, forget it.” Philippe Starck @TED.
I’ve been watching Design for Life on BBC2 – partly to indulge myself with footage of Paris and partly to be horrified how how stupid these pudding-brained designers are and question why I am not making my millions putting them all to shame.
When they’re not piggy-backing on idées reçues and re-doing things that have already been done to death they’re just plain stealing other people’s ideas and stopping to marvel at how difficult it all is – bar one irritatingly precocious prodigal son, who didn’t take long to realise he was the only one with a brain.
Still, seeing this makes it easy to understand why Starck claims no great designers have come out of Britain since Conran. Who would have thought it: a joystick’s a male object, and a plug is female. The buttons symbolise things. A bike is, erm, ecologically sound. Batteries aren’t. Big wow. Maybe it’s true: British people just don’t know how to think any more. But then, I’m not there, putting my life on the line in front of the cameras, so maybe I couldn’t do any better.
