12th June, 2012

 Dear All,

“And the veil was lifted from mine eyes.” Archaic language, perhaps with a leaning towards the melodramatic, nonetheless, capturing the “Aha” moment that comes to us all at some time in our lives; the lucky ones, more than once.

We take so much for granted, don’t we? Rarely looking around, generally just looking ahead to the next buzz, laugh, holiday, party, acquisition, rock concert, date or social commitment. Yet, so much happiness, pleasure and contentment is here, right under our noses. It’s always here but the tide of today’s expectations presses us to look ahead eagerly. Standing still to look around, never occurs to the busy mind.

Having all this new-found time in quiet, sleepy Lincs is delivering an array of delights that are really little more than ordinary. Being fundamentally a Basildon Boy brought up in a simpler time, it doesn’t take much to bring delight to Easily-pleased, Once Of Essex.

Before I left Essex, there used to be school reunions at my place where my mates and I wallowed and gurgled like fat little happy babies reminiscing about early Basildon, a time when we were children and it was truly a New Town. Conversations were often repeated, not through age-related forgetfulness, but from choice because they carried the simple pleasure of reliving happy times.

I had the same experience when Ford ex-auditors got together. Tall tales standing in baby shoes of truth were recounted, growing taller with each retelling -Sequoias with a tiny root system, easily knocked over if anyone cared to be sensible, but why would we? Why be sensible when fun is available? We all knew the truth of the exaggerations being paraded - but no one cared. The silliness of each story was all that mattered. So far, no one in those increasingly fictional storytelling sessions has felt the need to be sensible. Thank God.

These small cameos are presented just to illustrate that little boys are easily pleased. Memories, however distorted, are welcome at any time. It really doesn’t take much to keep children happy, a bit like a kitten with a ball of wool dangling on a single strand.

The school friends, we Basildon Boys, took all that for granted as kids. Mum and Dad provided food and clothes which met all our needs. Unlike kids today, we didn’t know what money was. It was a mystery till our teens. In those days, no one ever gave us money for Christmas or birthdays. That would have been just plain rude, lazy and uncaring. So with all needs met, we just played, fought and were friends again five minutes later. Now, in retirement, in a complex world bursting with technological toys and high-speed gratification on offer at every turn, our common values appear to be a greater appreciation of simple joys; the gift, the by-product, of having the time and the attitude - with age - to look at things with more open eyes.

And now I have filled a page, babbling about nothing but the happy memories of two groups of disparate friends who have never met yet who share my full heart when we look back; illustrating the earlier point - Joy is cheap - available somewhere near you - at a cost of nearly nothing. The font being located between your ears and in your heart.

In reading back over these letters, I see that I have tried too hard in the past to convince that all is rosy in my life. It is. I have no complaints but, to be fair, I think there was a bit too much stress on the cup being nearly full rather than half full, probably a trait that I learned in Ford where we were encouraged to talk up ‘problems’, glossing them more kindly as ‘issues’ and steering attention away from anything that smacked of reality.

With that in mind, this letter will present thoughts that arise from life here rather than whether life is comfortable or not. It is comfortable. That’s all we need. Now back to the theme of this letter, which is to be about the precipitation from having the time to think.

The first of these is something I half heard on the news recently to the effect that graduates are repaying the investment in them by contributing positively to the economy. If only that were true. This made me smile in that it was the conclusion of a piece of analysis - done by graduates - about themselves. In effect, graduates concluding that graduates are beneficial to society. Normally I would let that pass but some thoughts occur. Here they are.

Having done a fair bit of analysis of databases in my last few years at Ford, by selective inclusion and exclusion, I could make the data say anything I wanted - and I did. Of course the conclusions could not be challenged because unless you knew as well as I did what had been excluded, you were never going to be able to question my findings - all of which could be supported by real data from Ford databases - so looked solid. The trick is knowing what has been left out but who, in an audience of managers, wants to get their hands dirty with detail? Very few. Most prefer to nod sagely, as appearances are everything. So I played the audiences, taking advantage of their vanity.

The other key point about ‘analysis’ is that the architecture matters, i.e. what the logic is that leads to the conclusions. So pardon me if I am sceptical about graduates doing the analysis that congratulates them on making a positive contribution to the economy. I would like to know how the analysis was structured before I accept the conclusion. Having worked with about 500 since the mid-70s, most were nice people who talked theory confidently, with, due to their lack of experience of life, little or no application of common sense. Those few that dealt with realities and showed real social skills, became friends and are among the addresses to this letter. But they were the minority, unicorns in a herd of three-legged nags that non-grads tolerated and rather unkindly, had some fun with.

The ‘inclusion/exclusion’ aspect is highly relevant to a useful conclusion. For example, I wonder if on the COST side of this latest analysis, they included the cost of the Gulf of Mexico disaster - the lives of people, wildlife and the despair at the inhumanity of it all - as well as the cost in dollars? That disaster was down to the board of BP as I remember, (how many were graduates?) - led by a bloke with a degree in Engineering. “Oh yes, we can drill there. It’ll be OK. What could possibly go wrong? I’ve got an engineering degree. I know about these things” (in theory, as events showed, apparently not in practice).

Or Fred Goodwin, who led his bank to the biggest loss in UK banking history - £26 billion. He’s got a degree and how many of the Board of Northern Rock were grads and PhDs? Or the board of Halifax? Or Connaught’s when it went under? Or on the boards of any bank that needed bailouts as they lost billions by over-lending or in buying bad loans, a.k.a. Pass The Parcel so that the mug holding the asset when the music stops gets creamed for a crippling amount that must be compensated by the taxpayer - as high street banks can never fail.

It is warming to know that I pay taxes - not to give kids an education or so grannies can eat and keep warm in the winter but so Casino Banker wide-boys can indulge their gambling addiction with no consequences. I wonder if all of these very obvious bangs on the nose to the economy were included when evaluating the graduate contribution?

Lastly, on a much bigger scale, as the world economy goes into meltdown, how many grads have there been in the governments of Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland? All countries that have been led by their governments to live beyond their means for years and years so that when the piper has to be paid eventually, they are looking bankruptcy in the face while the rest of us face the turbulence of the wash.

Whatever happened to people of ability? While I have met a few grads with ability, in the main most that I worked with at Ford, Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase, were unworldly, insecure introverts - puffing themselves up by the self-appointed label of being in ‘The Top 5%’. Top of what social group? And who decides who’s in the club. Oh look! Just grads, talking about themselves again.

Promoting them to positions of power because of their qualifications got exactly what it deserved. By all means give them a job, but don’t put them in charge of anything until they prove themselves, unless you want mistakes through inexperience and loss of morale in your organisation as we had in Ford. To be fair, there were plenty of not-very-bright non-grads too who argued theory before reality and lacked social skills. I didn’t like them either. Perhaps it’s just me being a grump?

Well, that feels better. Now onto Leonard Cohen, nature’s Tour Guide to suicidal depression. When I listen to music, I just hear a general noise as a background to whatever really occupies my attention. However, I know that there are those amongst you who listen to the words and luxuriate in the poetry. My good friend Paul Underhill is one of these and recommended recently, an album by Leonard Cohen. Many of you will know of Leonard Cohen. He had the resident gig on the Ark; a man when I was a boy and still going strong today - which will lead to me having a whinge about the old men of the Queen’s Jubilee Concert. That joy lies ahead.

Paul believing that I would benefit spiritually from the rather beautiful lyrics, lent me a copy of Leonard’s OLD IDEAS, an album of what I suspect to be gospel songs. I say ‘suspect’ and ‘songs’ as Leonard doesn’t do any actual singing on the album. This is a work that celebrates a bloke talking, slowly, in a very deep voice - on every track. I think these may well turn out to be songs as, when he takes a breather for a bit of oxygen and a sit down, probably due to his impossible age, some very talented ladies pop up and take over, delivering very melodic strains.

You may well ask, “Why did you want to listen to this in the first place? Everyone knows that Leonard Cohen is Music to Slit Your Wrists By.” - as Damon Runyon would say, “A story goes with this.”

Once again I must refer you back to me not really paying attention to a song’s words. Paul is a Technoslave. He has a phone that seems to do everything from Making Tea to Mowing the Lawn. In its array of fabulous talents, it will play music as capably as any modern hi-fi system, while taking up the space of a matchbox - and he played me a bit of a song. The words “Show me the place you want your slave to go...”caught my attention. They were misheard. I thought it was “Show me the place you want my face to go...” See? I was tricked - sold a pup. I plead misrepresentation.

And so I was fooled into listening to this on my last journey to Essex; two hours of Leonard Cohen talking his way through a catalogue of gospel songs. However, the main thing I noticed also came up at the Jubilee Concert. Leonard seemed to be singing/speaking a lot lower than I remember from 150 years ago when I first heard him. I think this is a trick employed by ageing pop stars who can’t hit the notes any longer. Elton did the same when singing to the Queen. He was definitely a couple of keys lower than I was used to hearing, giving his voice a different timbre altogether. Anyone else notice this?

This though, is just a small aside relating to the concert. My main point is that old blokes; Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Sir Cliff, should realise that their voices are not up to the demands of a live performance any more. At first I thought it was just poor sound engineering, or, in Cheryl’s case, lack of talent in her duet with Gary Barlow, but the bum notes were far too frequent from people you remember as being able to sing. I wonder if they’ll ‘fix’ that on the video?

Then, Macca, what an OLD MAN! Did you see his face when he was standing behind Prince Charles at the end? He looked like Private Godfrey in that episode of Dad’s army when they were threatened with having to expel the older members as they were considered too old by the Army High Command. In that episode, Private Godfrey’s face looked alarming as he used make-up (to disastrous effect), to try and look younger. Macca looked just like him - an old man looking like an old man. Someone should tell these people that a) their voices are no longer what they were so they shouldn’t do live performances anymore, and b) they should learn to grow old gracefully, perhaps consider retirement. Although, they’ve been around for so long, perhaps they have no real life so cling with desperation to the one thing that they know - well beyond their shelf life?

Then, what about that awfully RUDE interruption by Lenny Henry? He asks the ever-chirpy, ever-charming, everlasting, people’s favourite, Rolf Harris. to help out and fill in a bit, then interrupts him just as he gets to the tear-jerking part of Two Little Boys. It was the last verse for Goodness Sake! What would it have mattered if Rolf had gone on for one more minute and finished the song to tumultuous applause? I know the Queen was supposed to light the last bonfire at 10:49 but would one more minute really have been such a catastrophe? As the crowd was singing along, they must have been miffed too. That was a silly, rude decision. I’d like to hear the justification for showing such insensitivity and bad manners via a worldwide TV broadcast. The timetable is all-powerful. Flexibility, judgement - and good manners - apparently count for naught.

Lastly, the comedians that did the compering were awful weren’t they? Normally, I am a fan of Rob Brydon, Jimmy Carr, Lee Mack and Miranda Hart but they were v. poor weren’t they? Stilted, self-conscious and trying too hard to be over-familiar with the Royals. How embarrassing for them to realise that until Peter Kay came on, the has-been Lenny Henry was the funniest comedian there.

While I am not a monarchist nor a republican, having no view in either direction, I was hugely impressed by the Queen’s dignity, tolerance and commitment to what must have been a draining and probably not too enjoyable weekend for an 86 year-old - three or four hours on a boat in the cold and rain - and then a rock concert the next day! What clown thought this would be fun for her? Must have been someone settling an old score. Secondly, the public euphoria, which, despite being conveyed only by TV, was tangible, infectious and best of all - genuine. In a world where appearances and pretext dominate daily life, this last aspect was the most moving.

And there we have my thoughts from all this time to think. If you find it flawed in any aspect, by all means let me know by phone, letter or mail, or face-to-face if we meet, but don’t expect it to rest there. I relish a good debate. You may find many more thoughts that have not yet been aired. For those of you who volunteered for the Ventarant forum - I’m still trying to find out how to get it started. There is a URL but no one apart from Mike Mason seems to have joined. I will persevere.