The Word

We value your business

2010-07-04T14:38:00.006+01:00

Click.

“Hello and welcome. You are through to RM Design. Let me assure you that your call is important to us. In a moment you will hear a list of options. This helps us deal with your enquiry as quickly as possible. May we remind you that all calls are recorded for legal reasons and training porpoises.

“Press one to hear a list of options that is half way through but doesn’t go back to the beginning.

“Press two to repeat the list from half way through and still doesn’t go back to the beginning.

“Press three for the first half of the list only.

“Press four for a fresh list of options when you finally realise that none of the options in either half of the original list is what you want.

“Press five for customer services (please leave your name, registered customer number, National Insurance number, hospital number, and two forms of identification – passport, driving licence or utility bills. We will respond within 28 working days.)

“Press six for the opportunity to record a message to help us improve our services to you. Don’t forget to use your twenty-five digit PIN number you will have received in the post but threw away without realising what it was.

“Press seven to receive a new PIN number in the post. Allow 28 working days.

“Press eight to record a suicide note

“Press nine to listen back to your suicide note

“Press ten to delete and re-record your suicide note

“Press eleven to repeat this list of options.

“Press twelve for the operator (not available during working hours)

“Please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions section on our website on www.rmdesign.co.uk for the answers to questions you will never ask.

“Thank you for phoning RM Design. Remember, we value your business.”

Click.

© Roger Murphy 2010

The right words

2010-04-30T14:22:00.001+01:00

We all know when the right words are found. They fit. They need no addition, no adornment, they just say it all.

Two years ago, a 16-year old, Alexandros Giroropoulos, was shot by the Athens police. The exact circumstances are the subject of a case that continues, but this was the spark that ignited a powder keg filled with resentment at crippling economic conditions, financial scandals, unpopular pension and education reforms, and a general strike. The Greeks took to the streets and battles raged in cities up and down the land.

A peculiarity of Greek law meant that the police are not allowed onto university campuses, so, under assault, the rioters in Athens had let it be known that they would regroup on the University library, a solid building. Professors and librarians, who had got wind of this at the last moment, and fearing the loss of incalculable treasures, locked the doors and barricaded the building, breaking up the furniture to do so, and grabbing lamps and chair legs to repel boarders. Thwarted, the rioters threw Molotov cocktails in at the windows and tried to break in. Some forced their way into the entrance hall, and a pitched battle began with white-haired, overweight bespectacled professors struggling in hand-to-hand combat with angry rioters. But suddenly, like a will o’ the wisp, the rioters retreated and moved off, leaving a lot of charred doors, smoke, smashed windows and broken white heads behind them. Luckily, with the collection being on the upper floors, none of the treasures were damaged. But it had been a close run thing.

One professsor, smeared with ash and distraught at the near disaster, was filmed by a TV crew with a pail of water still in his hand, trying to catch his breath. He was asked a question. He looked into the distance and shook his head, trying to control his anger and was at first unable to speak. Then, reaching into his memory, he found something.

“Two thousand years ago, we had a philosopher called Isocrates,” he said “who warned us of this moment.”

He turned to face the film camera and wagged his finger at it, and that night the citizens of Athens saw him on television framed by fire and smoke.

“ ‘Our democracy is destroying itself, because it abused the right to freedom and equality, because it taught people to consider impudence as a right, illegality as freedom, rudeness as equality and anarchy as happiness.’ ”

He left it at that, and went back to his work putting out smouldering fires.

It was quoted around the world, and one Greek daily newspaper cleared the front page and used the quote in isolation.

They may have been two thousand years old, but they were the right words.

You ain't seen (or heard) nothing yet

2010-04-21T10:27:00.000+01:00

Eyjafjallajoekull is a name to conjure with. It’s a name I like. Katla is also a nice name. Warm. Friendly.

These are the names of two of Iceland’s largest volcanoes and it is the smaller of the two, Eyjafjallajoekull, which is currently causing a lot of trouble all over Europe. But it is as nothing compared to the trouble that will happen when Katla blows its top, which it usually does when the warm-up act of Eyjafjallajoekull finishes. When that happens, we will all need to take to our cellars, stock up on rats and start licking the condensation off pipes to slake our raging thirst. Katla will be disruptive in a permanent and thoroughly effective way. It won’t toy with you like Eyjafjallajoekull.

It will start with a huge explosion below the glacier that sits on top of the volcano. This explosion will be loud, if ‘loud’ is a strong enough word. Possibly the loudest sound ever heard on earth was emitted by Krakatoa in 1883. It was certainly much louder than the loudest nuclear explosion, and was heard 3,000 miles away, with people up to 200 miles distant being struck instantly deaf. There is, therefore, a fair chance that we will get to hear Katla above the roar of party political broadcasts. The crater will crack open, the glacier will fall into the billions of tons of lava and a crazy mixture of lava, ice, steam, ash, gas and molten rock will pour out down towards the sea and up towards the stratosphere. This will cause trouble. Billions of cubic tons of lava will make the sea boil, surge and swell across the North Atlantic. Billions of cubic tons of ash, molten rock and quintillions of tons of volcanic gases will make a sizeable mess of the landscape, seascape and skyscape. Nothing will fly over Europe. Not even birds. Insects? Forget it. We will be gassed in our cellars to which we will have retreated after the opening salvo. Over the next few months, we will be buried under about 100 metres of volcanic ash.

We have one chance. Wind direction. Although the prevailing winds will probably take it to us, now and again, the circulation of winds will head everything West, that is, towards the US and Canada. Obviously if the eruption happens while the winds are westerly that would be fine. We’d be laughing. Until you remember that there’s always Etna, Vesuvius and Stromboli to our East.

Next week:
Earthquakes in New Malden +++Security against roaming gangs of looters +++How to panic-buy landmines.

Branding: make it catchy

2010-01-07T13:05:00.002Z

It is interesting to note that Offa, King of Mercia from 757-796 is still making a bit of a splash in our supermarkets. There are lessons to learn. Everywhere you look, the shelves declaim: “Special Offer” – which obviously employs the modern spelling of his name. They knew a thing or two about PR and branding in those far-off days, always looking to make things distinctive and memorable. Their key insight, developed over hundreds of years, was to use throwaway parts of speech as names. It lends a surprising familiarity. Offa’s dad, for example, was Thingfrith, a name that rings with clarity and decisiveness down the years. One can almost hear his mother calling: “Thingfrith! Put down that axe and come to your dinner at once.” He would, inevitably, have been known to his pals at school as Thing, and they may have given him merry hell for it, but it seems to have done him little harm. On second thoughts, though, calling his son ‘Offer’ might perhaps suggest a brooding and resentful nature. It’s hard to say.

What may have made things worse for Thingfrith is that he had a couple of alternative names, presumably because the Thingfrith thing didn’t stick in everyone’s mind. He seems to have been known also as both Dingfert (now Dingbat) and Thumfried. This latter clearly comes from his school days and suggests an incident not unlike Alfred’s burning of the cakes, only more painful.

Thingfrith (or Thumfried) was himself from a long line of well-named Kings. His ancestor Eowa (“Here you are”) ruled over the midland people called the Hwicce (which modern branding experts should note is so good they named it once). “Here you are” has the distinction of being the only King in British History to have died in two battles which perhaps explains the undisguised note of surprise in his name.

The Venerable Bede, local news correspondent with The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and founder of the National Union of Journalists, on whose information much of the above depends, has himself a name that excites the imagination. It could so easily have been John Smith, but The Venerable Bede is obviously catchier and more memorable. He may also have been small, round and highly strung. Typical journalist.

But the lesson from history is clear: when it comes to names, make it catchy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offa_of_Mercia

© Roger Murphy 2010. All rights reserved.

My ten New Year’s resolutions

2009-12-31T18:13:00.004Z

1) Resolve more resolutely
2) Resolve to revolve
3) Resolve to devolve
4) Dissolve more resolutely
5) Devolve more resolutely
6) Revolve more dissolutely
7) Dissolve more revolutely
8) Revoluse more dissolve...
9) Okay. Just one last glass.
10)

I hope that's clear

2009-12-01T13:18:00.001Z

I have an idea on the runway which will be a paradigm shift in the way we communicate. I need to tell you about it going forward. It will be a sea change, a win-win strategy empowerment-wise. Let me clue you. It’s sliced modularity.

Let’s not drink the Kool-Aid on this one. Eyeball the event horizon and get granular. My idea is to turn it all up-side down. No. Stay with me. I want to be totally open kimono on this.

It’s simple. We do some real-time customer-centric turkey basting here. We tell it like it is. We don’t do what they expect. It’s total immersion. Instead of dealing with things holistically, let’s deal with them partially. Instead of being proactive, let’s be reactive. It’s totally new. No-one’s thought of it before. It’s so next generation it’s got to be mission critical to hit the ground running and leverage the synergies.

At the end of the day, it’s all bandwidth. The ROI will be incredible and we can really grow the business. Of course we would have to silo the idea to make it pop with value-added. But it’s not herding cats. With a little bit of BPO or KPO, we can mindshare on this. Back-end netiquette can design pattern the way forward. Collaboration can convergence download the real-time metrics. You just have to think outside the box. Virtualization vapourware brings home the low hanging fruit. Logistically speaking.

Ballpark? It’s Best of Breed.

©Roger Murphy 2009. All rights reserved.

God's Rioja?

2009-05-07T19:31:00.002+01:00

Service is the basic form of communication. As children we are taught to serve. Everything from ladies first to putting yourself last in a list. But this has changed. Now we have to queue up in the rain for the privilege of getting our own money from a hole in a wall, and we are told that service has never been better. We squeeze into our local Tesco, fight our way around, queue for half an hour and when we get home much the worse for wear, we read the story that they have just won an award for service excellence.

We are gullible. We believe what we are told, despite the evidence of our own experience. People complain about the gullibility of the religious, but I, for one, would much rather believe in God, than the modern deity, Tesco.

We have made Gods of our buying. The Holy Ghost has become The Wholemeal Toast. The Son of Man, a Pound of Ham. The Holy Trinity’s three persons in one has been out-done by Two for One, Four for a Fiver. Just taste the value!

The divine Tesco doesn’t give a damn for me but rather likes my money. I feel it would be preferable to have a deity that didn’t give a damn for my money, but rather liked me. And I would rather worship in a Cathedral than the modern equivalent – today’s out-of-town hypermarket. These are buildings so vast that Zeppelins would be lost in them.

“Zeppelins? Aisle 390, sir. Watch out for our special on all dirigibles.”

Assistants move like cowled monks among the deep freeze units. Endless queues forming at the few operating checkouts, the confessionals de nos jours, which calculate, enumerate, and measure the cost of our digested sins. We shuffle forward reading the litanies on our packets: ‘…of which sugars, 3.5 grams. emulsifiers, E470, salt, water. Amen.’

And so it was with triumph that I walked away from Tesco Metropolitan Cathedral, New Malden, the other day having spotted an error in their pricing. Four bottles of superb (and usually very expensive) Rioja for £5. I snaffled them and headed for the checkout, where, after I had waited 25 minutes for service, I had the privilege of paying.

I conveyed my wine safely home, but, after the minor frisson of triumph had passed, I felt unclean for I had worshipped at the altar of a God in which I didn’t believe.

I can, however, report that he does produce some excellent Rioja.

A piece of the action

2009-05-05T14:41:00.002+01:00

I have decided to take over.

With the financial world going mad (for example, I now seem to be the sole owner of The Royal Bank of Scotland), I have decided to scare the government by declaring a redundancy package that guarantees me £1 squillion, unless my toxic assets are quantitively eased and forthwith. Obviously, they will cave in as soon as they realise I know what I am talking about.

I once convinced my bank manager to give me a vast overdraft at next to no interest by firmly using a phrase I learned from a P.G. Wodehouse book. In it, the impecunious main character is touching a rich friend for a substantial loan. “Credit is the life-blood of commerce,” he reasons, “without which, the marts of trade lack elasticity.”

I remember the bank manager looking at me with what I took to be reverence, but might, I now realise, have been pity. Either out of fear or wisdom he signed off the rhino immediately.

As the heads of world governments gathered in London the other week to posture and bluster I sensed that these bank managers of the world’s economy have no more idea than my b.m. of what is afoot. Some, half admitting it, say that the situation is new.

But it is they who have created a financial world in which there are no fixed points, where all financial definition became fluid. Concepts that were once fixed to a defined quantity or essence for two or three hundred years, now roam around the place stretching their muscles and looking dazed. It’s as if your living room furniture had suddenly learned to waltz. Too late, the bank managers are realising that once exposed to the joys of free movement fiscal entities will not voluntarily chain themselves back to the oars. As the World War One song put it about soldiers exposed to the delights of the city: “How you gonna keep them down on the farm, After they’ve seen Paree?”.

But to come back to the beginning. I have decided to take over. Capitalism has clearly run its course. What we need is something to replace it. The following are my proposals – a simple Five Year Plan.

1) Year One. Introduce democracy. It has not been tried before. The people will vote legislation directly, using small voting computers the size of a remote control, releasing politicians from the necessity of fiddling their expenses and telling us that honesty in public life is critical.
2) Year Two. Build tumbrils and plenty of them. I don’t know why, it just seems prudent.
3) Year Three. Spangles will be reintroduced, and Opal Fruits will have their name restored.
4) Year Four. Those in favour of capital punishment will be guillotined. I knew we’d need those tumbrils.
5) Year Five. I finally succumb to pleas from many notable figures in the community to emerge from my private life in New Malden where I tend goats. My refusal to accept the title His Majesty, Roger, the Lord New Malden and a tax free pension for life of an undisclosed sum, is drowned out in a tumult of praise. Although much against so many of my principals, I am forced to accept the generous will of the people who wish to express their profound gratitude. A place of honour is prepared for me in the Pantheon. I die of a surfeit of Spangles, which are consequently outlawed, though some feel sure it was a conspiracy among Opal Fruits. Posthumously I am decorated with the Garter and made a Knight of the Goat. I am remembered with love and affection for minutes by a flock in New Malden. In time my legacy is reviewed by historians who agree that my single greatest achievement was the resurrection of the tumbril industry.

Slubberdegullions

2009-02-26T15:21:00.003Z

It is sad that the latest Internet sensation is a recording of a film actor, supposedly called Christian Bale, though I think that might be an assumed name, swearing a lot at someone who distracted him and spoiled his concentration during a take. What marks it out is its lack of imagination. It relies almost exclusively on one word that is repeated ad nauseam. That such tedium passes for something remarkable these days is disappointing.

This is weak, mealy-mouthed abuse – sub-standard vitriol. If you are going to insult someone, it should be done with style. The vocabulary should be stretched, the syntactical muscles flexed. How much better if Bale had accused the object of his wrath of being…

"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."

This would have had the added interest of novelty – an actor quoting Shakespeare. This from King Lear II.2. Even just a couple of bits would have been fine. “You, sir, are an eater of broken meats,” would do. Or, perhaps, the beautifully measured, “You are a one-trunk-inheriting slave.”

This matter came up as a subject when I used the word ‘slubberdegullion’ to describe someone whom I felt would benefit from some gentle but reproving encouragement. No-one was more surprised than myself when I used it and later, when looking up the word, I came across a new resource that I warmly recommend.

I will say no more about it, since the author and owner of the resource, Michael Quinion says it all much better himself. It is to be found here: http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm

By looking up ‘slubberdegullion’ in this work, I found a section on invective that quotes the following from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Quinion says that it ‘draws heavily on vocabulary used in Scotland in his time’(1653)

“ The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown household loaf.”

Now this is majesterial stuff, and includes some of the ripest invective I have read in a long time.

This paragraph should become standard reading for every child in the land and each should be required to memorise it and reproduce it word-perfectly on demand. Imagine the whole of Year Five, for example, reeling this off in unison to visiting dignitaries from the Department for Education, or at prize giving or an end-of-term concert, perhaps harmonised by a barbershop ensemble for the delectation of parents and grandparents.

There is much more to learn from this paragraph than any amount of time spent drafting a letter of complaint to a supermarket, or doing coursework on how to write your CV. Study of this paragraph is of everyday value, enriches discourse, broadens the vocabulary in a very practical manner, and, as a result, stimulates the phagocytes. A prize should be awarded for the child that can most effectively reproduce its effect through imitation – The Rabelais Prize. This would, almost at one go, solve the problem of our disaffected, illiterate and unimaginative youth. A study of the derivation of ‘flutch calf-lollies’ for example, will take the class to an understanding of agricultural and farming methods of the seventeenth century. An etymological exploration of ‘scurvy sneaksbies’ would excite the imagination, develop medical knowledge, introduce a variety of philosophical conceits, and probe the moral law. What could be better?

All this may require a small adjustment to the Education Act, so I therefore urge you to write to your Members of Parliament immediately insisting upon this significant step forward in the education of our children. They will at last, poor lambs, matriculate with a vocabulary that will equip them for modern life and be able properly to inveigh and rail.

You know it makes sense.

The scissors is mitre than the PM

2008-06-25T12:29:00.006+01:00

I’ve never paid too much attention to Archbishops, and I am pleased to say that they have, in large measure, reciprocated. But it is hard to ignore some of them, notably Dr. John Sentamu, The Archbishop of York.

Of the current crop, he is the man who, given the time, the circumstances and a Nebucadnezzar of red, I would be happiest to sup with. At least on the evidence of his PR.

He is the sort of chap who, when you are watching TV, pops up when you least expect it and steals the show. I saw him the other week on the Andrew Marr political programme, execute a perfect paper and scissors routine on his own dog-collar. It was as if some hidden hand had suddenly switched over to Blue Peter, were it not for the fact that as he chopped he gave short shrift to the President of Zimbabwe. Each snip was a cut to the gizzard of Fat Bob. One wanted to stand and cheer. And would have done so, were it not for the plate of cheese and pickle sandwiches delicately balanced on the knee and the pint of Genuine Stunning in the right hand poised to gulp.

It may have seemed an empty gesture (the dog-collar scissoring that is) but while everyone will remember the scissors of Dr John Sentamu, no-one will remember the Prime Minister’s calls for action from the international community. Sentamu is a natural PR man and with this simple act secured more column inches and airtime for his views on Fat Bob than half a dozen Prime Ministerial announcements.

Within days of being enthroned, the Archbishop had erected a tent inside York Minster and had his head shaved. He slept rough for a week, lead prayer every hour for seven days and fasted throughout. He highlighted the plight of people caught up in the Middle East conflict and declared it was an act of public witness to encourage peace. Some clearly thought he was barmy but he conducted scores of TV and Radio interviews and was reported around the world. No fool he.

Dr John Sentamu is the sort of Archbishop we have not seen before – an Archbishop who believes in action and knows how to get the press on his side. This alone makes him formidable.

I was interested to note in a BBC TV interview at the time of the tenting that he was quick to acknowledge that he would be sleeping on his mum’s knitted mat and showed the journalist his torch and reading matter – a Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament.

But it is not his learning, but rather his energy, inventiveness, and commitment that one responds to. Daily one expects him to turn up on other TV shows. Perhaps Britain’s Got Talent on which one would not be surprised to see him give us a racy rendition of Land of Hope and Glory on the spoons while gargling The Peer Gynt Suite through a gazoo, and hinting at the glories of paradise by semaphore.

Of course, one applauds such exploits, or, as one is at home with another glass of real ale for company and a further small plate of cheese and pickle sandwiches, one guffaws, spraying the place with crumbs and small pieces of vegetable matter which show astonishing aerodynamic abilities and fly to the end of the room, well beyond the reach of anyone sitting in an armchair watching television. But he made me want to get up and do something about it. You see what I mean? John Sentamu is the Pied Piper of both Archbishops and those who sit watching Archbishops on television guffawing through cheese and pickle sandwiches.

He is obviously a PR man’s dream. He would be the sort of client who, in a meeting with advisers to discuss what could be done to publicise the plight of latterday boat people setting themselves adrift to float to a new life in a happier land, would blurt out: “Hows about I go over Niagara in a barrel? If we can get a couple of boat people to fish me out at the other end and give me artificial resuscitation would that be good?”

Or, who, hearing of the trouble in Darfur, would say: “Let’s cut to the chase. Why don’t I dress up as a Janjaweed – all Kalashnikovs and machetes on horseback – and charge into Westminster Hall? We can highlight security deficiencies at the same time as raising the profile of the downtrodden in the Sudan. In fact, let’s do it now.” At which he would storm out of the room and be half way into the saddle before his advisers could claw him back and persuade him that perhaps a more considered and diplomatic approach would be more efficacious, and may not result in him being shot by security men. But the AB of Y is not a man for diplomatic approaches. When things have gone too far, he leaps into action. As the mortgage market takes a nosedive, I daily expect to see him chained to the satellite dish on top of a tower block, calling for a more compassionate approach to those who are losing their houses. As food prices climb, I know I will see him soon astride a rotavator, ploughing his own allotment, his toothy grin on every front page smiling through a forest of leeks. Dig for Victory! As energy prices sky-rocket, how long before he switches off all the lights in York Minster by throwing a big red switch and lights a ceremonial candle to echo what pensioners up and down the land have to do every evening. All filmed by the nation’s press.

Of course, there are those who think he is just a crude self-publicist, and certainly his omni-presence means he is taking a strong lead from his ultimate boss. But he always has a good cause and he has the good sense to be first. I hope other Archbishops are not inclined to follow suit. Leave the field to the man who knows how to do it, is my advice. It would be a pity if the waterfalls of the New World were suddenly chock-a-block with Archbishops in barrels.

In October 2007, Dr Sentamu was awarded the title Yorkshireman of the Year by the Black Sheep Brewery. In his speech he expatiated on the name of the brewery and turned a swift pastoral lesson, then drew the attention of the audience to the little-known African-Yorkshire DNA connection. ‘Perhaps my parents had this in mind,’ he said, ‘when they gave me, as one of my Christian names, the name Mugabi, (John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu). If you spell Mugabi backwards it is I-ba-gum.”

He reminds me a bit of the prelates whom one encountered in G.A. Henty books, who robbed the obviously evil Guy de Brotignan with a merry laugh and redistributed the wealth among the poor, drank ale by the flagon and fought with anyone who crossed them – a sort of Friar Tuck de nos jours but without the paunch. Swashbuckling is the word I am searching for.

You might be out for a casual sky-dive one day, and who will come whizzing past you, clad in red leather, but the Archbishop of York, bestowing an apostolic blessing as he plummets to earth. And, of course, who does he choose to do his stunt with? Why, the Red Devils of course. Does he miss a trick? Not often.

The story behind the story tells us still more about the man. He had attended a charity dinner and a Yorkshire businessman seizing his chance challenged Dr Sentamu to make the jump with him. The cause? To raise money for the Afghanistan Trust – who support soldiers and their families who had been wounded or killed on duty in Afghanistan. Did he hesitate? Not our man. They aimed to raise £50,000. With money still to come in, they have so far netted £75,000.

They tell me that Archbishops of York often go on to Canterbury. I, for one, can’t wait.

Interlude – The impossible question

2008-05-16T12:03:00.007+01:00

Young men, starting out in life, often ask me “How can I become Geoffrye Chaucer?”

Since one does not wish to disappoint young men, it is a question replete with difficulty, and this is its great strength.

In my day, schooling was fundamentally a battle of wits. The great thing was to find the impossible question. Skilfully deployed this would bamboozle a teacher, confusing them long enough to make them forget to give you homework. Some teachers would fall for it every time. We loved them for their weakness, but, with the ruthlessness of the young, we gave them merry hell none the less.

A variant was to find an impossible answer to any question a teacher might ask. The aim – a similar delay until the bell rang. Soft teachers, like Mr White, would try to answer your question and get themselves tied in knots. Hard teachers, like Mr Gwynn, just shouted: “Cease your jabbering Murphy, and go to your next class.” It will be seen from this that while Mr White was putty in our hands, Mr Gwynn was a stranger to the milk of human kindness. It curdled as he hove into view. It was widely believed among the boys that he ate barbed wire, wore sandpaper next the skin and conducted black masses by the light of the full moon, but we never dared ask him if it was true. “Are you a double-headed axe murderer, Mr Gwynn?” was the sort of innocent enquiry which, had it been addressed to Mr White would have been taken as evidence of the spirit of enquiry that he wanted so much to encourage in the young mind before him. He would have delighted in trying to answer it. With Mr Gwynn it would just result in pain. At least six bouts of it.

Speaking of which…. My gas engineer (the guy who makes sure we are not about to be blown sky high by our central heating, although we may be by the gas bill) told me today that he had attended Rutlish school.

Now he is a splendid gas engineer. Quite the best the area has to offer. No-one can hold a candle to him. Not if they want to remain alive. He is efficient with a spanner, masterly with anything copper and a huge conversationalist. Within five minutes of arriving I knew more about his neighbour’s dog than any man alive including his neighbour. Or his dog. Conversation, for my gas engineer, is the staff of life and he leans on it fully and well. He reminds me of the sort of farmer, beloved of cartoonists, who stick their thumbs into their braces and lean against the wind to ask after your bunions, while the cows scatter in all directions behind his genial and unshaven smile.

Now this revelation that he had attended Rutlish school caught me by surprise. We used to thrash them regularly at rugby and cricket, so I was surprised that anyone would admit to going there, especially since their most famous alumnus was one John Major (one time Prime Minister of the UK). Not the sort of thing one would wish to boast about.

He told me a tale that began with the school uniform of the day – the boys wore boaters in the summer – and went on to reveal that he had been cruelly and unjustly punished over some minor transgression of the school rules. What made my eyes water was the punishment meted out. The boys (there were ten involved) were marched up onto the stage at morning assembly the next day and ‘given the slipper’ in front of the whole school. It was administered on the traditional gluteal area.

There will be those of you who will have no idea what that means, and leaving it unexplained will perhaps make you think it is something worse than it is, but suffice it to say that this ritual punishment involved pain and humiliation in equal measure. Actually, let my correct myself. It involved pain and humiliation in hugely unequal measure. For as my gas engineer told the tale, I could hear the traces of the humiliation experienced forty years earlier, still rise in his gorge.

But… to come back to the impossible question…

Our playground variations of these question and answer tricks were imaginative and played wonderfully with the language.

“What’s the difference between a duck?” we would ask each other.
“One of its legs is both the same,” we would correctly respond.

Flann O’Brien would have approved. It is a splendid bit of near sense combined with verbal surprise which still comes in handy in awkward social situations of which there are so many. I have had to deploy it several times, notably on finding myself at the front of a queue at the railway station, but without my change quite ready because I had been day-dreaming or trying to remember a fugitive quatrain, which is not the same thing at all. Asking the duck question through the grill, gives you time. They presume they have misheard and ask you to repeat what you said, by which time you have found a crumpled tenner in the depths of your pocket.

I would have thought that things had changed at school these days, but a teacher recently told me that this skill is fully alive in the new generation. He tells me of a fellow teacher who asked a pupil about her music coursework: “Jane, did you write the lyrics of your song or did someone else?” To which the girl replied: “I don’t know.” A splendidly impossible answer. But it was topped the next minute when the teacher felt she had to offer some reassurance to extract the facts: “It’s all right, Jane, it doesn’t really matter, but did you or didn’t you write the words?” To which the girl replied. “Yes.”

Check mate in two. One imagines the hard-pressed teacher holding on to the corridor walls until, gaining the safety of the staff room, a swift restorative could be administered.

Hearing this tale reawakened my faith in the young generation who have clearly got some good moves. In fact it has made me realise that everything we hear about them is a confidence trick of the highest order. They are supposed to be thick, illiterate, innumerate, moronic, ignorant, paralysed by computer games and stuffed with junk food. But they are playing us for fools. In fact they are bright, incredibly clever, funny and getting on for semi-literate by exam time.

And exam time is upon us. Upon them, actually. And among them is my son. I wish him and all his schoolmates the best of luck. If cornered by a difficult question I advise them to throw up their hands and ask the invigilator “Is it half past shovel-spade sir?”

It will give them time.

© Roger Murphy 2008

Writing 3: purée of bat guano

2008-05-15T14:27:00.004+01:00

Time was, writers could assume things. We assumed readers knew enough basic English, Mathematics, History and Science to get by. We assumed they were familiar with the central, basic literature of the culture. They would catch all the references we made, so we felt free to make them. After all, we were all from broadly the same educational background. They knew what we knew.

We cannot write like that any more. Not if we want to communicate. We cannot make the assumptions of old.

This is no tedious complaint about falling standards of education, or changes in society, it’s too late for that. As a writer, I just want to be sure that, given the standards of education, I can still be in touch with the audience. And I can’t. If I want to communicate, I have to change my references, or lose them altogether.

For example, here in the UK we can still assume, just, that most people will know about The Second World War and the Holocaust, but I think it may be different in the US. If you are writing for a worldwide audience, which increasingly we are, you have to explain.

Increasingly, people these days learn about history from Dan Brown novels and video games, but only if there is no sport on TV. And what they read and see is coloured by their own experience, not the experience of previous generations.

No-one spends time chatting with their grandma over the tea and biscuits any more. No-one ever sifts through the fading monochromes with Uncle Jim. The conversational cup has been replaced with children’s television or a video game of gut-spewing violence. Let’s face it, you don’t get your drug-money together by shooting the breeze with Grandad. Life is a bitch, and you’d better get used to it.

Harlan Ellison, the American writer, tells his experience of addressing a hall of university students in New York.

“In the course of talking I mentioned Dachau,” he says. “I can’t even remember what the context was, but I mentioned it. After a moment a woman about 21 years old, raises her hand.”

“I can usually catch most of your references,” she says, “but who was that you were talking about before?” she asked.

“Sorry? Who?” asked Ellison unable to remember what he had said.

“Dachau.” she said.

“Dachau?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“ Yea,” she said. “Who is that?”

Ellison, telling this story, gives his own commentary.

“What this points to,” he says, “is a rampant ignorance. A failure to maintain any ties with our past, a dissolution of our roots, a disregard for tradition.”

Later on he says that he finds that students are increasingly ignorant. “Not only don’t they know a damn thing, they are arrogant about not knowing a damn thing. Their brains have been turned to purée of bat guano by eating McDonald’s toadburgers and watching too much television.”

Of course, Ellison is known for expressing himself colourfully, and thank heavens he does. The truths he points to, however, are clear enough: we have failed to maintain any ties with our past.

But which of us has seriously struggled with this and changed our writing style to suit our changing audience? Which of us has taken to never mentioning things our audience will probably have never heard of (most stuff) – thus pandering to their ignorance – but maintaining lines of communication? This is what is required of us more and more.

The tail-spin destination of all this is to crash on the lowest common denominator of writing, the cardboard style (see Writing 2: cut out cardboard). The next is achieving a smooth, even texture with no variety of tone, syntax or meaning at all – the writing equivalent of babyfood, only less nutritious. Wet cardboard if you like, pulped for easy digestion.

Some of you, though, will refuse to write cardboard out of respect for your reader, whom you suspect may yet be capable of thought, or may wish to learn. Some of you will refuse to serve up pap to adults. Some of you will chose a risky written life full of variety and spice, hoping that people will enjoy the ride, risking that they won’t, and settling in for the long refusal to compromise with mediocrity.

You will become like an old war veteran who refuses to move out of his crumbling terrace house thereby causing a huge problem for developers who wish to put up newer, brighter, better designed and more efficient slums.

One or two of you will know, like that veteran, that the only battles worth fighting are the ones that are lost already. You alone can comfort yourselves with the thought that although you may be increasingly distanced from your reader, and the bulldozers are revving at your gate, you will never be purée of bat guano. You would die first.

© Roger Murphy 2008

Writing 2: cut out cardboard

2008-05-15T14:25:00.004+01:00

Variety, the cliché runs, is the spice of life. We recognise this truth in all aspects of our lives – even marriage, where it should be interpreted with care. But there is one area where we limit its truth and seem happy to provide an unvarying and unspiced diet – writing.

I have already written (see Writing 1: the challenge to management) about a recent journey into the heart of darkness – the reading of fifteen articles from senior management – a cross-section of British industry. I have complained about management’s failures in this, but I am worried about the writing.

There was no spice, no variety in the writing of these pieces. After reading them, I felt as if I had just eaten a huge meal of fifteen courses, each of the finest cardboard. Indigestible is the word I am searching for.

A big problem is style. And by style, I am including the approach to an article – the chosen form of the piece as well as the tone of voice.

More than anything, indigestion was caused by an identical approach being taken to each piece – a few hundred words from the desk of the top geezer. No interviews. No question and answer. No oblique angles. No background. Often, barely an introduction. Just straight in to the dull stuff. A suit speaks.

Good writers consider the reader first. The reader needs variety. But these days, when so many are cowed with fear, variety implies the out of the ordinary, which carries with it the risk of rejection. I am sure that writers do sometimes come up with ideas for approaching the same old articles in a new way, but they have been knocked-back so often that they have given up trying. They have settled for the safe, for the bland, for cardboard.

Editors should push for variety from their writers. A piece that is correct but dull is not good enough. They should insist upon enjoying it. But so much damage has been done, that most writers have one style now, because they only ever need one. Nothing more is required of them.

Reading those articles was like listening to a Mozart Opera where all the notes had been changed to one note, all the colour coalesced into one hue. Why do we imagine that we can remove all variety from writing and escape identical results?

That’s what was missing from these publications, lifeblood. All the variety that writing should bring with it, all the music, was lost. It was a dispiriting realisation. I had been reading bloodless cardboard.

© Roger Murphy 2008

Writing 1: the challenge to management

2008-05-15T14:19:00.005+01:00

I was angry at first, then depressed, but now I’m back in the fight.

I had to research various company journals this week, looking for interviews with senior managers. I wanted to see what others had done, hoping for some inspiration. After an hour, I was angry. What marked these pieces out for special concern was their lack of original thinking, or, indeed, any discernible thinking at all. And woe to the cynic who says I was looking for originality in the wrong place.

The articles I read were of the most profound dullness – paragraph after paragraph of platitudes, comparative figures and pious hopes. I wondered how they had come to be published. The answer was that these pieces contained the thoughts of the Gods. They had spoken from on high. So they must be published. That, or something like it, seemed to be the reasoning.

Responsibility for these abominations lies in two places. Firstly it lies with editors. The question that should precede the commissioning or publishing of each and every article is: is this good enough to publish? Will this interest people? If the answer is ‘no’, it should not see the light of day.

This is true even of words written by the Chief Executive himself. He has no right to bore his readers, and not only because they may be his workforce. As a communicator it is your job to warn him that he may lose people, and urge him to say something that will be meaningful. You may be the only person in the organisation who can do this knowledgeably, and can back it up with cogent argument.

If you are afraid to do this you are in the wrong job. Editors are hired, inter alia, to warn, to see the problems and solve them. Just be ready to defend your point of view.

Articles like the offending pieces I read, are often the result of lazy briefings and result in what most in-house magazines and intranets are full of – words that no-one wants to read. “It’s time we did that article on the figures, I’ll send an e-mail to the finance man and tell him we need 1000 words.” Fundamentally this is an insult to the readers.

But though editorial laziness can be to blame, I reserve my chief anger for managers. That is, those managers who have still to learn that emitting sound is not the same as talking sense. The challenge for management is to say things that are worth listening to. Remember that no matter how good at alchemy your communications team is, they cannot produce gold from dross.

I have seen managements eventually grow resentful of their communications teams. They see them as a constant reminder of a higher purpose, and a constant reminder that that purpose has not yet been achieved. They are the triumphator’s slave. He who, riding with the victorious commander on a golden chariot through Rome to the adulation of the city, reminds him that he is only mortal.

It must get a bit irksome. But good communicators will be pushing management all the time.

But what do you think?

When I had finished researching these articles, the source of my complaint, I asked myself: When was the last piece of really imaginative reporting I had read in a company publication? When was the last piece of internal or external communication, read in a house journal or website, that had set me alight, or had changed my perception. When was the last time a Finance Director’s article stopped me in my tracks with its perspicacity or gave me furiously to think. When last was my intellect thoroughly engaged by reading an interview with the Chief Executive?

Is this too much to ask? Too much to hope for?

If your answer is no, and you are a communicator, please refer this article to your management and ask for their opinion.

If your answer is yes and you are a manager, then please consider your position, for these are the things that you are meant to be asking your communicators to help you do.

Are you?

© Roger Murphy 2008

Checking the facts

2008-03-21T13:59:00.005Z

It has been suggested to me that there are too many classical, literary and art references in my blog to appeal to a modern audience. Well that’s fine by me.

As far as I’m concerned the only good audience is a dead audience. If my remarks are to be understood only by Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, St Augustine of Hippo, Piero della Francesca, and Dante Alighieri that’s fine. They can read my blog, I can read theirs.

Although being accused of not having learning or of having pretensions to learning might be bad, the key accusation here is of actually having some learning. Obviously, this is a charge from which we all recoil with loathing. It is second only to being called a paediatrician.

You will recall how a howling mob burned down the premises of a paediatrician in Portsmouth, mistaking it, apparently, for the premises of a paedophile. Presumably they reasoned that all paedophiles put up a brass plaque proudly advertising their proclivities.

But something about the story made me doubt its veracity. Only a little digging has revealed the truth.

Yvette Cloete, a paediatrician in Newport, Gwent, returned from work to find ‘paedo’ sprayed on her front door. This was in August 2000 at the time of a campaign by the News of the World to name and shame paedophiles in the community. She said, “It looks as though it was just a question of confusing the job title for something else – I suppose I’m really a victim of ignorance.” The distressed Ms Cloete moved home shortly afterwards.

So by exercising that old journalists’ trick, unknown to the modern audience, of checking the facts, I had discovered that nothing was true in this story apart from the one thing I had thought might be wrong. The incident had taken place in Gwent, not Portsmouth, there were no burning firebrands, nor was there an enraged mob baying for blood.

The element I had doubted, was the word the perpetrators had daubed: ‘paedo’. Although presumed by police to be the work of teenagers, the culprits seem to have spelled the diphthong correctly, so that can’t be right. It is obvious to me that the police should have been tracking down a classics scholar. I have been thinking about this, and I feel I can save them some time. The finger of suspicion points unerringly at Plato.

Although being dead for two thousand years may seem like a corker of an alibi, it should be remembered that this is the sort of thing you can expect from classicists: general sneakiness and rank duplicity. Take a look at this photofit of the man (remember they were pretty backward in those days, it is actually, can you believe it, chiselled out of marble!) and read the guilt written in every feature. And then there’s the matter of the smoking gun: he wrote a book called The Phaedo!

He can run but he cannot hide. I vote we go to Athens and spray something on his door. What’s the Greek for paedophile?

A bust of Plato who was born in Athens c434-424 BC. He died in the same city in c348–347BC. In the Phaedo, Plato gives us Socrates’s final conversation. Socrates, who has been condemned to death and must drink hemlock, deploys four arguments for the soul’s immortality. Obviously a wrongun.

© Roger Murphy 2008

The Lep'rous distilment

2008-03-21T13:47:00.002Z

The papers in Britain were much occupied in the early months of the year by two strange cases of disappearance. The first concerned the records of all those who received a government allowance, which included their bank details, addresses and national insurance numbers – in short all the things you need for a spot of identity theft and the swift and silent voiding of bank accounts.

It turns out that two disks containing all this information were thrust into an envelope and stuffed in an out-tray with nary a thought for their secure delivery. They disappeared and have not been seen since despite everywhere being searched including all the dustbins.

A senior civil servant resigned. Things looked grim for the government. At this precise moment, a quite different case of disappearance eclipsed this story in the headlines.

A man who disappeared five years ago, presumed dead when his empty canoe washed ashore, nipped into a police station and said, ‘It’s me. You know. The bloke you haven’t been looking for, for the last five years. The canoe bloke. I’m not dead, I’ve just been hiding in the house next door. Sorry about that.’

His wife, the press suggested, had connived at this and spent her holidays with her husband in Panama, enjoying the life insurance. The kids were excluded from the deal.

This is a clear case of Atalanta’s golden apples. The Panama story is a distraction, a diversionary tactic. The searchlight of embarrassing enquiry was beginning to focus on a shortcoming in Government circles, so a story is dreamed up of such bizarrerie that the tabloids cannot resist it and go off yapping in that direction. Sherlock Holmes, I recall, used a steak to toss to slavering guard dogs, while he nipped across a lawn to retrieve the Ruritanian Emerald, or was it the Balkan Treaty, from the small casket secreted within the chinoiserie cabinet. Anyway, it’s largely the same idea. For Panama read steak. For steak read misdirection.

It is clear that a whole department in Whitehall is devoted to fabricating unlikely stories and giving them semblance and verisimilitude with the aim of distracting the press from the government’s woes. These stories are called Downing Street press releases. They are fed through to Fleet Street whose ears are ever open. Shakespeare was for a time a parliamentary reporter on the old News Chronicle (which replaced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which some of my older readers will remember with fondness), and in his memoirs he recalls how he was tipped the wink by the Prime Minister’s spokesman:

“Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard, my custom always of the afternoon, upon my secure hour thy tipster stole, with juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, and in the porches of my ears did pour the lep’rous distilment; whose effect holds such an enmity with blood of man that swift as quicksilver it courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body, and with a sudden vigour doth posset and curd, like eager droppings into milk, the thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine; and a most instant tetter bark'd about, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, all my smooth body.”

Ah. The old News Chronicle.

However…. little has changed it seems in the corridors of power. You mark my words. The next time there’s a bit of a problem for the government, just watch the unlikely story that removes it from the front pages. But what I was getting at was that I think I would be rather good at coming up with unlikely stories for these Government Johnnies, and so I would like to apply for a post in Downing Street doing just that. But here’s the problem: search though I might, I have never seen a job advertised in this department.

So I am casting the net wide. If you have seen such a job advertised, please get in touch. I would be happy to pay for the information. Perhaps by swapping it for a couple of disks I have recently come across.

© Roger Murphy 2008

Interlude – Concerto for Black Hole

2008-03-04T15:42:00.002Z

It was Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday or the eve of Quadragesima (Lent) as I more frequently call it to annoy the children, and I had slipped into a doze in front of the post-prandial television, surrounded by a loving fire, warm relatives, and a fine old bottle of crusted.

‘Although a black hole cannot be seen, it can be heard,’ the TV documentary distantly burbled. I cocked open an eye.

‘The note emitted by a black hole,’ continued the respectful and awed commentary, ‘can be described as a B flat fifty-seven octaves below Middle C, a note so low that it is beyond the limits of human hearing.’ I was wide awake.

The lowest B flat on the piano is three octaves below Middle C. The limits of human hearing are only about two octaves lower than that. A piano that could play the B flat of a black hole would have to have a keyboard about 35 feet long. I could see contrary motion scales being a bit of a problem but otherwise a magnificent idea. On the other hand you could play with about twenty people at one time. Just imagine the fun.

I began to wonder why no-one had written music using only notes out of the range of human hearing. How exciting it would be to attend a performance of Concerto for Black Hole that could only really be appreciated by dogs, whales, teenagers and perhaps black holes themselves. You’d have to build an auditorium the size of the universe to get them in. The badly behaved ones would obviously go for the cheap seats at the back. I was instantly filled with a wild ambition to write and design the programme notes, perhaps in invisible ink on a wonderful hand-laid paper cut to the shape of a breve, that rarely seen note-length.

And what would the music itself look like? Think of the leger lines! Fifty-seven octaves below Middle C – you’d need broadsheet pages at least. Double elephant if you can still get it.

It was at this point that the bottle slipped from my twitching fingers as I essayed a quick scale played on a keyboard 35 feet long. The warm family suddenly became cold and agitated and I passed the rest of the evening banished to the office sofa to construct premieres of black hole symphonies that were heard only in the infinite space of my head. My last thought was about Pythagoras. How would he feel, I wondered, about attending the very first concert utilising the music of the spheres?

© Roger Murphy 2008

Heroes and villains

2008-01-25T10:19:00.002Z

We’re a strange lot. We like things to be perfect and have trouble understanding when they are not.

For example, we expect our doctors to be fit, healthy and in the peak of condition. Were they dogs we would expect them to have a shiny coat, a wet nose and nuzzle our genitalia with evident relish. When we find doctors stressed, deathly pale, and wincing as they move, we worry.

But why? A deaf musician might be thought a contradiction, but it was little trouble to Beethoven, or Fauré. The painter, El Greco, had a serious eye complaint. Then there’s the double amputee Oscar Pistorius, one of the fastest runners in the world, widely referred to as ‘The Fastest Thing on No Legs’.

Why can’t our dentists be snaggle-toothed? Why can’t our doctors get ill? Surely, some of them will get the flu. One or two may even die. What’s wrong with that?

In Britain we love a little harmless eccentricity. Indeed, we revel in it. We adore our corrupt politicians, for example, and when they emerge from open prison we interview them at length on television and give them high-powered jobs in government. When they prove to be drunks, we experience a fellow-feeling for them. Sins of the flesh – we all suffer from that.

Yet, somewhat unfairly it seems to me, we insist on strict sobriety and cold detachment as the proctologist advances towards us with a glinting scalpel. This is an unfortunate double standard.

Luckily though there are fresh avenues opening all the time in our brave new world for those who like to be eccentric and wish to benefit from our national attribute of tolerance. For example, it has recently become clear that society at large no longer requires communicators to be able to communicate. Specifically, reading and writing is not considered a necessary skill in the job. No longer do communicators have to be able to listen to people and explain their ideas cogently. Jargon and the use of buzzwords are now fine. And thank heavens for that. It will certainly make things easier.

What a relief it is to be able to look at these people with the same tolerance and love of eccentricity as our politicians. They add a touch of colour and amusement to our otherwise drab lives. After all, isn’t there something heroically distinctive about writers who can’t write?

And when you come right down to it, there is much to be said for those that gun down others in the street. All right, they exhibit no strict sense of community, and seem bad mannered. But who cares about manners these days? It’s so rear-view mirror. Aren’t these people just doing what we would like to do ourselves? It would be hypocritical and intolerant to condemn them, and we can’t have that.

Perhaps I should stand for parliament.

© Roger Murphy 2008

The Word

2007-12-11T16:08:00.002Z

“In the beginning was The Word,” says Saint John.

You have to say it’s a strong opening for a gospel. If you were going to write one, you’d want an opening like that. And it’s certainly not bad for a man in his 90s. There’s no Bethlehem birth, no donkeys, no shepherds, no wise men, no shining star, no melodrama. It’s straight in to the mysterious heart of the thing: “In the beginning was The Word.”

Of course, as he wrote in Greek the term he actually uses is ‘logos’. We know the word logos, but for us it is a plural and in the singular is an image. It is curious that our word for a word is a word for an image. Still with me?

It is interesting that we have separated into two disciplines what the ancient world considered one. For them word and image worked together to communicate, and since more people ‘read’ the image than the word, the Parthenon was friezed with sculptures. Images were considered to be the most powerful words. In the theatre too, words and visual representation went hand in hand. The vital ability for a writer (or orator) was imagination – that is, the ability to conjure images in the mind with words. This was true either in pnyx or agora, the legislature or marketplace.

Yet in our own time two disciplines that are separate have grown out of this unity, the visual and the verbal, and increasingly communicators are experts in one or the other of them, but rarely both.

With it has grown the notion that those involved in the image (photographers and designers) cannot read, and those involved with the word (writers and editors) cannot visualise. Were they alive today, Phidias would be considered a bit of a moron though quite handy with a chisel, and Demosthenes would be thought a visual illiterate, though a promising speech-writer.

Of course there are those who see it as their bounden duty to prove the fallacy true. Which is why an especially unpleasant part of hell is reserved for designers who do not read the text before designing, as well as for editors who are dead to matters visual.

But these days when literacy is common, designers must realise that their fundamental purpose is to enable things to be read – more easily, more swiftly, without obstacles. They should consider their work to be a form of writing, of communicating the essence. A designer who does that enhances the written word. And this is his function. It is content, and therefore meaning that must be put first. Image and design must both serve it.

So the 90-year old from Ephesus had it right. Take a look at these wonderful opening pages from St John’s gospel and see how, even in the Middle Ages, this concept of visual and verbal unity was still alive, how the very act of placing quill to parchment was an act of complete devotion to meaning. In these respectful hands, letterforms are things of immense beauty. The meaning, the word and the image become integral. For the writer (St John) and the illustrator (who would have been a Benedictine monk labouring by candle-light in a cold scriptorium over a thousand years after the words were first written) this unity of purpose gave their work great power. These works still illuminate. They show us like nothing before or since that the power of good communication lies in a unity of visual and verbal purpose.

By the Middle Ages, the text of the gospels had been rendered from Greek into Latin. These illustrations of the first page from St John’s Gospel therefore use the words: ‘In principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat verbum.’

© Roger Murphy 2008