My ten New Year’s resolutions

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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