A Few Kind Words

Mind the gaps

2012-02-09T23:45:00.006Z

Last Saturday I took part in the final event of the 26 Treasures Scotland project, chairing a panel discussion at the Winter Words book festival in the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. February 4 is a date which, since university days, I have thought of as the absolute nadir of the year. True to form, it was a filthy afternoon, sleety and freezing. We were also up against the Calcutta Cup kick-off at Murrayfield, half-an-hour after we started. But still we got an audience of about 40 people in the main auditorium.

The panelists were historical novelist Sara Sheridan, who has been the driving force behind the project, Linda Cracknell, writer of short stories and radio plays, and Alison Weir, expert on the Tudors and one of the UK’s most successful writers of historical biographies and novels. Sara, Linda and I had all contributed to the project. Alison had not, but she was in Pitlochry anyway doing her own event and the organisers thought her presence would add something to ours. It did.

The three of us talked about the objects we had been allocated and then read our respective 62 words on Queen Mary’s harp, the Coigrich – a talismanic gold casing for the handle of a bishop’s crosier, and the Gown of Repentance. We had also asked Alison to choose an object and she had obligingly come up with 62 words of her own on a large lump of Lewisian Gneiss, at (appropriately) 2.6 billion years old, the most ancient of all the 26 treasures.

We then began a conversation about whether these short pieces of highly personal writing, essentially fictions created in response to the allocated objects, had any place in a museum whose chief purpose is the presentation of fact. To elaborate on the question, I asked Alison if she had ever written a novel about an historical character for whom she had also written a biography. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘more than once. It’s all about filling in the gaps, you see.’

And that, it seems to me, is what the whole 26 Treasures project has been about – filling in the gaps. Mostly we stand in front of objects in museums armed only with the factual information provided by curators. We may be intellectually or aesthetically engaged by them, but if our imaginations aren’t kindled we are seldom going to make the more human, more emotional connection with them and their time and place of origin.

26 Treasures encouraged the writers, first, to imagine the stories around these objects, and then to communicate those to the museum’s visitors. The stories don’t alter the facts any more than Alison Weir’s novels alter their underlying historical truths, but they do enhance them. It’s no surprise that so many of the 26 writers came away from the project with a distinctly proprietary feeling about their objects; though the Gown of Repentance, unsurprisingly, stirred no such feelings for me.

But filling in the gaps is something we are naturally inclined to do as imaginative creatures. It’s what I constantly tell business writers. You don’t need to give us the kitchen sink. You can easily get rid of half of what you’ve said and your audience will still get it. We’re hard wired to read between the cracks. We imagine and intuit and do very effectively all those unmeasurable things that the business world finds so alarming. If we didn’t we would have been savaged by sabretooths or trampled by mammoths millennia ago.

To see all the 26 Treasures at the National Museum of Scotland click here.

Close encounter

2012-02-03T19:32:00.006Z

In December 1972 I quit my job at Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly and flew to Argentina with my girlfriend. There we met up with 30 other travellers of all nationalities and stripes who had signed up for a trip with the adventure travel company, Encounter Overland. With its fleet of orange-painted, blue-canvased three-ton Bedford ex-army trucks and trailers, the company had been driving the hippy trail to Afghanistan since the late 1960s. Now Latin America beckoned. At £500 a head for a five-month itinerary that would take us from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, we were the guinea pigs.

In the event, my journey lasted nearly a year. Encounter Overland had miscalculated and by the time we got to Lima, three months into the trip, they realised they were going to have to drive 18 hours a day to make their deadline. My girlfriend and I jumped ship and continued on our own, eventually flying home from Toronto the following September.

It was a momentous year in more ways than I can describe. I was 23 and very unsure of what I wanted to do. I had a law degree but no interest in continuing with the law, I’d allowed myself to be shoehorned into articles with an accountancy firm which had lasted only a few months, and I’d tried bookselling which had just left me feeling restless. I’d had a couple of short stories published and had the vague notion that I wanted to write full length fiction, but not the faintest idea about what. So when, to my father’s dismay, my mother sent me an advertisement for the trip, I jumped at it. What I didn’t know, of course, was that on a journey like this one tends not so much to find answers as more questions. When I got back to the UK I was still none the wiser, but I was profoundly altered and the experiences are with me vividly 40 years later.

Apart from some articles published shortly after I returned, I’ve tried writing about it twice since. In both cases I’ve fictionalised the Latin American experience; and while I don’t know what will eventually happen with The Artefact, in the first instance the trip provided the backdrop for the one novel I’ve written which remains unpublished. And this, Dear Readers, is what I believe lies at the heart of the dilemma and my request for help – to which you responded so generously, almost overwhelmingly.

Some of your thoughts came as comments to the blog, others as emails or phone calls – and I’m deeply grateful for them all. Roughly a third of you said Carry on, for reasons ranging from ‘An unfinished story is a pitiful thing’ to ‘We’re desperate to know what happens’ to ‘At least give it one more try’. The other two-thirds said the more difficult thing: ‘Look within’. Well, I did – with the help of a patient wife, a long frosty walk and, among many splendid and considered pieces of advice, the words of Gillian Clelland who wrote: ‘Yer heart doesny always get it right, neither does yer head, I find yer tummy always tells ye whit tae dae. Listen tae yer tummy. You will feel what is right for you…’

I consulted the entrails, Dear Readers – my own – and divined that I need to revisit the journey more fully, more personally; that it would be valuable to understand more deeply the many ways in which that year shaped me, and that to fictionalise it is to trivialise it when it has quite clearly been knocking at my door, demanding my serious attention, for some time. Put simply, I need to connect with the emotion of the experience, rather than holding it at one remove.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t at some stage return to The Artefact. ‘It will wait if it’s really right,’ counselled Faye Sharpe, ‘artefacts do, believe me, I’m an archaeologist, remember?’ But it does mean that for the time being I have another writing job to do which may, as Neil Baker suggested, turn out to be something closer to memoir; though at this stage I’m reluctant to give it form. Meanwhile, my heartfelt thanks once more to all of you who responded to my plea. I’m flattered that there are that many of you who are even interested in my ruminations.

And now I shall obey Andy Milligan, who wrote: ‘… enough of this self-reflection, man. Away with you and start writing!’

As a remarkable postscript to this, I have just Googled Encounter Overland to check some facts, and discovered that on YouTube there are three 10-minute episodes of a film made during our trip by the cameraman Peter Sinclair who travelled with us. I had completely forgotten about it and am not even sure whether I saw it at the time. I've just spent an utterly surreal half-hour watching my younger self and others pushing a three-ton truck out of axle-deep mud on the Bolivian altiplano. See here.

Breaking up is so hard to do

2012-01-27T09:51:00.002Z

I've beendismembering one of my books, painstakingly taking it apart, page by page, sothat each comes away from the glue of the spine cleanly, a perfect rectangle.It's a strange, not entirely comfortable, feeling. The book in question is apaperback copy of The Witness, mypost-Scottish-independence thriller. I'm doing it because I no longer have anelectronic version and the only way I can get the book onto Kindle is to havethe text scanned and create a new file from it.

AsI remove the pages I can't help pausing when my eye is caught by a passage orturn of phrase I remember particularly well or am especially proud of. I findmyself reliving the pleasure of writing it, and this throws into relief thedilemma I face at the moment: should I abandon the novel I've been writing forthe last four years? I wrote here last year that 'the story demands to befinished. It’s a living, growing thing, and to let it wither on the vine wouldbe tantamount to abortion. I feel morally obliged to it, such is the power andenergy of story.'

Hmm ...now I'm not so sure. I think perhaps that this particular story has lost itsenergy. More than that, I wonder about its relevance to me in 2012. When Istarted it, in 2008, I had recently published two novels in quick succession,both of which had been critically well received. A third in the same generalgenre - the young adult thriller - seemed the obvious thing to do, especiallyfor someone whose literary career to date had followed a random trajectory tosay the least.

Ihad two ideas gnawing at me. One was to mine the diaries I had written nearly40 years previously, during a year travelling on a shoestring through LatinAmerica. The other was to examine the impulses that make someone steal. As asmall boy at boarding school I had stolen sweets, sometimes from the large jarof favours that sat in the headmaster's study (fair game one might say),sometimes, much more shamefully, from other boys. I had been caught and beatenfor it and it had troubled me, intermittently, ever since. What, at that momentin my life, had made me do something I had never done before and have neverdone since?

Mystory, The Artefact, concerns a precocious eight-year-old who is taken by his parents on a scientific expedition to Amazonia wherethe whole family suffers a trauma. Later, back in Scotland and growing upneglected by his work-obsessed parents, he starts to steal compulsively. Thisleads him into bad company and worse trouble. By the time he is about to leaveschool he is staring into the abyss. It comes to him that he has been cursed,that the only way to get out of trouble and rid himself of the compulsion is to return to SouthAmerica and right a wrong he had committed there as a child, ten years earlier.

AlthoughI’ve written around 70,000 words, hardly any of that has been over the last twoyears. Other commitments and interests have taken over, not least Room 121, the business book I co-wrotewith John Simmons, and this blog. Dipping back into The Artefact now, some of it seems good, some less so, but - andthis may just be the time of year, though I suspect not - it feels stale; thethought of returning to it does not make my pulse race. I know that to finishit is still several months' work. Then there's the thorny question of whetherto find a publisher or self-publish. There’s promotion - can I face, indeed doI have the time for, touring the secondary schools again. And there’s the commitmentto a follow-up, pretty much a given should I find a publisher.

To some extent the project has alreadydone its job. I’ve come to understand through the research and writing that incertain circumstances stealing can offer a form of comfort and a sense of self-connection - an explanation certainly, if not an exoneration.I’ve also discovered that my South American material bears revisiting, andthere are other arenas in which I could re-work it, this blog for example. Yeta year ago a prominent children’s author for whom I have great respect,insisted that I finish it and paid me the compliment of saying that the kind ofbooks I write are important to their audience.

SoI’m stuck. Should I finish it simply because it's there? I need some other opinions – including yours, Dear Readers. I'mposting the first couple of chapters here to give a flavour of The Artefact. If you can spare a fewmoments, please read them and help me decide: carry on or let go?

A time for kindling

2012-01-19T23:44:00.002Z

There are some things you just have to take on the chin.

Ten days ago we had our annual Dark Angelsget-together. John comes up to Edinburgh from London. Stuart and I meet him atthe Scotch Malt Whisky Society. We plan the coming year and enjoy a good lunch.

‘You’re such a geek,’ they said, as I produced my newiPad.

It’s not quite how I see myself, but from theirperspectives I guess maybe it’s true. John cleverly avoids things technologicalby having an obliging better half to whom he refers from time to time as his ITmanager. Stuart, the poet, simply scribbles things on the backs of envelopes.Me … well, yes, I confess I enjoy things that do clever stuff. I like to beproperly tooled up for the job on hand (unfortunate turn of phrase, I know).

The iPad was a Christmas present to myself, well-deservedof course. That cut no ice with my 20-year-old son. He stole it at once and disappearedon an Angry Birds binge. When I’d retrieved it, I set about downloading theKindle app (although in truth you don’t set about anything with an iPad; youjust tap the screen and whatever it is happens almost instantaneously). In anycase, this – Kindle – was the real reason, I’d persuaded myself, that I neededan iPad.

A few weeks before, I’d had an e-publishing tutorial withEdinburgh crime writer, Lin Anderson. Lin has had some decent results on Kindlewith her backlist and is now, generously, on a mission to spread the good wordto other writers. The good word is this: no writer need ever again suffer theindignity of titles forlornly mouldering in that great literary boneyard known as 'out of-print'.

This is a revelation. Out-of-print titles, in my casefour out of six, are to all intents and purposes dead. No one’s promoting them(not that anyone other than me ever did much for mine, anyway). No one can buythem. No one can read them. All that effort and it’s as if, by declining toreprint, the publishers have locked them away, out of sight forever.

Enter Amazon. Suddenly, with a little bit offormatting I can upload my text and jacket image to the Kindle store, write theblurb, set my own price (having first reverted the rights from thepublishers, of course) and the books can carry on selling forever. Now, here’s the really good bit. If that price is morethan £1.50, Kindle gives me back 70% (or 30% under £1.50). I can set the priceas high or low as I like, and change it every day if I want to test the market.Furthermore, Amazon, with all its clever algorithms, will automatically, electronicallydo at least as much promotion as my publishers did.

I’ve written in the past about the economics ofpublishing fiction (see here), but only in respect of my ten percent of the cover price andwhat it has contributed to my overall income (practically nothing); not aboutwhere the rest has gone. One swallows all kinds of things out of habit orconvention. In twenty years of being published I’d never really questioned theobvious madness of giving away ninety percent of the income from work that Ihad sweated blood over. I do now.

Did I really need to help finance a glass-and-steeloffice at King’s Cross, an editor of whose time I might get a couple of days perbook, a marketing department quite likely to commission a cover I hated, and apublicity department staffed largely by eager but clueless teenagers?

Clearly not, as I now understand. I can’t wait to getmy backlist up on Kindle, to bring these books I love and am proud of back tolife again. They won’t necessarily be my pension (though nothing’s impossible),but they will at least be there for people to read once more. Perhaps I am a geek,after all. If so, I’m a geek who doesn’t like not being read.

Life and Fate

2012-01-14T18:02:00.003Z

We're two weeks into the new year and stories are everywhere, it seems. There's Melvyn Bragg and his Radio 4 series on the history of literature. It was the 4,000 year-old Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, that set humanity off on its story-telling spree, he tells us. Then there's War Horse, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's children's novel. Amid all the publicity, the author has been seizing every opportunity to repeat his mantra that every primary school day should end with the children being read to for half an hour.
   Backon Radio 4 Sarah Wheeler has been introducing readings from the diaries ofvarious members of Scott's South Pole expedition, surely one of the most tragicof exploration stories. And then there was Jeanette Winterson talkingpassionately about why it matters to read. 'A book is a door,' she said. 'Onthe other side lies somewhere else.'
   Ilove that thought. The somewhere else, of course, exists only in ourimaginations. But how vivid and real it can feel. Over the Christmas holidays Ifinished Life and Fate, the 800-page saga by Vassily Grossman set in 1942during the battle for Stalingrad. Not the kind of thing I normally go for, Ihave to admit; the last big Russian I read was Dostoevsky, in my earlytwenties. But after Radio 4 recently gave over every drama slot for an entireweek to a dramatisation of Grossman's book, I mentioned that it sounded worthreading and was promptly given it for my birthday.
   Duringthe war Grossman worked as a journalist, reporting from the Eastern Front forthe Red Army press. Witnessing the deadening hand of state ideology, even inthe thick of battle, he was appalled by the similarities between StalinistRussia and Nazi Germany - and went on to describe them in the novel with analmost Orwellian clarity. Before the book was even finished it had attractedthe attention of the KGB, who eventually confiscated it. Grossman died in 1964but had made copies which were later smuggled to the west where it was firstpublished in 1980.
   Ittells the story of Viktor Strum, a Jewish theoretical physicist, and hisextended family who between them experience practically every shade ofexistence in the Russia of the 1940s, from the front line to the labour camps,the state-sponsored laboratory to the steppes, the Lubyanka to Treblinka. Thecentral scene is the desperate struggle for control of Stalingrad during thepitiless winter of 1942/43; the central theme the erosion of individual destinyby the relentlessly controlling mechanism of the communist state.
   As'somewhere else' it wasn't always an easy place to be, but it was an equallydifficult place to leave. In my imagination I absolutely inhabited thosebombed-out factories, Siberian wastelands, crumbling apartments; I lived thecharacters' inner and outer struggles. Thescale and ambition of the book made most of the contemporary fiction I haveread seem puny and domestic. For the couple of months it took me to read itmajestically enriched my imaginative hinterland and I don't doubt that I'veexpanded personally as a result. That's why we need to read. That's why thebookless households inhabited by a third of children in the UK offer such ableak prospect.

Community spirit

2012-01-06T09:25:00.000Z

For me the year began properly on Monday night with the annualvillage dance. In the middle of Birnam is a large, ugly Victorian hotel withone marvellous, possibly unique, feature – a huge first-floor baronial hall.Here we gather every New Year to dance and greet those neighbours we didn’tbump into in the car park of the Taybank pub which, complete with coveredstage, raucous band and compulsory inebriation, has now become the focal pointfor Hogmanay itself.

The ceilidh, by contrast, is a family event.Every generation is there and most people know one another. There’s a greatatmosphere, excellent music from Edinburgh's Bella MacNab ceilidh band, prettywell everyone dances, no one gets too drunk or shouts, and the feeling ofgoodwill is palpable. I leave each time with the glowing sense of belonging toa real community. It’s a constant delight and a novelty that never wears offfor someone brought up in the kind of rarefied circle where one was more likelyto have tea in a castle than mix with the local village folk.

It made me think what an elastic word ‘community’has become. We talk of communities today to mean groups of people who are boundtogether only by someone else’s idea. There’s much talk of community in thecorporate social responsibility report I’m currently writing for a largemanufacturing plc. They’re eager – quite understandably in these scrutinoustimes – to be seen to be connecting with people beyond the factory walls, anddoing the right thing by them. But the members of these communities, be theywhole towns local to the factories, or particular common interest groups withwhom the company has dealings, or just, collectively, the people who buy theirproducts, have no knowledge of one another. So are they really communities? No,of course not. In a real community everyone is known to everyone else and allare nourished and supported by their membership of that group.

Which doesn’t, of course, mean that they mustlive cheek-by-jowl. A community that flowered briefly but thrillingly, andwhich I now miss greatly, was that of the musicians that gathered every Mondaynight at my local pub, the Birnam Tap Inn, during the first five years I livedin the village. Over the last few days I’ve been listening again to recordingsI made of those sessions and the feeling of nostalgia is, at moments, almostunbearable.

We came together one evening a week to makemusic in the most spontaneous, open, communal way possible. Everyone waswelcome, whatever their musical ability. There was no programme or agenda. Wesimply played what we felt like on the night and because the place attractedexcellent musicians, the music was mostly of a much higher quality than usualfor a pub session. It was exhilarating and deeply connecting, not just for theplayers but also for the audience of regulars and passers-by. We were allenriched by the experience and on certain nights, when the energy was high andthe musicians hit a particular groove, there was an almost religious intensityto the experience.

The session finally ended when the hotel towhich the pub belonged closed down. That was three years ago. Now the place isa pizza parlour; home, perhaps, to a new community of regulars. Whatever bringsus together, most of us need communities - although it wasn't really until I returnedto Scotland, in my early 40s, that I realised it. Now I belong to several, the village of Dunkeld and Birnam, DarkAngels and 26, to name but three. The thought warms me as we face theuncertainties of 2012.

Choosing your bees

2011-12-16T11:26:00.001Z

We had our last Edinburgh International Book Festival board meetingof the year yesterday. It has been a fascinating year as world events swirl aroundus and we’ve found ourselves debating issues as diverse as whether to initiatea cultural exchange involving representatives of the Chinese government, andwhat might be the pros and cons of a potential new media relationship with the Murdochorganisation (this before the hacking scandal broke and vindicated our eventualdecision).

Yesterday it was one of the smaller agenda items that intriguedme most, a snippet in director Nick Barley’s report concerning our booksellingoperation. The temporary, tented bookshop in Charlotte Sq turns over nearly £600,000in the 17 days of the festival. It’s an integral part of the proceedings, a largeairy space where you can browse, have coffee and meet authors at after-eventbook signings. It carries a vast range of fiction and non-fiction, including ofcourse the current titles of all the 700-odd authors appearing. This year ourtwo bestselling titles, both at around 350 copies, were Liz Lochhead’s A Choosing and Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees.

Two poetry titles.

Not fiction. Not memoir. Not biography.

Poetry.

What does that say? That in times of uncertainty weturn to poetry for meaning? That in an age of increasing digitisation, the roleof the book as artefact is still essential as the physical setting for poetry? Orsimply that a poet at the top of her game, as both these are, can say more tous about the business of being human than any novelist, biographer or historianever can?

It could be any or all of these things, though it maynot be indicative of a trend. Of all the places on the planet whereone is most likely to find a concentration of poetry buyers, it’s Charlotte Sqin August.

Nevertheless, it’s heartening; particularly since, asI mentioned last week, we’re hoping to produce a volume of all the writing fromthe four 26 Treasures projects via the crowd-sourced publisher Unbound. Andmost of those pieces are poems – not necessarily because people set out towrite poems when first confronted with their museum objects, but because theconstraint of 62 words ends up shoe-horning most people’s thoughts into the poeticform.

As I write this I realise what an apt metaphor it isfor the approach of Christmas, the constraint of the last few days. Everythinggets shoe-horned into a frantic burst of last-minute activity. I’m hoping thatsomething creative comes out of it. Inspired present-buying would do. Kindness,love and family togetherness would be better.

See you in 2012.

PS... Since first posting this, Tessa Ransford has emailed to remind me of this, which she has now designated her Christmas poem for 2011:

A Cup of Kindness

Faith, Hope and Charity

wrote St Paul in his hymn to Love

these three abide

In Iraq, explains Canon White on the radio,

Democracy is not what people yearn for

blasted on them as it was through missiles and bombs

What they most want, why can’t we understand,

is water, electricity and kindness

life, communication, things working normally

God only knows

Buddha only knows

Mohammed only knows

everyone knows we want the kindness

which lies at the heart of our being

In Scotland we have given a song to the world

‘a cup of kindness’

to take, to drink, to share

Water, electricity and kindness,

but the greatest of these is kindness

Tessa Ransford

26 Treasures Unbound

2011-12-08T20:07:00.001Z

A little over a year ago I went to see Sandy Richardson, head ofdevelopment at the National Museum of Scotland, to tell him about the 26Treasures project and to ask if he might be interested in helping us repeat theformula we had developed so successfully with the V&A in London.

This involved pairing 26 writers with 26 objects and invitingthem to write a personal response in 62 words, as a new and different way ofconnecting visitors with objects in the collection. (A sestude was the word newly minted for the 62-word form by 26 founder, John Simmons). Our plan was to take 26 Treasures not only toScotland, but also, simultaneously, to the Ulster Museum and the NationalLibrary of Wales.

Sandy put me in touch with the museum’s Learning Department and Iwent along to our first meeting, taking with me 26 Scotland’s new secret weapon:historical novelist, Sara Sheridan. Sara combines ferociousenergy, intelligence and organisational skills with irresistible charm anddetermination. She andthe museum’s learning officer, Claire Allan, picked up the project and together headed for thehorizon, leaving me to offer the occasional cheer from the stands. (And in anice completing of the circle, Sandy Richardson has since moved on to a new development job –where else but at the new V&A Dundee.)

Last Saturday, in a long gallery at the museum, 26 Treasures Scotland came together: 26 objects, 26 writers, 1,612 words, a virtuoso jazz saxophonist,a recording of pipe marches and a number of intrigued, if slightly baffled passers-by– the culmination of a year of hard work that was more, much more, than the sumof the parts.

Writer Aimee Chalmers and her jazz accompanist RichardIngham opened the proceedings with a spellbinding performance, 26 minutes long,in Scots, in the voice of Westlothiana Lizziae, a 340-million-year-old fossillizard. Then, at intervals over the next three hours, everyone in turn spokebriefly about their object and read their 62 words.

We heard the rattle of shipyard drag chains, the wordsof piper Daniel Laidlaw VC on the Battle of Loos, a catalogue of medieval cattlediseases, the clattering descent of the Maiden’s blade onto its inventor’s neck,the wry observations of a gilded 18th century teapot, the anguish ofrejected would-be Highland emigrants – a chorus of voices as varied as theobjects that mark a trail through Scottish history from the Big Bang to thepresent day. It was a wonderful afternoon, touching, funny and profoundlymoving by turns.

Now the exhibition runs through till the end of January. The trail is marked throughout the National Museum of Scotland’s Scottish collection, the words appear beside the exhibits, there’s a beautiful littlebrochure, and a programme of events will bring museum visitors together withthe writers and their objects.

Then there’s Unbound, a new publishing company whichinvites interested readers to buy subscriptions for a book and publishes itonly if, within 90 days, it reaches its funding target. In doing so, Unboundcreates stronger links between the books that writers want to see published andthat readers want to read.
Just as Robert Burns persuaded friends to financehis first collection of verse all those years ago, so now we’re hoping to raisethe money for the world’s first collection of sestudes – over 100 in all fromEngland, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will be a beautiful reminder notonly of a wonderful project but also of how history can be brought alivethrough the story an object has to tell.

Please visit Unbound and support us if you possiblycan.

Who cares wins

2011-12-01T19:58:00.001Z

Christie Watson must be very pleased. Her book, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, about a Muslim family in Lagos, has beenshortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize. Perhaps she has an advantage.She’s a graduate of the famous University of East Anglia Creative Writing courseand she was on Radio 4 this morning alongside one of its most illustrious alumni,Ian McEwan. With John Humphrys they were discussing that old chestnut: whethercreative writing can be taught.

Humphrys rounded off the conversation by asking Watsonwhat was the most valuable thing she had learnt on the course. ‘Write a bookthat other people want to read,’ she replied without hesitation, adding that itwas not a tutor but an RLF fellow who had given her this piece of advice.

That is interesting. The Royal Literary Fund fellowsdo in universities a similar job to what I and many other readers of this blogdo in organisations. We help with the practicalities of communication, itseffectiveness, rather than its underlying messages. Our clients have thethought (in theory), we help them express it to shareholders, customers,colleagues. Similarly, the students have the thought (in theory), the RLFfellows, all published writers, promote good writing practice, helping themwith structure and language – though one would earnestly hope that the creativewriting students don’t need much help in that department.

The advice may sound obvious. If you don’t writesomething other people are going to want to read, then no one will read it. Butwhen you’re in the hothouse environment of a creative writing course, otherimperatives may take over and writing ‘what Iwant to write’ may become irresistible. There’s an identical and equallyirresistible corporate impulse to say to the world, in exhaustive detail, ‘whatwe want to say’.

The RLF fellow’s advice directly echoes what we spendour lives telling people. Write what other people want to read (sub-text: notwhat I or we want to say). For book just substitute report, email, website or anything else that people in business have to write. Those thatget the message communicate in a way that connects. Those that don’t don’t.Sadly the latter are still in the majority.

Towards the end of the programme there was talk ofanother book. This, for me at any rate, had more uplifting associations. It’sby David Jones, chief executive of global advertising giant Havas, and it wascalled, in a parody of the SAS motto, WhoCares Wins. Its theme is that the really successful businesses of thefuture will be those who do more than pay lip service to corporate socialresponsibility; those who can demonstrate in deed that their drive for growthand gain benefits a far wider community than simply their shareholders.

If the tide really is turning this way, and DavidJones certainly believes it is, then telling people what they want to hear, writing what theywant to read, is going to become more important than ever. At its most basic it’sthe difference between monologue and dialogue.

Pencil or pills?

2011-11-27T19:52:00.001Z

It’s nice to hear that now there’s validation from the healthprofessionals for an exercise we’ve used since we first started Dark Angels; anexercise that’s also used by teachers of creative writing the world over.

Faye Sharpe, who came on the recent Dark Angelscourse, sent us a link to a blog by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi Worldwide,who had picked up on an article in the Sydney Morning Herald – such is the way that information whizzes round the globe thesedays – which, in turn, reported on 20 years’ research into the therapeuticpower of writing regularly about what we think and feel.

‘Expressive writing’ the psychologists call it and 15minutes a day, they say, is enough to make you feel better about yourself. Notonly that, it can also be good for blood pressure, the immune system andmemory. Over a more prolonged period it can even tackle physical ailments, forexample, helping to control cancer-related pain, reduce the severity ofrheumatoid arthritis and increase lung function amongst the asthmatic.

The trick is to write down whatever is in your head,and keep writing without stopping for a set amount of time. A recipe forgibberish one might think. But no. You may not believe you know the story youwant to tell yourself, but at some sub-conscious level you usually do, and theresults tend to make more sense than you might think they would.

We don’t use the exercise for therapeutic purposeswith Dark Angels, more to stimulate creative expression. It encourages peopleto write more freely, unfettered by the remembrance of rules or theanticipation of readers. But the researchers suggest that the therapeutic valuelies in the fact that writing this way allows us to externalise ourpreoccupations, so that we can see and examine them, almost as if they belongedto someone else.

An American, Julia Cameron, wrote a famous book calledThe Artist’s Way about leading thecreative life. In its slightly less famous companion, The Right to Write, she advocates what she calls ‘daily pages’.This is precisely the kind of expressive writing described by the research: half anhour a day of letting it all out onto paper, best done first thing in themorning, before the working day kicks in properly.

In half an hour you can write three sides of A4 inlonghand, if you do as much physical writing and as little stopping andthinking as possible. I know. I did it for six months, a few years ago, and theresults were really quite dramatic. I couldn’t speak for the health benefitsbecause I wasn’t alert to that possibility then, but I know it enabled me to resolvea number of preoccupations that had been rumbling away, unaddressed, for a goodlong time.

Over time, the daily rhythm took hold and put me incontact with a deeper part of myself, helping change the way I saw a variety ofthings that were going on in my life. It also occasionally rewarded me with amoment of penetrating insight, as on the occasion when I found myself seeingand describing a spring of pure, clear water, bubbling up in a pool of light at the bottom of a deep, dark cave. This I took to be my own creative source, my life force.

Writing this now makes me think I should start doingit again. In fact, we all should. Who needs pills when we’ve got pencils andpaper?

Bring on the clowns

2011-11-17T23:28:00.001Z

Here's a terrific story that surfaced in The Guardian this week in the context of the Pakistan match-fixing convictions, and the fact that corruption and gambling in Asian cricket is seen as a cultural problem.

In 1995 a new mayor took office in Bogota. Among themany seemingly intractable problems he faced was the Colombian dislike oftraffic regulations, and the propensity of drivers and pedestrians to flaunt them as amatter almost of civic duty. The resulting chaos on Bogota’s roads was chronicand indescribable.

The mayor, an eccentric mathematician and formerrector of the National University, who had been sacked for dropping histrousers in front of a lecture theatre full of noisy students, recognised thata conventional approach would cut no ice with Bogota’s testosterone-fuelledmotorists and lawless pedestrians. This called for cultural change. Eccentricthough he was, the mayor was smart enough to know that no culture hasever, in the history of the world, been changed by laying on extra policemen.

He duly hired 420 clowns and mime artists to wait at strategic roadjunctions and traffic lights. When they spotted jay-walkers, they walked afterthem, imitating their movements. Reckless drivers were also subjected tomocking treatment. It worked beautifully. No one, no matter how macho, wasgoing to be seen thumping a Marcel Marceau lookalike. Within a short time,three-quarters of Bogota’s pedestrians were meekly obeying the traffic signals.

Reading this reminded me that so often when I go into anorganisation to run a writing or storytelling workshop, the underlyingrequirement, even though it’s seldom acknowledged as such, is one of culturalchange. The alien language, the inability to talk in an interesting way aboutpractically anything, is symptomatic of something far deeper than a failure ofvocabulary or a paucity of imagination. It’s about the way that people who areperfectly bold and assertive as individuals, when thrown together in largegroups, develop a collective aversion to risk – so they seek refuge in thebanalities and convolutions of business speak.

I can’t help thinking that this is an area in which the mayor’stactics would work a treat. Imagine a board meeting or sales conference withroving clowns who tooted on a hooter or turned a somersault or pulled a sad faceat every cliché, absurd neologism or meaningless abstraction. People would soonstart to speak like ordinary human beings again. Laughing at wrong behaviourseems so much better than trying to punish or correct it. After all, byany normal standards, business speak is wrong behaviour.

The rabble

2011-11-12T10:24:00.001Z

There was a time when I imagined that in my sixties life would have startedto become a pleasant, carefree stroll through the sunlit uplands. Ah well …

This is what has been competing for space in my headthis week. Why collagen makes better sausage skins than animal gut. Why youshould leave your money to a famous university. How to teach a group ofadministrators in Zurich to write better reports. What to call a new bottlingof a famous whisky. How to be interesting and witty about a firm of stockbrokers.Why you should send your children to a certain well-known school. How toencourage groups of chief executives to tell stories. How to market a DarkAngels course in Sweden (not difficult). How to teach 3,000 Indian managers tomake better contact with their customers and colleagues (more difficult). Whatto do about my elderly mother who is losing the plot five hundred miles away inKent (very difficult). How to finish the almost finished novel I haven’t been finishingfor the last eighteen months (impossible). What to do about an epileptic iPhone. And what towrite about in this blog.

These are no vague musings, rather a platoon of smallbut highly trained attention-seekers armed with megaphones. They shout at mefirst thing in the morning. They whisper and nag me last thing at night. Andthey know nothing about collaboration. It’s each one for himself and may theloudest, the most insistent win. I was wrong. They’re a rabble, not a platoon.

Earlier this week I sent through the first draft of aninterview to its subject, one of the people whose stories feature in the school recruitment brochure. He rang me a couple of days later. It made himanxious, he said. He had talked about certain family issues. It was very personal.

I replied that the interest for the reader, and thevalue to the school, lay precisely in the personal aspect of his story; thatwithout it, it might end up reading simply like a CV. He agreed, but stillfelt that some of what I had written was too close to the bone. We duly tonedit down – without, I hope, losing any of the warmth and candour hehad transmitted during the interview. The story still makes the point that theschool had equipped him well to deal with the challenges of adult life.

On which subject, I spent last night with my son in Newcastle. He’s in hissecond year of a business studies course. We went out to dinner and he talkedabout his preoccupations, all entirely real and deserving of serious consideration.I listened to him and thought of my rabble. What a good thing it is, I thought, that we only really acknowledge the things we know we can deal with.

A small rebellion

2011-11-03T23:39:00.000Z

The ripples from our last Dark Angels course continue to spread. Twoweeks after leaving Inverness-shire, the glue that binds the group togetherseems to be setting firmer rather than weakening, as is more often the case.Our inboxes bulge daily with new banter, ruminations and aperçus.

This wonderful exchange came in today from Neil Baker,the one full-time professional business writer on the course, also anaccomplished writer of short stories (click here to read his latest). ‘ThoughtI'd report this small act of successful Dark Angels rebellion,’ Neil said.

Client (in agalaxy far, far way - aka New York): "Neil, there's good news and not sogood news. I love some of this enormously big thing you've written for me, butit's not working. The case studies are excellent, but the body copy just hastoo much information."

Me(exasperated): "That is what you asked for. You wanted all thatdata."

Client: "Iknow. I was wrong."

Me (at leasthe's admitted it): "Let me point something out: in the case studies, whichyou like, I'm telling a story. In the rest, which you don't like, I'm reportingdata. People like stories, they don't like data."

Client (after along, worrying pause, the sound of a penny dropping): "Yes, you'reright."

Me: "So whydon't I write the whole thing like that? A bit of data where we need it, butlet me tell stories. People will like it. They'll want to read it."

Client:"Sure. That's great. That's what I want!"

Me (pushing myluck): "While I'm at it, can I cut out all the business jargon?"

Client:"Can you do that?! You'd make me so happy."

Me: "Yes.”

Quod erat, Tenebris Angelis, demonstrandum.

In another part of the forest … I visited myacupuncturist friend Wenbo Xu for a treatment earlier on this week. I’vewritten about him in previous posts. One of these found its way into Room 121, whose title, as well as beinga pun on one-to-one, is a nod to 1984, where society is controlled by the language of Big Brother and opponents of the regime are tortured by being confronted with their worstfears in the dreaded Room 101.

I was touched to find that Wenbo had bought a copy of Room 121, which he asked me to sign. Ashe opened the book a small piece of paper fluttered out. It was the head andshoulders of a man, painstakingly cut out in silhouette from an article Wenbo hadread and which he was now using as a bookmark.

The man was George Orwell.

My Chinese friend had no idea of the connection.

Such are life’s delights.

Murder was there none

2011-10-28T09:23:00.000+01:00

‘What are the types of people who come on your courses?’ asked aprospective Dark Angels student a couple of days ago.

With last week’s course fresh in my mind I was able toreel off the following list: an archaeologist turned business consultant; awriter of web content for an oil giant; a professor of mental health; abusiness coach and trainer; a marketing assistant with a firm of fund managers;the owner of a small branding and communications consultancy; an arts curatorcurrently on a Clore leadership programme; and three freelances, one a writer,one a corporate video producer and one a PR agent.

Ten people with extraordinarily differentpersonalities, professional backgrounds and levels of writing experience. Agroup for whom five nights together in a remote Highland farmhouse might easilyhave had the makings of an Agatha Christie mystery. But murder was there none.Quite the opposite in fact. They got to know one another and stayed up late drinking,telling stories and singing songs. During the day they listened appreciativelyto each other’s writing and supported one another when the going got a littlerough. They cooked together and collaborated in pairs on joint writingprojects. They embraced fondly, some even shed a tear, when it was time topart. And nearly a week later the emails continue to circulate.

So what actually happened? Was it really just a weeklong lock-in, a love-in, a bonding session for a non-existent team? No. Whathappened – what always happens on Dark Angels courses – was that we offeredthem the freedom and encouragement to discover the connecting power of words.They used words to dig deep into ideas, to reach for half-buried feelings, tosay what they really, really meant about their lives, their loves, their work.Through this newly polished lens they could see the words of the world they hadtemporarily left behind for the lazy, lacklustre, tepid half-truths that sooften pass for communication in businesss. And through that newly polished lensthey connected with one another, heart, mind and imagination.

That’s the point of Dark Angels and they all got it.To choose the words that make the real human connections, in business, at homeor anywhere else. When he came to the final chapter of Howard’s End, EM Forster could have writtenit just for us. 'Only connect.' It’s all that matters – and now there are ten newly fledged Dark Angels that know it.

What's the point?

2011-10-21T08:59:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday night we took the students on our Dark Angels course tothe theatre. We left our lofty perch and plummeted down the hill to Loch Ness,then drove five miles along the lochside to the Victorian community hall in thevillage of Drumnadrochit (population 813 and known by musicians of myacquaintance as Dropmadrumkit, though more famous as the home of competing LochNess Monster centres).

This was no mere amateur dramatics evening. Theresidents of north Loch Ness-side owe much to the indefatigable Jennie Macfiewho, amid a slew of other activities, finds time to programme events at theGlen Urquhart Public Hall, putting on some of the best music and drama that comesto the Highlands. This week it wasSix and A Tanner, a one-man showfeaturing the Glaswegian actor David Hayman, fresh from the Donmar Warehousewhere he’d been appearing with Jude Law in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie.

It was a searing, deeply moving, and at timeshilarious portrayal of a Glaswegian man ranting at the coffin of his brutal,abusive father, written largely from personal experience by the actor’s friendRony Bridges. David Hayman held us enthralled for fifty minutes with the powerand magnetism of his performance and then, with scarcely a pause, tookquestions from us for a further forty minutes. As well as talking about the playand his craft, he told us about his work in Afghanistan for the charity, SpiritAid, which he founded in 2001 to help children whose lives have been devastatedby war, genocide, poverty or abuse. This is no celebrity posturing. I learntafterwards that for several years until his charity gained officialrecognition, he used to go there illegally, in disguise, so that he could dothe work he wanted to.

As we left it occurred to me that there was onequestion he hadn’t been asked but which would have been of interest to us all:how did his political activism and charity work, which seem to represent thegreater purpose in his life, feed into his performances as an actor? The answermight possibly have been something to do with a strong sense of injustice,which was certainly present in the way he portrayed the relationship of thecharacter with his dead father.

Purpose has been a recurring theme in our discussionsthis week. How can an organisation communicate authentically and effectively toany audience, internal or external, if it isn’t clear about its purpose? To saythat the purpose is to make money for shareholders simply isn’t enough anylonger. People want to know, quitereasonably, why the world would be a poorer place without it. Yet it’s aquestion many organisations seem incapable of answering; and then they wonderwhy they are in disarray. They could learn much from people like David Hayman,whose purpose seems to infuse every aspect of his thinking and being. In hisstage performance and subsequent conversation with us he felt truly joined up. How manybusinesses or organisations can you think of that really feel that way?

Getting traction

2011-10-13T23:29:00.003+01:00

On Monday I’m driving up to the writers’ centre at Moniack Mhor, in Inverness-shire, to run a Dark Angels course. There are several reasons why I’m particularly looking forward to it.

Firstly, I missed not being involved in the Advanced Course in Spain much more than I thought I was going to. Photos, glimpses of the writing produced there, and the flurry of euphoric emails that followed the course, did nothing to alleviate the pinch of something missed or lost. So I’m looking on Moniack Mhor rather like the breaking of a fast.

On which theme, secondly, we haven’t been there for five years and it’s one of my favourite of all the Dark Angels venues. A converted farm and croft house, perched high on a hillside between Loch Ness and Beauly with spectacular views north to Ben Wyvis and the big hills of Wester Ross, it feels wild and remote and quintessentially Highland. I’m even secretly hoping we get some snow next week.

Thirdly, it’s the original and longest in duration (five nights, four days) of all our courses – which is why we haven’t run it since 2006. We felt that in a tougher economic climate people might have difficulty taking so much time off work; though having reinstated it this year we’ve filled it without any trouble, which we now suspect may be the In Business dividend, the payoff from the programme BBC Radio 4 made about Dark Angels back in the summer. In any event, we call this one the Full Foundation Course and it runs from Monday evening to Saturday morning. It’s long enough to take people on a proper journey of creative and personal discovery; to get some real traction, as they say.

This is the nub of Dark Angels, this traction. Yes, our courses are about the words, about honing the craft, dusting off the vocabulary, polishing the syntax – those are all good things for any writer to do. But beyond that they’re about the kindness of the words – the humankindness (as in the title of this blog), that allows us as writers and communicators to make the powerful connections we seek with others who, whether we work with them or share our lives with them in other ways, are mostly just like us; people who become engaged, moved, bored by the same things as we do.

And the best reward for us as tutors is when we see our students first making that connection with themselves, understanding that the very greatest value those words, that vocabulary, that syntax can have is to provide the lens through which they start to see clearly their own purpose. Because only then are they ready to start using the words to make powerful connections with others.

Autumn tales

2011-10-07T09:27:00.003+01:00

I often write this on the train on the way back from Edinburgh. It’s a picturesque journey, across the Forth Bridge and east along the Fife coast, then inland through the soft, fertile farmland of central Fife, a short climb and down again to the glint of the Tay estuary and Perth, and finally into the hills for fifteen miles before the train deposits me at Dunkeld and heads on through the Highlands for Inverness.

Today there’s a real breath of autumn on the air. We’ve had sunshine, cold squally rain, and now a ragged sunset. The geese have been back from Greenland for a couple of weeks and today, the forecasters said, the first snow would dust the high hilltops.

The journey reminds me why I choose not to live in the city, and never more so than after a day like today. There were three long meetings, each one stimulating in its own way, but now I need to be out of the buzz to digest them and let my mind clear. The movement of the train and the passing view of the darkening countryside helps.

The first meeting was with one of the world’s largest producers of collagen casings – which you or I know better as sausage skins. Collagen holds us mammals together. It’s what our connective tissue is made of. And if you scrape it off the underside of cowhide, then subject it to clever chemistry, you can spin it into incredible lengths of absolutely uniform, unblemished, edible sheathing for sausage meat. In a single year this company makes enough to go to the moon and back five times.

The second meeting was with a designer colleague who has worked for a number of years with one of Scotland’s more famous hotels. Now it’s looking for a new voice – and more specifically a fictional character to embody the brand and provide that voice. If the project comes off it will stretch my imagination in enjoyable ways.

The third meeting was with my branding expert friend and another designer colleague. We were tidying up loose ends on projects we’ve undertaken together for several different educational establishments, all of which, for differing reasons, need to raise either funds or student numbers. Robert is a genius at helping them identify their unique selling propositions, which we then work together to articulate.

Sausage skins, a luxury hotel, an Oxford college and two private schools, one of them for children with specific learning difficulties. What could they possibly have in common? The answer, it struck me as we left Edinburgh, is that they are all searching for stories to tell. Stories that connect them with their audiences just as firmly as that extraordinary monument to Victorian engineering, across which we now rattled, connects the two sides of the Forth.

Take away our stories and we are nothing but husks. The same is just as true for organisations as it is for people. The trick, as I said here a few weeks ago, is knowing which one to tell when.

My friend the visionary

2011-09-29T20:31:00.006+01:00

Almost exactly forty years ago to this day I started my first job in London. Improbable as it seems now, it was as an articled clerk with one of the big London-Scottish firms of accountants. I’ve written about this in a previous post (click here) and I don’t want to repeat myself, other than to say that had I known how to go about doing the things I really wanted to do, I wouldn’t have ended up in the City. As it was, it seemed like a good enough way for a law graduate from Aberdeen University to get himself to London.

I nervously scanned my fellow novices on that first day, and there was one in particular who caught my eye. It was partly because he was the only Indian; partly also because there was a spark there, a hint of mischief and slightly baffled amusement, that set him apart from the otherwise rather stodgy-seeming crowd.

Over the next few weeks we got to know one another well. Almost immediately we were sent off for a fortnight to an accountancy boot-camp somewhere deep in the Worcestershire countryside. It was run by a blustering Yorkshireman called Mick Worthington who couldn’t get his tongue around my new friend’s name, Pramod, and instead referred to him as Ramrod.

In our own ways we were both square pegs in round holes. I was fascinated by his eastern-ness, the music, the joss sticks, the mythology and words of Hindi. He introduced me to good Indian food and eating with my fingers. I took him to my stepfather’s grand house in the Scottish borders over the Christmas holidays and we went pheasant shooting and danced reels.

I lasted only three months in the job but by then our friendship was firmly cemented and we continued to see each other regularly for several years until he qualified and his work took him off to the Gulf. We lost touch then for a couple of years, only to discover, quite by chance, that he was back in London again and living in the same Notting Hill street as me, three doors down. We vowed then not to lose touch again, and we haven’t, despite his subsequently spending a decade in the States, before finally returning to Delhi about fifteen years ago.

Today it’s his business that I travel to India to work for, or rather it was his business until June of this year, when he stood down as CEO of India’s first and biggest outsourcing company. It’s a remarkable story and I’ll tell it another time, but my friend, Pramod Bhasin, my skinny, unassuming, twenty year-old Indian friend, is now a global business leader, revered in Indian business circles as the father of that country’s outsourcing industry, the founder of Genpact, a company that turns over more than $1bn and employs 54,000 people across the globe.

During my trip this week to Hyderabad and Genpact’s newly re-named Pramod Bhasin Learning and Development Centre, I heard this story. On his recent valedictory tour of the company’s many facilities, he visited the training campus. The main building has a large cafeteria where ‘town hall’ meetings, as they’re called, usually take place. On these occasions it tends to fill slowly, a little reluctantly, and people have to be coaxed forward into the proximity of the speaker.

When the word went round that it was Pramod – as he is known by everyone in the business – who was coming, the cafeteria quickly filled to bursting and the people who couldn’t get in spilled back up the stairs and along the corridors, so tightly packed that when he arrived he could hardly make his way through them. When at last he reached the cafeteria, the applause started and wouldn’t stop. It went on and on and on, and all he could do was stand there and wait, visibly moved.

My friend Pramod, the visionary.

I wish I’d been there to see it.

Finca Banega

2011-09-23T18:21:00.006+01:00

Today John Simmons and Stuart Delves are in Spain with the Dark Angels advanced group and I’m preparing to leave for Hyderabad in the morning. It has been a strange day, knowing they’re there in that beautiful place, basking in warm autumn sunshine. Much of the time I’ve been wishing heartily I was with them. But I have a different journey to make, and there’s much to look forward to in India.

Right now though, on a grey afternoon in Perthshire, I’m feeling in limbo, caught between those two worlds – or should I say continents. Perhaps because I’ve been to Spain more recently, my thoughts are pulled to southern Europe, and in particular to the private finca that a small group of students will visit tomorrow morning. It’s a beautiful stretch of wild, rolling countryside, mantled with small oak trees, and populated by lazy cattle and black Iberian pigs. A good five miles down a dirt track stands the cortijo, an elegant whitewashed house with a terracotta roof and a large central courtyard. It was built sixty or seventy years ago entirely from materials found on the estate, not just the stone and timber, but even the clay from which the floor tiles were fired.

The land at Finca Banega has been generous with its resources for a long time. Up the hill from the house is a Roman quarry where you can still see the shapes of the millstones that were hewn from the granite, two thousand years ago. The first time we went there, six years ago, and climbed the hill, I was transported back at once. Later, I imagined this scene that might have played itself out there:

We woke at first light

Gracchus and I

Shivered in the Iberian dawn

Unfurled our cloaks

Rose yawning from the bony ground

And broke our fast with sweet, ripe figs

Plucked from the tree

Still cool with dew

Mist hung like bull’s breath

Among the holm oaks

As we hefted satchels on our backs

And climbed the rock-strewn path

Scattering sleepy piglets at our step

Sun rose, shadows melted

Light trickled down the hill

Warming the dust-dry earth

And on the scrawny plain below

Goat bells broke the silence

With their gurgling song

Ahead, a pocked loaf of granite

Reared into the deepening blue

In its shadow lesser boulders

Crouched like pagan worshippers

We downed our satchels, lit a fire

And cooked our porridge

In a haze of aromatic smoke

A small brown scorpion

Scuttled from a crevice

And watched us as we ate

Gracchus crushed it with his sandal

We spat on hands and set to work

All that long hot morning

We bored stone

Wrestling augers

Till our muscles cracked

The air grew thick with dust

And sweat ran down our backs

Our necks and thighs

When the holes were deep enough

I took the twenty-seven oaken pegs

And hammered hard

Driving them one by one

Into their beds of stone

Gracchus lugged the leather bucket

To the spring

Filling it with sweet cool water

That would swell the oak

And split the rock

And conjure rough-hewn millstones

To grind our daily bread

At last we rested in the shade

Dreaming of wives and home

We waited as the sun beat down

And nature’s forces took their course

While far from this forgotten place

Amid the seven hills of Rome

More skilful hands than ours

Made gods of men

And carved their likenesses

In marble from Liguria

Which story?

2011-09-16T10:34:00.005+01:00

Next week it’s time again for the annual Dark Angels expedition to Aracena, the small hill town in Andalucia where John Simmons, Stuart Delves and I take a party of students on our Advanced Creative Writing in Business course. For the first time in six years I won’t be there. I’m going back to India instead. But I’ll think enviously of the sweet figs on the tree by the poolhouse, the dawn mist in the valley and sunrise over the hills, the conversations in the courtyard and dinners on the terrace. I’ll miss the sense of companionship that blossoms over those four days, the moments of personal revelation and creative insight.

And I’ll miss the stories. The course begins with the opening words of one of the most famous stories of all time: ‘En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme …’ ‘In a place in La Mancha, whose name I don't care to remember …’ Don Quixote. It continues with stories written down in daylight and stories told over glasses of wine after dark.

I will be hearing stories in India, although of a rather different kind. With my colleague Paul Pinson I’m running a storytelling workshop for senior leaders from eight of India’s largest companies. What do stories mean to business? How do they work? Where do you tell them? These are the questions we’ll be posing and the simple answers are: everything, effortlessly and everywhere.

We’ll be explaining to our students how the stories we tell about ourselves and our organisations are the very warp and weft of our existences; how they’re the frameworks that hold us together and keep us upright; and how without them we are without structure or identity. And we’ll be impressing on them the importance of listening to the stories other people are telling about them, customers, colleagues, employees.

As I write this, the story of the Welsh mining accident is unfolding. We have just heard the news – unspeakable, intolerable for the four families – that they’ve found one body but that they can’t yet identify it. This story, that has come out of the blue to engulf those four families and the communities they belong to, will shape lives for generations.

Stories – the retelling and interpretation of events – have that power. Even the seemingly trivial can change individual destinies. The really big stories can shape nations. I think of Scotland, reaching for a new identity but still struggling to shrug off that old story of defeat, clearance, emigration, sectarianism, industrial decline and dependency.

We all have many stories. Knowing which is the right one to believe in at any given moment is not always so easy.

Buen camino (4)

2011-09-09T09:01:00.009+01:00

If you'd prefer to read the whole account in one, rather than working backwards through the blog posts, click here.

Once we reached the old part of Santiago with its narrow streets and shady arcades, we knew we were almost at journey’s end. We had spent our first night there before catching the bus back up country for the start of the walk.

After dinner that evening we had strolled away from the restaurant to find ourselves caught up in a swelling crowd, making its way towards the cathedral. Curious, we allowed ourselves to be swept along, and at the very moment we arrived in the square, packed with several thousand people, all the lights went out. For the next thirty minutes we were treated to a spectacular son-et-lumière, projected onto the façade of the cathedral which reared into the darkness like a vast mottled cliff, sculpted by wind and rain into fantastic embellishments and ornamentations.

Even in daylight, seen now across the town rooftops, the spires were impressive – a beacon for footsore, weary pilgrims. We were approaching the cathedral from behind and above. As we passed what looked like a small bishop’s palace with an ornamental garden in front of it, an exuberant group of a dozen or so young pilgrims came in from a side street and broke into song. Now we could see down to the deep archway that led into the cathedral square, and this first glimpse of our destination, combined with the cheerfully raised voices, provoked a strong wave of emotion and I was surprised to feel my eyes start to water. We followed the group down the slope, Sarah hobbling determinedly behind me, and as we approached the archway we began to hear Galician pipes above the voices. In the shadows of the archway was a young piper in traditional dress, accompanied by his dog. He broke into a jig as we entered the arch and the music filled it, quickening our pace for the final few steps. Then we were in the square, suddenly overcome with emotion. We stood there and hugged each other and wept.

The square is at least the size of a football pitch. It was filling up with tourists, locals and pilgrims, many sitting or lying stretched out exhausted on the flagstones, surrounded by their walking paraphernalia as if in some modern caravanserai. It was eleven o’clock and we’d made it with an hour to spare. We limped to a cafe just off the square, ordered coffee and took off our boots to wait there for midday. Though we’d walked less than a fifth of the distance some of the other pilgrims had covered, the sense of achievement was almost overwhelming.

Later we made our way into the cathedral and found a pew, stowing our walking gear like everyone else at our feet. The mass lasted an hour and at one point priests from half a dozen different countries stepped forward in turn to address the congregation in their native tongues, all framed by the fantastically ornate gilded cave in which sits a larger-than-life-size effigy of Saint James. Sadly they didn’t swing the botafumeiro, the enormous incense burner which is suspended from high above the apse and takes several priests to set in motion. Originally intended to fumigate travel-stained pilgrims, today its purpose is more theatrical than hygienic.

Before the service began we had glimpsed our Australian friend and exchanged congratulatory smiles. As we left the cathedral we realised that we badly wanted to find her and tell her how much she had come to represent the spirit of the camino for us. We never did. Over the next twenty-four hours we scanned bars and plazas and cafes but she wasn’t there. Perhaps she had already left for Finisterre. She will never know how much she gave us heart for our journey.

But perhaps that is what happens on the camino. Unknowingly we all give each other heart, because of the common purpose, the connection to some long, deep pulse of humanity. Why else would we have felt as we did, that our hearts were almost bursting, when we finally walked into the cathedral square?

We booked our trip through www.followthecamino.com

Buen camino (3)

2011-09-02T07:54:00.003+01:00

Mount Joy was not joyous that morning. Low cloud and light drizzle obscured the distant cathedral. Having completed our final climb we’d been walking along a wooded ridge that seemed to go on forever, past a vast timberyard, past the sprawling campus of TV Galicia, and now we were resting in the shadow of a large and hideous monument commemorating the visit to Santiago of Pope John Paul II.

Sarah’s shin had been growing more and more painful. I’d realised fairly early on that being solicitous was no help and that the best thing was just to keep going, since that was clearly what she was determined to do. Some of the time I walked in front, some of the time behind. I would never have thought that the sight of a bedraggled figure plodding doggedly along in the drizzle, head bent beneath a backpack, grimacing at every other step, could stir such strong feelings; but as the kilometres passed my admiration grew and grew and my heart swelled with it.

Our Spanish friends, Helen and Blas, daughter and father, caught up with us as we rested, sitting on a low wall. They were struggling too, they admitted. But there was something uplifting about their closeness to one another and I think we drew energy from it. We set off again, down into a valley on whose opposite side Santiago sprawls across the shoulders of another plateau. We crossed over a motorway and into the outskirts of the town and all at once there were brass scallop shells set into the pavement, beckoning us along the final leg of the camino.

Over the last twenty-four hours we had also been keeping an eye out for our young Australian friend. We had seen her a couple of times during the early part of the journey and each time her warmth, openness and cheerfulness had spurred us on. At our last meeting, with nearly five hundred miles under her belt, we’d asked her what she was going to do next. ‘I’ll just have to keep going to Finisterre,’ she’d replied with a smile.

Cape Finisterre falls short by sixteen kilometres of fulfilling its claim to be the end of the earth; Cabo da Roca in Portugal is actually the westernmost point of continental Europe. But for pilgrims who find they can’t stop in Santiago, the extra eighty kilometres lead to an unequivocal terminus in the form of a rocky headland pounded by Atlantic breakers.

By now our Australian friend had come to embody the spirit of the journey for us, and we both felt that we needed to see her one more time. Meanwhile, there were still a couple of kilometres of hard pavement to go to the centre of Santiago. It felt odd to be dragging ourselves through busy city streets, carrying our packs and poles, travel-stained and exhausted, while people in everyday clothes walked by on their way to the shops or to work – though we were by no means alone. A gathering stream of other pilgrims, singly, in pairs or in little groups, threaded their way through the crowds, their compasses similarly set on the cathedral square.
To be continued...

Buen camino (2)

2011-08-27T13:04:00.008+01:00

We’d imagined that the camino would be an endless succession of travellers’ tales as we moved along in a happy throng of pilgims, slipping easily into conversation with whoever took our fancy.

It wasn’t quite like that. The walking required concentration and effort as we climbed and dipped on a variety of surfaces – from tarmac to stony shepherds’ paths – through wooded hills and farmland, ever watchful for the next yellow arrow.

People walked determinedly, purposefully. Many had been on the road for a month and had already covered more than 400 miles by the time we joined them. Now they were scenting journey’s end. They were young, too, surprisingly so. We had pictured middle-aged pilgrims, but the majority were in their twenties and thirties – and Spanish.

But there were older walkers as well, and a good smattering of other nationalities. At our first stop, on the first day, we got talking to a spirited young Australian and her Dutch companion. They had four weeks’ walking behind them and we longed to know what it had been like for them. But rather than regale us with their stories she wanted to know about us, where we were from and how long we had been going. We told her we were a mere two hours into our journey. She sent us on our way with a warm smile and words of well-wishing and encouragement.

Later that day we fell in with a solitary Englishwoman, a faded upper-class rose. She was at pains to assert her independence, though we sensed her need for conversation. There was a story there but neither of us felt inclined to hear it. Perhaps towards the end of the journey we would have welcomed her company more than we did. But this was the first day and the camino hadn’t yet begun to pry us open.

On the second day we travelled for an hour or so with a pair of older New Zealand women, both Steiner teachers. The one I walked with began to tell me about her adult son who had become schizophrenic through drug abuse. She related her story with the detachment of someone who needs to protect themselves from the rawness of the truth. I was startled to find myself thinking that as a fellow pilgrim I should be doing something more than simply listening. There was obviously nothing for me to say, so for the rest of her story I concentrated on listening with as much empathy as I could.

On the third day – at nearly thirty kilometres, the longest and most exhausting day of the journey – we walked for a while with a Spanish father and daughter. Helen was in her late twenties and had been working as an education officer for the Spanish embassy in Niger. Blas, her father, ran a sports shop in Madrid. A lean seventy-year-old with an easy stride and a broad grin, he seemed to be bursting with the joy of his daughter’s company. She was equally happy to be spending precious time with him. She carried the heavier pack and attentively, though unnecessarily, placed a hand at his elbow when they came to a road. Their easy companionship and affection for one another touched us both.

These encounters and conversations, brief as they were, were gradually revealing a broader consciousness of which, like migrating salmon, we were as much a part as everyone else on the journey. It was this, perhaps even more than any personal determination, that drew us out from the shelter of the eaves and back into the rain with ten kilometres still to go on that last morning of the Camino de Santiago.

To be continued …

Buen camino (I)

2011-08-18T23:50:00.007+01:00

At five am in the Galician countryside it’s very dark. We felt like the only people in the world as we walked down the lane from our hotel. The sky was full of stars, a dog barked distantly and we carried our walking poles so as not to clatter on the road as we passed through the sleeping hamlet. This was our fifth and last morning on the Camino de Santiago, and we had twenty-two kilometres to walk by mid-day in order to reach our destination, the daily pilgrims’ mass in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela.

Shortly we came to a crossroads. The camino is marked mainly with yellow arrows painted onto trees, walls, telegraph poles, even the tarmac itself. The paint fades and here it was pitch dark. We took a guess and twenty minutes later found ourselves climbing into the next small town described in the guidebook. As we walked up the deserted main street another soul appeared, carrying a heavy backpack and wearing a headlamp. We fell into step with him gratefully, feeling like the novices we were.

Soon the path left the town and we were back in darkness again, climbing a leafy tunnel through oak woods. Our light-bearer was not talkative. A Madrileño, he had been walking the northern, coastal route for a week at thirty-five kilometres a day, nearly double the distance we’d been covering. His pace left little breath for conversation. But for the moment we needed him, so we marched smartly along behind him.

Other pilgrims were beginning to drift onto the path from their lodgings, solitary walkers, couples, little groups, sleepily mumbling ‘Buen camino’ to one another and talking in pre-dawn whispers. Pale pinpoints of light wavered through the woods ahead of us, the oaks now replaced by tall, scented eucalyptus trees. We could have left our Lucifer now, but it seemed we had become attached to him, drawn along in his slipstream as he forged on, overtaking everyone in his path.

Dawn was a long time coming. Clouds had drifted in and a fine drizzle was falling – the first we had seen in five days – when the sky at last began to lighten. We had been climbing slowly but steadily for nearly two hours by now and a glance at the map showed that we had already covered more than eight kilometres. I was starting to worry that we would burn out at this pace, particularly since Sarah had begun to complain of an aching shin at the end of the previous day’s walking. So finally, though not without a certain reluctance, we thanked our guide for his light and watched him disappear down the path ahead of us.

We were now on top of a plateau and making our way round the perimeter of Santiago’s airport. For half an hour or so we saw no other pilgrims. Perhaps we had missed the way and should have stayed with him. Or perhaps we really had overtaken everyone else, since no one would be joining the camino now until we reached the viewpoint and chapel at Monte del Gozo (Mount Joy – so named because, on a clear day, it offers weary pilgrims their first glimpse of the cathedral spires). Here minibuses disgorge day visitors to walk the final few kilometres into Santiago.

We dropped over the edge of the plateau to where, as the path met a main road, an elderly man was up early, handing out leaflets for his guest house. Although it was almost full daylight now we could see no waymarkings. My instinct said we should go right, but we asked the man and he directed us left. After an anxious twenty minutes, we picked up the signs again and at the same time sighted another group ahead.

The drizzle was getting heavier and Sarah was beginning to limp. I knew she was in pain; I also knew that, having initially dismissed the idea of attending the mass as being insignificant to non-believers such as us, over the last twenty-four hours, for reasons neither of us really understood, completing the journey at the proper hour, in the proper manner, had started to become the most important thing in our lives. This was soon to become a true journey of the heart, a fact which physical exertion, immersion in a new landscape, curiosity about our fellow pilgrims, and the gradual return of rusty Spanish, had so far largely conspired to keep from us.

We took a break, sheltering from the rain under the eaves of a house. Sarah changed her footwear and we ate the sandwich the hotel had provided for breakfast. Then, with ten kilometres still to go, we set off again.

To be continued …

Travellers' tales

2011-07-22T08:17:00.005+01:00

This time next week I’ll be in the Galician town of Sarria, preparing for the first of six days’ walking along the Camino de Santiago. Santiago, of course, is Saint James, after whom I’m named – though it was a close thing, apparently, since my birthday is actually Michaelmas Day, September 29, and I was nearly christened Michael. But even though I’m not in any way religious, and we’re walking the pilgrimage route for whatever experience it brings us, I enjoy the thought that our destination will be Santiago de Compostela, the last resting place of the man who would have been my name saint, were I to have one. It lends extra meaning to the journey.

Sarria is 115 kilometres from Santiago and our journey involves the slightly back-to-front process of flying to Santiago, spending our first night there, then taking a bus up country to Sarria, whence we walk back again to Santiago along the pilgrimage route. The travel company simply moves our luggage each day from one hotel to the next, an average of 20 kms per day.

A few weeks ago our travel documents arrived in an oddly bulky envelope which, along with the brochure and reservations, included two scallop shells. My first thought was that they must be drinking scoops for use at springs along the way. I wasn’t wrong, but there are many other interpretations too. The scallop is closely associated with the mythology of Saint James and the washing ashore of his shipwrecked body. It’s also a metaphor for the pilgrim, the shell washed up on the shores of Galicia as the pilgrim is guided there by the hand of God. And finally its converging grooves represent the many different routes that converge on Santiago from all over Europe.

But it’s also simply a badge of pilgrimage. And I very much like the idea of being a pilgrim, of making a journey that has no secular purpose. We’re not walking to bring news to someone, we’re not walking to attend a feast, we’re not walking to market, and yet the journey has a very distinct destination – the cathedral of Santiago and the relics that lie therein. Having said that, a pilgrimage is also a case par excellence where it’s the journey that matters almost more than the destination; the calming, meditative value of simply walking, and the slow, gentle connection with one’s natural surroundings that it brings.

Then there’s the company of other pilgrims – and the Canterbury Tales immediately spring to mind. Who will we fall in with along the way (in 1985, 690 people made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela; last year it was more than a quarter of a million)? What stories will we hear – either from recreational pilgrims like us or, maybe more interestingly, from those with a real religious motive? I haven’t made much use of the small black Moleskine recently, but this is one holiday when I will definitely be taking one with me. I see this as a pilgrimage to some inner place of peaceful reflection (and perhaps that’s what God is), but it’s the thought of what lies en route that really excites me.

You'll forgive me if I don’t post for the next couple of weeks.

Indian elephant

2011-07-14T22:08:00.006+01:00

I’m back eating dinner at the Leela Kempinski again, overlooking the Gurgaon toll, that winking 32-lane monument to Indian prosperity. Two things are different this time (see earlier post). First, I’m not reading Rosemary Sutcliff (though I did watch the film of The Eagle on a miserably small screen on the way out and ended up feeling irritated that BA can’t provide better quality viewing). Second, my room faces away from the city and overlooks a large tract of woods and farmland, maybe a mile square, that could be anywhere in rural India.

This afternoon I had a meeting in my sixth-floor room. One of my Indian visitors stood at the window and pointed down to where an ancient tractor was slowly ploughing a strip of field.

‘That chap’s probably sitting on twenty million,’ he said.

In hindsight, I’m not sure whether he meant rupees or dollars. But even if it was the former, that would be close to £300,000, a fortune for a small farmer. Only twenty-five years ago, most of modern Gurgaon was like that – open farmland. Fifteen miles from Delhi, there was an ancient town here, but nothing resembling a city.

Today Gurgaon has 1.5 million inhabitants and in the course of a single week you can practically see the skyline change as cranes swing to and fro and new business centres, apartment blocks or ‘convenience malls’ inch upwards. It’s the second biggest city in Haryana province and the first Indian city to have distributed electricity to every household. It has the third highest per capita income in the country and would be far higher than eleventh in the national ‘life-after-work’ index were it not for its abysmal roads and public transport system (and that despite being at the end of the new Delhi metro line).

But this is India, and the statistics take on a comically different perspective when you emerge from a meeting in a gleaming new corporate headquarters, pass through the security lodge, step out onto the street and trip over a pig.

Though I’ve yet to see an elephant here, I can’t help feeling Ganesha must be smiling on Gurgaon. I’ve always felt an affinity for the jolly, pot-bellied mono-tusker. There’s something irresistibly life-affirming about him. He makes me want to pat his fat tummy and tweak his trunk. I also like the fact that in some representations he’s holding a pen, though I didn’t know until today (99 Thoughts on Ganesha is my Gurgaon reading this time) that at the request of the sage Vyasa, he wrote down the whole of the Mahabharata in a single day. Respect, Ganesha!

He’s also the embodiment of prosperity and material auspiciousness. It must have been an inkling of this that sent me searching for a little silver statue of him on the last afternoon of an earlier trip to Delhi, a holiday that time, of which I later wrote:

You could have gone your own way

In search of silk or bolts of cotton

But on that final frantic afternoon

You followed me without complaint

In and out of shops and stalls

Where swarthy men drank tea

And proffered trays of stones

Agate, lapis lazuli, cornelian

Until at last we found him

Thumb-high, smiling

Pot-bellied, pen-wielding

Merriment with a trunk

I brought him home

And sat him on my desk

My little silver one-tusk

Fragment of the east, fellow scribe

Bringer of wealth, so they say

Though when I think about him now

It isn’t earthly riches that I see

But your patient hand in mine

That last hot Delhi afternoon

Now, five years on, I can’t help wondering whether perhaps he himself has had a hand in my return to India, in the new and bountiful relationship I’m enjoying with this flourishing, infuriating and utterly captivating country.

Striking a balance

2011-07-08T09:44:00.004+01:00

In a working week whose patterns are largely consistent only in their inconsistency, I have two regular punctuation marks. Both occur on Thursday. One is writing this blog, which I tend to do late Thursday afternoon (the fact that it arrives in people’s inboxes on a Friday morning is not, I’m afraid, a matter of design, but rather a happy accident; and how quickly the habit formed!). The second, later in the evening, is playing the piano with assorted fiddlers, mandolinists, guitarists, small pipers (the instruments, not the players) at the weekly session in my local pub on the banks of the river Tay.

To echo the point made by fellow writer Tim Rich in his excellent post from last week’s 66,000 Miles Per Hour, both are a kind of calisthenics, one for the brain and one for the soul, and I’ve come to depend on them to keep me in balance. When yesterday, towards the end of a punishing week, after a lightning strike had knocked out our local power and forced me to drive fifteen miles to the library in Perth in order to continue working, it looked for a little while as if I was going to have to forego both, something inside me protested insistently.

In the end it was the blog that gave way. Despite feeling utterly exhausted, I went to the pub, drank a pint of Guinness, played for an hour-and-a-half, and as a result had the first really good night’s sleep I’d had all week. Just as well, since I leave in a couple of hours’ time on the first leg of the journey to Hyderabad. On Monday I’m going to be running a workshop for an international group of 50 high-flyers on the first day of a year-long fast-track leadership programme; and this is the real source of the exhaustion.

I’m going with my friend and colleague Paul Pinson, who for many years ran his own Edinburgh-based theatre company, Boilerhouse. Paul is no stranger to moving large numbers of people about. In fact, our 50 are a mere scattering compared to some of the crowds he’s had marching about the streets of Edinburgh, the coastal dunes of Holland, and other places where he’s mounted site-specific productions. Nevertheless, the planning of this single day (which we’re then repeating with two other groups) has involved ten times more work than I’d ever imagined. I knew it was turning into a marathon when Paul said, ‘this is beginning to remind me why I eventually wound Boilerhouse down’.

But there’s a strong undercurrent of excitement that has carried us through each successive physical and mental barrier. We’re going to be taking these people on the first steps of a journey which, if we’re successful, will be much more significant to them than the physical one Paul and I are making from Scotland to India.

For me, meanwhile, it has been more a matter of gymnastics than calisthenics. But it does remind me how important is the balance between the two.

Overconnected

2011-07-01T00:06:00.006+01:00

Hyper-connectivity is not a word I’d heard until yesterday lunch-time, or if I had, it hadn’t registered.

It has now.

I was listening to three writers talking on Radio 4 about how our lives are being affected by our unprecedented exposure to information and to each other. They were an American writer who had realised that it was jeopardising his family relationships and has since written a best-selling book on the subject, a young journalist who admitted, among other things, that her smartphone had got her through the isolation of early motherhood, and a columnist who considers himself ‘not quite a luddite’, yet still can't organise his email and only reluctantly uses a mobile phone.

They all had interesting, thoughtful things to say about the phenomenon and they were all more or less in agreement that hyper-connectivity has benefits, including the capacity to open up new neural pathways in the brain; but they also agreed that if we don’t manage it well it can be harmful. There were three phrases that particularly stuck in my mind: ‘the traffic jam inside my head’, ‘we need to get back into our bodies’, and ‘we run the risk of not thinking deeply any more’.

In general, I like it all. I've come to see the the Internet, email, texting, Twitter, LinkedIn as essential tools of my trade and I believe that I couldn’t make a living without them; but I also enjoy them and find them stimulating. Nevertheless, they dominate much of my waking day and I recognise that they’re responsible for the constant feeling of slight breathlessness that I now seem to live with.

The ‘traffic jam’ I know only too well, and I try – not always successfully – to respond to it by shunting the unnecessary stuff to the back of the queue (and my mind). The ‘getting back in my body’, which is actually the antidote to the traffic jam, I do mainly by swimming and playing the piano. It’s the ‘thinking deeply’ that I find more of a problem.

I’m particularly conscious of it this week because I’ve just received the first copies of Room 121, my new book, co-written with John Simmons. Those three months over last winter when we were writing it, exchanging on an almost daily basis the blog posts that form each chapter, were a period of deep thinking because the time was ring-fenced; it had to be or we wouldn’t have met our deadline. And I’m proud of what we created because I believe that, thanks to that deep thought, the book goes way beyond the professional remit expressed in the sub-title: a masterclass in writing and communicating in business. At its core it’s a book about being true to oneself, about finding an authentic voice whatever one does, business leader or bus driver.

But as soon as we finished it, hyper-connected life crashed back into the almost sacred space we had created for ourselves and the deep thinking time was lost. Now I’m left with the frustration that while my life seems particularly rich in experience, my resulting view of the world feels only half-formed because I don’t have enough time to reflect on it. I know I need time to think deeply in order to do what I do better, and I know that hyper-connectivity is the main reason I don’t have it.

This strikes me as being one of the really big issues at this moment in our development as human beings; the way we choose to deal with it will be crucial to the direction society takes next. Yet perhaps my personal response to it needs be nothing more complicated than this: just write another book.

Repent, repent

2011-06-23T20:35:00.006+01:00

Alone in a glass case in the Church section at the back of level three of the National Museum of Scotland stand two objects which, at first glance, seem quite unexceptional. One is a square wooden chair. The other, draped on a display dummy, is a dull-looking gown.

On closer inspection, the chair reveals nothing. It is simply dark and polished with use. The gown is odd, though. It is not made of any fine stuff, but rather sackcloth, now worn and threadbare. It is not a garment for grand occasions.

But this is the Church section, remember, and the church in question is an unforgiving kirk where questing nostrils were constantly alert to the stench of moral turpitude, and the salvation of souls was prosecuted with much energy, zeal and inventiveness. The chair and garment are two of the great seventeenth and eighteenth century instruments of ecclesiastical discipline. Otherwise known as the Stool and Gown of Repentance, they were to be sat upon, or worn, in front of the congregation, by fornicators, adulterers, slanderers and other wrongdoers.

Jonet Gothskirk was one such. Between July and November 1677 she appeared before the congregation of West Calder kirk on thirteen successive Sundays for her adultery with a certain William Murdoch. ‘Because of her stupidity and that she could discover no sense or feeling of her sin, nor sorrow for ye same,’ she continued to wear the gown each Sunday, week after week, while the minister fulminated at her wickedness. Nature eventually intervened and she was released on account of the imminent arrival of her child.

But what did she feel, what did she think to herself while she stood there, Sunday after Sunday, her belly swelling, her legs aching, the sackcloth scratching at her skin? Did she look out at the congregation and read behind the pursed lips, the solemn faces, ‘There but by the grace of God go I’? Did she glance at the minister and rage at the hypocrisy that the Bard would immortalise a century later in Holy Willie’s Prayer? Was she so cowed by the collective opprobrium that she simply stood there and hung her head in misery? Did she long to be back in the arms of William Murdoch for whom no punishment was recorded? Was she simply resigned to her fate? Or was she too fearful for her own future, and that of her child, to think of anything but what she would do when her present ordeal ended?

I don’t know, but I have to find out. The Gown of Repentance is my 26 Treasures object. This is the repeat of last year’s 26 project with the V&A, which we’re running this year with the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Wales and the Royal Ulster Museum. I have to find out because now that I’ve been to see the gown, it’s Jonet’s voice I’m beginning to hear. I don’t yet know her well enough to know what she’s saying, but I will. By the end of July, the project deadline, Jonet will have spoken.

Ex libris

2011-06-17T09:07:00.001+01:00

The thing I most remember from my student days about the main Aberdeen University library was the carved mouse climbing the leg of each chair. It was a lovely touch, irreverent yet also somehow appropriate to what I remember as being quite an intimate nineteenth century reading room.

On Wednesday I was back at the university for a meeting. I was a little early so I bought a sandwich and ate it in the sunshine outside King’s College – a glorious setting with the medieval buildings, the lawn and shady trees, and little groups of students, also enjoying the sunshine, sprawled on the grass, deep in conversation.

It was a moment of intense nostalgia as I remembered my own summers there, especially the last; and the long, long days, reading outdoors till eleven pm, as we revised for exams. It must have been round about this week, I thought, mid-June. And then it struck me that having graduated in 1971 I was, quite accidentally, marking the fortieth anniversary of my finals. It was an odd feeling, both pleasant and disconcerting. I really don’t think of myself as someone who graduated forty years ago.

Then came another surprise. As I got up to walk to the meeting, I noticed a large glass cube towering into the sky, just the other side of the campus – the brand new £60 million university library, due to open in September. I know all about it because I wrote much of the original literature for the project, but I hadn’t yet seen it in the flesh, so to speak. I couldn’t go in, but from what I know it will be a marvel, a library of the future, a mere stone’s throw from the fifteenth century buildings of the old campus. It seems entirely right that the university has chosen to make its most conspicuous architectural statement with a library.

Yesterday it was another library, as we launched the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2011 programme in the grand, second-floor reference section of Edinburgh’s splendid Victorian Central Library. It’s a big space, lit by huge south, west and east-facing windows, and it was packed to the gunwales with authors, publishers, agents, journalists, sponsors and people from all the other organisations, including competing festivals, that make up literary Scotland.

It was an inspiring event with brilliant presentations by both Janet Smyth, the new children’s programme director, and Nick Barley, the main programme director, now into his second season. Revolution, inspired particularly, but not exclusively, by the Arab spring, is the theme this year. There was a buzz afterwards, a sense of collective engagement with the big events that are shaping the world around us; and as always I felt privileged to be part of this festival, the largest of its kind in the world, which may have books and authors at its heart but is in reality about so much more.

This year there was something else as well: a deeper sense of connection with our purpose, coupled with a palpable feeling of solidarity, arising from the fact that we were in Edinburgh’s main public library. A library is, after all, the ultimate symbol of a free and civilised society. What does it say that we live in times when they are being closed?

Labour of love

2011-06-10T07:07:00.004+01:00

This is a commercial and I make no apologies for it. My friend John Simmons has written and published a beautiful book.

It’s called The angel of the stories. It’s about a young woman called Julia who lives in a small Spanish town – whitewashed, cradled by wooded hills (not so very different, in fact, from Aracena where we take a group of Dark Angels students every year). Julia yearns to become a writer and as her craft starts to blossom so too do the buds on her shoulders. Soon they flower into wings that take her on journeys into the lives of her fellow townsfolk, whose foibles and passions and longings she chronicles with great tenderness.

Technically speaking, The angel of the stories is magical realism. To me it’s purely magical. The writing is simple and limpid. The storytelling has a quiet but mythical quality. Then there are the illustrations …

The book has 21 colour plates taken from paintings by the artist Anita Klein. She and John collaborated over the writing of the book; in fact, her Italian Angels series was part of the inspiration for it. Now she has created a series of original paintings around the character of Julia. What a delectable angel Julia makes: dreamy and pensive, innocent yet knowing, voluptuous and sexy, she is charming as only Beryl Cook-meets-Modigliani could be.

And then there’s the book itself. This is book-making as craftsmanship, and the craftsman’s hand is that of designer David Carroll. It’s cloth bound and comes in a cloth-covered slip case. It has a gold silk ribbon for a bookmark. The typography is lovingly chosen, as is the paper onto which the colour plates have been hand pasted with consummate care.

The angel of the stories is, in fact, a labour of love from first thought to final credit, from cover illustration to endpapers. Even the colophon of John’s newly fledged publishing company, called – wait for it – Dark Angels Press, is a plump little ‘d’ sheltering beneath the ‘a’ of an outspread angel’s wing.

This is the ultimate reproach to the Kindle. Writing, typesetting, design, binding, illustration, all work in harmony to create an object that has value beyond the sum of its parts. In the age of electronic publishing, thank God for The angel of the stories. May it be but the first of many from the Dark Angels Press.

You can order the book from www.darkangelspress.com

You can see Anita Klein’s work at www.anitaklein.com

Other worlds

2011-06-02T23:58:00.005+01:00

A sackcloth gown and an empty room in a disused telephone exchange might not sound much like the stuff of dreams, but the human imagination’s a wonderful thing. I’m trusting that mine is going to respond by taking me on a couple of creative journeys over the next year.

The Gown of Repentance is the object I’ve been allocated for 26 Treasures Scotland, a repeat of the project we ran last year with the V&A in London, but this year one hand of a three-hander involving the National Museum of Scotland, along with the Welsh National Library and the Royal Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland. It will take the same form as last year, a wonderful exercise in precision of language, with 62 words exactly in which to write a personal response to one’s allocated object. This year my fellow author, the indefatigable Sara Sheridan, has been making the running in Edinburgh, liaising with the museum, herding together the 26 writers (including a wheen of Scots-speakers and Gaels), and pairing them up randomly with the objects the museum has chosen to create a historical trail through its Scottish collection.

I haven’t been to see the gown yet, but I know it stands in a glass case beside its more famous neighbour, the stool – both redolent with disapproval and attended by the ghosts of stern-faced kirk elders. Personal associations with repentance have kept themselves out of sight so far, but no doubt they’ll surface when the time comes.

The room in the telephone exchange is much more of an unknown quantity. This is a brand new project which has arisen from the Dark Angels masterclass at Merton College, Oxford, in the spring. The exchange is the building which, in due course, with the necessary funds raised, will become the new home to Oxford’s wonderful Story Museum. With somewhere in the region of sixty vacant rooms, currently housing a few items of abandoned furniture and the odd dead pigeon, the place is ripe for a show of some kind before the builders move in. So my two equally indefatigable partners in Dark Angels, Stuart Delves and John Simmons, have hatched a plan to invite twenty of our most advanced former students to choose a visual artist as a partner and mount an installation in the empty room they’ve each been allocated. Stories are the theme, of course, and Other Worlds is the title of the show. This time next year it will run for two weeks to a paying public, thereby raising funds for the Story Museum and promoting Dark Angels at the same time.

Although I’m looking forward to getting to grips with that grim article of apparel in Edinburgh, I’m looking forward even more to visiting Oxford in September for the Other Worlds briefing – because I’ve chosen as my partner my daughter Ellie and her brilliant alternative floristry business, The Flower Appreciation Society. We’ve never worked together before and right now I can’t even begin to imagine how we will, but there’s something thrilling and deeply satisfying to me about the idea of words and flowers coming together, just as there is in a collaboration between father and daughter. I can't wait to get started.

The eagle

2011-05-27T03:28:00.004+01:00

Yesterday evening I raised my glass to Rosemary Sutcliff. It was an odd moment. I was sitting on my own in the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Gurgaon, overlooking what my driver had proudly told me earlier in the week is the largest road toll in Asia (Ay-zee-a, he pronounced it), sixteen lanes of winking red tail lights, sixteen lanes of unblinking white headlights; and she had made me cry.

Here, in one of the most conspicuously modern cities of 21st century India, I was reading about Roman Britain. The young invalided former centurion Marcus and his freed slave Esca had made it back across Hadrian’s Wall having rescued the talismanic bronze eagle, lost by Marcus’s father and his few remaining comrades of the Ninth Legion in their heroic last stand against the tribes of the north.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental as I get older, but their exhausted, quietly triumphant return to Marcus’s gruff old uncle’s villa at Colchester, and an ecstatic welcome from Marcus’s tame wolf cub, brought tears to my eyes. But then again, perhaps it’s not age. Rosemary Sutcliff was an exceptional writer and The Eagle of the Ninth her best-loved book. I had read it as a child and adored it. Prompted by the release of the current film (which I’ve deliberately avoided, though now I might see it), I bought a new copy for this trip and was not disappointed.

Like her character Marcus, Sutcliff herself endured disability, though his was acquired in battle whereas she was an invalid from infancy. A progressive wasting disease confined her to a wheelchair for most of her life. Yet she managed to evoke with the utmost plausibility events she could never possibly have experienced, for example a wild and terrifying manhunt through the hills and bogs of central and southern Scotland; and more remarkably still, a lyrical vision of landscape and a natural world that she was most unlikely ever to have seen.

‘Well, that’s the writer’s job,’ one might say, ‘to imagine.’ And one would be right. It just happened that, imprisoned in a frail body, she was particularly good at it. She died, heaped with honours, at the age of 72 in 1992.

She would certainly have been an inspiration to the young Indians I’m here to help with their writing and presentation skills. To communicate properly with your customers you have to be able to imagine you are them, I’ve been exhorting them. Tell the customers what they need to know, not what you want them to hear. And they try, because they value self-advancement highly and are eager to learn anything that will help them. They’re admirable people, these young Indians. Their working environment is ferociously competitive – I don’t think anything in the UK even begins to resemble it – and the rewards for success are almost incalculable in their terms, yet in the training room at least they’re serious (though by no means solemn), dignified, even self-effacing.

But they’re shackled by the language of their industry and the American provenance of their organisation. In their language, one doesn’t send people to do things, one deploys resources. But if you think of people as resources, I point out to them, it’s not long before you start treating them as such. I’ve been coaching three of them during the second part of the week, and they’ve all pledged never to use the word again when they mean people. It’s a small step but it’s a start. I’m sure Rosemary Sutcliff, wise and humane, would have approved.

Soundscapes

2011-05-19T23:43:00.005+01:00

What seems like a very long time ago now, I launched and published a monthly magazine for the radio industry. It was called, unsurprisingly, Radio Month and it aimed to do for the world of radio what Broadcast did for the television industry. I was the grandly-styled publisher and Nick Higham, who later went on to become BBC television’s media correspondent, was the editor. There were four of us altogether, in an unheated, rather smelly former shop on Dawes Road, in Fulham.

Radio Month was a trade magazine. It talked about programme-making and station management, studio equipment and the then relatively new business of selling advertising; commercial radio in the UK was only five years old when we launched and was still making itself up as it went along. We had a good run for three or four years, then came the recession of the early 1980s. Our own advertising dried up and the magazine went bust.

That painful moment was, quite directly, the start of my career as a business writer, although that’s another story. But working with the BBC’s Peter Day and his producer Sandra Kanthal through the recording of last week’s In Business programme about Dark Angels reminded me of two things in particular from that time.

The first is that radio then was populated mainly by enthusiasts. With a couple of notable exceptions (Kenny Everett, a true comic genius, being one) it wasn’t a celebrity medium. You could look like the back end of a bus and still be a brilliant broadcaster, the pay was generally lousy, the hours long, the working conditions sometimes hair-raising, and the company often eccentric. Most people who worked in radio did so because they really loved the medium. They were genuine, and genuinely committed. Sadly, I’ve lost touch with that world now so I don’t know whether the same is still true. I hope so. Peter and Sandra certainly both seemed cast in that mould.

The second thought, and it’s hardly an original one – though I think it connects with the first in some slightly opaque way, was that radio was, and remains, so much more a vehicle for the imagination than television. Peter and Sandra had nothing but a couple of microphones (one of them admittedly rather large and hairy, like an unkempt rat on a stick) and a tiny digital recorder with which to create half an hour of radio. The resulting programme was rich with the sound of bells, of footsteps, of different voices, of echo and its opposite – close presence, all building an atmosphere of Oxford and the mood of a Dark Angels course. It left one room to create one’s own pictures, all the more powerful for being personal. (Click here if you missed the programme.)

The analogy is there with good writing, which leaves room for one to attach one’s own thoughts and feelings to the words written; a lesson which the business world still largely has to learn. And perhaps the people who write well for business are also rather like the radio-makers, unseen craftsmen and women, who know how to create space for one to make an imaginative connection with the subject at hand, no matter how dry. These are not the people who would ever write, as I recently heard one organisation proudly declare, that they are ‘nurturing their talent pipeline’; for which Orwellian abstraction read people.

Still crazy

2011-05-13T20:43:00.007+01:00

Last weekend I went to see Wim Wenders’ film Pina, about the work of the pioneering German dancer and choreographer, Pina Bausch, and her company. It was an extraordinary two hours, not least because Pina herself died three weeks after filming began, but rather than abandoning the project, at the insistence of the company Wenders turned the film into a tribute to her. Inter-spersing the dance footage, each member of the company in turn speaks a few words to camera about what she meant to him or her. It must have been a profoundly emotional experience for them all.

Apart from these short spoken pieces the film was all dance and music. It was a feast of colour, movement and rhythm, some of it filmed during theatrical performances, some in ‘natural’ settings ranging from a river-bank to a steelworks, the rim of an open-cast mine to a busy motorway intersection. There were moments of humour and surprise, menace and tenderness, violence and joy. And underlying it all was a growing sense of the depth of Pina’s influence on her dancers – who came, it seemed, from almost every country under the sun.

I’m used to being transported by words, music and images, but less so by bodily movement and I was unprepared for how touched and inspired I felt by this film; not merely by the unseen but towering presence of Pina Bausch herself and the affection in which she was clearly held by her dancers, but by the beauty and grace of those lean, steel-muscled bodies, by their power to silently evoke all the emotional and psychological subtleties of what it is to be human.

Funnily enough, though, rather than making me want to dance, I left the cinema with a very strong craving for stillness. Those dancers, I felt, were able to move their bodies as they did, in some cases almost like acrobats, because they knew how to be still at their core, to create some point of inner calm and balance from which their control, and therefore the power of their movement and emotional expressiveness, flowed. That stillness was there in their faces even as they talked about Pina.

Life as I get older is not as I’d imagined it. It’s not slower and calmer, but faster and increasingly frantic. There is so much I want to do and never quite enough time to do it all. I’m sure I would do more still, and all of it better, if I could find that stillness. But it doesn’t come merely from the absence of activity; it’s the presence of something single-minded and disciplined, hard-won through years of practice. Yoga and meditation are paths to it. Perhaps we reach a version of it when we’re utterly absorbed in something, living only in the moment. But the trick must be in being able to put ourselves there at will, rather than waiting for the moment to strike.

I imagine it as a kind of gathering-in, of bringing all of oneself to a single point – which is just how Pina’s dancers were, the totality of their beings focused on each successive movement. Swap dancing for any other activity you care to name and the goal starts to become obvious, even if the means of reaching it are less so. But I love the paradox that these thoughts of stillness were triggered by a film about movement.

A Cup of Kindness

2011-05-08T10:26:00.007+01:00

Tessa Ransford, distinguished Scottish poet and founder of the Scottish Poetry Library, sent me this in response to Friday's post about Syria. She says: "I wrote this poem about three weeks ago after hearing Canon White from Iraq speaking on a Sunday morning interview on Radio Scotland."

Faith, Hope and Charity

wrote St Paul in his hymn to Love

these three abide

In Iraq, explains Canon White on the radio,

Democracy is not what people yearn for

blasted on them as it was through missiles and bombs

What they most want, why can’t we understand,

is water, electricity and kindness

life, communication, things working normally

God only knows

Buddha only knows

Mohammed only knows

everyone knows we want the kindness

which lies at the heart of our being

For boys and girls, men and women, animals and plants

for all who go about their lives

for daily bread and caring for one another

it is kindness we want

In Scotland we have given a song to the world

‘a cup of kindness’

to take, to drink, to share

Water, electricity and kindness,

but the greatest of these is kindness.

Tessa Ransford

April 2011

The road to Damascus?

2011-05-05T23:37:00.003+01:00

Walking back from the polling station yesterday afternoon in the drizzle, past the familiar faces and houses of our village, I found myself trying to imagine what it would be like to live in Damascus where, aged 61, I would never have had the experience of voting in a free, democratic election; where I would have lived my adult life keeping my thoughts to myself for fear of informers or the secret police; and where now, today, I would most probably be living in real terror of arrest and torture, if I hadn’t already been carted off.

But the thought that really gnawed was this: where, knowing what faced me, would I find the courage to go out on the streets and protest? It seems to me that those thousands of ordinary people across the Arab world, and particularly those in Syria, who have recently joined the crowds knowing that they may simply not make it home that evening, that they may be picked off by snipers or mown down by tanks, or rounded up later and taken to some hideous secret interrogation centre – these ordinary people are quite extraordinarily brave.

Having never felt the resentment and anger they must feel, I don’t think I can really understand where that bravery comes from. It must be a huge rage, a consuming sense of injustice, that will make a peaceable person expose themselves to the possibility of extreme physical or psychological pain, or even death. And perhaps in voicing these thoughts I’m also acknowledging the fear that, if it came to it, I would turn out to be a coward, unable to find that courage.

I imagine that anger of this kind must have a quickening effect, a sharpening of the sense of being alive. Perhaps it even promotes a feeling of invulnerability, and certainly there must be a sense of solidarity, even of some kind of collective safety, while you’re in the crowd. But when the bullets begin to fly, or the door’s kicked in at three in the morning, doesn’t even the most righteous indignation yield to weak-kneed terror?

Last weekend, under a cloudless sky, I spent a morning at the magnificent new Culloden Moor visitor centre. The battle still casts a faint shadow over Scottish politics, more than two hundred and fifty years later, and I was reminded that for years afterwards the Hanoverians ran a kind of police state in the Highlands, in which actual and suspected Jacobites were ruthlessly hunted down and normal civil liberties – including the right to speak one’s language of birth – were brutally suppressed. I was so caught up in the drama of those far off events, and their wonderfully vivid interpretation, that I didn’t think of Syria at the time, nor, oddly enough, the fact that we were less than a week away from our own election.

But I see the connections and parallels clearly now, and it reminds me just how fortunate we are to live in a democracy; also how vital it is that we lead politically engaged lives, that we stay informed, that we vote and that we teach our children to vote. That way, with luck, our courage may never be put to the test.

Curiouser and curiouser

2011-04-29T09:13:00.005+01:00

A couple of times most weeks I take the train to Edinburgh. For several miles the line follows the Fife coast. There’s a long view south under huge skies across the Forth Estuary to Edinburgh and its acropolis, the Pentland Hills looming behind. In places the track runs very close to the shoreline and at low water there are colonies of seaweedy boulders, great expanses of mudflat, and flocks of wading birds to be seen. Yesterday morning was one of brilliant sunshine and air of a particularly limpid clarity, the water ruffled by a light breeze. At one point, as we rounded a headland, there, crossing a small bay was a solitary kayak, its paddler oblivious to the fact that twenty yards behind him, head and neck raised clear of the water, followed an inquisitive seal.

When we are curious we feel alive. Witnessing such a thing on a journey to work made me feel that a good day lay ahead, and indeed it did. First there was a meeting with Paul Pinson, theatre director turned executive coach, who partnered me on the Indian adventure last year. Paul gave me invaluable feedback on a story-telling workshop I’m preparing. Keep spelling out the business benefits and giving real life examples, he urged me. You may have all this knowledge, but to your audience it’s a new concept and they need to be reassured that what you’re telling them actually works. There’s no end to what we can learn, nor the satisfaction in it, I thought as I left.

Next came an Edinburgh International Book Festival board meeting: two hours of solid concentration, one tricky decision, and the thrill of hearing details of this year’s programme – a banquet of contemporary fiction and current thinking on everything from science and the environment to the Arab Spring and the growing power of China. Book festivals are a modern cultural phenomenon and more appear practically every week. With 750 events and more than 200,000 visitors over 17 days, we claim ours to be the world’s largest. But where does this desire to hear authors talking come from? I believe it’s about curiosity and learning again. Book festivals are really festivals of thinking and we hunger for the imaginative connections we can make, the sense of belonging we can experience, by hearing new, interesting and challenging ideas in the company of others.

From Edinburgh I travelled to St Andrews, back along the Fife coast under a still unblemished sky, with another colleague. Robert Fletcher, former chairman of Saatchi’s New York, is a genius at helping brands of all kinds to communicate why the world would be a poorer place without them. In this instance the brand is St Andrews University, which in two years’ time will be 600 years old and needs to find a compelling way to raise many millions of pounds over the coming years in the seemingly paradoxical pursuit of remaining small. Even ancient seats of learning have lessons to learn, in this case that the institutional voice will not always serve it best.
Nowhere is human curiosity more visibly enshrined than in a place such as St Andrews. It’s not just what makes us feel alive. It’s what keeps us moving forward.

Standing under

2011-04-21T21:11:00.003+01:00

I suppose Easter weekend is as appropriate a moment as any to write about empathy. In the Christian calendar, at least, it represents the high point of suffering; and empathy translates literally from the Greek as ‘suffering in’ (as opposed to sympathy, ‘suffering with’).

But that’s not what has prompted me. The trigger, in fact, is a TED talk I was directed to this week, in which American sociologist Sam Richards illustrates empathy by taking his audience step-by-step through the process of identifying with an Iraqi insurgent. He does it by first unfolding an imaginary scenario in which a hugely powerful China, dependent on American coal, sends an army of occupation into a conflict-ridden United States; then drawing the parallel with the situation in Iraq and inviting the audience to imagine how an ordinary Iraqi might feel about the Americans – which is not, as he crucially points out, the same as agreeing with that person. In a post-9/11 US, it’s a brave but effective way of making his point.

Richards describes sociology as ‘the study of the way humans are shaped by things they can’t see’; and empathy, he tells his students, is everything because to study those invisible forces you must be able to understand other people. The OED defines empathy as ‘the power of projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding, the object of contemplation’. The literal meaning of the word ‘understand’ is to ‘stand under’, and at one point in his talk Richards takes a pace to one side, then turns through 180 degrees to face the way he has been facing previously, thus miming the act of stepping into someone else’s shoes, or ‘standing under’ them. I was amused because I make the same movement when talking to people about the importance of empathy in writing. It must be the default gesture for empathy, and I love the implication that we intuitively under-stand that selfsame word’s intrinsic meaning.

Empathy was constantly on my mind when John Simmons and I were writing Room 121, earlier on in the year. Not only is it one of the defining themes of the book, but in the writing John and I were almost daily inviting empathy, one with the other, as we swapped stories. Even so, the impulse to tell an audience what you want to say rather than what they want to hear can be a powerful one. I’ve been caught out in the past when talking to people whose grasp of stories and language has been more literal than I had appreciated, and seen the blank looks resulting from my assumption that they will ‘get’ the emotional torque of a phrase or story without my having to explain it.

Empathy, it seems to me, is the principal means of bridging the gap between our human differences. It’s not possible without the capacity to imagine. But it also requires an effort of will, a wish to connect, even if not necessarily to concur – and when that is absent, all manner of troubles ensue. Imagine what might have happened had Sam Richards given his talk to an audience of Romans, inviting them to empathise with a rabble-rousing Judaean mystic.

Chinook secrets

2011-04-14T23:00:00.003+01:00

In June 1994 an RAF Chinook helicopter, travelling from Northern Ireland, flew into a hillside on the Mull of Kintyre, killing everyone on board. Alongside the four crew, the 25 passengers included almost all the UK's most senior Northern Ireland intelligence experts. It was a security catastrophe, and because the crash happened in dense fog there were no witnesses.

The following year an RAF board of enquiry, led by two air-marshals, concluded that it was the result of pilot error. They found the two young flight lieutenants, Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook, aged 28 and 30, guilty of gross negligence in flying too fast and too low for the prevailing conditions.

But the pilots' families and many others, including a number of prominent figures, disagreed. In the years that followed there were several inquiries and reports, all of which challenged the original conclusion or left the question of blame open.

In 2001, my father chaired the last of these inquiries. It was one of the final jobs he undertook as a retired Law Lord. He found that the air marshalls had effectively inferred negligence from the absence of any evidence to the contrary, a decision that would have been impermissible in any civil court; and that they were therefore wrong to have reached the conclusion they did.

As Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Secretary at the time of the original inquiry, wrote in the Sunday Herald, shortly after my father’s report was published: “The immediate reaction of the government was made by armed forces minister Adam Ingram within hours of the publication of the report. He could hardly have had time to read it, but he appeared to dismiss it as containing nothing new. The implication was that the government would not budge.”

My father was quietly furious, not because this was yet another report the government was going to kick into the long grass, but because he felt the case against the young pilots was far from proven and feared that a genuine injustice was being perpetrated against them. Sad then that he didn’t live to hear the news, just this week, that the BBC have uncovered an RAF internal report, written two years before the accident, which seriously questioned the airworthiness of the Chinook on a number of counts. The report had never been seen by any of the previous inquiries; the clear implication being that it had been buried by the MoD.

Another review is currently under way and now, at last, it seems that the pilots’ names may be cleared and the families might see the justice their sons deserve. All of which leaves one gasping at the cynicism of an organisation that would rather blame two young men than admit to its own failings. Though perhaps that’s a naïve view. Even in these more transparent times, the MoD carries with it a hefty legacy of secrecy.

On the other hand, maybe the MoD is not so different from the many other organisations where that kind of cynicism and secrecy and lack of proper regard for individuals is a fact of daily life. On the Dark Angels course at Merton we talked a lot about the parlous state of dysfunction that so many organisations seem to have reached these days. Mark Watkins, who lives and works in Denmark, put it particularly well with this description of a kind of reverse alchemy: “Imagine you’re on your way to your first day in a new job. You’re full of enthusiasm, purpose, the wish to contribute, to make a difference, to be useful. How hard does your organisation then have to work to turn that gold into lead, that energy into apathy?” The answer is either quite hard, or not very hard at all. Both are sadly true.

Summing up

2011-04-08T00:02:00.008+01:00

I heard yesterday that my novel The Witness has finally earned out its advance, nearly four years after publication. Jenny Brown, my agent, tells me that a cheque for about £20 is on its way to my account. Champagne all round, then.

The economics of writing novels have never really made much sense for me. I started this book, my fourth, in around 2001, as an adult novel, and finished the first draft about three years later. It did the rounds of a dozen major fiction publishers and was turned down by all of them, though one or two said they thought it might work as a young adult title. So we took it to Macmillan Children’s Books who agreed to give it serious consideration if I was prepared to re-write it. I eventually did, once I’d realised that almost the only thing I needed do was re-cast the main character, making him an 18- rather than 45-year-old; everything else stayed much the same. It took me six months and I was rewarded by a contract with Young Picador and a £5000 advance.

The Witness was eventually published in August 2007, about a month after my father died. I think he always found it difficult to engage with this part of my life; he hardly read any fiction and the literary world was one he seemed to find hard to relate to. Yet the very last words he said to me, a couple of days before he died, were: “good luck with the book, old boy.” I would have liked him to see it in print; better still read it since there was much in it – the Highland landscape and way of life, issues of land-ownership, traditional music – that he would have enjoyed. But he’d suffered a severe stroke two years previously and wouldn’t have been able to read it, even if he had lived.

Today, it’s nearly ten years since I started work on the book. That means its earnings average £500 per annum. Its successor, The Reckoning, fares better because I wrote it much more quickly. I started work on it in January 2008 and it was published in November 2009. I also received a bigger advance, £6000. So The Reckoning has averaged slightly under £2000 a year so far, though that figure will decrease because the book isn’t yet close to earning out its advance. In total, including lending royalties but excluding appearance fees, writing fiction has brought me around £30,000 since my first novel was published in 1990. Call that £1500 per annum. Hah!

Yesterday – by coincidence, or perhaps not – just before I heard the extravagant news from Jenny, I had started work again on the last in this series of three young adult novels. I have been stalled at page 200 for over a year, mainly, though not wholly, through pressure of work. The other reason for the hiatus is that despite The Witness and The Reckoning being shortlisted for successive Royal Mail Scottish Children’s Book of the Year Awards, despite my going into something close to fifty secondary schools over a two-year period and promoting the books as hard as I possibly could, Macmillan deemed me not to be selling enough and sacked me in summer 2009. So there’s no contract and no advance for The Artefact, as it’s provisionally titled.

Why on earth am I bothering, then? It will be another six months’ hard graft, squeezed in between everything else, with the very real possibility of the book never seeing the light of day. Should a publisher materialise the advance will be nugatory, such is the current state of publishing, and I will almost certainly have to commit to a follow-up. Why bother? I’ve been asking myself this question for some months. I continued to ask it when we were at Merton last week, where I finally came to the simple conclusion that the story demands to be finished. It’s a living, growing thing, and to let it wither on the vine would be tantamount to abortion. I feel morally obliged to it, such is the power and energy of story.

Oxford blue

2011-04-01T07:10:00.020+01:00

I’m in Oxford now, at Merton College. Our Dark Angels students are working on their projects and I'm finding a brief moment of quiet in my room, remembering the first time I ever came here.
  I was twelve years old. My mother had driven me down from Scotland to sit the scholarship exam for nearby Radley College; an heroic twelve-hour journey in a Morris Minor Traveller. We stayed, in what felt like tremendous splendour, at The Mitre, an ancient half-timbered pub on the High Street. We went to look at Christ Church, where my father had been a student, and wandered around the vast-seeming Tom Quad. I wanted to visit Carfax and Turl, streets my father had mentioned, simply because they had such strange names; I don’t remember if we did. I do remember feeling highly embarrassed, but also secretly rather proud, of being made to wear a kilt for the interviews. There were very few Scots at Radley in those days, and I think it caused a stir.
  I didn’t get the scholarship, but a kind of consolation prize in the form of an exhibition (to this day I don’t know why they’re so called), which meant I had my name in italics, rather than bold, in the school list. It was worth £80 a year. It also meant that Oxford featured prominently in my life for the next five years. With leave from our housemasters, we cycled the five miles at weekends and loitered, ogled girls, spent our pocket money on records and improbable clothes (it was the mid-60s), occasionally went punting and inevitably, as we got older, pubbing – which involved dodging the dons, as Radley also styled its teaching staff. My home was deep in the Scottish countryside, and Oxford became much of what I knew about the grown-up world throughout my teenage years.
  But I didn’t fulfil the promise of the exhibition. I was pushed early into the classics department to study Latin, Greek and Ancient History, a tiny hothouse for which I was neither temperamentally nor intellectually suited. Well into adult life I continued to have nightmares about sitting the Greek unseen exam without having memorised enough vocabulary. By the time I sat Oxford entrance, my academic career had followed a steady downwards trajectory for three years and I was thoroughly demoralised. Christ Church turned me down for PPE and I ended up in Aberdeen reading Law.
  I brushed it off at the time, one does at the age of eighteen, and went on to enjoy greatly my time at another ancient university, the other end of the country. I gave the whole thing very little thought until much, much later, only a few years before my father’s death. He had been at a dinner for eminent Christ Church alumni where someone had said to him: ‘not surprising your son didn’t get in in 1967, the college had become very left-wing and the fact that you had been there would have gone against him.’
  I was touched that he passed this on; it felt like a kind of apology. But it also reminded me that somewhere inside, the rejection had always slightly rankled. Not because I felt that I should have got in, but because I knew perfectly well that I hadn’t been up to it, the entrance exam the culmination of a three-year failure of education. After taking two A-levels, aged fifteen, and scoring two e-grades, I’d begged to be allowed to change from classics to modern languages. My housemaster's response was to note in my report that I needed to grow up. I was trying.
  And yet, these things are seldom black and white. Those three years of intensive Latin and Greek vastly increased my grasp of the English language and made me the writer I am. Without them I might easily not be at Merton now. On the other hand, my two Dark Angels colleagues, John and Stuart, both studied at Oxford. Sitting here now in a medieval building, at a desk in an undergraduate room, off a spiral stone staircase so narrow I almost have to turn my shoulders to climb it, I won't pretend I don't envy them.

More dreams and portents

2011-03-24T19:56:00.012Z

Next week we go to Merton College, Oxford to run the second of our biennial Dark Angels masterclasses. It will be an exciting few days. Not only do we have BBC Radio 4’s In Business team joining us for part of the time to make a programme about the course, but also the best-selling author Philip Pullman is coming as our guest speaker. There’s a special resonance here because Philip’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, and John Simmons’s book, Dark Angels, from which our courses take their name, both owe inspiration to Milton’s Paradise Lost; while Philip's literally fabulous landscape is a kind of ever-present backdrop to our own work. As if that weren’t enough, we’re housed in one of the most ancient Oxford colleges, one of whose boasts is the oldest continuously functioning academic library in the world, built in 1373. I remember from last time we were there the sense that wherever one turns at Merton, knowledge seeps from the masonry.

Our ten students are all from business, and they represent activities as diverse as television and Formula One motor racing, environmental and communications consultancy, and freelance writing. They have all previously been on our advanced course in Spain, so they know the score. As always it will be a cocktail of the personal and the professional, with exercises related both to the world of work and to their individual creativity, as we continue to make the point that good writing is good writing, no matter what the context; and in business, good writing means better communication, better connections, better decision-making, better relationships, better pretty well anything you care to name.

As preparation, we ask everyone to re-write a piece of typically bland financial services writing in the style of a novel we have allocated them, a novel that has a connection – either through its author or subject – with Oxford, for example: Brideshead Revisited, The Hobbit, Zuleika Dobson, The Hunting of the Snark (not a novel, I know), Jude the Obscure, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and others. As well as offering plenty of scope for amusement, the exercise makes serious points about tone of voice and the value of a more imaginative approach to writing about business subjects. There will also be poems and stories, a field trip into the city itself, and one-to-one tutorials.

I'm hugely looking forward to it. It will be an intense three days and we tutors will get as much out of it as the students. Though this, which came in yesterday from a friend in response to my two recent posts about Tycho Brahe, elevates the whole concept to new and undreamt of heights:

“A propos your dream the other week, I had a dream last night you might find interesting. Dark Angels had taken out a whole page advert in a broadsheet – I think it was the whole front of the Guardian, but no masthead on it, with your website address www etc... in very large letters going right across the page (and underlined) with wings either side, but half a wing, a sort of capital D on its side... I can't remember what it said exactly but the gist was that with everything going on in the world it was time for people to listen to what the Dark Angels had to say to change the world for the better. I can remember thinking, in the dream, that I would need to get in touch with you to help because you would be inundated with people contacting you. There was also some sort of image, I think it might have been Mount Rushmore, but instead of the presidents, it was the faces of you, Stuart and John in the rock.”

So, no pressure next week, then … And Susan, stand by your phone.

Good Friday

2011-03-17T19:59:00.012Z

My visitation by Tycho Brahe last week seemed to strike a chord. Many people responded with suggestions as to what I should do or think – and I’m grateful to you all.

Among other things I was recommended to do ten minutes’ automatic (stream of consciousness) writing about him; to rejoice at the beneficence of the universe and welcome wild imaginings (a little difficult right now, given what has since overtaken the poor, poor Japanese, let alone the Bahrainis and Libyans – what is happening in the world?); to peruse a long list of anagrams of his name; to take dinner at the Brahehus which appears to be a derelict Swedish castle; to spare a thought for an old friend who is currently bound for Svalbard to act in a movie; to buy a tychobrahe effects pedal for an electric guitar; to investigate the lunar crater named after him; and to start keeping a dwarf. Personally, I’d prefer an elk.

But the best response of all began like this: “Have I ever told you that taking five minutes away from work to read your blog is one of my favourite things about Friday? I don't think I have. But it's true.” You have now. Thank you, Roshni Goyate, poet.

This, of course, is one of the main reasons I write it, or rather keep writing it, when sometimes on a Thursday afternoon it feels like the very last thing I have the energy or inclination for. But I’ve kept it going now for slightly over eighteen months. Last week’s was the seventy-fifth post, and make of that what you will, oh ye Brahephiles. Anyway, I carry on partly because of the writer’s compulsion to write; partly because of some kind of work ethic that seems to have attached itself to this particular activity – or maybe it’s nothing more complicated than a rhythm. Whatever it is, it makes me feel peculiar at the thought of defaulting for even a week.

I also write it because it helps me to clarify my own thoughts about things. As EM Forster so memorably said: “How can I know what I think till I see what say?” And then, of course, I write to be read. What writer doesn’t? I’ve kept all the responses and comments I’ve received since starting the blog. Today in my ‘blog’ email folder there happen to be 666 of them (and if Tycho being the seventy-fifth post tickled your fancy, stick that in your bong and smoke it). But presentiments of The Beast apart, knowing that what I say has meaning for others completes the circle in the most satisfying way.

So please, dear readers, keep on commenting and emailing. I know that becoming a follower confers no special privileges, and can be a little technologically challenging, but apparently it makes the search engines happy. Simply passing on the link to your friends is enough to make me happy. With apologies to René Descartes and Latin scholars everywhere, it looks increasingly as if blogito ergo sum.

Tycho Brahe

2011-03-10T20:03:00.009Z

On Monday night I had a very strange experience. It had almost the quality of a vision. We had spent the weekend in Wales with my daughter and her family. On Monday morning we had left early to travel back by train, and I had stopped off in Edinburgh on the way home for a meeting. It had been a long day and, unusually, I had gone straight to sleep without reading.

Sometime during the night I had a dream. I remember almost nothing about it now, except that two words surfaced. I didn’t know what they meant but I could see them very plainly, as if printed in bold capitals: TYCO BRAHE. I tried to understand them but couldn’t and so, since they had no obvious meaning for me, I began in the dream to imagine that they might make a good name for a fictional character, an Albanian perhaps or some other Eastern European. They remained with me for the rest of the night, very insistently it felt, almost as if someone was shouting them at me in my sleep. And they were there in my mind, perfectly clear and still perfectly inexplicable, when I woke up next morning.

I mentioned it to Sarah as we were getting up. She suggested I google the words. I did, over breakfast, and almost fell off my chair when up came Tycho Brahe (correctly spelt with an ‘h’). A sixteenth century Danish nobleman, astronomer and alchemist, Brahe, it transpires, was a major figure in the development of science. Way ahead of his contemporaries in the accuracy of his astronomical observations, he was the first person to argue that the heavens were not perfectly fixed and immutable. He was also extremely wealthy and a wild character who had lost the bridge of his nose in a duel when he was young and wore a metal prosthesis throughout his life. He held lavish gatherings in his castle, kept a dwarf jester, whom he believed to be clairvoyant, beneath his dining table, and also a tame elk that was said to have drunk so much beer at a party one night that it fell down the castle stairs and died.

As I read all this, a very dim bell began to ring. Brahe is just the kind of character that crops up on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. I checked and sure enough he’d been mentioned in the programme back in January 2008. Now another even dimmer bell was ringing. In 2007 I had researched medieval perpetual motion machines for my novel The Reckoning, and I thought it possible that his name might have come up then. But my notes are in a box in the attic and I didn’t have the energy to go rootling for them. Not that it would have made a great deal of difference, for even though I had now established that I probably had heard of him before, it was at the very least three years ago.

So I’m left with the question, Why now? And why so insistent? I’ve looked for connections. My son-in-law is quite knowledgeable about esoterica, but Brahe definitely hadn’t been mentioned over the weekend. Perpetual motion … well, I suppose I could argue that my new granddaughter represents the genetic version of it. But even so, what then? Am I supposed to write about him? Am I meant to learn something from his life or his studies? Or has my sub-conscious simply bowled me a wide? What on earth, if anything, am I telling myself? Answers on a postcard, please …

Rhythm and blues

2011-03-03T19:54:00.009Z

How we need rhythm in our lives. For the last four months, John Simmons and I have been batting back and forth chapters of Room 121 on an almost daily basis (a form of exchange, and therefore of book, it occurs to me, that wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of email). Now, apart from pulling together final details like blurb, biographies, photos and the all-important endorsements, it’s over and I feel as flat as the proverbial pancake – appropriately enough, I suppose, since next Tuesday is Shrove Tuesday.

As it happens, this week has been quiet on the work front, and although I have a list of things to do that’s longer than my arm, I’ve felt tired and listless and have found it difficult to focus. End-of-winter blues, I started telling myself until the penny dropped: I’d got used to a particular rhythm and now it was gone. But it’s not just the routine the rhythm provides that I miss, it’s the energy I derive from it. It’s as if there was a little drummer somewhere inside me, whose beat was pulling me along, helping me to march purposefully down the road. Now he’s not there and all the steam has gone out of my legs (I suppose if you think of legs as pistons that just about works as a metaphor).

He’s not the only rhythm-maker now absent from my life. The newly be-Oscared Aaron Sorkin, writer of The Social Network, has been transporting Sarah and me almost nightly for well over a year with his magisterial West Wing. We watched the final episode a couple of weeks ago with the feeling that we might have been emigrants bidding farewell to a family we’d never see again. The triumphs and tribulations of President Jed Bartlett and his White House inner circle have lodged so deeply in our connubial consciousness that we sometimes found ourselves discussing their dilemmas over dinner as if they were old friends – which, in a way, they became.

These big, beautifully crafted American TV drama series raise storytelling to a new level and I have no doubt we’re the richer for them. Not even Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo were able to exploit their plots or develop their characters on such a scale. These shows answer to our deep thirst for stories, and they serve them up with a long pulse that corresponds more closely to that of our own lives than any other form of narrative except perhaps soap operas.

That said, I’m also now very close to the end of another long cycle, Michelle Paver’s spellbinding sextet of children’s novels The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. Set in the northern forests of stone-age Europe, these tell of fourteen year-old Torak, his four-footed companion, Wolf, and their battle with the evil Mages who threaten to blight the natural world and the harmony with which the different clans of forest-dwellers inhabit it. As well as spinning an extraordinarily gripping tale, she evokes a lost landscape and way of life with such apparent authenticity that it fills me with yearning and I feel as if the connection with my hunter-gatherer ancestors might have been forged only yesterday, rather than millennia ago. And when Torak and Wolf triumph, as they surely will, possibly on the train on the way to Wales to see my granddaughter tomorrow, another cycle will have come to an end.

But spring is on the way and renewal with it. New cycles will take hold of me. New stories beckon. I'm ready for them.

Tall trees

2011-02-25T15:58:00.010Z

A twenty-minute walk from my house there’s an eighteenth century pinetum, enfolded in a bend of the River Braan. The Hermitage, as it's known, was created for the Dukes of Atholl as an extension of the gardens of their second home, nearby Dunkeld House. Complete with a fake hermit’s cave, a deep gorge, and a folly overlooking a fierce waterfall and salmon-leap, the Hermitage provided a dramatic riverside walk for the Atholl family and their visitors.

I know all this partly because it’s on my doorstep, partly because some years ago I wrote the guidebook for the Dukes of Atholl's principal seat, Blair Castle, twenty miles up the road at Blair Atholl. Usually I forget things in direct proportion to the speed with which I’ve had to assimilate them; but sometimes I’m sufficiently engaged by the subject for some of it to stick. So on this occasion I also know that the fourth Duke of Atholl was known as ‘the planting duke’, and that he propagated acres of hillside with larch by firing seed out of a cannon. His plan was to help keep the British navy afloat, but alas the first ironclad appeared while his little larches were still saplings. Nevertheless, we’re in his debt for much of the magnificent russet and gold that cloaks the Tay valley each autumn.

But more impressive than any larch is the stand of Douglas Firs at the Hermitage. These giants rise up on the riverbank, tall and straight and spacious, like the pillars of an enormous cathedral, and you have to crane your neck to see the canopy. These we owe to David Douglas, another local but from the opposite end of the social spectrum. More or less contemporaneous with the fourth duke, Douglas was the son of a gardener at Scone Palace, home of the Earls of Mansfield, just outside Perth (and I know this because I also wrote the guidebook for Scone Palace – during what I should perhaps now refer to as the ‘heritage phase’ of my career).

One of the earliest and most famous of all plant-hunters, David Douglas was astonishingly tough. He travelled the wilderness of northwest America, frequently alone and on foot, fending off wild animals and hostile natives, climbing unnamed summits and traversing vast tracts of unmapped forest. In one famous incident he calmly records in his journal how he is lying behind a fallen tree, cocked rifle in one hand, knife drawn and resting on the trunk before him, as a war party of Indians advances on him through the trees.

Douglas was responsible not only for bringing home the Douglas Fir but also for a huge number of other common plants that we now take for granted in our gardens. He came to a sticky end, aged thirty-six, in an animal pit that already contained an angry bison. Whether he fell in or was pushed has never been fully ascertained. But he’s on my mind today because yesterday I ran a workshop for staff of the Edinburgh International Book Festival in the David Douglas room at Edinburgh’s Botanical Gardens; and I asked them, in advance, to find out what they could about him. The room is a wonderful first-floor space with handmade furniture in different woods, and three glass walls looking straight out into the trees of the gardens. It seemed appropriate that they should make the link between this botanical hero and the place where we were spending the afternoon.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. I’m writing this on the train home to Dunkeld from Edinburgh, having stayed overnight for a board meeting. In the seat opposite me is a young man who, it transpires, is on his way home to Blair Atholl for the weekend. Now he works in Edinburgh but until a year ago he was a groundsman – at Blair Castle.

Sometime one has the sense of being spun on a wheel whose revolutions are quite beyond one's imagining.

Three friends

2011-02-18T00:08:00.010Z

This week I’ve been in London, putting the finishing touches to the book that John Simmons and I have been writing together. Called Room 121, it’s a conversation that takes the form of alternating blog posts, and it will be published in the summer. Although its theme is the way we use language at work, it’s as much about the way we respectively see the world as it is about the craft of writing.

We’ve got to know each other well, John and I, over the last half-dozen years. Along with our partner, Stuart Delves, we’ve taught Dark Angels courses together in Scotland, England, Wales, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and Poland. We’ve been on a writing retreat in France. Occasionally we’ve even had to share a room. We’re at a stage in our lives where we’re both fairly clear about how we want to focus our energy through the years ahead. Our friendship is rooted in the fact that we not only like each other and enjoy one another’s company, but share an understanding of how the world is shaped by language, and a vision of how that can be used to the good. You could say that we met at an age when our ideals had begun to settle and mature.

In the bigger scheme of my life, however, John is a new friend. Janie I first knew in my early thirties. Late last year, I was amazed and delighted to hear from her again via Facebook. Back in the early Eighties we were both recently married and living in London with young families. We came to know each other through the world of commercial radio, where she worked as a press officer and which I wrote about as a journalist. On Tuesday we caught up for a drink and, despite an absence of nearly three decades, were able to pick up again almost without missing a beat. Naturally, much has happened in our lives, not least the fact that we both have new partners and, in my case, more children, while Janie has made a tremendous career at the BBC. We spent an hour-and-a-half of glorious story-swapping and I left with the warm glow of a connection rekindled.

The previous night in London I had stayed with David, whom I’ve known since childhood and would consider my oldest friend, if not chronologically, at least in the firmness of our friendship. Brought up in rural Scotland, we were the only two boarding-school boys within a wide radius (although we weren’t at the same schools), and we hung out together staunchly throughout our teens. Our lives since have gone in very different directions – David is now a statesmanlike figure on the property scene – and there have been long hiatuses, but each time we meet it takes just a few seconds for the years to fall away as the timbre of his voice, a facial expression here, a quirky little physical movement there, reassert themselves, so familiar, so reassuring that we could easily be teenagers together again.

It’s been a week of friends, three in forty-eight hours (more in fact but I don't have room here to write about them all), each from a different period in my life. And I realise more and more that these friendships, new, renewed or constant, are among the most precious things we possess because they not only bring us affection and pleasure, but connect us with ourselves; they help to complete the continuously unfolding story we tell ourselves, the story of our lives.

Wide knowledge

2011-02-10T21:11:00.015Z

I’ve been talking to my friend Wenbo Xu again, quizzing him about all things Chinese as I lie face down, bristling with acupuncture needles. I love these conversations. They’ve become a quite unexpected bonus of my regular visits to him. I mumble my questions through the hole in his treatment table and then wait as he frames his reply. English is a difficult language for him. It fills his mouth awkwardly, making him gnaw and chew at it.

This week, with Amy Chua’s highly divisive book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, making its debut in the UK, we discuss the Chinese approach to parenting and education. The almost fanatical desire for success is a product of the single-child policy, he believes. Six people, two parents and four grandparents, all place their hopes in one child.

Wenbo’s first son, Datong, was eight when they left China. The pressure on children there, the control, was one of the reasons he left, he says. He didn’t want that for his son. (Regular readers of the blog will know that that is just one symptom of the deeper reason for his departure nine years ago: he wished his family to be free, to live in a democracy. See Chinese medicine)

‘And what about when you arrived here?’ He replies that he really noticed the difference, even wondered whether things here had gone too far the other way. ‘So do you think we’re soft in the West?’ ‘Well, the children hardly have any homework!’ He explains that Datong is clever, works hard and gets good reports. He’s top of his class and is going to study medicine, but he probably wouldn’t be at an equivalent level to his cousins in China.

‘But I like that children here can be friends with their parents, they can joke with them. My little boy Luke – he’s two – he calls ‘Daddy, Daddy’ and when I don’t answer he calls me by name. We all laugh. In China that would be shocking. Impossible! My father didn’t speak to me as equal till I had graduated from university and had my job as a doctor.’

Wenbo’s father, I remember from an earlier conversation, had been trained as a teacher and sent off to work in a school in the mountains. He hated it and returned to his village to farm, whereupon he was appointed village teacher. Because of that he was spared re-education under the Cultural Revolution, though not the animosity of some of his neighbours who put up posters denouncing him as an intellectual. Wenbo’s maternal grandfather was not so lucky. He was jailed twice, once in the 1950s, once during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, for having been a member of Chiang Kai-Shek's government. On his second release from jail the villagers denied him entry to his home and sent him to live in a cowshed. Wenbo remembers being present on the day he was given his house back and the villagers returned his furniture.

I ask him about names. He explains that during the Cultural Revolution many children were given names with the prefix Wu, denoting war. It was a revolution driven by words and slogans and Mao wanted an army of bellicose people mobilised by violent language. But Wenbo’s father valued wisdom over bellicosity and in an act of defiance named his children with the prefix Wen, denoting knowledge. Wenbo means ‘wide knowledge’ he explains, then laughs. ‘That too big name for me!’

I leave thinking he’s wrong. How many European doctors do I know who have not only qualified in western medicine but also know where to place an acupuncture needle, how to prescribe herbal remedies and give you a neck massage?

The bridge

2011-02-03T23:27:00.002Z

Two weeks ago I learnt that my former next-door neighbour, Ian, had committed suicide. He was 50 and he had fought alcohol all his adult life. Yesterday I went to his funeral.

During the seven years we shared a garden fence I got to know him and like him very much. He was cheerful and helpful and he valued good neighbourliness. We swapped things, garden tools, a run to the skip, and chatted easily. Although we were never close I felt that over time there grew a certain mutual respect, maybe even affection.

Earlier in his life he had worked on fish farms. Latterly he gardened for the council and dreamt of developing a plot of land he owned, a little further north. But back problems and domestic complications – his wife and children moved out a few years ago – made for an erratic working life. And of course, underlying it all, there was the booze. Every so often I would realise that I hadn’t seen him for a while. Then he would reappear, looking a little rough around the edges, and give me a disarming grin. He never made any secret of his difficulties. In fact his honesty was one of the things I found attractive about him. He was also tall, good looking and intelligent. But for all that there was a vulnerability about him, he felt like an innocent abroad. It was as if there was a part of him – the part that came to have the final word – that didn’t really belong here.

In his last two or three years he started another relationship and his new partner, Di, did everything she possibly could to help him. They sold the house and moved first to Perth, then to Glasgow where she encouraged him to attend an AA meeting every night. There are three hundred AA groups in Glasgow, she told me at the funeral. ‘It’s a great place to keep off the booze.’ She paused. ‘It’s a great place to get on it again, too.’

In a final impulsive act he bought a ruined cottage, sight unseen, off the Internet, on the Isle of Scalpay, Harris. He spent a few weeks there in the late autumn, not drinking, getting to know the locals, and starting work on the renovation. ‘I had never seen him so much at peace,’ Di said. Then came the January darkness.

It was a humanist funeral, and the main part of the service consisted of an address by the celebrant, who had interviewed those close to him, and put their remarks together into a series of stories. Although she had never met him she spoke with warmth and humour, yet without shying away from the realities of his life. This is what we leave behind, I thought, listening to her – stories. Long after the details of a life have faded, we remember the incidents, the small, often inconsequential moments that touched us. Far more than any urn, these stories become the vessels that preserve the essence of the person.

As I left the service I found myself thinking of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, the great American humanist novelist and playwright of the early twentieth century. It’s one of my all-time favourite books, and worth reading for the final paragraph alone:

‘But soon we shall die and all memory … will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’

Judging by the tears at the funeral, Ian was well loved.

The New School

2011-01-30T11:59:00.003Z

There has been a lot of interest in Friday's post, and the school is happy for me to give details. It is The New School at Butterstone, Perthshire. www.thenewschool.co.uk

Safe haven

2011-01-28T10:04:00.002Z

This week I have been interviewing pupils at a small specialist school for young people who can’t get the support they need from mainstream education. It’s in a large old house, a lovely, comfortable, friendly place on a wooded hillside in a beautiful part of Scotland, and it seems that what happens there is almost miraculous.

The students, aged 12 to 20, have cerebral palsy, Aspergers syndrome, dyslexia, anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, autism and a wide range of other conditions, though on first arriving there you would never know it. It’s just like any other school, bustling with noise and activity and youngsters coming and going between classrooms.

Even on closer inspection you wouldn’t necessarily spot the difference between these students and their mainstream peers. There are friendly smiles and plenty of eye contact, a natural curiosity about who you are, together with a readiness to welcome and give directions.

Then you start to hear the stories and you begin to understand the physical, mental or emotional difficulties these teenagers are learning to cope with and overcome. You also hear what it was like before they arrived in this safe haven, and in particular of the bullying they have almost all had to endure. I heard from one young woman of being locked in the kitchens of a previous school by her schoolmates who told her, ‘we’re doing it because we love you’. I heard from a young man who had been ostracised to the extent that in the packed assembly hall of a large city school, the only two vacant seats were those on either side of him. I heard of children being physically abused by their peers and emotionally abused by their teachers. All because of their difference.

When they finally arrive in this secluded place the support available to them is all-enveloping, and it comes not just from the staff but from their fellow students. Unconditional acceptance is the watchword, and as a visitor I found the sense of community palpable. Each individual child is treated according to his or her needs, and one senses that underlying the cheerful hurly burly, there is an immense body of knowledge and experience, along with a complex system of weights and counterweights that maintains the delicate balance necessary for this remarkable place to function.

I heard about new friendships, outdoor adventures, academic achievements, creative accomplishments. I heard about profound behavioural change within weeks of children first arriving. But the thing I found most affecting, indeed almost overwhelming, was the bravery of these young people, not only in dealing with the difficulties that in previous, less loving surroundings had driven some of them to despair and self-destruction, but in their readiness to put the cruelties inflicted on them by others behind them.

Here they are free to be themselves and get on with the business of learning about and enjoying life, as we all do. They seem to do it with particular gusto.

Just do it

2011-01-20T19:58:00.007Z

In the last twenty-four hours I have spoken to two Dark Angels ‘graduates’ who both, independently of one another and unprompted by me, said in so many words: ‘the main thing that I got out of coming on the course was the realisation that the thing I love can also be the thing I do to earn a living.’ They were not, as you might expect, both talking about writing. One of them is a writer who works in the world of branding, but the other works in the hotel business and is an entrepreneur.

Along with a little glow of proprietorial pride came the unspoken thought: so why would one not do the thing one loved for a living? Then I caught myself, remembering that for many, if not most, people it’s not nearly so simple. Even loving the thing you do, which doesn’t presuppose that the loving came first, can be difficult, let alone doing the thing you love.

I know it well. For a long time I thought that the thing I loved was writing fiction, while the thing I did most of, writing for businesses, was simply to pay the bills. But the effect of compartmentalising the activities in that way was to cause me a great deal of conflict: the bread-and-butter work that was supposed to buy me a small amount of time each day to write fiction left me too depleted to write well, so I ended up resenting it deeply while also struggling with the books. For quite a few years I neither loved the thing I did, nor did with any satisfaction the thing I thought I loved.

Happily there came a turning point, a combination of people and ideas that appeared in my life, along with a wonderfully supportive wife who effectively bought me a year of what I think of, in agricultural terms, as ‘set-aside’ – during which I did not much of anything while my creative soil replenished itself. And now I do what I really love, which is to communicate what I believe in any way available to me, through writing or teaching or making music. But it took me half a century, a good deal of heartache, and I had to let go of some extremely powerful conditioning along the way.

So when I hear that our work with Dark Angels has helped people to that critical understanding, that moment when it becomes clear that there is really only one thing they’re here to do, I raise a silent cheer. And today I would without hesitation say to anyone what I said to my second daughter a couple of years ago when she was wrestling with difficult career decisions, which was: don’t play safe, be brave, look into your heart and see where your passion really lies, then put your trust in the universe and follow that passion. She did. And I don't think she'd chide me for saying that she hasn't looked back.

Dark Angels

2011-01-13T19:57:00.005Z

Each new year John Simmons, Stuart Delves and I meet in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s comfortable rooms on Edinburgh’s Queen Street, as we did today. It’s our annual Dark Angels partners’ meeting. We have a bar lunch, a bottle of wine, review the courses we’ve run over the year past and plan the year ahead, then John goes back to London on the train and Stuart and I shuffle off into the murk of a Scottish January afternoon.

Now entering its eighth year of existence, Dark Angels is a strange, uncategorisable beast – part business communications course, part creative writing course – and as far as we know there’s nothing like it anywhere else on the planet. Our students come from corporations large, businesses small and the freelance community. The corporate ones tend to work in brand management, marketing or communications; the others are consultants of one kind or another, or they are business writers. All come out of an interest in improving the way they write at work.

The Dark Angels thesis is that good writing is good writing whatever the context, and that the world of business communication has everything to learn from the world of literature. The skills that novelists and poets bring to their work are entirely transferable to the workplace and the exercises we set our students reflect that. Moreover, we make no bones of the fact that ‘creative’ writers generally work with their emotions and imaginations fully engaged and that good writing, in the workplace or anywhere else, therefore involves a large degree of self-awareness. So our students find themselves writing poems, stories and descriptive pieces, often on very personal subjects.

Most years we come to the conclusion at our January meeting that we could make more money out of Dark Angels than we do, but for that to happen it would have to become the antithesis of everything it currently stands for – which is an alternative, sometimes mildly subversive, vision of the world of business communications. Anyway, we do it mainly because we all three love it; it has become a passion. The thrill of bringing together a group of people who don’t know each other and taking them on a journey of creative revelation and self-discovery is very hard to describe. But it can be hugely rewarding and it is almost always moving and inspiring, the human capacity for inventiveness and connection a constant source of wonder.

Does it really work? This is another thing we ask ourselves annually. And if it does, how do we know? After all, the goal is to send our students back to work not as fledgling poets (though that sometimes happens) but as confident, polished professionals in the unforgiving world of business communications. On one level we know it works because people keep coming back. This April we’re running the second Dark Angels masterclass at Merton College, Oxford, at which most participants will already have been on two previous courses. But what about career development? Do Dark Angels graduates move ahead in their jobs?

It seems so. A quick trawl of past courses today produced quite a few potential ‘case studies’. Among those who have said to us that Dark Angels was a career turning point, one has gone on to be the senior writer for a major soft drinks company and recently won a coveted D&AD ‘yellow pencil’ award for copywriting; one now holds a very senior position in one of the world’s largest creative consultancies; and one has helped build the brand and write the best-selling books for one of the UK’s most popular TV programmes. It would be condescending to say that they’re our protégés, but we’re still in touch with them and their achievements make us proud.

And the name Dark Angels? It’s a nod to Milton’s Paradise Lost and the idea that our creativity comes from our flawed human nature; that as Dark Angels we are neither those who have ascended nor those who have fallen, but that we occupy the fertile, if broken, territory somewhere in between. www.dark-angels.org.uk

Don Roberto

2011-01-06T23:55:00.007Z

My great-great uncle, RB Cunninghame Graham, or Don Roberto as he was known, was a character quite beyond anyone’s invention.

The Laird of Gartmore, in Stirlingshire, an aristocrat and descendant of Scottish kings, he outraged his landed neighbours by becoming successively a founder, with Keir Hardie, of the Labour Party, then a founder of the National Party of Scotland, and eventually founding president of the Scottish National Party.

A true radical and lifelong champion of the unemployed and oppressed, he was elected Liberal MP for North West Lanarkshire in 1886 on what must have seemed a hair-raising programme of reform which included nationalisation of industry, abolition of the House of Lords, universal suffrage, Scottish home rule and free school meals. He was the first ever socialist at Westminster and was once suspended from the House for uttering the word ‘Damn’. In 1887 he spent six weeks in Pentonville after being beaten and arrested during the Bloody Sunday protests in Trafalgar Square.

He wrote prolifically – travel, history, biography, poetry, essays, politics and short stories – and cut a dashing figure in the literary London of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Literary mentor to Joseph Conrad, he was also friends with John Galsworthy, GK Chesterton, WH Hudson, Ford Madox Ford and GB Shaw who acknowledged him as the inspiration for his play, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Handsome and bearded, with strong traces of his grandmother’s Spanish blood, he was painted by Lavery and sculpted by Epstein.

He was also an accomplished horseman and an inveterate adventurer. After leaving Harrow, aged seventeen, he travelled to Argentina to make his fortune cattle ranching, but ended up being conscripted into a revolutionary army. This was the first of a number of spectacular failures, on several continents, the most outlandish of which was his unsuccessful journey in 1898 to the forbidden city of Tarudant in southern Morocco.

Disguised as a Turkish doctor, and accompanied by three locals, he set off on horseback into the Atlas mountains at a time when Christians were liable to be killed on sight. He was within a day’s journey of the holy city when he was caught by the local Caid and imprisoned for three weeks in that potentate’s mountain castle. He told the story later in his book Mogreb-el-Acksa – which I took with me to Morocco before Christmas.

I have previously found him wordy and, to be perfectly honest, have steered clear of him since he has been my mother’s lifelong obsession, and one devotee in the family has always felt to me like enough. But this time I enjoyed the book greatly, as much for his descriptions and wry observation of human foible as for the extraordinary story. Everywhere we went in Marrakech – in the Medina and in the great square, Jemaa el Fna – but especially in the Ourika Valley leading into the mountains, I felt we were accompanied by his ghostly, rangy figure, clad in turban and robes, astride the black horse he had bought for the journey.

There are any number of incidents and discursions I could quote from the book, all of which lent an extra dimension to our holiday, but the one I like best is the observation, for which he offers no explanation (though he was clearly an admirer of the Arabs), that a European shepherd drives his flock from behind, but an Arab leads it from in front.

Rebel talk

2010-12-09T20:07:00.008Z

Intervention. Usually, it’s what takes place between people arguing or fighting. We intervene to stop things getting worse. Perhaps, then, it’s not so odd that it’s a word used so frequently by health professionals. A medical intervention. A surgical intervention. A psychiatric intervention.

Personally, I think it’s a hard word. It makes me imagine someone coming at me with some kind of instrument. It conveys none of the sense of curing or caring, healing or making better that is its presumed aim. And it’s on my mind because my wife Sarah and I had a conversation about it at dinner last night.

Sarah’s a counsellor and some of her work is in the NHS where she’s available to counsel hard-pressed staff, from consultant physicians through to hospital porters. We were talking about how she approaches a first session with a new client and the discussion she has with them about what they might need. ‘I tell them that there are a variety of interventions available,’ she said.

I questioned the use of the word, saying that I felt it was depersonalising. We explored alternatives. ‘There are a variety of approaches we could take,’ was better, we agreed. But the best was, ‘there are lots of different ways we can help you.’ Rather than the abstract ‘intervention’, this phrase contained the three very real and human words ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘help’.

The trouble is, like legionnaire’s disease, ‘interventions’ and all the other abstractions of health-speak breed in the air conditioning of hospitals, and in their own way I believe they’re just as lethal. For anyone who is sick, one of the most important things surely is to be treated humanely, to be made to feel cared for, and language that fails to do that is no part of the healing process, quite the reverse in fact. But in a monolithic organisation like the NHS, making the conscious decision not to adopt that way of speaking takes courage. It’s a small but important act of rebellion.

Talking of which, there may be rebellion in the air on the publishing front. First, a question: what does Room 121 mean to you? Does it intrigue you, perhaps make you wonder what goes on there, perhaps remind you of Orwell’s Room 101?

It’s the title of the new book that John Simmons and I are writing, on the subject of writing for business. It’s sub-titled ‘a masterclass in business communication’. Our contention is that to communicate well you have to write as one human being to another, one-to-one, in fact. In writing the book we’re creating a space, a room if you like, where people can come to learn. And the form in which we’re writing it, as a series of 52 weekly exchanges, directly reflects the title.

But our publishers’ head office is in Singapore and we’re currently ‘in discussions’ with them because they tell us that ‘readers in Singapore don’t get the title’. Perhaps they’d get a title like How to write better for business, but there are umpteen books out there making that claim. Room 121 is aimed at people who already write for business and regard it as a craft they’d like to improve. These are people who’ve got beyond advice such as ‘use active verbs and personal pronouns’. They want to be intrigued, entertained and enlightened.

We’d love to know how you respond to this title. Like it? Hate it? Find it confusing? If you have a moment to leave a comment here, or email me direct, it would be a great help to us. (If you've already responded to John, don't worry - and thank you!)

And finally, I may not be able to post next week. I'll be in Marrakech, charging the solar batteries in readiness for the next round of snowmageddon.

Skating backwards

2010-12-03T00:10:00.001Z

I don’t remember the miseries of the winter of 1963 (no running water in the house for several weeks, among other things, I’m told). I just remember the fun. I was fourteen, home from boarding school, and Perthshire was a winter playground.

There was endless tobogganing. The best, at Ochtertyre, just outside Crieff, was down a long, very steep field and straight out across several hundred yards of frozen loch, dodging skaters, a motorbike (how it stayed upright I have no idea) and even a couple of cars. It was surely the dream toboggan run, the best thing outside the Cresta.

Then there was ice hockey. Ten minutes from home, a neighbour had flooded a field to make a flight pond. Set in a hollow between two hills, it was shallow and froze very quickly. That winter it was a couple of acres of pure glass. We played with walking sticks and a shoe polish tin filled with sand to give it weight. God, could we skate – flat out across the ice, whacking the puck and occasionally each other, twisting and turning on sixpences until the surface was scored and powdered by our blades and our cheeks were crimson and burning in the cold. Late in the afternoon the sky would turn pink and fill with skeins of geese heading down to the River Earn to roost. I remember feelings of extreme exhilaration at the sport and the speed of it, combined with something approaching ecstasy at the beauty of our surroundings.

But the thing I remember best, and last week’s Imagination Club outing to that great empty ballroom put me in mind of it, was skating backwards. I got very good at it, skating forward as fast as I could, then pivoting on one toe to whip round into the backward movement with almost no loss of speed. Skating backwards involved making a snakelike movement of the hips as you transferred your weight from one ankle to the other, and more even than forward skating it seemed to depend on a good rhythm. If you got it right it was almost like flying (if you didn’t you were liable to trip and crack your skull).

So much of what we do works best when we get into a rhythm. I’m just back from the pub where for, obvious reasons, it was a quiet night. But there were three other musicians there, all good players, and after half an hour or so of warming up we spontaneously hit a groove. It was exciting, like skating backwards, and we kept it going for a good long time. We could tell that it was infectious from the way the audience reacted, nodding, smiling, tapping feet.

Another rhythm has me in its grasp at the moment, too. John Simmons and I have been commissioned to write a book about business writing and language which takes the form of a conversation between our two blogs. With meetings cancelled because of the weather this week, we’ve hit a groove in our exchanges, batting back and forth new blog posts almost every day. Again there’s something exhilarating about it, and I’m sure we’re both writing well at the moment.

It’s easy to forget that from the moment we first hear the thud-thud of our mother’s heartbeats, we are creatures of rhythm. Last week’s dancing reminded me of it, and so, oddly enough, has being in the grip of the coldest November on record.

Gone dancing

2010-11-26T08:59:00.003Z

Last Tuesday I went along on an Imagination Club outing. The club was set up three years ago by Barclay Price, director of Arts & Business Scotland, on the Heineken principle: that it would refresh the parts – well, one part in particular – that everyday organisational life doesn’t reach.

Three or four times a year, a small group of us meet for a few hours to do something that none of us have ever done before, and stretch our imaginations in the process. ‘We’ are mainly people from the higher echelons of the Scottish academic, arts, cultural and enterprise world, plus me as a kind of official recorder.

So far we’ve made short films at the BBC, spoons in the jewellery department of Edinburgh College of Art, and I can’t remember exactly what in an imaginary sandpit in Barclay’s office; written poems in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, visited Jupiter Artland, a private sculpture park outside Edinburgh, played the World Game in a converted boathouse on the Fife coast, brainstormed new uses for touch-screen technology in a high-tech lab at Edinburgh University’s Informatics Department, and last Tuesday – danced.

The majority of us, I suspect, were dreading it – quite needlessly as it transpired. It was fantastic. We had an empty ballroom to ourselves, and an inspirational leader in the person of dancer and choreographer, Christine Devaney. Within half an hour she had us unashamedly gliding and swooping, springing and leaping around the huge space, lost in what we could make our own bodies do, entranced by the feeling of physical freedom. Within an hour we were in groups, rolling and tumbling and writhing in coils. And for the finale, all inhibition by now cast to the winds, we choreographed our own short dance pieces.

Total absorption, self-forgetting, is the thing that has characterised the best of these outings. This was certainly true of Tuesday, though it was accompanied by a strong sense of physical awareness, as if we were experiencing the world almost entirely through our bodies, and the relationship of our bodies to the others around us. It was, I realised afterwards, an almost unconscious form of communication; more than that, a form of communion, and a more powerful one than anything we normally achieve with words, outside perhaps poetry.

Most of us these days lead less physical lives than at any time in human history. To paraphrase Sir Ken Robinson’s famous remark about academics: our bodies have become a form of transport for our heads, they’re how we get our brains to meetings. This can’t be a good thing. Dancing and movement reminds us of something important about ourselves, something without which we’re incomplete.

Temples of Mammon

2010-11-19T00:02:00.004Z

Thirty-nine years plus a few weeks ago I started my first job. Incredible though it now seems, it was in the City.

I had graduated with a law degree from Aberdeen University but wanted neither to practice law nor to stay in Scotland. What I really wanted to do was write stories and make records, but my father was an advocate, my stepfather a banker, and in those days one toed the line. So I signed up with one of the big London Scottish firms of accountants. ‘My boy,’ I seem to remember someone saying, ‘with a law degree and a CA under your belt, the world’s your oyster.’

I certainly remember my first day. The offices were on King William St, on the north side of London Bridge. As I walked anxiously down from Monument tube station, a great grey tide surged towards me across the bridge, shoes shined, brollies furled and bowlers bobbing up and down amid the throng. It was an unnerving sight.

I lasted six months. Despite, on an audit in Watford, writing the report I was asked to produce in the style of a Mickey Spillane thriller, I’m proud to say that I left voluntarily. By the following spring I was working in a West End bookshop and six months after that, en route to South America for a year on the road. My first attempt at grown-up life had failed magnificently.

Yesterday I found myself back among the temples of Mammon, a couple of bridges upstream from where I’d begun, running a day’s training for one of the country’s larger accountancy firms. There was an odd and brief moment of déjà vu as I approached their offices, but it didn’t last long. It seems almost superfluous to note that so much had changed. The art in the lobby. The pink shirts and short skirts and no ties. The information screens and bottled water and bowls of fruit.

It would be easy to say that the one thing that hadn’t changed was the language, but it wouldn’t be true. The world of taxation, accountancy and financial advice, let alone City regulation, is an infinitely more complex one than it was nearly four decades ago – and the language reflects it. Whereas many things have changed for the better, it’s probably fair to say that the language has changed for the worse. But attitudes also are changing and there’s now an awareness that it doesn’t have to be that way, which of course is why I was there.

That seems to me like a straw worth clinging to. Even down in the oily, throbbing maintenance area of the economic engine room there are people keen to make space for a few kind words.

War Horse

2010-11-12T09:06:00.001Z

I seldom watch breakfast TV but I was staying in a hotel on Wednesday night, so yesterday morning I did. One of the guests was the former Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo. The stage production of his story War Horse is about to go to Broadway, while Steven Spielbeg has also just finished filming it.

Animals have always been a challenge in the theatre. I remember going to see the original version of Equus at the Old Vic in the early ‘70s. Then they used large wicker horses’ heads worn by brown-clad actors. It worked. Equus was a profoundly disturbing theatrical experience.

Things have moved on. As we saw yesterday in a live studio demonstration, the horses in War Horse are whole, life-sized animals. The bodies and heads are wire armatures covered in gauze, the legs hinged sections of wood. Each horse has three attendant grooms in brown boots, breeches and waistcoat, who are really the puppeteers. They stand beside the animal as if tending to it and reach up, down or inside to manipulate the different parts of it with their hands.

So lifelike are the animal’s movements, so distinct its personality, that even in the brief couple of minutes the demonstration lasted I quickly forgot about the puppeteers. It was as if they had become transparent. It was a stunning example of how easily we can be persuaded to see only what someone wants us to see.

The three actor-puppeteers, we were told, were known respectively as Head, Heart and Hind; and this, I think, is the reason that this trompe l’oeil worked so beautifully. Working together, each immersed in his or her role, they conjured a living, breathing, feeling animal so real we could almost see its breath.

Head, heart and hind. I couldn’t help thinking that it’s sometimes helpful to think of organisations in anthropomorphic terms too. It reminds us that as well as a head, most organisations also have a heart, although they don’t always know where to find it. And they certainly have a hind. It’s what a lot of them spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to cover. But the main problem is that unlike in War Horse, their puppeteers so seldom seem to be working from the same script.

Truth in Assynt

2010-11-04T20:48:00.002Z

I’m reading a beautiful book. At The Loch of the Green Corrie is by Scottish novelist, poet and mountaineer, Andrew Greig.

Part memoir, part meditation on fishing and wilderness, part tribute to another Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, it speaks to me particularly because it’s set in Assynt, a wild corner of the northwest Highlands where I’ve spent time making music during each of the last two summers, and where the Lewisian Gneiss that thrusts skywards through grass and heather is one of the oldest geological formations on earth. (Scotland drifted around a lot, for a very long time, before finally settling where it is now.)

At one point Andrew Greig describes a childhood game he and his brother used to play. They called it ‘Copsbrook’ after a third, imaginary player. He says this: ‘I have never known a game as demanding, as absorbing, as pure and difficult as playing Copsbrook – unless it is trying to write a poem, a true poem, that has no visible constraints but bends around its inner necessity.’

I really love that: ‘… bends around its inner necessity.’ There’s the sense of shaping a rim to a wheel, endowing the core of a thing with the means of its own movement into the world. And I love it because true as it is of writing a poem, it’s also true of the whole business of communicating.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the value of constraints in the creative process. Here Andrew Greig describes the constraint-less constraint. This is where the essential truth of what you want to get at gives shape to what you have to say.

All of which implies an honesty, a seeking-after-truth, that might seem all too rare in the business world. And yet … I truly believe people are longing for it. They’re fed up with corporate platitudes and spin, with failure of nerve and the bland drivel that results, with disingenuity and vacuity.

I ran a workshop today for a very large technology business. The participants were senior people, educated, intelligent, articulate, experts in their own field. The feeling of longing to let what they had to say be bent around its inner necessity was almost palpable. I hope I encouraged them to reach for it.

It’s very simple really.

People like truth.

Memorabilia

2010-10-28T20:15:00.003+01:00

My maternal grandfather, a retired admiral, could recite The Hunting Of The Snark in its entirety. As a young midshipman he had committed it to memory and there it had stuck for the remaining seventy-odd years of his life. I still remember as a child shrieking with terror and delight when, with a flourish, he would declaim the final line: ‘for the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’

He had, as we say, learnt it by heart. But why do we say that? Without going into the niceties of where memory actually resides, wouldn’t it seem more rational to say that he had learnt it by head?

In fact, the expression is supposed to derive from the ancient Greeks' belief that the heart was the seat of the intellect (and in a nice etymological parallel, the word record pursues the same train of thought, deriving from the Latin word cor for heart, thus to re-heart).

But the Greeks’ anatomical mistake serves as a useful reminder (in English we’ve got the anatomy right, you see) of something else – that most things worth remembering (not, in fact, re-member, as in reconstruct, but re-memor, Latin for mind) engage the heart as well as the head. Which, of course, is why so much that is written and spoken in the world of business is so instantly and permanently forgettable (Old English: for meaning far from or away from, plus get meaning get).

Except that sometimes it’s memorable for the wrong reasons. I heard a captain of industry speaking on television the other night about the success of his business. He expressed it this way: ‘our headcount has grown fifteen per cent in the last year.’

Our headcount? If all he recognises are heads, the chances are his company is not a great place to work, regardless of how successful it may be. Well, that’s just a perfectly normal piece of business jargon, you might say. Maybe so, but it’s still very revealing of the underlying thinking that persists in so many organisations, where – however much their leaders may assert the opposite – people are really thought of as ciphers, two-legged information processing machines.

Now if he’d said, ‘our heartcount has grown fifteen per cent in the last year’, it would have been a different matter altogether...

Hold me

2010-10-21T19:03:00.005+01:00

As in life, so in art - we do need constraints. In their own way they can even liberate, by relieving us of the pressure of having to encompass everything. That has certainly been my experience with the two 26 projects I’ve written about in the last year: 26:50 with International PEN and 26 Treasures with the V&A. In both cases we were permitted a very limited number of words for our response to a brief. These constraints actively encouraged creativity.

But there’s another side to this, and whenever I think of it I see myself aged 23 on a large horse careering across a field in Argentina. There are several things about that image that still make me shiver. One, I’m not a natural horseman, in fact horses frighten me and this one knew it. Two, the ground was covered with termite hills, three feet high, baked hard as concrete, and tapering to sharp points. Three, fields in Argentina are the size of English counties. Clinging to my steed’s neck, I thought the ride would never end.

Sometimes I get the same feeling when I have to write something, particularly to the sort of brief that ends with the client saying vaguely, ‘Oh, you know the kind of thing we want…’

I go home, sit down and look at my notes and there’s a horrible moment of paralysis. It’s not simply where do I start, but where on earth do I stop? How am I going to give this thing structure, form, some boundaries so that my thoughts don’t just slither about like amoebas and go wobbling over the edge of the earth?

So I look for whatever I can find that will help to contain the job and make it seem manageable. There’s always something. Maybe it’s the word-count. Maybe it’s the designer’s layout. Maybe it’s something the client said that I hadn’t picked up on. And if none of those are available, I work through my notes to start giving some kind of shape to what I do know. Perhaps there’s a chronological flow to the information or some kind of inherent organisational logic. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made or a story to be told.

Whatever it is, I’m looking for a constraint, something that encloses the work I have to do and makes me feel safe in the knowledge that it will end and that I can get there; that I’m not back in that seemingly boundary-less Argentine field. For constraints don’t merely liberate, they also protect one from the void – sometimes known as the blank page.

Out of the darkness

2010-10-15T07:57:00.003+01:00

On Wednesday evening, as the Chilean miners emerged one by one from that hellish, six-hundred-metre-long metal tube, President Piñera, who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of bons mots, declared that his country’s most precious resource was not copper or gold, but ‘we Chileans’.

It wasn’t a particularly original sentiment, although in the circumstances it did have a very particular resonance. But what made it interesting was his choice of the word ‘we’.

How often has one heard the leaders of businesses and other organisations trot out the old cliché, ‘our people are our most precious resource’?

Leaving aside the notion that people can be relegated to the status of mineral deposits, it’s the ‘our’ – that possessive pronoun – that gives the game away. It implies something paternalistic, a little condescending, and it always carries an underlying sense of disconnection, as if the speaker and the people they are referring to don’t belong to quite the same tribe.

But what the Chilean president did was to make the statement inclusive rather than exclusive. He placed himself in it, as one of the resources. ‘We Chileans’, he said. And in that moment, with that simple phrase, he summoned the image of a nation profoundly united.

As the miners were being winched to the surface, I was running a workshop for a large financial institution in Edinburgh. I invited the participants to use art materials to portray where they felt their organisation was at present, and their group within it.

One group created an underwater scene, complete with octopuses and sharks, shoals of small colourful fish, shipwrecks and a submarine. In the bottom left-hand corner was a blacked-out section, evidently a cave, from which peered several small pairs of eyes.

‘Who’s that in the cave?’ I asked.

‘Our leaders,’ came the answer. ‘They don’t like to come out much.’

The kind of leaders, no doubt, who would be quick to proclaim that their people are their greatest resource, while failing to acknowledge that they themselves are part of the same rich seam of human talent and energy and emotion.

While this was obviously a source of huge frustration, even anger, for my group, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy for those wretched leaders, failing to connect with the tribe they belong to, trapped in their cave by their own fear. For a moment, they even reminded me of the miners…

Why fiction?

2010-10-08T10:31:00.002+01:00

‘Why should I read fiction?’ This was a question put by one of our students in Spain, a couple of weeks ago.

It’s a good question, and a reminder for me that not everyone has the passion for stories that I share with my fellow Dark Angels tutors, John Simmons and Stuart Delves. People read for many reasons. It may be to learn or to become better informed, it may simply be to be entertained, and it doesn’t have to involve fiction. Even if they do read novels, it may not necessarily be for any reason other than to be caught up in a ‘good yarn’.

Nevertheless, the question invited us to reflect on the fact that there are deeper reasons for reading fiction, good fiction at any rate; and since it was seriously put it deserved a serious answer. We (the tutors) hit our stride quickly: because it helps you to see the world around you in a new light; because it reveals universal truths; because it highlights moral dilemmas; because it reflects what it means to be human; because it stretches your heart and mind; because it challenges your view of things; because it helps you develop and grow – these, from memory, were just some of the reasons we gave.

But what have discussions about fiction got to do with business writing? one might ask. After all, isn’t business writing about facts and the hard realities of commercial or organisational life? Well, yes, but to whom do those facts and hard realities apply? People. People whose lives wherever they are, at home or at work, involve searching for universal truths, facing moral dilemmas, reflecting on what it means to be human, and so on. I rest my case …

Yesterday morning during a workshop I was asked a different question, yet one which seems go hand-in-hand with the first: ‘How do I become a better writer? Would reading help? And if so, what – newspapers, novels…?’

Yes, I answered, and yes again. Reading does help, in fact it’s probably the best way there is to become a better writer. Reading good writing, in the quality press, in serious non-fiction, and perhaps most of all in good literary fiction, is an invitation to anyone with the least curiosity to investigate how it’s done. Syntax, vocabulary, rhythm, texture, colour, energy, all can be learnt from what we read, and the more we read the sooner we stop learning and start breathing it in.

But most importantly of all, reading - for the story or the style - teaches us that the best writers, in any field whatsoever, are those that are deeply preoccupied with being human. For them, making the connection is everything.

Dawn chorus

2010-09-30T16:52:00.007+01:00

Finca el Tornero de Abajo is the Spanish home of my childhood friend, novelist Robin Pilcher. A chestnut farm on a hillside in the Sierra de Aracena, 100 kms northwest of Seville, it’s a place of magical light, long views to distant ridges, tumbling wooded slopes and clear, clean air.

One wakes there to a morning chorus of dogs, roosters and a donkey, their voices echoing up from the valley as it floods with sunlight. And there’s another sound when the Dark Angels are gathered there, as we were last week: the sound of human voices raised together in celebration of existence.

Since our courses are about helping people to develop their metaphorical voices as writers, we work on the principle that it’s good for them to exercise their physical voices as well. So the day begins with five minutes of singing, usually a simple but beautiful early Christian chant: ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est (where there is kindness and love, there is god).

Religion has never had any place on our courses and never will, but that’s not to say it can’t offer us a rich seam of music and language. The melody of Ubi Caritas is easy to learn and the sentiment is one that most people find hard to disagree with, even though some might prefer to substitute the word ‘truth’ for ‘god’. Most importantly, though, the chant brings us together in a way that these days is all too rare.

Once upon a time the human voice was the predominant sound wherever one walked on earth, but today it’s drowned out by machines, and even when it’s not, half of us have our ears blocked by headphones. But at Finca el Tornero, our voices ring out in unison across the valley, the chant at once a confluence of sounds, a raising of consciousness and an invocation. It brings us together in a way that reminds us of both our individuality and our shared humanity. It’s good for our lungs and our heads, our hearts and our souls.

And when we come to the other exercises, that word ‘kindness’ is at the root of everything we teach, for kinder words are those that work harder to recognise our human kinship. Nothing is more vital to good writing or any other kind of communication, and yet it's so often missing in the world from which our students come, the world of business. Each year we watch them drink at the well of kindness like desert travellers at an oasis.

Cable news

2010-09-23T07:45:00.005+01:00

When the business secretary Vince Cable yesterday announced his plans to shine ‘a harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour,’ the director general of the CBI, Richard Lambert, went on the attack, saying: ‘It’s odd that he thinks it sensible to use such emotional language.’

Cable probably hasn’t replied directly to Lambert, but were he to have done so, he might well have echoed the children’s novelist, Philip Pullman, when he was leading a group of writers to protest at publishers’ plans to badge children’s books according to the age band for which they were deemed appropriate (the plan happily fizzled out).

At a meeting with senior publishing industry figures, Pullman opened with an impassioned warning of the perils of attempting to compartmentalise readership. The leading publisher heard him out, then requested that they keep the emotion out of the discussion and consider things rationally – to which, so the story goes, Pullman responded that he would very much prefer to keep the emotion in, if they didn’t mind, since this was an issue about which a great many people felt very strongly.

Vince Cable provoked Richard Lambert’s displeasure by using simple, unambiguous language to pose questions that many people might want to ask: ‘Why should good companies be destroyed by short-term investors looking for a speculative killing, while their accomplices in the City make fat fees? Why do directors forget their wider duties when a fat cheque is waved before them? Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can.’

This may be rhetoric, depending on your viewpoint, but what is undeniable is that Cable’s choice of words summons images and stirs feelings. Which is where he and Philip Pullman will always have the edge over the dull pedlars of business-speak. They are clever men, both of them, and quite at ease with all things rational, but it’s in their readiness to make room for emotion that they become more than twice as effective as their less inspiring counterparts.

Today we take a group of business people to Andalucia for our annual Dark Angels advanced writing course. Apart from tuning their senses to the sights and sounds and smells of a foreign landscape for five days, we will also use a series of writing exercises to tune up their emotions, because we firmly believe that the best leaders and communicators (and increasingly I wonder if there’s really a difference) are the ones, like Cable and Pullman, who choose to keep the emotion very much in, if you don’t mind.

Treasure trail

2010-09-17T09:47:00.008+01:00

Visit the V&A from tomorrow and for the next nine days you’ll see something rather unusual: large red panels with alternative interpretations of twenty-six objects in the museum’s British Galleries. There will be the normal curatorial information: stuffed dragon’s head, Ruritania, c 250 AD, ironwood mount inlaid with mother-of-pearl, taxidermist unknown (possibly George, St). And beside it there will be a more whimsical, reflective piece of writing, 62 words long, which captures some aspect of the spirit of the object.

This is 26 Treasures, part of the London Design Festival, and I make no apology for mentioning it for the second time in as many months. The brainchild of Rob Self-Pierson, a recent graduate of University College Falmouth’s MA in Professional Writing, 26 Treasures invites 26 writers to respond in their own way, in precisely 62 words, to an object with which they’ve been paired. Rob took the idea to the writers’ collective 26, and 26 approached both the V&A and London Design Festival.

The resulting project has grown bigger and attracted more publicity than anyone could have imagined. The V&A has welcomed it as ‘a brilliant idea’, while 26, no stranger to projects of this kind, has set up a second stream of pairings, such was the demand from its members for a place among the original 26 writers (who include poets Andrew Motion - a bust of Homer; and Maura Dooley - an ornate mirror). Soon, anyone will be able to submit 62 words on an object of their choice via the website at www.26treasures.com

Blogging about the project this week, my fellow contributor, Sara Sheridan, the Edinburgh-based historical novelist, mentions the ‘refreshingly egalitarian’ approach of 26, by which she means that it’s not a tight-knit little literary club, but one that’s open to anyone with an interest in words. And indeed she’s right: 26’s members range from poets and novelists to language experts and brand consultants, marketing and communications people to freelance business writers, advertising copywriters and graphic designers.

26 is testimony to the fact that the writer’s life can come in many shapes and sizes, not all of which involve writing books, but most of which are defined by a common curiosity in the workings of the world and a passion for the words that allow us to investigate them. 26 Treasures is a lovely example of the unexpected paths down which that curiosity and passion can take one. Do drop in and see it if you can. If not, have a look at the website.

26 Treasures, British Galleries, V&A, 18-26 September

Sara Sheridan's blog

www.26treasures.com

www.26.org.uk

Jam yesterday

2010-09-09T17:43:00.007+01:00

The city of Gurgaon, where I’m staying, is a satellite of Delhi, fifteen miles or so from the centre of the capital. Twenty-five years ago it was mainly green fields. Today it’s the sixth largest city in the state of Haryana, home to many global names in the financial services, telecoms, automotive and outsourcing industries, one of whom is my client.

It’s a city literally springing up before one’s eyes, and full of the kind of contrasts you see only in India. Pigs rootle in the rubbish at the gates of towering new corporate HQs. Rajasthani labourers and their brightly-dressed wives live in plastic-sheeting shelters on the construction sites where they work. Bamboo scaffolding clings to high-rise apartment blocks. Cows amble down the centre of the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway.

Yesterday Gurgaon was paralysed by its worst-ever traffic jam. Why? Because the authorities were testing the dedicated lanes that will bring Commonwealth Games traffic to Delhi from outlying areas when the games start in October. In the ensuing chaos of blocked access and exit roads, hundreds of thousands of people (luckily not including us) were stuck on the expressway for up to six hours. Add to that the fact that a late and particularly vicious monsoon has wrecked the surfaces of many of the main roads – the result of cost-cutting and corruption among contractors and officials – and you start to get a sense of what the daily commute for Gurgaon residents may be like in coming weeks.

But this is India. People just shrug and try their best to get to work. If they can’t, they take a day off. Most people that is. Not the Indian national cycle team, though, according to a sad little story on the front of yesterday’s Hindustan Times. The cyclists were brought to Delhi from their training base in Patiala to get in some early practice on the routes where they will compete next month. But things didn’t go quite according to plan.

Despite leaving their accommodation at 4.00am, the state of the roads meant that it took the team two hours to get to the local expressway where they were going to train. They then had just two hours’ cycling before having to stop for fear of being mown down by rush-hour traffic. Then there’s the near-epidemic of mosquito-borne dengue fever, a direct result of standing water from the monsoon, which is hitting Delhi. With no team doctor present to tell them what precautions to take, three of them were immediately struck down with the fever. Another six caught viral infections, leaving only seven of the 18-man squad fit for training, and now – unsurprisingly – they’re back in Patiala again.

What’s this go to do with kind words? Nothing at all. I’ve had enough of language this week with my students. Occasionally it’s good just to write about whatever you feel like - in this case the continuously extraordinary experience of being in India. And it's my twenty-second wedding anniversary today. So there.