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Scammed, slammed and hung out to dry
I still cringe when I ‘fess up to anyone that I got scammed a few weeks ago. And why do I see in in confessional terms? As something somehow shameful? I was a victim not a perp after all. Knowing that doesn’t help much. Getting scammed is not something anyone is keen to admit to because we don’t want to admit to being helpless or gullible. It’s embarrassing. I certainly consider myself to be competent, confident and generally on to it. But, to be Biblical, pride goes before a fall. And how I fell.
I took a call early one morning which woke me up. It appeared to be from my bank asking about charges that had been added to my credit card and could I confirm whether they were bona fide. They mentioned several quite large charges in the $1,500-$2,000 range and I got into a panic because the voice on the phone kept telling me another one had come through and asking me to provide text message codes they were sending so they could stop them.
What a moron! The lack of request for vocal ID by the caller (supposedly from my bank) should have sent great big red letters of fire flashing before my eyes in warning. It didn’t, and I just kept on making it worse for myself. I’ve adroitly side-stepped other scammers. Not this time. I walked blindly into this one and the trap snapped savagely shut on my credulity like a gin-trap on the leg of a harmless little animal. Like the animal, I had no way out. I can hear your groans and cries of “what were you thinking?” from here. Believe me, there is nothing anyone can say to match what I’ve said to myself.
Being scammed is the ultimate own goal — you might as well set fire to the money
Of course I blame myself. But I’m not the villain of the story. I had a moment of poor judgement and am paying for it on many levels. Scammers are thieving amoral clever cxxts (sorry but there is no word I can think of that adequately describes my feelings other than this) who prey on our decency, credulity, frailties and fears. They don’t care who they hurt or how deep the damage. When I got the call, my fear of financial loss was triggered and I didn’t stop to think. Stupid me. Poor me. Maxima mea culpa. All of the above. But it’s not my fault that predators exist. There have been charlatans, mountebanks, fraudsters, imposters and confidence tricksters since Adam was a boy.
The financial loss wasn’t insignificant and it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of getting the money back. They’re investigating, but my expectations are lower than the proverbial wicked stepmother’s morals. I lost what was to me a fair chunk of money which means I can’t take trip home to the UK that I was planning for Christmas. But the scammers thankfully didn’t wipe me out.
I know scams often leave some people with nothing, so it could have been a lot worse. That’s like telling your kids to eat their greens because starving kids in less lucky places would be so grateful for your Brussels Sprouts! Just BTW, do any kids anywhere like Brussels Sprouts? Hard to imagine. In any case, it was enough money to cause me some real pain. If there could be a silver lining, I was lucky that I didn’t give any actual passwords to any of my other accounts.
But it’s not just the money
The financial loss was only a part of it. I felt violated. Dirty. Pathetic. Ashamed. Foolish. Vulnerable. Duped. Fragile. Worst of all, defeated. These are not emotions or states that I often experience. That sounds very smug, but it’s true. In my own eyes, I’m not a fool or an object of pity. Yet in the course of one very mis-guided phone call I proved myself to be just that. I got well and truly hung out to try. Trussed like a fowlfor the spit. Taken to the clearners. Caught hook, line and sinker. Done like a dog’s dinner. The scammers ate me up and spat the bones out.
It’s hard to put my finger on why this epidode has left me reeling when many other ostensibly worse things haven’t hit so hard. My last blog covered how to use the lemons life lobs at us creatively. I’m pretty good at that, but I’ve been struggling to think how to put a positive spin on this. I know from experience that time will heel the wound. I just wish time would also wound those scamming heels. It was a bruising experience that rocked me to the core. The whole sorry saga doesn’t jive with my sense of who I am. I’m Tigger for God’s sake! But I seriously had to check my premises and assumptions because if I could be that fooled in that way, am I fooling myself about other stuff?
The ‘gift’ that keeps on giving
I am still struggling to let myself off the hook even though I know I’m in good company and smarter folk that me have been hooked as badly or worse. Maybe some of my self-disgust is because I’ve seen too many movies where wealthy mature women get targeted by charming con artists like Steve Martin and Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Scammed is another one of those things I didn’t want to be when I grew up. And yet here I am.
I wasn’t going to write about this. I thought I’d got over it. And, to be honest, why would I focus on my own idiocy. But I mentioned what had happened to someone I know just in passing in a text and that ripped the Band Aid off. The hurt and bewilderment is still lurking like basking sharks waiting for their opportunity feed. I’ve cried as I’ve written this. I’m surprised by the depth of emotion. But it’s been cathartic and I’m glad to have got it off my chest.
We won’t get fooled again
I won’t let those parasitic, bottom feeding low life’s grind me down or I’d risk becoming a recluse who despises their fellow humans. I’m not that person. I’m still Tigger. Tiggers have to bounce. See all the happy things. Believe the best in people. But I’m also human. I hope Karma is a real thing. That what goes around comes around. So these travesties of humans who steal and cheat people out of their honestly gained savings, bring endless misery and don’t bring or create anything of value, get theirs in time.
We get bombarded with scamming stings. Phishing phantasamagorias. They work because they are so believable or play on our sympathies and inherent good nature. Would it have been less of an issue for me if the money involved was less? That a yes, because I wouldn’t be angry on two levels. If it was only a few dollars, I’d only be feeling foolish. But being scammed is a horrible experience on many levels. No one walks away unscathed. I hope telling my story will offer solidarity to others who have gone through it so We Won’t Get Fooled Again.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?
I’ve recently heard at least three people trot out the old trope that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. It’s such an easy-to-understand metaphor for staying optimistic in difficult times and turning the tables on what life deals to you. It’s the lemony version of playing the cards you’ve been dealt.
The expression first appeared in print in an obituary written and published in 1909 by the American writer, publisher and artist Elbert Hubbard in the Literary Digest. In his opinion, “A genius is a man who takes the lemons that Fate hands him and starts a lemonade stand with them.”
It’s more often attributed to Mr Win-Friends-and-Influence-People, the king of self-improvement, Dale Carnegie. Carnegie used it in his 1948 book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: “If you have a lemon, make a lemonade.”
However, others used it between the Hubbard and Carnegie instances. I particularly like this one in a poem published in a 1940 edition of The Optimist by Clarence Edwin Flynn:
Life handed him a lemon,
As Life sometimes will do.
His friends looked on in pity,
Assuming he was through.
They came upon him later,
Reclining in the shade
In calm contentment, drinking
A glass of lemonade.
A good metaphor, a bad rap for lemons
I like lemons. What would lemon tea be without the lemon flavouring? There’s no obvious substitute. Mandarin tea, anyone? I don’t think so. Gin and Tonic—unthinkable without a zesty zing of a slice or two of lemon. Okay, some people prefer lime. But the purists still choose lemon—the cynic in me thinks this could be due to the price difference, but that could be … well … cynical. The adventurous might even go for a taste bomb by adding a slice of both. I salute their inventiveness. Worse than a lemonless G&T, imagine a gorgeous white fish fillet slathered in herbs, garlic and butter without the blissful finishing tartness of a twist of lemon.
The lemon dissing even carries over into song. Harry Belafonte, the singer and actor who popularised Calypso and fathered Halle Berry, released Lemon Tree in the fifties. Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.[1] Duuuuude—come on. We all know you don’t eat lemons like other fruit. They’re garnish. Ingredients. You’d have to be desperate to peel and chow down an entire lemon au natural like an orange. But … lemon meringue pie … lemon cake …. lemon souffle … lemon mouse. I love the flavour of lemon in pretty much any guise. Ironically, except for lemonade, which I can’t see the point of and wouldn’t give you beans for.
Putting a positive spin on your lemon mountain
Anyway, there is a point to this meandering story. Like most people who have lived any length of time and taken the odd risk, life has lobbed a fair swag of lemons at me. But I’m not bitter, unlike those sour little yellow suckers. I tend to see my lemon mountain as an acknowledgement of an adventurous spirit prepared to try new stuff and push the envelope a bit. My adventures haven’t been at the extreme end of the spectrum. E.g., journeying to the centre of the earth-type adventures. I haven’t (yet) been embroiled in a space odyssey, even a minor one or been part of any pioneering expeditions to find world-changing places like the Northwest Passage. I haven’t even climbed any mountains of note. But I’ve most definitely taken the road less travelled at regular intervals.
AND Why stop at lemonade?
Back in 2010, in addition to becoming co-owner of a creative agency, I was co-founder of a pioneering event app, and I could see the dramatic impact smartphones would have on our lives. The ramifications were mind-boggling and made me think long and hard about the future of branding and design. This resulted, in 2012, in a short business plan in infographic form—we are a design studio, after all—setting out a blueprint for a digital transformation of our business. Not exactly messianic. All creative sector businesses worth their salt could see the writing on the (digital) wall and the need for reinvention to stay relevant.
But my thinking was a little different. I didn’t just want to make lemonade, as in shifting from a print worldview to a digital one— we had to do that anyway. No, I wanted to do something entirely different. To shift the paradigm (as we were so fond of saying then). I understood that our value wasn’t so much in our team’s undoubted skills and expertise or our quality of work and service model. Print-led or digital, any pivoting in the business-as-usual sense would be about survival and continued competitiveness rather than systemic change.
Our primary value was (and still is) in the IP around our brand development process, which we have amassed over many years. You’ve heard about software as a service. My thinking—couldn’t we create a branding-as-a-service offer. I.e, take our IP online and enable people to learn the nuts and bolts of developing and managing a standout brand, drawing on our years of intel, insight and innovation?
An idea whose moment has come
It was a great idea, but in 2012, it would have required us to build a complex (aka hugely expensive) bespoke web portal. We didn’t have access to template-driven websites like this WordPress one I use, with all the widgets and plugins that enable almost any interaction with users at affordable prices. There are even subscription-based learning platforms that host video courses, learning resources and offer community building tools. Everything you could want at a tiny (miniscule) fraction of the cost of building from scratch. Better still, it’s on them to keep adding features and functionality and support the system. My 2012 aspirations were ahead of the curve—the idea wouldn’t have succeeded even if we’d had the funding to make it happen. But the times and tools they have achanged.
Catalysed by the latest tsunami of lemons delivered to small businesses like mine in the COVID aftermath, supported by the seismic shift to online everything, I am finally making it happen. I love working with ambitious early-stage businesses, but our conventional pricing structure makes that hard. My online learning platform will allow anyone to access high-calibre brand thinking without the fancy agency price tag. I published the programme’s flagship Brands with Moxie — Eight Steps to a Winning Brand late last year. This book sets out to help entrepreneurs, small business owners, and early career marketing and comms managers understand and leverage the full power of their brands. That used up quite a lot of lemons. I’m now converting the remainder of the lemon mountain into video training courses and other resources, and I’m poised to launch the first of these by the end of the year.
Like most things, it all comes down to attitude
I’ve wanted to throw in the towel many times over the last few years. Go into hibernation mode as I talked about in a previous post. Admit defeat and walk away. Give up on years of business development and find something less challenging. But I decided to, as the saying goes, keep calm and carry on. Whether your bag is lemonade or lemon soufflé , with the right attitude, you’ll always be able to find something to do with the lemons life lobs at you. I’m not out of the woods yet. My new take on my business still has a long way to go to earn its and my keep, but I’m hopeful.
I feel proud of myself. Every time life has given me lemons, I’ve come back with a burst of extraordinary creativity, bringing a lot of personal growth. Everything is risky. There’s no such thing as a wrong decision. There’s just a different destination. I’m saying this as much to shore up my resolve as to convince anyone else. Bitterness is seductive. The drama of disappointment is too easy to get derailed by. Making disappointment a defining characteristic is diminishing and a massive turnoff to other people. Life increasingly becomes a dark place where ‘they’ are out to get you, and perspective disappears.
So, I say, whilst raising my G&T with its extravagant two slices, Slàinte Mhath—cheers—fellow adventurers. When life gives you lemons, don’t just make lemonade. Get creative. Make something new and exciting. Step away from your comfort zone. What’s the worst that can happen? You get more lemons and try a different recipe.
[1] YouTube failed me and I couldn’t find a recording, but here’s one of his most loved songs from that era Island in the Sun.
Brattish or demure—which tribe do you belong to?
A couple of days ago, I read about the trending makeover of the word demure on TikTok in an article How Demure Are You?[1]. TikTok is awash with advice about how to be demure. Before you get your feminist dander up, no one is urging a dash towards traditional womanly demureness. The repurposed demure is not about being reserved, modest or shy. It’s been hijacked to serve more modern mores.
The instigator of the new demure is TikTok creator Jools Lebron, who sets standards for seminal stuff like managing makeup and moustache sweat. The concept has been seized on and spread like wildfire. Lebron uses demure semi-ironically to encompass the ideas of respect and mindfulness. Well, who can argue with that? Not me—those are two qualities I wish were in greater supply, as a matter of course. So, sitting gracefully. Demure. Showing restraint in your coffee order. Light milk, not the full version. Yup, also demure. Demure dainty spritzes of perfume instead of the usual scent surplus that challenges the olfactory senses and triggers anyone with allergies. Demur clothes to show respect to others at work. Wow, maybe all those female lawyers flashing their cleavages in fantasy TV courtroom dramas could take a leaf out of this book?
I thought the word demure had long since been tossed on the bonfire of, if not the vanities, the behaviours no one (broad generalisation) seems to care much about. Instead, it’s heading towards the stratosphere in the influencerverse. It’s hilarious when you think it’s pretty much the antithesis of the “brat” thing inspired by Charli XCX’s recent album. Like demure, which is no longer about keeping your eyes modestly lowered, a brat is no longer a brat— a petulant, badly behaved child or someone acting like one. No, the new Charli XCX brat is a different beast altogether. This brat is super cool. Petulance has transformed into the more admirable audacity of non-conformity. Bad behaviour is now spirited youthful defiance and ‘out there’ or creative self-expression.
Whatever happened to the seductiveness of slow?
OK, so you probably realise I’m not a TikTokker. Reading is my primary source of what’s hot and what’s not, with an underpinning of docutainment from the streaming services. Even though I don’t spend time on TikTok, the impact of it is everywhere. As a reader of opinion, you can’t be entirely oblivious to some of its influencers’ influences as they whoosh past. It’s fascinating. It’s like the world exists in fast-forward—words and images flash in front of our consciousnesses in perpetual motion as each new thing grabs headspace and headlines. But you’d have to say all the brouhaha is entertaining. A bit of fun in our not-so-fun times. But, like Shakespeare’s Darling Buds of May[2], TikTok’s lease has all too short a date. Summer ends, and so do TikTok trends.
I’m taking a bit of licence here by bringing in Shakespeare in the context of TikTok, but his Sonnet 18—Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day?—is one of the most enduring and loved of all poems. The language is gorgeous, but the meaning is divine (see the poem below). Shakespeare’s theme is the opposite of our fast-forward and instantly forgettable ‘content-driven’ times. It is an exquisite word picture capturing the enduring power of love and poetry to immortalise and preserve. The Sonnet so elegantly puts across the author’s belief that the essence of a person, an idea, or a love can outlast death. These can be captured in words that long outlive the writer or the subject. The wonderfully comforting thought is that as long as we can see (read) and breathe, the subject will live on with each new reading.[3].
When I was the age of the current Brat Pack, I’d have been rampaging in brattish trappings with the best of them. An invitation to be demure, even in it’s made over sense? Not so much.
The whole “Brat Summer”[4] break out fun. Ditto, the reinvention of demure. I’m not saying they don’t matter—when I was the age of the current Brat Pack, I’d have been rampaging in brattish trappings with the best of them. An invitation to be demure, even in it’s made over sense? Not so much.
Whether your tribe is brat or demure, it’s okay to flirt with a new thing. But it all seems so fleeting and ephemeral, encouraging attention spans that might struggle to compete with the average goldfish. It were ever thus when it comes to shiny new things, but the speed at which the carousel is spinning is mind-boggling—an average TikTok post lasts less time than ice cream in the sun. Or, maybe I’m just demurring the reality of digital overwhelm when I say I prefer to keep company with concepts that eternal summer cannot fade.
Sonnet 18 — William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Charli XCX Brat
Jools Lebrun on TikTok
[1] Madison Malone Kircher, Callie Holtermann, Gina Cherelus, Melissa Guerrero and Anthony Rotunno in the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/style/demure-tiktok-mindful-cutesy.html?searchResultPosition=1
[2] The timeless Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare. Originally published with Shakespeare’s other sonnets in 1609.
[3] I enjoyed this commentary of the Sonnet by ThoughtCo.
[4] The other big trend du jour, inspired by Charli XCX’s recent album Brat.
Mutton dressed as lamb and other outdated taboos
I’ve always had at least one foot in the if you’ve got it, flaunt it camp. While I was flicking through the op-eds a couple of weekends ago, one of the headlines I hovered my mouse over was, Are You Ever Too Old for a Bikini? The old mutton dressed as lamb thing in a more beguiling wrapper. In any case, that clever little clickbait title acted like catnip to … er … a cat, and I was hooked.
It turned out to be an advice column. The seeker of advice was worried about what to wear at her daughter’s beach wedding and whether a bikini would be appropriate. There would be a lot of conservative types attending and she didn’t want to be seen as a try-hard, attempting to look too young or an exhibitionist set on upstaging her daughter. While the main worry was about this specific occasion, it posed the broader question of whether there is an age beyond which one shouldn’t go all itsy bitsy teeny weeny[1] when on the beach, at the river or poolside.
My first thought was, are you fricking serious—this is something you need to ask? My second was, don’t you have anyone better to discuss this with??
I’m often surprised by the questions people send to newspaper advice columns. Perhaps, more accurately, I’m surprised by how many people lack self-confidence in the context of the question. But I’m amazed when it’s a question of what’s OK or not to wear—another headline that grabbed me a while ago was How Many Rings Are Too Many to Wear? More disbelief on my part, I’m sorry to say.
But the people asking these questions in the public glare of a high-circulation newspaper or magazine are doing the rest of us a favour by bringing difficult topics into the open. Whether the question is to bikini up or not, or any other variant of Am I too old to wear…whatever…it is indeed a good question. It’s a question many of us ask as we stare in indecision at an item in our wardrobe while the mutton dressed as lamb monster lurks, rubbing its hands in glee, cackling at our dilemma. Gung Ho, though I am, I am certainly not immune to its judgements.
It’s all part of the invisibility trap: the pressure to act or dress your age and not break the myriad taboos laid down over generations.
So many conscious and unconscious biases are baked into our neural pathways from our earliest days about what’s acceptable in almost every facet of our lives. It’s particularly insidious when it comes to clothes. Running the gauntlet of dressing too young for our age is unthinkable. It would almost be preferable to die or become a hermit than to be considered mutton dressed as lamb. I’m shuddering as I write. But, like many buts, it’s a big one: We get so caught up in worrying about it that we don’t stop to worry about how effectively the wool (!) has been pulled over our eyes.
Although lamb and mutton can be male and female sheep, like many social mores concerning appearance and dress, this little mutton dressed as lamb canard is uniquely applied to women. But where did the lambasting expression come from? Sheep meat is defined in two ways; lamb is from animals up to twelve months old (young and tender before they’re weaned), whereas its mutton (mature and tougher) after that. The metaphor not only plays on this division in age and meat characteristics but also acknowledges the culinary procedure of ‘dressing’ something to cook, making it a conscious act. An attempt to gull others into thinking you’re younger than you are.
“Someone the other day asked the Prince of Wales at the Ancient Music whether he did not think some girl pretty. ‘Girl!’ answered he, ‘Girls are not to my taste. I don’t like lamb, but mutton dressed like lamb!’”.
Comment attributed to The Prince of Wales (later George V) by Mrs Frances Calvert, in her Social Gossip Journal compiled in 1811
The above quote is one of the first references, but there were earlier variations and other applications of the sheep (mutton/lamb) epithet, as I found in this fascinating book preface Mutton Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England by Amada Vicary. The author references period publications like the Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, which noted in a 1737 article that a woman past her prime could be labelled an ‘old Ewe’. The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1785) included entries ‘Laced Mutton’—slang for prostitute—and ‘Mutton Monger’—a man addicted to ‘wenching’.
According to the Fashion History Museum, until the early 19th century, there was no real distinction in how the different ages presented. “Children dressed like miniature adults, and with an average life expectancy in the 18th century of 43 years, old age was not something to worry about, but rather to hope for”. Towards the end of the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, fashion designers started offering fitting (pun intended) styles for different age groups as people began to live longer through scientific and medicinal advances. Children got clothes that acknowledged their activities instead of making them so many Minie-Mes.[2] Younger women dressed in sportier and brighter-coloured costumes, while older women were trussed in subdued but highly elaborate colours and styles.
Soon, this separation became convention, and it wasn’t ‘done’ for younger women to dress too extravagantly or older women to dress too young. By the 1920s—the ‘flapper’ era—older women were still sporting the ‘buttoned up’ pre-war formal wear, while racy young women got adventurous. Hemlines shrank, whalebones were tossed away, and lower legs became daringly visible as they Charlestoned the nights away.
After WWII came Dior’s New Look, Courreges’ mini skirt, and many other couture innovations intended mainly for the young woman of the world. Acknowledging the growing gulf between young and old fashion, Vogue created a column for older readers, ‘Mrs. Exeter, catering to “the woman of a certain age who chose colours to suit greying hair, and similarly suitable ‘styles’ for every social occasion — town or country.”
Then came the “youthquake” that was the Sixties, when the fashion world turned on its axis, and the generational divide became wider than ever. While some iconic designers, like Karl Lagerfeld, made clothes that “make older women feel sexy,” the new kids on the block designed for hipsters and made clothes unashamedly for teens and young adults. In this world mutton was even less welcome in lamb’s clothing than ever.
Coming back to the article. After reading it, I admired the woman for even contemplating wearing a bikini because swim or beach wear is where many lines are drawn in the sartorial sand. However well-toned and put together the age-kissed body is, displaying it in a bikini is quite brave and can be confrontational to others struggling with their self-images and fears. It’s one thing to bikini up in the seclusion of your garden or pool to catch some rays or enjoy a bit of water therapy, but should you flaunt it in public places?
My body’s not in bad shape for my age. I can’t kid myself that it’s in the same league as the movie stars of my vintage, but I’m proud of it, and I’m glad it’s all down to my efforts, not that of any cosmetic surgeon or treatment. While I recognise that my outer casing now is a well-lived life away from its younger versions, but I still have fun dressing it. Even the most phlegmatic amongst us don’t live in a vacuum where it’s possible to ignore the knowledge that youth and beauty still rule the roost (As I’ve written about in a previous post—I Feel Pretty). Or should that be pasture?
Bearing ageing arms in strapless tops is one path mature angels, like me, often fear to tread for example. But fashion has our backs on that one with so much choice of skimpy tops with mesh or diaphanous sleeves. There are some things I won’t wear—pelmet style short skirts have been out of the running for decades (other than for fancy dress parties—I work one recently to a Rocky Horror Picture Show fundraiser).
“I Feel Bad About My Neck!”
Nora Ephron onthe practive of ‘compensatory dressing’ by wearing turtlenecks, scarves and mandarin collars to hide one of the big flags of age, a crepey neck.
While it’s often difficult to come to terms with it, there is nothing unnatural or shameful about ageing skin and bodies. It just messes with our vanity and self-image. Our inner person is still young at heart and it’s hard to sync that with what we see in the mirror. There’s also the other aspect in that showing too much of it scares the crap out of younger people—OMG, am I going to be like that one day?
Faced with the bikini dilemma, this recidivist flaunter would probably dial it down if it were my niece or great-niece’s wedding. I can’t imagine anyone in my family opting for a beach wedding, but you never can tell. The last time I went anywhere near a beach, I coaxed myself into a somewhat skimpy one-piece cossie, but a bikini is probably beyond my comfort level. Why is this? What difference does a small additional bit of covering make? As we say in my brand world, “It’s all about perception.” Equally, as I’ve said before, if you have to get any part of your kit off, if you can’t tone it, tan it.
To bikini or not bikini is a choice. The length of your hemline is another choice. Whether you’re comfortable bearing your arms, keeping your hair long, or wearing tight jeans or figure-hugging ‘wiggle dresses’—all choices. I sincerely believe the choice simply depends on what you feel comfortable with. If you are hesitant about wearing something, don’t— there’s not much worse than suffering through an evening of wearer remorse. There will be something else that you can really rock.
I hate that we are so inhibited by so many unwritten and outdated conventions and proprieties—what’s ‘done’ and ‘not done’, The snobbery and judgementalism that pushes us into a doom loop of self-flagellation. Who can ever measure up? When I’m the ruler of the world, phrases like mutton dressed as lamb will be banished from the vocabulary in perpetuity, along with all those other ghastly limiting expressions that keep us chained up behind the bars of invisibility.
[1] The ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Bikini’ was immortalised in this truly awful song by Bryan Hyland of “Sealed with a Kiss” fame (a bit better, still cheesy) written by Vance and Pockriss whioch reached #1 on he Billboard Hot 100 chart, (#8 in the UK) and sold almost a million copies in the first two months of its release, when Hyland was only 16, and over two million copies in total.
[2] Mini-Me is a fictional character from the spoof Austin Powers film franchise, a miniature clone of the gloriously awful antagonist Dr. Evil.
To smooth or not to smooth? The eternal dichotomy of curly hair.
If you came into the world sporting insanely curly hair like me, you’ve probably had a love/hate relationship with it throughout your life.
It’s estimated that about 60% of us have curly hair. That’s a fair chunk of people who regularly decide they don’t want the hair type they were allocated because it’s not the ‘in’ thing. Of course, we shouldn’t fall victim to this eternal runway of fashion ins and outs but … advertising is a powerful shapeshifter. We want to be beautiful, have the right look, not be ‘othered’.
To be clear, I haven’t spent my entire life obsessing about whether to straighten my crowning glory or let it do its corkscrewed worst, but here’s the thing. At times when the world has worshiped at the shrine of flowing straight locks, for us frizz heads, smooth, sleek hair seems as precious as Tutankhamun’s Golden Mask, and just as out of reach. We live our lives on that most uncomfortable of places, the horns of the to smooth or not to smooth dilemma.
People, talk about beauty shaming. What about hair shaming? Shouldn’t that be a thing too? Straight or curly, there’s always a time when what you have doesn’t cut it according to the fashionistas and you don’t feel in the slightest pretty — a topic I’ve covered in a previous post.
When I finally acknowledged a couple of years ago that I might as well have been trying to nail jelly to the wall as keep my tousled tresses under control for significant chunks of my life, I put a stop to a lifetime of denial. I stepped away from the Curly Wars and towards my best hair life, casting aside all the primping paraphernalia like so much unwanted baggage.
I was a curly-haired cherub as a child. People would positively croon over my gorgeous golden spirals … and I basked in their admiration, right? Wrong, I hated it. As I entered my teens, I realised my look just didn’t make the cut … as it were. I wanted to be a long-haired badass, not a curly-haired little butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth poppet. When my mother’s hair writ split at the ends in my early teens, I went on a long march to curly freedom.
But oh, the pain of the journey. Getting short curly hair to the bit where it’s a cascading glory not a god-awful grotesquerie builds lifelong attributes like inner fortutide, grit and determination. My recalcitrant curls couldn’t seem to stir themselves to grow any length, and for a couple of self-loathing years, I became that person. The nerdy, bookworm, violin-playing possessor of a horror story triangular frizz.
At that time, it wasn’t the curls per se that were the problem—Marc Bolan had already seduced us with his lyrical depth, “I ain’t no square with my corkscrew hair” in Telegram Sam. And I wanted to be that person. Pity the diminutive Glam Rock pioneer prematurely got curled around a tree in a pocket rocket Mini in 1977 just a couple of weeks short of his 30th birthday. The curly world mourned more than the loss of a rock legend. Think what he could have done to change the curly conversation over the years. Or maybe even the Mighty Mouse of the singing world would have succumbed to prevailing hair trends along with the rest of us Lemmings.
It doesn’t matter a damn that other people rave about your curls – curls are a personal thing.
It also doesn’t matter a damn that other people rave about your curls. Many people have put mine up on a pedestal. Everyone except me seems to love them. But curls are a personal thing. Mine weren’t the sleek Siren look I lusted after because “it is known” (a la Daenerys’s handmaids in Game of Thrones) or at least it certainly seemed to me that straight hair was perceived as more appealing and sexier than curls. As a consequence, I spent hours daily duelling the unruly little suckers with a blow dryer. I’d section my hair and brush each one over and over until it had a semblance of straightness. It was all awful for the hair, but we didn’t have the flat irons and specialised product we do now.
Ironically, I grew up in a cold climate where gale-force winds, driving rain or blizzard conditions were the prevailing weather conditions, so all the hours of smoothing went out the window the minute I stepped out the door. Remember the episode of Friends when Monica landed in Hawaian humidity with glorious sleek hair that frizzed out the minute she stepped off the plane? Been there, done that, worn the tee-shirt.
So, I started straightening in the mid-seventies, the time as some wag said, when hippies roamed the earth and footballers sported perms and ‘tashes. But it wasn’t until the mad eighties that we reached peak curl. The eighties were a riot of too much everything. I moved to London in 1981 and revelled in the excess. It was a time when fashion was said to have thrown discretion to the winds and gone plain wild. It was all about extreme individuality—the tail end of the Punk Era and the rise of the New Romantics. Big, curly hair wasn’t just a style but an attitude. In that decade, if you had straight hair, you were screwed. Hair was ‘pouffed’ to within an inch of its product-laden life. Body was the bomb. Curls reigned supreme. I was at last free to stop trying to coax my curls into conformity and revel in my great good fortune in not needing a perm to achieve the look.
By the eighties, we reached peak curl. Big, curly hair wasn’t just a style, it was an attitude. If you had straight hair, you were screwed!
Then, from the mid-nineties, it all went pear-shaped again as the pendulum of fashion swung, as is the way with pendulums. And, to my shame, I swung with it … and then swung back … and swung again.
OK, so I exaggerate in the interests of a good story. I’m not—quite—the fashion victim I’m making myself out to be. What’s fuelled my personal curl-path more than wanting to be in with the In Crowd has been my prevailing mood. Curly is confident me—the kickass, outgoing facet of my many-faceted self. Straight has often accompanied the stressful, conflicted me, coping with times of uncertainty and change. I guess it was a way of imposing some order and feeling a bit glam.
Women are notable for slashing long hair when relationships break down. In my case, I tend to go to ground and dial everything, including my hair, down while I re-energise and recover from whatever’s bothering me. For sure, fashion trends have some impact—I don’t live in a vacuum—but it’s largely about how I’m feeling.
Anyway, in this tale with a lot of twists, I’m glad to have once-and-for all accepted that my curls are one of my superpowers. I am once more a rebel without a comb. Like the Hidden Tiger, I’m coiled and ready to spring. My hair has always been more mood than mane. I finally see that curly hair like mine isn’t just a plate of food. It’s a signature dish.
And how clever of me to come to this life-changing conclusion at a time when curly hair has become infinitely Instagrammable. Tellingly Tik Tokable. The frisson of frizz fascinates rather than frightens. Posting endless pix of your capricious curls is all the rage. It’s not just in our modern times that curls have come and gone. It’s been the same story since Eve was blamed for everything and chucked out of Eden.
Humans are contrary by nature—we’re rarely happy with what we’ve got. The curly want straight, and the straight want curly. It was ever thus. My advice? Keep calm and curl on.
Here’s my Top Twenty picks from Instagram’s curly cuties whose “spirals have gone viral”.
Courtesy of Wolf Global
- Embracing the chaos, one curl at a time
- Sassy, classy and a bit smart-assy
- Born to be wild and curly
- Twist, shout, and let those curls out
- Curly hair, don’t care, got flare everywhere
- Curls rule the world
- In a sea of straight, my curls are the wave
- Living the curly life one spiral at a time
- Embrace the chaos of your curls
- Let your curls do the talking
- Sassy, classy, and a bit smart-assy… courtesy of my curls
- Walk through life like it’s a curly runway
- When life gives you curls, flaunt them
- Own your curls, own your crown
- Fearless in the pursuit of what sets my curls on fire
- My hair isn’t messy; it’s just erupting with awesome
- Curls are the exclamation point of my personality!
- Perfectly curled and unapologetically bold
- Curls on point; life on track
- It’s not just curls; it’s an attitude with spirals.
Not a dry eye in the house? There’s nothing like a good cry.
OK, so full disclosure: I’m a crier. I snivel at the drop of a happy or a sad ending. I tear up at feats of astonishing human achievement, bravery, loyalty, courage, against-the-odds survival, redemption, etc. Thinking about it, I tear up at astonishing feats of animal bravery, loyalty, courage, and against-the-odds survival. Not sure if redemption is a thing for animals, although there are some fantastic stories of animals that have gone feral and been rehabilitated, which have the same effect.
Perhaps a better way of putting it is that I am easily moved. I hope that means I’m healthily plugged into my emotions, not just at the mercy of a heap of repressed crap that gets triggered by the stuff I see, read and listen to. In any case, our experiences, good and bad, shape our responses, whether they bring smiles, laughter, tears or even a whopping great punch-up—some are just more in more socially acceptable than others. I’ve written a lot about the benefits smiling and laughing with, or even at, others, but a good cry is up there in the feel good stakes too.
According to Dr Thomas Dixon, in a recent book where he examines the history of British Crying — Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (don’t you love the title?), “Weeping is an intellectual activity, and yet it is also a bodily function like vomiting or sweating, or farting.” Tears seem to fulfil a higher function than just a vulgar bodily emission, but I guess they’re all forms of purging. When you think about it, crying’s not just an eruption of our emotional geysers, they’re also a way of protecting our eyes from spoilers like onions, billowing smoke, and particles carried in the wind by washing them out.
Whatever. There’s nothing like a good cry, or, as my Scottish compatriots would say, “a guid greet”. We have a rich vocabulary around crying. Snivelling, tearful, blubbing, wailing, sobbing, weeping, howling, bawling, to name the ones that instantly spring to mind. Bit like Miss Smilla and all those words for snow. Given how essential it is to our wellbeing, it’s a pity that publicly crying is one of the last taboos of our era. It’s almost up there with PDA (public displays of affection) on the pantheon of awful. We make fun of outsize emotions. God help the celeb caught crying a river over a broken relationship — paps have a field day, and it’s nirvana for the wits of the world who conjure meme magic to the schadenfreudistic (is that a word?) delight of all.
It hasn’t always been like this. We’re much more buttoned up than we used to be. From the earliest of times, tears have been associated with mourning rituals that included extreme acting out—prostration, excessive crying, tearing the hair, ripping clothes, smearing ashes on your face, for example. I’m glad that style of mourning has … er … died a death. But we’re far from it being considered good form to break down sobbing if our cappuccino is delivered cold.
In the medieval and Tudor world, histrionics were all the rage. People regularly gave their lachrymal glands a workout. Think big beefy Henry VIII (in his later years) projectile crying and generally carrying on like a toddler in full view of his court when something didn’t go his way. Up to comparatively recently, crying and emoting bit time were social norms. In the grip of high Romanticism, the early Victorian ear was awash … literally. It wasn’t until Albert died, leaving Victoria a grieving widow, that the vibe changed and emotional exuberance exited stage left. In it’s place came the stuffy, straight-laced, stiff-upper-lipped society we associate with the later era (at least on the surface). And it happened in only a couple of decades. Thanks for your legacy, late Victorians!
Subsequent generations copped all those repressive sentiments like “big boys don’t cry” and “I’ll give you something to cry about”. Even now, with much more relaxed standards and our buy into the concept of emotional intelligence, we’re not performative in our grief like our forebears.
The Tearjerker movie was a genius invention in a world with so little tolerance for adult tears. Tearjerkers allowed us a legitimate release valve. We could snivel up a storm in a dark auditorium where the tear police’s writ didn’t run. Of course, penance for this self-indulgence came in that ghastly moment when you had to exit your local Odeon clutching a wad of soggy tissues with bloodshot, morning-after panda eyes, and mascara-streaked cheeks. A blobby red nose and puffed-up, swollen lips completed the wrung-out look. The fact that everyone emerged the same did nothing to diminish the cringe factor of being seen having given in to an emotional storm. You could even hear the most blokey blokes coughing manfully, trying to camouflage this heinous crime. No one met anyone else’s eyes. It was wonderful and embarrassing and deeply cathartic. There is nothing like a good cry.
I read an article this week about the absence of tearjerkers from our screens over the last couple of decades. Perhaps, with the advent of streaming services, we no longer saw the attraction of collective emoting in the dark. It’s just not the same sitting at home blubbing to yourself, your family and / or your companion animals.
Although tearjerkers have been Hollywood’s secret sauce since the earliest “I want to be alone” Garbo movies, their heyday is considered to be the seventies and eighties. This time saw a plethora of cryfests like Terms of Endearment, The Way We Were, Love Story, Kramer vs Kramer, Field of Dreams, ET, Top Gun, Beaches, Watership Down, and A Star is Born (the Streisand/ Kristoffersen version) and many more, hit our screens. We cried. And cried. And cried some more. It was magnificent. Not a dry eye in any house. Then peak tears arrived in 1997 with the titan of them all, the blockbuster Titanic, and we gave our tear ducts a rest. However, it seems there are stirrings in the wind that it might just be crying again[1]. Oh yeah, baby, yeah.
The article got me pondering my all-time, guaranteed to open the emotional floodgates films. I blubbed my way through all of the above and many more. But if I want to cry without resorting to watching a movie— if I were an actor getting myself into the zone—there are two standouts. Curiously, both are children’s films, and both are about animals. So … drum roll … at the pinnacle of my all-time weepies? The 1994 film of Black Beauty. Specifically, the bit when Beauty sees Ginger for the last time alive.
“As if by magic, there she was, my beautiful Ginger. She was skin and bones. What had they done to her?”
From the 1994 film Black Beauty
They stand next to each other in a cab rank for a moment, and Beauty remembers when she was young and beautiful and all their happy ‘before times’ when men were kind. The next time he sees her, she is being hauled away, lifeless, on a cart. Tearing up as I write.
Black Beauty was my favourite book as a horse-mad little girl, which likely underpins my response to the film. I still have a copy. The last time I read it, I cried from about half way through, ending in convulsive sobbing at the bittersweet end . Luckily, it’s not a long book—I don’t think my internal waterworks could have coped.
Next? The ever-green Disney classic, Bambi. Specifically, the bit when a hunter shoots Bambi’s mother, and he’s left all alone. Gets me every time. In third place, Bambi again — when we realise his father is watching out for him. Now I’m crying as I write. It’s amazing that this 1942 movie still tears the heartstrings in a way many more recent ones don’t.
What are your favourites when you want a good cry? Here are a couple of handy top compilations of films, songs and books to get your give your tear ducts a workout. I don’t always agree with the selections, but each to their tearful own.
Anyway, must run. Off to my local cinema to catch Freud’s Last Interview. With a title like that, it’s bound to be a tearjerker!
[1] If films don’t do it for you, try this this gravelly Ray Charles, version of It’s Crying Time Again.
Who pays the ferryman when disaster strikes at sea?
I was reminded the other day of a hugely popular television series produced by the BBC in 1977, Who Pays the Ferryman? The title was a stroke of genius as it hooked me and my family before the series even started—we were intrigued and really wanted to know the answer. It incorporated the terrifying prospect of disaster at sea and the dark waters of Greek mythology.
The series was about a former soldier who returns to Crete to take stock after his boatbuilding business is bought out. It’s thirty years since he fought alongside the local resistance (andartes) during the Second World War, and he finds the ghosts of the past waiting for him and a cast of people who wish him ill.
The ‘ferryman’ in the title refers to Charon, the Ferryman of Greek mythology who carried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to the underworld, Hades. The fee for the journey was a single coin—the custom was to place a low-value place coin in or on the mouth of the deceased so they could pay Charon’s fee. Charon served Hades, the god of the dead and king of the underworld, who judged the souls entering his domain, deciding where they would spend eternity depending on how they lived. As well as the dead, Charon gets into all sorts of trouble with Hades by ferrying legendary heroes such as Hercules, Orpheus, and Odysseus to and from the underworld, which is supposed to be closed to the living.
This somewhat macabre train of thought and the question Who Pays the Ferryman?, which still haunts me, got me thinking about disaster at sea and two very different examples that happened back-to-back last year, one playing out in Greece’s maritime territory, where Charon might have been lurking, waiting for his fees. It’s hard to believe these tragedies happened nearly a year ago, and I’m sure I won’t be the only writer to comment on their anniversaries.
Disaster at Sea #1: The Adriana
On June 14, Adriana, a rust bucket of a fishing trawler, left Tobruk, Libya, heading for Italy stuffed to the gunnels with about 750 assorted Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian and Palestinian people seeking a better life in Europe. Its journey ended in an infamous and possibly preventable disaster at sea. As I’m sure you’ll remember, three days out of Tobruk, the dangerously overcrowded ship became stranded in Greek fishing waters with minimal power. Ultimately, as people panicked and rocked the unstable boat, Adriana capsized and sank in the middle of the night of June 18. Only 104 of the 750 men, women and children on board were found alive, making it one of the worst sinkings the Mediterranean has ever experienced.
“Everyone knew the migrant ship was doomed. No one helped. Satellite imagery, sealed court documents and interviews with survivors suggest that hundreds of deaths were preventable.”
Martine Stevis-Gridneff and Koram Schoumali, New York Times (July 1, 2023)
Adriana’s story of disaster at sea is a harrowing one of neglect, brutality and lethal inaction. When it capsized, there was only one Greek Coast Guard ship to act as a witness. According to Stevis-Gridneff and Schoumali, passengers, some of whom had talked to humanitarian workers by phone, “waited and waited for help that never came.” Officials watched and listened for 13 hours via sonar, radio and telephone on ships and aircraft … and did nothing other than to instruct two nearby vessels to offer food and water and despatch the Coast Guard vessel to play a waiting brief. This small ship couldn’t have saved everyone on board, even if it had instructions to intervene. The whole thing was complicated further by Adriana’s captain refusing help—he and his crew would likely have only been paid on arrival in Italy.
Who pays the Ferryman?
The reluctance to get involved by the Greek authorities in this unfolding catastrophe and with so many others experienced by European nations is that smugglers pack the boats, holding our hope for the desperate passengers who accept the conditions and pay money they’ve scraped together to get on what can only be described as ‘death boats’. Some of Adriana’s ‘passengers’ spent $4K plus for their place; the collective total was around $3.5m. The smugglers rely on European marine authorities to rescue people if things go wrong. The maritime authorities are hesitant to intervene and go to the rescue if, by doing so, they encourage the smugglers to despatch more people on ever less substantial ships. It’s a chilling, vicious cycle.
Nine Egyptian survivors from the Adriana were arrested and charged with smuggling and causing the sinking. From sworn testimonies and interviews, survivors said that many of the nine brutalised and extorted passengers—another $50 could get you a relatively ‘safe’ spot on deck.
Disaster at sea #2: The Titan
Then, on June 18, the second disaster at sea hit our news feeds just as Adriana was heading into crisis. The submersible craft Titan set off on a journey to the bottom of the ocean for a once-in-a-lifetime dive to see the wreck of the Titanic resting in Stygian darkness more than three kilometres (two miles) below the surface. Forty-five minutes into the two-hour dive, the support boat on the surface lost contact with the Titan. After a massive search operation during which seemingly the entire world held its breath, hoping against hope for a happy ending, wreckage from the Titan was discovered on the North Atlantic seabed near the Titanic. This confirmed that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”, severing communications with the mother ship, and instantly killing the five people on board.
“It was perhaps the very unlikeliness of that outcome (rescue) that increased the appetite to see it realised”.
The Guardian Newspaper
The Titan’s plight gripped the world as it unfolded in real-time via round-the-clock news stories. It somewhat took the oxygen from the coverage of Adriana’s investigation. But why did one eclipse the other so strongly? After all, they were both disasters in progress, with people in peril as the world looked on. Why did the Titan pull so much harder at people’s heartstrings and attention?
For starters, there was the absolute horror of the thing. I remember being appalled as I thought about those poor people spending their last hours crammed in the claustrophobic interior of a craft the size of a minivan, knowing communications were down and there was only so much oxygen to sustain them through to rescue. They were on a trajectory towards the ocean floor where the sub would have to withstand pressure 400 times greater than at sea level, which it could only do for a limited time. We agonised with their loved ones. We didn’t know until six days into the search when hope had all but been extinguished anyway, that the implosion had spared them that fate.
The people involved were a source of voyeuristic fascination. The five were two wealthy businesspeople and one of their sons, a French explorer, veteran of 30 similar dives, and the CEO of Titan’s operator OceanGate. The price of a seat for this fatal dive was a cool quarter of a million dollars. The sheer bravura of the dive, combined with a price few of us could afford, only increased the fascination.
Who pays the Ferryman?
The stakes were raised by celebrity filmmaker (Titanic, among others) and deep-sea explorer James Cameron and several other marine dive experts criticising the owners for their lack of safety protocols and testing in their quest to move quickly and ‘disrupt’ what they saw as an over-cautious sector.
The Titan tragedy continues to dog the submersible industry. According to Patrick Lahey, an expert builder of and advocate for submersibles (who repeatedly warned a friend who was one of the passengers not to make the dive), order books remain full. Still, questions abound—given the amount of regulation that governs watercraft, how could the tragedy have happened? It might now be a little harder for operators like OceanGate to bend the rules … you’d have to hope.
It seems not All disasters at sea are equal
The Titan disaster was a thoroughly first-world tragedy, whereas the Adriana was only a boat full of human flotsam shining an unwanted mirror at us, and we mostly turned the other way and went with the better and more immediately horrifying drama playing out. The Adriana had one small Greek Coast Guard boat to witness its end; the sea search for Titan had five well-equipped marine search vessels and significant air support. The Titan’s passengers had agency and choice, however badly it played out for them. Adriana’s victims were desperate and prepared to risk everything for a better life.
However you view it, no one should die in either circumstance—both of these disasters at sea could arguably have been prevented. But the reality is that refugee boats are very far outside most people’s comfort zones. In contrast, Titan’s unfolding story was familiar from disaster movies and other real-life catastrophes in which we’ve got similarly caught up. One example is the “Houston we have a problem” near-disaster for the Apollo 13 Space Shuttle. It had similar dynamics with a small number of people trapped in a malfunctioning ‘tin can’, but Apollo’s crew still had open communications with Ground Control, who were able to help the astronauts do a patch job and get the shuttle back to Earth with no loss of life.
We were appalled, shocked and saddened with Titan, but we understood the rules. It was happening to people like us who had choices and for whom the dive was a wealthy person’s quest to boldly go where few had gone before. With Adriana, we were appalled but didn’t understand the rules—it was an alien situation to us, happening to a boatload of seemingly alien people with few choices left. I truly do wonder who pays the ferryman for such people. Or was it just another disaster at sea that was easier to close our eyes to?
Illustration Copyright
The illustration of Charon the Ferryman from Goethe is by Luise Duttenhofer (1776-1829). It is in the public domain in any country or area, including New Zealand, where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or fewer.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/world/europe/greece-migrant-ship.html
Are you doing it this winter?
Are you taking the plunge this winter? Readying yourself to tap into a euphoric eruption of endorphins? Already wondering what I’m on about. I’m talking about cold-water swimming, of course. What? Did you think this might be a spicy little post about something else? Bad luck: you need to go elsewhere for your X-rated intake.
We’re heading into winter in the Southern Hemisphere, so it’s time to consider the exercise regime of choice over the cold months. In the Northern Hemisphere, people are throwing in their cold-water towels and planning beach breaks and warm stuff. I just read a review of her second year at it by Caitlin Moran. She seems to like this what? Hobby … sport … therapy … self-inflicted act of sadomasochism? “Who needs drugs when I can get off my face cold water swimming?” Whatever you choose to call it, cold water swimming is riding a wave, as it were—I know at least two people in NZ who swear by it. Maybe in NZ, it’s worth a go. Where I live, we rarely even get frost, so it could add a bit of frisson to one’s day as winter sinks its fangs into the underbelly of autumn. But in colder climates like the UK, when you likely have to get a coast guard to chainsaw a swimming hole for you through the ice, it has to be nuts, right?
But growing it is, and growing both in popularity and controversy. It seems to have triggered some resentments which have bubbled to the surface in its seasonal wake.
Cold-water swimming seems like a relatively new thing. It’s not. It’s been a thing in many northern countries since … forever. In Russia, pre-Christians frolicked in ice water, and it became part of court protocol and was a custom among the ‘plebs’ throughout the Moscovian era from the late Middle Ages. Muscovy was a Grand Duchy or Principality founded in 1283, which morphed into the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century under the first tsar.
What’s changed is that ice-swimming competitions have sprung up like icicles after a deep chill. The establishment of the International Ice Swimming Association in 2009 formalised ice swimming as a ‘sport’. Swimmers compete in the Ice Mile (1608 metres). The water must be colder than 5 degrees Celsius, and competitors are only allowed the basics of swimming goggles, caps, and togs. There’s now also a metric 1500m version. Are they mad? To borrow from Gordon Ramsey, “Expletive me!”
So why do people take the plunge? Caitlin says it involves “ten minutes of gasping, often agonised breaststroke through frost, sleet, hail and snow, but the endorphins make it all worthwhile”. Put like that, does it sound like something everyone should try at least once? Adherents say benefits positively affect the cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems. There’s also the psychological and metabolical lift (remember all those endorphins).
However, I would never inadvertently put my readers at risk by encouraging something that could negatively affect your health and well-being. For all the apparent benefits, detractors claim it’s pretty risky, particularly for inexperienced and untrained swimmers. So, if you’re considering it as your next wellness springboard, it’s recommended to go for a gradual acclimatisation. Dip your toe in the water, so to speak. Break yourself in one shivering inch at a time over time rather than jumping in at the deep end. While cold water swimming might be verging on a religious rite to some, this extreme version of total immersion can kill you. Heart failure brought on by extreme cold is one of the risks, as is the only slightly lesser possibility of hypothermia.
I have tried it, though, so never let it be said that my opinions are based on prejudice and hearsay alone. One night, many (many) years ago, as an undergraduate at Saint Andrews, a few of us were having dinner at a friend’s house. Said house was a stone’s throw from the town’s celebrated outdoor swimming pool, located on a wind-blasted shore and filled by the incoming tide. Such pools used to be common in coastal resorts, but they’ve fallen out of favour. From the late sixties, we Brits deserted the bracing outdoor experience, lured by the advent of the cheap ‘bucket shop’ holiday. Cheap all-in packages allowed us to escape our dismal summer and flock in droves to Mediterranean nirvana, where we pursued the honourable pastime of frying ourselves to a crisp on a beach, falling into the bath-warm sea to break the monotony of hours prone on a sun lounger mitigated by copious quantities of lager and cocktails.
Back in historic St. Andrews, imagine the scene, if you will. About six of us are in the post-dinner alcohol-infused bravado stage that tends to herald trouble when you’re a student. At some point, someone (history doesn’t relate who) said, “Let’s go for a swim”. It’s February, in the middle of the Scottish winter, but we’re pretty drunk, and it seems like a great wheeze. Our host somehow rustles up towels for everyone. We lurch over to the pool, which is as wind-swept as ever, black as Hades, and we could just make out the white tops on the not-inconsiderable waves. Some brave soul sheds most of their clothes and jumps in, provoking the rest of us to follow quickly—no one wants to appear a wimp.
Gordon Ramsay’s ripe vocabulary applies here, too. It was beyond cold. Eskimo Pie cold. The sort of cold that makes your lungs want to collapse to avoid it. I doubt we stayed in for more than a nano-second as the freeze factor sobered us up, and we grasped how insane it was. I don’t imagine the current practitioners get in a wild sea pool at 2am at least five sheets to the wind. You’d have to hope not. How we survived without succumbing to hypothermia, I’ll never know. They’re right about one thing, though. The endorphins are incredible – once you’ve convinced your lungs to start functioning again and the blood starts flowing back to those important muscles, like your brain. As the chill receded along with the blue flesh and chattering teeth, the big-noting began, and a saga was born.
A very long-winded way of saying that cold-water swimming isn’t new. But it’s spawned a new, highly divisive fashion accessory—the dryrobe. Ever ready to get on a new bandwagon, the fashion industry has seen this predominantly middle-class pursuit as a potential gold mine. Ergo, we now have the dryrobe as the accessory of choice for the dedicated cold-water swimmer. In case, like me, you’d missed the arrival of this seminal new garment, they’re huge coats with towelling lining. They break all the prevailing fashion rules, which require a garment to render the wearer less, rather than more, bulky. Dryrobes also apparently achieve the sleight of drape that makes wearers look triangular.
Nonetheless, swimmers love them so much that they’ve started popping up in the most improbable places— supermarkets, football stadiums, and even workplaces. It won’t be long before someone decides to discard their ball dress for one. Their popularity now goes way beyond the original purpose of post-dip warmth and modesty.
But in parallel, dryrobes have become a weapon in the class wars. Google and ye shall find headlines like Too Cool for the Pool: How the Dryrobe Became the Most Divisive Thing You Can Wear. (The Guardian) and Don’t Humiliate Anyone You Spot in a Dryrobe, Especially When It’s Me. (The Times). There even is (or was) a Facebook Page, The Dryrobe Wankers, with more than 80,000 followers. Let the games begin!
I live a hop, skip and a jump (or a slide, skate or slush trudge in winter parlance) to a waterfront. Once I’ve saved enough money for the eye-wateringly expensive, must-have dryrobe accessory, perhaps I’ll give it a go. Perhaps. If the tides are right. If there’s a full moon and I can see hair growing on the palms of my hands. If Hell starts freezing over. Wait, it seems to me that cold water swimming actually is Hell on Earth, so why opt to get there early, even equipped with a dryrobe? I like my swimming holes to be like the velvet warmth of the Mediterranean mid-summer or the waters inside the reefs in the Fijian Islands, where you can bask like a lurking shark for hours on end without getting cold. Without the sharks. Or the rip currents. Or even any waves when I think about it. I’m sorry, Caitlin, but you can keep the big chill, endorphins notwithstanding. I’ll take a long soak in a hot bath every winter.
Do the (Side) Hustle
Remember the 1975 disco hit The Hustle by Van McCoy and the Soul Symphony? The ‘song’ made No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Soul Singles charts during the summer of 1975 and on the Canadian RPM charts. It peaked at No. 3 in the U.K., No. 5 in New Zealand, and No. 9 in Australia. It only made 38 on the French Singles Chart, confirming (in case it needed to be) that the French are different. The Hustle won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance early in 1976 and sold over a million copies.
But wait, there’s more. This catchy but annoying ‘song’ has been featured in films including Stuck on You, Vampires Suck and The Lorax, T.V. programmes— Shark Tales, That ‘70s Show, American Dad! and Futurama, amongst others. You’d have to say it was a whopping success despite only having three words—Do the Hustle!
According to wikiHow, The Hustle is a “fast-paced partner dance, related to swing, and commonly danced to disco and modern pop. The dance involves four basic moves: stepping, twirling, chicken dancing, a move called ‘The Travolta’, and turning.” Then it was rinse and repeat until you drop.
If you want a walk down memory lane and the chance to brush up on your hustle moves or try them out for the first time, you’ll find instructions in this incredibly cheesy short video. You’ll love it … honestly. Despite my cynicism, listening to it brought a fun flashback to my mid-seventies teenage disco queen.
Anyway, despite a cursory search into the background of the dance, I couldn’t find anything specific. Presumably, it was a nod to the need to hustle to succeed or survive in the hustle and bustle of the seventies. It’s become much more sophisticated these days—it seems everyone has a side hustle—as a cheeky ‘must have’ accessory to one’s working life. Side hustles are flexible work that you do over and above your primary job to bring extra cash, get your creativity flowing or add purpose to your life. It could be taking up a new hobby, learning a new skill or using an existing one you want to ‘monetise’ at some point. Could even be volunteering for a non-profit you rate.
As professional speaker and coach Alissa Carpenter says, “We all know Millennials love a good side hustle—to fuel their passions and wallets”. But it’s not just Millennials. It seems we’re all at it, including me; you’re no one if you don’t have a side hustle. It’s the ultimate put-down of our contemporary world: “What, no side hustle!”. I exaggerate, but the concept of the side hustle is endemic.
I feel we need an updated version of The Hustle—Do The Side Hustle. What a pity Van McCoy died in 1979, shortly after the hit’s success, so he can’t do a side hustle of his own by remastering the original and raking it in. Clearly, it’s a great opportunity for some keen hustler.
Of course, it isn’t new. People have been forced or opted to take up additional burdens to make ends meet since Adam and Eve were ejected from Eden without notice. I’m sure they hadn’t had time to build up a rainy-day nest egg. People bandy the words around like membership of an exclusive club, but for people living on the margins, it’s always been an unwelcome part of their reality—the only way they can feed their families and survive. There’s also always been the darker side. I’m thinking black marketeers during war and rationing when fortunes are made by offering consumer goods that couldn’t be bought in conventional shops at exorbitant prices. The side hustle all too often comes wrapped in the trappings of despair, manipulation or holding people to ransom.
While this type of side hustle is still shamingly very much part of the human condition, the trendy contemporary version seems pretty harmless. Side hustles, after all, make us better, more rounded, more connected, or simply wealthier people. Where’s the harm? Who suffers if you decide to set up an Etsy Shop as an outlet for your creativity? Or if I use all my waking hours outside work trying to become a best-selling author? Surely, it’s good to pursue the paths that make our hearts sing beyond the 9 to 5 grind. Why not use our ingenuity to make money on the hoof?
I’m a side hustler with the best of them, but there are issues. I’m about to publish a new book, and I’m running on fumes, trying to keep all the plates spinning. Side hustles can be hungry beasts sucking up all your best energy. In my day job, I run a design studio, which I own. As my book launch date looms, I’m not entirely clear which is the side course, and which is the main one as I scramble to keep all the plates spinning and keep my business dynamic whilst doing everything it takes to give my book its best shot. I’m blessed with high energy levels, but they’re not infinite, and I’m conscious of the risk of burnout if I keep the candle lit at both ends. I live alone, so it’s my call how I use my out-of-office time, but side hustles can short-change friends and family, stealing time that should be theirs.
I’m all for putting time into hobbies and gaining new skills. You meet new people, expand your horizons, and potentially earn a bit of welcome extra dosh. I’ve met a wide range of like-minded people through mine, something I didn’t even consider when I started my indie publishing business with my sister. However, the statistics show that side hustles as a necessity are on the rise. According to CNBC’s Gilli Molinsky, “44% of people with a side hustle think they’ll always need it—and more are picking one up”. According to an April 2023 Bankrate survey of 2,505 U.S. adults, more than 39% have a side hustle to help cover living expenses rather than for discretionary spending. Half of the Millennials surveyed and over fifty per cent of the Gen Xers have one.
The tragedy behind these stats is that too many people are going backwards financially, often underpaid, and coping with eye-watering costs of living hikes. Inflation at least seems to be under control (for now), but that only means commodities stay at the same high rates; they don’t revert to their more affordable pre-inflationary levels, so the cost-of-living hike is hard-wired in even though the curve has flattened (again, for now).
Anyway, I’m sure you get my point. Side hustles can be fun and richly rewarding on many counts for those of us lucky enough to follow our dreams because we can. They shouldn’t be a survival mechanism for people who have no choice.
P.S. Sorry if I’ve given you an earworm. If it’s any consolation, I can’t get the pesky Hustle thing out of my head either.
You have the attention span of a goldfish!
Devastating insult or statement of fact? According to “the science”, having the attention span of a goldfish would, until recently, have meant you could only manage to focus on something for around eight seconds. That much? is my first thought. My second is, how on earth can they tell with goldfish?
It’s easy with humans. After all, you kind of get the idea—there’s nothing like the affirming glow of watching someone’s eyes glaze over as they zone out listening to your latest rant. You don’t have to be the empath of the century to discern that you’ve lost them. Even if they’re polite and conditioned to look mildly interested, the twitching mouse hand or the occasional furtive but longing glance at their mobile or the look over your shoulder to find someone more interesting speaks volumes.
But fish? Unless I’m missing something, their eyes are perpetually glassy and lacking focus. Maybe some earth-shattering metaphysical thinking is going on as they swim, seemingly purposelessly, from one side of their bowls to another. Perhaps we judge harshly, and they’re living the fish dream. Enjoying the little joy things like that witty sunken treasure chest or shipwreck you thoughtfully placed to enrich their existence. Maybe they, like humans, aspire to smell the roses and rise above the limitations of the daily grind. For goldfish, rather than roses, think the aesthetic and olfactory glory of a bunch of weird sounding aquatic plants—Moneywort, Hornwort, Rotala Rotundifolia, Pygmy Chain Sword, Hygrophilia Polysparma and Cryptocorne Wendttii are among the most popular. They seem more like ingredients the witches in Macbeth might have been familiar with than joy bringing plants. Each to their own.
In any case, according to Forbes Magazine, in 2015, the internet was awash with shock and horror about claims that the attention span of the average human had plummeted to eight seconds–about the same as that of a goldfish—and that it was getting shorter There were even suggestions that big sporting events be condensed to accommodate this downward dog of a trend. “Well, bugger me sideways!” scandalised people everywhere exclaimed (when shock saw off good taste and horror provoked strong reactions). “That’s appalling! How have we sunk so low? Can’t we rewind to the Halcyon Days of pre everything smart and get back to being smart ourselves?”
More recently, this supposition has been pretty roundly debunked. It turns out that we both—humans and goldfish—can do better than the eight-second average that only a few years ago shocked and horrified so many. Phew. That’s all right then. Let’s face it: eight seconds is mind-bogglingly unimpressive. Eight seconds pass faster than you can spell Mississippi. (Remember how we were taught to time stuff absent as kids by saying one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four, five, etc, ad infinitum to count time for stuff like games and races where timing mattered and we didn’t have mobile phones with inbuilt timers).
But just because we can do something doesn’t mean we will. Even thoug we are able to focus on one topic beyond eight seconds doesn’t always mean we will. Off-hand, I can think of several examples where my attention span slumps to significantly less than eight seconds. I generally give up well before the eight-second mark when searching streaming services for something new to watch, and pick up my Kindle instead. There’s just so much choice. I want to watch stuff as a leisure activity, not something that feels like so much more work. As you will have read in my previous blog, assembling flat pack furniture is another example where I need the dogged determination of a terrier after a rat that’s gone to ground to push beyond any seconds of focus.
All joking apart, I have the 2015 understanding of a goldfish’s attention span when it comes to stuff I don’t care about and an infinite capacity to focus on the stuff I do. Whatever the extended span of a goldfish is now said to be, it’s not like they use it to read books or put together flat-packed furniture! There’s no one-size-fits-all on attention spans, and stupid scientific research trying to average it out is … er … stupid … in my humble opinion. But it does seem as if attention spans have shortened and continue to shrink.
I can cut people slack and believe we pay attention when we want or need to. Perhaps that’s generous, and I should be more worried about the overall plummet in our device-induced vacuousness. But my worry is declining attention seems to walk hand-in-hand with the infinitely scarier knowledge that in places like the UK, as many as 50% of the population don’t read books. That’s don’t, not necessarily, can’t. FIFTY PER CENT!!!! Most people can read. Reading is still taught at schools. They just choose not to.
I read this in the Times Newspaper this week and nearly wrote an email to the editor expressing my shock and horror until I realised that would make me one of those grumpy older people always harping on about an infinitely better state back in the day. But I can muster pretty impressive howls of outrage at the loss to humanity when people consign the greatest thinkers of the past to the too-hard basket because they no longer have the inclination or stamina to cope with anything more than a meme, lurid headline or the latest TikTok sensation. Oops, straying into the grumpy olds again.
In our defense, lack of attention is not entirely our choice. We have a conscious aspect that supports focus and a subconscious one that keeps chucking other things on our periphery into the mix. We’re conditioned to scan for trouble so we can trigger the fight, flight reflexes that linger on from our more primal pasts. Now, it’s more like scanning the horizone for shiny new things to fixate over and take flight from the borning task at hand, but there is at least some justification for our fickleness of attention.
Achieving deep focus is a question of practice. It’s not something that just comes naturally to most of us. It’s a layered and nuanced skill built over time and effort, but we can’t be in that zone every minute of every day. There’s nothing wrong with bursts of limited attention. I went to my town’s annual fair yesterday and sifted around in a drift of people enjoying the day and relishing the enticing wafts of all sorts of yumminess from the food carts. I drifted and sifted without any particular focus, idly scanning the stalls for the shiny thing that would draw me in and get my attention. You can’t always give everything full focus—we need enjoyable and non-challenging downtime like that.
Coming back to the point, if goldfish have been proven to have attention spans longer than eight seconds, the old insult no longer holds true. We need something new and worse. What about substituting the humble gnat? Gnats have an attention span of zero—that’s nil, nada, zip, diddly squat—because gnats have no memory. Again, I wonder how on earth THEY know this, but THEY likely do, so I’ll take THEIR word for it. Whatever. Next time you’re tempted to accuse someone of having the attention span of a goldfish, think again. If you want a genuinely desiccating insult, it doesn’t get much better than comparing them to a gant. It’s a winner on two counts. Much worse than a goldfish and, unless you’re a serious gnatofile or gnatologist, they’re also ugly little suckers!
Fun with flatpack furniture
How hard can it be? Seriously. Putting together a bunch of pieces to make an item of furniture? Child’s play, you might think. I certainly did, as I pressed Buy on a stylish mini-drawer set from IKEA, which looked perfect for my new home office. I live in an apartment, so space is always a consideration, and this baby offered bountiful bang for my buck in its miniature Scandi magnificence.
Flatpacks, AKA knock-down furniture or ready-to-assemble furniture, are very popular. The concept is seductive—go to the online or physical store, buy the item, haul it home or get it delivered, and, after a bit of assembly time, voila, you have the perfect artefact for your home or garden or whatever. Right? Sort of.
But what a great wheeze flatpacks are…for their makers. Imagine the eureka moment when some eager beaver middle manager thought of an innovative way to make truckloads more money. Picture being a fly on the wall as said manager makes a presentation to their senior team, which might have gone something like this:
“I’ve been thinking outside the box to bring a major paradigm shift—or is it a pivot?— to the table here for your consideration. Thank you for the opportunity to run this game-changing idea up the flagpole. The central theme of the premise going forward is to let the customers assemble products themselves. Think what that will save us,” he/she/they enthuse as they rip through a PowerPoint full of quadrant graphs, up arrows next to dollar icons, etc.
“We get them excited about affordability, convenience and the whole DIY bandwagon that’s kicking off—they’ll love it and won’t notice we’re selling them a pup. Next steps? Whiteboard a go-to-market strategy, take a deep dive, unpack the possibilities, and shift the dial. I’ll reach out in a couple of weeks to touch base and see if it’s in your wheelhouse.”
In addition to being a walking cliché, our manager was clearly the identical twin of the towering genius who believed self-checkouts were a giant leap forward for civilisation.
But love them we did—flatpacks that is, not the suits responsible for them. IKEA, the spiritual home of the flatpack, was founded as a mail-order retailer in 1943 by Swedish entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad. By the early 2000s, IDEA was the world’s largest furniture seller, with three hundred-plus stores and infinite online buying options.
Anyway, in the same way, time heals all wounds—or wounds all heels, if you prefer—it also cauterises past flatpack traumas. I’m not a flatpack virgin—I’ve given a few of them a go since the London IKEA opened to much excitement in 1987. It’s brutal—every time. But if you leave it long enough between purchases, the scars fade, and you forget how awful it was. Your inner recovery mechanisms dampen any trigger warnings, and before you can say, “Flatpacks suck”, you’re back in that magical thinking place where hope triumphs over experience. In my experience, hope has always been the loser.
Returning to last Friday. My new flatpack duly arrives at my business and, with it, my first challenge. It’s heavy. When I bought it, I thought it was made of lightweight wood or MDF or something. Oops. It’s metal. The box itself is pretty small, but I can barely lift it. How to get it to my car and home without breaking myself? My business partner gallantly lends me his fold-up trolley, and, home from work, I’m feeling optimistic and light-hearted as I start unpacking. Until I look at the instructions when buyer remorse kicks in big time. There are 20 different steps involved. Surely, that’s overkill for a box with six dinky drawers. Realising this might be more than a two-minute job, I put it off until Sunday as I have more fun things to do on Saturday.
The next day dawns bright and sunny, but I’m a bit groggy, having got home at 3am and woken up at my usual first sparrows ludicrously early timeslot. Despite the lack of sleep, I know it’s now or never—if I don’t tackle the beast immediately, it will stay in its box for all eternity. It’s summer and already about 30 degrees. By the time I’ve got to Step 12, I’m sweating like a dyslexic on a spelling bee as I realise I’ve made all six drawers with the runners on the inside. Unlike Intel, which is a good thing to find within your computer, for drawers, the big virtue is runners on the outside. OMG, kill me now. I unravel all six drawers, mashing my fingers with the out-of-control screwdriver and swearing like a trooper. You get the picture, I’m sure.
It took me three hours. THREE HOURS! The miserable hours. But I have to say, broken nails and bruised hands and all, I am very pleased with myself and my wee drawer set. Here are some handy tips to consider as your mouse hovers over the BUY button:
- Understanding flatpack instructions is a near impossibility. Sometimes, you have to discern a build path from screeds of written instructions, typically in a font size requiring more magnification than the Hubble Telescope achieves. The IKEA people had helpfully reduced the one in question to mostly large pictures. Despite this, at most stages, I was still none-the-wiser and resorted to trial and error…which rewarded me with …mostly error.
- Putting the wrong pieces together or the right pieces the wrong way around is a certainty, and hours disappear like clouds driven by a gale-force wind as you undo it all and start again.
- It’s easy to miss something in any given step. I’m unsure that the back of my drawer set is securely attached. But it’s the back, so who cares? Twenty-four hours later, it hasn’t fallen off. I’ll take the win.
- Think of a number, double it, then treble it, and you might end up with an approximation of the number of hours you need to allocate to this rewarding endeavour.
- If you are a quitter, don’t bother. You need a backbone of Titanium— wait, make that Tungsten—and the determination of a terrier up a drainpipe after a rat to put this sucker together.
- If you have high blood pressure or a heart condition, don’t bother.
- On no account, try it alone. Even if the other person is as bewildered by the entire thing as you are, you need—nay must have—moral support, or you’ll risk insanity.
- Flatpacks are a new level of pain, even if you’re a legend at DIY. I’ve done a fair amount of DIY in my time—hanging shelves, painting rooms, etc.—with reasonable results. Well, apart from that one time when I nearly electrocuted myself trying to wire up a small chandelier. Even this shocking experience had nothing on yesterday’s ordeal.
- If you thought you were a ‘potty mouth’ before you started, you’ll discover profanities you didn’t know you knew before you finish.
- The opportunity loss is immense—so many other things you could be doing instead of breaking your hands and mental equilibrium, grovelling about on the floor, perspiring and cursing the gods of convenience as your body curses your choice.
While researching for this post, I came across the previously unknown concept of flatpack assembly services. I felt immensely vindicated because if there are flatpack alchemists who can come to your rescue and transmute the base parts to furniture gold, that means flatpacks are impossible to put together—it’s not just me. How I wish I’d known. But OMG, the irony of paying someone to do what the manufacturers have offloaded—you pay less for the convenience of buying it in bits only to pay someone to put the bits together. Is the affordability thing, therefore, a delusion? Have we been suckered?
Unless you are a DIY Wizard or professional carpenter (why would you need a flatpack item in the first place), my best advice is to buy the made-up version, get help from someone who knows what they are doing or even bring in a paid professional, however much it hurts to do so. In my case, note to self: never buy another flatpack.
Serendipity rewards the prepared
When’s the last time you thought I just had one of the best days of my life? It’s easy when we look back to overload the scales with the things we’re not proud of or might do differently. Things that have caused us distress, harm or sorrow. Missed opportunities. Resolutions that didn’t make it to the end of January. The self-pitying seduction of the might-have-been is powerful.
Everyone around me was weary in the run-up to the holidays this year. Not unhappy, just a bit over it. By it, I mean 2023. There seemed to be a sort of collective consciousness willing the year away—a profound desire to close the door behind us on a confused, conflicted and curiously flat year and move on to the undoubted sunlit uplands[1] of 2024.
Human psychology is an interesting beast. Nothing changes with a new year. The seasons come and go; time moves inexorably on. A year is simply a construct designed to enable us to plan, record and be productive. There’s no alchemy about it. But the transition from one to the next has a symbolic importance that’s hard to ignore. It offers a valuable ‘moment’ for reflection and re-calibration. A holiday-induced pause (for those lucky enough to have them) to take stock and re-set, sometimes even take the extreme option of reverting to factory settings.
Ringing in the new with a resolution or two is as engrained in humans as chewing slippers is in puppies. The Babylonians were the first people recorded as celebrating each new year through a twelve-day festival, Akitu, marking the start of the spring planting season. Akitu included making resolutions to their gods, like loyalty to the king, paying debts and giving stuff they’d borrowed back to their rightful owners. You’d have to think they might also have included the usual suspects. Stop killing so many ‘fatted calves’ so they could shed a few sheckles (Babylonian kilos). Spend more quality time with the family. Read a few of those papyrus scrolls gathering dust in the study. Re-gild and polish the chariot and get back into the racing circuit.
New Year’s resolutions have been around since Adam was a boy. While they undoubtedly are an excellent option for some, I don’t go big on them because I’m a planner and a natural goal-setter. I enjoy the reflective time over the holidays, the headspace to go deep. I also like the feeling of optimism that is triggered by a New Year, which reinforces my commitment to pushing further.
But whether you’re a resolver or not, planning and resolutions only take you so far. Sticking rigidly to the programme shuts down the random twists and turns that become our tales of the unexpected. Those thrilling, surprising convergences when a heap of seemingly unrelated stuff coalesces as if by magic and makes something incredible happen. The times when you are looking for one thing and find something else entirely along the way. Being open to the unexpected.
At the end of October, I published a professional book—Brands with Moxie: Eight Steps to A Winning Brand. I was beyond delighted as this was the culmination of two years of commitment and hard work, which, at times, felt like a black hole sucking every fibre of my being into its relentless vacuum. It certainly hoovered up all my spare time. But it finally got done, and when the first copies arrived, I felt as proud as any new parent of my creation. I then, not unpredictably, got sick—or maybe I was just exhausted—and had some enforced time to ponder life’s big questions. This episode of navel-gazing confirmed what I’d always known. I want to write. More than anything. It’s my thing. I have a lot to say. I like entertaining people. I’m an essayist at heart. But the bonus was that I realised I had most of the content for another book comprising a non-fiction collection of opinion pieces in the style of and named after this blog—Never Succumb to Beige and Other Rules for a Colourful Life. It’s opinion meets autobiography meets history in a tongue-and-cheek way. It draws heavily on my not-uncolourful life experiences. I then worked like a demented being to finish it before the end of the year.
This somewhat accidental book triggered a sequence of serendipity that makes me smile as I write. Serendipity is, of course, the beneficial occurrences and developments that happen by chance. Or, as American crime writer Lawrence Block said, “Serendipity is when you look for something, find something else, and realise that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for”.
I decided early on to go the ‘indie publisher’ route and quickly realised success with the brand book would need coalitions of the able and willing. In this mindset, I amazingly unearthed a printer I didn’t know about in my own backyard with a business division supporting indies like me. I set up a meeting to discuss my brand book, but decided to also show the person I met my Beige manuscript. Her response blew me away—she loved it and thought it had broad appeal. She was also a fountain of knowledge about book publishing. From this one contact, others have flowed. I now have an editor and a top publicist who has agreed to work with me towards an April/May launch. I’ve also found new, like-minded people prepared to swop insights and discoveries. The happy dance goes on and on.
Although this happened quickly, it’s not as accidental as it seems. I have been writing for years, but not in a particularly joined-up way. I’ve ghosted a book on sales success, co-written a column—Sects in the City—reviewing business networking events and how to get the most out of them and clocked up several other decent notches on my writer’s headboard. But I’ve always seen writing as a ‘side hustle’. While I don’t intend to give up my day job any time soon, I’ve now got a way to elevate writing and content production to a central role in my business practice, and I have at least two other books ready to roll after Beige.
I’ve wished on many stars over the years but often struggled with the self-belief to reach up and grab one. Serendipity walks hand in hand with risk and trust. Without taking risks, you won’t grow; you don’t take risks without trust. Without either, the beautiful possibilities of the unimaginable remain in the wings, and you risk missing out on all sorts of good things. When I look back, the highlights are often the unplanned events and people that seem to have landed in my path out of the blue. Luck, you might say. Maybe. But serendipity has also been described as intention unmasked. I like that concept. This most recent demonstration of serendipity in my life is a long-standing intention finally unmasked.
It’s also said that serendipity rewards the prepared. A bit like fortune favouring the bold. Fate is more likely to step in when you’ve already put yourself in its path. I was prepared for my brand book to be the change I wanted to see, and it’s doing everything I envisaged, particularly as the foundation for a new direction for my business. I was rewarded with so very much more.
So, I’m excited about what the New Year will bring. I’m moving forward with optimism and confidence in my plans. But I hope there will also be serendipitous twists and turns I haven’t planned for. Like the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, I’m keeping some room in my heart for the unimaginable.
Best wishes for a 2024 journey that includes surprise, serendipity and adventure.
[1] Winston Churchill used the phrase “sunlit uplands” in his “their finest hour” speech delivered in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940, a month after he took over as Prime Minister leading an all-party coalition sketching a picture of an idealised or longed-for future time of happiness, prosperity, good fortune, etc.
Homemade with love and butter
I had a little cry this morning. I was using a mixing spoon my mother gave me a few years ago to make scrambled eggs. It’s got a wooden handle and a blue rubber bowl that says “Homemade with love and butter”. At the time she gave it to me, I could only ask, “What was she thinking?” It felt like a sort of token “that’ll do” choice, and I figured she must have been light on imagination, drunk or high on something when she bought it as it seemed so out of character.
Thinking about it, that’s not strictly true — she was occasionally seduced by a frill or two, took the occasional little step away from the righteous path of good taste into the barbarism of floral, even frilly. I don’t recall her succumbing to motto-infested items before, but I guess there’s always a first time.
Mostly, though, she was a flag bearer for understatement and conventional good taste. Hyperbole wasn’t something she suffered from, and superlatives weren’t in her standard lexicon. You had to dig deep to understand that describing something as “good” meant she absolutely loved it. That could be frustrating on occasion until you remembered her generation’s stiff-upper-lip approach to life.
Now, I look at the spoon and see a cherished memento given with love, if not butter. Actually, I also see a very good mixing spoon, which I use all the time, even though I snobbily dislike stuff with naff mottos. I nearly threw it away because it was far from what I would have bought myself. I’m so glad I didn’t.
I look around my apartment and see other gifts received over the years imbued with memories and love. I associated them more with my mother than my father because she bought them. Unfair, I know, but them’s the breaks. Staring tearily into space, remembering my mother this morning, I thought again how lucky I am to have had parents who always gave generously and with love, even when times were hard for them, which they were for many years.
My mother died a few months ago, and I miss her profoundly every day. I miss her particularly, knowing Christmas is just around the corner and, for the first time, she won’t be there. But I feel her with me when I use my naff spoon, and its naffness makes me smile … when it’s not making me cry.
Mum loved Christmas. She spent her last one in hospital. We did our best to bring the season to her with mini lights, some decorations and presents … of course. This year, our little family will be dispersed for the first time in years, but some good friends and a much-loved niece will be joining this orphan for dinner, and the season will be jolly, reflective, happy and sad. As it should be. I will raise a glass to my beloved mother, knowing she will be there in spirit and enjoying the moment wherever she is.
As Christina Rosetti said in her 1885 poem, set by many composers to music as a carol over the years, “Love came down at Christmas.” I know it will come down again this year.
So, you want to write a professional book?
Every seasoned professional should have their book, right? I read that in Forbes Magazine article back in the mists of 2016. For a moment, I was tempted to give it a go, but it wasn’t the right moment, and I wasn’t very filled with get-up, let alone go at the time, so I filed the idea in my rainy-day basket and got on with my life.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago. My get-up gene was flexing its muscles, and I was ready to have a go at something new. I have always loved writing — I’m an essayist at heart — this blog has provided the perfect vehicle for a bit of wry self-expression. I’ve written a swag of other stuff over the years, some of which has been published, some not. I had one of those ‘aha moments’ in this go-getting Renaissance.If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,I thought, closely followed by I’m a writer and know a thing or two about branding, why don’t I write a book about brand development?
By way of background, as co-owner of boutique creative agency for nearly 15 years, I’ve worked with people and organisations of every type — start-ups, small businesses, corporates, leading charities, local and national government entities, and social enterprises — to help them create and manage standout, impactful brands.
I’ve also been on the other side of the equation. At the start of my career, I worked for two dynamic start-ups that became global brands. Their trajectory instilled a deep understanding of the role of a strong brand as a springboard to success. I’ve experienced first-hand the competitive advantage standout brands bring and the value at each stage, from business planning and development, capital raising and growth, to exit.
Combining this with my writing and comms skills, I figured I had the chops to give it a go. These combined lemons would surely make a lot of lemonade. My vision was to take what I know and create a practical, hands-on resource to help people shape their brand thinking and maximise their brand’s value.
I tried the book idea out on a few clever people, including my business partner and a trusted adviser. Not only did they encourage this rush of blood to the head, but Paul (adviser) with a love of brands and a lot of experience in developing them, offered to help review and shape the content. I also identified and tested the concept with target audiences, who seemed to think this could fill a gap in the market. Game on! In a tsunami of creative energy and determination, supported by a how-hard-can-this-be approach, I started scoping the structure of this new creation.
Seriously, you start with a proven brand development process that’s worked for people and organisations of all sorts and you re-tread that into book format. A walk in the park you’d think. Think again. In some ways it was easy because I already had a structure for the book from the steps in our process. I’ve done loads of brand workshops in my time and a lot of reading around the subject so I wasn’t starting from ground zero. Despite my initial confidence and my starting knowledge base, it was remarkably difficult to take that and make it into a book. In my agency’s branding work, we do all the heavy lifting, whereas the book had the different focus of supporting people to do it themselves.
Although I thought I had a lot of content, when it came down to it, there wasn’t much. At least not much that was usable — I couldn’t ethically include client case studies, so I had to find relevant examples that fit the narrative through the book. Luckily, I was able to draw on my experiences with branding the start-ups I’ve co-founded as examples and my varied career has kicked up a wealth of anecdotes and insights. Creating meaningful exercises that would push people’s thinking was a whole new world of pain, although once I got into my stride, I enjoyed compiling them.
Even for someone who enjoys writing, this was a beast. I struggled big time with the opening and rewrote that entirely many times. Paul was a rock throughout, reviewing each chapter as we went along — his feedback was on the money every time and kept me putting one word in front of another. I had some other very useful feedback from a couple of other people who offered to be ‘tame readers’.
Two years on, what can I say? It was hard. There were days when I viscerally understood the old maxim: the only way out is through. I bled time. Thinking about it, sometimes I just bled. I stalled a couple of times when I realised the latest rewrite didn’t cut it. But I come from a long line of brace-up and get on with it types, so I braced-up, got on with it, and the result is Brands with Moxie: Eight Steps to a Winning Brand. I was and still am thrilled to have finished the writing — it was one of the biggest challenges of my life, but in terms of my own standards, I nailed it.
Writing it, of course, wasn’t the end of the story. It needed to be professionally proof read, designed and laid out. How convenient to have a creative team in my orbit! Even so, we had to find a creative direction for the design and overall look and feel of the book. Ultimately we went with a complex option which included a hand-painted illustration style. Nothing like making a rod for your own creative back.
Then there were other BIG decisions to be made. The first — and it was a doozie — was whether to go it alone or try and find a publisher. I did a lot of research into the pros and cons of each. Getting a name publisher to take you on has its appeal in terms of third-party endorsement and overall credibility. Publishers take many practical issues away but also take away a fair amount of control and earning potential. Many publishers also expect the authors they take on to have an ‘author platform’ — i.e. a ready-made, online following to boost the marketing.
These days, ‘Going Indie’ doesn’t have the stigma it used to — many leading authors self-publish, and no one is shrieking ‘vanity’ at them. Self-publishing on Amazon and or the other platforms is seductive. You’re instantly in the publishing business once you’ve got a complete manuscript in the proper format. The downside is that all the promotion and marketing is on you. Theoretically, you do better financially from any sales, but it’s not a level playing field.
Ultimately, what tipped me into the Indie camp was time. I don’t have much of it at this stage in my career, and waiting a further, possibly three years or more, after the two I’ve already sunk into writing and production, just seemed ludicrous in these days of convenience and instant everything—that’s if you even get accepted at all. It seems so random and a game with rules known only to insiders. So, Indie it was.
That decision made, I had to consider which platform to go with. I decided to launch on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which is still the biggest and then add others once I’d got the hang of it. Next, what format was going to work best? Kindle only? Kindle and paperback? Hardback as well? Coming out of a creative studio, the book needed to be visually exciting, so a paperback version was a ‘must have’. I also opted for a simpler Kindle version. It’s ended up at 280-pages, so I ruled out a hardback version as it would have been too big and too expensive. Kindle and paperback are quite different propositions, which meant creating the book in two formats because the designerly paperback wouldn’t work in the Kindle world of ePub and the need to be responsive to different reading devices — each one needed discrete sets of skills to produce.
Then how would I sell it? Another curve ball and another war chest to find. I got help and took on experts to set up the launch campaign on Google and social media because these aren’t my bag.
Even with help, a lot of the publicity and promotional activities are on me. Shameless self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I’m no exception. The brace-up conditioning I mentioned earlier walked hand in hand with the self-deprecating British thing. But for the Indie Publisher, it’s just part of the deal and I accepted that I would have to move out of my comfort zone and into this competitive arena to succeed. It’s also another time sink hole.
What else? Well, for anyone who believes they have a book in them, here are my outtakes.
1. If you know your stuff, you can write a book. Even if you don’t think you have anything special to say, you likely know more than you think, and your thinking and insights are different to anyone else’s.
2. Although challenging, writing a book is a great way of reinforcing what you know and building confidence and self-belief. If you’ve ever suffered from Imposter Syndrome — I certainly have on occasion — it’s a great antidote.
3. The first draft of anything is generally sh1t … so are the next xxxx … but digging deep gets results, and the satisfaction from finally landing it is immense.
4. The ability to ‘slash and burn’ will become a top skill worthy of inclusion in your CV.
5. However long you estimate it will take, quadruple it, then quadruple it again and don’t expect to have a life as your new obsession takes it over.
6. It’s like living through a lengthy illness — you don’t realise how sick you are until you’re not, and it’s done.
7. Procrastination doesn’t qualify as writer’s block. I dedicated a two-hour block early each morning and great chunks of my weekends to keeping my book moving. That worked for me because I’ve long been an early bird, and I could get stuck in before my colleagues arrived, and the business day took over my headspace. It really is a question of JFDI, baby!
8. Loading a fancy paperback book into the Kindle Direct Publishing portal might make you lose the will to live. We’re experts at producing high-quality print publications, and it took us about six stressful attempts over a week to crack it.
9. You need a great team around you and understanding friends and relation. Without expert help it would be a la big mountain to climb and I am eternally in debt to my team of understanding cheer leaders who offered unconditional support no matter what.
10. When your new ‘baby’ is finally born — the Amazon stork delivered mine yesterday — all the stresses and sacrifice melt in a surge of love and awe at the achievement. My colleague Katie Williams , who created the gorgeous design, and I were the proudest parents on the block, I can tell you.
Seriously, it was an amazing voyage of discovery, growth, and affirmation and I’m so glad I stuck with it. It’s opened fresh thinking and reinforced the best of the old. If that weren’t enough, according to the Forbes article I referenced at the beginning, having a book makes you more cool at cocktail parties. That, of course, makes all the difference.
A Halloween Dinner to Dye For
A chilling scream rang out. The guests, already spooked after the reading, looked at each other horrified in the darkened room, lit only by a Hellish red glow as a fiendish fog crept slowly along the hall.
I have always loved the concept of Halloween. I love it almost as much as I despise what it’s become, so I sort of span both sides of the argument. I think devoting all of October to peddling tacky Halloween merch is an obscenity. I see today that even Google has succumbed with little animated ghosts floating up my screen when I hit the search bar. Very cute.
And the shops? Maybe if the Rider of the Apocalypse could do a circuit of each high street, it might cool the shopping frenzy. Then again, it might fuel it further, as people would think the Riders just another prop instead of the ultimate omen of death and destruction.
A visiting alien might be forgiven for thinking that Halloween is a craft way for retailers to fleece the gullible public. Tacky or fun, to me, it opens boundless imaginative creativity. I find the concept of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night horrifyingly mesmeric.
Halloween (Hallowe’en) or All Hallows Eve was initially celebrated on the Eve of the Western Christian feast of All Saints’ Day. It began with the observance of All Hallowtide, the time in the Church year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints, martyrs, and all the faithful departed. It’s still an important occasion for the Christian Church.
It’s not hard to make the leap from a night remembering the dead to ‘guising’, which is how we celebrated Halloween in Scotland, where I grew up. Guising is dressing up as magical or frightening creatures or characters from a story, waiting till dark and lighting up your pumpkin lantern, and hitting the trail of neighbouring houses to fill your bag with sweets or money as a reward for the dress-ups. Thinking about it, we didn’t have pumpkin lanterns; we had to make do with turnips, but they were just as convincingly scary.
We didn’t know about ‘trick or treating’, and there was no Halloween merch to be had, so we made, or rather my mother made, costumes for my sister and me. We were lucky because Mum was a fantastic dressmaker and created some stand-out costumes. One year, I was radiant as Marie-Antoinette, dressed as a shepherdess complete with powdered wig and crook. My mother wasn’t sufficiently gruesome to provide a bleeding, detached head, but I’m sure people got the idea. We revelled (literally) in the whole thing.
Lit by our creepy turnip lantern, all costumed up, we’d creep out into the pitch-black Highland night on our way to what adventure and riches—or at least a handful of Quality Street chocolates—scaring ourselves witless by telling ghost stories between house visits.
Where we got from there to today’s almighty homage to the God of Landfill, only perhaps only their nemesis in the fiery realm can say. In any case, it got me thinking about memorable Halloween’s past. One stood out from my London days when I was a rebounding divorcee in my early thirties enjoying the party scene. I decided to host an intimate Halloween dinner party for eight. I then got into it with the gusto of Mephistopheles in search of souls to barter. I figured I’d share my blueprint.
While it was a small gathering, I saw a total immersion experience from the initial invite to the menu to what they saw when they came through my front door to an after-dinner spooky story session. With help from my designer sister, a sufficiently macabre invite materialised—people were invited to A Dinner to Dye For—in a demoniac script in dripping blood. I offered a prize for the best costume to get people focused.
Creating a menu that rose diabolically to the occasion was fun. I decided on three courses, but they all needed to be reasonably simple and preferably dishes I could prepare in advance as I had a lot of other alchemy to work on the night. But they also needed to have creep quotient. Here’s where I landed:
Starter: Devils on Horseback (what else?)
Main: Bat out of Hell Pie
Dessert: Mordor Mess
To add hellaciousness to the Devils on Horseback—baked prunes or dates wrapped in bacon— they sat on an inferno of chopped red chillies. As an aside, the first mention of the dish was in an American magazine, The Country Gentleman, in 1885. They were called devils because they were served devilishly hot.
Bat out of Hell Pie gave meaning to the invite as it literally was to dye for. I turned the potato topping fiery red with cochineal and picked out a bat on top using sliced black olives. Adding cayenne pepper brought additional fire and brimstone to the dish, achieving the desired hot as Hades temperature.
I based the Mordor Mess on the better-known Eaton one. More cochineal here, turning the cream as black as the vacuum in the Nazgûl king’s eyes (or as close as I could get). The accompanying summer fruits (frozen given the time of year) needed no help, and I used edible food paint to transform the (bought) meringues from cream to flame red and orange.
The whole ungodly shebang could be prepared and assembled in advance. The mess was cold, and the first two courses were ready to be reheated in the oven. So far, so good.
Next, for spooktacular staging. I was living in a beautiful Victorian ground-floor flat at the time. The main rooms led off the front section of the hallway, which had a slight dog-leg and two steps down to the dining room and galley kitchen to its rear. It was a perfect setting for an amateur to ‘stage’ because guests could see the dining room from the front door.
Mood music as people arrived— there was no choice here. It had to be Saint Saen’s spectacular, Dans Macabre, on a taped loop (no smart devices in those days as it’s only about seven minutes in length. My ghostly, ghoulish, and horrific props included the usual suspects—red light bulbs in every light fitting, a massive sprayed-on cobweb with a beastly black spider at the centre covering the dining room door frame.
The piece de resistance was intended to be deploying dry ice (solid carbon dioxide)—the stuff used in theatres to create an effect of low-lying fog- and I imagined fogging up my hallway to add to the sinister impression. Epic fail! With no Internet or time for research, I had no earthly idea how to use the damned stuff, no one to ask. I bought it from some medical supplies shop, and they weren’t exactly up on the theatrical potential of their product. Of course, professionals use a machine. All I knew was that you added water to achieve the fog but couldn’t figure out how to disperse it. I tried using a blow heater, but that only made the fog rise and ruined the vibe.
Running out of time, I gave up on that idea and just put blocks of the dry ice and quickly improvised ‘cauldrons’ …double, double toil and trouble…on a plinth at the dog leg in the hallway and on the mantelpiece in the dining room. The one in the dining room had evil-looking snakes spilling over the sides. When I added water, the fog rolled out over the edges of the ice bucket and cascaded to the floor. It looked incredible, but you had to keep adding water to maintain the effect. My guests were happy to oblige with this because it was so cool.
At one point, some of the ice landed in the kitchen sink, and someone had the wit to make a tray of faux-foaming cocktails at one point. Throughout the evening, finding innovative ways of using the ice became something of a competition. It was wicked fun! Of course, there was a pumpkin lantern as the table centrepiece—a pity it didn’t occurred to us to insert a block of dry ice
Everyone’s got a ghost story, right? So, the main after-dinner event was to get the guests to share theirs and di, they are ever. We heard about close encounters of the spectral kind, apparitions, photos that captured mysterious figures and other tales of the scarily unexpected.
The final part of the entertainment leading up to the Witching Hour was reading The Horla, French writer Guy de Maupassant’s 1987 very dark story about a supernatural presence that torments the protagonist. In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper-class, unmarried bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish. This anguish occurs for four days after he sees a “superb three-mast” Brazilian ship and impulsively waves to it, unconsciously inviting the supernatural being aboard the boat to haunt his home. It gets creepier and creepier, but I won’t do a spoiler alert and just leave the rest to your imagination.[1]
I split the journal entries between the guests so everyone read parts in rotation. I’d timed it so that the telling would end just before midnight. Almost as soon as we’d finished, a piercing scream rang out, which tailed off into a ghostly wail. My guest nearly jumped out of their seats. I’d taped the scream at the end of a cassette and set it to play before we started the read. It was the perfect end to the dinner, although we went on for some time after that.
The final thing was a secret ballot for best costume; my friend B won it. B’s costume was a masterpiece of macabre. He transformed himself into Charon the Ferryman, who, in Greek mythology, carried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to the underworld, which separated the world of the living and dead. He had whited out his face and used black and grey makeup to transform his eyes into shadows. A long black hooded robe and lantern on a pole completed the terrifyingly Hadean ensemble.
It truly was a Halloween dinner to dye for. It was so much fun…apart from having to find a way to remove splatters of Mordor Mess from my dining room curtains the next day. How in Hell did that happen?
Sadly we forgot to take photos, so any thanks to the following for the inspiring images:
- Lovely Greens showing how to make incredible turnip lanterns—www. lovely greens.com
- HGTV for an incredible and sometimes improbably number of ways to use dry ice—www.hgtv.com/lifestyle/holidays/halloween-magic-make-a-wicked-wine-cauldron
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horla