Labour of love

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
This is a commercial and I make no apologies for it. My friend John Simmons has written and published a beautiful book.

It’s called The angel of the stories. It’s about a young woman called Julia who lives in a small Spanish town – whitewashed, cradled by wooded hills (not so very different, in fact, from Aracena where we take a group of Dark Angels students every year). Julia yearns to become a writer and as her craft starts to blossom so too do the buds on her shoulders. Soon they flower into wings that take her on journeys into the lives of her fellow townsfolk, whose foibles and passions and longings she chronicles with great tenderness.
Technically speaking, The angel of the stories is magical realism. To me it’s purely magical. The writing is simple and limpid. The storytelling has a quiet but mythical quality. Then there are the illustrations …
The book has 21 colour plates taken from paintings by the artist Anita Klein. She and John collaborated over the writing of the book; in fact, her Italian Angels series was part of the inspiration for it. Now she has created a series of original paintings around the character of Julia. What a delectable angel Julia makes: dreamy and pensive, innocent yet knowing, voluptuous and sexy, she is charming as only Beryl Cook-meets-Modigliani could be.
And then there’s the book itself. This is book-making as craftsmanship, and the craftsman’s hand is that of designer David Carroll. It’s cloth bound and comes in a cloth-covered slip case. It has a gold silk ribbon for a bookmark. The typography is lovingly chosen, as is the paper onto which the colour plates have been hand pasted with consummate care.
The angel of the stories is, in fact, a labour of love ­from first thought to final credit, from cover illustration to endpapers. Even the colophon of John’s newly fledged publishing company, called – wait for it – Dark Angels Press, is a plump little ‘d’ sheltering beneath the ‘a’ of an outspread angel’s wing.
This is the ultimate reproach to the Kindle. Writing, typesetting, design, binding, illustration, all work in harmony to create an object that has value beyond the sum of its parts. In the age of electronic publishing, thank God for The angel of the stories. May it be but the first of many from the Dark Angels Press.
You can order the book from www.darkangelspress.com
You can see Anita Klein’s work at www.anitaklein.com
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Other worlds

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
A sackcloth gown and an empty room in a disused telephone exchange might not sound much like the stuff of dreams, but the human imagination’s a wonderful thing. I’m trusting that mine is going to respond by taking me on a couple of creative journeys over the next year.

The Gown of Repentance is the object I’ve been allocated for 26 Treasures Scotland, a repeat of the project we ran last year with the V&A in London, but this year one hand of a three-hander involving the National Museum of Scotland, along with the Welsh National Library and the Royal Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland. It will take the same form as last year, a wonderful exercise in precision of language, with 62 words exactly in which to write a personal response to one’s allocated object. This year my fellow author, the indefatigable Sara Sheridan, has been making the running in Edinburgh, liaising with the museum, herding together the 26 writers (including a wheen of Scots-speakers and Gaels), and pairing them up randomly with the objects the museum has chosen to create a historical trail through its Scottish collection.
I haven’t been to see the gown yet, but I know it stands in a glass case beside its more famous neighbour, the stool – both redolent with disapproval and attended by the ghosts of stern-faced kirk elders. Personal associations with repentance have kept themselves out of sight so far, but no doubt they’ll surface when the time comes.
The room in the telephone exchange is much more of an unknown quantity. This is a brand new project which has arisen from the Dark Angels masterclass at Merton College, Oxford, in the spring. The exchange is the building which, in due course, with the necessary funds raised, will become the new home to Oxford’s wonderful Story Museum. With somewhere in the region of sixty vacant rooms, currently housing a few items of abandoned furniture and the odd dead pigeon, the place is ripe for a show of some kind before the builders move in. So my two equally indefatigable partners in Dark Angels, Stuart Delves and John Simmons, have hatched a plan to invite twenty of our most advanced former students to choose a visual artist as a partner and mount an installation in the empty room they’ve each been allocated. Stories are the theme, of course, and Other Worlds is the title of the show. This time next year it will run for two weeks to a paying public, thereby raising funds for the Story Museum and promoting Dark Angels at the same time.
Although I’m looking forward to getting to grips with that grim article of apparel in Edinburgh, I’m looking forward even more to visiting Oxford in September for the Other Worlds briefing – because I’ve chosen as my partner my daughter Ellie and her brilliant alternative floristry business, The Flower Appreciation Society. We’ve never worked together before and right now I can’t even begin to imagine how we will, but there’s something thrilling and deeply satisfying to me about the idea of words and flowers coming together, just as there is in a collaboration between father and daughter. I can’t wait to get started.
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The eagle

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
Yesterday evening I raised my glass to Rosemary Sutcliff. It was an odd moment. I was sitting on my own in the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Gurgaon, overlooking what my driver had proudly told me earlier in the week is the largest road toll in Asia (Ay-zee-a, he pronounced it), sixteen lanes of winking red tail lights, sixteen lanes of unblinking white headlights; and she had made me cry.

Here, in one of the most conspicuously modern cities of 21st century India, I was reading about Roman Britain. The young invalided former centurion Marcus and his freed slave Esca had made it back across Hadrian’s Wall having rescued the talismanic bronze eagle, lost by Marcus’s father and his few remaining comrades of the Ninth Legion in their heroic last stand against the tribes of the north.
Perhaps I’m getting sentimental as I get older, but their exhausted, quietly triumphant return to Marcus’s gruff old uncle’s villa at Colchester, and an ecstatic welcome from Marcus’s tame wolf cub, brought tears to my eyes. But then again, perhaps it’s not age. Rosemary Sutcliff was an exceptional writer and The Eagle of the Ninth her best-loved book. I had read it as a child and adored it. Prompted by the release of the current film (which I’ve deliberately avoided, though now I might see it), I bought a new copy for this trip and was not disappointed.
Like her character Marcus, Sutcliff herself endured disability, though his was acquired in battle whereas she was an invalid from infancy. A progressive wasting disease confined her to a wheelchair for most of her life. Yet she managed to evoke with the utmost plausibility events she could never possibly have experienced, for example a wild and terrifying manhunt through the hills and bogs of central and southern Scotland; and more remarkably still, a lyrical vision of landscape and a natural world that she was most unlikely ever to have seen.
‘Well, that’s the writer’s job,’ one might say, ‘to imagine.’ And one would be right. It just happened that, imprisoned in a frail body, she was particularly good at it. She died, heaped with honours, at the age of 72 in 1992.
She would certainly have been an inspiration to the young Indians I’m here to help with their writing and presentation skills. To communicate properly with your customers you have to be able to imagine you are them, I’ve been exhorting them. Tell the customers what they need to know, not what you want them to hear. And they try, because they value self-advancement highly and are eager to learn anything that will help them. They’re admirable people, these young Indians. Their working environment is ferociously competitive – I don’t think anything in the UK even begins to resemble it – and the rewards for success are almost incalculable in their terms, yet in the training room at least they’re serious (though by no means solemn), dignified, even self-effacing.
But they’re shackled by the language of their industry and the American provenance of their organisation. In their language, one doesn’t send people to do things, one deploys resources. But if you think of people as resources, I point out to them, it’s not long before you start treating them as such. I’ve been coaching three of them during the second part of the week, and they’ve all pledged never to use the word again when they mean people. It’s a small step but it’s a start. I’m sure Rosemary Sutcliff, wise and humane, would have approved.
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Soundscapes

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
What seems like a very long time ago now, I launched and published a monthly magazine for the radio industry. It was called, unsurprisingly, Radio Month and it aimed to do for the world of radio what Broadcast did for the television industry. I was the grandly-styled publisher and Nick Higham, who later went on to become BBC television’s media correspondent, was the editor. There were four of us altogether, in an unheated, rather smelly former shop on Dawes Road, in Fulham.

Radio Month was a trade magazine. It talked about programme-making and station management, studio equipment and the then relatively new business of selling advertising; commercial radio in the UK was only five years old when we launched and was still making itself up as it went along. We had a good run for three or four years, then came the recession of the early 1980s. Our own advertising dried up and the magazine went bust.
That painful moment was, quite directly, the start of my career as a business writer, although that’s another story. But working with the BBC’s Peter Day and his producer Sandra Kanthal through the recording of last week’s In Business programme about Dark Angels reminded me of two things in particular from that time.
The first is that radio then was populated mainly by enthusiasts. With a couple of notable exceptions (Kenny Everett, a true comic genius, being one) it wasn’t a celebrity medium. You could look like the back end of a bus and still be a brilliant broadcaster, the pay was generally lousy, the hours long, the working conditions sometimes hair-raising, and the company often eccentric. Most people who worked in radio did so because they really loved the medium. They were genuine, and genuinely committed. Sadly, I’ve lost touch with that world now so I don’t know whether the same is still true. I hope so. Peter and Sandra certainly both seemed cast in that mould.
The second thought, and it’s hardly an original one – though I think it connects with the first in some slightly opaque way, was that radio was, and remains, so much more a vehicle for the imagination than television. Peter and Sandra had nothing but a couple of microphones (one of them admittedly rather large and hairy, like an unkempt rat on a stick) and a tiny digital recorder with which to create half an hour of radio. The resulting programme was rich with the sound of bells, of footsteps, of different voices, of echo and its opposite – close presence, all building an atmosphere of Oxford and the mood of a Dark Angels course. It left one room to create one’s own pictures, all the more powerful for being personal. (Click here if you missed the programme.)
The analogy is there with good writing, which leaves room for one to attach one’s own thoughts and feelings to the words written; a lesson which the business world still largely has to learn. And perhaps the people who write well for business are also rather like the radio-makers, unseen craftsmen and women, who know how to create space for one to make an imaginative connection with the subject at hand, no matter how dry. These are not the people who would ever write, as I recently heard one organisation proudly declare, that they are ‘nurturing their talent pipeline’; for which Orwellian abstraction read people.
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Still crazy

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
Last weekend I went to see Wim Wenders’ film Pina, about the work of the pioneering German dancer and choreographer, Pina Bausch, and her company. It was an extraordinary two hours, not least because Pina herself died three weeks after filming began, but rather than abandoning the project, at the insistence of the company Wenders turned the film into a tribute to her. Inter-spersing the dance footage, each member of the company in turn speaks a few words to camera about what she meant to him or her. It must have been a profoundly emotional experience for them all.
Apart from these short spoken pieces the film was all dance and music. It was a feast of colour, movement and rhythm, some of it filmed during theatrical performances, some in ‘natural’ settings ranging from a river-bank to a steelworks, the rim of an open-cast mine to a busy motorway intersection. There were moments of humour and surprise, menace and tenderness, violence and joy. And underlying it all was a growing sense of the depth of Pina’s influence on her dancers – who came, it seemed, from almost every country under the sun.
I’m used to being transported by words, music and images, but less so by bodily movement and I was unprepared for how touched and inspired I felt by this film; not merely by the unseen but towering presence of Pina Bausch herself and the affection in which she was clearly held by her dancers, but by the beauty and grace of those lean, steel-muscled bodies, by their power to silently evoke all the emotional and psychological subtleties of what it is to be human.
Funnily enough, though, rather than making me want to dance, I left the cinema with a very strong craving for stillness. Those dancers, I felt, were able to move their bodies as they did, in some cases almost like acrobats, because they knew how to be still at their core, to create some point of inner calm and balance from which their control, and therefore the power of their movement and emotional expressiveness, flowed. That stillness was there in their faces even as they talked about Pina.
Life as I get older is not as I’d imagined it. It’s not slower and calmer, but faster and increasingly frantic. There is so much I want to do and never quite enough time to do it all. I’m sure I would do more still, and all of it better, if I could find that stillness. But it doesn’t come merely from the absence of activity; it’s the presence of something single-minded and disciplined, hard-won through years of practice. Yoga and meditation are paths to it. Perhaps we reach a version of it when we’re utterly absorbed in something, living only in the moment. But the trick must be in being able to put ourselves there at will, rather than waiting for the moment to strike.
I imagine it as a kind of gathering-in, of bringing all of oneself to a single point – which is just how Pina’s dancers were, the totality of their beings focused on each successive movement. Swap dancing for any other activity you care to name and the goal starts to become obvious, even if the means of reaching it are less so. But I love the paradox that these thoughts of stillness were triggered by a film about movement.
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A Cup of Kindness

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey

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


Faith, Hope and Charity

wrote St Paul in his hymn to Love
these three abide

In Iraq, explains Canon White on the radio,
Democracy is not what people yearn for
blasted on them as it was through missiles and bombs

What they most want, why can’t we understand,
is water, electricity and kindness
life, communication, things working normally

God only knows
Buddha only knows
Mohammed only knows
everyone knows we want the kindness
which lies at the heart of our being

For boys and girls, men and women, animals and plants
for all who go about their lives
for daily bread and caring for one another
it is kindness we want

In Scotland we have given a song to the world
‘a cup of kindness’
to take, to drink, to share

Water, electricity and kindness,
but the greatest of these is kindness.

Tessa Ransford
April 2011
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The road to Damascus?

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
Walking back from the polling station yesterday afternoon in the drizzle, past the familiar faces and houses of our village, I found myself trying to imagine what it would be like to live in Damascus where, aged 61, I would never have had the experience of voting in a free, democratic election; where I would have lived my adult life keeping my thoughts to myself for fear of informers or the secret police; and where now, today, I would most probably be living in real terror of arrest and torture, if I hadn’t already been carted off.

But the thought that really gnawed was this: where, knowing what faced me, would I find the courage to go out on the streets and protest? It seems to me that those thousands of ordinary people across the Arab world, and particularly those in Syria, who have recently joined the crowds knowing that they may simply not make it home that evening, that they may be picked off by snipers or mown down by tanks, or rounded up later and taken to some hideous secret interrogation centre ­– these ordinary people are quite extraordinarily brave.
Having never felt the resentment and anger they must feel, I don’t think I can really understand where that bravery comes from. It must be a huge rage, a consuming sense of injustice, that will make a peaceable person expose themselves to the possibility of extreme physical or psychological pain, or even death. And perhaps in voicing these thoughts I’m also acknowledging the fear that, if it came to it, I would turn out to be a coward, unable to find that courage.
I imagine that anger of this kind must have a quickening effect, a sharpening of the sense of being alive. Perhaps it even promotes a feeling of invulnerability, and certainly there must be a sense of solidarity, even of some kind of collective safety, while you’re in the crowd. But when the bullets begin to fly, or the door’s kicked in at three in the morning, doesn’t even the most righteous indignation yield to weak-kneed terror?
Last weekend, under a cloudless sky, I spent a morning at the magnificent new Culloden Moor visitor centre. The battle still casts a faint shadow over Scottish politics, more than two hundred and fifty years later, and I was reminded that for years afterwards the Hanoverians ran a kind of police state in the Highlands, in which actual and suspected Jacobites were ruthlessly hunted down and normal civil liberties – including the right to speak one’s language of birth – were brutally suppressed. I was so caught up in the drama of those far off events, and their wonderfully vivid interpretation, that I didn’t think of Syria at the time, nor, oddly enough, the fact that we were less than a week away from our own election.
But I see the connections and parallels clearly now, and it reminds me just how fortunate we are to live in a democracy; also how vital it is that we lead politically engaged lives, that we stay informed, that we vote and that we teach our children to vote. That way, with luck, our courage may never be put to the test.
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Curiouser and curiouser

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
A couple of times most weeks I take the train to Edinburgh. For several miles the line follows the Fife coast. There’s a long view south under huge skies across the Forth Estuary to Edinburgh and its acropolis, the Pentland Hills looming behind. In places the track runs very close to the shoreline and at low water there are colonies of seaweedy boulders, great expanses of mudflat, and flocks of wading birds to be seen. Yesterday morning was one of brilliant sunshine and air of a particularly limpid clarity, the water ruffled by a light breeze. At one point, as we rounded a headland, there, crossing a small bay was a solitary kayak, its paddler oblivious to the fact that twenty yards behind him, head and neck raised clear of the water, followed an inquisitive seal.

When we are curious we feel alive. Witnessing such a thing on a journey to work made me feel that a good day lay ahead, and indeed it did. First there was a meeting with Paul Pinson, theatre director turned executive coach, who partnered me on the Indian adventure last year. Paul gave me invaluable feedback on a story-telling workshop I’m preparing. Keep spelling out the business benefits and giving real life examples, he urged me. You may have all this knowledge, but to your audience it’s a new concept and they need to be reassured that what you’re telling them actually works. There’s no end to what we can learn, nor the satisfaction in it, I thought as I left.
Next came an Edinburgh International Book Festival board meeting: two hours of solid concentration, one tricky decision, and the thrill of hearing details of this year’s programme – a banquet of contemporary fiction and current thinking on everything from science and the environment to the Arab Spring and the growing power of China. Book festivals are a modern cultural phenomenon and more appear practically every week. With 750 events and more than 200,000 visitors over 17 days, we claim ours to be the world’s largest. But where does this desire to hear authors talking come from? I believe it’s about curiosity and learning again. Book festivals are really festivals of thinking and we hunger for the imaginative connections we can make, the sense of belonging we can experience, by hearing new, interesting and challenging ideas in the company of others.
From Edinburgh I travelled to St Andrews, back along the Fife coast under a still unblemished sky, with another colleague. Robert Fletcher, former chairman of Saatchi’s New York, is a genius at helping brands of all kinds to communicate why the world would be a poorer place without them. In this instance the brand is St Andrews University, which in two years’ time will be 600 years old and needs to find a compelling way to raise many millions of pounds over the coming years in the seemingly paradoxical pursuit of remaining small. Even ancient seats of learning have lessons to learn, in this case that the institutional voice will not always serve it best. 
     Nowhere is human curiosity more visibly enshrined than in a place such as St Andrews. It’s not just what makes us feel alive. It’s what keeps us moving forward.
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Standing under

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
I suppose Easter weekend is as appropriate a moment as any to write about empathy. In the Christian calendar, at least, it represents the high point of suffering; and empathy translates literally from the Greek as ‘suffering in’ (as opposed to sympathy, ‘suffering with’).

But that’s not what has prompted me. The trigger, in fact, is a TED talk I was directed to this week, in which American sociologist Sam Richards illustrates empathy by taking his audience step-by-step through the process of identifying with an Iraqi insurgent. He does it by first unfolding an imaginary scenario in which a hugely powerful China, dependent on American coal, sends an army of occupation into a conflict-ridden United States; then drawing the parallel with the situation in Iraq and inviting the audience to imagine how an ordinary Iraqi might feel about the Americans – which is not, as he crucially points out, the same as agreeing with that person. In a post-9/11 US, it’s a brave but effective way of making his point.
Richards describes sociology as ‘the study of the way humans are shaped by things they can’t see’; and empathy, he tells his students, is everything because to study those invisible forces you must be able to understand other people. The OED defines empathy as ‘the power of projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding, the object of contemplation’. The literal meaning of the word ‘understand’ is to ‘stand under’, and at one point in his talk Richards takes a pace to one side, then turns through 180 degrees to face the way he has been facing previously, thus miming the act of stepping into someone else’s shoes, or ‘standing under’ them. I was amused because I make the same movement when talking to people about the importance of empathy in writing. It must be the default gesture for empathy, and I love the implication that we intuitively under-stand that selfsame word’s intrinsic meaning.
Empathy was constantly on my mind when John Simmons and I were writing Room 121, earlier on in the year. Not only is it one of the defining themes of the book, but in the writing John and I were almost daily inviting empathy, one with the other, as we swapped stories. Even so, the impulse to tell an audience what you want to say rather than what they want to hear can be a powerful one. I’ve been caught out in the past when talking to people whose grasp of stories and language has been more literal than I had appreciated, and seen the blank looks resulting from my assumption that they will ‘get’ the emotional torque of a phrase or story without my having to explain it.
Empathy, it seems to me, is the principal means of bridging the gap between our human differences. It’s not possible without the capacity to imagine. But it also requires an effort of will, a wish to connect, even if not necessarily to concur – and when that is absent, all manner of troubles ensue. Imagine what might have happened had Sam Richards given his talk to an audience of Romans, inviting them to empathise with a rabble-rousing Judaean mystic.
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Chinook secrets

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
In June 1994 an RAF Chinook helicopter, travelling from Northern Ireland, flew into a hillside on the Mull of Kintyre, killing everyone on board. Alongside the four crew, the 25 passengers included almost all the UK’s most senior Northern Ireland intelligence experts. It was a security catastrophe, and because the crash happened in dense fog there were no witnesses.

The following year an RAF board of enquiry, led by two air-marshals, concluded that it was the result of pilot error. They found the two young flight lieutenants, Jonathan Tapper and Rick Cook, aged 28 and 30, guilty of gross negligence in flying too fast and too low for the prevailing conditions.
But the pilots’ families and many others, including a number of prominent figures, disagreed. In the years that followed there were several inquiries and reports, all of which challenged the original conclusion or left the question of blame open.
In 2001, my father chaired the last of these inquiries. It was one of the final jobs he undertook as a retired Law Lord. He found that the air marshalls had effectively inferred negligence from the absence of any evidence to the contrary, a decision that would have been impermissible in any civil court; and that they were therefore wrong to have reached the conclusion they did.
As Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Secretary at the time of the original inquiry, wrote in the Sunday Herald, shortly after my father’s report was published: “The immediate reaction of the government was made by armed forces minister Adam Ingram within hours of the publication of the report. He could hardly have had time to read it, but he appeared to dismiss it as containing nothing new. The implication was that the government would not budge.”
My father was quietly furious, not because this was yet another report the government was going to kick into the long grass, but because he felt the case against the young pilots was far from proven and feared that a genuine injustice was being perpetrated against them. Sad then that he didn’t live to hear the news, just this week, that the BBC have uncovered an RAF internal report, written two years before the accident, which seriously questioned the airworthiness of the Chinook on a number of counts. The report had never been seen by any of the previous inquiries; the clear implication being that it had been buried by the MoD.
Another review is currently under way and now, at last, it seems that the pilots’ names may be cleared and the families might see the justice their sons deserve. All of which leaves one gasping at the cynicism of an organisation that would rather blame two young men than admit to its own failings. Though perhaps that’s a naïve view. Even in these more transparent times, the MoD carries with it a hefty legacy of secrecy.
On the other hand, maybe the MoD is not so different from the many other organisations where that kind of cynicism and secrecy and lack of proper regard for individuals is a fact of daily life. On the Dark Angels course at Merton we talked a lot about the parlous state of dysfunction that so many organisations seem to have reached these days. Mark Watkins, who lives and works in Denmark, put it particularly well with this description of a kind of reverse alchemy: “Imagine you’re on your way to your first day in a new job. You’re full of enthusiasm, purpose, the wish to contribute, to make a difference, to be useful. How hard does your organisation then have to work to turn that gold into lead, that energy into apathy?” The answer is either quite hard, or not very hard at all. Both are sadly true.
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