Travellers’ tales

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
This time next week I’ll be in the Galician town of Sarria, preparing for the first of six days’ walking along the Camino de Santiago. Santiago, of course, is Saint James, after whom I’m named – though it was a close thing, apparently, since my birthday is actually Michaelmas Day, September 29, and I was nearly christened Michael. But even though I’m not in any way religious, and we’re walking the pilgrimage route for whatever experience it brings us, I enjoy the thought that our destination will be Santiago de Compostela, the last resting place of the man who would have been my name saint, were I to have one. It lends extra meaning to the journey.

Sarria is 115 kilometres from Santiago and our journey involves the slightly back-to-front process of flying to Santiago, spending our first night there, then taking a bus up country to Sarria, whence we walk back again to Santiago along the pilgrimage route. The travel company simply moves our luggage each day from one hotel to the next, an average of 20 kms per day.
A few weeks ago our travel documents arrived in an oddly bulky envelope which, along with the brochure and reservations, included two scallop shells. My first thought was that they must be drinking scoops for use at springs along the way. I wasn’t wrong, but there are many other interpretations too. The scallop is closely associated with the mythology of Saint James and the washing ashore of his shipwrecked body. It’s also a metaphor for the pilgrim, the shell washed up on the shores of Galicia as the pilgrim is guided there by the hand of God. And finally its converging grooves represent the many different routes that converge on Santiago from all over Europe.
But it’s also simply a badge of pilgrimage. And I very much like the idea of being a pilgrim, of making a journey that has no secular purpose. We’re not walking to bring news to someone, we’re not walking to attend a feast, we’re not walking to market, and yet the journey has a very distinct destination – the cathedral of Santiago and the relics that lie therein. Having said that, a pilgrimage is also a case par excellence where it’s the journey that matters almost more than the destination; the calming, meditative value of simply walking, and the slow, gentle connection with one’s natural surroundings that it brings.
Then there’s the company of other pilgrims – and the Canterbury Tales immediately spring to mind. Who will we fall in with along the way (in 1985, 690 people made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela; last year it was more than a quarter of a million)? What stories will we hear – either from recreational pilgrims like us or, maybe more interestingly, from those with a real religious motive? I haven’t made much use of the small black Moleskine recently, but this is one holiday when I will definitely be taking one with me. I see this as a pilgrimage to some inner place of peaceful reflection (and perhaps that’s what God is), but it’s the thought of what lies en route that really excites me.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t post for the next couple of weeks.
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Indian elephant

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey

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

This afternoon I had a meeting in my sixth-floor room. One of my Indian visitors stood at the window and pointed down to where an ancient tractor was slowly ploughing a strip of field.
‘That chap’s probably sitting on twenty million,’ he said.
In hindsight, I’m not sure whether he meant rupees or dollars. But even if it was the former, that would be close to £300,000, a fortune for a small farmer. Only twenty-five years ago, most of modern Gurgaon was like that – open farmland. Fifteen miles from Delhi, there was an ancient town here, but nothing resembling a city.
Today Gurgaon has 1.5 million inhabitants and in the course of a single week you can practically see the skyline change as cranes swing to and fro and new business centres, apartment blocks or ‘convenience malls’ inch upwards. It’s the second biggest city in Haryana province and the first Indian city to have distributed electricity to every household. It has the third highest per capita income in the country and would be far higher than eleventh in the national ‘life-after-work’ index were it not for its abysmal roads and public transport system (and that despite being at the end of the new Delhi metro line).
But this is India, and the statistics take on a comically different perspective when you emerge from a meeting in a gleaming new corporate headquarters, pass through the security lodge, step out onto the street and trip over a pig.
Though I’ve yet to see an elephant here, I can’t help feeling Ganesha must be smiling on Gurgaon. I’ve always felt an affinity for the jolly, pot-bellied mono-tusker. There’s something irresistibly life-affirming about him. He makes me want to pat his fat tummy and tweak his trunk. I also like the fact that in some representations he’s holding a pen, though I didn’t know until today (99 Thoughts on Ganesha is my Gurgaon reading this time) that at the request of the sage Vyasa, he wrote down the whole of the Mahabharata in a single day. Respect, Ganesha!
He’s also the embodiment of prosperity and material auspiciousness. It must have been an inkling of this that sent me searching for a little silver statue of him on the last afternoon of an earlier trip to Delhi, a holiday that time, of which I later wrote:

You could have gone your own way
In search of silk or bolts of cotton
But on that final frantic afternoon
You followed me without complaint
In and out of shops and stalls
Where swarthy men drank tea
And proffered trays of stones
Agate, lapis lazuli, cornelian
Until at last we found him
Thumb-high, smiling
Pot-bellied, pen-wielding
Merriment with a trunk
I brought him home
And sat him on my desk
My little silver one-tusk
Fragment of the east, fellow scribe
Bringer of wealth, so they say
Though when I think about him now
It isn’t earthly riches that I see
But your patient hand in mine
That last hot Delhi afternoon
   Now, five years on, I can’t help wondering whether perhaps he himself has had a hand in my return to India, in the new and bountiful relationship I’m enjoying with this flourishing, infuriating and utterly captivating country.
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Striking a balance

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey

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

To echo the point made by fellow writer Tim Rich in his excellent post from last week’s 66,000 Miles Per Hour, both are a kind of calisthenics, one for the brain and one for the soul, and I’ve come to depend on them to keep me in balance. When yesterday, towards the end of a punishing week, after a lightning strike had knocked out our local power and forced me to drive fifteen miles to the library in Perth in order to continue working, it looked for a little while as if I was going to have to forego both, something inside me protested insistently.
In the end it was the blog that gave way. Despite feeling utterly exhausted, I went to the pub, drank a pint of Guinness, played for an hour-and-a-half, and as a result had the first really good night’s sleep I’d had all week. Just as well, since I leave in a couple of hours’ time on the first leg of the journey to Hyderabad. On Monday I’m going to be running a workshop for an international group of 50 high-flyers on the first day of a year-long fast-track leadership programme; and this is the real source of the exhaustion.
I’m going with my friend and colleague Paul Pinson, who for many years ran his own Edinburgh-based theatre company, Boilerhouse. Paul is no stranger to moving large numbers of people about. In fact, our 50 are a mere scattering compared to some of the crowds he’s had marching about the streets of Edinburgh, the coastal dunes of Holland, and other places where he’s mounted site-specific productions. Nevertheless, the planning of this single day (which we’re then repeating with two other groups) has involved ten times more work than I’d ever imagined. I knew it was turning into a marathon when Paul said, ‘this is beginning to remind me why I eventually wound Boilerhouse down’.
But there’s a strong undercurrent of excitement that has carried us through each successive physical and mental barrier. We’re going to be taking these people on the first steps of a journey which, if we’re successful, will be much more significant to them than the physical one Paul and I are making from Scotland to India.
For me, meanwhile, it has been more a matter of gymnastics than calisthenics. But it does remind me how important is the balance between the two.
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Overconnected

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
Hyper-connectivity is not a word I’d heard until yesterday lunch-time, or if I had, it hadn’t registered.
It has now.
I was listening to three writers talking on Radio 4 about how our lives are being affected by our unprecedented exposure to information and to each other. They were an American writer who had realised that it was jeopardising his family relationships and has since written a best-selling book on the subject, a young journalist who admitted, among other things, that her smartphone had got her through the isolation of early motherhood, and a columnist who considers himself ‘not quite a luddite’, yet still can’t organise his email and only reluctantly uses a mobile phone.
They all had interesting, thoughtful things to say about the phenomenon and they were all more or less in agreement that hyper-connectivity has benefits, including the capacity to open up new neural pathways in the brain; but they also agreed that if we don’t manage it well it can be harmful. There were three phrases that particularly stuck in my mind: ‘the traffic jam inside my head’, ‘we need to get back into our bodies’, and ‘we run the risk of not thinking deeply any more’.
In general, I like it all. I’ve come to see the the Internet, email, texting, Twitter, LinkedIn as essential tools of my trade and I believe that I couldn’t make a living without them; but I also enjoy them and find them stimulating. Nevertheless, they dominate much of my waking day and I recognise that they’re responsible for the constant feeling of slight breathlessness that I now seem to live with.
The ‘traffic jam’ I know only too well, and I try – not always successfully – to respond to it by shunting the unnecessary stuff to the back of the queue (and my mind). The ‘getting back in my body’, which is actually the antidote to the traffic jam, I do mainly by swimming and playing the piano. It’s the ‘thinking deeply’ that I find more of a problem.
I’m particularly conscious of it this week because I’ve just received the first copies of Room 121, my new book, co-written with John Simmons. Those three months over last winter when we were writing it, exchanging on an almost daily basis the blog posts that form each chapter, were a period of deep thinking because the time was ring-fenced; it had to be or we wouldn’t have met our deadline. And I’m proud of what we created because I believe that, thanks to that deep thought, the book goes way beyond the professional remit expressed in the sub-title: a masterclass in writing and communicating in business. At its core it’s a book about being true to oneself, about finding an authentic voice whatever one does, business leader or bus driver.
But as soon as we finished it, hyper-connected life crashed back into the almost sacred space we had created for ourselves and the deep thinking time was lost. Now I’m left with the frustration that while my life seems particularly rich in experience, my resulting view of the world feels only half-formed because I don’t have enough time to reflect on it. I know I need time to think deeply in order to do what I do better, and I know that hyper-connectivity is the main reason I don’t have it.
This strikes me as being one of the really big issues at this moment in our development as human beings; the way we choose to deal with it will be crucial to the direction society takes next. Yet perhaps my personal response to it needs be nothing more complicated than this: just write another book.
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Repent, repent

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
Alone in a glass case in the Church section at the back of level three of the National Museum of Scotland stand two objects which, at first glance, seem quite unexceptional. One is a square wooden chair. The other, draped on a display dummy, is a dull-looking gown.

On closer inspection, the chair reveals nothing. It is simply dark and polished with use. The gown is odd, though. It is not made of any fine stuff, but rather sackcloth, now worn and threadbare. It is not a garment for grand occasions.
But this is the Church section, remember, and the church in question is an unforgiving kirk where questing nostrils were constantly alert to the stench of moral turpitude, and the salvation of souls was prosecuted with much energy, zeal and inventiveness. The chair and garment are two of the great seventeenth and eighteenth century instruments of ecclesiastical discipline. Otherwise known as the Stool and Gown of Repentance, they were to be sat upon, or worn, in front of the congregation, by fornicators, adulterers, slanderers and other wrongdoers.
Jonet Gothskirk was one such. Between July and November 1677 she appeared before the congregation of West Calder kirk on thirteen successive Sundays for her adultery with a certain William Murdoch. ‘Because of her stupidity and that she could discover no sense or feeling of her sin, nor sorrow for ye same,’ she continued to wear the gown each Sunday, week after week, while the minister fulminated at her wickedness. Nature eventually intervened and she was released on account of the imminent arrival of her child.
But what did she feel, what did she think to herself while she stood there, Sunday after Sunday, her belly swelling, her legs aching, the sackcloth scratching at her skin? Did she look out at the congregation and read behind the pursed lips, the solemn faces, ‘There but by the grace of God go I’? Did she glance at the minister and rage at the hypocrisy that the Bard would immortalise a century later in Holy Willie’s Prayer? Was she so cowed by the collective opprobrium that she simply stood there and hung her head in misery? Did she long to be back in the arms of William Murdoch for whom no punishment was recorded? Was she simply resigned to her fate? Or was she too fearful for her own future, and that of her child, to think of anything but what she would do when her present ordeal ended?
I don’t know, but I have to find out. The Gown of Repentance is my 26 Treasures object. This is the repeat of last year’s 26 project with the V&A, which we’re running this year with the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Wales and the Royal Ulster Museum. I have to find out because now that I’ve been to see the gown, it’s Jonet’s voice I’m beginning to hear. I don’t yet know her well enough to know what she’s saying, but I will. By the end of July, the project deadline, Jonet will have spoken. 
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Ex libris

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey
The thing I most remember from my student days about the main Aberdeen University library was the carved mouse climbing the leg of each chair. It was a lovely touch, irreverent yet also somehow appropriate to what I remember as being quite an intimate nineteenth century reading room.

On Wednesday I was back at the university for a meeting. I was a little early so I bought a sandwich and ate it in the sunshine outside King’s College ­– a glorious setting with the medieval buildings, the lawn and shady trees, and little groups of students, also enjoying the sunshine, sprawled on the grass, deep in conversation.
It was a moment of intense nostalgia as I remembered my own summers there, especially the last; and the long, long days, reading outdoors till eleven pm, as we revised for exams. It must have been round about this week, I thought, mid-June. And then it struck me that having graduated in 1971 I was, quite accidentally, marking the fortieth anniversary of my finals. It was an odd feeling, both pleasant and disconcerting.  I really don’t think of myself as someone who graduated forty years ago.
Then came another surprise. As I got up to walk to the meeting, I noticed a large glass cube towering into the sky, just the other side of the campus – the brand new £60 million university library, due to open in September. I know all about it because I wrote much of the original literature for the project, but I hadn’t yet seen it in the flesh, so to speak. I couldn’t go in, but from what I know it will be a marvel, a library of the future, a mere stone’s throw from the fifteenth century buildings of the old campus. It seems entirely right that the university has chosen to make its most conspicuous architectural statement with a library.
Yesterday it was another library, as we launched the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2011 programme in the grand, second-floor reference section of Edinburgh’s splendid Victorian Central Library. It’s a big space, lit by huge south, west and east-facing windows, and it was packed to the gunwales with authors, publishers, agents, journalists, sponsors and people from all the other organisations, including competing festivals, that make up literary Scotland.
It was an inspiring event with brilliant presentations by both Janet Smyth, the new children’s programme director, and Nick Barley, the main programme director, now into his second season. Revolution, inspired particularly, but not exclusively, by the Arab spring, is the theme this year. There was a buzz afterwards, a sense of collective engagement with the big events that are shaping the world around us; and as always I felt privileged to be part of this festival, the largest of its kind in the world, which may have books and authors at its heart but is in reality about so much more.
This year there was something else as well: a deeper sense of connection with our purpose, coupled with a palpable feeling of solidarity, arising from the fact that we were in Edinburgh’s main public library. A library is, after all, the ultimate symbol of a free and civilised society. What does it say that we live in times when they are being closed?
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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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