Don Roberto

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rebel talk

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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Skating backwards

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gone dancing

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Temples of Mammon

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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War Horse

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Truth in Assynt

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s very simple really.

People like truth.

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Memorabilia

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hold me

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Out of the darkness

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Jamie Jauncey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who’s that in the cave?’ I asked.

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

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

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

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