One of the downsides of checking into my Yahoo email account is the full frontal news assault which I can’t escape during the two step process to my inbox.
Early in the morning it’s relentless and gratuitous. ‘Grandmother finds axe murderer in spare bedroom.’ ‘Five-year-old savaged by bull terrier.’ These stories are at the hard news end and they’re barring the way into my day.
They could be playing out in Willenhall or Wellesbourne, Solihull or Sierra Leone. I’ve no idea how they connect with my life and right now I haven’t time to wonder. They’re leeching my attention while I’m trying to do something that matters and so their gut-wrenching irrelevance is flagged up. I switch off.
Maybe I should try harder. In olden days my eye would be caught by the front page newspaper headline on the mat. The font size told me ‘this is the biggest news of the day and you need to know it’. Fair enough. Thirty seconds is enough to scan the standfirst and skim the content for the main facts of the case. But Yahoo doesn’t sleep and doesn’t have a copy deadline. 24/7 the stories keep coming even though there’s still nothing new under the sun.
Just replay after replay of the same old, same old human dramas.
This has been going on for a long time. More and more, journalists are talking brazenly about stories; a good story, a breaking story, an incredible story, an inspiring story. Do you have any stories? True or surgically enhanced… it makes no real difference. It’s all in your mind. Compulsive news-eaters will gobble them up, hungry for lurid stories to entertain the idling corners of their brains.
The places where imagination used to lurk.
Morning stories? The characters living them don’t think they’re fiction. Their stories are real and messy. And although you’ll never get to see, feel or taste the reality of them, they usually involve hardcore stuff like blood, drugs, weapons, tragedy, rampant egos and pointless loss of life. Swallowed whole with your Shreddies.
No wonder genuine storytelling is in revival. Stories that make you picture good and hopeful things, the heroic struggle against enemies followed by moral or actual victory, the glow of achievement and reunion with loved ones at the end. You know the sort of thing. Stories that make you feel good.
Happy ever after? All stories should be. Otherwise they’re incomplete and not ready for the telling.
Monday 7 December 2009
Wednesday 2 December 2009
Behind the mask
Just read a piece by the ‘great travel writer’ Jan Morris in the Guardian today. I’ve never heard of her but am willing to accept that is entirely down to my ignorance.
My attention was captured by Jan’s attitude to the cities she has visited in a career spanning many decades. Intriguingly, she treats the places she’s visited as people. She’s met them in favourable or unfavourable circumstances at a certain point in time and a relationship has developed of either liking or loathing on both sides.
Yes, that’s right. Jan’s relationships with cities are very definitely reciprocal.
I am one with this. I always feel very black and white about places, especially cities. It is just like meeting a person. You immediately become aware of their personality and whether it’s a good fit with yours. In the case of cities, you either like how they look (architecture, street plan, public spaces) – or you don’t. You either warm to the people (they’re friendly, energetic, helpful or vibrant) – or you don’t.
But there’s something else as well. All cities have their own unmistakeable atmosphere. Perhaps this is the sum total of everything - people, architecture, public spaces, and the businesses that call the city home. But it’s also something less tangible. It’s essence itself and it includes the history, whether turbulent or serene, and location, especially if it’s on a river, beside a mountain or on the coast.
Cities I have known and loved? Bursa in Turkey is one. I spent a year there and constructed a complicated relationship with that metropolis. Nudging the foothills of Uludag (Great Mountain) the city can’t escape the massive mountain rising just behind. It dominates the weather bringing heavy snow in winter and oven-temperature heat in summer. And it dominates the citizens’ thinking as well as it moves in and out of focus like a camera lens (again depending on weather conditions and visibility).
Cities I haven’t? San Sebastian left a strong impression. It might have been because I was tired (and I definitely was because we were camping and there was a thunderstorm right through the night), but I went there ready to love it and just didn’t. It seemed on the surface to have everything – beaches, headlands, shops and cafes, a vibrant population… but something didn’t add up. It just didn’t feel right. We headed back over the border next morning.
I’ve never been back. Just like friendships it’s best to move on. New places, urban spaces, to stimulate your mind and shift your soul. Just glance through a ‘city break’ travel brochure or surf a travel website and notice which places, pictures and descriptions lift your heart.
Who knows, it may be your new city friend calling you home.
My attention was captured by Jan’s attitude to the cities she has visited in a career spanning many decades. Intriguingly, she treats the places she’s visited as people. She’s met them in favourable or unfavourable circumstances at a certain point in time and a relationship has developed of either liking or loathing on both sides.
Yes, that’s right. Jan’s relationships with cities are very definitely reciprocal.
I am one with this. I always feel very black and white about places, especially cities. It is just like meeting a person. You immediately become aware of their personality and whether it’s a good fit with yours. In the case of cities, you either like how they look (architecture, street plan, public spaces) – or you don’t. You either warm to the people (they’re friendly, energetic, helpful or vibrant) – or you don’t.
But there’s something else as well. All cities have their own unmistakeable atmosphere. Perhaps this is the sum total of everything - people, architecture, public spaces, and the businesses that call the city home. But it’s also something less tangible. It’s essence itself and it includes the history, whether turbulent or serene, and location, especially if it’s on a river, beside a mountain or on the coast.
Cities I have known and loved? Bursa in Turkey is one. I spent a year there and constructed a complicated relationship with that metropolis. Nudging the foothills of Uludag (Great Mountain) the city can’t escape the massive mountain rising just behind. It dominates the weather bringing heavy snow in winter and oven-temperature heat in summer. And it dominates the citizens’ thinking as well as it moves in and out of focus like a camera lens (again depending on weather conditions and visibility).
Cities I haven’t? San Sebastian left a strong impression. It might have been because I was tired (and I definitely was because we were camping and there was a thunderstorm right through the night), but I went there ready to love it and just didn’t. It seemed on the surface to have everything – beaches, headlands, shops and cafes, a vibrant population… but something didn’t add up. It just didn’t feel right. We headed back over the border next morning.
I’ve never been back. Just like friendships it’s best to move on. New places, urban spaces, to stimulate your mind and shift your soul. Just glance through a ‘city break’ travel brochure or surf a travel website and notice which places, pictures and descriptions lift your heart.
Who knows, it may be your new city friend calling you home.
Sunday 29 November 2009
Can you spare a moment to be surveyed?
Doing a survey quickly makes you aware of one thing. The vast majority of people have a lot of trouble answering a question clearly and simply.
It would be reassuring to think that the survey designers were considering their difficulties when they drew up their questions. You know, gentle opening, introduction of subject in plain English, logical sequence from question to question, taking previous answers into account of course.
It's not always the case. In fact they’re more likely to be thinking of their client’s marketing requirements.
A range of ethnic groups, age diversity from 18 to 80, socio-economic status from A to E, all culled straight from the phone book. And all struggling at this unearthly hour, as good, true and honest citizens of these dominions will, to second guess your intentions and deliver the answers you want to hear.
But what DO you want to know, I wonder, as I dial the seventieth number of the day and start my spiel. ‘COULD you spare a moment …?’
In this case my charm works. The lady respondent neither ‘has visitors’, nor is ‘just on my way out’ or ‘right in the middle of cooking scrambled eggs’. She can spare two or three minutes and there is not a lot better that being told your opinion matters.
‘So,’ I venture, ‘how many pieces of fruit and veg do you eat in a day?’ It’s a challenging opener, unique in its ability to befuddle, confuse and polarise.
Are we talking about pieces as in parts of a whole? If you have an apple, say, with your breakfast and cut it into quarters, does that amount to four pieces? It’s difficult to say. And if you have five types of veg with your pork loin and fruit salad to follow does that satisfy your quota for a week?
The media, health professionals, doctors, nurses, dieticians, all remind us repeatedly that we should eat fruit and veg at five different times during the day. But it’s hard to quantify, not to mention hard to achieve.
Meanwhile I strive to keep on message. A supremely effective tactic of the lost and confused is to go off at a tangent. Despairing of understanding your questioning thrust, they meander off and tell you all about their very own personal dietary approach.
It’s not that I’m not interested. Just that I only have three minutes to get the answers I’m paid for.
Several questions later we veer round the bend into the final lap. This is the heart of the survey. Does my respondent seriously think that free cooking courses might be a good idea, even though she has fifty years’ experience, has raised six children and 18 grandchildren and knows more about nutrition that any of us raised in the junk food era. It’s patronising. It’s also showing clearly that the question-mongers have not thought this through. In their single-pronged assault on the nutritionally ignorant, they just haven’t allowed for the range of knowledge and experience that actually resides in the population.
Many of my mature lady respondents brush off such disrespect with contempt. ‘Would you like information to be available about preparing low-cost healthy meals?’ I murmur in an even tone, hoping my words will be lost somewhere down the line and she will say ‘yes’ just to save time.
‘My dear, I brought up six children on war-time rations. I think I know as much about this as I’m ever going to learn’.
I’ve even been called ‘young lady’. Music to my ears now I am decidedly not.
They’re understanding though. Everyone knows that surveys are the new national service. No matter how trite, irritating and irrelevant the questions, you just smile inwardly, think of the nation and offer your response. It’s all for the highest social good and practically everyone now accepts that surveys are integral to how society works. We just have to keep on believing that they garner some vacuous, twilight truths about what people actually think.
I’m heading into the final straight now. The ubiquitous demographic details. Postcode so we can place you, age (so we can get a spread), ethnic group (and the glaring truth that a very large number of people deeply resent the moniker of White–British and insist on their Englishness). ‘Would be you be willing to participate in future surveys?’ Some do, ‘if you can catch me in’.
It’s all over, the boxes are checked, contact details recorded. They walk free (perhaps with a smug, virtuous feeling to help them through the day).
I’m on to the next Watt in the BT Phonebook. ‘Er, I’m calling on behalf of …’
It would be reassuring to think that the survey designers were considering their difficulties when they drew up their questions. You know, gentle opening, introduction of subject in plain English, logical sequence from question to question, taking previous answers into account of course.
It's not always the case. In fact they’re more likely to be thinking of their client’s marketing requirements.
A range of ethnic groups, age diversity from 18 to 80, socio-economic status from A to E, all culled straight from the phone book. And all struggling at this unearthly hour, as good, true and honest citizens of these dominions will, to second guess your intentions and deliver the answers you want to hear.
But what DO you want to know, I wonder, as I dial the seventieth number of the day and start my spiel. ‘COULD you spare a moment …?’
In this case my charm works. The lady respondent neither ‘has visitors’, nor is ‘just on my way out’ or ‘right in the middle of cooking scrambled eggs’. She can spare two or three minutes and there is not a lot better that being told your opinion matters.
‘So,’ I venture, ‘how many pieces of fruit and veg do you eat in a day?’ It’s a challenging opener, unique in its ability to befuddle, confuse and polarise.
Are we talking about pieces as in parts of a whole? If you have an apple, say, with your breakfast and cut it into quarters, does that amount to four pieces? It’s difficult to say. And if you have five types of veg with your pork loin and fruit salad to follow does that satisfy your quota for a week?
The media, health professionals, doctors, nurses, dieticians, all remind us repeatedly that we should eat fruit and veg at five different times during the day. But it’s hard to quantify, not to mention hard to achieve.
Meanwhile I strive to keep on message. A supremely effective tactic of the lost and confused is to go off at a tangent. Despairing of understanding your questioning thrust, they meander off and tell you all about their very own personal dietary approach.
It’s not that I’m not interested. Just that I only have three minutes to get the answers I’m paid for.
Several questions later we veer round the bend into the final lap. This is the heart of the survey. Does my respondent seriously think that free cooking courses might be a good idea, even though she has fifty years’ experience, has raised six children and 18 grandchildren and knows more about nutrition that any of us raised in the junk food era. It’s patronising. It’s also showing clearly that the question-mongers have not thought this through. In their single-pronged assault on the nutritionally ignorant, they just haven’t allowed for the range of knowledge and experience that actually resides in the population.
Many of my mature lady respondents brush off such disrespect with contempt. ‘Would you like information to be available about preparing low-cost healthy meals?’ I murmur in an even tone, hoping my words will be lost somewhere down the line and she will say ‘yes’ just to save time.
‘My dear, I brought up six children on war-time rations. I think I know as much about this as I’m ever going to learn’.
I’ve even been called ‘young lady’. Music to my ears now I am decidedly not.
They’re understanding though. Everyone knows that surveys are the new national service. No matter how trite, irritating and irrelevant the questions, you just smile inwardly, think of the nation and offer your response. It’s all for the highest social good and practically everyone now accepts that surveys are integral to how society works. We just have to keep on believing that they garner some vacuous, twilight truths about what people actually think.
I’m heading into the final straight now. The ubiquitous demographic details. Postcode so we can place you, age (so we can get a spread), ethnic group (and the glaring truth that a very large number of people deeply resent the moniker of White–British and insist on their Englishness). ‘Would be you be willing to participate in future surveys?’ Some do, ‘if you can catch me in’.
It’s all over, the boxes are checked, contact details recorded. They walk free (perhaps with a smug, virtuous feeling to help them through the day).
I’m on to the next Watt in the BT Phonebook. ‘Er, I’m calling on behalf of …’
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