Brilliant.
Man just turned up at the door with a nice box. My books from Taschen.
Good packaging with those huge air bubbles and all the books in perfect order despite being supposedly damaged stock.
So far I’ve glanced at the book on Tado Ando, the Japanese architect, and I’ve in love with it already.
There’s one called Trespass which is a sort of ode to the Banksy brigade of urban art graffiti artists and then Brand Identity Now, which will be with me on the train to London in a bit, in fact very soon.
I hope the weather down south is better than here, bloody great hail stones hammering down on Manchester at the moment. They suit my mood though. I feel a bit thundery myself, no doubt in part due to the large number of beers imbibed last night in town before an excellent curry at East 2 East, which I reckon is Manchester centre’s finest.
Better pop a couple of pills and order a cab. No time for taxi now. Silly arse that I am.
Sat on the train now, unusually empty and I’ve got a table seat to myself. Not that I’m going to work though. What I really need is a pillow. It won’t be a difficult meeting, but nonetheless I need to be on the ball. In my memory print suddenly gets a whole lot cheaper when the buyer starts to walk away.
I love books. I buy more books than I read. I love book shops. And even though I think I’d love a kindle for reading at night, or for the convenience of just popping it into my pocket, I reckon I’d still buy a hard copy of most of the books that I read.
I got carried away on the Taschen website on Sunday night and popped several into my virtual basket, but knowing the danger of shopping after a few drinks I was sensible enough to not go to the checkout until Tuesday. But then I went for it. Architecture, branding, art. Yee ha! Hope the delivery comes before the weekend, and when I’m here alone so I don’t have to justify my frivolous purchasing.
I’ll take the branding book with me to London next week to swot up on my way to the printers in london which I found through the city visitor site, but who turned out to be hugely helpful. they’re going to be doing some work for a client who seems to be using me as his marketing manager as well as business advisor. Have to admit I quite enjoy it as I get to practise a bit more of what I preach.
But back to the books. I don’t care for paper diaries, but Taschen say they’ll send a free one of theirs, I guess they have a few thousand left that they need to shed. I reckon I might even start using it for a retro feel.
This morning I got up at 7.30 which is about usual.
Took the dog to the park and wandered around on our own for a while, and then met a few friends until there were seven of us. Seven dogs can make a fair old rumpus and ours were doing their best to make their presence felt today.
There was a fairly big terrier that’s probably the only dog I don’t like around here, not helped by the fact that I don’t like its owner much either. I love the dog’s energy and the distance he shrinks with his bounding gate, but what I don’t like is the way he plays – seriously hard. He usually has a bleeding ear and often a bleeding leg from where it has got too much for his unwilling play mates. His technique is to either bite ears or actually bite the other dog’s mouth.
They’re pretty well immune to pain and mine somehow puts up with this treatment every now and then, but today she was having none of it. She fought back hard and there was some awful noise. Then her biggest friend, a massive newfoundland, starting body slamming the terrier to great effect, The little fellow soon got the message and sloped off to annoy someone else.
But as I watch her sleeping beside me now it doesn’t seem possible that the aggression and speed could be so completely contained just an hour later and sleep be all she cares about.
And yesterday the beleaguered business secretary finally laid out his plans to restrict executive pay.
And what a lash up it is!
It’s a chalice indeed this one. There is doubtless deep dissatisfaction in the country about the completely crazy amounts some of the bosses are being paid, but how do you work it out? Can you just work on a multiplier on the lowest salary? Or perhaps of the average? The lowest is unlikely to have any responsibility and no worry, so how do you quantify the difference between them and the person at the top? Perhaps the company average could make sense? When I was consulting at The Co-operative I’d guess the average salary in head office was something like £30k, the then chief executive was pulling around a million. So a 30 x multiplier. Would he have done the job for half a million? Probably. So does that mean they were wasting half a million a year on one guy? Probably.
And how funny that the guys trying to sort out the situation are all on less than a £100k. Hard luck Vince.
Last night I spent far too long in a place called The Bar in Chorlton with my mate Carla who was bursting with excitement over a fellow she’d met through the Parship dating site. I dearly like Carla, and yes, I would, and so I’m dead chuffed for her, but I didn’t really want to know just how wonderful this fellow is. It left me feeling like a bit stuck in the mud. So I just drank too much as she wittered on. Bless!
And now as a consequence the grey of the day suits the grey of my mood.
You know how it is when someone gives you a book for a present (in this case Christmas), but the person themselves is someone you don’t share any reading with? You wonder whether their choice will suit? I’m so fussy (in most things actually) that buying anything for me is a risky business. Mrs G rarely buys me clothes for that reason and I’ve long ago asked mother and sister not to either.
Well Mrs G’s mum bought me two books for Christmas by the same author, this fellow Robert Ryan, who it turns out, takes history and turns it into novels, such as the Great Train Robbery, Lawrence of Arabia and the like.
The first I read, Empire of Sand, loosely based on the life of TE Lawrence, was OK, but not much better than that. But I’ve just finished Death on the Ice, a story of Robert Falcon Scott’s two Antarctic Expeditions, and found myself thinking about it when I wasn’t reading, wanting to get back to it to find out more.
As it nearer the grim and inevitable end that we all know something of I was happy to sacrifice the company of friends to plough through the final stages of the disastrous journey. The descriptions of the pain, or the rotting of flesh on loving men, and the culmination of so many little things going wrong was truly awful and no man could read it without feeling a deep chill and dread.
I’ve never been drawn to the extremes of temperature at either end of the scale. So to contemplate man hauling sleds through minus 40 or worse, with no food, ancient kit, no hope of warmth. It makes me shiver even now.
It’s not a brilliant read, but it was good and educational and I liked it for that.
This morning I heard that the Chinese State Investment Company had taken a 10% stake in one of our water companies.
OK. They are PLCs and there should be little control over who buys what, but such news does bring out a scary xenophobia in me.
Our power companies are mainly French and German. The whole of Europe is becoming ever more dependent on the morally corrupt Russians for natural gas.
So what happens if we fall out with these guys? I mean like really fall out? Like we’re at war with them?
Hell, we’ve been at war with the French throughout history, yet now one of our major electricity suppliers is owned by the nationalised French EDF. So it’s a nationalised industry in France, But they own part of ours?
Picture this. We’re back at war with France. We’re bombing the bejesus out of each other. Then some cunning general just decides to flick a switch and the whole of the south west of England has no power. OK, it’s taking things to an extreme, but am I the only one worrying about this?
The gas pipelines are the biggest concern though. Running through some pretty unstable previously Soviet states I know what I’d target if I was a terrorist wanting to make a major strike for my cause.
What a jolly though to lead into the weekend with!
I usually work from home, occasionally going out to meetings or to run workshops for clients.
The great side of that is that I can walk the dog, and come straight in and sit at the desk and start thinking, working or whatever. The down side of that is that I often sit in my dog walking clothes all day long. While that’s definitely slovenly it too has its obvious advantage in that I’m already dressed for the next dog walk which comes just before dark (because she doesn’t like the dark much, but is better if it becomes dark while we’re out, rather than venturing out into the dark). And truly I guess it doesn’t matter, but given that I used to be oh so smart at work, it’s a bit of a come down.
Today though I have an important and scary telephone meeting where I’m pitching to do some consultancy for a small Swiss bank. Small they may be, but they are big enough as a business to get involved in Formula One sponsorship.
I started writing my notes early this morning, then at 7.30 I took the dog out for an hour. I came in, showered, tidied my beard (if i said I had a shave people would expect to see me clean shaven rather than just a bit neater), quick squirt of perfume (Penhaligons Castile) and then dressed in an ironed shirt and great trousers, I even put shoes on.
And it has worked. I feel ready to take on the call. In fact I’m really looking forward to it. But I am scared as hell. It has been years since I did something like this. I’ll be reporting back. 20 minutes to go.
Tonight we try again at training the dog.
We’ve had her a while now.
She’s actually pretty cool most of the time, and is certainly easy to live with.
But I get jealous as hell every time I meet a friend who has a german pointer who is so well trained I just stand and look on in awe.
Fact is it makes a lot of difference how the person is just as much as how the dog is, and with that in mind I expect to be trained at least as much as the dog will be. It’s about me and Mrs G being consistent. Firm but not angry. Confident. All those attributes I don’t have on a regular basis. We’ll see.
Thinking back, the thing that made her harder to train in the first place is that she just isn’t that interested in food, and so will just not even think about jumping through hoops to get a bit of meat. Not even raw meat let alone a dried piece of something smelly from the pet shop.
I’ll report back tomorrow.
I don’t watch a lot of TV, but we caught the Richard Wilson rant against automated call services last night and although teh programme and the man got on my nerves I do find the whole topic interesting.
I have a lot of sympathy for the topic and while I find the systems clever, I also find them utterly infuriating. Where I lost patience a little was when he took his rant to the parking machines. In my experience it’s a choice whether you pay by phone or coin. Is that not the case everywhere? If there are areas where you can’t but pay by phone I think that is a huge imposition, especially on the older folk, many of whom don’t have mobiles, and those who do are often sort of scared of using them.
Just writing this reminded me of the need to change the registration details of my car with Ringo who run a lot of the mobile call meters. It was easy. Really easy. I actually like the meters you can pay on the phone as I rarely have enough cash on my. The slight down side for me is the fact that I usually pay for more time than I would if I did have the cash on me, just because it doesn’t seem like real money.
So back to Grumpy old man Wilson. Yep, got the point. Should have been 30 minutes not an hour. And it scares me how many people will be losing their jobs as a consequence of such systems. And so so cheap!
What was I thinking of?
I love a hand of poker in the pub now and then. I especially like it when we’re away in some remote place in Scotland or Cornwall and it feels like you’re gone back in time, sitting around, bottle of whiskey, maybe a hunk of good cheese and some of those fab Fumbles biscuits.
I even like a little go now and then on the computer if I’m home alone for a while.
But last night it all went a bit silly.
I played Texas Hold ‘em Poker from about nine through to a time I’m not about to put into print, and ok I had fun, and the rush came (and went) and while I lost money it wasn’t that much. But a grown man. Spending all night alone playing poker oinline. It just doesn’t seem right.
But it wasn’t so much the hours and the poker, it was the whiskey that was the big problem.
Trying to recreate that Scottish island croft feel I made my way through far too much Tobermoray.
Feeling grim now. Silly arse.