Guns

I very rarely post about Madness even though they're my favourite band. Over the last few days however I've been reminded of a song they wrote back in 1984 in support of CND, a cause they were lending their support to at the time.

The song was a 'throwaway B-side' to the sublime single 'One Better Day'. Madness were trying to make a difficult transition at the time - one which it could be argued they have never successfully accomplished. They were attempting to move away from the Nutty Boys image which had brought them such success in the first four years of the decade, and start to tackle subjects that were beginning to trouble them as individuals as their world view widened beyond Camden Town. Its simplistic both musically and lyrically - songwriter Suggs dealing in a naturally jokey way with the parallels between gun ownership and the nuclear weapons debate that was raging at the time. Madness have never wanted to get 'too heavy' with their audience and any messages have always been treated in a light-hearted way... but the message is still there behind the smile.

'Guns' compares something that has always seemed faintly ridiculous to us Brits - the idea that Americans are safer for being able to carry guns - with the accepted theory on nuclear deterrence (at the time) that continuing to invest in nuclear weapons was the best way for the West to ensure that it remained safe from the threat of a nuclear war. Ironically - in the quarter of a century plus since the song was released, the latter theory has been gradually dismantled along with the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons. And yet the bit which we always saw as ludicrous - the arguments in favour of the freedom of Americans to carry guns - seem to retain the same strength that they had back in 1984.

Last Friday's shocking events in Newtown Connecticut have quite rightly brought the question of gun control to the front and centre of the American political agenda. We in the UK can only look on slightly bemused as Americans grapple with how to deal with the contradictions of preventing such events as these and yet protect their rights under the Second Amendment. On Sunday, a former Texan Judge commented on the radio that the problem was not too many guns, but too few! He said "I wish to God that [the Sandy Hook principal] had had an M-4 in her office, so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out... takes him out, takes his head off before he kills those precious kids." This sort of thinking just seems entirely irrational to me.The National Rifle Association is reckoned to be one of the strongest lobby groups in the US. It has 4.3 million members. Since Friday it has sensibly set it's Facebook page to private and kept a low profile on Twitter. But silence cannot be its position in the long run and at some stage someone from this group needs to show leadership and face up to the unarguable link between guns being easily accessible and the risks it increases of massacres such as Newtown and Columbine, Virginia Tech and Aurora.

Maybe, this time something constructive (or hopefully deconstructive) can be done to start to reduce the likelihood of future recurrences of this sort of event. In the meantime - here's Guns...

I read a brand new paper 
The man who had a thousand guns 
Lived in the Southern States 
Well away from everyone 
Felt it wasn't safe 
Even in the Southern States

I read a brand new paper 
Walking down my own street 
The man with a thousand guns 
Has taken to his feet 
He felt it wasn't safe 
Even in the Southern States

He thought that he might die 
Who was he frightened by? 
Anyone with a gun. 
Well, every stranger's danger 
Everybody has one 
But alone and hungry 
He couldn't eat his..... 
Guns

I watched my television 
Sitting on the floor 
The window man was watching 
Me and a million more 
He read me the news 
Someone's getting their dues

He thought that we might die 
He wasn't frightened why? 
Everyone has a bomb 
It's a passing danger 
Or so he said 
Everybody has one 
Courtesy of Judge Dredd

All the 12s

I've always had a penchant for numbers and also for numerically pleasing dates... so I couldn't let this moment pass without a post in recognition. After all, it'll be the last of these for a while... unless you want to mark 8:12pm in 8 days time of course ;-)

How to win a gold medal

Or probably more accurately how to win more than one gold medal.

As part of our Corporate Leadership event in Birmingham today I was lucky enough to be able to listen to Sir Steve Redgrave taking part in a Question & Answer session led by Gavin Esler. He was clearly briefed to fit the theme of the day about sustaining high performance, but all the same it was fascinating to hear him speak about some of the psychology that helped him achieve five gold medals over five Olympic Games. His messages actually chimed a lot with some of the principles and techniques I've been trying to use from the work of David Allen (the productivity 'guru' not the dead Irish comedian).

For posterity... and for my own future reference... here are some of the key things that I picked up from Sir Steve today...

• After winning an Olympic medal an athlete will sit down with their coach and consider what it will probably require in order to win again at the next Games. Usually this will mean facing up to the need to achieve an even faster time than they can currently achieve and often at face value this can be very dispiriting after the high of achieving their first goal
• To make this achievable though requires that you break down the task at hand into intermediary tasks. Shaving four seconds off a time can seem daunting when you've just achieved the fastest time you've ever rowed to win gold. Viewing it as a second improvement each year starts to make it seem more achievable  Viewing it as less than a tenth of a second improvement per month suddenly makes it feel a whole lot more do-able. (Of course 'cutting up the elephant' is a basic task management technique, but hearing it from Sir Steve in relation to winning gold brought it so more vividly to life)
• Redgrave was asked how he motivated himself to train on cold dark mornings when he really didn't want to and I found his answer very enlightening. He said that goal visualisation is a key technique for all top sportsmen and women, but the goal that you visualise can't always be standing on the winner's podium bathed in the sunshine. When the going is good then that's fine, but on the dark mornings the goal would be a much smaller, much more achievable one. It may even be just getting to the cup of tea or the hot bath that awaited at the end of the training session. The less motivated you're feeling the easier your goal needs to be, so that success can be constantly achieved.
• Finally he made a very interesting comment about goal setting and aspiration. He said that not everyone has the ability to be an Olympic champion or even the best in their particular field, but every one of us has the capability to achieve personal bests. Its all about setting realistic goals to make yourself the best 'you' that you can be.

It was a really inspirational session and one I will remember for a long time to come.

Not reverting to type

I heard today that the last British typewriter rolled off the production line in a factory in Wales last Friday. For me it was one of those nostalgic moments, that made me reflect on the passing of time, on getting older and on how gradually parts of my personal history are disappearing from the recognisable world of your children and their peers. 

When I was growing up my Mum and Dad would regale me with stories of ration books, rag and bone men and imperial currency and I would look at them with a slightly puzzled countenance. Inside I was wondering why they were recounting dewy eyed stories about these items from a bygone era. Items that had simply become extinct through the natural force of evolution and the survival of the fittest. Now it is my turn to experience the loss of things that I took for granted as a child and recognise the onward march in the name of progress.

Of course the typewriter is not the first thing to disappear from my youth. Along with an endless array of old confectionery bars - Aztec, Amazin Raisin, Texan and Nutty to name but a few - things like the weekly local delivery man with his fizzy pop van (fancy a Cresta anyone?) died out many years ago. I have also shown my children - who each looked at me with a slightly puzzled countenance(!) - how a record player worked, partly so that they got a better understanding of what all these black plastic discs in the garage were actually for. I also tried them on the simple Age Test that I saw on Facebook the other week... and neither had a clue what the link could be.

The typewriter was a fixture in our dining room in the early seventies. When much younger, my Mum had  worked in the typing pools of a few different organisations. She kept her hand in by doing endless typing of Scout/Guide newsletters, meeting minutes and Dad's college work. Initially we had a 'portable' like the one above... with a heavy metal chassis and a plywood covered box lid for when it was stored. When my Dad bought her a much lighter machine in heavy duty plastic, the old Imperial (made in Leicester) became mine. 

I loved having my own typewriter which I used for typing up every book and play that I started writing (very few were ever finished). When 'writing' plays I would make full use of the split ribbon by typing in both red and black to highlight the lines of different characters. Typing was a laboriously slow  - one fingered activity with corrections being made in a using a circular rubber like this...

I can even remember, making full use of three pieces of carbon paper to 'print' four copies of my document simultaneously!!

So here I am effectively sending out multiple copies of my latest piece of writing... and my typing technique has added the use of a couple more fingers and a thumb over the intervening years. The keyboard responds to a much lighter touch than my old Imperial 'portable, and correcting mistakes is considerably easier. But something has possibly been lost in the richness of the overall experience, and as I sit here reminiscing and bathed in nostalgia for a bygone era, I wonder how many other parts of my youth are now museum pieces for my children to gaze upon quizzically. 

What are words worth?

So we start again. Third time, I've started a new blog in a new location. And I'm not really sure why. In recent months I've cut right back on my blogging activity, because it was just taking up too much time. And I can't say I've particularly missed it. But something inside tells me I'm not ready to let our latest online eviction notice be the end of my blogging adventure.

Truth is I wonder whether I've genuinely been blogging before now. My first foray (on Blogger as it happens) lasted for a few posts only and the lack of interaction did for me. I persevered in my second attempt, plucked up the courage to speak to a couple of others on the same platform, and before I knew it blogging (or was it social networking) was taking over my life. When Yahoo 360 was unceremoniously closed down I moved with the crowd to a new home with a new optimism. Existing (and new) online friendships developed and flourished in our new playground, but for the most part the experience withered during 11/12 as we all found new distractions (step forward Messrs Zuckerburg and Dorsey) and less inspiration for genuinely insightful writing. (I'll excuse Neil and Charlie from this last slanderous remark). With hindsight it should have been self-evident to us all that the platform we had chosen was a burning one, but we fiddled while the flames licked around us. Eventually Multiply decided that simply not developing or supporting their 'product' wasn't going to be sufficient to wake us up and so served eviction notices on us. This time I decided to gather up some of my belongings on my way out and you can find nearly five years worth of meaningless mutterings here should you be interested (in truth I'm proud of some of it, but I'm not telling you which bits).

Which brings me back to what was supposed to be my central theme - why have I decided to start up again and not just throw in the towel and accept that it was nice while it lasted. Well it seems to me that I like 'the idea of writing'. I don't harbour any illusions that I'm good at it, in fact I'm quite aware that finding the right words can often be a difficult and slow process for me. (Not for me the four or five page 'blessays' that dear Mr Fry appears to knock off in a single stream of conciousness) But still I find the process of writing to be good for the soul... and I'd like to invest in my soul for the good of my spirit. And if I'm going to treat myself to some writing time, then I may as well preserve what I write somewhere, and even see if anyone else finds it vaguely interesting.

Experience suggests that my themes will tend towards lots of stuff about music, the occasional comedy video, maybe some football now and again and once in a while a little bit of politics. Its not that I don't try to expand my horizons - but ultimately its those things that interest me and that will probably continue to inspire me to go from simply hearing that little dictation voice that plays and replays word combinations in my head, to consciously listening to him and being bothered to capture it for posterity.