INSPIRATION

https://www.42.us.org/

This is by far the most inspiring thing I have seen recently.

DAVOS

Whenever there is a World Economic Forum at Davos, I look closely at the attendance list. It's a fascinating read. You can see who is great and good. I play a little game. Do I know anyone? Personally, I mean. There are normally between a couple and a dozen. So I have good Davos years, and bad!

But here's the thought which I have every year. Here assembled are the forces of the world economy. There are Heads of State, chiefs of media organizations, top bankers and investors and, of course, Chief Executives, and other C-suite dwellers. But in all my list browsing I have never found anyone with a job title like production worker, machine operative, shift worker, indeed I have never found anyone with the word worker in their title at all!

What does this tell us?

It shows where power is. And it shows where power isn't.

For all our talk of valuing democracy, it's striking how it isn't applied in the workplace - the environment where most people spend most of their working lives.

For all of our talk about staff engagement, it's striking how real power is still held in the hands of a tiny minority, completely ignoring the majority.

My eye is not a socialist one. My eye looks for the mutuality of interest between an organization and its staff. This is not difficult to see if you look for it. It resides in innovation, and a respect for the individual human being, the individual human brain deployed in the community of an organization.

Odd, that the World Economic Forum does not see, or celebrate this.

PUZZLED

We want to see gender balance in Boardrooms. yes?
We stand against sexism, yes?
And we acknowledge the argument (so respected it does not need to be repeated) that gender balanced Boards are in fact good for business, add value. Yes?

So here's a little puzzle with which I've been struggling.

Let's assume there are, say, seven Board members of an organization. And they're all men. Between them they add their value to the organization - a combined total represented as £7 - one pound coin each.

Now, there's a woman can add value too. £1. She's as able as any man.

By rebalancing the gender mix of the Board, greater value can be added. How?

CURLEWS

If I fail, say, and work on a supermarket checkout
I can’t think I’d be less happy
Or live with less meaning
Than my prized career, my treasured vocation,
And the proof is in markets and also in curlews.
Markets, like the one in St Hippolyte
Where the cheese man is flirting
And flattering, and laughing,
And ladies take compliments they get nowhere else.
There’s love in those sales
And ladies leave glowing.
And I wake, feeling lucky, to hear calls of the curlews
Which people call liquid
And most beautiful of birds
(And to a scared boy in cities where curlews weren’t singing,
A wide, unexpected chorus of peace).
But I wonder if it’s really deliberate, this beauty,
As practised an art, as anything can be,
Where, with noble intention,
The act doth become so.
Like loving, for a few moments,
Anyone through the checkout,
Which might be their portion of love for today
And you gave it. What a thing to say of your life!
Wherever I was, I gave love to the moment.
Makes me think of the curlews and the nature of their calling
And I wonder if their calling isn’t their calling?

WAR POEM

We went to the oncology ward, and from there Zara and I walked into York. At the gallery, there is an exhibition of World War One art, much of it on loan from the Imperial War Museum. Works by Paul Nash, John Nash, Stanley Spencer, Jacob Epstein, and William Orpen's To the Unknown British Soldier.

Alongside the art there were visitor sketch books provided, children's games and activities and magnetic boards with words, for them to add their feelings.

Using one, this war poem emerged:

SACRAMENT

No march to drums parading

No glittering command

No dreams of armies shining

No broken liberty.

The cities still remember

As careless fields grow cold

The youth who fell midst violets

For laughing days to come.

THE ASSEKREM CLUB

Last night I dined with a friend and discovered something new - that, like me, he is one of what must be a tiny number of westerners to have visited the hermitage at Assekrem, in the Hoggar mountains of southern Algeria.

The monastery was established by Charles de Foucauld.

This former French Army Officer grew to love and respect the desert and the Tuareg who lived in it. He learned their language, and codified it into a dictionary of translation. He built the hermitage at Assekrem and lived there from 1911 to 1916.

With an outlook like this, it is easy to see how a man might make this choice, as a location for a life of solitary and silent contemplation of the divine. It was the Tuareg also who killed him. A bungled kidnap attempt resulted in his murder.

In Geoffrey Moorhouse's The Fearful Void - an adventure book like no other, based on the preposterous notion of an agoraphobic walking the Sahara from East to West - Moorhouse greets the incumbent hermit at Assekrem - a lineage from Charles de Foucauld. The picture of him shaking hands with the old monk somehow inspired me. Deep in a chest somewhere here at home is a picture of me shaking hands with the self same monk, atop the mountain, by the hermitage at Assekrem.

I was 25. I wanted adventure.

I am 55 now. I still want adventure.

Last night's unexpected formation of the Assekrem Club reconnected me with this. It is something easily lost, left dormant. Perhaps I have left this aspect of my being too passive, too long.

Apart from physical expeditions, it is adventure which led me to start my business, adventure which propelled me to make it distinctive, adventure which led me to be as rebellious as I have been in all my dealings, adventure which led me to choose the home and relationships I have, adventure which interests me and excites me every time it offers me opportunity.

I hereby reconnect.

I hereby get active, adventure seeking.

Bring it on.

DEAR MR B.

Thank you, Charlie.
You showed me
What stops me
Is nothing worth stopping for:
A sensibility,
A thought -

"No.
This is not worth saying
No one will....
The form isn't....
No, don't embarrass yourself,
Who cares?"

But if no one cares
There's no reason
Not to choose words
And spill them on a page.
Singing to hear one's own song,
Smiling at its echo.


Like the girl singing in the gardens now,
Swinging idly under the ash tree
In a reverie of song
Uninterested in publication
Or audience,
Notes and themes all
Higgeldy.


Notes, nonetheless,
Reminding self
The self is here
And, reaching for a higher shelf.
Take down unused words, lists -
See what they sound like.

SWALLOWS, SWIFTS

A friend writes
Here I am
Pumped with stuff
Which makes me wish
They’d just left the cancer
To do its death-thing.
And as I’m reading this
Swallows are having complex clicking chats
As though they’ll never die.
And I recall the mischief of this man
Not knowing whether to laugh or cry
But knowing they have given him four months,
And he ends his message with make the most of every day
Like, maybe, today Ravenna
Tomorrow Pollenca or skydiving.
Or just here, is it? Arundel,
And annual anxiety –
Will swallows come?
For swallows only come to happy homes.
The swift passage of life
Comes anyhow
Whether we distinguish or confuse
Symbols of joy, emblems of doom.
The calls of the mart
Let ordinary things go on in ordinary ways.
Haste’s shrill cadence mocks forth sons,
And its rush of dark past souls
Skim and hair raise,
But do not touch our ground,
Gone in four months,
Not caring if we make the most of every day.

ZEN TODAY

How can I change
What I deny?

I'M IN

This referendum needs thought. Here's mine.

The argument I want to advance is barely political, though it finds itself in a political context.

All human conflict has at its heart a notion of “us” and “them”.

Without an idea of “us” and of “them”, there would be no conflicts.

We are at our best as humans when we seek to build community, understanding and a shared sense of identity. The more we understand our commonality, the more humanity advances, and the more humane the advance.

There are those who worry about the EU’s enlargement as swallowing, diminishing “us”. Yet the more we advance together in wider definition of what that “us” is, the more humanely we are likely to go and grow. The bigger the scope of “us” we draw, the more compassion.

In contrast, drawing smaller circles of the set called “us” reduces our empathy and compassion, and, at worst, leads us to inhumane dismissal of “them”.

The EU isn’t perfect. Nor, sadly, is it an “us” without a “them”. It is puzzling there is still so much “us” and “them”.  It is puzzling that we have at present so few institutions which are genuinely universal. The more of these we had, the more we lived as one world, sharing this precious planet of “ours”, the more we would recognise that there is ultimately only one “us”, the whole of humanity.

The EU isn’t this. But maybe it is an important start. Its urges for peaceful community are the same urges which may one day take us to the proper conclusion of that journey. It encourages wide and widening community, and the peaceful solution of differences within it. If its expansion widens “us”, so much the better. If that habit eventually leads “us” to the sane conclusion there is no “them”, how wonderful that would be, and how many of the world’s most fundamental problems would be on their way to being solved? Perhaps it will not, but the habit and practice of finding commonality brings that hope closer to realization than not.

I hope ultimately for a peaceful world, where “we” can share “our” planet as one. Perhaps I won’t see it in my lifetime. Hopelessly idealistic, you may say. But if nobody ever hopes for it, there is no hope of it ever being achieved. So I don’t mind giving my hope to it, even if I’m alone. Perhaps it will help. That hope is tempered by the sure knowledge that there are many in the world today who do not yet want that. But there are also plenty who do.

It is with that hope that I shall vote in the referendum, placing my vote for the habits of community, for the expansion of “us” and for participation in an institution which, however flawed, moves us further on that path of understanding  and cooperation with “our” fellow humans - wider, ever wider.

FRY DAY THOUGHTS

A proper fried breakfast is a thing of beauty and should reflect the following guidelines:

• The essential key components are:
• Smoked bacon (2 varieties can be used, but one is fine)
• Sausages (more than one type may be used)
• Chipolatas (optional)
• Mushrooms, fresh, fried
• Tomatoes, fresh, fried
• Tomatoes, tinned (optional)
• Baked beans (Heinz)
• Black pudding (Bury)
• Fried white sliced bread
• Eggs (3) fried or poached, always presented atop the fried bread
• Hash browns (optional)
• Above to be served with toast and butter. Frank Cooper's vintage Oxford marmalade may be added.
• Acceptable beverages are mugs of tea or coffee.
• Orange juice may be served.
• The only condiments acceptable are salt, pepper (but never on eggs), Heinz Tomato Ketchup and HP Sauce. No others. Barbecue sauce, no. Chili sauce, no. Thousand Island Sauce, Mint Sauce or any other sauce? Don't be silly.
• Mustard? Only for those above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Even then, sparingly. And English only. And only applied to sausages.
• Sauces should be in small pools at the edge of the plate. never in scrolls or flamboyant nouveau cuisine style flourishes.
• The best fried bread result is achieved by cooking in bacon fat (or flitch if it can be obtained)
• White pudding is for perverts.
• Chorizo is for latin people.
• Fried potatoes should never be served. Otherwise it's a lunch, not a breakfast.
• A level of charring is desirable on fried fresh tomato halves.
• Less than three eggs is ungenerous.
• Bubble and Squeak, the cockney's friend, is welcome as an occasional visitor, but only in the manner as one would welcome a troglodyte to one's country house. In order to remind yourself why you don't want to be anything like them.
• Laverbread doesn't travel, so leave it in Wales.
• All other things you think "I'll just add that," - don't.
• The best place to cook everything except the tinned tomatoes, beans and eggs is in an Aga. Yes, even the toast - Aga toast is great. I'm no fan of Agas. Generally they are crap. But they do do the fry up doings better than anything else.
• Grilling bacon is like showering without soap. Or premature withdrawal. Or something.
• Both bacon and sausages should be bought at a local butcher's. Seriously, the quality difference between their products and the supermarkets is huge.
• The Oxford Union has debated whether mushrooms should be peeled before cooking. This House was undecided. They should however be large field mushrooms. Canned mushrooms are completely indigestible and are idiocy when fresh mushrooms are so easily and cheaply available.
• Eggs should be sourced from local farms. If poaching, a fresh egg does not need vinegar in the water. It will hold together well. If it doesn't, your supply source is wrong. It isn't fresh. Poaching eggs is actually preferable to frying. On a decent fry up it isn't as though you don't have enough fried stuff already on the plate. Yolks should be runny. Whites should be white, not snotty.
• Only salt should be put on egg. Pepper absolutely ruins the taste.
• I think that purchased hash browns are actually preferable to home made. They are quite hard things to make properly, and there is something delightfully bland yet satisfying about the frozen variety.
• These few guidelines seem to me to be perfectly easy to follow, and to result in breakfast happiness each and every time.

DANDY LINES

"Oh no," she said, emerging from the campervan. "We've forgotten the salad."

"Give me a bowl," I said.

A few minutes later - salad.

Dandelions are blooming in lawns, meadows and verges, triggering this memory.

Forget rocket and expensive salads. Young dandelion leaves are the business.