Back

After a brief hiatus, the blog is back and you'll notice it's had a bit of an overhaul.  I've removed some posts because it came to my attention that someone I care about deeply had read certain entries and wasn't happy with them.  If he's reading this now, I'd like to say sorry.

Shame

There’s been a lot of talk in the UK over the last week or so about the Beecroft Report and, in particular, a proposal in the report that certain legal protections should be removed so as to allow what’s being called “no fault dismissal.”

Should you be late to the party, let me clarify a few things for you.  The Conservative Party is the largest party in the coalition currently governing the UK.  Adrian Beecroft, the author of the report, is a prominent businessman and donor to the Conservative Party - he’s given them something in the region of half a million pounds. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence, though - stranger things have happened.

Beecroft is also heavily involved with the high-interest pad-day lender Wonga: should you be unaware of Wonga, it’s a company that makes short-term loans, at interest rates of around 4000% per annum. Such is the nature of life in the UK at the moment that people are desperate enough to take such loans.  The Office of Fair trading recently criticized Wonga for its aggressive and unfair collection practices.  But I digress.

One of the proposals that Beecroft makes is that it should be possible to sack employees without going through all that tedious unfair dismissal stuff, so long as you give them a bit of a lump sum - what he calls Compensated No Fault Dismissal.  How like the current stage of the UK that the government comes up with a report that, essentially, suggests it’s okay to remove protection from employees, so long as you give them some money.  Everything is up for sale.  Anyway, Beecroft feels 

“the result of this change would be that the onus would then be squarely on the employee to perform well enough for the employer to value them as an employee. It would no longer be possible to coast along, underperforming in a way that is damaging to the enterprise concerned but not bad enough for the employer to want to undertake the whole rigmarole of the unfair dismissal process”

It’s interesting that he feels CNFD would be necessary to overcome

“the difficulty of removing an employee whose performance, once felt to be satisfactory, is no longer acceptable. This can be for reasons to do with the employee’s motivation or with changes in the demands of the job concerned as the company grows, technology changes, customer needs evolve and so forth. Or it can result from promotion to a higher level for which the person concerned proves not to be competent.”

none of which circumstances appear to have anything to do with employees “coasting” along and are as much to do with poor management practices as with the ability of an employee. But I digress again.

The mindset behind Beecroft’s proposal is that what’s holding the UK back is that small businesses are afraid to hire new employees because they won’t be able to fire them easily.  It’s tempting just to dismiss this as the fatuous nonsense that it so palpably is - Britain, unlike Germany with its strong Mittlestand, has never relied on small and medium sized enterprises to drive its economy although that may well be changing as traditional industries die away.  

The fact is, however, that we shouldn’t just dismiss this assertion because that’s all it is - an assertion.  The words “research” or “evidence” don’t appear in the report; it’s just that Beecroft thinks it would be a good idea; it would make his life, and the lives of certain employers, easier.  And who are these “employees” (mentioned 100 times in the report) whom employers should be able to fire at will?  You and me; not some amorphous, faceless mass but you and me, your husband or wife, you children.  With little to no protection in the face of their employers; with reduced job security and increased uncertainty in their future.

I’ve worked with a lot of managers and, with the best will in the world, a lot of them have absolutely little to no clue what they’re doing and even less of an idea what to do when confronted with an employee who - for perfectly legitimate reasons - is underperforming.  The thought that they might just be able to sack people - because let’s face it, it’s easier than actually trying to fix the real problem - fills me with horror.  

We used to care about each other in this country; the lives of others, the rights of others used to matter to us.  Sixty-odd years ago, in the midst of austerity, after the most horrendous war the world had ever seen, we established the National Health Service. We can look back on that generation and be proud.  In the midst of this austerity, what are we doing to make the future better?  Will our grandchildren look back at our generation with the same pride?

You are what you wear (part 2)

I'm genuinely not being patronising here - I'm trying to learn Mandarin and I know that speaking another language is hard - but some of these tee-shirts are just bizarre.  I'm flying back to the UK tonight but before I go, here's a selection of the best I've seen:


Bluebell for figs
(an admirable sentiment - who doesn't like bluebells and why shouldn't figs have some, too?)


Disco twinkle
(points off for making sense, extra points for being, well, charming)


Directlys noise
(I don't... I... What?)


Packer - fanky fresh
(What a difference a vowel makes - haven't we all wanted to be fanky fresh at some point?)


His fashion does and
(and? And? Give me closure here)


Beans
(that's all it said. Big letters, across the chest. Is it a brand? Is it the wearer's name? Is it a tribute to the musical fruit? Who knows - probably not even the woman wearing the shirt. )


Baby dream ever
(even though it makes no sense, extra credit for being white letters on pink background and for being worn by someone extremely cute. Kawaii!)


And finally, my favourite:
Speed crooks access and sevens
(this is clearly some kind of William Burroughs cut-up experiment gone horribly wrong and wins purely because I can't make head or tails of it, no matter how hard I try.)


I'll leave you with a picture; this may be a foreign language - I'm not sure it's English...

You are what you wear

Like most other eleven-year-olds, Little 'Un couldn't really give a monkey's what he wears. Quite frankly, some days it's all I can do to get any clothes on him at all - the boy's a born naturist and is perfectly comfortable lounging around the house stark naked. Which, when I think about it, is probably quite sweet because he seems very comfortable with his body and at least understands that he needs to wear clothes in public.


I've tried to explain to him that clothes are part of the way we present ourselves to the world - that we say things about ourselves with what we choose to wear. We can change others' perception of us, based on our clothes. He is about as interested in that concept as he is in any story of mine which begins "When I was your age..." which is to say, not remotely.


Undiscouraged, I remain fascinated by clothes and love shopping for them. Hong Kong, as you might imagine, is a good place to go if you share that love: there are shops everywhere. Enormous malls occupy vast amounts of space and contain almost endless shops - not just the big chains you'll know but little boutiques which you won't.


Now, I'm no clothing expert but a range of tee-shirts based on the movies of David Lynch - Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive (a strong contender for most frustrating and baffling movie ever made) etc - would not have been my first suggestion. And yet, there they are on the shelves and on the chests of various hipster kids that I see around town. Have they seen Eraserhead, I wonder to myself. Do they have any idea what they're wearing or is it just a nice design? Does it even matter?


My own favourite is Uniqlo (which has a presence in the UK), branches of which I appear physically unable to walk past without entering, browsing and (more often than not) buying something. I particularly love it when they have a sale because all the "unusual" sizes that they have left over are the sizes that fit me. Hence, I've become a bit of a fiend for bargain shopping and poor Scarlet is finding her wardrobes increasingly full of my clothes!Uniqlo do fairly middle-of-the-road clothes - good price, nothing too flashy and reasonable price. They do, occasionally spring a few surprises, like with their current range of tee- shirts.


This is nothing new. Back in the 1980s (and do you have any idea how depressing that statement is, when you realise we're talking nearly 30 years ago) there was quite a vogue for having Japanese kanji on clothes. I have no idea what the symbols actually meant - if they meant anything at all - and they could have been grossly offensive, for all I know. They were on clothes because of the way they looked and the connotations they had. Interestingly, the same thing works the other way around: in Hong Kong, there are a lot of t-shirts with English writing on them.


In the same way, I imagine, as the kanji didn't always make sense, some of the "English" tee-shirts don't quite make sense, either, and I've been keeping a list of examples. My favourite was worn by a tiny, grey-haired gentleman in his 60s which just read (in big yellow letters on a mauve shirt) "Purple Rock Unicorn" which, I think you'll agree, probably says it all...

Incommunicado

As I type this, I'm sitting in a Pacific Coffee in Telford Plaza although where I'll be when I upload this, I don't really know. Although Scarlet has leant me a mobile phone and sorted me out with a local Sim card, the phone predates Twitter and blogs and, roaming charges being what they are (ie, legalised usery) I'm enjoying being largely out of touch.

It's a treat, to be honest. Since Little 'Un was born, nearly 12 years ago? And probable since before even then, whatever mobile, PDA or smartphone I've owned has been constantly on. This has been mostly a "just in case" kind of thing - I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of times I've received an emergency call and many times it's only served to remind me how much whichever unsuitable woman I was dating at the time didn't want to contact me.

But I digress. What I meant to say is that it's actually rather pleasant to be out of touch. Instead of being bombarded with Twitter and Facebook updates, emails or texts or Whatsapp messages, instead of looking for distractions on Zite or Pulse, now I just... think, muse, daydream, woolgather, whatever. I even deliberately left my headphones at home today, so I don't have the option of listening to my iPod.

I'm not being a luddite about this - i love technology and all the rest of it. I'm not calling for a return to the days of Morse code and carrier pigeons. I love what modern technology does for us. I rediscovered one of my closest friends, on the other side if the world, thanks to Facebook. I've met some wonderful people, thanks to Twitter. But sometimes, I think it's good to just switch off for a while.

You may say that you're far too important to be out of touch in this way and who am I to argue? Perhaps that's the case; perhaps you - like people of equivalent stature such as the President of the USA - have to be contactable every single minute of every single day. But if not, try it for an hour. Switch off and just... do whatever: pay attention to what's going on around you; pay attention to your thoughts and feelings; pay attention to the people around you - hell, pay attention to the TV! Just switch off and be incommunicado for a bit.

Byzantine

How should I tell you the story of Byzantium?  Perhaps it’s a story of beginnings, the story of the emperor Constantine, who made not one but two decisions nearly two thousand years ago which shape the world we live in today.  Perhaps it’s a story of intrigue and betrayal, the story of how the Christian church split in two and how the Byzantines were betrayed by the very people they thought were coming to save them.  Perhaps it’s a story of strength, the story of how the empire forced the armies of Islam to head west into north Africa, rather than north, into Europe. Perhaps it’s a story of endings, a story of how the walls of the city held inviolate for a thousand years, until the army of Mehmed II finally captured it.  Or perhaps it’s the story of new beginnings, the story of how the oncoming Ottoman armies drove scholars and intellectuals from the empire to Italy, where they seeded and fertilized the movement that was later to become known as the Renaissance.

However you tell it, the story of Byzantium is a fascinating one and little known.  When I was at school, the story we were told about European history was that there were the Greeks, then the Romans, then the dark ages, where nothing much happened for a thousand years, and then the Renaissance, where everyone pretty much rediscovered the Greeks and history got started again.  The Roman empire fell in the fifth century, we were told, bringing the curtain down on progress in Europe but what our teachers never told us - perhaps they didn’t know - was that the Roman empire didn’t fall. It continued for another millennia, growing, developing, changing but still recognizably Roman, with a series of emperors who traced their lineage back to Augustus, the first Roman emperor.  Even the inhabitants of the empire called themselves Roman, even though Rome itself had long since been lost to the empire.

Originally founded around 660 BC, Byzantium occupied a favoured place on a peninsula in the Bosphorus.  The emperor Constantine, who never really liked the city of Rome, recognised its potential and ordered a new city to be built there, one which he suggested should be known as “new Rome” but which came to be known as the city of Constantine - Constantinople.  Such was Constantinople’s fame that, during the European middle ages, it was simply known as “the city” - everyone knew which city you meant. In fact, Constantinople’s current name, Istanbul, is a derivation of medieval Greek and simply means “to the city.”

Much of Byzantine history has been lost but if you visit Istanbul - and I recommend that you do because it’s a beautiful city - you can still see traces.  There are the gargantuan city walls, the magnificent Hagia Sophia, the echoes of the Hippodrome, where the Blues and the Greens used to meet, and occasionally fight, and the Milion, the point from which all distances in the empire were measured - literally the centre of the world for the Byzantines.  It was Byzantium that rekindled my interest in history and there’s a fantastic project called Byzantium1200, dedicated to recreating the city virtually, as it was in the year 1200.  You can find their website here and if you want to know more about Byzantine history, I can’t recommend Lars Brownworth’s podcasts on the subject highly enough - you can find his website here.

The Cabin in the Woods

I think the earliest memory I have of seeing a horror movie is Carry On Screaming. If you've seen it, you'll know it's not the most terrifying of films but it left its mark on me and not just because of the lovely Finella Feilding. I vividly remember laying in bed afterwards, paralysed with fear, totally convinced there was something (Odd-job?) at the door of my bedroom.

I was probably about eight or nine then; over the years, the movies have steadily become more sophisticated while my reaction to them has steadily declined. I've watched hundreds of horror films: some have scared me (Blair Witch Project, The Evil Dead, Paranormal Activity, Rec) some have disturbed me (Audition, The Ring, The Haunting) and some have disgusted me but the vast majority have had no impact at all and none have ever had the impact of Carry On Screaming.

Watching horror films is, as I think I've said before, a profoundly masochistic experience. No one actually likes fear - real fear - in the same that no one likes real pain. We like the controlled simulation of those experiences. Real pain, after all, hurts; real fear is, well scary. But there's something about the chemicals released in the brain that makes it appealing and I go on, looking for the scares but more often than not I don't find them. Most modern horror movies are too obvious, too easy to predict.

Which leads me to The Cabin in the Woods, which I saw this afternoon in a cinema that was so air-conditioned as to be arctic. Now I don't intend to give you a review of the film - movie criticism is a skill I don't have. But, if you like horror movies TCITW is worth checking out. I liked it but I didn't love it and I certainly don't see what the fuss is about - to me, the "twist" seemed fairly obvious and certainly didn't come as any shocking revelation. Nor, sadly, was it remotely scary although I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be.

It spoon-feeds the audience a bit towards the end and I think a little less could have been said. Personally, I quite like films where I have to do a bit of the work and, as any true horror movie fan knows, the best films leave your imagination to fill in the gaps because what's in your head is always far scarier than what's on the screen. But it passes the time relatively painlessly and has some amusing things to say about horror films, as a genre, in a "Scream" sort of way.

If you do go to see it in HK, take a jumper because, seriously, the A/C at the cinema in the APM Mall is fierce! And secondly, if you see the dick who took a phone-call (loudly) half way through the film, tell him I say... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Welcome back

Hong Kong has a smell.  Or, more specifically, Hong Kong airport has a smell.  It’s not a bad smell although you probably wouldn’t want it as a perfume.  It’s very difficult to describe - as all smells are, I suppose.  It’s sort of a vague smell of barbecue pork, humidity and air conditioning but in a good way.  It’s the smell, more than anything, that let’s me know officially that I’m back in Hong Kong.

When I stepped off the flight yesterday afternoon, I had an email from my accountant waiting for me - they had spoken to the authorities, who said that they’ll make a decision on my visa application “early next week.” Which means that as of Monday morning, I’m going to be on complete tenterhooks! Oh well - fingers crossed for a week, then.

It’s very warm and humid today, in HK, and my body’s wondering what to do with itself: I got seven hours of sleep last night, which was fantastic, although it’s now 3:15am in the UK, so my body thinks it should still be asleep.  That’s the joy of jetlag, folks, and probably explains why this post makes very little sense at all!

Is that it?

I was listening this morning to The Urbanist which is one of a range of podcasts from Monocle magazine.  Andrew Tuck was talking to photographers about billboards and the iconography of print advertising and they were also discussing the changes that billboard advertising is going through, as more and more possibilities are opened up by digital technology and the internet. You've seen them, I'm sure - digital advertising on the escalators in tube stations, screens at bus stops and so on. 


Now, I like Monocle - although, it has to be said, I like the idea of Monocle slightly more than I like the reality of Monocle; the reality, sadly, often comes over as insufferably smug.  But, having said that I like the programme and the philosophy behind it, I was really disappointed by the lack of imagination shown by the contributors to the programme.  


Is that what digital technology is for? To show us, in ever greater degrees of sophistication, the multitude of things that we could buy and the variety of ways in which we could spend money?  In the days after the local elections here in the UK, elections in which two thirds of the eligible population chose not to participate; in these days where the things we could buy are things we don't need, which we buy with money we don't have, isn't there something better we could do with this technology? Do we have to use it to shill yet more useless products on people?


Can't we, perhaps, use it to educate people? Can't we use it to raise consciousness of issues? To provoke public debate? To encourage people to talk to each other?  I'm not claiming to be an expert or to have all he answers but it just seems to me that we're setting the bar awfully low for ourselves. The internet is more than just a world-wide Argos catalogue. Perhaps we could use all this fantastic technology to, you know, make the world a bit of a better place?