Credit Crunch Wisdom

Just surfacing briefly from an enormous pile of nappies, wet wipes and tiny garments to draw your attention to some wise words uttered (or rather typed) earlier by my lovely cousin The Bureauista.

If you're looking for a job at the moment, or if you're suspicious about your employer's long-term prospects, take heed:

'The experience of watching a business disintegrate has taught me quite a few things. If I ever go for another job interview, it won't be the training opportunities and the staff canteen arrangements I'll be asking about; I'll be requesting to see the balance sheets and to have a long chat with the company accountant. I'll be asking exactly how much guaranteed business is coming in in the next six months, what contingencies are in place in case a client drops out of the picture, whether there are savings to cover salary payments in the event of an emergency: all things I would never have considered it necessary to ask before.'

All these things are essential questions to ask at interview, or at your annual appraisal, or you may come to regret it very soon...

Read the Bureauista's complete post here.

Mad Men vs Patroclus: The Copywriting Smackdown

As time's wingèd chariot bundles inexorably towards the onset of my maternity leave, I find myself wondering what I'm going to do with the acres of free time I'm going to have for the next three months or so.

(What? Surely changing nappies and breastfeeding can't take up 24 hours of the day, every day! That would be madness!)

I'm gingerly testing the waters of the imminent lifestyle change by stepping up my television viewing. Not real, as-broadcast television, we don't have that at the moment, but DVDs and stuff.

And what better place to start than with Mad Men, a programme that not only is 'the nearest to genius television can get' (Metro), but in which several of the protagonists also have the same job as me - to wit, advertising copywriters.

This is where the similarities between me and the dramatis personae of Mad Men end, though, because after having viewed six episodes of Season One, I can confirm that there are some significant and probably insuperable differences in our working lives. Allow me to enumerate.

1. Office. The Mad Men office is chock-full of rich young men-about-town, the occasional silver fox and a horde of impeccably-coiffed fashionable secretarial ladies, all of whom spend their working day smoking, drinking cocktails, ravishing each other in well-appointed hotel rooms and making barbed comments about each other's dress sense, literary achievements, etc. In my office there's just me and the cat, and the cat is definitely the better groomed.

2. Client Meetings. In Mad Men, all client meetings go on for five minutes and unfold in exactly the same manner: the advertising team (who are all hungover) tell the client they don't have any ideas, the client gets a bit miffed, one of the advertising team berates the client for being female/stupid/Jewish/out of touch, and the client storms out in a huff. Later, someone has to save the account either by taking the client out to a strip club, or by sleeping with them, or both. By contrast, my client meetings are all at least an hour long, involve very long, very tedious powerpoint presentations littered with technical jargon and three letter acronyms, and end with the client requesting that I find some kind of common lexical ground between a photo of some peas and the notion of activity-based costing, which moreover must be expressed in a 'punchy' and 'compelling' fashion.


Fig. 1: Copywriting in the 1960s. Note reclining position, lack of clothes, absence of laptop, etc.

3. Desk. The desks in Mad Men are furnished with a) a phone, b) an ashtray, c) a bottle of spirits and a number of elegant spirit glasses. My desk is furnished with a) a phone, b) a printer, c) a laptop, d) several vast, unwieldy piles of printed-out powerpoint slides littered with technical jargon, three-letter acronyms and scrawled notes about 'key messages' and 'calls to action', e) any number of unfinished cups of peppermint tea, f) the cat, g) clumps of discarded cat fur, h) a leaflet about breastfeeding, i) dust, j) crumbs and k) a load of pens that I stole off the lovely Mr BC and promptly lost the tops of.

4. Office Hierarchy. In Mad Men, the copywriters (who are all men) have fashionably-attired lady secretaries to type up their copy (although I've yet to see anyone really produce any copy) while they set about playing practical jokes on each other, drinking whisky and ravishing successions of women in well-appointed hotel rooms. I, on the other hand, spend my day not only thinking of copy, but also typing it up on the typey-typey keyboard and emailing it to the client. Yes! I am living proof that women can think as well as type, something that in 1960s New York was apparently unheard of. On the downside, very little ravishing goes on in my office, possibly because I am eight months up the duff. (Yes! I am living proof that a woman can think, be pregnant and type all at the same time, despite what Theo Paphitis would have you believe.)

5. Remuneration. Despite the dubious business model outlined in point 2 above, the directors and account directors in Mad Men are all filthy rich and able to afford summer houses in the Hamptons, expensive clothes, successions of mistresses for ravishing in well-appointed hotel rooms, etc. Curiously, despite spending most of my working day actually working, as opposed to bitching and drinking cocktails, I have a lower salary than some of my teacher chums and a wardrobe composed almost entirely of cast-offs from eBay. (Despite this, my Granny has taken to informing her friends that since going freelance I've become 'a millionaire again', but that's a story for another time.)

So there you have it: Mad Men 1, Patroclus 0. Anyone fancy a martini?

Criminal Justice

I've been commissioned to write a lengthy tract about some technology my client has developed that will apparently make the criminal justice system more efficient.

On a planning call with various 'stakeholders' in this project, the conversation wheels around to why I was selected to write this thing in the first place.

'So, Patroclus, do you have a background in criminal justice?' asks a stakeholder.

I pause briefly to consider my experience in the sector, which includes:

1. Being told off by a weary policeman for rolling in a municipal flowerbed in Forres, Moray, at 2am on the night before the 'Britain in Bloom' judges were due to arrive.

2. Having a disgruntled policeman pop up from behind a hedge to take my photograph as I participated in an episode of organised civil disobedience on Crown land as a protest against the criminalisation of peaceful mass trespass under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill (later Act).

3. Being forcibly manhandled off Crown land by a no-nonsense mounted policeman during the same episode.

4. Being tear-gassed by riot police in Park Lane, after a protest march against the aforementioned Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill (later Act) became somewhat lively, this liveliness including the burning of cars, trampling of flowerbeds and overturning of bus shelters in the aforementioned Park Lane, and the rattling of gates leading to Downing Street (the latter activity later immortalised in the opening credits of woeful 1999 Britflick Human Traffic, which is now notable only as an early celluloid outing for The Lovely John Simm (awww look at his little face, awww, etc.) and for having the Age of Love's 'Age of Love' on the soundtrack).

5. Receiving a phone message from the Devon and Cornwall police requesting that I go down to the station 'for a chat' following the publication of an article I had written for the student magazine about a conference at which representatives of the aforementioned police force had reassured local parents that 'there are no drugs in Devon and Cornwall'. (In proper Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas style I had turned up to the conference stoned, but only in order to give a hilarious ironic counterpoint to my article. My professional dedication has never been anything less than impeccable.) I didn't go.

'Erm, not really,' I reply.

The Mug Chain

I am having a pleasant instant-message conversation with my brother about what we did on our respective weekends. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, the conversation takes an unexpected turn:

BROTHER: Did Alan Turing actually used to chain his mug to the radiator?

ME: I don't know. Did he?

BROTHER: I can't remember if it's true, or whether I made it up.

ME: I once tied a mug to myself*, but it wasn't my 'magic' Alan Turing one.

I do some digging on the internet, and discover several references to Alan Turing chaining his mug to the radiator. I duly inform the brother.

BROTHER: Ha! I knew I hadn't made it up!

ME: Is this for a client?

(My brother works in marketing too, and is often required to come up with 'creative ideas' to promote some piece of software or other.)

ME: Are you giving away branded 'mug chains'?

ME: Give us your business card, and we'll give you a FREE mug chain - just like Alan Turing's!

ME: Radiator not included.

It becomes apparent that my brother has sloped off, no doubt unable to withstand the vim and verve of my potent wit, so I relate the conversation to Mr BC instead.

MR BC: Is the mug included?

ME: Hm, I didn't think of that.

A companionable silence descends. Presently:

MR BC: It would need to be quite a long chain, so you could lift the mug to your mouth.

Suddenly this doesn't seem to be such a bad idea at all. Branded mug chains would be cheap to produce, and would surely be popular among the Turing-worshipping geek community, who would no doubt welcome a means of keeping their 'special' mugs - which they probably got from Linus Torvalds's secret bunker at the alpha launch of the Linux kernel in 1992 - out of bounds to their colleagues.

The chain could also imply 'security', and would therefore be an ideal booth giveaway for a security software company, like an antivirus company. And what's more, by ensuring that the mug is not used communally, the chain would - quite literally - prevent the spread of 'viruses' across the 'workspace', thus giving concrete, tangible form to an abstract, metaphorical notion; something the software industry has always struggled to do.

I am on marketing fire! I sketch a rudimentary mug chain on my to-do pad, and make a note to fax it to none other than Siralan** himself.

It is at this point that I notice it's already midday, and there's washing to be done, and boxes to be packed, and carrot cake to be made - and before I do any of that I have to write an article about online video for one client and a list of recommendations to the governments of Central and Eastern Europe for another.

The mug chain will have to wait. But ITS TIME WILL COME, goddammit.


* A true story, but one for which the world is not yet prepared.

** Sugar, not Turing. Alan Turing is dead, for a start, and therefore doesn't have a fax machine. And he wasn't a 'Sir', although he did more for this country than Suralan ever has, and what's more Suralan wouldn't even have had a company if it hadn't been for the work of his illustrious predecessor. And besides, faxing my idea to Turing, the rightful originator of it, would be tantamount to commercial suicide!

Revelations

The lovely Mr BC has tagged me (mainly because I asked him to, I've never quite got the hang of these 'meme' things) to answer the burning question: 'What revelations have you had since taking up your writing career?'

The reason I wanted to do this one is that I'm aware that quite a few of you are, like me, toiling at the unglamorous end of the writing industry, with no prospect of ever being asked to write anything about dragons, or ninjas, or unfeasibly attractive and scantily-clad Liverpudlian teenagers.

BUT WE HAVE FEELINGS TOO, DAMMIT!

So now I am going to impart some wisdom, and then I will tag some more of you to impart your own wisdom, and maybe together we can create a beautiful primer of everything that anyone might want to know about how to be a 'professional writer'.

Here we go then, some revelations I have had since I took up my writing career - or rather 'accidentally fell into' my writing career - nine years ago:

1. Being a freelance writer is brilliant. You get to work at home, have coffee whenever you like, look out of the window whenever you like and (usually) organise your working day however you like. Now there's the internet, and laptops, you can theoretically work from anywhere, which is how I didn't have to give up my job to go and look after my mum when she was ill, for which I am profoundly grateful.

2. Those adverts ('Make A Living From Writing!') that you see in the back of Sunday supplements are deeply misleading. Unless you're extraordinarily good, extraordinarily lucky or extraordinarily well-connected, you're never going to make a decent living as a freelance journalist, novelist or screenwriter. (Obviously this doesn't mean you shouldn't try, especially not if you're a naturally gifted creative writer, but just be aware that it's highly unlikely to make you unbelievably rich.)

3. This doesn't mean you can't make a decent living as a writer, though. You can. If you get enough work, and if you work hard enough at it, you can even earn the equivalent of a six-figure salary*. To do that, you need to be in the private sector. And not just any old part of the private sector - you need to be in an industry that's awash with cash. And not just any old industry that's awash with cash - you need to be in one whose products are complicated and obscure, and therefore need careful and precise explaining. It helps if it's an industry in which not many people know how to write about the products in a way that laypeople understand. Technology is one. Finance is another**. Pharmaceuticals is probably another one.

4. Once you get into one of these industries, and demonstrate that you can write beautiful, limpid prose that not only educates the target market about what the product does but also makes them REALLY WANT TO BUY IT, you'll be amazed at a) how much people are prepared to pay for your services and b) the kind of things they ask you to write. On more than one occasion, I've been paid to write an internal memo. Amazingly, there are people who have so little confidence in their own writing skills that they'd rather pay someone to write their emails for them. In some ways, I find this a sad reflection on an education system that has clearly failed a lot of people. In other ways, I'm eternally thankful that so many people feel unable to string two words together, because otherwise there'd be no work for me.

5. There's a received wisdom in the world of marketing that no writing is any good unless it's 'punchy', which means 'extremely short', 'devoid of verbs' and 'bereft of all meaning'. Many clients don't seem to care what the text actually says, as long as it meets these criteria. (This post of Matt's sums up the attitude nicely.) This means that I quite often spend all day writing meaningless 'punchy' stuff, which is why I like to be quite long-winded on this blog. Sorry about that.

Now then, let's hear it from fellow writers Great She Elephant, Bête de Jour and Rach. And of course anyone else who feels like joining in.

UPDATE: You can read Rach's very fine answer here.


* For the record, I don't have a six-figure salary, but I came within spitting distance of one during the dotcom boom. The dotcom boom was brilliant.

** I'm aware that the finance industry is currently emphatically not awash with cash, but give it six months and it'll probably recover.

I Like A Challenge

When I tell people I work in marketing, it probably conjures up images in their minds of exposed brickwork and glamorous product launches and handsome men in black polo-necks designing impossibly cool viral campaigns on their Macbook Airs.

In reality, I spend most of my time writing the blurb for those bits of paper that fall out of magazines, and which you immediately curse and throw in the bin without ever looking at them.

And as I work in B2B, rather than consumer, it's likely that you don't even look at the magazine itself, which is probably called something like Purchasing Manager Monthly, and you get sent eighteen shrink-wrapped copies of it every month despite the fact that you never asked for it and you don't even work in purchasing.

(I'm not bitter: I reconciled myself long ago to the profound and fundamental pointlessness of my chosen career. The money helps.)

Today, though, there must be something in the air, because two separate clients seem simultaneously to have decided that it's time to be a bit more 'creative'. The resulting tidal wave of conceptual free-association washed into my world as follows:

Phone rings.

Me: Hello?

Client: Ooh hello Patroclus, I need you to do this thing, it's urgent.

Me: No problem. What is it?

Client: We're doing a postcard, an invitation to [some government computing show]. We're giving away free smoothies on the stand. I need you to come up with a headline that ties in the concept of a smoothie with the concept of government departments moving to a shared service operating model.

Me (trying not to giggle): Central or local government?

Client: Doesn't matter.

Me: Can I use the brand name of the smoothie?

Client: No.


SEVEN MINUTES LATER


An email arrives. It reads:

Patroclus,

I have found a picture of some peas. Can you come up with a tagline that ties it in with the need to upgrade your call center infrastructure to include multimedia contact channels? This is urgent.

Yours,

CLIENT

(He did sign off in capitals, as well. I suspect he accidentally hit caps lock in a frenzy of unadulterated creative excitement.)

Lying On My Bed With Nothing In My Head

Well, I didn't come back from Wokingham with any blogging inspiration, although I did come back with bleeding feet and a potentially enormous work project (although experience dictates that potentially enormous work projects tend to have a way of dematerialising shortly after coming into being, like fragile soap bubbles of money pricked into non-existence by the capricious fairies of transatlantic office politics).

So while I'm still suffering from blogger's block, here are some things that aren't YouTube videos:

1. A photograph of my lair:


In this photo you may notice some or all of the following:

- A to-do list that is dated 24th December 2007.

- A calendar that is still set to March.

- A to-do pad with nothing written on it.

- A broken pencil.

- A map of the recently redefined Schengen area.

- An image of the Blue Kitten doing an impression of a frozen king prawn.

- Some iPod earphones engaged in a complicated mating dance.


2. A photograph of some cherry blossom in my dad's garden...


...which I rather pretentiously fancy to be the organic cousin of this other photo I took last year of some wrought iron:



3. A rather splendid squelchy acid dance number by a band with the rather splendid name of Holy Fuck, featuring some rather splendid drumming into the bargain:


Holy Fuck - Royal Gregory (m4a)


Right, I'm off back to the chaise longue to wallow in the continued ennui.

The Mighty, Fallen

I don't normally comment on the passing of blogs I like, as most lapsed bloggers seem to come crawling back to the big B eventually, like a bird on its belly.

But LC seems determined to give up this time, so I thought I ought to say a few words to mark the occasion.

Which is more than I did when LC first came to work in my team. I was going through a terribly bad patch at the time, what with my marriage breaking up and everything, and I felt barely capable of taking responsibility for myself, let alone anyone else.

So, like all great leaders of men, I addressed this situation by almost completely ignoring LC in the workplace, in fear that if I acknowledged him, he would immediately discern that I was a feckless and irresponsible waste of a human life masquerading as some sort of professional superior.

As far as I recall, this carried on for some time, until one day I noticed that some character calling himself 'LC' had left a comment on this very blog. My amazing powers of deduction, combined with the fact that LC had referred to me in this comment as his boss, led me to conclude that this could only be the 'LC' whom we had recently employed.

Naturally I was utterly mortified, especially as in one of my recent posts I had been contemplating the twin temptations of committing suicide and buying expensive French underwear, neither of which, I felt, endowed me with a great deal of professional gravitas.

The only redeeming aspect of the whole sorry experience was that it appeared that 'LC' also had a blog, which at least meant that I might not be alone in the public embarrassment stakes. I was far too scared to look at LC's blog at first, though, in case it referred to me as a feckless and irresponsible waste of a human life masquerading as some sort of professional superior.

Luckily I got over all of this eventually, and LC's blog became staple reading, and one of the few blogs that really, really made me laugh. His review of King Kong, for example, now sadly lost to the world, had me weeping tears of mirth at my desk.

Towards the end it seemed that the female blogosphere could be divided into four categories: those who'd slept with LC; those who wanted to sleep with LC; those whom LC wanted to sleep with, and those whose relationship with LC was strictly professional (if feckless, irresponsible and charlatanical) at all times. I suppose we'll have to find a new taxonomy now.

Unless he comes back, of course. Then we'll just have to forget that this post ever happened. We are British, after all; it doesn't do to display sentiment.

But What If The Beard Got Stuck In The Photocopier? Health And Safety, You See.

When I was a Very Important Executive, as opposed to the idle layabout that I am now, one of my more dubious management perks was that I would automatically receive all of the CVs sent in by people applying for jobs with us.

Normally I would read through these with a view to reaffirming my own snobby prejudices viz. that the entire country's education system is going to the dogs, with the result that young people these days can barely spell their own names, let alone muster the intellectual nous and wherewithal to, say, write a press release unaided*.

However, despite a frequent lack of grammatical expertise, not to mention a widespread tendency to sprinkle apostrophes where they were not needed while omitting them from places they should have been, most applicants at least managed to put together a fairly robust argument for why they should be considered for the job in question.

Except one.

This was a CV from a jobbing actor who was applying for a position with us - presumably because poncing about pretending to be someone else practising 'the craft' wasn't bringing in enough loot to support day-to-day existence in The World's Most Expensive City^TM.

As well as including a number of moody headshots and listing his screen appearances, the applicant in question also reassured us that among his key skills were the ability to:

a) Adopt a Yorkshire or Birmingham accent upon request

and

b) Grow a convincing beard in three days.

As these weren't necessarily attributes we were looking for in an office administrator, he didn't get invited in for interview.

I often wonder how things would have turned out if we had given him a job, though. Maybe we could have opened up a lucrative sideline as an undercover detective agency specialising in Northern and Midlands-based cases. Maybe we could have added another trophy to the groaning shelf by spectacularly winning the prestigious All-London Marketing Agency Facial Hair Growing Contest. Maybe we could all have been extras in an episode of Heartbeat. Who knows?


* A prejudice not actually borne out in reality, but that's the lovely thing about prejudices, isn't it - you can just ignore anything that doesn't fit them and only focus on the things that appear to back them up.

This Blog Post's Rubbish Too

I've spent at least some part of every working day of the last month meticulously crafting the text of a promotional postcard for a new client.

The client - the CEO of a startup software company - and I have discussed the semantics and semiotics of practically every single word on this postcard. I've dished out my best professional advice on how he should position the company and its product to his target market of procurement directors in large companies. We've negotiated over the placement of Oxford commas and capital letters. I've tweezed out widows and orphans to make all the bullet points the same length. We spent an entire week debating the most suitable URL to put on it.

After four weeks of delicate discussions and tiny, incremental modifications, the thing was finally declared by the client to be perfect. It duly went off to the printers, to be printed and delivered to a huge conference in California where the client's product is being launched.


Where it turned out they'd only been printed on one side.


And it wasn't the side with the text on it.


Over the past ten years I've occasionally been troubled by the thought that my contribution to society isn't perhaps among the most valuable. That if I had never existed, nothing would have been much different. That in fact the world might even have been a slightly better place. Today was one of those occasions.

The Remote Cove Cake Hut suddenly looks like quite an attractive proposition.

Question Time

People keep asking me questions that I can't answer. All I can do is gape at them and say 'well, er, I don't really...I mean I haven't really thought about it much, to be honest.'

Which is fine if the question is something like 'Are Ant & Dec a gestalt entity?', or 'Do cats have souls?'. Unfortunately, the questions that I keep getting asked tend to be more along the following lines:

• Why are you leaving your job?


• Why are you moving to Cornwall?


• What are you going to do there?


• How are you going to make a living?


• Why do you keep making cakes?

I'm not sure that 'gaping' is an adequate, adult or mature response to any of these questions, to be frank, so later on I am going to sit down and write a detailed life plan for the next five years in a nice notebook.

Or I might just make another cake.

'F' Is My Second Favourite Letter, Though

I tend to avoid the F-word, because whenever I use it I always end up unintentionally horribly betraying the sisterhood in some way.

And also I can't help thinking that a lot of feminism only serves to ghettoise women further, and is therefore completely counter-productive, and that what we should really do is just get on with things without drawing attention to our gender every five seconds, and oh arse, I just did it again.

But sometimes I do get a bit riled up, like just now when I was perusing a leaflet that fell out of our industry rag, the inimitable PR Week.

The leaflet is for the Fast Growth Business Awards 2008, and the categories are as follows. See if you can spot the incongruity:

1. T-Mobile Fast Growth Business of the Year

2. Service Business of the Year

3. Product Business of the Year

4. Retail/Leisure Business of the Year

5. Online Business of the Year

6. Best Use of Technology

7. Innovative Business of the Year

8. International Business of the Year

9. Angel or VC-Backed Business of the Year

10. PLUS New Business of the Year

11. AIM New Business of the Year

12. Female Entrepreneur of the Year

13. Financial Director of the Year

14. Green Business of the Year

15. One to Watch

I can't work out if the award organisers have established category 12 because they think that female entrepreneurs deserve a little pat on the head for doing something that's the preserve of men, or because they think women are unlikely to win in the other categories because their companies won't be good enough.

Still, at least they didn't say 'women entrepreneurs', eh, English language fans?

My Interesting Life

It was brought to my attention by Annie Rhiannon that I had not blogged for some time.

Here then is a quick roundup of things that happened during my blogworld absence:

1. Visitors from Cornwall came, intent on spotting celebrities in That London. Within 48 hours they had racked up Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Noel Gallagher, Dustin Hoffman and Jodie Kidd, most of them in the organic wholefood supermarket in Kensington. Not to be outdone, Mr BC and I went to Sainsbury's and saw Rula Lenska. Chiswick is a hotbed of A-list stardom and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

2. I had an email from an informant, informing me that the informant had seen Peter Serafinowicz's brother in the High Road Brasserie, and that he looked just like Peter Serafinowicz (the brother, not the informant).

3. I retrieved a cat from SE27.

4. LC and I sold something we'd made* to a very big company, which made us happy. Capitalism rocks.

5. I watched Mr BC play Bioshock. At no point did he exclaim 'that's what you get for messing with the J-man!', but it can only be a matter of time.

6. The television broke. No one was unduly bothered.

7. I attended an event about how no one in the television industry knows what's going on any more. A man from Channel 4 said the channel had run out of money** and had asked the government for help. A scuffle broke out in the audience. It was a bit like the last days of the Roman Empire, but with free canapés.

8. I offered to be interviewed for an online magazine on the subject of fear of public speaking. The thought of talking to the journalist is making me anxious.


* When I say 'we' made it, what I mean is LC made it, while I hovered behind his shoulder making helpful suggestions like 'I think the logo should be bigger'. I am very much the Pointy-Haired Boss to LC's Dilbert.

** My commitment to factual accuracy and editorial integrity compels me to add that this may be a slight exaggeration. Although it might go some way towards explaining this (the bit about the sitcom, not the bit about the mobile phone).


UPDATE: In accordance with my new editorial policy of 'telling lies then correcting them in the footnotes', I should acknowledge that my informant points out that Peter Serafinowicz's brother didn't look 'like Peter Serafinowicz' so much as like 'what you would expect Peter Serafinowicz's brother to look like'.

Gah

When will it end? When?


UPDATE: It has ended now.

UPDATE 2: No it hasn't.

Meeja Pundits: Your Help Needed

Hello blogchums, I wonder if anyone out there fancies helping me with an article I am writing for our work newsletter.

I'm doing a little analysis of the MediaGuardian 100* list that was published on Monday. The list is supposedly indicative of a shifting balance of power in the UK away from traditional media and towards digital media. I'm interested in hearing anyone's opinions on whether it does genuinely represent a shift in who has media power and influence these days, and if so, in what way? Also, was there anything you found particularly surprising or interesting about the list?

Feel free to comment (anonymously or otherwise) in the comments box, or send me an email. I'll be writing it tomorrow morning, so any time today is good.


* Sub required, but it's free. Although still annoying.

Tea And Antipathy

INT. PATROCLUS'S OFFICE - DAY

I am in the office kitchen, looking in the tea cupboard.

INNER VOICE: Hmm...Chai...Lapsang Souchong...Goji Berry and Arrowroot...where's the Earl Grey?

Seconds later:

INNER VOICE: There's no Earl Grey. Why the FUCK is there no Earl Grey?

Seconds later:

INNER VOICE: I specifically asked the office manager to get Earl Grey. Honestly, you can't get the staff...wait, what's this?

(It is a new packet of Earl Grey teabags, recently purchased by deeply efficient office manager)

INNER VOICE: These are Whittards teabags! I specifically asked the office manager to get Twinings! I *only* like Twinings! I told her that! Whittards Earl Grey is too strong! Also, Whittards isn't a proper tea company, it's only a pretend tea company, which sells over-perfumed girly doll tea in an attempt to lend a more upmarket air to its frankly pedestrian china. And they turned me down for a job once. Bastards. Although actually that might have been Cargo Homeshop. But still. This is going to upset my entire afternoon!

INNER VOICE: Patroclus, do you ever consider that you lack a sense of perspective?

INNER VOICE: (meekly) Yes.

I make a cup of Whittards Earl Grey, in my special Alan Turing 'magic' mug. It doesn't taste too bad.

Call Off Cthulhu

The lovely Mr BC has been attempting to draw me into the world of role-playing games by slyly positioning them in terms I can relate to.

While we were strolling along Nairn beach last month, he casually mentioned that it's possible to play the game Call of Cthulhu as any character from the 1920s, before giving me a sideways look and adding 'even Lord Peter Wimsey'.

Sadly this intelligence hasn't* given me a taste for complicated rulebooks and unusually multi-faceted dice so much as for re-reading all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

I've started with Murder Must Advertise, which is a splendid period novel in which people take the tram down Theobalds Road (where I used to work) and say things like 'it's going to rain like billy-oh in about two ticks'. It's also deeply entertaining for me personally, because in it Lord Peter, the aristocratic detective, goes undercover as a copywriter in a London advertising agency.

And that's my job too!

It was also Dorothy Sayers's job, which is why she was able to describe the daily life of an advertising copywriter in the early 1930s in such great and witty detail. I swear nothing has changed, except we now type into computers instead of passing handwritten bits of copy to typists, and we send text by email instead of by messenger boy.

Otherwise, it's exactly the same. Take a deep breath and read this:

Mr Bredon had been a week with Pym's Publicity, and had learnt a number of things. He learned that the word 'pure' was dangerous, because, if lightly used, it laid the client open to prosecution by the Government inspectors, whereas the words 'highest quality', 'finest ingredients' and 'packed under the best conditions' had no legal meaning, and were therefore safe; that the expression 'giving work to umpteen thousand British employees in our model works at so-and-so' was not by any means the same thing as 'British made throughout'; that the Morning Star would not accept any advertisement containing the word 'cure', though there was no objection to such expressions as 'relieve' or 'ameliorate'; that the most convincing copy was always written with the tongue firmly in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity's worth producing - for some reason - poverty and flatness of style; that if, by the most farfetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning that the Great British Public would infallibly read into it; that the great aim of the studio artist was to crowd the copy out of the advertisement and that, conversely, the copywriter was a designing villain whose ambition was to cram the space with verbiage and leave no room for the sketch; that the layout man, a meek ass between two burdens, spent a miserable life trying to reconcile these two parties, and further, that all departments alike were united in hatred of the client, who persisted in spoiling good layouts by cluttering them up with coupons, free-gift offers, lists of local agents and realistic portraits of hideous and uninteresting cartons, to the detriment of his own interests and the annoyance of everyone concerned.

Having just spent the day writing and re-writing a junk direct mail piece for a Large Software Company, during which time I was told by the 'layout man' (actually a layout woman) that what I'd written was too long, too wordy, too unspecific about the benefits of the product and too difficult to illustrate by the 'studio artist', before being told that the client had decided to scrap the idea altogether and go with something completely different, I find the above passage enormously comforting.

Sayers wasn't long out of her copywriting job when Murder Must Advertise was published. I like to think of her using it to exorcise years of frustration with difficult clients and meaningless marketing drivel. And I can actually feel her glee at writing the massive 275-word sentence above as revenge for all those snappy five-word slogans she had to write in her job.

Aww, Dorothy Sayers was great.


* Yet.

Never Believe What You Read In The Papers

I'm writing an article for a client that's partly about the growing use of internet banking in the UK.

When I asked the client if he had any figures illustrating the growth of online banking, he directed me to two recentish press releases.

The first press release was issued by Apacs on the 28th December last year, and says that 'over a third' of UK adults now bank online, with the 16-24 age bracket growing fastest.

The second release was issued 25 days later by Lloyds TSB, and says that 68% of UK adults now bank online, with the over-50 age bracket growing fastest.

Both stories were reported faithfully by the financial newswire Finextra, with no acknowledgement of - let alone attempt made to investigate - the gaping discrepancies evident therein.

It annoys me intensely that a lot of 'journalism' is actually just re-printing press releases about spurious surveys that miraculously support whatever it is the companies who wrote them are selling.

Next time you see some survey data in the paper, take care to note who sponsored or carried out the survey. If it's a company promoting an associated product, pay close attention to the small print, especially about how many and what sort of people were surveyed and what they were asked. Nine times out of ten* it will turn out to be statistically invalid, spurious bollocks.

I wish more journalists had the presence of mind to do the same.


* Hee.

Time And Relative Thinger In Whatsit

The jet-set life of the IT copywriter is such that I never know which exotic locale I will be swanning off to next.

Yesterday, for example, I was summoned to Earls Court to do some glamorous live-action note-taking in front of a studio audience. At a public sector computing show.

(Really, sometimes I'm amazed no one has ever wanted to make a book of this blog.)

Anyway, I've been to Earls Court like a million times, but I swear I've never seen this before:


There was no sign of David Tennant, but his absence was as naught to me as I am the only female in Britain to remain steadfastly immune to his charms.

But enough of this drivel. I recommend that you depart these pages post-haste and go and check out these two new blogs:

1. The Blovel, where a bunch of talented bloggers are fashioning a gripping LA-based noir out of the primordial ooze of the blogosphere, orchestrated by GSE.

2. Chumster, where LC has assumed the role of blog post quality filter and is choosing one 'good' and/or 'funny' post a day from the blogosphere at large, and presenting it for your delectation.

Go to it!

Life Imitates Ghostbusters

I can't help but feel that the Fabulous New Business Division that LC and I have been setting up is an exact mirror of the entire plot of Ghostbusters.

A metaphorical spook appeared in a notional municipal library in January, and by March we'd become convinced that all hell was about to break loose. We've even made an advert. It starts running next week.

But for now, everything is very quiet. Too quiet. A typical conversation in the office might go like this:

ME: LC, any calls?

LC: No.

ME: Any messages?

LC: No.

ME: Any customers?

LC: No, Dr. Patroclus.

ME: Type something, will you; we're paying for this stuff!

Still, I'm pretty sure something wildly unorthodox is going to happen any day now. I've even armed myself with a new pair of Converse and the latest Husky Rescue album in preparation for the coming Social Media Armageddon.

Anyway, while we're waiting for Zuul to manifest in the spanking new office fridge, please help yourselves to our super tap-along theme song:


Ray Parker Jr vs Public Enemy - Bring The Noise (m4a)
[Buy from Amazon]


Now back to cataloguing my collection of spores, moulds and fungus...