A romp through the torpor of middle aged life
Probably shouldn’t be doing this on Christmas eve; there’s presents to wrap, drink to be drunk and still a couple of children to tell off, but I would very much like to share my favourite local news article from the last few weeks.
Topical, full of seasonal cheer, and a fine metaphor for the year ahead.
Enjoy!
I’ve been lucky enough to be working with technology in one form or another for all of my working life. I ‘got into it’, as we used to say when we were young, purely by accident, and have grown ever fonder of the twists and turns it has taken ever since, providing us with new smarter ways of communicating, keeping transparent, staying alive, and much much more. So I am what you might call a fan of technological advance.
And central to the theme of technological advance is Research & Development. Or at least it used to be. In what my children are increasingly calling the olden days, there would be a separate R&D function in almost every business that was delivering new stuff. This stuff could be anything from service products to cars to software. It was expected that any company worth its salt would be finding out what the market wanted or even how to manufacture that market. (History is, of course, littered with attempts to manufacture the market that went horribly wrong. The one that always sends a shudder down my spine is the campaign based on Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) at the end of the 90’s. If you’ve erased this from your memory (and I so wish I could), this consisted of O2 promising that the internet was going to be arriving on WAP-enabled handsets, so everyone could happily browse away in the (relatively infant) web. The problem was, they couldn’t. Not only was the network not up to the job, but neither was the internet. Or the handsets, really. Which just left a half baked idea and a lot of front. And what might work for Simon Cowell didn’t work for O2.)
Anyway, R&D was pretty core to the smart companies that dominated the post war years. Any book on company management will tell you that R&D is the key to the constant re-development of companies like Sony, Apple, Toshiba etc. And the companies that didn’t have effective R&D are the ones that started feeling a bit cumbersome. I think that’s what happened to IBM, and I also think (and part of me secretly hopes) that it’s what may well happen to Microsoft. If your business is constantly trying to push the same market, there’s a chance you’re going to run out of customers.
So, I was at a meeting with a pretty big IT company recently, and asked them how much they were spending a year on R&D. The rep quoted an absolutely massive number, which I couldn’t quite believe. Pushing a bit harder, we agreed that this number must include acquisition costs. At which point it struck me that that’s where we’ve got to in the development of R&D. We see this all the time in IT, with the big companies buying up the small ones to create a portfolio of product, sometimes at odds with their initial direction as a business. And I think that’s a real shame as it becomes all about wedging something small into a bigger whole, and that’s not really about R or D. And of course, in extremis, the big company buys up the smaller one before they can become a competitor, sometimes killing the developed technology in the process.
So I think that’s a shame. When I looked at this fantastic idea from the RCA grad show:
then I can’t help feeling that what’s being developed by the bigger businesses in the name of R&D these days is pretty second rate.
There’s a danger that this blog ploughs the troughs of predictability, but bear with me, do.
I made the huge mistake of venturing ‘up the city’ last weekend. It was of course, late November, but no reason not to have every single shop dolled up like a Vegas Elvis, with the shop assistants all wearing those hilarious festive caps. And every shop I went into* was playing a loop of jolly yuletide songs. Cue the grumpy old man blog about Christmas coming far too early, completely missing the point of being festive, and feeling suicidal every time Sir Noddy yells ‘It’s Chriiiiiistmas’.
But no, I am nothing if not unpredictable, as my wife remarked a few years back when her birthday presents were all centred around a golfing theme. For this is a short blog about rhyming couplets.
I don’t really get the whole rhyming thing, to be honest. If you really strip it down, the idea of expressing yourself in the form of rhyme is really weird. It means that every time you say something you immediately limit yourself on the second line. And yet we’ve all had a go in our time, and usually to disastrous and embarrassing effect.
My personal trick with this, incidentally, is to start with a really more obscure word on the second line, so that from a distance, it looks like you have contrived the whole thing out of nowhere. So:
‘For you I would defy temptation, or mastermind matriculation’
has got a lot more hope of getting through the censors than
‘It’s only a matter of time before you, become the doo be doo be doo**’
Anyway, you get the general idea. The point of rhyming to express yourself is just mad. And sometimes, in a bid to just make a song rhythmic in the most contrived way, it all goes horribly wrong. Which brings me back to the shops. A fantastic example of the ouvre*** is my personal favourite at this time of the year:
On a worldwide scale, It’s just another winter’s tale
(Winter’s Tale – David “Bard of” Essex)
And, if you care to look, almost every line in this song is a similar appalling lyrical crime.
And let’s knock up a quick top five while we’re here:
2. I’m serious as cancer, When I say rhythm is a dancer
(Rhythm is a Dancer – Snap!)
And they say there are no taboos left….
3. Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon, I hope my legs don’t break, walking on the moon
(The Police – Walking on The Moon)
From the group that brought you ‘Da Doo Doo Doo’, and other great classics. You could easily have had “You don’t ever want to see me again, And your brother’s going to kill me and he’s six feet ten”, but I prefer the idea of Sting/NASA worrying themselves about breaking their legs. On the moon.
4. And fiery demons all dance when you walk through that door, Don’t say you’re easy on me you’re about as easy as a nuclear war
(Duran Duran – Is There Something I Should Know)
Err, yes. That lyric is an embarrassment. You’ve let yourself down, you’ve let your school down, etc etc
5. There was a little old lady, who was walkin down the road, She was struggling with bags from Tesco. There were people from the city havin lunch in the park, I believe that it’s called al fresco
(Lily Allen – Ldn)
I would hope that in future songs, ‘Our Lil’ will manage Lidl/Fiddle, Aldi/Mouldy, and very possibly M&S/Hedonist.
So that’s my pre-Festive gift to you. If you want to populate numbers 6-10, please do let me know. Almost any Bob Dylan songbook from the ‘lost years’ would give you a good start.
Until we meet again. (Don’t know where, don’t know when.)
*And reader, sadly there were many. My bid to get ‘something special’ for Mrs Emu at this time of year extends my patronage well beyond my normal haunts of Thorns the Ironmonger and Chadds the Gentlemen’s Outfitter.
**You can insert a number of endings here. Blue, True, New, and even, in the right circumstance, Glue. The only really great example of this rhyme in pop music that I can think of is:
‘Alison, I know this world is killing you, Alison, my aim is true’
***Get you!
The Emu 