Going faster during the slow-down

Richard Noble and Andy Green, who achieved the world landspeed record in 1997, last week announced that they want to go even faster: 1000 mph in fact. We can expect to see this in 2011.

The BBC announced this news on the same day that Governor of the Bank of England uttered "Recession" on Radio Four's Today programme.

Breaking the LSR to an extent of 1000 mph will be utterly awesome if it faces anything like the challenges presented on the fly during the last project, which achieved the still-standing record of 763 mph. And it will indeed be awesome. Engineering will again be at the edge of its limit: the record stands for over 10 years, and 1000 mph is faster than the record for a low-altitude aircraft. Already, the plan is to change the jet when turning around for the return trip. The team is now looking for a 15-mile stretch of flat stone-free desert, and it is justified in doing this considering the footage of route walking and incidence analysis that it went through last time (The Mission: Supersonic Dreams [not playable online]). This project has the experience to fulfill its goal, regardless of a recession.

It makes me wonder whether it is that the big ideas will keep succeeding while every other is put on ice, and whether the big ideas will be kickstarting those that have stalled whenever there is a return of Confidence.

If so, I hope that the big ideas pushing through to the end will belong to a New Economics (sales of Das Kapital have risen 300% in Germany this year), that they will recognise the value of a producer's labour above that of materials, which is the way that Richard Noble approached his last project.

He operated on a shoestring, not knowing if a sponsor would come forward with his fuel costs, and even, towards the end of the season, with the vagaries of climate (quite ironically considering the stock markets' volatilite reactions to the economic climate); he succeeded because of the dedication of his people. Now he helps teams become more effective using his Transformation Dynamics model.

The concomitant announcements of the LSR and a putative recession could be prescient with my first-hand experiences on the same day (I'll give the wry details another day, suffice to say that I'll be talking about the food industry within the UK motorway service and pub restaurant chains), but it is just that I am looking for such connections and choose to interpret my observations. Staff can be hindered from serving a business's customers or the converse, staff can be empowered and make profits when there are less people prepared to part with their money.

Businesses with the big R on their minds have a choice: do business better for the same price (in this instance, invest in staff and they will be more inspired in their work) or do business worse for cheaper (cut investment in staff and offer nothing special). The difference in choice reflects the dogma, with which I happen to agree even while I don't like it, that selling for cheaper doesn't work in a recession: that is, when money is tight, sell to those want to pay more simply because they are the ones who can afford to make the decision to spend. Are China's toy and textile industries suffering simply because they serve the lower income market?

Taking a long-term view, businesses should follow the first option, maintain and improve standards and operations, and even more so in a recession so they can be ready to take opportunities when they present themselves again.

In fact, the supersonic car website says much the same thing in terms of education. Go faster, Andy, go faster!

Decisions with Mother

Only one link in this post, but here you will get up to speed on a personal situation that I am sure is close to many of our hearts: looking after our ageing parents. This is the start of a series examining other facets of adult childhoodship.

I am entering into a phase where Mother needs my support.

This statement alone will seem strange to those from cultures that keep close to their family. And I agonise over the fact that it is not part of my family culture -- my nuclear family culture at least. Talking with my Mother's sister, who stayed in her home town along with her brother and who was around more for her mother in her working life and old age, I know that the distance between my Mother and I till now is not generational behaviour. But my Mother being who she is, I have had to keep my distance. Indeed, she has often (always? still?) had an emotional wall that I've had to avoid bumping against. Yet this seems to have yielded with recent events, contracting and developing large holes through which my love and attention can reach.

This is fortunate and I thank serendipity for it: Mother needs support now and I have dedicated the last month to engender this emotional movement. It is awesome how she has grasped this nettle (oh yes, it is a nettle indeed when it involves a physical movement of 450 miles from a place after 35 years).

Until 4 weeks ago, I had a very laissez faire attitude with my mum: after all, she is/was physically and mentally active, making (or trying to make) decisions, being independent. Even after the whole of this year of telephone calls, when she has told me what she has done, how she has been thwarted, or ignored, or unsupported, or put down, or her letters blandly noted or actioned to no beneficial effect to her (and hardly pausing to even contemplate that I might have news, being so involved in her own life), and desperately wanting to move away from her new neighbours, I was planning to simply help her to sort things out rather than to engineer her relocation.

She had to wait for me to get to her: I had contact time with my children and then a conference to attend, all booked and waiting to happen. I could not get to her before the middle of September without exhausting myself; she waited for me for 2 months.

In the week before I reached her, it became clear that her moving away from her neighbours had to be a positive move (no bygone arguments or stress rumbling on) and a committed move (no lingering to desires to move away from the area completely, which has also been rumbling on for years with no lasting decision). This was the point of my Decision 1, made rather selfishly. The fact is that my Mother's daughter's worklife suddenly needed a massive commitment; either that or she needed to put her career on hold. Indeed, I had even made a decision this summer to curtail my business activities because Mother had become more needy. So, in the week before my long-awaited arrival, I phoned her and was candid. I explained to Mother my position, that her daughter had a choice, that I wanted to not have to feel that I had to drop whatever I was doing when she phoned, that I could know that I would not have to cancel work commitments because of new situations arising -- and she responded, praise the skies! "You should be able to live your life, I've had mine [not as negatively said as it reads]". And there we created a common goal, to organise her house sale, accommodation and other matters and to limit future disruption to my life.

Decision 2 was still to come. Even on my arrival, I thought it was a case of helping her to move asap within her locality (though I really wished she would move closer to me). But her incapabilities became clear very quickly. She was struggling to cope with the intricacies of everyday life, unable to have tenacity in whatever she needed to organise, unable to communicate effectively with the world at large, unable to do little, save shop for food and clothes: in the week before I arrived, she was too busy shopping for winter boots to make appointments for me to attend with her. I find her inability to cope very sad: sad because she has not understood the world for a long time, because she has a nervous condition for years that has not been recognised, and it is this that has disabled her. Physical incapabilities too: her managing the stairs with arthritis is exactly that, a deliberate management of the actions required to move up and down 9 feet of height lots of times a day. I was now concerned and decided that I had to keep her close to me.

So the scene was set for this 40-year-old woman to spring into action with tempered determination. We spent 10 days at her place looking into finances, local housing (private and Council/housing association options), house maintenance before sale, with daily meetings on what we had found out, what we thought, what needed to be done next (I can still hear her exclaim "Do we have to have another meeting? Now?") and oh so carefully broaching the option of changing location. Then I brought her to my place, so she wouldn't be left alone with "them next door", so I could use the tickets I'd booked for a night with Dylan Moran, so she could have a holiday and to see what it is like here, get balls rolling with the Council/housing associations and removal firms, before making a decision.

Tomorrow, after 2 weeks here, we head back to her place, to finish the house and move her out within the next 2 weeks (my partner is now involved on the project, which is an understatement). And we have Decision 3, which is Mother's.

Mother has decided to move closer to me. A long-awaited and fantastic result. Mother--daughter partnerships, huh? In the end, the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm and I am expecting other instances of uncertainty. But here's hoping this one is on a roll from here on in. Even if the first part of this moving closer involves her sleeping in my living room. TBC.

(Note 08/11/08: To continue this as a series is now impossible as mother reversed her decision. See my second and last entry on this story to read the conclusion.)

Clichés? Let's use them

Last week, the Guardian published a series on "How to write", which included "The Guardian Book of English Language" (read " .. of Guardian style". The Guardian's style includes the proscription of certain phrases, clichés. I disagree: I truly appreciate the image of a business "haemorrhaging cash" if they really are losing money hand over fist. Clichés are powerful. They get an idea across straight away. They may avoid the use of thought. But that is no reason to dogmatically refuse to use them: writers just have to make sure that they are using the right idea.

The Oxford Shorter Dictionary lists "cliché" as "a stereotyped, expression, a hackneyed phrase or opinion" and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors as "unoriginal phrase". Therein lies the sometime nature of the beast: negative, careless and wrong. "Cliché" first appeared in the English language in 1892, according to RW Burchfield: this is about the time that publishers had become established and were beginning to put their own style, their own choices, their own dictats on what they published. The style of "avoiding clichés" must come from this time. One definition of a cliché includes "overused to the point that its sole function is to mark its user as a lazy thinker". Hmm, so using a cliché reflects badly on the writer, which can only be when the cliché has become popular enough to become a cliché? It's a good example of a circular argument, which it seems is the best way to tackle any discussion of clichés: Stephen Fry wrote in his book Moab Is My Washpot, "It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue." It seems that it is very difficult to talk positively about clichés and Burchfield himself wrote of them that they are "always reminding us of the repetitiveness of things, the humdrumness that lies beyond and within the doorstep if one's imagination should weaken or one's sense of humour runs out". Oh help, how do we get away from such dogma about what is often a non-issue?

Clichés are metaphors, dead metaphors, those that we know so well that we don't have to think about to understand. People use idioms, analogies, colloquialisms because they are useful in their quirkiness. It is as simple as that. Idioms, I note, are OK: there is even a dictionary of English idioms. Phrases such as "like a fish out of water", "a feather in his cap", "Hobson's choice" have a historical and cultural basis, and refusing to use them risks losing the diversity in the English language.

Yes, there is a caveat: clichés can be misused for didactic purposes. They are familiar, instantly recognisable, and therefore dangerously powerful, and the message becomes subliminal, one that enters the mind yet only skims the surface of conciousness. This is just what is very handy about them, to get the message over, but lazy readers, that is lazy thinkers, may be more likely to accept a point that they otherwise wouldn't. Well, good writing should make reading easy, but writers can't and shouldn't second guess their style to accommodate potential laziness in their readers. Let's use the English language as it is given to us.

Are non-native English speakers put at a disadvantage when a cliché is used? Is the material made inaccessible to them? On the down side, reading has to stop until the meaning has been researched. On the up side, there is going to be no slipping fast ones past these readers, they aren't lazy. And the nuances of the language that are otherwise so difficult for non-native speakers to access are made available. Spoon-feeding (my choice of phrase) non-native readers, like spoon-feeding in general, does not allow development.

Finally, I am reminded of a colleague's comments when our supervisor was interviewing candidates for a post-doctoral position within our research group. " Oh her, that one. She was nothing but clichés. They can't appoint her." Well, "that one" got the job. And brilliant she is, the longest standing member of the group bar the supervisor himself. Not that I always agree with her, and she has views on a lot of things. Indeed, I relish the challenge of keeping on my toes in conversation with her and making sure that I don't just allow her latest point of view to slip in unnoticed, to flavour the rest of the conversation with a premise that I don't agree with. She doesn't second guess me; she trusts in my intelligence.

Talk until you are tired

"Talk until you are tired" is the translation of the words printed on a kanga I was buying in Dar es Salaam in 1989: Mtasema mtachoka. With many of the kangas in East Africa having a jina, they were clearly important for communication. I didn't want to be in ignorance; I asked the shop assistant.

She paused and laughed, clearly having difficulty. She explained: "It means that you keep talking about things that matter to you, whether it is a certain problem or just things. It is very important to talk as much as you can. You have to keep talking until you cannot talk anymore because you need to sleep."

Talking until you are tired is a way of life. It is the only way to sort things out. I spent 3 years in Africa, where women talk all the time as they walk, wash clothes in the river, wait by the bus stop. Men sit in groups in the evenings and talk. Great efforts are made to talk to the right people: in a country without a fit-for-purpose telephone system, people made long journeys, over the hill on foot, by bus or by train, and I am sure they still do.

Now, I'm blogging until I am tired. There is much to talk about. I'm writing from a UK perspective and I'm hoping, not least because the seed of this blog's attitude originates in Africa, that the blog will generate a collection of world views simply because there are issues that affect us all.