Joe Joseph is a shepherd, who has just been granted grazing rights for his flock of Wiltshire Horn sheep on Glastonbury Tor.  On the eve of Winter Solstice we were sharing supper with Joe and our friends in his shepherd’s hut and the conversation got round the distinctive characteristics of the Somerset landscape and the spirit of place.  Joe mentioned he had just finished Madeleine Bunting’s book on search for her father through the a small plot of  the Yorkshire landscape he devoted much of his life to and  offered to lend it to me.

A post Christmas cold meant that I took time out and found it hard to put the book down once I had started.  Her extraordinary journey through the history, ecology and farming of the gritty Yorkshire landscape is woven with a heartfelt journey of coming to terms with her father’s genius as a sculptor and learning to love him just as he was.  It made me look afresh at the watery landscape of the Somerset Levels that I have been living on for the last thirty years.

The nature writer Garry Snyder once said, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stay home.

I don’t think I have had as much fun since I was six. Why do we have to graduate from Plasticine at such an early age into the dreary non-tactile world of irregular French verbs, Pride and Prejudice and Quadratic Equations? To see an army of parents jump in and excitedly make Gromits says to me that we need much more plasticine in the world.

The great enlightener

Just had the privilege of working with Adam Hart-Davis who recorded the narration for our film on Coastal Change in Somerset. My minor claim to fame is that a few years ago we shared a stage in Taunton. I was one of the warm-up guys and was asked to give a presentation on sustainable tourism. He walked on as the keynote guest speaker, wearing the most fantastic Hawaiian shirt, and gave a spellbinding talk on green technology.

A true polymath, in my book he’s up there with the Jonathan Millers of this world. With 12 honorary PhDs to his name he could afford to pull up the drawbridge and remain in his ivory tower, and yet he remains one of those delightfully modest British eccentrics. The David Bellamy of popular science without the excessive facial hair.

how we used to do it

Broadband celebrates it’s tenth birthday! It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since we were running businesses and buying on-line via those toe-curlingly slow whistling, humming, clicking 56kb dial-up modems. And yet in the day we were so impressed! A few years earlier I’d brought a fax machine that had the impressive go faster stripe on the side saying ‘all data transmitted at ultra-fast 9600bauds a minute (that is 9.6kb). A page of A4 text every 40 seconds – zipperty do da. We really thought we were cooking on gas. Despite Steve Job’s best efforts, people still hanker for technology that feels comfortable – hence the delightfully retro ‘dialler’ app for the iPhone. No doubt someone is designing a typewriter iPhone app with full carriage return so that we can send text messages the old fashioned way.

I made the cardinal sin today.  A friend and I met for coffee and were having a great conversation.  After a while I waited for him to get distracted and look briefly away.  Probably only a few seconds – but enough time for me to scroll rapidly through the new messages on my phone.  When I looked back up, his face said it all.  You sad sod – you can’t even share a cup of coffee without checking your messages. Rachel Cohn knows all about this pattern of behaviour and reminds us to take a step back and NOT be permanently wired, or wirelessly, connected.

I’ve just been to B&Q to buy some replacement blades for a modelling knife. Unable to find any, I ended up having to purchase a new ‘Craft Knife’ pack encapsulated in a teeth grindingly tough plastic blister pack.  It contained three different knife handles (none of which I needed) and 12 blades (11 of which I didn’t need). I mentioned this waste to the cashier and he immediately tannoyed for any available member of staff. Two rapidly appeared and took me back down the aisle. ‘Well’ they said, searching through the blades section, ‘We don’t appear to have any’ (pointing to an empty display peg) ‘but I am sure that we used to stock them’. It reminded me of the great Jack Dee sketch.

In contrast, we had to purchase a couple of new suitcases recently. An online search found that the best offer was at John Lewis ‘Never knowingly undersold’ (well, most of the time). We drove over to the vast temple of consumerism that is Cribbs Causeway and dutifully trotted through to the suitcase department. Although the website said stock was available, the special offer was nowhere to be seen. Feeling slightly frustrated we asked for help and a bright young woman, with an impressive ‘Head of Suitcases’ badge, immediately appeared. ‘But we saw it online and your website said there was stock available and we have just driven thirty-five miles’ we whined rather pitifully. ‘Don’t worry‘ she replied cheerfully, ‘John Lewis is a multi-channel retailer now‘ and took us over to a computer, brought up their website, checked warehouse stock levels in the warehouse and said ‘We can have them delivered to your home on Tuesday for no extra charge, at the same price as you saw on our website‘.

John Lewis were late to the world of e-commerce and launched their website in 2001. The company’s aim was to eventually generate  £100m in online sales. Last year the John Lewis online store turned over £327m, outstripping even their most successful department store  and it is growing at about 30% a year. No wonder their staff proudly talk about John Lewis being a multi-channel retailer.

I am a huge fan of Lee and Sacha leFever’s work at Commoncraft.  Why use lots of talking heads when you can explain technology with a cracking script and some very simple and clear 2-D animation?  They have perfected the use of the sound bite sized video as a powerful educational tool. And I dedicate this film of theirs to the worried couple who approached me after a seminar last year and said ‘We’d love to have a website just like you’ve described, but we’ve been told that the Internet is already full and we’re afraid we have left it too late’.

Fascinating dialogue at NESTA about the future impact of Social Media between newly anointed Twillionaire Stephen Fry, Biz Stone (founder and CEO of Twitter), Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn ably chaired by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA. Stephen Fry’s recent spat with a Twitter follower, who found him slightly boring, is forgotten.  Humble memo to Stephen Fry – You can’t have Wildean wit every second of the day, the law of averages means that you are bound to twitter something pretty boring occasionally. Relax and don’t take it so personally.

I recently attended a screening of some animation shorts and discovered the extraordinary work of Len Lye – a New Zealand artist / film-maker who worked his passage to Britain as a coal trimmer on a steam ship in 1926. His talents soon drew him to the attention of the GPO film unit, where his creativity flourished.  This richly imaginative film, set to the music of the Lambeth Walk, pays repeated viewing.  Long before the days of Flash, CGI, Final Cut Pro – this was animation at its most time consuming.  Painting directly onto the film stock.

This has to be one of the finest jazz trios to come out of Hungary (let’s ignore the haircuts and the suits).  The late, great, Aladár Pege on double bass, the brilliant Gusztáv Csík on piano and some impeccably tight drumming from Géza Lakatos Pecek.  They make this Miles Davis classic (wrongly attributed to Charlie Parker) really swing. Fantastic jazz.  Watch the way the classically trained Pege tears through his solo whilst not looking at his bass once.  No wonder he was called the Paginini of the double bass.  In my book he’s right up there with the legendary NHOP.