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It's time for a break. We're driving south and staying somewhere beautiful with no agenda for a week.
I've decided to switch off completely. No twitter, no facebook, no blog-reading. This is making Matt nervous - he's asked if I think I'll need to bring a friend. I think that's a sure enough sign that a switching off for a while is no bad thing!
I've always had a thing for singing. It doesn't matter that I've not got much of a voice; that my parents always awarded my brother the winner in our Limahl: Never Ending Story sing-offs; that I once overheard a teacher telling someone that the reason they'd given me a solo was because I was guaranteed not to get stage fright and could be relied upon to belt the tune out. Singing makes me happy.
These days I prefer singing as part of a chorus. Protected by a sense of anonymity, I am emboldened and liberated. It's a herd thing. I find it impossible not to feel thrilled at simply being human and alive when I'm part of a great meld of voices. It's just good for the soul.
So I got very excited when I spotted an ad for London Sing on the side of a bus coming home from groups last night. What a wonderful idea. Sadly, I'm going to miss the big sing-off on the South Bank (another wedding - this time in the Czech Republic). Had I been in London, wild horses wouldn't have kept me away.
Not going, not getting the t-shirt
I have to admit my sense of fomo is quite acute just now. Especially as the photo above (taken from Ben Terrett's flikr) has reminded me I'm missing out on a good excuse to buy a new notebook. Nevertheless, I hope you all have a marvelous day. I'm looking forward to experiencing it remotely.
It's not so bad though, I'm going to a wedding and I freaking love weddings - when else do you get to cry, laugh and dance with someone's granny all in the same day?
I want to hear all about it...
Photo by Jonny2005
Twice this week I've found myself wandering along the Southbank. On both occasions I was on my way somewhere, but something about the atmosphere prompted me to take time out to dawdle.
I think the Southbank is my favourite place in London to just be. There's an easy inclusiveness to the mix of people and activities, and something about being beside the river, taking in the views of London old and new. The Southbank is the only place I know of that Londoners get close to promenading. I feel relaxed there; happy to just let it all soak in.
Last night, as I mingled amongst the Royal Festival Hall opening activity - watching TV reporters do their job and people interacting with the Appearing Rooms water sculpture - I wished I had my digital recorder on me. I wanted to record the meandering flow of sounds, to see if just hearing them later could evoke the feeling and atmosphere. I tried to get innocuously close to people, wanting to catch bits of conversation.
Then today I spot this on Londonist. In 2002, someone else had the same desire to capture the mood through snippets of chatter. Only they acted on it.
Perhaps the Southbank has this effect on lots of people? If so, I wonder where else in the world people get this kind of feeling? It would be nice to know of such places, just in case I find myself in the vicinity.
A few weeks ago the following conversation bubbled up in a group:
There’s all this new thing about the carbon footprint and how many miles and what have you...
Oh don’t mention that! I had someone stop me in the street about that and they put me in The Evening Post! They said, ‘do you know what carbon footprint is?’, and I said ‘no’, because I didn’t. Obviously you do.
If we use local produce or predominantly British ingredients then it’s not coming in from foreign countries or whatever and it’s not using so much petrol and things...
I’d never heard of it.
It’s very popular at the moment. Something to do with how many flights you take, or how many miles you do in your car.
They’re talking about the unnecessary. Not doing the unnecessary...
I suppose it’s all to do with the ozone layer, protecting the ozone layer...
Or is it more like Fair Trade or Organic?
Is that what they’re trying to say there?
What's interesting is that this response arose in the context of a group and stimulus that had nothing to do with green issues. Inadvertently, the stimulus triggered something that was lurking below the surface of the womens consciousness. The issues may not be top of mind, but people are soaking them up, unconsciously looking out for them or expecting to see them.
Understanding is partial and fragmented, often different issues are confused. Some know more than others and pieces of information are being casually transferred like gossip. Terms like 'carbon footprint' become sticky because they're evocative and give us a feeling of knowing. I sense that many of us feel we should understand more about this stuff than we do - but are not (yet?) sufficiently motivated to seek the information out. Besides, anyone who makes a toe-dip attempt to find out more, soon discovers that the issues are terrifyingly complex and come with no easy answers. So we wait until the information comes to us, via all our normal communication channels. "They'll tell us what we really need to know".
Green and ethical issues are just beginning to trickle in to what I find myself researching. Apart from a climate change project early last year (pre An Inconvenient Truth - how different the response would be if we re-ran that project now), there's been nothing until the last few months. Now it feels like the opening of floodgates, it's going to become a pervasive theme, just like health and healthy eating have been over the last five years or so.
There seems to be a similarity in how people approach world issues and healthy eating concerns. I get the feeling that treating subjects like climate change as world health issues helps us to make sense of them. The way conversations play out is fascinatingly similar.
I'm still trying to marshal my thoughts on Friday's psfk conference. I started the day nervous (I was something of a conference novice, and terrified it would be full of hardcore networking that I would be hopeless at), but I needn't have worried. It was a superb day, I was able to catch up with a lot of my favourite bloggers - lunch with Northern Planner was the biggest treat - and put a few more faces to names. All while trying to absorb the fascinating conversation and thinking that was being presented.
It's going to be a well blogged event and I suspect some of the stuff I learnt is going to inform a fair few posts of my own in the next few weeks. In the meantime I thought I'd record my overall impressions and personal highlights.
If I had to describe the pervasive mood of the day, I would call it uncertain. There seemed to be swings and shifts between feelings of optimism and pessimism about the future, and a certain amount of discomfort about where marketing is right now. There was a lot of talk about the need to understand your own values and beliefs in order to have pride in what you do.
In part, I felt this mood was set up by the first morning session. We had Timo Veilkkola who talked about how Nokia sets about anticipating the human need for communication will manifest in future. Timo ended with an Arthur C Clark quote suggesting that the future will be "utterly fantastic". This optimism was immediately followed by the fabulous Regine Debatty (the first of four speakers I fell a little bit in love with - nothing serious, this happens to me all the time) who showed us how artists are interpreting cutting-edge biotechnology developments. It was provocative stuff, and the presentation I've found myself thinking and talking about the most since Friday. Then came the Marketing Gap in Green panel which was all too short, but enough to really unsettle us and place what Amelia smartly calls the elephant in the room.
After that, some of the discussion around whether 'digital is better than advertising' and 'can planners be the new creatives' seemed a trifle inconsequential. I don't mean to suggest these discussions weren't interesting (they were), it's just that these intended-to-be-provocations seemed much less so in the context of what had preceded them.
Oh, but as a fiction-fiend I loved the story section. Jeremy Ettinghausen talked about some of the fantastic experiments in publishing that Penguin have been exploring in the last few years. They've tried a bunch of things, some worked others didn't, so they've tried to do more stuff that resembles and builds on the stuff that did. Jeremy was also polite when I acted like a pathetic fan-girl while talking to him later. Then Dan Hon of Mind Candy made my jaw drop as he told of the crazy obsessive behaviour that can be induced by brilliantly complex alternative reality games/stories like Perplexcity.
There was plenty more, but the Special Topics in Calamity Physics podcast is starting so I'll leave it there for now...
The post title is my standard way of asking for spontaneous gut responses to something (the word 'make' is meant to be more neutral than asking people what they think or how they feel about it).
Responding to this is interesting, because I'm immediately aware that however I feel about it now, by 2012 my response will be entirely different. This is always the case of course, but because we're talking about a big event so far in the future my awareness that my feelings will change is heightened. So for the record, I think my first response went something like this:
Oh, it's pink...Gosh...Erm...Not what I was expecting...What does it say? It's a bit difficult to read...Kind of like graffiti...Is it trying to be a bit too cool?...You know, I think I might quite like it...Some people are going to hate it...Can't wait to hear the grumbling and sniping...Exciting!
I didn't come at it completely cold though. I had a lovely lunch with Lauren today and by chance, we were talking about the Sydney Olympics and London 2012. Having been in Sydney in 2000, and sensing what an amazing atmosphere the games had created, I'm really excited about 2012. I am planning to keep this way against all the inevitable doom and gloom reporting we'll face over the next few years. (I sometimes think that being a quiet and willfully naive cheerleader as a protest against cynicism is one of the things I do best in life).
This design brings out the perverse side of me. Knowing that people are going to snipe at it makes me like it more. Can't wait to hear the discussion it provokes...
Read more about the London 2012 visual identity on the website here
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