The T word

There is hardly a news story now not centred around the R word - the economic reality that started as a slow-down, grew quickly to be an acknowledged recession, and for some particularly lugubrious columnists, is darkly hinted at a possible depression. But to stay with the majority, let's call it by the R word. Working, as I do, writing about and sometimes for business, I am acutely aware of the multifarious ways that the R word is impacting on the culture and behaviour of businesses affected by the nervousness, strangled cashflow and retrenchment that fills the corporate air now. 

Lymehound works for a range of businesses in different stages of their lifecycle: some are babies at that fragile point when idea blooms into reality; others are mature and street-savvy, playing the media, ducking and diving. Like any other business, we have to collect debts to survive, and we have been very lucky in having honourable, well-meaning clients who, because they're pretty happy with what we do, pay us on time or thereabouts. We know that sometimes that has been at personal cost, and we appreciate it all the more because of that. We do the same. Why? Because we have an instinctive knowledge that we should act as we want to be acted on, so to speak. 

Interestingly, the only real problem we, as a new media company, has had in collecting our debts, has been with our biggest and oldest client. This client is one I have known personally for many years, and one I admire. It never occurred to me that this high-profile, well-established, highly-appreciative firm should be our one late payer. I left it a while. But when I was getting no replies to emails or phone calls, I started to worry. Here was a vibrant, savvy firm, led by a high-profile CEO who speaks with gung-ho positivity at numerous events and conferences, who would regularly email me perhaps six or ten times a day, simply going silent on me. I decided that I couldn't sensibly continue to work without communication and said so. And today, she called me to tell me she can't afford to work with someone who needs to be paid on an agreed timeline. It was kind of my fault for having the unreasonable expectation of getting paid in a vaguely timely fashion.

Now I'm a grown-up and know there will be many business relationships that for all sorts of reasons come to an end. But what upset me about this wasn't the fact that Lymehound was being sacked (incidentally in open violation of a contract, initiated and signed by the client only weeks ago) but the absolute breaking of trust. "Trust men and they will be true to you," said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Trust is so much more valuable than legal contracts. Trust is what makes you bust your gut for a client; over-deliver; introduce them to valuable business contacts without any payback or chance of payback. Trust has to do with a feeling that you understand the lay of the land and you are working to do something important together. Trust stops you billing for every hour, every train journey and expense. Trust makes the world go round. 

When  you can't pay a supplier, call him. Ideally call him before he calls you. Tell him how it is. Don't suggest it's unreasonable to expect payment or any other game you might play. Just level with him and keep close. You may think you can do without your suppliers - plenty out there clamouring for your business. But at some stage, maybe next month, maybe next year, you're going to need business relationships that are based on trust. If you've forgotten that, the R word may be the least of your worries. 

Alex Kingston and the Middle-aged Actress

The Sun reports that Alex Kingston is returning to ER for the very final episode, shooting early 2009. Alex Kingston was famously fired from the series for that peculiarly feminine sin - becoming old. Not even old, just less young. Alex's eight series' body of work as Elizabeth Corday in ER, at reportedly $150,000 per episode, was in itself a living example of one of my favourite George Herbert quotes, "Living well is the best revenge." After a bitter and difficult marriage to Ralph Fiennes, for my money she deserved every dollar. 

Why should I care? Well, Ralph and Alex happened to live in the flat above mine in the then rather risqué East Dulwich, and proximity being what it is, we became friends. They were then struggling actors with the RSC, evenly matched in typical thespian penury. I fed them and got lots of free tickets. It was a perfect arrangement. I witnessed Ralph's supersonic rise to fame, memorably including a slightly drunken supper when the phone rang and one of us, among the invited rabble answered it, giggling loudly – it's Steven Speilberg, Ralph, for you. Yeh right, we all collapsed. But, of course, it was. And the call was the approach that was to lead to Ralph's astonishing performance as Amon Goeth in Schindler's List. 

I held loud parties in those days, with French windows wide open to rather a lavish garden at the back and a balcony with beautiful wrought iron that had escaped, due to its location at the back of the house, requisitioning for the War Effort. Ralph used to appear, in indigo silk dressing-gown, remonstrating in a Noel Coward way, about the noise. It was entirely reasonable and didn't seem to dent our friendship. When not engaged in learning lines, or preparing for a new role, he was an enthusiastic dinner guest and danced with the rest of us to UB40 before slumping into an armchair and falling quietly asleep. Always serious. Always self-conscious, many found him difficult. But he was charming to me (and of course then meltingly handsome) and we used to find a quiet corner to discuss literature and occasionally philosophy.

Everyone adored Alex. She was always more beautiful in real life than in front of the camera and generosity shone from her in a completely winning way. Alex, you felt, could not but be herself. I was lucky enough to go to their wedding in Suffolk – and another old friend, Joelle Dupont, was tasked with taking the photos. Which she did rather badly, by missing out half the important people. There were droves of unmistakable members of Ralph's illustrious Twisleton Fiennes clan including a towering uncle in Greek Orthodox robes and resplendent beard. I remember standing in the buffet lunch queue behind Ben Kingsley. No-one talked to him, so I did. Fame can be an isolating attribute. The two went away in a pink Cadillac – a kind of premonition of the Hollywood lives they would both individually build for themselves. But even then the marriage was creaking and it creaked badly before they finally broke apart in the uncomfortable glare of the press. 

Later, when Ralph was filming the Kathryn Bigelow cult classic, Strange Days, I went to stay with him in his own movie set in the Hollywood Hills. We'd arrived late at LAX and wound our way through the warm and fragrant night from the urban smog below in our vast, cream convertible Chrysler le Baron. Ralph was waiting at the gates to his house, dressed memorably in wafty white, and waved us through the sleek and minimalist house to a terrace where champagne lay chilling next to some delicate sushi, with a technicolour, widescreen view over Los Angeles which took one's breath away. It was my first visit to the States, and I will never forget the sheer thrill of it. Somewhere David Hockney talks about his first experience of America being like breathing oxygen for the first time - and that's how I felt. High and energised. Ralph was an attentive host, considering his weird daily schedule that required a nocturnal existence - Strange Days being filmed exclusively at night. He was then newly acquiring the behaviour of a Hollywood A Lister: a masseuse arrived daily; the hazlenut-roast coffee was delivered; he would nonchalantly slip from a towelling robe (as we slurped morning coffee by the pool) naked into the water. We went on-set and met co-stars Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis, like giggling schoolgirls.

Many years later I was in LA on business and called Alex on the offchance. Alex, husband Florian and I growled away in their 4x4 from my hotel in Beverley Hills to a classic diner where we had huge calorific breakfasts. I still have the photos. And the love handles.

Now Ralph and Alex are both appearing in costume dramas – Alex as Mrs Bennett in Lost in Austen and Ralph as the cruel William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, in The Duchess. In real life, Ralph is famously restrained, private. Of course it doesn't always work: that Qantas air stewardess was never going to stay stum about their short-lived liaison at 35,000 feet. But mainly Ralph's life is his own. Alex has always been more open with the press - talking of her struggles to have a baby, for example. Her daughter, Salome, was born a month after my first son, Louis. They never met (and never will, because unfortunately Louis died last year from a brain tumour) but it remains a diurnal connection.

All this from a brief news story in The Sun: what would we do without our red-tops?

Money, money, money

Over the weekend, Reg "I'll get you Butler" Varney left this world aged 92, after many successful years as the Cockney bus conductor in 'On the Buses' - but his place in history was made, not from comic acting, but from making the first withdrawal anywhere in the world from an ATM machine in 27 June 1967. The bank was Barclays. The branch was Enfield in North London.

News of Varney's death came hot on the heels of another historic stat in the development of money and how we manage it. In October UK banking customers completed one million financial transactions (checking balances, paying bills, transferring funds) on their mobile phones, using the fast-growing Monilink service. Check it out here.

And in 687BC Herodotus reports the creation of the first rudimentary coins in Lydia.

Album downloads from iTunes

Although I am a fan of vinyl and the 3D nature of the sound, I continue to be lured into the iTunes store all too frequently and find myself exploring dark corners of the site for little-known recordings -  usually of early blues music or trashy 70s pop. I don't personally find digital music quality (assuming some decent equipment to harness your computer to) significantly worse or flatter than CDs. Occasionally maybe there is a tendency to that 'bright' tone but I think you'd have to be unusually acoustically fastidious to really notice the difference. (Listen to Blue Note vinyl recordings though and I defy anyone not to be amazed how much better they are than any of the digitally remastered CDs that followed the iconic label's heyday).

One major gripe I do have, however, is with the digital sequence of large albums, especially classical recordings. I've just downloaded a 1956 recording of a seminal Glyndebourne production of Figaro (easily my favourite opera) and because individual tracks are arranged alphabetically, you do not listen to it in any kind of sensible sequence. It is absolutely infuriating to have to manually scroll through arias to put them in the right order. And occasionally testing too. Half way through you suddenly come across the overture. It's not exactly astra physics to sort this out iTunes. Please.

RIP MacBookPro and hello MacBook White

I never thought I'd own the shiny white baby of the mighty Mac range: altogether too cute for me. But when yesterday my second MacBook Pro hard drive died in under 9 months, and the fact that it has had to have a new keyboard too, I decided to go simple. Yes I know I could have had another hard drive under warranty, but honestly how many chances can I give the right hand of my life? 

So here I am smiling inanely at the pleasing clickable keys, deep glossy screen and altogether ease of use. I was an early adopter when it comes to Macs. I've had the odd PC affair, but all my main loves have been with the apple way back to neanderthal times when wireless was something your parents listened to. I'm quite glad it's not the ubiquitous aluminium and the keys don't automatically illuminate as dusk falls. Thanks to the new dual core processors it's as fast as my 12-month old top of the range MacBookPro that cost more than twice as much as the albino baby. And it still comes with two firewire ports (unlike the all-new, improved MacBooks).

I may regret this, but so far, my latest love looks like we may go the distance. 

In praise of lunch

In my first career in book publishing, the institution of lunch was the cornerstone of my business life. Lunch took up at least a third of the day, was the focus of all business deals and the only serious activity ambitious editors had to get right. Lunch was king. But then republican bean counters and efficiency monitors deposed Lunch and we all got used to dribbling bits of sandwiches over our keyboards. Deals were done in stuffy, anodyne meeting rooms and occasionally over a skinny latte in Starbucks. Lunch, like eating, was so yesterday.
So it was something of a surprise when, trying to catch up with Karen Hanton, queen of the starry Web 2.0 company toptable (an institution in its own right), she suggested we have Lunch. Last time I went to the offices of toptable, they were housed in an incongruous part of private medicine-land west of Harley Street. Now they are comfortably settled in the heart of Clerkenwell, and we walked past another threatened institution, the gaudy, municipal high-Victorian architecture of Smithfield, to a local Italian restaurant in Cowcross Street. The restaurant, like Lunch, was reassuringly passé. At one time there were hundreds of family-run pasta joints like this one: now they are hard to find. Over my linguine and her fettuncine, Karen and I caught up. Because we were having Lunch, conversation ranged, like a revolutionary, across the borders of private and business life. There were no agendas, PowerPoint presentations or meeting notes. We were able, in the course of a modest, relaxed hour or so to talk a good deal about business, but almost without noticing.
Toptable has put immense care and effort into building a best-of-breed platform in its space. It hasn't had an easy time of it but its numbers are now not just robust, but spectacular. It leads its peers in the analysis of its customer base and their behaviours; its expertise in search engine optimisation leaves so-called seo companies standing; it is as sharp a consumer-focused, market-leading web company as you will find. And having poured talent and money and energy into its platform, it is now scaling out at a rate that is eye-watering, delivering something as old-fashioned as Lunch: bottom line, cash profits.
The first time I interviewed Karen I learned of her roots as the daughter of crofters whose daily graft sucked every ounce of colour and blood from both parents and the young family too. Those roots have built an extraordinary entrepreneur whose clear-sighted, absolutely focused vision is now delivering extraordinary results. And she can still stroll round the corner to a local Italian gaff and chat over pasta. Long live Lunch.

read this e-journal

Part of day job is putting together a monthly journal for Julie Meyer's company, Ariadne Capital. If you're interested in early-stage companies in the broad media, tech and telecom space then it's not a bad read and occasionally a very good one. Through the Maze comes out the third week of every month and is free to subscribe to. I'm always looking for interesting stories and writers too, so if you fall into that category, contact me.

Is Google making us stupid?

This was the title of Nicholas Carr’s article published in Atlantic Monthly that sparked what has become a firey debate between the guardians of old culture and the nouveau tech. It’s a debate that interests me profoundly, not just because I don’t just sit but live on the fence between the two, but also because of the more scientific research that has begun to show neurological changes in a whole generation intellectually engaged with Playstation, Facebook and MSN.

John Walsh in this Sunday’s Independent, iterated the case that there are increasing numbers of people now unable to tackle what might be called ‘difficult’ literature: Joyce, Beckett, Homer, Milton. Actually that should read difficult and long. Because the argument goes that given the way we engage with information on the web, ‘power browsing’, we are increasingly unable to apply the necessary intellectual concentration needed to sustain meaning over the long distances of big novels or other works. This inability is mirrored in structural changes to the fore-brain, or the parts of the brain that are involved with language and abstract logic.

I’ve just finished reading Susan Greenfield’s ‘The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century’ (no, not that long). Professor Greenfield is the eminent Oxford neuroscientist whose work has been popularised in various forms over the past decade. She writes, “At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.” So the brain is plastic and malleable, like a muscle. Use it or lose it. She quotes a fascinating research study undertaken by the Harvard Medical School. Three groups of adult volunteers with no prior ability to play the piano are given a week in an identical room with an identical piano. Group 1 is given intensive piano practice for five days; group 2 has nothing to do with the piano and Group 3 is told to imagine that they were spending five days intensively practising the piano. Comparative brain scans showed Group 2 had no change; Group 1 had significant structural changes to the parts of the brain associated with fine motor control and – big surprise – Group 3 showed almost as much change to the same parts of the brain as Group1. In other words, the impact of the imagination, or higher thought process, is not just real but physical.

My late father studied Classics at Cambridge and then went on to carve out a very classical career as a mandarin civil servant. He always maintained his education had taught him how to think, had trained his mind. I, of course, poo poo-ed such Byzantine thinking until, in the immortal words of the Fonz, I realised he was right just at the point when I have a son who thinks I’m wrong. (And aged four, wants nothing more than to master Playstation).

I don’t really think the Sony Reader with its galactic memory (160 books-worth) and leviathan battery life or Google Book Search (with its millions of scanned books out there free on the web) are a threat to the world’s creative imagination. To me physical access to ideas is always good if it’s expanding: I think people will always choose to lose themselves in a good book, with paper and ink and easy pages to turn at some time. What does concern me, though, is if somehow the democracy and vastness of the internet, with its multiplicity of views and sources, turns us away from the deeply-researched, long argument posited by a single, deeply-thinking person, and worse, makes us unable to follow him or her on a deep intellectual journey.

Beanz meanz Heinz...or Branstons?

OK now we know the credit crunch is real. Sales of baked beans are up 12% on last year and Branstons beans are up 22%. I'm a Heinz girl myself - and the full sugar version too. They can't do them in France where the name says it all - haricots blancs à la sauce tomate - so I wonder what hard-pressed French families are eating more of? Let them eat cake.

In a world where...

Don laFontaine has died aged 68. Until his death no-one outside his niche knew his face – even his name. But his voice sold over 5,000 of Hollywood's most blockbusting flicks from Dr Strangelove to The Terminator. He'd started as a radio engineer and then progessed to a few radio ads before finding his real talent. Overweight and unglamorous, he is probably one of Hollywood's most hired actors. In his 33 year career he single-handedly created an industry of voicing movie trailers with his signature sound of an insomniac's throaty base rolling like thick black coffee over gravel. He had a pregnant voice; a voice that held your attention and promised and suggested. How can one man's voice be so iconic? So unrepeatable? So resonant for so many people across all the world. Earlier today I was doing some early work putting together Ariadne Capital's next journal to Maria Callas belting out arias at high decibels across the Somerset countryside. It got me thinking about other voices I love: the unfashionable 50s tenor, Beniamino Gigli and the rasping bark of Sid Vicious (strangely also admired by the great interpreter of German lieder, Ian Bostridge) and Tom Waits and Dylan and Louis Armstrong. They've all got highly individual voices that are drenched in experience: unmistakable. So now we can look forward to many laFontaine immitators and how dull they'll be.

The soundtrack to your life

If, like me, you have a large, unalphabetised and long-unvisited collection of vinyl, the Ion USB is like an instant time machine that will transport the soundtrack to your teenage life onto your iPod within minutes. Turn the past into the future, goes the marketing spiel. And it does. The turntable comes bundled with Audacity software (good for PCs or Macs) and Bias Soundsoap 2 which irons out some of the worst cracks and splutters of those much-abused discs. My own time journey is so far incomplete but an unexpected rediscovery were several of John Cooper Clarke's idiosyncratic works or oeuvres as I feel they should be called. Like Morrissey but funnier and darker, the sardonic Cooper Clarke still pounds the circuit in his black drainpipes, big hair and outsized sunglasses. The bard of Salford delivers his bleak vision through devastating puns in a flat Northern monotone against what are often trite tunes.  His first LP – Où est la maison de fromage? – was released in 1978 just as the Sex Pistols were shaming glam rockers into retirement. More recently The Arctic Monkeys cite Cooper Clarke as a major influence. It is difficult to convey the full effect through quoted lyrics but here are a few lines from Beasley Street:

The boys are on the wagon

The girls are on the shelf

Their common problem is

...That they're not someone else

If you want to, you can trace his verse back through a very British tradition - to Betjeman and Noel Coward - of small quotidian life and something nasty in the woodshed. Here he is in rare, romantic mode with I wanna be yours:

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

If you like your coffee hot

Let me be your coffee pot

You call the shots

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat

for those frequent rainy days

I wanna be your dreamboat

when you want to sail away

Let me be your teddy bear

take me with you everywhere

I don't care

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter

I will not run out

I wanna be the electric heater

You'll get cold without

I wanna be your setting lotion

Hold your hair in deep devotion

Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean

That's how deep is my devotion

Books I wish I had written

I am not about to launch into a solipsistic journey into my literary passions, don't worry. But just occasionally you read a book that is close enough to your own interests or frame of mind to stand out as one you wished had been yours. Haunts of the Black Masseur by Charles Sprawson is exactly that kind of book. Subtitled Swimmer as Hero it presents an erudite but also seductive history of the culture of swimming and also vividly communicates the physical elation of moving through water from someone who has swum the Hellespont. There's Byron leaping into the surf at Shelley's beach funeral, Virginia Woolf weighting her coat pockets with pebbles before quietly walking into her Sussex river suicide, Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico. He reminds us that in England everyone swam naked until about 1840; that the Germans from Goethe and Thomas Mann to Leni Riefenstahl associated swimming with a Faustian quest for spiritual perfection through godlike athleticism while in the States swimming has been inextricably linked with refuge and withdrawal. There's Esther Williams and David Hockney; Edgar Allen Poe and Yukio Mishima and of course Johnny Weissmuller and Mark Spitz. The book is a great modern example of the work of a true amateur in its original meaning. I wish I had written it.

Women entrepreneurs

Tomorrow I'm meeting Jenny Fielding, who has recently arrived in London from the US. She works for a really interesting organisation called Astia whose mission it is to bring promising women entrepreneurs into supported contact with venture funds. As someone who has been meeting and writing about entrepreneurs for a good part of my career, I was curious to drill some numbers here. According to VentureOne (a Dow Jones subsidiary) in 2007, companies run by women CEOs attracted just 2.9% of available funding in the US, down from 4.52% in 2006. The UK tally is undoubtedly even worse, although perhaps tellingly, I haven't found a reliable data source. The reason is almost certainly one of closed male networks. Venture funds tend to back people they know. Ninety-four per cent of venture fund management in the US is male. In Britain, who knows? More, probably. Ergo male entrepreneurs are 20 times as likely to get funded as their female counterparts.

Astia has an astonishing track-record of getting bright women entrepreneurs early stage funding in Silicon Valley. Running a pilot last year in New York, 70 per cent of companies who had been accepted into the Astia programme, got funded. Jenny Fielding is here to replicate the model in London and it will be fascinating to see how it works. There are, of course, some great examples of young women entrepreneurs – Christina Domecq (SpinVox), Sarah McVittie (Textperts), Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Susie Willis (Plum-Baby), Cary Marsh (Mydeo) – but they (or rather we) are not winning this game en masse. Spectacularly failing at it, actually.

Beijing: three consecutive dotted letters

Apart from Beijing, I can only think of two other words with three consecutive dotted letters - Fiji and hijinks. 

Beijing and the odd world of statistics

I don't know if you heard Professor David Forrest on Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday, talking to Evan Davies about Olympic medal ranking? David Forrest is something of a world expert on sport economics and has proved a statistically strong link between a country's GDP and its medal ranking, so the USA will top the medal board so long as it remains the world's richest economy. China can be expected to do better and better in medal rankings as its economy grows. No great surprise, you might think: richer countries can afford better facilities for their sporting talent and have fewer demands competing for the spend. Money buys success right?

Not always. Professor Forrest went on to single out some notable anomalies to this broad correlation. Some countries spectacularly outperform their GDP-place, for example Australia, and others equally spectacularly underperform, for example India. Forrest went on to suggest some reasons for this: India's national obsession with cricket effectively channels all the national effort into one single team sport. Australia, by contrast, is strong in individual sports, especially swimming, and there are more medals to be won in the pool than anywhere else, so skewing their odds on the medal board. He also pointed out that the rankings are done by gold medals first so a country that has won a single gold will be ranked above one that may have twenty silvers. 

Listening to this piece got me thinking about the world of statistics and odds. How the way we have chosen to construct our Olympics medal boards reflects a value system that ranks being the best (gold) in a single endeavour way above coming second (silver) any number of times. 

As we in the UK provide fewer and fewer measures of real excellence, preferring to get more into a broader category ('A' grades at 'A' level or first class degrees), something tells me we're missing the point badly. Go for gold, be the best, or stay at home.