Gave somebody my business card the other day, and got told that I'd done it wrong. My card lacks a white f in a blue square - lacks the Facebook logo. Well-meant advice, and it's true that you can't tell from my business card that I'm on Facebook.
     There are cultures in which a request for a business card is met with "I don't do that any more. Look for me on LinkedIn." People who would otherwise have the word "innovation" on their business card tend to do that. No doubt at least one of them is working on an app whereby two people can exchange LinkedIn details by bumping their smartphones together. Remember Digimon? Putting two together for a battle? And there are cultures in which a business card is a personal representation to be respected: presented and received with both hands; held in both hands, read and understood before being stored away.
     Now there's a culture in which a business card is a thing to be critiqued. Yes, I agree that it would be a good idea to have the Facebook logo on my business card. But I don't have the Facebook logo on my business card. Not that I'm bothered by the uniformity of it all, and I suppose the Facebook logo is now one of the minimum necessary components, like a physical address used to be. But you can guess, can't you, that I'm on Facebook**? In a way that you can't guess that I'm at [insert physical address here]?
     You might look at my business card and think: gosh, he's not on Facebook. Or you might not. You might look at my business card and think: what an odd business card! Or you might look at my business card and think: okay, these are the ways he's happy to be contacted (and I wonder if he's on Facebook). Given that it's proverbially revealing for a prospective employer to look at a young applicant's social-media history, you might take the usual logos as a given. Or wonder if I'm hiding something - and go find it.
     A while ago, I carried around a business card with nothing on it. Thick, white card - offcuts (I suspect they cut them off specially for me) bought from a small (now deceased) shop in Bath with copious wedding invitations in the windows. I'd write in my name and whatever I was doing that day - phone number, maybe the organisation hiring me to be wherever I was. But that got to be so achingly pretentious after a while that I gave it up. Now I just have pretentious very small shopping lists. Soon, I suppose, I'll have very small shopping lists with everything on them except the Facebook logo.
     Strange sky this morning. Very dark clouds bulking over the horizon behind the castle, and a haze that is beginning to be rain coming in from the other side. A moment ago, the light went very bright, as the sun sometimes does when it's sharing the sky with the promise of rain, and I completely lost my train of thought. I have a business card with my phone number on it, and a website address. Does that make me stand out from the crowd? Ironic if it did.

*Cards of Identity, Nigel Dennis, novel published in 1955 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson. The friend who recommended it also liked Lady into Fox, David Garnett, 1922, Chatto & Windus. Distinctive novels about identity, both interesting.
**We'll pretend to ignore, for the sake of this conversation, the logos in the top right-hand corner of this page. They came as standard.

We could remember the late Jenny Diski, and her first novel Nothing Natural (1986). A man gets his fun out of an abusive relationship, but this is the woman's story, and the ending is clever. Jenny Diski saw this abuse thing coming. I think I might read Naomi Alderman's book, The Power (2016), which is heading towards television. Women develop the power to electrocute men? Have I got that right? It's on the reading list.
     Final thought (from me) on all of this. In a conversation about #metoo recently, a woman I know said "It was never okay" and "Women have had enough", quoting from an interview she'd seen, and I said something about communications technology changing the nature of the beast. We talked about that picture of the American senator smirking as he reaches out to hold a sleeping woman's breasts - the woman a journalist, dressed in a flak jacket and helmet, the setting a US military aircraft flying from a danger zone - and it struck me: whatever else this is, it's an invitation to grow up. A final, exasperated, lost-patience plea. Grow up.
     But we can't do this angry. We can't do this as a discussion between one half of the population and itself. A woman also said to me recently, "You can't get any sense out of a man when he's got a - " and I thought: timing? Then I thought: we treat each other so badly. And we get so angry. There are always sides, and factions, and even in the resolution, once the perpetrators have been sent down, we're still falling out with each other. On to the next outrage.
     To steal a line attributed to Gandhi, I think Western Civilisation would be a good idea. But gentleness, on all sides, would be a better one. 

Afterthought. This is not civilisation. This is a civilisation. In our attempts to hold each other - each other - to a higher standard, we devolve towards mob rule. Gandhi's exhortation to "Be the change" is to be spoken to ourselves, not to others.

Came across a reference the other day to the convention that “men make the first move” in relationships. Not every time they don’t, was my instant reaction (enough with the bragging already), but then I thought about it further, later*, and I had an idea.
     We’re talking about those moments when a relationship seems likely to go up a level. The suggestion is that men get to make the first move across the pre-existing boundaries of whatever you are to each other. They take (not every time, etc.) that risk ... and either it works out or it doesn't ... and either way you're okay with the basic fact that he did that (within limits - keep reading). You’ve always been friends, say, but then, kind of, he, um, you know, and however (un)happy you might be to wake up next to him the following morning with your clothes on the other side of the room – you can generally work out that he started it and that part was okay. When two people say "let's do this" and do it, the convention assumes that the man spoke first.
     No, I’m not about to suggest that certain men in the news should be forgiven their trespasses because all they did was misread the signals in a let's-go-up-a-level setting. Abuse is abuse and let the law take its course. But I did think about it and I did have an idea. “Men make the first move.” What if that was never true? What if men never made the first move? What if we all agreed that an interested woman would make the first move? So that a woman who wasn’t interested – wouldn’t make the first move, end of story? Imagine powerful men sitting at their desks waiting for their vulnerable young interns to grab them by the knee (I said knee, Donald! Go back to sleep, Bill.). A lot of work would get done.
     Setting aside the productivity gain, could we do that? Imagine the alt. hist. if we'd done it already. Shakespeare would have had to rewrite Juliet & Romeo; Jane Austen’s Emma would have been Jane Austen's Knightley; Bridget Jones’s diary would have been moved to an entirely different section of the library; and whoever’s singing Please Mr Postman (the Marvelettes came out with it in 1961) would have sat down at the breakfast table and written a letter. Oh, and Lana Del Rey would have re-released Fucked My Way Up To The Top (2014) as a novelty Christmas single – only to be beaten to the top slot by Cyndi Lauper’s re-released 1983 version of Girls Just Want To Have Fun.
     But seriously. Could we?
     Nature’s no help here, because nature’s only interested in one thing and not too particular about how it’s achieved. "Men make the first move” may be hard-wired into the collective psyche by nature, so maybe we can't do anything about it. Or it may be some patriarchal thing left over from the days when “who:whom” (to borrow Stalin’s ominous phrase from another context) was determined largely by physical (then financial) strength. Or it may just be something that used to work for us. Or more than one of the above. But regardless, could we? I say: let's try. Because in that part of our world represented by social and other media (assuming real-world consenting adults can sort out their private lives for themselves), the current arrangement doesn’t seem to be working any more.
     Wait a minute. Social media's science, isn't it? Nature gave us whatever it is in the male brain that (for example) gets male dogs so excited in the presence of on-heat females (thanks, nature - big help), but science has given us communication. We have #metoo because we can communicate, and we have any number of movements for social and cultural change that draw on communications technology. Feminism, for example, which surely sits a little oddly with any convention that men take the initiative? So let's communicate in this context as in so many others. There is an entry on Wikipedia for Women's empowerment, and that has a subsection titled "The internet as a tool of empowerment", but it doesn't mention relationships. Why not? Maybe it really is nature that's getting in the way, in the sense that we don't even think of empowering women in relationships - Wikipedia's mostly about development an economics.
      To get past nature, which by definition goes pretty deep, we would probably have to give up on ambiguity, or indeed anything remotely close to subtlety. No more meaningful looks or indeed significant eye contact or anything that could conceivably lead to a claim of misunderstanding (see above re abuse). To get past nature, we would have to communicate. Clearly. Loudly. We could, for example Harness The Power Of Technology to develop clothing fabrics that change colour on a release of pheromones, or build facial-recognition technology into an app that detects good-looking guys. Or possibly not. But every cliche I've ever come across tells me that women are better at relationships, and I'm assuming that includes very short-term relationships. Why shouldn't/couldn't they take over the handling of sensitive moments?
     Sharing them works, too, of course. But watching all that media, I just think we've got something absolutely fundamental wrong. All of us, not just the criminals. And we're headlining the problem rather than looking for a solution. But I also suspect that this is just the next step in a much longer term social, cultural and interpersonal evolution that will sort itself out over time. Thirty years from now, in this culture, we won't have relationship issues around "men:women"; it'll all be person to person (with "gender roles" shared out). Which of course is how it should be. Thirty years from now, if progress goes in a straight line, we'll talk more readily, explain ourselves more clearly, be honest with each other, treat communication as a medium whereby we can get closer to each other rather than get indignant with each other.
     Yes, I did wake up this morning to a comment on the radio about a woman who's written a book about "redefining masculinity". Yes, this is a post by a man entitled "Redefining femininity". Balance, right?
 
*Which is why I’m not sure of the attribution. Might have been Robert Shrimsley’s ‘National Conversation’ column in the Weekend FT, which it often is, but it’s too late to go back and check, and I’m far too old to think of looking it up online.
I deleted the paragraphs to which these next two footnotes apply, but I'll keep them in here.
**I remember an elderly relative telling me once, long ago, that a gentleman would always walk outside a lady on a pavement, so that her beautiful clothes would not get splashed by a passing carriage. I was being prepared for life in what century?
***And yes, I realise that discussing this as a men:women thing is archaic, but can we let that one go? Gender fluidity is already happening, so why not a ground-up rethink of gender relations?

Maybe the central delusion of our time is that more organisation improves organisations. People know how to do the things they do. Whether or not they do them well is not determined by the addition of more managers to tell them how to do the things they do. Nurses don't nurse well because they care for their managers; they nurse well because they care for their patients. Okay, they turn up to work because of their managers, but that's a different matter. Teachers don't teach well because they're deeply concerned for the future success of their heads of department.
     We don't need organisers - managers and administrators - to issue instructions, draw up flowcharts and look busy. If we need organisers at all, their role should be to accept instructions from their staff, provide resources on request, generally to admire the people doing the work that the organisation is set up to do. Nurses need assistants more than they need managers. Teachers need administrators who sit quietly at the back of the class until the IT packs up and they're needed to fix it.
     What counts is the unquantifiable aspect of a job: the personal fulfilment; the job satisfaction; the sense of a job well done. There is something undefinable about a job well done, whether it's a well-built house or a grateful former student or a smiling post-operative patient making a full recovery. Equally, there is something undefinable about whatever it is that inspires somebody to give of their best. Those undefinable somethings are lost if the job has to be brought within the understanding of an administrator. You can talk about costs and hours with an administrator, incentive schemes and remuneration packages, but you can't so easily get anything across about the approval of your peers, or the camaraderie, or even how it feels to see the patient's smile.
     The more a specialist job is administered by non-specialist organisers, the more efficient the organisation will seem, because of all the measurable stuff being generated, and the less trusted the really talented staff will feel, because what they bring, their unique quality, is undervalued. Instructions (flowcharts, etc.) are issued as a method of asserting control, looking busy, not because they're needed. A large organisation that looks efficient will tend to have a large public-relations/marketing department rather than (necessarily?) a huge number of dedicated and enthusiastic staff. Administration, via measurement, destroys trust, thus reduces commitment, and thereby, in the long run, obscures the truth that matters - for example, that children need more than paper qualifications to succeed in life.
     So here's a quick thought experiment instead of a closing paragraph. If I tell you that a painting measures 77cm by 53cm, you get an idea of its size. If I tell you that it's an oil painting, painted on a wood panel, you know a bit more. You might think about the wood, and whether it was an offcut, or cut to size at the DIY store. The artist obviously knew what he wanted, or maybe he (she?) was an amateur trying out those birthday-present paints on whatever came to hand.
     I could even tell you that it's a painting of a woman, and you wouldn't be overly surprised, or even interested. You might begin to think: where's this going? Because all I've given you are the measurements. But if I tell you that what makes the painting famous is the enigmatic smile on the woman's face...
     It's the smile that matters, not the centimetres. The measurements - size of the painting, performance of the economy - don't convey the understanding we need in our own lives. We need the smile more than we need the performance assessment.

My challenge to VR developers everywhere is: develop the reality. Yes, it’s amazing that we’ve got the computational power to make the journey, but why would we want to go? Give us some destinations. And while we’re on the subject, stop talking down the computational power (I seem to have picked up a new phrase) of the past. Don’t disrespect yesterday’s technology. Go to the moon, and then you can tell us how much cleverer we are today.
     On that subject, there was a thing on the radio this morning (I really must switch to wake-up music) about an initiative to send women to the moon. Okay, great, but if we’re making this another men:women thing, my comment on behalf of men everywhere is: been there, done that. I realise that the England cricket team and the England football team are far more successful than the England men’s cricket team and the England men’s football team, and I’m really not going to say anything about “women drivers” (a phrase used disparagingly, children, in the middle years of the twentieth century) and moon buggies.
     But here’s an idea. How about dropping this out-of-context interest in each other’s gender-specific attributes, and sending people, just people, to somewhere new and/or to do something new? The title of a 1992 book by the author and relationship counsellor John Gray hasn’t even crossed my mind at this point, but how about sending both men and women to make homes on Mars and Venus – or, more realistically, to build a little house on the moon? Sorry, a big tough space station. Cross between a Tonka Toy and a Lego fortress, only bigger.
     What I’m saying is, it’s nigh-on forty years since we sent people with, er, between their legs to the moon. Instead of getting all excited about sending people with, er, between their legs to the same place to, at a wild guess, plant a flag and jump around in non-gravity – couldn’t we send people with pants on to do something original? [Sandra Bullock, Gravity (2013), pristine white undies after several days in a space-suit; of course the plot requires that she take her kit off and show us.]
     We couldn’t, could we? Go to the moon, I mean. But what is it that they had, that we don’t have? Serious question: what have we lost? That generation decided they were going, built the rockets, and with about as much computational power as you’d find in a washing machine today, went. We would get no further than a studio discussion about everything else that we could do with the money. It’s all about money now, not technology; money and a lack of direction. So: no moon landing.
     Although come to think of it ... with all the computational power at our disposal today, if we harnessed the power of technology, blah blah, our conspiracy to fake a moon landing would be a thing of beauty. Worthy of VR, even. I’d buy a headset for that.

For family reasons, I own an XBox. It's an inoffensive piece of kit, and on it, soldiers and zombies run about happily, shooting each other. My XBox also plays movies and box sets, which I would find useful if my attention span hadn't gone the way of the nineteenth-century triple-decker novel. Every now and then, more frequently than seems reasonable, my XBox needs to update itself, and whenever I turn it off, it does that new-tech thing of checking that I clicked 'off' because I wanted to switch it off. And not for some other reason. It does that, I've worked out, because it's all too easy to make a mistake with new(ish) technology. We should worry more about that, I think.
     Anyway. Every now and then, in the games my XBox plays, we come to a 'cut scene'. This is a bit where the gaming stops and the characters walk through a scene that takes the story forward. It's a mid-game film clip. And I had an idea. Why don't all films do this? In reverse, I mean. Why don't we buy movies that have game sections that take the story off in a semi-random new direction? Harness the power of gaming technology to make unpredictable movies, I mean, that are never the same twice in a row. [Aside: I prefer the word 'movie', but 'movie clip' sounds silly.]
     I never play (or rather, join in playing) games on my XBox because I can't operate the little handset quickly enough (or somehow, find time to practise). But I would like to play a game that mostly plays itself with a little nudging from me. As if I was watching a film with the plot-flexibility of a game. If I remember my younger-than-I-am-now parenting days, the characters in The Sims keep on going to work and coming home, amassing money and swearing in little symbols about how much they need the bathroom, if you leave them to it, and in Iain Banks' Complicity (1993), there's a game that seems to play itself alongside the action of the story.
     I've enjoyed the few iMax films I've seen, and I'm sure I'll be hugely impressed, in due course, by virtual-reality headsets (although see above; I wrote this post first). But if we're talking about the content, and not just the means of looking at it, I really would buy a film that was different every time I watched it. In the sense, the plot's unpredictable because there's an element of gaming technology mixed in with the hi-def picture, crystal-clear sound, blah blah, so that you get a <random> option in the start menu, and perhaps the choice between the adult and family versions. Happy ending: yes/no?
     You get, say, a version of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) in which Charlize Theron gets a flat tyre at a key moment. Or there's a murder on some Orient Express somewhere, and you can watch it twice after all because second time round, the clues are different and, er, somebody else did it. I think the aliens really should have won in Independence Day (1996), and I would have like to extend the closing scenes of 2012 (2009; spoiler alert), so that when the West's leaders, industrialists and plutocrats land in their grey ships on the one African plain that is the only land left above water, we get to see how the locals greet them.
     That is the happy ending? As the film is now? And what about a rom-com in which we see the later lives of the protagonists in the version where they never got back together after the near-the-end big argument? Getting carried away with this, I'd love to see the prequel to You Only Live Twice (1967) in which Blofeld hollows out a volcano for a headquarters and launches his own space program without the locals noticing. Or - back on topic - the version of any Bond film in which they're not expecting him and unfortunately the restaurant/casino/hotel's fully booked this evening.
     Virtual reality, huh! Why bother, unless it's storytelling? And if it is storytelling, it's not really innovation if it's just another way of watching a screen. There must be a huge market for films in which, every now and then, the baddies don't magically lose their ability to hit anything in the final shoot-out. If electorates deliver protest votes these days, wouldn't they watch protest movies, in which the obvious good guys, with their heroic angst and their clever one-liners and their lovable (sic) quirks - protest movies in which those guys got flattened?
     Never mind alternative history; I want alternative film.

Don't usually do this, but here, complete but for the footnotes, is a media release that landed in my inbox today. PIMFA is a trade body for the finance industry, and it's signing up to something put out by the UK Treasury. You might think gestures like this belong in the same historical appendix as John Major's "traffic cones hotline" of 1992, which was part of the Citizens' Charter, and I'm sure we all remember that - but I don't think so.
     I remember back in the first decade of this century. Facebook became big, and a while after that, the finance industry exploded with training courses and consultancies on how to "leverage" Facebook. That was the point at which, for me, Facebook ceased to be a new thing and became an old thing - or at least, a thing so established that even your bank manager (in the old-fashioned sense of "bank manager") could admit to knowing about it.
     Okay. So the title of the release is: "PIMFA is proud signatory of HM Treasury's Women In Finance Charter." No disrespect to PIMFA, nor indeed the Treasury, but I went to Sibos in Toronto, for Innotribe, and heard more presentations by women than by men (I wasn't counting, but I'm pretty sure), and while I kind of noticed it, I didn't think much about it. Various nationalities, ethnicities, et cetera, as well, but they're not my point here. I didn't think much about it - that's my point. I didn't think - gosh, that presenter's female! Nor did anybody else, and I'm only thinking about it now because this release has arrived. Change creeps up on us. By the time we notice it happening - it's happened.
     Diversity can mean many things, but in the context of this media release, it mostly means women. What I'm saying is, if the finance industry (Personal Investment Management and Financial Advice Association, since you ask) is onto diversity, in the way that it got onto Facebook a decade ago, we can pretty much assume that we have diversity. We're there on that one. It's happened. That crunching you hear underfoot - yes, it's broken glass.
     Anyway, here's the release. It argues for diversity, and makes some interesting points in favour of diversity, and never mind that we're there already. I think it marks a turning point - albeit a turning point that you can only see if you look in your rear-view mirror.

PIMFA is proud signatory of HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter
 
PIMFA, the leading trade association for the personal investment management and financial advice sector in the UK, is one of the latest organisations to sign HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter.
     The Charter’s aim is to work together to build a fairer, more balanced industry - highlighting that a balanced workforce is good for ‘business, customers, profitability and workplace culture, and is increasingly attractive for investors’.
     Research such as the 2015 report from McKinsey consultants has demonstrated the benefits seen by diverse organisations who actually perform better - respondents in the top quartile for gender diversity were "15 per cent more likely to produce better returns than their local peers. Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were even more likely to do better.  The same applied at the bottom end of the scale — less diverse companies were less likely to do well". This pattern was also borne out across industries - “for every 10 per cent improvement in gender diversity, firms saw a 2-4 per cent increase in profits.”
     As part of this commitment PIMFA will run regular forums over the year to address key issues in the diversity area. One series is our Women in Wealth Forum and another is our Millennial Forum. The aim of both of these is to help understand how the business culture in the financial services sector affects different segments of our community and how we can see ways to improve both conditions of work and quality of life for all categories of employee.
     It is important to recognise the industry’s need to adapt as working lifestyles change and we believe the industry is embracing the positive movement towards work/life balance with flexible working, returnships, part time working etc.  This kind of approach to work is taking root especially as technology develops and makes it easier to work from home or conduct meetings by video rather than necessarily always in person.  The increased use of technological changes to help improve and diversify the nature of the work experience and input is a pointer to the future.
     Liz Field, CEO at PIMFA commented saying: “We need to ‘up’ the conversation on diversity in the sector.  Diversity has proven benefits and we intend to lead the way in emphasising this through our signing of the Charter. We are committed to developing a culture of diversity and sophistication of approach in the business area we represent and will continue to provide practical assistance to firms in developing the diversity conversation. The clients and families we look after will expect us to be progressive in our thinking and to reflect the diversity of the client base in the firms we run. Our signing of the Charter is our commitment to diversity at all levels and we encourage our member firms to do the same.”

Sometimes, it crosses my mind that civilisation as we thought we knew it is about to collapse. Our technology is telling us too much about the real world, and how it really works, for the necessary myths of "western civilisation" to endure. Which is a good thing. Scary, but good. I think.
     Once upon a time, "the establishment" had control of the means of communication, which mattered a lot more than the means of production. Institutions were remote, and the only voices we heard were establishment voices. We respected them, or behaved as though we did, because there was no apparent alternative. The establishment made the rules, made sure those rules were all we knew, and supported itself with every trick that appeals to human nature, including quasi-religious ritual. The judiciary dressed up in wigs and gowns, for example, and the judge would put on a black cap to pronounce a death sentence. The history of power is (okay, not quite) all about dressing to impress.
     Today, we face an old problem and a new problem. The old problem is that sooner or later, any establishment starts to believe its own mythology. Roman emperors came to believe that they were divine, for example (The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, ages ago, or John Hurt as Caligula in the 1976 TV adaptation of Robert Graves' I, Claudius, 1934). Keeping it short; we could cite the fuhrerprinzip, which in its best-known application, stipulated that whatever Hitler said, went. Or, more recently, the UK's parliamentary expenses scandal.
     My understanding is: the view was widely shared among MPs that they weren't paid enough. The view was equally widely shared that giving themselves the pay rise that they "deserved" would be politically impossible. So a system evolved whereby expenses could be "nodded through" (my term), so that MPs could use their own judgement to reward themselves appropriately. It's not that any of them ever believed that [insert ridiculous claim here] was necessary to their parliamentary work, nor that they could get away with an inflated claim because the system was lax.
     It's not believing in the myth, exactly; it's believing in one's own myth-given authority. Effectively, believing that because you are an MP (or other authority figure) you have a right to interpret/apply/adjust the law in the given situation - and believing that this is compliant with the spirit of the law. So MPs believed that their expenses were a quiet but justifiable way of getting paid according to their worth.
     But they failed to take into account the new problem. In a system where we all get to see everything eventually, where control of the means of communication has distributed out of anybody's control, and we're all judgemental, that kind of "nodding through" - of being the authority figure who exercises rights over the law - is no longer sustainable. We all have a view, and often a harsh judgement, and we all have an equal right to be heard. Technology delivers that equal right to be heard far more effectively than any dogma. Technology is an unquestioned happy ending for its promoters, as though a householder having a conversation with a robot that he (yes, he) might have had with his servant a century or two back - delivers Utopia. Can it be that simple? Thought not.
     So my question to myself is: to what extent does the - what? The civilisation we want to believe we live in? Yes, that. To what extent does that depend on a myth that just can't be achieved if we're all sniping away at each other via our media and our smartphones? Whatever you think about the expenses scandal, we need to trust and to be trustworthy without being held to a standard by, say, CCTV. Civilisation has to allow for "I'll just park here for five minutes, nobody will mind", just as it has to allow for the kind of social, cultural, political compromise that would be exceeded by, for example, "If I claim for a hedgehog shelter, I'll cover the real cost of today's work."
     We need to find a way to blur the edges, loosen the constraints, be flexible with each other, despite the constant presence of a stranger's high-definition smartphone camera.
     Don't we?

Mind you, to be fair, that twenty-minute discussion on a radio-news programme that I mentioned last week - it did come ahead of a series of revelations that retrospectively justified the time spent, so maybe that was their way of hinting. I think my underlying point stands, but I take the rest of it back. Sorry, people.

Sometimes, I think that we get comfortable in our grievances. We go on grumbling, and by doing so, hold onto the grievance even as it evaporates. We're all complacent, but it's a negative complacency. Once, we might have told ourselves, say, that a Certain Person is in his Heaven and all's right with the world; nowadays, we're united by an identity politics that thrives on a mild form of victim-hood. 

Odd coincidence, don't you think, that every time an improvement is announced in state-provided health care, or welfare, it's also a cost saving? They never spend more money on us.
     I wonder if, in their private lives, government ministers call up their friends and say: "Let's not go to the fancy new restaurant that's just opened in the middle of town. Let's have our celebration at the cheap fast-food drive-through on the ring road." I don't really wonder that.
     Maybe the big secret is that we can't afford the way we like to live. We can't afford any of it. Nothing at all. It doesn't work. The state is bankrupt and collapsed and we need to start again as a small insignificant foggy country full of warring tribes out on the edge of Europe.
     And the guilt of not addressing that is beginning to eat through the fabric of society. Because at some level we all know it. But some of us are insisting on denying it.
      I feel better now, thank you.   

For consent to exist, a question has to be asked. If we're going to be criminalising the question, as the various news media have come close to doing this week, we're going to be creating all manner of difficulties for like-minded adults (although possibly not for future generations). And we're going to be overlooking some serious crimes.
     To begin at the beginning. Consent is only possible where a question has two possible answers. "Would you like a cup of tea?" enables consent - yes, you'd like to participate in some consensual tea-drinking. But that's only consent because you could say no. "You will have a cup of tea, won't you?" is coercive and thus reduces the scope for consent. From there, it's a slope to holding people down and forcing tea down their throats. Refusing an offer of tea made by an enthusiastic would-be tea-drinker requires careful handling, on both sides, as does refusing an offer of tea from a friend who just somehow isn't in the tea-drinking category.
     Empathy matters, but so does self-control, Questions can be asked and answered clumsily - and finesse (or the lack of it) doesn't indicate good or bad intent or indeed authenticity. If we get a lot of practice at this, that doesn't make us any more sincere. Exclamation mark. Clumsiness is often a feature of these situations, and if it expresses vulnerability, it can be a foundation for intimacy.
     There's a shared obligation to respect each other's boundaries with regard to invitations to tea drinking. We learn that by growing up - don't we? There's also a need for some kind of agreement on the behaviour that can be part of a properly conducted tea ceremony (this metaphor has gone too far, but never mind). Children learn that part too by growing up, although there's so much input into their lives these days that guidance, counselling, formal education - would be just as useful for the rest of us as well, come to think of it. I was on a university campus recently where there were racks of booklets defining consent - I regret not picking one up. [Update: just discovered that there's a book called Debrett's Manners for Men: What Women Really Want by E Jane Dickson (Debrett's, 2007). Probably more reliable than that film; must get a copy*.]
     But consent, in the sense of a question asked (within acceptable limits of clumsiness) and answered (ditto), really isn't the issue. There was a twenty-minute discussion on a Monday-morning radio news programme this week, about an incident that occurred fifteen years ago. The incident has become famous by now: a "senior politician" put his hand on a "senior journalist"'s knee, and was told to remove it. The word "repeatedly" turned up in subsequent retellings, although I could swear it wasn't there at the start. Anyway - both parties have since played it down, as was acknowledged in the twenty-minute, prime-time discussion. We had journalists interviewing journalists, news editors giving their expert opinion ... until somebody from outside was brought in to point out that, actually, these were two adults and nothing much had happened, actually - and certainly nothing on the scale of Hollywood.
     We could do with a booklet on how to tell the difference between incidents that fill airtime because they've got "senior" names in them, and incidents where real people get hurt. I don't know what the senior politician should have done, or refrained from doing, if all of a sudden he was minded to invite the senior journalist to tea, and I'm not here to defend him. I think perhaps a "senior politician" in late middle-age might bring a certain clumsiness to such a Q&A. But in other "stories" of the moment, people are being raped. Assaulted. Injured personally, physically, professionally, bullied, intimidated. Power is being abused.
     We're all very shocked, in an undiscriminating way, about everything from knee-touching to serial rape. But are we indignant about all this because we're indignant, or because it's suddenly become available as news? The term "casting couch" has been in the language for as long as I can remember, but until a certain film producer became vulnerable, nobody said anything - no, that's not right. Nobody listened. Nobody listened.
     Nobody listened. And now that we are listening, we're still taking the easy story.
* It's out of stock at Amazon. I couldn't see a "for Women" version, although there is Debrett's Etiquette for Girls by Fleur Britten (2006). The front cover of that - see Amazon, for example - gives you an idea of the age of the target audience. She's eating an oyster, if you can't quite work it out.

"That's another box ticked!" said the leader of our little group, after we had satisfied another Health & Safety requirement by being in a room for an hour while somebody lectured us on procedure. We had signed the attendance record, received the certificate to show that we were competent at, er ... the subjects discussed between the person and his PowerPoint slides - and now we were clear to get on with whatever it was that we wanted to do.
     Let the record show that I have attended the course, heard the presentation, and can go forward into the future with a piece of paper. If some (un)foreseen emergency occurs, and you react by asking to see my certificate, I won't let you down.

To be a "serious" news organisation, if we can imagine such a thing, is to be above taking stories from certain tabloids and online outlets.
     It is not a convincing get-around to report the fact that a tabloid is reporting a story. The arguments for finding a way to pick up a piece of reader-bait nonsense - the term used to be tittle-tattle - may be convincing - readers are interested; it'll fill a gap; it's cheap - but they're transparent. You "serious journalists" are being led by the - I mean, you're following where you once led.
     i remember, years ago, hearing a news editor explaining the likely dire consequences of yet another round of cost-cutting at his organisation. Journalists would end up interviewing journalists about the news, he said.
     What we have now is not state-of-the-art news-gathering, vastly enhanced by the latest technology, blah blah, but the cost-cut remnants of an operational model that was taken for granted in the past, when we did things rather than talking them up in their absence.

Okay, look. I'm just going to share this. Then I'm going to write and ask permission, so if it disappears - the error was mine, as they say in books.
     It's the latest of Maya Stein's 10-line Tuesday poems, and it just arrived. They take a day to cross the Atlantic. Find out more at Maya Stein's website. You can sign up to get one every Tuesday - which may be spelling out the obvious, but never mind. Here it is.

if it's okay with you, I'm going to stay happy *

Do you hear the sound of the world breaking?
All that fury in the floorboards and rupture in the walls. Even our hearts
in the throes of their own keening lamentation. This morning, a hard wind
came through the trees, cutting their flock off at the neck. So much color felled
and foiled, this once-sweet season turned bitter in less than an hour.
It was easy - too easy - to imagine this a harbinger or metaphor, to close the door
to the bunker and count the remaining rations. But the sky was so adamantly clear,
almost delirious with optimism, as if refusing the ruin gathering 
at its feet, and I wondered if, perhaps, I had misjudged the sorrow of the leaves,
and they'd landed precisely, thrillingly on time.

* I stole this line (with permission) from a condolence card my friend Jean received.