Middle Management

My official title at work is Library Manager. This is something of a misnomer as, in a company of just five people, I don't really have anyone or anything to manage apart from myself. That remains a challenge due to my tendency not to listen to myself but is probably not on a par with two positions that have been in the news of late.

The first is the manager of my beleaguered football team, Ipswich Town. Mick McCarthy took the role recently, replacing the sacked/resigned Paul Jewell and immediately led us to an improbable 1-0 away at Birmingham. Will he succeed where Jewell and Roy Keane before him (and Jim Magilton and Joe Royle before them) failed and lead us to the Premier League? Will he even be able to save us from relegation, languishing as we do near the bottom of the Championship?

I have no idea and, frankly, I doubt he does either. He was appointed on the basis of having the profile to command the respect of the players and the experience of not only leading two teams (Sunderland and Wolves) from the Championship to the Premier League but of keeping (one of) them there, albeit fairly briefly.

This all sounds fine and dandy until you consider that these were the exact same criteria that were used to select our previous two managers. Indeed Paul Jewell's CV is remarkably similar (just substitute Bradford and Wigan for Sunderland and Wolves). The two men are good friends, of a similar generation, come across as honest and hard working and have a nice line in dry humour.

McCarthy may well be the man to take us forward. But if he does I can't help feeling that he will be riding partly on the coat-tails of a levelling out of Ipswich's natural position in the world of football. Unless you've been as badly run as Portsmouth a club of our size, fanbase and financial resources should be at home in the upper reaches of the Championship or lower reaches of the Premier League.

There was an article in the London Review of Books some years ago making just this point, albeit with more eloquence and scholarly rigour. Football doesn't sit naturally in the pages of the LRB much as post-modernism has little place in the ITFC matchday programme. So perturbed was I that I wrote a letter questioning the article which they chose to publish. Using Ipswich as my reference point (a consistent theme) I argued that George Burley's achievement in taking Ipswich to 5th in the Premiership the year after promotion and securing a place in the following season's UEFA Cup (a holy grail for Town supporters after winning it in 1981) showed that an exceptional manager can buck the statistical trend and consistently overachieve.

I still think that's true. I just don't think it was true of Ipswich at that time, as our subsequent relegation made clear. Burley wasn't an exceptional manager; nor was Jewell; nor is McCarthy. They have all had periods of success and failure - have they managed 'better' during the good times and 'worse' during the bad? Or have they been more at the mercy of events than we care to admit?

Being manager of Ipswich Town is a tough job. But it's not as tough as being the manager of a radio station employing Danny Baker. Before going any further I should make it clear that I consider Baker to be the finest broadcaster of his generation (or any other come to that). He has that rare combination of a magpie mind, a phenomenal memory and a natural eloquence that makes him perfect for radio. And he attracts calls like this:

http://youtu.be/8Hhk8VVS2AU


The recent axing of his BBC London show has drawn righteous anger from across a wide spectrum of listeners and fellow broadcasters. His last show was an epic two hours of controlled invective, utterly compelling.

And yet.....reading the comments of the head of BBC London the following day, my managerial genes twinged with some sympathy. David Robey pointed out that Baker had taken 3 months off the show at short notice earlier in the year due to pressure of work (finishing his autobiography). On the back of that Robey wondered if it might make more sense for Baker to host a weekly show. Apparently this was communicated to Baker's agent as the BBC London management had been told all such communication must go through his agent first. This somewhat undermines Baker's claim that it was an outrage that no one had discussed the idea with him directly.

I suspect there's some truth in both accounts. BBC London clearly have a wider agenda than just looking to 'refresh their schedule'. And I doubt that Baker's time is overburdened with checking the finer details of employment contracts.

Whatever the truth it must be a bloody nightmare managing a station which has Danny Baker on the schedule. He's a loose cannon, someone who plays by his own rules and is good enough to get away with it. But for all his rant about there being more meeting rooms than studios in the BBC now, the station also needs a manager, someone with talents very different from its start attraction.

And that manager has to decide if he can allow someone to play by his own rules simply because he's really good at his job.

In many ways Robey took the only rational decision. Would I have done the same in his shoes? No. Because Danny Baker is a titan of radio and for him to be expressing his genius on a daily basis on a small local radio station is the equivalent of Sinatra playing a weekly residency at the Bush Hall.

But I can't help but feel a little sorry for the bloke trying to square an impossible managerial circle.

Ink and Paper

My wife has been known to refer to me as a 'musical fascist'. I think this is meant as a term of endearment; that's certainly the way I'm taking it. It stems from my uncompromising attitude to what I like and dislike. I'm not one of those people who, when asked what kind of music they like, says 'a bit of everything' or 'all sorts', although there would be some truth in both statements.

The fact is I fall hard and deep for music I like, frequently to the exclusion of anything else. So criticism of the Tindersticks, Sisters of Mercy, early 80s electropop, Van Der Graaf Generator or John Grant will stir passions like almost nothing else. I used to be passionate about pretty much everything. I remember getting so worked up during England's Italia 90 World Cup quarter final against Cameroon, which I had to watch at my parents' house, that I was forced to watch the match on a different TV to everyone else and emerged after extra time pale, sweating and having mislaid my shirt, to the clear bemusement of the rest of the family. Now I can barely raise a shrug. I think it might be something to do with growing up.

You might infer from this that my life revolves around music, that I have a huge record collection and encyclopedic knowledge, that I'm a veritable anorak...in short, a fan.

And yet I'm not sure that I am. The downside of falling hard for a band or an album, so hard that you can't bear to listen to anything else, is that you don't. Listen to anything else that is. And this phenomenon doesn't last for days or weeks; it can last for months. Consequently, while my taste could be seen as eclectic it is not broad. I have a perverse disinclination to listen to people I should clearly like: I own no music by The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, James Brown or Bruce Springsteen (actually, that last one is probably fair enough). I have voluntarily listened to My Latest Novel's album 'Deaths & Entrances' more than I have music by all the aforementioned artists put together. This makes me happy but I don't think it makes me a music fan.

Confirmation of this came during one of our periodic de-cluttering exercises at home. Presented with boxes full of CD's I merrily filled bin liner after bin liner with scarcely a second glance, knowing that all this stuff was in my itunes library or, if not, I could get it on Spotify within 30 seconds.

But when it came to the boxes of books that followed hard on the heels of the CD's I was angst personified. These were books that:

(a) I had read
(b) I was very unlikely to read again
(c) often weren't very good, and
(d) I could easily access again via a Kindle (if I had one)

And yet I physically could not bring myself to throw them away. It just felt wrong, as if I were taking them out into the street and burning them.

It's the same with the retail experience. I never liked record shops. I think it's a tragedy that so many independent record shops are closing but only in the same way that I mourn the passing of bespoke tailors. The world seems a poorer place without them but their disappearance doesn't impact on my life at all. Being able to pay £10 a month and access (nearly) all the music I need at the click of a mouse strikes me as an entirely good thing.

But I consider Amazon to be the work of the devil. Books should be purchased from bookshops and they should be printed on paper. I find it as impossible to leave a bookshop without buying something (occasionally a book I already own) as others do in record shops or confectioners. I could quite happily live in a bookshop, provided it had a small bar. I know all the arguments about portability and accessibility and believe me they resonate when I'm wrestling with the hardback of 'Bring Up The Bodies' on the tube. But they're still wrong.

There, I've found something else to be passionate about. I'm a book fascist.

The Facebook Generation

The lady on the train in front of me - well dressed, attractive - is reading Spirit & Destiny magazine. Or possibly Psychologies. She doesn't appear to be doing it for the comedy potential. Reading an article titled 'Tantra' over her shoulder, I encounter this:

The author tells how a year ago she met a wonderful man, Gary. She immeidately knew it was serious. And how did this early commitment manifest itself? 'We each changed our facebook status to "in a relationship".

I suppose it will save them having to fork out for rings come the wedding.

Getting Into Their Heads

The Man Booker prize winner is announced on 16th October. I can't see Hilary Mantel winning for 'Bring Up the Bodies'. Despite the judges' protestations that they are judging the books not the authors, it seems unlikely that they'll give the prize not just to the same author who won two years ago but for a sequel to that previous winning book. I hope I'm wrong because despite not having read any of the other short-listed books, I'm convinced Mantel should win.

This isn't just because 'Bring Up the Bodies' is a great book, although it assuredly is - tighter, better paced than 'Wolf Hall' with an even greater feel for place and period. It's because she achieves something that I had hitherto thought impossible: she gets into the heads of people who lived in another time - a time in many ways more distant from us than the 500 years on the calendar.

Mantel's two historical obsessions, Tudor England and the French Revolution (her early novel set in the Revolution, 'A Place of Greater Safety' is a worthy companion to the Tudor series), uncannily mirror my own. I'm not sure there's much to link the two periods: both saw violent upheaval and the prime movers are fascinating, even improbable, characters. But they're hardly unique in that.

Whatever it is that draws Mantel to these periods, she has an extraordinary and, in my experience, unmatched ability to understand the psychology, the motivation of those playing the game. I could never reconcile the way religion underpinned the whole Tudor period with the frankly irreligious, unchristian acts of most of the participants. I long assumed that religion was just a smokescreen, a launchpad for more temporal issues of politics, power and money. But that's clearly wrong as even the most brutally secular power-politics are underpinned by a religious sensibility that unites all the major players just as their doctrinal differences divide them. Religion matters to these people.

The genius of Mantel's writing is to reconcile the religious and the secular in her characters and still make them believably human. Maybe the novel is a better medium for this than academic history which has always been suspicious of relying too much on an understanding of the psychology and motivations of historical figures.

Mantel has no such qualms. She is able to frame the immoral (in the eyes of their God) actions of Anne Boleyn or Henry in the light of their deep religious convictions. What seems contradictory to us now is entirely convincing within the context of the book and the period.

At the heart of her achievement is an understanding that there is no opt-out clause when it comes to religion in sixteenth century England. We may see Henry or Cromwell or Anne as hypocritical, their actions a direct contradiction of their beliefs. But religion was so much a part of the fabric of their society, so much a part of how they saw themselves as individuals that it simply makes no sense to separate their actions from their beliefs.

Her Thomas Cromwell, a man who, if transplanted into the modern era, could easily pass for an amoral, atheistic exponent of realpolitik, still thinks and talks in terms of salvation, still reads his prayer book at times of stress, still cares deeply about the 'new religion'. Does he truly believe? I'm not sure even Hilary Mantel knows that. But he is as much a part of the religious culture of his time as the more obviously pious More or Cranmer.

There's a telling line when Cromwell broods on Anne's arrest:

'One thing she set out to do, this side of salvation: get Henry and keep him'

It's that 'this side of salvation' that is key. However consumed the players are by their earthly dramas, they are all played out in the wider context of a Christian universe. Henry is obsessed with the health of his soul as well as his body but there isn't a character who doesn't have one eye on the afterlife.

Mantel's understanding of the sensibility of the time and her ability to draw characters who are entirely true to that sensibility is her greatest achievement and what elevates these books to another level.

A City of Beauty

'When you're presenting 'haute cuisine' you don't want the working class sticking its nose in it.'

Basil Fawlty, Gourmet Night

Fawlty has always been something of a hero of mine. I've seen all the DVD commentaries in which John Cleese explains, in his desperately analytical way, how so much of the humour of Fawlty Towers comes from the fact that the lead character is, to all intents and purposes, a monster. But I find myself sympathising with his plight more often than not. Of course, this may say more about me than I care to admit.

Yes, his actions are filtered through his absurd prejudices and snobbery but he is frequently surrounded by characters so obnoxious - Mrs Richards, the brash Americans, Nicky Henson's desperate 70s lothario - that his floundering in the face of circumstances elicits sympathy, even support. His diatribe at the collected guests at the end of the 'Waldorf Salad' episode - 'this is exactly how Nazi Germany started' - rarely fails to raise a small cheer.

But agreeing with the defiantly lower middle class Fawlty in his dismissal of the working class is poison, espacially for a guilt-ridden middle class radical like myself. Which is why I'm desperatly trying to skirt around the subject when thinking about our recent family holiday to the Isle of Wight and the aesthetic joy of our return to London.

Because it is beauty that is at the heart of this. The Isle of Wight was lovely, the people friendly if a little eccentric - an unlikely mix of fading white surf dudes and octogenarian middle ranking military types - the scenery and beaches spectacular. It was the ideal staycation, a perfectly formed British Family Holiday.

And yet....in the midst of such natural beauty there was so much that was ugly. And the ugly ones were us, the British on holiday. Badly dressed, badly made up, eating crap, drinking crap, settling not just for second best but for third or fourth best and not looking any too happy about it.

It's easy to assume that this is something to do with class or money or both. That would certainly be Basil's line: you can't expect the working class to appreciate the finer things in life; it's not their fault, merely a condition of their social status.

But I'm increasingly convinced that this is a matter of geography not class. London is a beautiful city. Not just the buildings and the parks and the river but also the people. They have a self-awareness, a desire to make an effort, a confidence to stand out as an individual, safe in the knowledge that the city will guarantee their anonymity.

And it appears it was ever thus:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00t6fdl

Does living in London make you beautiful? Or does London merely attract the beautiful? I don't know. But whatever the cause, the effects cheer me on a daily basis.