Decluttering - and being bitten by the ebay bug

Ever since I moved out of our old office in Henley about five years ago, I've been carrying round dozens of boxes and crates. Most have contained various work paraphernalia - old project collateral, business papers, bits of kit and the like, but the box collection also became home to various odds and sods that we hadn't got space for at home.



Most of the boxes sat unopened for the 18 months we had the Oxford office, and then they all got shunted into storage when we moved over to Risborough. Some then got destroyed when the storage unit got flooded - I still growl every time I drive past Red Devil in Aylesbury - before what remained - and a whole new lot of additional items - went into a storage centre in High Wycombe.



Finally, last month, I got fed up of paying out to lock up stuff I clearly haven't needed for years, and set about emptying the unit and decluttering.



I've now refound my 80s/90s CD and cassette collection and Laura-Beth and I have been bopping around to everything from Big Country to Lisa Stansfield (and about 250 tapes in between). Some fairly ancient IT kit swiftly ended up in the computer recycling area of the local tip; some stationery, books and a couple of small bits of furniture went straight to a charity shop; a heater was pressed into use at home. I've restocked on office stationery from stuff I'd bought years ago and never opened; old business papers have been squeezed in to our latest, rather compact, office and a load of old collateral simply got sheredded (and recycled!).

Still I was left with two large crates. When I opened them up I found hundreds and hundreds of old football and rugby programmes. Now I've kept every programme from every match I've ever been to - and I've seen a lot of matches over the past thirty odd years. But I thought I'd lost most of them in the flood. It turns out that quite a few had survived - but I just don't have the space to indulge in my magpie tendencies any more.

Rory, Sophie and I had a great time pulling out the rarities - programmes signed by the likes of Man United, Arsenal, Spurs, West Ham and QPR back when my dad had a friend who was a League referee in the late 70s and early 80s. We also pulled out all of the Wasps programmes with Rory's picture in - he has done quite a few of their community initiatives over the years, and with his bright ginger hair, he stands out a mile. The rest, we bundled into lots and stuck them on eBay.

Now I've never sold anything on eBay before, but the last few weeks have been a revelation. Everything we've put up so far has sold - some for quite decent money, others for pennies - and seeing our stuff attract bids, watchers and questions has become compulsive viewing.

The bulk of what I had to offload has now gone, but some bits and pieces remain - at least for the next five or six days (and they're here for anyone interested). In some ways selling off the programmes is sad - every one is a little bit of my history, and I actually wrote and edited quite a few over the years for Oxford, Wycombe, Swindon and Fulham - but hoarding crates of the things has more than a dash of train-spotteringness about it.



Anyway, it has quickly become a habit to check first thing in the morning to see what's attracting bids - and I often have a quick peek before I sign off in the evening.

Decluttering's definitely cathartic - even if I'm selling off my youth!

Noises off

So it has been - and is still being - half term this week. Half term and school holidays can be the nightmare scenario for small businesses with child juggling thrown into the mix of keeping the business on a steady course.

This week has lived down to expectations with one animal crisis, one sleepless night - and numerous interruptions just when clients are getting to the crucial bit of a phone call.

Jac had taken the girls away to her parents for the weekend and wasn't coming back until Monday evening, so it was my turn to feed the rabbits and open up their run first thing on Monday morning before starting work.

Now it had been down to minus 6 centigrade on Sunday night and the garden looked lovely, white and frosty. Unfortunately it had proven a little too much for one of our rabbits and so the week got off to a pretty horrible start with me finding Billie dead in the bottom of the hutch with her sister Millie jumping around and sniffing and poking away at her.

It wasn't a total surprise - Billie has been losing weight for a couple of months and has had a couple of trips to the vet for different treatments. She just wasn't a very strong rabbit and it seems the freezing night and her own weak state did for her in the end.

The rest of the day set the tone for the week with the sound of Rory and his mates playing cricket (in February!!) just outside the window - alternating with Wii sports played to much mirth and at high volume.

Tuesday was a day away from the office so not a problem, and I just gave up early on Wednesday and took the kids to the Tower of London instead - great fun, but no money earned!

I spent much of yesterday and this morning on various interview calls - interrupted every so often by Sophie with an urgent question or piece of information....well, urgent for her. She seven, bored when I'm working and can't understand that when the office door is shut it means I'm working and not to be disturbed. it's not an ideal situation - and somehow she thinks that half-term means my holiday too.

This morning's had the double complication of the morning after the sleepover before - I think it was about 2.15am when L-B and her friend finally quietened down a bit. at least it meant two of the four kids in the house stayed quietly asleep until noon today!

Anyway, I suspect good working time will be scarce this afternoon - so I'm just going to go with the flow and be Dad first, and the writer and editor way down the list of priorities.

And another thing.....

Busy, busy week - but just time to collate a few random thoughts as no fewer than six men peer down a hole in the pavement outside my house!

I'm stuck here this morning - not least because I can't get my car past two transit vans - and am fascinated by the 'great British workman' in action.

We've had drainage problems since December, and finally, the gang turned up to replace a broken pipe on Monday. They arrived at 8.15, told us they'd arrived, and proceded to sit in their van for an hour before even unpacking their gear. I was trying to work from here, but as they dug into the road, our broadband dropped out, the building alarm went off and then all the power died. I was due in Southampton in the afternoon, so I just headed off a couple of hours early. When I got back at about 10pm, there was a hole in the road with all the lights, safety fencing and other paraphanelia one would expect. Yesterday just two workers turned up. Nothing happened with the hole in the road. They sat in their van for most of the morning - apart from breaking off to wash one 'worker's' car which was parked in the road opposite. I was out for the afternoon, but when I got back the hole seemed peaceful; undisturbed by a day of inaction.

They were back at 7am this morning. I looked out bleary-eyed to see the van parked up over the road and two workers happily reading the paper. To be fair, they got cracking just before 8.30am and there's all sorts of banging, crashing and the sounds of machinery going on out there now. I'd love to know how they charge for their time - so far they've been in attendance for about 18 hours, and I'd say they've actually physically worked on the job for a third of that. Madness.

Anyway, part of the visit to Southampton was the chance to discuss BBC local radio music policy. Now I'm a fan of local radio - when it's good it's excellent at uniting local communities; providing a level of local interest journalism that the nationals can't rival and a style of programming that's at a completely different pace from the relentlessness of national broadcasting. But while stations such as BBC Radio 2 have reinvented their music policy and new options such as 6 Music have emerged, BBC local radio has kept its music choices safe, warm and fuzzy, paddling in the shallows of the safe 70s to the soft end of 90s rock. It's bland, boring and too often cheesey. So, it was good to hear from a BBC local radio station's editor how the music is chosen. In short, a playlist of around 600 tunes is tested on focus groups fitting the demographic ther stations are aiming at. What happens in practice is that this list is fed to a bunch of 50-something critical friends of the BBC. Those melodies that appeal form part of a package sent to all stations. But presenters don't then select individual tunes, they select time slots and genre (upbeat, ballad, or whatever) and the computer does the rest. The result? Bland, personality-free music choices - and frankly, lazy radio. At a time when local radio is losing listeners, and those it's keeping are getting older and older, this doesn't bode well. Fewer and fewer of the next generation will be bitten by the local radio bug.

But what will we be listening to in the future? possibly not DAB. GCap's decision to close the Jazz and Planet Rock and move out of DAB further weakens the platform. And though the BBC has announced it has no plans to ditch DAB, there has to be a danger that it becomes the Betamax of the radio industry. OneWord, Storm and a number of other DAB pioneers have recently disappeared and commercial FM stations have been slow to take up DAB multiplex slots. GCap clearly see FM and the internet as the ways forward......which is a bit of a pain if, like me, you have four DAB radios in the house!

Anyway, performance management, pandemic flu, hange management and Khrushchev are all a-calling, so I'd better crack on.

Nothing new - but plenty to renew

I'm feeling a bit flat today - the natural come down after completing the fifth of my six essays for this year's modules on my MA. There's no chance to cruise though, as essay six - and it's a biggie - needs to be submitted in just 14 days, while there's also a research proposal to write and a dissertation to get moving.

But while the course is taking me into new areas of thought and really stretching both my knowledge and capability to learn, I'm not quite getting that same buzz from work - well, this last couple of weeks at least.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the projects I have and will put heart and sould into them, but my current pattern of work is a bit formulaic, and with a certain sense of deja vue.

Like others of my experience, I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing new in IC. Despite what the gurus and consultants might say, and no matter how it's dressed up, it's about organisational leaders building relationships of trust with their teams that enable everyone to do their jobs better. We don't all need to be best mates or even to share the same beliefs, but we all need the right information to do our jobs effectively brought to us in a timely and relevant way; and the right channels to be heard. Frankly, that hasn't changed since January 1989 when I moved from straight-forward journalism into my first in-house role at Nationwide.

We may be talking about engagement and involvement rather more than reporting these days, and there may be slightly more emphasis on two-way communication, but the essentials of the job remain the same. The so-called revolutions that have exploded the box around social media and broken the barriers between internal and external communication are important: but 15 years ago I was working on issue-based communication. True, our tool kit has changed, but the underlying skills and experience required are far less changed.

Where those of us with a few grey hairs have to adapt and indeed renew is in our cultural referencing. This strikes home to me every time we kick off a debate at university. The background to my life was the fall of Saigon; breaching the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The recent intake of undergrads were born after the fall of the Wall and have never known a world precariously tottering on a balance of power. While the icons of my youth are the heroes of punk, new wave....and yes, even new romanticism, my colleagues on my postgrad course come from an age when R&B is dominant; where schoolwork is conducted on the net and where meeting your mates happens through MSN.

It's not quite 'jumpers for goalposts' stuff, but it's totally unfair and wrong-headed of us as communicators to assume our audiences share our values and references, or that we should impose what matters to us onto them. We can't always hark back to the good old days - some of them were pretty shitty - and we can never assume we've got nothing to learn.

I'm doing the same-old same-old in terms of the process of communication; but my tools are a little different, and my outlook has to change a little too.

Challenger: 21 Years On

It's worth reflecting for just a moment today that it's 21 years since the Space shuttle Challenger disintegrated as it hurtled towards orbit killing all seven astronauts on board. The BBC tell the story much better than I can here.

Perhaps this was NASA's lowest low, and showed up the Shuttle for the poor compromise craft that it is, and more damningly, amply displayed NASA's disfunctionality in the decades after the moon landings.

I wonder if the anniversary will even merit a mention in today's news outlets?

Back to business

I'm really glad that the new year hangover has finally shaken out and that Britain finally seems to be back to business as usual.

For whatever reason, it was a really slow start to the year and business only really took off again last week. It probably didn't help that my phone line was out of action for three days. But that aside, most clients and business contacts I spoke to weren't exactly rushing to get new projects on track in the first couple of weeks of 2008.

Last week the pace began to pick up, bringing immediate work; remedial action on some very ancient work; the prospect of additions to some fairly recent work; plans for the next step on some ongoing work and two leads that look promising and have required some quite detailed follow-up. So, from having the time to languorously read my Masters text books for a week, I've gone head-down into hyper-work mode in the last six days. Added to that I played squash for the first time in about eight years yesterday......and then, because the weather was so gorgeous here, followed it with a game of tennis.

So, today there's lots of writing to be done, but my whole body aches every time I move proving it's impossible for a 43 year old to go from couch potato to athlete overnight.

One nice piece of post that arrived today was the latest issue of Connections which I write large chunks of for Badenoch & Clark. It covers issues around the recruitment field and is an interesting one to write. While this one's not up on their website yet (it's issue 4), the first two are, and can be viewed here.

Anyway, back to the grindstone now - and hopefully a bit more regular posting on the blog.

Sod's law!

I spent a good chunk of this afternoon emailing companies who might like to use my services - some know me, but others were more or less a 'cold call'.

Now I wouldn't expect an immediate response from anyone - but you never know......

So, I was less than best pleased when I went to use the business line late this afternoon and was met with just a hiss and a crackle. I called my line from my mobile....and was diverted straight to voicemail.

I registered the fault online and four hours on.......it's still being investigated.

Somehow, the law of sod always kicks in just when it's least wanted.

All 'freelancers' aren't the same

I've had one of those infuriating exchanges this afternoon with an agency looking to bring in freelance talent to help with their projects.

I'm always looking to expand my comms network and have had a couple of conversations with this agency before. So I responded to the person putting out the call, explained a little about my background and the kind of projects I'm currently - and previously - have worked on.

It must have sparked a little interest as she came back almost immediately and asked my date/hourly rates.

Now I'm probably upper quartile for writing/editing but cheap for consultancy - I sent back some rates but explained that I'd far rather quote on a project basis as I work a lot quicker than many others in my situation. How do I know that? Mainly from a year where I've commissioned a lot of writing from other sources - and have been gobsmacked by how long it takes some people to produce the goods (or how little they seem to think merits a day's pay).

The contact came back almost as quickly stating they paid about a third of my day rate to freelancers - and was I still interested?

No! No! A thousand times no!!!!

When will agencies realise that they have to treat freelancers as individuals and actually marry the skills on offer to the projects they're handling. Freelancer skills can't simply be commoditised. We have different experience and skills to bring, and judging people only on price brings everyone down to a 'word rate' which takes no account of the insight an individual brings to a job.

If we were making widgets to a set formula, then fine.

But comms isn't like that and while agencies select talent on price alone, the only people who suffer are clients.

Now not all agencies are like that - but in the UK at least, too many still are.

It's more effort to get work directly from new sources - but I keep coming back to the thought that it's so much more satisfactory than working through an agency whose goals are maximising their own profits while minimising their costs.

Funny enough, if this agency invested a little more time in selecting their freelances, they'd probably not spend a whole lot more and gain far higher client satisfaction.

Back to student life

I'm off to Brunel shortly to hit the library and also drop off my fourth essay.

Essay writing has been, perhaps, the hardest element of my return to academia - quite surprising really as I've made my living or the last 20 years from stringing words together in one shape or form. But that's part of the problem.

One of my modules last term was on Globalisation - a fascinating and often disturbing issue, since what emerged from 12 weeks of discussion is an impression of continued US hegemony, providing an environment for big business to get bigger at the expense of the developing world. My tutor was a guy called Nafeez Ahmed and while he remained suitably above partisanship in the classes, his extremely well articulated views - found here make compelling reading.

Anyway, I've had real trouble hitting the right level of academic rigour in my essay writing - for 20 years, I've written journalistically, either telling a story from whatever angle suits the publication, or editorialising where my views mattered. Academic writing is so different. I'm reading for a Masters, so what matters is not my views at all, but my ability to summarise an argument and replay it using the voices of those already recognised in the field. My tendency is to summarise journalistically; to simplify the debate too much without sufficient referencing and too often to polemicise. Only four essays in do I feel I'm even beginning to get the hang of both what and how I should be writing.

Aside from the work, my impression is that students have changed a lot too - and not necessarily in a good way. there's a core of us in each seminar who keep the discussion going - and aren't afraid to throw in opinions even if we're ultimately proved wrong. But more than half the class say nothing - which seems a huge waste of the opportunity for debate offered. Even more strangely, there has been a significant number of students who have hardly shown up for classes at all, despite the fact that they're meant to be compulsory. while in my first life as a student, i wasn't the greatest lecture attender, I never missed a seminar or tutorial . Back in the '80s, I was privileged to attend university. Now I get the impression that students feel they're pretty much owed a degree once they've paid the fees. Somehow, the course has become a transactional arrangement, and that's a bit depressing for me.

Allied to this change in attitude, the other thing I notice on campus is how rude people are. Perhaps it's because I'm old enough to have fathered most other students at Brunel (though I would have had to have a pretty fast bike!), but I'm struck on a daily basis by how 'polite society' seems to have disappeared. if I hold open a door, 10 people push past in either direction; people walk straight at anyone coming in the opposite direction and barge past rather than stepping out of the way. Common courtesy is rarely, if ever, met with any thanks and there's a distinct surliness among too many undergrads and even post grads. Maybe we were all like that 25 years ago too - but I distinctly feel that there's a lack of respect not just for elders, but for each other among my young student contemporaries on campus today.

Anyway, 'old git' rant over.

Finally, I'm enjoying the US race for the White House, and recommend Justin Webb's blog. It's amazing how the world's one remaining superpower has such a weird and convoluted election process which ensures the current incumbent is a lame dog for at least a year or more of their presidency - who's even vaguely interested in Bush now, when Hilary and Barack, Mike and Mitt and all the others are wheeler-dealering around various cold bits of Uncle Sam's back yard?

I picked up my Hilary 2009 badge in Washington DC last year and I'm still with Hil. Following the disastrous lurch to the right the US has experienced with 'Dubya', I'm really hoping the Democrats get in this time. I think they have the best chance of this with Clinton, since I'm worried about Obama's inexperience and also worried that if he get the Democrat ticket, he'll prove unelectable at a national level where I'm not sure that ultra-conservative middle America is actually ready for a black president. A woman in the White House is a big step: a black man may prove a step too far and let in the Republicans. that would be a travesty.

My 'dream ticket' would be Clinton for President and Obama learning his trade as VP. Trouble is, the only truly statesman-like Democrat at the moment is Al Gore - and he shows no signs of entering the fray.

Out with the old and all that

So it's January 2nd and I'm back at my desk though I can't say I'm really working. My three kids are much in evidence around the place today and most of my clients are still off so it's a chance over the next couple of hours to clear the mountain of 'pending' that piled up during a very busy December before the pressure to entertain my offspring means work has to take a second place to Christmas holiday activities.

Christmas and New Year passed off pretty well here and this this very short lull before the grindstone gets turning again has given me a bit of time to reflect on the good and bad parts of 2007.

The pluses

Leapfrog has been busier than in the two previous years with a good variety of work mixing b2b publication work with change projects and tactical internal comms projects. I spent a lot of time with one particular client, but for once managed to keep my other work going in parallel without any client work suffering.

I've had some of my history writing published in BBC History Magazine and am working on a commission for a publication detailing the secret role of one of the UK's stately homes during WW2.

I've embarked on an MA in International Relations at Brunel University , and while it's tougher than anything I do in work, and has taken just about every spare hour I have in the week just to keep up with the reading, it really has given me a new spark. After probably five years of feeling in a bit of a rut about work, I'm finally seeing real possibilities to expand into new areas - and perhaps take a slightly different direction once the course is complete.

On the margins

My TV wannabe-ness got me onto the BBC's Mastermind. It was a fabulous experience and I felt great just to get through the selection process and into the famous black leather chair. But once there, nerves and a slightly daft selection of specialist subject combined. While I was never going to win the heat, I didn't do as well as I could or should, so left the studios in Manchester a little disappointed with my own performance.

Minuses

One downside of being a microbusiness has been having to turn down work. For the first time in three years I've been approached for projects I simply didn't have the capacity to fulfil. some I was able to pass on to associates, but I simply had to knock back a few other opportunities. 2007 was certainly the year when a couple of clones would have been very useful.

Another downside of being stretched workwise and by the MA was having to give up my CiB involvement for the time being. The final straw for this was the huge apathy within the organisation for making the changes necessary for it to remain relevant to the communications industry. There are a few people who do a great job to keep CiB going - but it's all too few. For a year, I was part of a membership group that delivered very little. Partly this was the perennial problem of a volunteer organisation: too little time and little money to back plans. But more so it was down to a much wider apathy. Initiatives got little support and most members simply wanted to get everything spoon-fed without making any effort to put anything back in. Around 70 people out of over 1100 could be bothered to vote in council elections, and when just 62 participated in a CiB-sponsored communications survey in the Autumn I really felt I was wasting my time. I had little enough of that time available anyway, so putting CiB on the back burner wasn't hard.

Finally, 2007 saw the usual tale of projects that started but got pulled; late payments and mounting costs. I'll need to review my rates early this year, since they haven't really changed for rather too long now, while all of my costs have spiralled. The present government has made it harder and more expensive to run a business, and too much of my time is spent on bureaucracy when I should be earning money. We may well face a consumer recession this year, and I'm genuinely apprehensive about how the credit crunch will affect this distant link on the business food chain.

However, I'm going into 2008 with a good pipeline, strong contacts and enough nous to get me through any potential tough times.

Anyway, I hear the call of squabbling kids....