How would you feel if you were Hitler's brother?

You can get a good idea of the problems that Adolf’s half-brother Alois encountered from the story on the front page of the Sunday Dispatch of 14 October 1945, which had been used to wrap some lead figures I just unearthed.

ALOIS DOES NOT LIKE HIS NAME: HITLER – He’s quoted as saying “The name Hitler has sometimes been a source of embarrassment to me”, and his strategy was simple – the previous day he’d applied to change his name. To “Hiller”

The rest of the page is a testament to our lack of progress over the years:

900 GOOD HOUSES TO BE KNOCKED DOWN TO EXTEND LONDON AIRPORT – nearly 65 years later the same story, and the same village, Sipson, are in the news for precisely the same reason, as the Government announces its decision on Heathrow's third runway

PALESTINE ALL QUIET – “There have been no new military disturbances in Palestine during the last 24 hours, British military headquarters announced in Jerusalem last night”. However …

USA AND JEWISH CASE – “President Truman is understood to be considering advocacy of the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, in place of the Jewish-Arab State envisaged by the British 1939 White Paper policy.” You get a clue to recent events when you read “This already delicate and difficult situation in which the British Government finds itself has not been made less difficult by the intervention of President Truman”. It’s all about us, really

US MAY RECRUIT A-BOMB SPIES – Apparently they were going to “live abroad in positions in which they would learn of any large-scale attempts to find the secret of atom bomb manufacture”. Didn’t they do well?

19th CHILD WAS 14lb – And after all those years of rationing too. The mother, from Grimsby, was just 43 and probably ready for further action

JAVA REBELS DECLARE WAR ON DUTCH – This was the work of Soekarno, a busy man, who’d declared an Independent Republic of Indonesia eight weeks previously. This time he gave advance warning of his tactics, listing his weapons of war: “all kinds of firearms; also poison, poisoned darts and arrows; all means of arson; any kind of wild animals ...”. Today, the airport is named after him

QUISLING APPEAL FAILS – Having already turned down suicide and exile, he faced the firing squad 10 days later. Today, traitors are named after him

MEN BEHIND DOCK STRIKES – This was the banner headline. Guess who they were. Step forward The Revolutionary Communist Party. However, in another part of the forest …

BRITISH ARREST SOVIET TROOPS – Ah, those were the days.

Welcome to Boracic Park

That’s right – just now, while we’re still deciding whether to embrace poverty or kill ourselves, we’ve nothing better to do than write headlines with rhyming slang in them (boracic lint = skint, ie penniless).

And while our MPs are industriously fixing the income tax system so its worse excesses kick in about a quark above their salary, the rest of us are trudging round the recession theme park with our heads down looking for small change.However, since I wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before, I can advise you about how recessions go:

Phase one – Denial

· Wall-to-wall media drivel from soi-disant experts about how to survive a recession and save your job

· Swingeing job cuts in the media

· Applause

· Young people saying life isn’t fair

· Old people saying they’ve seen it all before

· Miserable bastards saying this is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world

· Politicians, central bankers, treasury officials etc denying any prospect of a downturn

Phase two – Downturn

· Politicians, central bankers, treasury officials etc saying they’ve been warning about a downturn for years

· Companies going bust

· People having their homes repossessed by banks now partially owned by the people they’re kicking out

· More media drivel, but now with a harder edge, eg: how to live rough / grow turnips / make Christmas presents from gravel / darn socks / go bankrupt / emigrate / beg / shoplift / join the Foreign Legion / become an MP

· Gangs of middle class folk roaming the streets looking for rich people, politicians or bankers to lynch

· Global rope shortage

Phase three – Amnesia

· Sudden realisation that the recession has been over for two or three years but you couldn’t be arsed to go to work

· Credit boom

· Property boom

· What recession?

It’s all about timing isn’t it? By the time anyone’s spotted the problem we’re half way through it, and the only people who ever foresee a recession are those irritating swine who never predict anything else, and are thus as useful as stopped clocks – which are absolutely accurate twice a day. It’s just that you don’t know when.

Luckily I've had the foresight to get my hindsight in early, and I'm already working on the boom after next.

Welcome to Bear World

You thought that Bear Stearns and bear markets would be enough ursines to be getting on with, but no – welcome back to the Russian Bear, grinding its tanks across the Caucasus and scaring the shit out of everyone.

It’s like a blast of fresh air, straight from Siberia. The Russians have finally worked out that they don’t really like McDonald's, Levi’s, free elections, independent media, private enterprise or balsamic vinegar. They’ve given it 17 years, but enough’s enough, and they’re right – we know what we expect from our Russians, and it isn’t effete western rubbish like this.

Like it or not our view of the Russians is still defined by the Cold War – we want them inscrutable and brooding, scrunching around in their snow wearing boots, fur hats and greatcoats. We want them silent, sullen and morose, patrolling their borders and gulags, intercepting radio traffic, bugging hotel rooms, springing tender-traps, rounding up spies, and generally murdering people.

And it’s reassuring to note that they’ve lost little of their style. Liquidating a dissident in London is one of the set moves in this game so, rather than simply shoot Alexander Litvinenko two years ago, the poor man ended up dying on live TV poisoned by polonium-210. Nine out of 10 for artistic merit. And additional bonus points for having the prime suspect elected to the Russian parliament.

These guys are getting back into world class form, but what of the UK? Sadly, our response to the troubles in Georgia has conformed to the tenets of British Lite Culture. It’s true that strafing the Kremlin would probably be going too far, but wallowing in high dudgeon and squeaking with righteous pique isn’t going anywhere. Our Foreign Secretary is rushing around being pompous and building coalitions, and I fully expect ministers to start criticising the Russian military manoeuvres on the basis of their carbon footprint.

Somewhere deep in the Lubyanka a thick-set man with a crew-cut and plastic shoes turns to a henchman: “What has happened to the British? Where are their gunboats, their devious diplomats, their moles? Have they forgotten how to gloat, to infiltrate, to retaliate? Have they no wrath, no shame?”

As it happens, shamefully, we don’t. But by and large we’ve chosen to live in the present, despite the fundamentalist wings of both major political parties and the Anglican Church. Retro-politics is for folks who can’t hack it in the 21st century, but the Russians should remember who won last time. However, will they work this out before things get worse?

The answer to this involves woods and of course bears.

It's a numbers game

In a cellar at dawn, I have severed the jugular vein of sacred bulls against a black rock. If your job application letter contains this line you are either mad or from Borges’s fictional Babylon, where the lottery company runs the state – or perhaps does not exist.

While in the UK Lotto is all about money, the Babylon Lottery goes deeper – the results of a draw may give you wealth or status, but could also decide your exile or execution. Every draw leads to several others, and each of these leads to more, so the lottery becomes infinite and impossible to grasp – any event in society might or might not be the result of an untraceable series of draws. In this regard it is exactly like the workings of the European Union.

However, the communication problem facing the UK lottery is that the only winners the PR team get to work on are those without the commonsense to opt for anonymity. And there’s only so far you can go with your glee over the good fortune of a rapist or armed robber.

We’re never going to find out about the sensible winners. Even if we know them personally they’re going to put their new Bentley Brooklands coupé down to an astute investment or the death of a long-lost relative in the hedge-fund sector. I know I did.

But winning ticket-holders are only one side of the equation – on the other are the Good Causes, which get on average 20,000 lottery grants every year. Of course no-one can remember any of these, so the answer is obviously to change the rules and hypothecate.

You want to save a Leonardo for the nation? Give Jodrell Bank a makeover? Re-take the Bayeux Tapestry? Buy a seat for the Prime Minister on a Mars probe? Pitch it to the National Lottery Distribution Fund. They select the best (or weirdest) and publish a list of one a month for the next year. A Good Causes jackpot rolls over for three weeks and on the fourth the money goes to the project.

This would give the PR people something to get their teeth into. The selection controversies alone would be grist to the communication mill, but at least the wheel would be turning as supporters got behind their project.

So the message is clear: get special-interest lottery targets out into the open on a national scale and start fighting over them.

Unless you want to find yourself in a cellar at dawn with a knife and a sacred bull.

A rummage in the Ex Files

The UK is awash with memoirs from political has-beens: the ex prime minister’s whining wife; his giggling ex fundraiser-in-chief; and Bigfoot, his ex deputy. The only people who will read these are people who are either listed in the index or paid to (ie journalists and lawyers).

Each author has obeyed the first golden rule of memoir writing, which is to cash in while:

· people you are likely to savage (ie Gordon Brown) are still in the news

· publishers (and the public) can remember who you are

· newspapers are still interested in paying for serialisation rights

Large sums of money can be involved, so, if you fancy writing some memoirs yourself, why not use my handy template to save you time? For example, your chapters need to divide up along these lines:

· Early life – how you were so totally disadvantaged it’s surprising you survived at all, growing up in a slum with dysfunctional parents (or in a nice suburban house with a loving and supportive family – your ghost-writer will turn this into a nightmare for you)

· My struggle (it’s best not to use the German for this) – how you overcame everything, and dedicated yourself to the cause of saving humanity

· It wasn’t me, guv – blame lots of other people, but don’t bother naming them, for all the mistakes you made so publicly

· I told them at the time they were wrong – it doesn’t matter if this is untrue, you just have to get it on paper before your victims write their memoirs

· How the media lied about me – get your serialisation rights sorted, then lay into everyone else

· My secret illness – it doesn’t have to be bulimia; pseudo-psychological claptrap works well, but ensure your illness has symptoms which explain your crass behaviour. A famous British jockey, at his trial, relied on an illness whose only symptom was an inability to pay income tax

· My Rock – it doesn’t have to be your butler; it can be the wife who stood by you despite your serial adultery, or perhaps some religion or other you rightly kept quiet about at the time

· Why I hated the people I worked with – you need this for the media interest, but remember that their lawyers will be watching

· Why I couldn’t be honest with you at the time – copy something from Scott McClellan’s What Happened.

Whether you’re an ex politician or an ex CEO currently languishing in jail for fraud, this lot should see you through your book deal. But remember that when the Monster Raving Loony Party finally forms a government your book will take on a new life in the criminal justice system as people are sentenced to read it. To keep your street cred intact you'll want to come somewhere between community service and public flogging.

Come on baby, tick my box

If you live in the UK, and even if you are an opium addict, you’ll have worked out that reality doesn’t matter any more. What matters is “information”. Politicians are happy with this because, while they’re not very good at reality, they’re demons with “information”.

In days of yore, our leaders oppressed us rather more honestly, with swords, spears, stocks, thumbscrews, dungeons, gallows, tithes, Latin and Hell – but that was when we worked for them. Since the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, however, they’ve been increasingly working for us. But that’s just the information; the reality is different.

Politicians, civil servants and policy wonks now inhabit a meta-world, intent on managing not reality itself, but the information about it. A recent example concerns pre-school “education”, which in our country involves children from the age of 24 months (that’s right) to five years.

You, opium addict or not, might think that this would be all about preparing our children for life in the real world – developing an enquiring mind, a sense of proportion, a capacity for fun and basic manners, for instance – but you would be wrong.

The latest wheeze, a national and compulsory curriculum called the Early Years Foundation Stage, in fact sets 500 milestones involving 69 separate “skills” and compels the adults in charge to gather information about the process.

While some of the skills they’re after are beyond belief, that’s hardly surprising, coming from these wraiths of the meta-world, but it’s not the issue here.

The issue is that once again it’s about information, not reality. The nation’s tiny tots are to be condemned to ceaseless monitoring by people with stopwatches and clipboards, endlessly ticking boxes. When all the boxes are ticked, our children are ready for life, no matter what they’re like.

Set aside for a moment the infinite arrogance of our wraith-wonks who must seriously believe that they, and only they, can define a human being, and that they can do it with information like this. Consider the information itself – what’s it for?

It’s for them, and has no use in the real world. They will collate it, read it, check it, analyse it, write it up, summarise it, abstract from it, comment on it, tweak it, spin it, convert it into pie-charts, burn it onto CD and leave it in a pub, put it on PowerPoint, brief ministers on it, write papers about it, email it by mistake to the Burmese government, upload it to YouTube, and leak it to the Daily Mail.

Companies and their PR advisers have traditionally looked with envy on the power of politicians, but they know they’re different – by and large they gather their information from the real world (what we actually buy, what we hate about things) and exploit it ruthlessly. They know that if we stop adding their product to our cart they’re dead.

Politicians and their hench-people should think about carts more. Specifically about those we know as tumbrels.

Who's your father, referee?

Internal communication is all the rage and some, although not enough, very smart people work in the field. They struggle to get people singing from the same hymn sheet and embedding silly corporate mission statements in their work. Done well, however, this is powerful voodoo.

Football (ie soccer) clubs should take heed. Unlike in normal business, where you don’t expect 75,000 fans cheering you on as you wrestle with next year’s budget, football clubs like to play before big crowds of their own supporters. Why? Because they figure their fans give them uplift. Home advantage is not to do with the slope or viscosity of the pitch, the light, or the idiosyncratic wind - it’s about the crowd.

The crowd sings its particular anthems (there’s not a huge repertoire and many are shared among all fans), they boo the opposition and the officials and they cheer their own team – unless they’re playing badly in which case they’ll boo them as well. Booing is what crowds do best. Racial insults are outlawed, but otherwise, football crowds are rightly praised for their irreverent sense of humour.

This is all very well, but a smart team would understand that this could be taken further.

Imagine, as you lead your visiting team onto the field where the home crowd have been roped in to my scheme, that you are greeted by a crowd chanting the name of each of your players followed by a searing indictment of their ability and probity.

Each player’s weak points will have been researched, chants passed around on the club intranet, and rehearsed during the hour before the match.

How good is a visiting player going to feel if, every time he gets the ball, 50,000 people in unison refer to his recent adultery, warts, operation to enlarge his penis, unwise property investments, and so on?

Your own team’s goals are celebrated with a rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus, while an opposition score gets the kind of low hissing which so disoriented Eve in the Garden of Eden.

A decent crowd, with a few weeks’ practice ought to be able to add two goals to their side every match until the opposition fans catch on. As the project slips into gear it will be interesting to find out, among other things, if all crowds currently sing in the same key. If they do, then why? And if they don’t, then, well, why?

When Manchester United and Chelsea learn of this development, there will be excellent business for the internal communication arm of Campaignteam but bad news for sanity. So it’s a definite go-er.

Nine tips for people writing "ten tips" articles

Apart from having people set fire to your house or force you to watch talent shows on TV, nothing is more irritating than articles offering you tips about how to do things.

These grim pieces, of which there are millions, masquerade as a service but are entirely focused on the superior knowledge of the writer. They are part of the stock in trade of the media relations business at its low-rent end, and too often appear in free magazines. They should normally be torn from the publication, shredded and offered to your hamsters or rare-breed ducks as part of their en suite bathroom paraphernalia.

However, if you insist on proceeding with your tips, here are mine:

1. Work out if you’ve actually got ten tips. Ten is the most popular number by far – presumably thanks to God, whose commandments managed to convey an entire way of life. My research shows that the lowest number of tips people are prepared to offer is two (for Creating Academic Documents). While you can get 27 tips for Wrapping, Storing, and Thawing All the Foods you Freeze, the real inflation is in the corporate world of course – witness 44 Tips for Using Bullets and Numbering, no fewer than 46 Tips for Flip-chart Users and, ludicrously, 57 Tips for Delivering Dynamic Presentations. I gave up at this point and had some whisky. My second tip is therefore:

2. Have some whisky

3. If you feel you haven’t really got as many tips as you think your audience would like, then simply say the same thing in different words a few times – like most people, once they get above half a dozen

4. Treat your audience as if they had been born yesterday

5. Adopt a patronising tone (this is essentially the same as point four, but – you see what I pulled off there? – an extra tip with no work at all)

6. Accept that no-one will learn anything from your tips and that they will see them for what they are – an excuse to get your name into print

7. Don’t give any really useful tips – your readers aren’t expecting them and won’t be able to distinguish them from the ballast

8. Be sanctimonious at all times, particularly about research. Don’t bother doing any research yourself

9. Include your contact details and a photo of you looking sober.

Giving tips is an easy, rigour-lite approach to communication – you can abandon structure and argument in favour of a list, so, when you run out of things to say, just count them up and put the number in the title. Like I did.

Older, Wiser and Crazier

When I was a child, old people seemed like aliens. With their white hair, colossal bosoms and war wounds they would have a lavatory in the backyard and a tin bath in front of the coal fire.

They made their own clothes, skinned rabbits, grew vegetables, saved up pieces of string and ate all food put before them.

They seemed to have had a hard time of things (the war wounds were a give-away) but they didn’t whine about it and indeed seemed pleased that life was simpler for us. The general consensus was that, while they were a bit out of touch with the new technology (eg telephones) and evolving social mores of the later 20th century, they had survived a different, more brutal, world and therefore knew a thing or two.

However, while the onset of British Lite Culture (prop. T Blair) has made it impossible to criticise children any more, it’s de rigeur, for politicians at least, to patronise older people, and their PR advisers egg them on.

For example, our Foreign Office, which must have sorted everything else in the world out while I wasn’t looking, has spent our money surveying what people over the age of 55 get up on their holidays. Now the results are in, they’re not happy:

• More than half eat and drink more while on holiday than at home (surely the point of most holidays)
• Sometimes this makes them drown or get thrown in jail (hey ho)
• 20% have the effrontery to engage in activities they wouldn’t consider at home. Bungee jumping is cited, but one of the main ones is probably voluntary euthanasia, which is illegal here but available in more enlightened places like Switzerland. The rules about assisted dying are made, of course, by people who aren’t old yet and thus have no idea what they’re talking about. Funnily enough old people seem to have a firm grasp of the issues.

The ridiculous Foreign Office Minister Meg Munn (age 48 and a Methodist, a sect not known for its bungee jumping) says that the Foreign Office is “all for over-55s having fun on holiday”. This is generous of them, although whether we enjoy our holidays or not is none of her department’s damn business.

She has much more to say, of course, but she will not be keeping a scrapbook of the media coverage, and she has hopefully fired her PR people (as if).

The reason for this goofy media play was that the Foreign Office gets irritated when their people on the ground have to spring old people from distant jails, but that’s part of what we pay them for.

In any sane society the PR wonks, before coming up with their fatuous communication strategies, would first have wondered why so many older people would have as their role model a truly great man who died not so long ago aged only 67 – Hunter S Thompson. I’ll tell you why when you’re older.

Bare Sterns

Every so often our bankers are caught with their trousers down and their naked backsides on grisly public display. We are tempted to seize the opportunity to give them a good kicking, but hell – they know where we live (until they repossess our home). What a bummer.

In the past we’ve seen our banks brought low by dodgy loans to South American governments, institutionalised money laundering, rogue traders and most recently sub-prime mortgages.

The sleight of hand which has taken this latest chunk of risk and spread it like mycelium throughout the world’s financial system is impressive, but right now all banks assume that every other bank is in the same mess as they are, so – impasse. No-one’s lending to anyone and as far as liquidity is concerned they’ve gone from snake oil to embalming fluid in a matter of weeks.

In good times (ie between banking meltdowns) our financial services companies treat punters with contempt and you only have to watch commercial TV for an evening to see this. Advertising for financial products in the UK starts from the premise that the product range is sufficiently complicated to rule out the possibility of just telling us about them.

So, adopting and adapting David Ogilvy’s insight that “when you've got nothing to say, sing it”, they hit us with 30-second commercials featuring crooning bank tellers, cartoon newlyweds or half-baked comedy sketches.

They must see our chain of reasoning as something like “Hey, these people can really sing – let’s give them all our money to look after.”

My own bank, some years ago, closed my branch down during a multi-zillion pound TV campaign focusing entirely on how they weren‘t closing any branches down. Oh how we laughed.

I kept my account with them of course since chutzpah of this quality only shows up infrequently.

However, we don’t need banks to make us laugh or gnash our teeth – we’ve already got politicians for that. From our banks we prefer clarity, although we’re never going to get it.

And yet, despite it all, complex financial instruments and products are here to stay. Lots of smart and rapacious people depend on this and, although they screw up badly now and again, the industry would go nowhere if we didn’t let them test the envelope.

So, as we consider just how far up shit creek these people have hauled the rest of us we should resist the temptation to kick ass, but we’ll certainly remember that, when we use the term “merchant banker”, it has a secondary meaning.

As rhyming slang.

Kosovo - an early to-do list

So, hello Kosovo. It must be nice to be a new country with everything to play for. There’s obviously plenty to do – there’s a new currency to design, tax collectors and tourism ministers to recruit, an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest to pen, a national drink to, well, drink.

On top of all that you need a national anthem – not your usual dirge, but something more likely to scare the shit out of anyone hearing it. In fact something like the hakka, performed by the New Zealand Rugby Union team before each match. This seems to say “We are mighty. You are feeble and have the gonads of mice. We are going to kill you.”

It’s important to get all the cultural sensitivities right and I think that strikes the right note.

Of course it’s a relatively civilised business setting up your country these days. In colonial times we never used to worry about other people's cultural sensitivity. Or their religions, laws, land rights, customs, women, dignity, reserves of spices/gold/slaves/opiates/diamonds/uranium etc.

Our civil servants have sat round many a mahogany table with our allies, carving up continents more or less at random. They've got out protractors, rulers, dividers and all those other geometry instruments that no-one has seen since 1970.

They've drawn nice neat lines round colossal swathes of territory and said OK let's call it Rhodesia. No matter that the new borders slice straight through ancient tribal homelands, bisect your royal palace at the billiard room, give you a piece of lake measuring four feet by 1,500 miles, put the source of your main water supply in the hands of your deadliest enemies and place your bauxite reserves in the Spanish enclave next door.

It’s tough that we couldn't find anywhere for the Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Karen, Welsh, Basques, etc but look, we've DRAWN it now.

These fellows played their cartography to win. If you were so rude as to disagree with their arbitrary geometry, then we'd simply pile in a couple of hundred crack troops and have you swinging from your palace balcony in no time.

These days we can't get away with such whimsical behaviour as you have probably noticed. By and large people can do what they like inside their own borders. Our governments concentrate instead on telling us what we can do in our own homes - individually we're easier to subdue than United Nations delegations, hedge fund billionaires and the Taleban.

Bali Hype

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, put it neatly: “One of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.” PR people beware, particularly those heading back from Bali amid their vapour-trails of greenhouse gases.

The world’s climate change evangelists have communicated so badly that global warming is now moving from being a problem (about climatology) to a meta-problem (about the politics of climatology). They have succumbed to the In-Crowd Effect.

In-Crowds get on our nerves and take many ugly forms, all united in their preening self-importance and their demand that we admire them as a matter of principle. They include the people who won the 2012 Olympics bid for London, eco-warriors, animal rights campaigners, death cults, creationists, riders of the EU gravy train, New Labour policy wonks, MPs, terrorists and Princess Diana fans.

They have booked their place in heaven with a cause more important than anything else, and this sense of disproportion produces tunnel vision about a photon wide, along with a belief that standard rules of proof don’t apply. Distortion and hysteria are OK as long as they help to Wake Us All Up, and Al Gore’s histrionics have, disgracefully, won him a Nobel Prize for precisely this.

But for the rest of us – while we may accept the reality of climate change but admit we don’t understand its dynamics and potential – we know when we’re the Out-Crowd, and we react to this as only human beings can (ie badly).

As a species, we didn’t get where we are today without taking note of what people do rather than what they say, preach, scream or spend our taxes on. In the UK we observe that while our government tells us we’re all doomed to drown, starve and fry, they’re putting in an extra runway at Heathrow, building thousands of houses on flood plains and commissioning new coal-fired power stations.

We see that instead of switching off the lights in their offices when they go home, they have announced the world’s largest windfarms – onshore (south of Glasgow) and offshore (Kent coast). This reversion to centuries-old and cost-inefficient technology is being wildly hyped as showing their commitment, but to what? To grandstanding, sanctimony and cynicism.

These are not “big decisions”, they are big projects, and we know the difference. A big decision might involve targeting a deep cut in our energy consumption, but where’s the fun in that?

As long as members of the climate change lobby pursue their In-Crowd strategy they will fail to get anything useful done and, casting around for an alternative energy source, we will burn their endless reports.

Welcome to the sustainable bonfire of the vanities.

'Tis the season to go bust

It is now considered very un-British not to go bankrupt during the Christmas season. Everything is for sale and everything must be bought, no matter what it is.

To the nation at large however, all this giving of gifts, all this wrapping up, this secrecy, seems rather childish and we have to be whipped into doing it.

Every year retailers claim their business will be in ruins unless we rush to the stores and this year they’ve recommended a cut in bank interest rates to help us on our way to financial doom (they got it too). All media run endless pages of suggestions to save us from our impoverished imaginations.

Despite it all, some people go through their whole lives giving and receiving socks at Christmas, in a kind of minimalist ritual, a barely discernible nod in the direction of Goodwill to All Men. They’ll also take a small glass of sweet sherry and a half-pound box of chocolates but draw the line at a grope under the mistletoe. The word “humbug” creeps into their vocabulary.

However, at least our gift exchange systems are more subtle than the classic Polynesian examples which all social anthropology students have to learn about before going to the pub. While the hierarchical distribution of pieces of a butchered animal survives with the dismemberment of the Christmas turkey, we adopt a broad range of approaches and our gifts can be divided into four major categories:

Useful: Power tools, whisky, fly-tying equipment. We’re not terribly good at understanding what counts as useful to other people, which is where our vast “nearly new” industry (particularly in power tools) comes from. It’s also why we drink so much whisky.

Useless: Power tools, things shaped like fish, actual Gifts – things which have no other purpose than to be given to someone else (ie about 75 per cent of all manufactured objects). These gifts cycle through social networks over time, and it can be comforting to find the same one cropping up every few years. When you pass it on again you sometimes paint it first, brush out the dead flies or take the handles off.

Egocentric: Jars of home made jam for instance or a ghastly photograph of your dog made into a jigsaw puzzle.

Deliberately provocative: Socks, for instance, or aggressive lingerie. A great-uncle of mine once gave his wife a ton of horse manure for her Christmas present. She responded with matching bed-linen, something no man has ever consciously bought.

So, anyway, if everything goes according to plan the only people with any cash by 25 December will be retailers, their advertising agencies and PR firms. The rest of us will have to rely on finding a silver threepenny piece in our Christmas Pudding.

Lessons from prehistory

If you're the smug type you'll probably enjoy reading books by people who know less than you. Recently I've been entertained by the 1933 edition of the Wonder Encyclopaedia for Children, written by people who had 74 years less knowledge than us but vastly more international real estate (Great Britain Is The Greatest Teutonic Nation On Earth).

The chapter on the history of mankind, for example, is on shaky ground, having been written before it was discovered that Piltdown Man, the alleged Missing Link fossil found in Sussex in 1908, was a total fraud. There's even a helpful reconstruction of what Piltdown Man looked like. He looked like Gordon Brown, our sub-prime minister.

Nonetheless, there's stuff I didn’t know. For example: Early Man Hid From Wild Beasts Until His Cunning Developed.

This sheds completely new light on human evolution. You can imagine our noble ancestors, hunkered down (behind rocks, according to the pictures), wondering how cunning they’d need to be. From time to time someone would say: Well, are we smart enough yet? And for millennia we must have looked out at the Wild Beasts and thought: Holy shit, have you seen the claws on that thing?

They must have gone through an experimental phase of shoving the smartest folk out into the open where, of course their potential contribution to the gene pool would be nipped in the bud (and everywhere else). After a short period of this everyone would be faking stupidity 24/7 and they’d have realised they were fairly cunning already, so they’ll have started to calibrate: Right, what have got so far then?

Well, we've got kind of oblong stones for scraping things with, flat stones for cutting things with, big stones for bashing things with and sharp, triangular pointed stones on the ends of sticks for, er, what are these for again?

Despite it all we were on our way, and sooner or later: There's a bloke behind that rock over there with a Wheel.

Surely that's enough cunning, they'll have thought, and sprung out.

There's no real indication of what Early Woman was doing all this time. The pictures simply show her dressed as Amy Winehouse and cowering alongside Early Man, in a trend-setting non-division of non-labour.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually got so cunning that it was November 2007, and yet somehow nothing much had moved on. By and large here in the UK we're simply hiding from the Labour government until our cunning develops.

Let them eat carrots

As Alex Levine pointed out, only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups – alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat. You might have thought that the health food debate could have usefully stopped right there, but no.

According to the World Cancer Research Fund it’s possible to commit suicide by eating bacon sandwiches, something I have done so often that it would have been economically sensible for me to go into pig farming at an early age.

However, no-one apart from the media is listening to these warnings any more. Health fascists and researchers in need of funds tell us what we can’t eat, while the food industry tries to sell us goji berries, which look like rabbit droppings from a bad acid trip.

Not long ago we were told that eating carrots on a daily basis helps to prevent cancer. We saw this coming of course since generations of children here have been forced to eat carrots on the grounds that they help you to see in the dark, and World War 2 fighter pilot heroes were invoked in this propaganda battle.

Those who go on to become fighter pilots of course must wonder from time to time if it was the carrots that got them in.

Since the invention of fire however, we haven’t really had that much use for seeing in the dark around here (except when we’re sea trout fishing or dealing with power cuts) so it would have been nice if our ancestors and government experts could have concentrated on locating some other, more valuable, power. Common sense would have been useful, or second sight, or perhaps the ability to breathe under water.

Even this is a bit unambitious though. In the old days our alchemists spent their time either trying to make gold out of scrap metal or concocting an elixir to confer immortality. Of course they can’t have come anywhere near either of these goals – what was their best result in the transmutation of lead into gold? Lead, obviously. And how many of them are still alive to profit from their elixirs?

At least there’s less scope for serious measurement with the elixir of life, which is why we have ginseng, royal jelly, cod liver oil, broccoli and all the rest of the health food industry. But we only believe in this slop the way we believe in astrology.

So, while sucking on a piece of damp wood first thing in the morning might be good for me, I’ll take the full English breakfast with extra black pudding please. Health food marketers beware – we’re going to die, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.

We're still burning Catholics

Only a few of our national rituals continue to escape the clutches of the PR industry and avoid political correctness. For example, since 1606 we have celebrated the death of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic in a Protestant country, who was discovered beneath the Palace of Westminster shortly before the opening of Parliament on 5 November, surrounded by barrels full of gunpowder. He was arrested, tortured and executed, in that order.

Of course we celebrate the man’s death – not his pragmatism, his enterprise, his derring-do, his chutzpah or his sense of proportion. And how do we do this?

We spend weeks building enormous bonfires, and construct, from old clothes, straw etc, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, known as a guy. As children, we stand on street corners with our guy slumped beside us hustling for money (“penny for the guy”, we bleat at returning commuters).

(Introduced to begging at such a young age we turn into soulless bastards later on, kicking our vagrants, shunning our bag-ladies and refusing to buy The Big Issue. We may still give a penny for the guy though – we were young once.)

We buy loads of fireworks, and bake parkin (a sort of ginger cake), make bonfire toffee (with black treacle) and soup.

On 5 November we put our guy on top of our pile of wood, spray the whole thing with petrol and set it alight, then stand around, consuming our bizarre refreshments. We might go so far as mulled wine, but we will certainly throw potatoes into the holocaust, ostensibly to bake them. Of course they are never seen again (and neither are any scruffy small people who look like guys).

We watch our guys engulfed by the flames. Young children have become emotionally attached to their guys over the weeks of course and the whole business becomes charged with despair as these cuddly effigies, wearing their cast-offs, burn horribly before their eyes.

We let off our fireworks, some of which are unpredictable, since you can get caught out by advances in firework design. In the old days you’d always launch your skyrockets by poking the stick in an empty milk bottle and lighting the blue touch-paper. Nowadays this is likely to result in high-velocity shards of glass taking everyone’s legs off at boot level, while the rocket fizzes round your garden, bouncing off fences, beer mugs, pets, neighbours and so on before exploding in the greenhouse.

We finally get the garden hose out when the flames have caught the fruit trees and almost reached the kitchen window.

The following day it’s cool to ask people how the injuries went at their bonfire, while the media feasts on mutilation horror stories and calls for fireworks to be banned from public sale. And then we forget the whole thing, as we become preoccupied with complaining about Christmas.

Interestingly, although this is a major national event, there are no dedicated greetings cards (except the Get Well Soon designs which become necessary on 6^th November).

So anyway, Merry Bonfire Night.

No laughing matter

The season just ended, and trout men have come up out of the river, shaking a summer's worth of twigs, flies and dead bats from our obnoxious headgear. We've trudged back across the fields, our minds elsewhere. We've found our cars, gone to the pub and sneaked back home in the dark to re-acclimatise.

We’ve stacked the rods, hung up the waders, emptied the beer bottles from our bags, filed our catch returns and stared malevolently at our forthcoming calendar.

Eventually, regrettably, our attention has been forced to focus on what you have been making of things while we were otherwise engaged.

You have not shaped up. Your concentration has obviously wandered and our world does not appear to have improved. On the contrary, we've got asymmetric political debate in Burma, another inquest into Princess Diana’s death, the first run on a British bank since the 19^th century and the emergence of the Clinton Cackle as the archetype political laugh.

Politicians don’t have a sense of humour on the whole. Whatever it is in their genes that makes them want to swan about being important and pretending to run things for us, also snips the laughter muscles and by-passes the humour circuitry.

It is their deeds rather than their wit that make us laugh. So, when someone tells you they’re all about substance, not spin, and then hires spin doctors to promote this calumny at every opportunity then you know you’re dealing with a politician – in this case Gordon Brown, ersatz prime minister of the UK.

The advertising campaign designed to make us like the man had a photo of him (dangerous for anyone with a face like a car wreck) and the words “Not Flash. Just Gordon”. At first I thought it was some crazed gin advertisement, and anyway, while I can remember who Flash Gordon is (or will be – he must have been set in the future), I can’t believe he means much to anyone younger than 40. After all, he was all the rage in 1934.

To avoid politicians and retain a sense of disproportion, chalkstream fly fishers must now switch attention to grayling, so it’s out with the box of Red Tags and Treacle Parkins, on with the Barbour jacket and away to the autumn river.

Splitting hairs

A 14-year old girl stands accused of murdering her older sister in a dispute about the potential life trajectory of her boyfriend – destined, says the accused, only ever to work in supermarkets.

Because of the age of the defendant, the judge and barristers have decided that during the trial they will – wait for it – remove their wigs. You really couldn’t make it up.

They will claim that their intention is to avoid intimidating the girl, but exposing any modern teenager to the sort of atrocious hairstyles affected by our legal brethren is nothing less than common assault.

And where does this lead? What bloodcurdling attack-toupées do they have in reserve for the trials of serious career psychopaths?

I suppose it’s pretty clear how all this began. Imagine the scene many thousands of years ago:

A What’s that stuff on your head?

B It’s a wig

A (Looks more closely) But it’s just a clump of mammoth hair and lard

B Yes, it’s good isn’t it?

A It’s fantastic, but what’s it for?

B I thought I might get a job as a judge

A Good call

There is other talismanic headgear at large in the legal environment however. There’s the British policeman’s helmet, recognisable across the galaxy as a symbol of, er, British policemen.

Our police forces constantly try to abandon the helmet in favour of the sort of cool flat caps they’ve seen on cop TV shows, but this is a big mistake.

The old helmet makes our bobbies seem so tall, which has to be an advantage when you’re dealing with desperate villains. Your flat cap is going to make you look like a traffic warden and people are going to feel more like giving you a strong poke in the gob after a few beers on a Friday night.

More importantly, the tall helmet works as a symbolic throwback to the days when the bobby on the beat was the acceptable face of neighbourhood policing – law enforcement at its most socially-targeted.

It has been for so long such a potent symbol of authority that knocking one off a policeman’s head is all you really need to do to make your point. Knifing and shooting our coppers have simply been unnecessary.

Take away the helmet though, and in our darker moments we’ll have to find something else to abuse. A strong poke in the gob will be the least of your worries, constable.

This is all about brand identity, and scrapping heritage, whether in legal headgear or Coca-Cola recipes can bring out the worst in us.

Been there, done that, got the spacesuit

As it’s the silly season, space is in the news (and of course everywhere else as even a rudimentary knowledge of quantum electrodynamics will tell you). Another US shuttle has a hole in its shields, NASA is gearing up to put a telescope on the dark side of the moon and plans are being drawn up for a one-star orbiting hotel. All this is a bit of yawn for the British.

It's not that we're against space as such – with HG Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Dan Dare, Dr Who and Hawkwind on our side, we’ve always considered space to be, well, ours.

Indeed if we’d been a little quicker off the mark in 1945 we could have had our own German rocket scientists, but at the time our leaders obviously felt that this would be cheating and left our space programme in the hands of the Ministry of Works, where it languished.

So, while our government concentrated on minutiae such as rebuilding our bombed-out cities and dismantling our Empire, other forces were obliged to take on the cosmos. While we haven't bothered with anything as flashy as a moon programme, we've had a space station in orbit for years.

Launched discreetly from a water-meadow on the country estate of the British Interplanetary Society, and protected by Klingon cloaking technology, our space station is positioned in a relaxing orbit which brings it over Buckingham Palace every Wednesday afternoon at tea time.

Unlike the International Space Station, which comes across as a random collection of corrugated iron sheds rag-bolted to a pair of windmills, Her Majesty's Space Station Indomitable is from an original idea by Sir Christopher Wren.

Of course there have had to be compromises along the way, but fans of British colloquial architecture will revel in the detail – the shuttle-bay, for example, is thatched.

Whereas in the ISS the astronauts spend all their time either conducting worthy experiments, huddling in tin boxes during power cuts or welding on additional Meccano, aboard HMSS Indomitable it's more or less what you'd expect from the British.

There's an oak-panelled 'drawing room with plenty of space for the dogs, a billiard room and a library opening onto a terrace overlooking the orangery. The saloon bar is staffed by secondment from Claridge’s and the milkman calls on Mondays.

Crew and guests are forbidden to fire upon the ISS as it clanks round in the slow lane and after a tour of duty they normally have to be brought back to Earth by force. Earlier this year a mission was sent up by the National Space Centre to repaint the logo in a serif typeface.

Of course when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic takes over the shuttle franchise his PR people will generate rather more media coverage, but having our brilliant achievements forced out into the open is one of our key communication strategies. Don’t even ask about our time machine, our wormhole cruiser or our immortality patches.

Talking bollocks

In media training courses, people are too often coached on how to talk bollocks. Decoding spokesperson-speak should be compulsory in all media studies curricula.

So, enjoy this Q&A from the BBC’s Today programme, when Evan Davis was questioning our glistening new Foreign Secretary after his first trip to Afghanistan.

Evan Davis: “People whose only contact with the Afghanistan government, the government we're supporting, is when their men come and mow down their only source of income.”

OK, it’s not a question, but neither is what follows an answer.

David Miliband: “Well that if I may say so is a bit of a caricature of what's happening.

This means ”Yes this is what’s happening but you’ve described it rather vividly”, but gives the impression of meaning “this is not what's happening”.

Actually the attack is often that there's not enough eradication going on rather than that there's too much …

That’s a different attack.

… and I think I have got to be very careful not to do a rah-rah for what's going on in Afghanistan. It's difficult, it's dangerous and I don't do a rah-rah, there's no point in pretending otherwise ...

OK, we promise not to pretend that he’s doing a rah-rah.

… Equally though it's important that from a distance we don't fall in to a fatalism that says these people would prefer to grow poppy, they'd prefer to live under the Taliban it's all lost because I was only there for forty eight hours so it's wrong for me to pretend I'm the world expert after 48 hours …

This much is clear.

… But I did talk to Provincial Council, elected Provincial Council in Helmand Province. They don't want to go back to 2001 when women couldn't go to school …

They also probably don’t want their mountains painted blue, but that too is irrelevant here.

… There were three women counsellors out of the seven that I met and they were absolutely clear that good government is basic for them …

And the other four?

… and it means moving forward from the Taliban not moving backward …

Time-wasting.

… and it's the Taliban who are driving the drug, who are pushing the drugs not the international forces or our forces.”

Well I didn’t really think the UN had moved into the smack trade, but is he saying that without the Taliban Afghan farmers would settle down to coaxing asparagus from the soil?

Feeble-minded thinking expressed in meaningless drivel like Miliband’s is much of the problem. There’s a global shortage of opiates yet our policy in Afghanistan is to destroy the raw material. Legalise it, buy it, ship it to where it’s needed (ie right here where listening to this stuff demands serious painkillers in major quantities).

Your media studies homework for tonight: Do a rah-rah.