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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Empty Vessels

We knew Blair’s government would be for airheads from the moment they decided to proceed with the Millennium Dome. This monument to British Lite Culture was supposed to attract visitors from around the world (apparently a benefit) by, er … well, that was the problem.

We instantly spotted the empty dome as a metaphor for Blair’s Britain, which at the time was just a massive election win with no content. Of both we asked “what are they going to put in it?”

The government began by using the Emperor’s New Clothes strategy – telling us that, whatever it was they put in the dome, it would be utterly fantastic. Then they switched to the Exception Ploy, announcing things which were not going to be in it, and checking our reactions.

Our collective poker face held firm, so they flew to Disneyland on a fact-finding mission, a move which told us 95% of what we needed to know.

From the moment it opened, in a blitzkrieg of overwrought security, it was a disaster, losing eye-watering amounts of taxpayers’ money and thus continuing the government metaphor.

The thing was divided into zones, designed to answer big questions, such as:

WHO ARE WE? This is a good question as it happens, especially in an era of increasing immigration, but one unlikely to be resolved by zones dedicated to Body, Spirit and Learning and based on what our leaders learned during an afternoon with Donald Duck.

WHAT DO WE DO? This was answered by zones which tackled work, rest and play, which is all we ever do here apart from sleep, so there’s not really much point having a display about it – you might just as well look at us in real life, without zones. Obviously you’d have to pay us for the privilege, but that’s what tourism is all about

Another zone, which didn’t get quite so much PR fanfare, was the No Car Zone, which prevented anyone parking within two miles of the place.

The dome has been closed for years until now, when business has taken over. Now it’s the O2 – a venue for pop concerts. Simple. The government and the PR business obsess endlessly about sending signals and delivering messages. But content is the point.

When the first of our millennium domes was built, at Stonehenge, there wasn’t so much debate about what to put in it. Over here a display of grass. By the altar an exhibition of axes. See the sun rise at dawn on the Solstice. Just pop the white robe on and lie down on this slab. Goat rides. Face painting by the main entrance. Woad available. Toilets wherever you like.

We’ve lost a lot.

Guilt-edged marketing

Scooter Libby did wrong, got caught and had his punishment cancelled by friends for whom he did a good turn. This kind of sleaze is scarcely new although in marketing terms you need look no further back than 500 years when the Catholic Church sale of indulgences peaked.

At its most bare-faced this wheeze offered remission of temporal punishment for sins committed, in return for cash. However, its main outcome was not consumer cynicism but Protestants.

Nowadays, in the UK at least, we’re a fairly godless bunch and thus two of our major atavistic needs have to be addressed differently.

First, we want answers to the big existential questions – how did the universe begin, where did we come from, where’s the nearest pub etc. In the old days (and in much of the US today it seems) we asked our priests, and they told us stuff which has turned out to be bollocks.

Second, we need something to anchor our ethics: our sense of what’s fair and right; how to decide in moral conflicts; who deserves our understanding and who we ought to hang.

Our priests have had a better track record here but even so we now turn increasingly to agony aunts and lawyers, while politicians (of all people) try to get in on the act.

Of course our need for ethics is wrapped up with our need to feel guilt and then assuage it through atonement. In the 21st century though, instead of worrying about original sin and the Ten Commandments, which are now more likely to be Reality TV formats than moral paranoia triggers, we have poverty, hunger, genocide, animal extinctions, disease and climate change to feast on.

It’s taken the marketing industry a while to catch up but they’re beginning to hit their stride, not only with Live Aid, Live Eight, Live Earth and other such narcissism, but more deeply with cause marketing.

Thus, welcome to Freetrade, Greenpeace, Carbon footprints and Organic food. In the UK hens’ eggs are classified by the amount of suffering the hens are going through to produce them. The less pain the higher the price.

So, at the secular confessional we gladly take away our punishments of tree-planting, environmental taxes, recycling, ethical stocks and free-range eggs. We know we have sinned and we need to feel the lash.

And the PR business continues to take all this further, seeking an edge from altruism everywhere. A recent PR Week article was devoted to “cultural collusion” – in which companies strip out guilt via paying money to the arts. I’d like to think the PR people were being up front about their deceit (“collusion”: secret agreement or understanding for purposes of trickery or fraud – OED), but in fact it just shows how vapid all this can be.

Bring back hell.

Is there no end to Cultural Sensitivity?

No there isn’t. It’s how we try to understand our fellow nitwits and ensure we hit the right buttons when we communicate with them. More examples, as threatened last time:

TOWN / COUNTRY: Most people here live in towns, and romanticise the country. When they take a trip there however they find no stage coaches rattling through quaint villages, no be-smocked peasants quaffing cider by haystacks and few hens scratching around drowsy farmyards in the sun.

Instead they find billions of chickens confined in tiny cages in giant sheds, a housing concept borrowed from towns and cities.

This town/country split was brought into sharp relief by the fox hunting issue which occupied more parliamentary time than any other in Blair’s government.

It’s largely people in the towns who seem to be against it, while if you live in the country you normally couldn’t care less until a pack of hounds and five dozen horses pursue a fox in through your front door and out through the French windows. Anyway, it’s illegal now, although I doubt if foxes have noticed.

LABOUR / CONSERVATIVE: When confronted, it’s always best to claim you base your voting pattern on local issues, because no-one will know what they are. This enables you to talk through your hat for hours, and gives you time to work out the point of view of the weirdo you so unwisely stood next to when you ordered your beer. It never occurred to you that this would be the reason for the free space at an otherwise crowded bar.

LIVERPOOL / EVERTON: It’s always wise to check if there’s any deadly rivalry going back generations between supporters of competing football clubs in your neighbourhood. This is essential information on Merseyside and in many other places too, especially Glasgow.

Remember that Glasgow Celtic manager Jock Stein, when asked if he thought football really was a matter of life and death, replied “It’s much more important than that”.

TEA / COFFEE: Unless you were counting on staying awake for weeks on end in a prolonged juddering caffeine fit, drink tea here in the UK. On business, however, go for coffee, since good tea is beyond most companies, and no-one will give you a glass of absinthe.

NORTH / SOUTH: Look around. Can you see rolling countryside, sunshine, sleepy country towns, orchards, wealth, Heathrow, traffic chaos, effete cultural behaviour or the French coast? If so, you’re in the south.

Or can you see driving rain, dark satanic mills, coal mines, steel works, factory chimneys, bleak moors, cobbled streets, back-to-back terraced housing, outside toilets, people in flat caps drinking thin beer out of straight glasses, pigeon lofts, whippet racing or black pudding? If so, you’re in the past.

GET IT / DON’T GET IT: People who get cultural sensitivity know that when they communicate they’re addressing something richer than a target audience. Those who don’t are condemned to wonder why their campaign bombed.

Let's do Cultural Sensitivity

When an American client asked if I could provide cultural sensitivity advice I saw a rich vein.

While PR people divide up populations into target audiences, modern societies consist of an interlocking network of entrenched camps populated by people of diametrically opposed views, and here in the UK we’ve had plenty of time to dig ourselves in.

The prickly English relationship with the Scots and the Irish dates back to the Iron Age, while Yorkshire and Lancashire are still divided by the Wars of the Roses which finished just before Columbus set sail.

There are many other opposing coteries here that you ought to be aware of if you want to enter pubs with any confidence and in general avoid the kind of social gaffe which could result in a visit to one of our diminishing stock of accident & emergency units. For instance:

UPPER / LOWER CLASS: It’s only in society that scum settles at the bottom. At the top of the greasy pole here are your royals, aristocrats and investment bankers. Everyone else is middle class, whether they like it or not, except the homeless. Wealth is not the point. It’s about breeding.

Foreigners are outside of this system of course, and simply foreign. Their breeding, if any, is irrelevant to us. Their quaint kings and queens are of no interest now we no longer cement our national alliances by inter-marriage between royal families. Instead we now have the Eurovision Song Contest.

PRO / ANTI EUROPE: The credibility of the EU is undermined by the fact that it’s a political construct. Since the real issues are so opaque, this is strictly a meta-division, defined by which division you’re in, not whether or not you agree with its alleged stance, hence the vacuity of the current debate.

PROTESTANT / CATHOLIC: This really only matters in Scotland, Ireland and the afterlife. That’s Celts for you.

OXFORD / CAMBRIDGE: This is mainly important on Boat Race day, when people realise that shouting for one crew over the other is the only way to remain awake during the TV coverage.

You’ll note that some of the more obvious divisions (eg black/white, straight/gay, male/female, lawyer/non-lawyer) are missing here, along with left-hand/right-hand, which is only relevant in cricket – where it’s astonishingly important.

This is because we’ve had plenty of time to get over these and move on. Our divisions are arcane, difficult to spot, and of course they cement society together, because people are members of different combinations of them. It’s what cultural sensitivity is all about, here and everywhere.

This is a rich vein. More when I get back from the fishing trip.

Light my fire

New media such as blogs have hardly altered PR practice at all, say 21% of the 200 senior level communicators (including me, naturally) who make up the President’s Panel of The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR).

Well, the principles may not alter but all new communication systems change the practice – some more than others however.

For example, from my office I can see part of a medieval communication system – Ditchling Beacon, one of the highest points on the South Downs – where they’d light bonfires if they saw, for example, the Spanish Armada impudently sailing up the English Channel.

On the North Downs people would look out for Ditchling Beacon to light up so they could ignite their fire, and so on until the message reached the king. So, depending on where he was, he’d probably have been among the last to know.

But the system was essentially binary – either the thing was on fire or it wasn’t. Hello, Ditchling Beacon’s lit up – what does he mean? Has anyone seen my pig? The Middle Ages are over? It’s cold up here?

They must have agreed beforehand what it would mean – OK, the next time I light up my beacon it means the Spanish Armada’s coming, right?

So there will have been teams of messengers charging up and down, telling everyone what the next bonfire would mean, and meanwhile, out in the Channel, your Spanish sea captains would see the beacon blazing away – Well, they’ve spotted us then (yawn).

Of course I’m probably simplifying things. Give people a communication system and they’ll find ways to exploit it – maybe they had several fires on each beacon. Hey, he’s lit up three fires at Ditchling, so ... (looks it up) ... Tobacco’s Been Discovered.

Or maybe they varied the colour – Ho, a blue flame ... (translates) ... The Bloke on the Beacon After Yours is Sleeping With Your Wife.

Anyway, you can see why this failed to energise the nascent PR business – not enough scope for manipulating the content. What price “The Spanish Armada, sponsored by Toledo Swords SA, is coming”?

Such simple systems have survived into modern times however. During the cold war, we had a four minute warning system here, set up to inform the nation that we were about to be hit by a barrage of ghastly foreign nuclear warheads.

During these 240 seconds we were expected to get our tax affairs straight, return our library books, dig a deep underground shelter and lay in provisions. I wouldn’t have stood a chance of course, but 400 years ago I’d have been among the first to know about the Spanish Armada.

Seeing the big picture

Salvador Dali could see the big picture. One of his works is called Fifty Abstract Pictures Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger.

From even further away it looks like a coloured blob, like all paintings, but that’s not the point.

At the other end of the scale there is HD Turing’s 1948 essay The Problem of the Olive (we’re talking about flies that trout eat) in which he concludes that the best way to distinguish between three species of Baetis is to examine the colour of their eyes. He inscrutably declares that in B. rhodani “the eyes are madder brown (which has a distinctly red tinge)”.

Here is a picture so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. While he’s got his magnifying glass out comparing eyes the next bloke on the riverbank has tied on a hairy green-looking thing and caught the bloody fish.

In British Lite Culture we take the Turing approach. Thus, last week there was a nasty accident on the anticlockwise carriageway of Europe’s busiest road, the M25 – London’s orbital motorway – in which six people died. The police closed the carriageway for nine hours, bringing chaos to the surrounding area and presumably costing millions of pounds.

Now, I have nothing against the British police, despite having been searched (dogs and guns, the full works) under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act while provocatively dropping my wife off at Gatwick Airport.

But increasingly they’re missing the big picture. After all, what exactly is to be learned from a fingertip search of 500 metres of motorway? When I ask this people say “we need to know what happened”, and at first sight this seems sensible.

However, the job of the Highways Agency and the traffic police is not to pick obsessively over history but to keep traffic flowing. Their efforts on the M25 will end up as free consultancy for the insurance companies but I doubt if anyone else will truly benefit – certainly not the thousands of people whose lives were massively disrupted while skid-marks were measured.

In the PR business, as elsewhere, seeing the big picture helps your career trajectory as well as your client. Those who ask Why are we doing this in 10pt? stay writing press releases, while those who ask Why are we doing this at all? get promoted to account director

Remember that while small picture people re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the big picture types are getting into lifeboats (and the serious spin doctors are telling everyone we just stopped to take on fresh ice).

Fly-fishing your way to business success

The trout season is underway on British rivers, and fly-fishers are exhuming the kind of clothing you normally see on scarecrows, shaking the bottle-tops out of their fishing bags, filling their hip flasks, reviewing their tackle and buying bizarre hats.

Those with jobs know the close relationship between work and play – and not only because one pays for the other.

For example, PR people have put fly-fishing on their “active” corporate hospitality menu to spice up the constant barrage of golf, clay pigeon shooting and lunch. A summer’s day spent stalking trout on a chalkstream half a mile from your guest is not perfect for deal-making, but it’s obviously better than being roped together in a blizzard on the north face of the Matterhorn.

But fly-fishers also believe they learn business lessons without actually having to go to the office. And even if they are wrong, at the very worst they are by now millions of trout ahead. Here’s an initial selection of such wisdom.

Getting into rivers is easier than getting out. If you've waded downstream in a powerful river, the chances are that you won’t be able to wade back up – and in several of the rivers I’ve fallen into you'll also by now be wobbling on the brink of an invisible slippery ledge, with a sheer drop on three sides. Lesson: always have an exit strategy – a fall-back position could involve drowning.

Why have one fishing rod when 40 or 50 would do just as well? Fly-fishers maintain that you need them in different lengths, actions and materials – and buy more rods than they ever use. In business one obvious parallel is financial reporting, where the x-dimensional views of every last penny can obscure the fact that you’re going bust.

Ugly flies can catch beautiful fish. Successful fly-fishers know that the flies they tie are designed to catch fish, not win prizes. In businesses like advertising and PR there’s a temptation to see analogies with the trophy cabinets of football clubs. But in sport, the trophies are the objective. In business we should look at the client’s ROI as well as our own.

Hell and high water are all in a day’s fishing. Although you returned from the river drenched, broke and knackered, you’re going to do it again tomorrow because you love it. Back in the office, if you’re not having fun you’re doing something wrong.

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, says: one of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.

PR people are not wholly to blame for this but they’re among the prime suspects. Nearly 400 years ago, legendary English angler Izaak Walton said: Study to be quiet.

These four words are worth a business book to themselves but, taking his advice, I’ll shut up now.

Missing media

Media fragmentation is a fact of the PR landscape but makes people concentrate on cliques and miss the big picture. Take boys’ magazines – they don’t cover boys. But things weren’t always like this. A letter in the February 1964 edition of the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) ends Do other readers leave their tortoises out during winter?

Sadly an energetic correspondence on pet hibernation strategy didn’t follow, which probably began the decline of the British tortoise, while the magazine died three years later as less arduous approaches to boyhood, involving beer, girls, rock music and radical politics, took hold.

BOP readers engaged in a constant rampage of bicycling, canoeing, and birds-nesting. In their improvised tents on Ben Nevis, they’d light fires, darn socks, scrutinise Ordnance Survey maps, whittle catapults and blow birds’ eggs.

BOP articles, therefore, were all about doing things: camping with a boat, racing model cars, grayling fishing and (yes) making diesel (You will have to do this in bulk), sending you down to the chemist for anaesthetic ether, nitromethane and amyl nitrate (If you explain what you want it for there should be no trouble in getting it).

Of course this was for model aircraft, not bombs. These were Great British Schoolboys, skinning their own rabbits, building bivouacs and radio sets, trainspotting and digging latrines at the slightest provocation.

This was an age when boys were not only expected to be polite and do well in exams but also to survive in the wild, arrest escaped convicts, expose international conspiracies and thwart rocket spies. Their dogs, meanwhile, would foil burglars and find the missing jewels.

Today the problem page would cover girls, skin complaints and fashion, whereas BOP focuses instead largely on legal matters, reflecting the hands-on approach of its readers: Did you realise that every time you threaten to give someone a good bashing, the chances are you are breaking the law?

The readers’ letters reveal a fellowship of taxonomists. One begins I collect weapons and I find it is a very expensive hobby, while others bring news of collected bones, nutcrackers, golf-balls and teeth. One pleads More Articles on Cycle Maintenance Please.

The fiction is 100 per cent adventure (Spotted Killer, Unseen Enemy), while the advertising has recruitment ads for the armed forces and banks among the tents, fishing tackle, cameras and gear (Save up the Libby’s milk labels and get a 4-inch blade sheath knife).

And while some boys who read BOP are now running our rabbit farms, blue-chip corporates and diesel supplies, others are our major criminals, rock dinosaurs and property tycoons. They helped to make The Dangerous Book for Boys by the Iggulden brothers a recent bestseller in the UK.

Great British Schoolboys are still out there, some of them in their sixties. Just because there isn’t a magazine for them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Taking the rap

Companies can learn a lot from governments, one of whose prime tasks is to take the blame for everything whether it’s their fault or not. While they take the credit for all good things they never admit to failure, in flagrant disregard of perfectly obvious facts. But we shouldn’t mind, because we’re going to blame them anyway.

While this is unfair, it's part of the social contract and based on fairly recent history: when “we” needed more data on the effects of nuclear weapons British armed forces were subjected to some of the quickest suntans in history; to test our chemical arsenal, taxpayers who thought they were volunteering to help find a cure for the common cold got something way beyond the healing power of Vick’s Vapour Rub or even prayer.

It's this kind of skulduggery that prevents us from buying Christmas presents for our leaders, or inviting them to baby-sit.

But until very recently we haven’t expected admissions of guilt or apologies. British Lite Culture is changing this – everyone’s a victim and the witch hunt has moved into the commercial world.

While governments can hide behind the social contract, what prevents companies from taking the rap – and they are blamed for everything from obesity to climate change and poverty – are lawyers.

Unfortunately they take it too far, so when corporate spokespeople confront the microphones and cameras their media training kicks in and they start to sound insincere, like government ministers. Speaking like Daleks from tortuous prepared scripts they haemorrhage brand equity from line one. And this is a shame because, as it happens, apologising comes naturally to the British.

Of course there's a catch: we’re happy to apologise profusely for anything, as long as it either doesn't matter or isn’t our fault. So our government is sorry about the rain, the cricket, slavery, the Irish potato famine, the extinction of Neanderthals and the species implosion at the end of the Ordovician, but not about taxation. And not (yet) about Dresden.

Companies do better when they recognise that when their spokesperson speaks, we see a person. When individuals own up, take the rap and apologise we admire them for it, and trust them more. Which companies don’t want that?

As far as the Neanderthals are concerned, they took the arrival of our Cro-Magnon forebears on the chin, in the neck and probably elsewhere, until one of them looked around and thought bugger it – I'm the last one. They were genuine victims, but with no government to blame they had it coming.

Advice to illegal immigrants

Illegal immigration is back in the news here with rumours of a new French refugee camp at Sangatte, so here’s some advice in case you were thinking of participating in this foolish activity as part of your 21^st century lite "portfolio" career.

HOW TO ARRIVE. Don't climb into the wheel-bays of a 747 bound for Heathrow unless you want to arrive dead. Immigrating to the UK without papers when dead is still an offence. Much better to come ashore in your beached sperm-whale costume and then sneak off during a lull in the attempts to save your life.

WHERE TO LIVE. Don't bother with the countryside, which is designed to look nice but is where foreigners who suddenly pop up with no idea how to behave are likely to be dumped in the threshing machine. The best bet is to live close to someone who can forge the mountain of paperwork you're going to need.

HOW TO BEHAVE. Obviously you will never be able to behave properly since you're not British so you can opt for either anonymity or a silly hat. The former route depends on a working knowledge of our language and an ability to talk about absolutely anything from a position of total ignorance, but is difficult to sustain because of all the CCTV cameras – 25% of the world’s supply are trained on us.

The silly hat strategy is better since it marks you out as a maniac or a fly-fisher and people will generally avoid or humour you.

WHAT TO DO. While getting a job sounds like a good idea remember that summer is on its way and you're in time for the cricket season. It would be foolhardy to give up your rare position of being in England with nothing to do and yet not technically unemployed. So spend May through September at major cricket matches. This saves you the trouble of constantly being in touch with developments during the Test Matches. If you are a man you absolutely have to know what's going on. Total strangers will say:

* Did they get any reverse swing before lunch?

* Is Flintoff hungover or what?

* Pietersen was never leg-before

* Why are you wearing that silly hat?

* Are you an illegal immigrant?

It's funny how perceptive we can be.

Perhaps it would be better if you simply joined a multinational PR firm and asked to be seconded here. That way you don’t need a silly hat, and you can sell the sperm whale idea to a client.

The playground of the vanities

Since children don’t vote in the UK, they’re at the mercy of government whim and widely vilified as obese, inarticulate, feckless and violent.

This is because in British Lite Culture, spin and targets, rather than substance, are the reality, since it’s easier to manage numbers than people. So children must not be educated – they must hit education targets, and government spin demands that most of them do.

Thus the charms of the quadratic equation, the Petrarchan sonnet, the gerund and Boyle’s Law are, insultingly, considered beyond today’s young people, so it’s goodbye to interesting stuff and hello to media studies, raffia work and PR.

Young people get straight A grades in this rubbish and go to university since the target says that 50% of them must.

Simultaneously, statistics show that children are overweight, although they look OK to me, and this is apparently due to their diet, rather than the almost total lack of facilities for, or incentives to, exercise.

When we were sending kids up chimneys and down coal mines, their rights were zero but, in addressing this, our politicians went too far. Today, children’s rights are these:

• To remain silent, sullen, morose

• To bring in a note from your mum saying you’re too ill to play rugby

• To behave as badly as you like without sanction

• To be unconstrained by rules of logic, grammar or spelling

• To dress like an oik

• To own a dog which lives on a diet consisting exclusively of homework

• To eat nothing but gloop.

Perhaps these problems are linked. While people sentimentalise their schooldays, there has never been a Golden Era for school lunch, which remains the only meal for which you would automatically adopt the brace position. In their classic book Down With Skool, Willans and Searle summed it up with a section entitled: “Skool food – or the piece of cod which passeth understanding”.

Proper food is to school meals as Chanel No 5 is to a nerve-gas attack, and our children have had the common decency and will to live beaten out of them by a relentless diet of random meat products, chips and algal swill.

So the obvious solution is a dramatic upgrade. Jamie Oliver’s campaign was right but didn’t go far enough. Schoolchildren fed on devilled langoustines, filet mignon and fine claret will not risk expulsion or failure. They will hang around for a glass of Remy, perhaps a decent cigar and a chat about the Outward Bound syllabus and the Latin Poetry Competition.