How To Re-Make A Bad English Movie

Things To Do Before You're Thirty – one of many joint equal holders of the worst British film award – was an awful film of a really good idea. A bunch of men who play for an amateur football team are asked by a female journalist what they would like to do before they turn thirty. The journo is a friend of most of their partners. So the men scribble down various answers, many of which are either silly Man Things or guaranteed to upset their partners – the young lad with Billie Piper for a girlfriend wants to have a threesome. The journo publishes the list and shares it with their partners and the rest of the movie goes over the usual arguments, revelation of homosexuality and missed threesome with Billie Piper (I was very upset at that bit). After splitting up, leaving and breaking friendships, everyone comes together at the end to Win The Final Match. Trust me, it doesn't work a tenth as well as it sounds. It was written by an Eastenders staff writer. Right at the start you ask how the lads could be so dumb as to tell a journalist the truth, later, when you meet some of their partners, you wonder how on earth they ever got together in the first place, and of course you wonder what a girl who looks like Billie Piper is doing going out with a scrawny lad who looks like that. The whole thing is implausible – especially the Gay Revelation moment.

So this is how it could have been done. The journo asks for the lists, the lads write down some suitably harmless twaddle designed to be shown to their partners – because they are smart enough to work that out - except one who tells it like it is for him – call him The Lad. Over the next week, they discuss the question, in pairs and threes, finding out that none of them told the truth. So what would do they want to do, they ask each other – safe this time from the censorious eyes of the female. This lets us see the relationships between them, understand who they are and what their lives are like. Some of them, we learn, have Things To Lose, while others Have Yet To Live (this would be Billie Piper's boyfriend) and some Hate Where They Are. We meet their partners, most of whom are Thoroughly Nice Women – except The Bitch and the Wet Rag. Now we know what the stakes are. One by one the men start to go after what they want, and discover the price in terms of work, change and above all conscience. We learn the difference between a fantasy and a dream. We cheer when the Bitch gets hers, shake our heads sadly when the Wet Rag gets left behind, chuckle when The Lad comes good, approve when dreams are abandoned for Marriage And Children, wonder if marriage and children will last when He Takes A Job In Another Town, and the boyfriend lets himself get jumped by a girl we've only seen in the background after he sees Billie Piper going at it with another girl one evening. Cue music and close with a three-way cut between one of the lads getting ready to sky-dive (which was what he wanted to do) and another with his girlfriend getting ready to ski-jump and the Bitch unpacking her bags in a new town. (I like a little ambiguity in the ending.)

Okay, there's more to this, and it will follow.

We had the Big Announcement today and I understand that there were tears and tantrums in Chester. There were some stony faces in London. No-one understands the new organisation, which is littered with junior analyst posts. The job descriptions are a hoot, the roles are shallow and ill-thought out. Of course they are - the whole thing was made up of whole cloth from the senior guy's head. Or is the most calculated series of insults HR ever came out with - nah, they aren't that smart. Between now and next June, everyone will have to apply for a job in the new organisation. If they don't get one - and twenty per cent of the roles are going - they win compulsory redundancy. Now the thing to see is how many people decide they have had enough of being messed around by an insensitive, self-centered organisation and take the money. My guess is that it will be way more than HR expect.

The Philosophy of Mistakes: Summary So Far

At the start of this series of posts I was asking why I made so many mistakes. There's been a bit of a lull in this subject – partly because some of it turned up in a presentation at work. I understand now that I was wondering about a number of different things.

First, why was I letting the wrong people see working drafts?
Second, why wasn't I asking other people to help me remove the errors and oversights, which is a natural part of producing a document?
Third, why did / do so many errors and oversights slip by me?
Fourth, why can't I get it right first time?

Here are the answers. First, because I didn't understand that the receivers of a document are The Enemy, whose only intention in asking for anything is to gloat over the mistakes in it. Second, because there's no-one in my team I can ask. In an organisation where everyone is busy and there are few shared skills and knowledge (everyone's a single point of failure) your colleagues can't help you. Third, because I don't really know what answers to expect, so I can't see the wrong numbers. That and the fact that I'm not as sharp as I used to be – even if the grey hair is distinguished.

Fourth is not really about mistakes. It's really a way of asking, why am I so damn slow? The answer to that is, I'm not. Okay, so you can leave me in the dust, but you work for a serious technology company: six months in a retail bank with our lousy equipment and your brain will turn to mush as well. I give myself the impression of being slow because I dive right in and start cutting code – and I'm the only person who does that - Not. With spreadsheets, it's tempting to draft directly in the workbook: the average Excel-basher would think we were crazy if we suggested that what they are doing is the same as cutting Java or VBA raw. But it is – the spreadsheet is the code. Of course, I don't understand the problem when I start and only begin to as I try to solve it. Then it feels like I'm making mistakes or being slow – because it's code and code should compile. So I get side-tracked from the task of understanding the problem and how to solve it into writing first-draft code that compiles. Ooops. I'd be better off if I did some scribbling of ideas on a pad of paper first. That doesn't look like working to some people, and it also makes me feel like I should be able to talk about the task with someone else. Which I can't. It's easier to tap away at the keyboard and look as though I'm working – which I am, but not always effectively. Also, the open-plan office is not a great place to concentrate. (Wondering if you're going to lose your job always helps as well. We should be hearing sometime in the coming week.)

This isn't all of it, but it takes a lot of the emotion out of the subject for me. More to follow on it.

Perfect Tens and Sexy Sixes

The things that obsess a chap... Everyone knows what a Ten (as in Perfect Ten) is, but what's an eight? Or a five? Okay, here's how it goes.

First the general rules. These scores do not apply to anyone under sixteen or over fifty-five. For gallantry, women over forty-five retain their score at that age to fifty-five, unless it gets better. Anyone's score can vary from day to day and even hour to hour: a Seven can, by choosing her clothes and haircut and carrying herself with an unusual vivacity, be an Eight for a day. I work with a girl who looks like a Seven only because she refuses to let her Inner Eight shine through. If it did, she'd be taken less seriously at work. It's my personal opinion that women reach their best in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties – with the exception of a handful of models who burn bright and out. Men reach their best a little later. Young people can be a bit puppy-fatty and blurry of feature for my taste – as if they are as outwardly uncertain as to the exact shape of their cheekbones as they are of their personalities.

Now the specifics. Ten is Penelope Cruz and Christy Turlington, George Clooney and Clive Owen. Fit, sexy, handsome, beautiful and with added magic. Tens can and often do make a living on or because of their good looks. Not all actresses and models are Tens, but few Tens aren't. Tens are the people that other people want to think they look like.

Eight is top-end generic: catwalk model / actress, fit Spanish / Russian / French / Sloane / California girl. Ditto for boys. The keys are refinement, class, style, manners, charm, a sense that they take care of their appearance. Trophy wives and Handsome Gay Men are all Eights. Eights almost always went to fee-paying schools. Very few men are Eights – except for a few years in their early twenties. British male Eights are either gay (Rupert Everett) or put on weight and turn into Sevens (Colin Firth). All the pilots in Battlestar Galactica are Eights. Kylie Minogue is a fine example of an Eight (generic pretty Aussie girl) who made it to Ten (around the time of Spinning Around) and then returned to Eight.

To judge from the comments on the Vice Do's and Don'ts, Eights are American size Tens.

Sevens are generics who can't be bothered to try, or to whom Nature wasn't quite as kind as it was to their Eight sibling. A good-looking generic with a foul mouth or really bad dress sense is a Seven (at best). Seven is the default setting for reasonably fit sixth-formers and undergraduates who haven't yet decided what they look like and who they are.

So far we've been tracking the beauty axis. Seven is where it ends: the Pretty Line. Seven and above is genetic. If you're a Six or below, you will never make it above the Pretty Line. This is the fundamental unfairness of life.

Sixes have one feature that puts you off and one that you like. If they went to the gym and wore exactly the right clothes, they might pass for Seven on a sunny day. Sixes are still sexy, actually, come to think of it, Sixes can be sexier than many women above the Pretty Line. Most attractive or sexy women are sixes, because attraction and sexiness are unrelated to beauty. Any man who isn't obviously handsome or pretty, and isn't a fat slob either, is a Six.

Five is a special and very subjective category: rough but shaggable: you would, but you wouldn't want everyone to know you had. We're talking sex here, nothing to do with beauty, charm, looks or anything else.

Now we've come to the end of the sexy axis. From now on it's sexless all the way. Don't ask me how people get to be sexless: there are a lot of them and for all I know they get laid more often than people above the Pretty Line. I have no idea what sex with a Four is like, but since the human race continues to reproduce large numbers of them, I assume other Fours are content. To be blunt, Fours and below may as well be a separate species, as they will never mate with anyone with a higher score. Four is what happens to sixes when they get married, have kids and live in the suburbs. Go to the NHS drop-in centre in a nice suburb on a Saturday afternoon: all those young mums who brought in the kid with earache? Fours. Not sexy.

Zero is fat, foul-mouthed chav. Do you care about the difference between and One, Two and Three?

Which brings us to Nines. A Nine is the prettiest boy or girl in the room unless there's an actual Ten there - but they don't have the Magic. If a Ten walks in the room and causes everyone to faint / gasp / whisper to each other / stand back, a Nine causes everyone to decide that he / she will be (insert your hopes here). Skiers will think you ski; backpackers will think you backpack; sun-hunters will think you know every beach in the world and bookworms will think you've read everything. Whatever the fantasy, it gets projected onto a Nine – even Tens project. The only people who don't are other Nines. When everyone finds out you're not like that, they get so pissed off with you. Find a photograph of the young Brian Prothero or Nick Drake.

I used to be a Nine until age and a few bad years turned my face into a featureless mask I barely recognise each morning when I shave.

"World Class" as BS

I've been to two team strategy meetings where the conclusion was that they wanted to be a “World Class” team. Maybe that was so early Oughties and no-one does it now, but just in case they still do...

It goes without saying that neither of the teams had a cat's chance in hell of being world-class anythings – they weren't even very good bullshitters. The first team, at a telco, was half contractors and half full-timers; the second, at the current employer, were reeking with the smell of booze and barely compos mentis after a company ball and piss-up the previous night. (If they'd been working for me, I would have told them all to go home and booked them off sick. Then read them the riot act about getting that drunk on a school night.) Both groups had been assembled to think through what they did and what they needed to change to do their jobs better. Neither team had the slightest idea of how to do this, nor, I believe, the slightest inclination. Desperate for something to say, the telco team came up with “world class” as they were putting together the Powerpoint thirty minutes before presenting the results to the Marketing Director, and the drunks came up with it about two-thirds of the way through the day as one of many merely random noises they'd been making.

What does “world class” mean? Well, since they don't do things too well anywhere except in Westernised countries, it means “doing it as well as they do in (insert company X name here)”. Company X, of course, pays well over the market rate for its people, which it selects by a rigorous three-stage process involving actual tests as well as interviews with a range of people. Which is not where the rest of us work.

It means you win awards from your industry or professional body (and my employer refuses to spring for the relevant membership, let alone the qualification fees). It means you're invited to give talks at conferences and that people from non-competing companies visit you to see how you do whatever it is you do. It means every time anyone wants to hire, they say to the head-hunters “see if (insert your name here) wants to come over”. It means you have published research and there are a couple of universities who could be interested in hiring you should you want to retire from the rigours of the private sector. It means the government ask you to sit on committees and you are asked to give evidence to official enquiries. The journalists who deal with your industry or profession know your name. It means you're at least as good as the people with the connections and desire for publicity to gather all these things to themselves.

The people in those two teams had no idea what is involved in being “world-class”. They said it because the truth is too painful for them to describe and admit to themselves, they don't think their manager wants to hear it and they don't believe anyone can do anything about it anyway. So they blow smoke up their manager's... face and in their own. And because he knows the truth and that he can't do anything about the problems they face, he nods along with it. The only people who win are the guys who hire out the room and facilitate the meeting.

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

What is wrong with this picture? Click to get a good look.

Take a look at the guy's left hand...

And the woman's left wrist...

Yep... no guitarist would hold a chord like he is or wear bangles and bracelets like she is. Let alone hold a pick between thumb and forefinger.

It isn't that the people who do this stuff don't know as much as they should. It's that they assume that we don't know anything or don't care. But your subconcious picks it up and you react to the fakery, even if it takes you a week or so to spot it as it did me (I wasn't focussing on the guitars).

On Reading Roger Scruton Once Too Often

All right, I've had it. Roger Scruton is supposed to be a philosopher. So hear him on the subject of sexual temperance: it is to be thought of “...not as the avoidance of desire, but as the habit of feeling the right desire towards the right object and on the right occasion. That is what true chastity consists in, and it provides one of the deep arguments in favour of marriage or, at least, in favour of the constraint upon sexual appetite that is offered by love, that it makes sexual enjoyment into a personally fulfilling habit.”

This is how a trained philosopher discusses a serious subject? What's wrong with his definition? Not the content, but the form? It's empty, because we don't know what he means by “right desire” or “right object” or “right occasion”. This is why you nodded along, because you immediately interpreted those words your way, so how you possibly disagree? Or you guessed that he had some middle-of-the-road interpretation in mind that involved wives, bedrooms and did not involve leather hoods and strap-ons.

The next sentence confirms some of your suspicions. The “right object” is your wife, the “right desire” is to show your love for her (rather than shag her brains out because she looks so hot in that red dress) and though there's no “right occasion”, I'm guessing that frequency plays a role here, so that “twice a year” isn't going to cut it. So sexual temperance is, for Mr S, making love to your wife at least twice a week (or near offer).

Temperance is modest or self-restrained behaviour, with special emphasis on the consumption of alcohol. The point about temperance is that it kicks in when you see someone with whom you would like to perform a variety of sexual acts now (no self-restraint) and over there and damn anyone who sees us (no modesty): temperance either stops you (self-restraint) or at least makes you wait until you've got into the hotel room (modesty). Now if there is one thing that will kill your married sex life, it's going to be modest and self-retrained behaviour in and around the literal and metaphorical bedroom. There is nothing either modest or self-restrained about sex that's worth having. If one or other of you is having to restrain yourself (because the other one won't do that and certainly not that either), it is eventually going to cause problems. My guess is that the best marriages are between partners with the same kinks (which includes having a very low sex drive) or who are pretty plain vanilla and easy to satisfy. Where there is a mismatch, there will be a problem.

Sex is not a bodily function like eating or evacuation: masturbation is, but not sex. If masturbation is eating a sandwich at the office, sex is anything from a seven-course Michelin to an order-in pizza eaten to satisfy the munchies. The point is, it's supposed to be fun. Once it starts being a source of emotional reassurance or bodily relief, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Because you're using the other person as an object to satisfy your desires, instead of a partner in a mutually-satisfying dance. Sex is not there to express anything or fix anybody – it's there to make babies and for fun. That's why God gave women a clitoris.

Now my guess is that if Mr Scruton were ever forced to get down to specifics, his view would not be so different from mine. Or we would discover he really was a prissy spoil-sport. All that twaddle about “sexual temperance” and “true chastity” is a schtick.

In the article that set me off, he's arguing that once you take the restraints away, Puritans turn into a bunch of grunting, binge-drinking pigs. The English, in fewer words. Or at least some of them. They do so because they don't appreciate, as the French and Spanish do, the subtle differences between, say, intoxication and drunkenness, or between chastity and sexual temperance. The English behave like pigs because they haven't read Aristotle and didn't go to school in Provence.

Except it doesn't work like that. A Puritan is not going to impressed by some fancy hand-waving about intoxication vs drunkenness or the true nature of sexual temperance. Puritans know very well the difference between taking the edge off with a glass of wine and having your mouth turn numb from drinking cider, and they disapprove of both. They know very well the difference between a Saturday night shag and a couple of married romps a week, and they disapprove of both of those as well. Puritans know very well that the best sex is simple fun – it's exactly fun they don't like.

It's not because some of the English are Puritans who lack a sophisticated view of virtuous pleasure that so many of them behave like pigs, it's because some of them are pigs that they lack a view of virtuous pleasure. But you can't say that – not an get invited back for another column in Standpoint Online. And as ever, he's poking at a straw man: you've got to know where to go to see truly revolting binge drinking, and decent people don't go to places like that anyway. The English don't binge-drink because they are Pigs or Puritans – they drink because Newcastle is not Barcelona. England is a northern European country, and northern Europeans drink because it's cold, cloudy, dull, grey, their food is tasteless, their jobs are awful and they have to live in the suburbs because the city centres are given over to shopping malls, hotels and offices. Manners, grace, dignity, dressing and eating well are much easier to do when the sun shines more often than not, you can get fresh bread at a corner shop even at five in the evening and you don't have to spend hours a day crammed into a train too many people and not enough seats.

But that would be too political and way too practical. What Mr Scruton writes is a kind of high-falutin' escapism, Mills and Boon with pretensions of learning. What worries me is that some editor thinks that people who, given that they have the attention span to wade through it, will be fooled by it. It's entertainment masquerading as thought and an abuse of his role as a philosopher to produce it.

Payment Methods Are Not Product Features

Recently I had to sit through a discussion of why what my employer does is better than what the other companies do. Since they don't actually make anything – it's financial services – it was all about the payment scheme. Payment methods are not product features.

I mean, what would you say to the man in the off-licence who made it seem like he was doing you a favour by accepting twenty pound notes as well as ten pound notes and credit cards?

A product or service is one thing, and how you pay for it entirely another. Insurance is a product, and I'm going to choose company A over company B because of price, excess, coverage and comments about them I read on the web. How I pay for it is more or less irrelevant and may be a deal-breaker (“What? No direct debit?”) but is not going to be a deal-maker. Look at personal loans: they make a huge issue about being able to defer the odd payment, delay the start of payment, paying over longer or shorter terms that the competition will allow, you name it. None of those are the product. The product is, well, gee, money. Not even cash. What you're getting is the permission to withdraw what you borrowed from your account. Chances are you won't even be able to lie on the bed and throw it up in the air. All that stuff about how you repay it is not the product, any more than how you pay for your Bose noise cancelling headphones is part of the headphones (Bose do an instalment plan) or the one year's interest-free credit is part of the sofa. At Hertz back in the day they made a big deal about how they could give you different payment options and how neat their invoice was – as if that mattered. The decision was about the car and the price.

Amazon offer me various delivery options, but that's not what I'm buying. They offer me those options to make it easier for me to buy what I want to buy. Same with payment methods: it makes it easier for me to buy what I want to buy, but it isn't what I want to buy.

But don't Visa offer me a product (service)? Yes they do, but they don't make an issue about how I pay for it: Direct Debit or nothing. The fact that I can use Visa to buy a book is not a feature of the book, though the fact that I can't use Mastercard is a reason I might not go back to that retailer.

Payment methods are hygiene factors. And hygiene factors aren't product features – they are product givens (you know, like not falling apart after three days and being easy to clean).

If payment methods are all you've got, you don't have a product. Or you don't understand what your product really is.