My Son in law recently visited an Ice-Cream Parlour in Ross on Wye. He reported with some humour, that the name Gelato’s sounds Italian, yet the inside layout is like an American diner. Its food is Mexican, but puddings are Italian. Its décor is English tea-room, and the script of its menu partly German gothic. The staff are assorted European with west country English dialects tinged with traces of French and Albanian. He further notes that this eclectic mix gives lie to the myth portrayed daily by the BBC about ordinary Britons being insular, racists, and intolerant. He comments that ordinary folk pay £3.7 billion in licence fees to the BBC’s 28,973 employees, and yet are scorned, vilified, and disdained in return. However, the towns of Ross, Ledbury and Newent are evidence of how snooty media hacks are misrepresenting Britain.
I have often wondered how TV, which commissions some wonderful programmes in the arts and music, can be so ignorant about the people who pay their wages? I guess the problem is caused by the size of an organisation. It seems to be the case that when thousands of people are employed under one banner so to speak, it’s not long before they lose sight of their original purpose and become a self-serving body rather than a publicly good one.
I suppose that because the top-dogs live in a bubble of their own kind they start to think they are cleverer, more important, and less fallible that those outside the bubble. In that bubble, their life comprises pulling levers and pushing buttons to send signals to people outside to ‘do things.’ Top dogs soon bore of this, which is why they invent schemes to brighten up their own lives or gain advantage over top people in other bubbles.
However, they forget, the people at the other end of the levers they pull. They take them for granted, but this has consequences! (For further development of this theme see the Website)
I expect readers have looked at YouTube and marvelled at what is available. It seems to be that any ‘How do I do’ …… question can be answered by someone ‘doing’ exactly what you yourself want. From, ‘Feathering and drawing a chicken’ to erecting a fence or sewing a pleat, it’s all there. Recently however, I’ve found YouTube on our TV and become a late-night fan of the New Orleans Street jazz group Tuba Skinny. Their stomping rhythm makes my left leg work and pump the blood around before I retire to bed.
Finally. Halfords recently fitted a Sat Nav in the Shogun, and on the way back from Hereford I tested it by deviating from the route it had planned. The lady in the Sat Nav showed no irritation as I made a couple of deviations from her plan. However, her amiable demeanour took a nasty turn at Fownhope. I felt her attitude stiffen when I decided to cross the Marcle Ridge and drive down past Weston’s Cider. She curtly announced, “You are on the wrong road,” and refused to speak to me again. I apologised and begged her to talk but her lips were sealed. It was only when I stopped at Three Choirs and entered our postcode once more, that she decided to say, “In ½ a mile turn left into Birches Lane. Not a word of apology; just, “Turn left ….”
I end however with a brief reflection of how in earlier paragraphs, I suggested that there is a point at which every man-made organisation that relies on bureaucratic procedures to perform its original purpose will fail as it becomes the opposite of that for which it was intended.
For forty years I have observed my bees. I noticed that at the very apex of a colony’s success it becomes so large that the queen loses touch with a significant number of the workers. She is surrounded by her acolytes and so in a bubble, but there are consequences! Those bees which never touch or see her build a special cell for an ordinary egg. As it develops, they feed it special food and so make a new queen. When she emerges, the entire colony becomes riven by conflicting loyalties and breaks up.
This moral from nature is:
Never lose touch with the ordinary worker. There are consequences!
View from the Pew 