Monthly Archives: March 2010

Today’s List

Posted on by

Life is so short that you only have a finite amount of time to read. The question is then do you occupy your remaining hours on earth reading new books that could be crap or do you re- read books that you know to be enjoyable, brilliant, challenging, memorable. If I was told today that the world was ending, books I would read again, not in any particular order:

The Life of Pi

The Crossing

Murphy

Catch 22

At Swim-Two-Birds

The Road

The Sportswriter/Independence Day/Lay of the Land

Moby Dick

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Táin translated by Kinsella

Sweeney Astray

Sin É! Hopefully it won’t come to that.

A Right Shower

Posted on by

I spend a good proportion of my time involved with my local GAA club, Eoghan Rua CLG Cúil Raithin. I coach under 8 football and hurling, senior camogie and am involved in various club administration functions including being chair of the cultural committee and doing bits of PR.

But in reality as anyone involved in a GAA club knows, your activities very quickly expand to fill the time available  and beyond. Involvement at managerial or administrative leve,l or as a player, is ideally suited to the public servant or teacher  – people who either get generous holidays or can do a bit of GAA work during the working day, usually at the State’s expense.

How many reams of government-bought paper are used to run off agendas and other documentation? How many staples, rubber bands, paper clips, pens and gegabytes of computer memory is used to underwrite and hold together the GAA?

In the last week we conducted a very worthwhile and enjoyable exercise in the club. During a historic visit to our new Clubrooms prior to Christmas, we were advised by an Uachtarán CLG Christy Cooney to draw up a new development plan/strategy. I thought it would be a good idea to propose this at the AGM and have a business like brainstorming session to take the thing forward. (Angela tells me that in the PC world of education ‘brainstorming’ is no longer an acceptable term so the the less violent term ‘thought shower’ is now the preferred lingo. Maybe that explains the problems in the local education system, that shower in DeNI. Anyhow I digress).

We got about fifty people involved in the club to gether together in the clubhouse last Saturday. And in true management consultant style we split them up into five smaller sub groups that would rotate through the topics, covering each in turn. Each group was given twenty minutes to get their ideas of their chest and anything else they could down on paper. Best of all we told people that we would be finished at 1.00pm and even allowing for a teabreak we let everyone go home, first part of the job done at 12:45.

The pressure is now on us guys to sort out the next stage of the process. Looking forward to that part of it.

Love Me Tender

Posted on by

In recent weeks I have been working on series of tenders with a number of partners, all in the interests of securing income in these ‘difficult’ times.

These tenders have varied from an excellent copywriting opportunity for a Council who wish to build a story bank of City success stories to other tenders that include a cultural visitor centre’s website and associated material; a large marketing/branding job; and marketing communications material for two education clients. I have also been on the other side of the fence drafting, issuing, receiving and collating replies for another client. Based on what I have experienced as a gamekeeper I was able to turn poacher again.

In all my years working at UU, we took what I now see was a very blasé approach to inviting tenders. The general attitude was ‘if they want the job badly enough they’ll do whatever work is required to put in a decent pitch.’ This included requests to provide graphics and visuals, often at short notice. We would have made suppliers jump through various hoops which, to their credit, they did without crying foul. In retrospect, in terms of purchasing the institution treated local small businesses very poorly and certainly showed little understanding of the business realities of life in a small business.

The advice and guidance from the purchasing people was helpful but seemed more designed to avoid litigation than to attract the best and most contemporary or suitable design. Latterly they introduced greater rigour to the entire process, introducing a series of scoring mechanisms but in my view assessors make a decision on a potential supplier especially after a beauty parade and then ensure the paperwork supports that decision. This may not be the PC thing to say but it is a fact.

Latterly I have been on the receiving end of a series of tenders emanating from government departments and government agencies. I suspect that there is a team of purchasing ‘consultants’ going around giving courses in: ‘Tender Documentation Best Practice to Achieve Value for Money’. Aside from the fact that printing off these behemoth documents to actually read them can write off an entire ream of paper, a lot of the information asked for does nothing to establish the actual graphic design or copywriting capability of my friends and I.

In one case, a tender from an organisation that supposedly exists to promote and support SMEs required a devastating and time consuming level of detail. This is time of course that is well spent if you are successful, but a waste of potential fee charging time if you are not. In this case an army of businesses no doubt beavered away jumping and even skipping through the various hoops placed in the way. The outcome? No decision was made, and the likelihood of a re-tender. Don’t you just love them.

Today’s List

Posted on by

For tonight’s training I need:

36 x size 4 sliotars

4 x smash bags

4 x hurdles

2 x pairs 2kg dumbbells

2 x 5 kilo medicine balls

Bibs assorted colours

3 x lines of balls

Assorted disks & cones

Whistle & stopwatch

Sense of humour

Session planner

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer

Posted on by

My paternal grandmother lived in a fairly remote cottage in Tullymore in Co Armagh. She died before I was born, so I never had the chance to meet her. She was by all accounts a bit of a character.

At one stage in her later years, she broke her leg and was housebound. Having been predeceased by her husband, she was home alone, no-one called that often. So to break the loneliness she started writing a letter to herself everyday so the postman would call on his rounds and she would have someone to talk to.

I can empathise with her. One of the downsides of working as a freelance is that very occasionally, and usually when I am cloistered away working on something, I find myself sometimes spending an entire day talking to no-one other than my young daughters and Joanna, our Polish babysitter. The girls potter about the place and occasionally come in to brief me on some drama concerning Peppa the Pig, or perhaps the hens that live in our back garden. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy talking to them and to Joanna. Her English is a hell of a lot better than my Polish; in fact my two-year-old daughter Treasa has now started speaking Polish too.

That is the loneliness of the long distance writer. When I worked at UU I spent a few years as my only departmental representative on a particular campus and was happy in my own company with my colleagues and my boss in particular an hour away if they were needed (and they were!).

I miss the casual conversations with people you might run into at the coffee shop, when posting a letter, when to-ing and fro-ing, to and from meetings, home, other offices etc etc. I don’t miss all the nonsense though, not one little bit.

The last week I have been working for a partner in the US and another here in Ireland, conscious of two time zones. It is interesting the perception when you are working for others. The work must be done, but your own time is the malleable, flexible factor. To do it late at night, early in the morning, whenever. Snatch an hour here and there. It is essentially a solitary pursuit, one that is highly satisfying, and rewarding. I do occasionally miss the opportunity to bounce things off others in person.

And the loneliness? Well, I suppose at least I haven’t resorted to emailing myself. Not  yet anyway.

Today’s List

Posted on by

Ten DVDs that I bought that I’m going to watch again soon. I’ve watched most of these before, but a DVD these days is so inexpensive, you might as well buy a few – most nights the television is rubbish, for all its nine hundred odd channels.

  • Raging Bull (so good I bought it twice for £3 each time)
  • Life is Beautiful
  • We Were Soldiers
  • The Mission
  • Local Hero
  • Zidane – A 21st Century Portrait
  • The Big Lebowski
  • Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous
  • Syriana
  • The Killing Fields
  • When We Were Kings
  • Friday Night Lights
  • Any Given Sunday

26 Ways

Posted on by

A few years ago I came across the writing of John Simmons. At the time I was sort of casually hunting about looking for a decent book to give me some fresh ideas on writing copy for business. When I worked at the University, the management and the administrators about the place wrote deadening, stultifying prose that was teeming with best practice, deliverables, cutting edges. . . the whole effect of course was to create a centre of excellence. Aren’t they everywhere?

I knew that this sort of tripe most definitely wouldn’t do if I was going to work for other people. Although I could write with the best of them, I could feel myself gradually getting mired in this nonsense.

Any books on writing copy seemed to be written more in the form of self help books by American copywriters, full of big bold headlines like ‘How to ensure your email is opened’ or ‘Twelve ways to write a sales letter.’ All good stuff I’m sure, but I didn’t feel the immediate need for a writing recovery programme.

So when I discovered John Simmons work almost by accident, it was a breath of fresh air. I think the first book I read was The Invisible Grail. The opening sentence reads:

‘The basic narrative of this book is the quest for the ‘grail’ that will enable brands to build better relationships with their audiences.’

Hmmm I thought, interesting but not rocket science. As I read on however I became more and more enthused. John Simmons advocated an entirely new way of writing for businesses. Creative. Engaging. Using humour. Poetry. Taking inspiration directly from great works. He says:

‘Words are a creative force: words that write poems, tell jokes, engage people in conversations. Words that tell stories.’

This last sentence in particular intrigued me. Telling stories. Reading The Invisible Grail, I quickly moved onto his other works, We, Me, Them and It and Dark Angels. These books tell the story of how you can write well for any purpose without lapsing into corporate speak. But more interestingly how to bring your work alive be being daring, adventurous and using the influences that are all around you. Anyone who is interested in improving their writing should read them. Now.

I have started his latest work which I am enjoying: ‘Twenty-six ways of looking at a blackberry: How to let writing release the creativity of your brand‘

If you have the chance and the time, try reading John Simmons. You’ll find at least 26 ways to improve your writing.

Today I’m Listening To. . .

Posted on by

I upgraded my iPhone the other day to a 3GS 16 GB. My experience with phones has been interesting. I still have a big brick of a thing I had in 1999. I remember going to the Champions League Final in Barcelona with my brother Peter and a few other lads including Stuart Wilson, formerly of CreativeLynx in Manchester.

Stuart had a nifty wee Nokia and I had this big thing in my pocket that said ‘Is that a mobile phone or are you just pleased to see me’. Since then I’ve been through PDAs, smart phones, stupid phones, you name it. In summer 2008, I dropped a trusty Nokia e65 into a rock pool when I was crab fishing with the children. It was time to bite the bullet and get a new phone.

My friend Kieran Lappin and his wife Ann Marie amused us one night with their ‘his and hers’ iPhones. I admit I was jealous, and thought ‘I want one of those.’ It took me a minute or two to get the hang of it, but it’s definitely a good job. Around the same time Angela got one, although she had a mishap a few months later when our daughter Treasa decided to drop it into the bath. I dutifully got her another one, although we didn’t really ever talk about it again.

Anyway, I now have a funky new phone on upgrade from O2. And what did I do with the old one? Well, it’s been pressed into use as a permanent iPod, docked and loaded, ready for action. It sits in the corner blasting away through a Bose Wave System. So that’s what I’m listening to today.

ps: Angela’s due an upgrade today as well. At least if this one goes for an early bath, we’ll have two old ones to fall back on!

Slaughtering a Few Sacred Cows

Posted on by

I used to work with a guy called Bob. One day he announced, ‘Sometimes you’ve got to slaughter a few sacred cows.’ I’m sure he wasn’t the first person to ever say this, but as well as being funny it was absolutely right. If you do what you always do, you’ll get what you always get.

So, instead of creating a ‘typical’ website, I’ve decided to go for a simple blogging site. Hopefully this will give people who want to work with me an insight into what I do. If you want textbook stuff, go and buy the textbook. If you like what you see here, give me a call.

I’ll keep this site up to date with info about things I’m working on, what I’ve been up to, what I’ve been listening to and watching and so on. You’ll get a bit of sport, bit of music and who knows what else.