Was it really almost a year ago?

It's hard to believe, isn't it? It was almost a whole year ago!
And it seems that the Olympic spirit touched people in some rather unexpected ways, like this mains access in this street just south of Oxford Street.

The maintenance chaps working here obviously decided to brand their efforts in a very permanent way. (Well at least until someone digs it up again.) Those Olympic rings look suspiciously like they were made with a glass or a bottle...a beer bottle would be my guess.

It's a whole new slant on 'Olympic Legacy'.

Nevertheless, it's an impressive affort.
And to think that the pollsters were telling us that people didn't care and had very little interest in it all.
Cheers!

MACE could be ACE

Leather Lane market, Farringdon, London

I've walked by this shop hundreds of times and never given it much thought. Sure, it has always evoked memories of my childhood and I'm sure that it will for you, if you are native to the UK or Ireland. MACE. Who hasn't shopped in one at some time or other? A rare reminder of a former staple of the high street. The 'ghost' type a poignant reminder of a busier and better time. A spectre of a long-gone member of the MACE family.

Watch any outside news broadcast on the high street from the 60s and 70s, or external shoots on a British sitcom of the same time, or big-screen extensions of the same or many films from the Carry-On canon, and you'll see a MACE. The candy-stripe awnings, facias, bags and unapologetic post-modern logos. I never really appreciated how forward it was back then. And then walking through Fitzrovia last week, I saw this horror...

Fitzrovia. Under the Telecoms Tower, London.

MACE outlets are all independent traders who on joining the 'family' buy their stock from the brand owner. They also have the pleasure of paying the same for brand and marketing support. Pay...for this! Are they mad? It's a disgrace. Most kids could produce something more alluring and appropriate.

In an age when people are keen to support local traders it seems to me that Palmer & Harvey have missed a trick. The MACE of yesteryear projected all of the values that are important to today's consumer. Not for the first or indeed last time the future should be informed by the past. A neat inversion indeed. A national chain which embodies small-scale high street shop principles.

Bring back the awnings; the bags; the 3-D lettering; the optical illusionist facias and leave the perspex in the factory.

I found this fantastic site, the creator of which has a very personal link to the MACE story. Check it out.

Belt and braces

Six years is a long time to walk a circle, yet that’s how long it’s taken RCapital to walk the circle that is the girth of the Little Chef’s belly. They’ve gone all the way around it to get right back to where it started from. Of course there are a few more holes in his belt nowadays since they’ve slimmed him down in more ways than one and he’s now back on the market 117 sites lighter than he was at the 2007 weigh-in. (See my 2012 post, http://susan-turner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/knowing-your-arse-from-your-elbow.html.)

This team of accountants instigated the most ridiculously inappropriate and unsympathetic repositioning exercise since Consignia, namely, the grafting of Heston Blumenthal’s periodic concoctions onto an enterprise with an established heritage and clientele. An enterprise whose very ‘domesticity’ rendered it perversely ‘exotic’ in an ever increasingly ‘other’ based market.

Only it’s funny, because the “next phase”, according to the Manchester outfit they’ve briefed to rebrand the chain, seems to be the phase before RCapital got involved. It’s about getting “back to basics”. Apparently their approach will be informed by the heritage of Little Chef and what it stands for in the consumers mind. Architecture apart, that means chips, beans and fried toast and not Heston’s fabrications. You don’t say! And all of this pre-sale, which is odd really and it signals acknowledgement that their repositioning has not been as successful as they make out. Sure, they’ve made and saved money. But then they’ve got rid of more than half the chain, haven’t they. But it hasn’t worked. Has it?

It’s all a bit mad really, especially since it’s reported that Starbucks and Costa along with service station brands such as Welcome Break are interested, all of whom would draw the chain into their own brand-world to some extent, so why spend money now? It doesn’t make sense. But then none of it ever did.

Fitzrovia 6,5 here...

More treasure. What's striking about today's find is its modernity in contrast to the reports shown in my post Holborn 6,4, please, which pre-date it by just one year. 

It's designed! The posterised cover and the use of a sans serif on a GPO document is a real departure. It's also a fudge, since the innards are exactly the same as the earlier reports. Given that the big story of the day was the opening of the Post Office Tower in 1965, one suspects that someone had pointed out that this modern, brand-spanking new marvel needed to be represented as such and that a little consistency needed to be brought into the equation. 'Let's see what those bearded weirdies in commercial art come up with, what!'

Holborn 6,4 please...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about some fabulous GPO/BT files I stumbled across in F for Fabulous. I have to admit that I’ve made a point of walking down the service road at the back of the old GPO exchange where I found them in the hope that there might be more treasure, since someone is obviously having a bit of a clear out. And guess what?

 

Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t make a habit of rooting around in rubbish bags. In fact someone else had done that this morning and thank goodness they had, because otherwise I would never have seen these. They had been strewn on the pavement like so much garbage and not recognised as being historical brand documents, as they most certainly are.

 

It was the logo I spotted first, a big crown and those no-nonsense caps: GPO. I’d happened across an accidental Annual Reports and Engineer Reports graveyard, all were marked highly confidential of course and all containing details of cutting edge technology at the time of their publication and circulation. But sadly, in a lame attempt to preserve their confidentiality, the chucker-outer had torn them in half – an act of social vandalism if ever I saw one – but they’re thrilling nevertheless.

They’re a window on the past that offered a view of the future of telecommunications. How very exotic the new type of phones, including the Trimphone, must have seemed to the people reading these documents while planning their introduction to the public.

There’s something rather beautiful about the purity and simplicity of the typewritten contents. No hiding behind fonts, clipart, pro-forma charts or background textures; just, facts, figures, objectives and innovations. And the naivety (by today’s standards) of the presentation underscores the integrity of the contents rather than diminishes them.

The books I picked up date from 1957-58, 1960-61 (the year of my birth) and 1964-65. As I write this online while occasionally checking my smartphone and posting the photos I have just taken with my iPad, I get a sense of just how far we’ve come.

Home Alone

About two weeks ago I noticed a friend’s post on Facebook wherein she said that she was getting used to working from home. I replied and my post went something like this: Don’t do it. You’ll regress / lose your voice / vocabulary / figure /sense of proportion / your friends and sanity. It’s mans’ worst invention.

Last week, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, (in)famously banned employees from working from home. Indeed the newspapers, radio and the telly-box have been brimming with related stories ever since. Some pieces have focused on productivity issues and others on the sociological impact of home-working, or the trust factors involved between employer and employee, namely, are you having a laugh at their expense?

Already the camps for and against are pretty well defined and entrenched. It seems that those employers who are doing the reigning-in are being branded as draconian and unreasonable and it will be interesting to see how or if this eventually affects their brands.

I can understand why home working is appealing to some or why it’s pivotal to others – those with children for example – but I also know that it’s lethal, especially if you live alone as I do, sans husband, partner, children, cats, dogs or budgies. I think that this is really an argument about personal growth and this is my two-penneth.

 

We all need Scalextric lines.

 

We know that kids need certainties, routines, structure and boundaries, because those things make them feel secure and they provide a framework for development and adults are no different. People start to unravel without them. If you work from home the onus is on you to create a framework and that is not as easy as it sounds. The distractions are legion, from the washing that becomes a point of fascination, to the walk to ‘get your head around something’ which transmorgifies into a shopping trip or lunch. The rituals and ceremonies of the office (even the process of getting there) provide the bends and curves in the day that keep us psychologically on the straight and narrow. I work very hard to inject structure into my days. I make a point of going to a public space for a portion of every day, thus mimicking the process described above. It keeps me sane.

 

Work expands to fit the time available.

 

Or more accurately, ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’, as Parkinson decreed. It should really be recognised as the official motto of the home worker. In the office shame-factors are at work and the close proximity of others makes it more likely that we will ‘get on with it’ because they can see if we’re not. 

I can also tell you that your backside and your gut will eventually expand to fit any garment available. You just don’t move as much when you’re at home and the absence of co-workers’ beady eyes means inevitable self-sanctioning of multiple dips into the Hob-Nobs, fridge, crisps or chocolate. One can easily get to the point when Pimms ‘O’ Clock is anytime you want it to be. Add to all of that the absence of the daily walks to the tube or rail station, or the cycle to work, or the stairways en route and on site and the general workout the office provides (even a beetle to your neighbour’s desk in your wheelie-chair, which, incidentally is great exercise) means the negation of the benefits of your morning gym session or run and hastens your introduction to elastic waistbands. 

A word about words.

Work alone for long enough and they stop flowing. If your only conversations, even for a couple of days, are with shopkeepers or yourself, you start to lose your voice both literally and figuratively because you’re not using it and the lack of interaction, intelligent or otherwise, means that your vocabulary suffers as a result. Words are increasingly likely to be found sitting on the tip of your tongue as you continue to spend more time sitting on your ar*e.

 

Falling between the craics.

 

The banter, the cliques, the gossip, the politics, the intrigues, it’s all important stuff. We all know that don’t we? I can tell you that if you’re a nobby-no-workmates the craic is what you miss the most. A beer on Skype on a Friday night is no substitute and never will be. People say that technology brings people together, that it makes you feel like you’re a room away. But it’s not true, because you’re always sending stuff somewhere else. The craic is about belonging, which promotes well-being, whereas home working promotes a sense of detachment and a dilution of one’s sense of proportion because we have no one to tell us we’re being stupid / wrong / rude / nice or a tw*t. You begin to understand that even the assholes you work with have a function.

 

Home alone. Over blown.

That’s what I think.

 

Yours, Nobby.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Out to lunch

Eccentric.
We are.

Humour.
For Sure.

Whimsy.
By the boat-load.

Just some of the words used to describe 'Britishness' and 'the British'. 

Thank goodness.

A picture paints a thousand words, so they say.
They're right.

I took these on Regent Street a couple of hours ago. 
The Great British worker lunching with style and living the brand. If the Post Office ever puts out a set of stamps to  celebrate Britishness these chaps should be on them.