...You're Hired

Under and On The Radar

Yesterday eveningI had a very good Thai meal with the chap on the bottom right here ,Earl Okin, who will be appearing on Sunday teatime At Cabaret Central just across from Piccadilly Circus Tube . It’s a reminder to me of how significant conversations, good food, ideas with longevity, happen in surprisingly small , neo-or-actual domestic/ated spaces. Home from Home. Or, as Earl reflected the other night, the recreation of them. I think those of us who work at Riverside Radio are still embrangled happily in the authentic pezzaz of La Minogule who switched on the christmas lights at Battersea Power station and ran a pop-up emporium for a bit. You can’t it seems to me maintain the energy to do what she does without a whole bunch of unadvertised skills, not least the ability to connect with people of all stripes at a professional and personable level. It’s the small room effect. The same is true of Earl, who while of rather less prominence of late , has been around and active for quite a long time. He’s also a hybrid- jazz musician, Brill Buildingy jobbing songwriter and Cabert performer who migrated seamlessly to what became the Alternative, now ( he says) Mainstream. Earl also notes that very few people in Arts and Ents come to prominence over the age of 40, old souls though they may be. Time hurtles on, and La Minogule has sashayed past 50, admitting Cellulite (surely among the loveliest on Planet Earth) and disappears for well-earned downtime or chairwoman of the boardness leaving this here substantive corona.

While her chateau may be discreetly gated behind what my Mum would call ‘Dingly Dell’ , in That London the admirable tendency not to make a fuss or even revere , but Hire ( to use another Okin truism) is what keeps the ball rolling. This business of transition to later life while still active is ever more pressing in the current economic climate. Retiring (with or without quotes) to Diversify , notwithstanding hard times, seems to be playing out as existentially life-enhancing. For quite a while, the political economy has arguably been having it both ways with phases of shaving off the excess of such small matters as accumulated experience and seasoned, crap-detecting judgement ; sometimes retaining adolescence in a spotlit echo chamber of incubation. This is where doing more than one thing, away from whatever public face you have to maintain, seems to prove useful again what my sometime supervisor Denis Postle calls ‘…Wall To Wall Extroversion’ which after a while yields in Larry Hart’s phrase, if you’re not careful, ‘…The feint aroma of performing seals’. You can imho see this all over the cathode ray these days , where the face forward deus ex machina judgmentalism way exceeds the esprit de corps. In Politics, two leaders , ideally some version of Yin and Yang perhaps, seems to speed the plough. Corbyn seems to have been reviled these long years because he has a humility to listen and stick his neck out. So the Zara Sultanaey aspect has resolved itself naturally and amicably with regard for due process . I have a hunch that Kemi Badenoch’s impressive if performative tilt on Student Loans at PMQs this week got the job done as a result of being well-researched and featured in the weekend press, viz. thought through. It is an example of a pause-giving issue dragging on since the demise of the full funding from which we crusties benefitted., and a thorny issue on which to chance the inter-generational arm. It shows us what we have attitudionally normalised that comes back to bite us on the fundament - to which those who quietly keep score in the long haul have cause to disceetly point.

…Also qualities that come with age, rather than the Dorian Grey forcing house that one day comes unstuck. A fine example of this hereabouts is this crew of which-disclaimer- I was a founder member. One of the premises I recall was the due noting that most self-employed people in the UK, back in 2017 , were over 55-ownership of Apple Macs , surprisingly I thought, had then much the same national shaping. One of the first milestones was the hiring, with Arts Council funding, of a vintage bus for a demonstration of ‘Flamboyance’ where the -largely female amidst traddy male recalcitrance- public collective displayed their fashion acumen and conviviality while giving the knees a bit of a rest. Needless to say substantial things have followed on from that overture, particularly in encouraging successful entrepreneurship by utilising the wisdom in the room. In essence, you might say that it is a fulcrum of second chances. Pauses in such company can be nourishing , the obverse of the dreaded scrapheap- the Repair Shop. Goldfish bowl scandal aside, the resonance of that show surely has to do with running repairs to ones’ mojo, or as PG Wodehouse put it,’… Browsing and Sluicing’. It is all to the credit of many of my peers that they do or have done this while appearing elegantly in public , as in the adroitness of an Anna Raeburn, for example , who said sagely of the somewhat peremptory and quality-assurance jettisoning (corporate takeover ) end of her brilliant broadcasting career that it reminded her of not being cast for the school nativity play one year and her Dad pointing out ‘…It’s not your turn’. Whatever the rights and wrongs , it’s a graciousness to be commended and emulated. Luckily the fount of wisdom and encouragement is not about to dry up, nor will it.

As I reflect upon a couple of good relaxed suppers this week, a holiday from the commute, having time to get some new or refurbishable ducks in a row, I must say that I , along with many of my peers, have been lucky in being trusted and valued in ways which the coming generation may find difficult to discover as technology takes over at varying rates. As has been said a lot lately, it learns your ticks but doesn’t give you the sometimes necessary breakfast table meaningful glance, rather keeps the echo chamber muttering, until the likes of HAL suddenly leaves you out of the algorithm. When my old Floating Support boss Big Al , amateur economist, former ASM, ardent anti-racist West Ham fan, Proms devotee, used to suggest that the way forward to longevity was the patina of the’..East End Dandy’, I used to , forgive me Al,quietly scoff a bit. I am mostly at heart Old Git at C and A circa 1977 before some welcome feminine advice. All I think Al meant was being visible and approachable , other than by the men in whitecoats, in an optical society, and that is what my four stalwart examplars above thoroughly are. The proviso is that the risk of scrunching up the apparel is trounced by -in the words of the humanistic thinker Rene Dubos- being up to something. Thus, in my Dad’s case , legitimate furtiveness with Old Holborn tins full of essential grommets in the shed and the olfactory splendour of Mr. Culpepper’s hedgerow decotions. This making/ones’self/ stuff useful has, as a first wave of post-technogical reskilling, yielded this extraordinary constellation (which welcomes Women too). Here your Cabaret room of collective lyrical wisdom morphs into the workbench, tea and biccies, and light bulbs switching on as they do when La Minogule opens something. The Good Pandoras Box of inter-generational renewal that is the quest for the good stuff and whence it came.