I went on the basis it’s the first cinematic release funded by crowdsourcing, and wanted to see if collaborative development had worked – the community also had input into set design and character bios. (It’s not “bunking off for the afternoon” it’s, “Continuing Professional Development”.)

While everyone applauds the *model*, it’s been getting mixed reviews *as a film*…. and when I hit the Prince Charles Cinema, it was obvious from the bums on seats that the business model hasn’t quite worked. This was a geek-only cinema with NOT A SINGLE GIRL IN IT. So my expectations started low, and I had a pleasant surprise: it’s so stupidly funny I enjoyed it straight off the bat.

First off: the cinema itself. The Prince Charles Cinema is a hidden gem: tiny, atmospheric, and what a *real* cinema should be: close and intimate. Less about watching a film and more about the popcorn-infused experience of going to the movies. it shows a lot of reruns you wished you’d seen the first time around. Go there: rents are high around Leicester Square and it needs you. 

But anyway, the film. In 1945, a Antarctica-based bunch of Nazis decided the best place to vamoose was not South America but … the Moon. And they’ve been there for 70 years, waiting for the right moment to return.

The enjoyable thing here: I expected to be annoyed by the way they skipped over the huge difficulties of living on the Moon – recycling air, growing food, building giant swastika-shaped bases etc. Not to mention getting a few hundred people there in the first place.

I’d have appreciated a ten-minute montage showcasing those first years on the lunar surface. The cramped conditions in the saucers … the breakthroughs by the scientists when their CO2 scrubbers and hydroponics worked … the gradual ascent into functioning machinery and mining the Helium-3 … the first Nazi children giving their first Seig Heils as their society developed an economy. But the film’s premise is so laughable you forgive it the dropped balls.

It’s perfectly acceptable that the Nazis don’t have any more trouble living on the Moon than, say, the Amazon. The gravity doesn’t appear any different to Earth’s, and Moon-born people don’t have any problem adjusting to the crushing weight they’d feel. The steampunk look just about allows suspension of disbelief; after all, during the Cold War ICBMs went into space with no more computing power than an abacus. But there are other errors. Air-breathing petrol engines appear to work just fine on the lunar surface. They’re on the dark side, yet the giant base is clearly bathed in sunlight. And in one shot, controls on the Nazi spacecraft are clearly labelled in English. It may have crowdsourced $millions, but this is still a low-budget independent film.

However, the plot goose-steps along at reasonable pace, and the moments of comedy – “In case of emergency break to hear National Socialist anthem” – mostly work. Sometimes it goes overboard (although whether a film about WWII-era Nazis living on the Moon can go over the top is debatable): the US President isn’t a parody of Sarah Palin, it actually is Sarah Palin.  And the ending is brilliant. Whether or not you’re into the whole Nazis-on-the-Moon genre, support independent film and buy the DVD.

And of course, apologies to my girlfriend. It’s impossible for a Brit to go to a film featuring German dialogue and not speak in an accent for hours afterwards.

* All right, Mondays. But I work so many weekends that my monthly cinematic escapes can legitimately take place any weekday.

Two bets were possible as Facebook hit the markets: the normal one when it started trading, and a pre-market punt on how many billions over $100bn the valuation would go on its first day. The latter attracted plenty of bets and at $137bn two-thirds of betters were long – hardly unanimous. I stayed out for two reasons. First, at a minimum bet of £10/pt and a stop no narrower than 100pts, my exposure was £1000 straight off the bat – well outside my risk taste at this stage. But second was simply instinct. While I’m familiar with technology valuations and Facebook’s finances, something didn’t feel right about the $38-per-share IPO, so I stayed on the sidelines.

This was the right decision: at the close, Facebook’s valuation was barely in twelve digits. (I.e a lot of people got burned.)

In the secondary market itself, the stock’s now trading around $33, way below its offer price. (It also seems Morgan Stanley has stepped in several times to prop it up.) If this surprises you – the hotttest technology IPO in years from a company that picks up around a third of all web pageviews in the Western world – here’s why.

Facebook and Google have roughly equal visitors and pageviews, but Google monetises each user around ten times better ($40bn revenues vs $3.8bn) at higher margins. The social network may be a great comms infastructure, but not perhaps a great investment. The site’s not going away – I believe (as a big user myself) it’ll continue to be the default social network for a billion people – but it’ll prove hard to monetise at a level that answers a high NASDAQ tick.

Facebook is a killer app… but a killer app the way email is a killer app. Not the way Office is a killer app.

And here’s the kicker. If I’d followed my instincts, I’d be £4480 richer. (Shorted when it started falling from $40 or so, sold when it hit $35ish.) Risking around £3k, sure, but my instincts tend to be right on such things. And that’s why I didn’t do it. Spread betting, for me, is not gambling; I treat it as I would any other investment. I don’t risk my pot on hunches.

If you don’t know why you’re making the bet, don’t make it. I may have “lost” £4k+, but I’m gaining the discipline I need to be among the third of spread betters who make money at it.

Betting on spreads – where you’re given bid/ask prices by your spread betting provider, and you wager a sum per point on how far and in what direction the price will move outside this range – is classed as gambling in the UK. But since you can back your decisions with all the normal tools of the financial business – technical analysis, corporate fundamentals, information – spread betting isn’t really about gambling, any more than poker’s about gambling if you know where all the aces are.

However, it’s not really about investing either. (You’re not buying a share; you’re contracting with a bookie about where its price will go.) Spread betting is really about trading. Buying cheap and selling high, like every form of mercantile exchange for 30,000 years. Like a bank extending you credit, you can trade on the margin: with most bets your provider will only ask you to front 5% of your total exposure. And you can use leverage to magnify your wins (betting £10 a point, a penny’s rise in share price gives you a thousand times that in profit) meaning the profit opportunities are large. Of course, the downside is just as big – which most people find out very, very quickly.

I’ve been FSBing a day or three a month for the last six months, and just starting to get into it seriously. It’s something I thought I’d enjoy; I never expected it to get vocational. But when I looked back on trades the Why of it became obvious. I don’t have a gambling mentality; in twenty trips to Las Vegas I’ve sat down at a blackjack table precisely once. But I do have an affinity with charts and patterns – the trends and trajectories of technical analysis. In spread betting, that’s what you’re really betting on – herd behaviour, not the fall of a dice or the turn of a card.

I wrote a thesis on behavioural finance once; the way human biases affect markets is a subject I know a lot about. In addition, the complexities of financial derivatives that keep most people out of the game – the calculations around stops and limits, the patterns of market timing, when to go on margin and how far to pull the leverage – are, at the scale I’m doing it, simple enough to fit on a spreadsheet.

Now I’m starting to trade seriously I’ve decided to blog my wins, losses and learnings – keeping it open keeps me honest. As with all writing, the critical thinking it forces will help me develop a trading strategy – patterns that work, patterns that don’t, places where my own cognitive biases get in the way. In two years or so I hope to be trading for a consistent monthly profit; note what matters here is consistency rather than number of zeroes. Here goes nothing…

And as usual, Britain’s journalists are completely missing what’s really happening here: Britain’s unions want the queues. Here’s why.

Let’s look past the talking heads to some basic drivers of human behaviour. You’re a union baron wanting to secure yet more pay and benefits for your members. (Most of whom don’t vote in favour of strikes, but that’s by the by for union bosses – nobody plays faster and looser with inclusive democracy than a committed Socialist.)

Now Labour’s out of power and the days when you could rock up to Number 10 and be invited in for beer and sandwiches are long gone, the main tool at your disposal is striking.

And if you’re looking to strike, lengthy queues at Heathrow beforehand would make it look justified, wouldn’t it?

So that’s the crux of it: who, here, really benefits from long queues at Heathrow? Not the government; they’ll shoulder the blame. Not, of course, the customers: we’re talking unions here, whose only attitude to customers is fuck the lot of ‘em. The only people to benefit from apparent undermanning are the people planning to go on strike.

That’s why the queues last forever: a deliberate act by the lefties to screw Britain’s economy … for the benefit of its own members.

Eyewitness accounts from passengers confirm that at busy times there have been just two desks open to process arrivals. They may have had manpower cut by 10%, but that still leaves a lot more than two immigration clerks. Which makes it obvious what’s really happening here: Britain’s over-unionised, ultra-bloated public sector is cynically engineering a crisis to make itself look like a victim.

I don’t see why anyone’s surprised, really. It’s all the public sector ever does.

Why do I like them? It’s something about the contrasts: the big-sky vastness of the American West, pockmarked by hidden concrete bunkers whose sole purpose was to rain down Strangelovian death on people thousands of miles away. (Or, to take the realpolitikal view, to prevent the need ever arising.)

It’s such a science-fiction cliche – the innocuous shack or wooden door leading down to a cathedral-sized space within the earth – but the pointy bit here is that such things actually exist. Hundreds of them, dotted around mostly-abandoned Air Force bases, from sea to shining sea. Designed to take a direct hit from an airburst in the megatons, they were the strongest structures ever built by Man… perhaps the strongest structures man will ever build. (Cold War budgets aren’t coming back anytime soon.)

Like walking through a graveyard, the few signs above ground create a sense of wonder. Who were these people? What drove them to attempt such feats? What are the stories of that which lies beneath? 

I first travelled across that landscape at 20, and I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of it. To own a parcel of it isn’t even an unattainable dream: there’s a lot of land out there, and in parts of the US 3,000 acres cost less than a one-bedroom London flat. But it wouldn’t quite have the melodrama without a missile silo on it. So my needs are simple and specific: an Atlas-F.

If your idea of a missile silo involves a big trapdoor in the desert with a rocket blasting vertically out of it, it’s the Atlas-F you’re thinking of. They cost an incredible sum to build – over $400m in today’s dollars -  yet their operational lifetime was just a few years; the fearful pace of development during the 50s and 60s made many obsolete even before the bomb went in. With no appeal except as novelties, they change hands today for under US$500,000. (In case this sounds like a bargain, consider: many of the silo tubes were imploded or flooded to discourage trespassers, and I know of no case where the tube itself has been remodelled.)

With an Atlas-F, you get a bit of land above ground, the “Command Centre” to convert into a dwelling, and – down a subterranean corridor – the missile silo itself, minus its erstwhile resident. Many are within commuting distance of major cities; the surburbs sprawl broader today. Most of the Atlas rockets eventually got used for peaceful purposes – launching satellites and whatnot – but their amazing garages remain. Gigantic Euclidean solids under the earth, temples of technology to a war that never came.

I saw one years ago, and the sense of being somewhere Man was never supposed to be is hard to describe properly. So that’s my goal: to own an Atlas-F site.

And now, what comes onto the market but a Titan-1?

There’s always a bigger fish.

The Titans were the biggest land-based nuclear missiles ever – able to deliver their megatons of radioactive death to any point on earth. A Titan site is basically an Atlas F site… in triplicate. THREE enormous vertical cylinders, a huge fuel dump and machine shop for each, plus a command centre complex, all connected at deep level by half a mile of tunnels. Now that’s what I call a project!

And one of the very few ever built is on sale. If only.

Unfortunately the price is over £2m. And let’s face it, remodelling the equivalent of three 17-storey skyscrapers through a hole in the sand is one hell of a development project. My dreams continue…

-          If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.

-          Never have anything in your life you couldn’t walk away from in ten minutes.

-          Wahey!

The book’s main idea: whether a nation turns into a prosperous land of citizen-stakeholders, or a lawless wasteland with a venal elite, is all down to how its institutions develop.

If they’re “inclusive” – applied to everybody equally, as Britain’s broadly are – rule of law and economic growth happen as a natural consequence, because everybody’s got a stake in things getting better. If institutions are “extractive”, sucking power out of the hands of the public to serve an empowered minority – as in much of Africa and Asia – the pie never gets larger, and all you get is a gaggle of guys in sunglasses seeking an ever-greater share of an ever-shrinking pie.

In the second case, even revolutions rarely change things for the better, since once the rebels are in the presidential palaces they tend to need extractive institutions to cement their newfound powers.(Hi, Big Men of Africa!) Acemoglu and Robinson use countless examples, both in their book and on their blog – from Argentina’s early success and current basketcase status, to why China will fail in the long term despite its apparent juggernautism today. (That’s something else I agree with: Chinese mercantilism will not lead it to global leadership, the Yuan will not become a reserve currency, and it will all end in tears around 2020. Call it a Big Short.)

But there’s no reason for us Brits to feel smug. Because whether countries go one way or the other depends on some very, very small nudges near the beginning. For example, I’ve long thought that the reason for Britain’s dominance of the world in the 19th century was a simple and subtle accident: the fact that British adventurers were allowed to be in business for themselves, rather than acting as agents of the State like the Conquistadores. English Kings and Queens of medieval times were weak, and didn’t really get to order the merchants around…. which led to us developing the boundless potential of big empty places full of promise, like North America and Australia. We weren’t better by nature; we became better thanks to a happy circumstance. There wasn’t anything deliberate or insightful about it, but Britain nudged itself in the right direction around 1600, and became perhaps the most inclusive and successful nation that ever has, or ever will, exist.

Fuzzy-thinking Labour and Liberal voters (is there any other kind?) will doubtless disagree with my take here. After all, doesn’t “inclusivity” sound more like the all-are-equal dream of the Left, and “extractive” sound like fat cats getting rich off the back of the masses?

But this is down to what (I feel) is the great misunderstanding of the Left: life isn’t a zero-sum game. Nor should it be. There is not a fixed amount of work to be shared out among workers (the false reasoning behind France’s 35-hr workweek), nor a set volume of wealth that must be divided equally (the apparent belief of Britain’s grab-it-all public sector.) Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome. In an inclusive system, anyone can start a business … but not everybody will prosper from it. (If the outcomes are guaranteed, there’s no reason to work hard at anything.) Some fail, some succeed, the markets allocate capital accordingly, and the system pushes itself upward. In the capitalist system, an “inclusive” system, the pie gets bigger.

It’s why Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Castro, the Kims, and champagne-swilling charlatans like Marx were wrong. It’s why the worst of British leaders, like Blair and Brown, were wrong. It’s why today’s woolly-minded lefties like “Gogglehead Ed” Miliband are wrong. But of course, plenty of people like the comfort their wrong views provide… like Britain’s wrongheaded public sector. We won’t get rid of the scourge of leftism for a while – but in the long run, it hasn’t a chance.

“When walking into an independent shop, restaurant or hotel, straight away you notice something – “this is like nothing I have seen before”. That’s because you haven’t. One of the things I love about them is that every time you visit you get a different experience.“

I applaud Maos for wanting constant variety and diversity in his life. (After all, I’m in the same boat. Life’s a journey where you choose your own pitstops, and I believe there should be constant action. It’s why I’ve trekked across deserts and jumped from planes a hundred times, why I’ve worked in six countries and haven’t had a “proper” job in over a decade. If I walk down the street and fewer than three bullets get fired at me, I find it hard to stay awake.)

But the reality of business is that most people don’t. An inconsistent experience, however positive, remains inconsistent. There’ll be no brand perceptions carried across locations, no shared values for people to talk about. Like it or not, a huge part of customer experience comes down to getting what you expect, even if the quality’s lower than what’s available. The mustard-coloured pants that arrived in your mailbox are great if you like mustard-coloured pants (amazingly, some do) – but if you ordered a quality pair of black 501s, your out-of-box-experience will be somewhat suboptimal.

An example comes to mind of a UK brand called Southern Fried Chicken. The chicken’s probably okay if you like that sort of thing. But after years of immoderate franchising where storeholders weren’t even held to a common set of colours and logotypes, the brand equity is in effect… zero. Even though it’s entirely possible that every visitor, to every store with a Southern Fried Chicken sign in the window, receives a perfectly good experience.

And – if you’re the chainstore’s shareholders – a different experience each time means no brand values get carried through. Which means there’ll be no net gain on word-of-mouth marketing, no multiplier on the P/E ratio, no saleable value in the business beyond that of the individual stores. An explosion of experiences isn’t manageable or growable. And because customers like different things, you’ll be running your losses and cutting your winners too often.

Individuality doesn’t scale.

Which might make you think I’m cheerleading for frozen-faced script-reading big-box chainstores. I’m not. When I’m barrelling down a US Interstate I make a point of always pulling off to a street five minutes away, where the Mom ‘n Pop restaurants are. Time and again I’ve had stunning burritos, homecooked ribs, tasty burgers a thousand times better than anywhere with a golden arch over the door.

And that’s what I think Maos is really trying to get across here: whatever it is, customer experience should be authentic.

I’m not sure he actively dislikes the Costa Coffees and Tescos of this world – it’s possible he’s even shopped in them. What he dislikes is the all-too-common inauthenticity of them: the boring repetition of a standard script, the “Your call is important to us” barefaced lie of IVR. The presentation of something as fresh and original that’s not.

This, I think, is our common ground: good customer experience has a human voice, and speaks with genuine warmth and honesty. Whether you’re in the depths of generica or Mo’s Solo Diner on the wrong side of the tracks. And there, at least, we can agree.

.

.

Now, these are beautiful ads (there are three of them). And I’m all for showcasing new songwriting or singing talent. (Life can be hard for those who warble and strum, so if any young creative can snare a big brand to license her cover versions to, all well and good.) But the marketing team at Twinings need to be tied to a tree and slapped repeatedly about the head with a drawstring pouch filled with wet teabags.

These ads aren’t just wrong for the brand. They are fractally wrong*.

Take Twining’s previous campaigns featuring Stephen Fry. The great man’s not my cup of – well, y’know – but his plummy Englishness perfectly complemented a no-nonsense, down-to-earth brand with a pleasant sense of humour. The writing was brilliant, with Fry complaining how long it’d taken traditional Twinings (it opened London’s first tea shop in the 1700s) to get into the new-agey fruit teas that appeal to a younger (and predominantly female) demographic. Best of all, the ads sold the product, not just the brand. I’d never bought Twinings before Fry got involved, but pretty soon after my hand strayed a shelf down in the supermarket.

These ads, however, are “artsy”. Art for art’s sake, not because it does the right thing for the brand. And they’re always obvious. They happen when an art director sees a particular visual treatment leafing through awards annuals, and decides to use it in her next campaign, no matter what. It’s why you regularly see ads for totally different products with similar artistic treatments… and why no French TV spot ever features anything more than happy children and brightly coloured balloons. (Bit of a navel-gazing market, French-language TV.)

But think about a tea drinker. Not the most creatively rip-roaring individual, is he? Probably older, a bit traditional, might even believe the Daily Mail represents the voice of Middle England. I dare you to show this ad to any tea advocate – not the people who drink it in the office or on the building site, but the 20% of tea drinkers who buy 80% of all tea. And ask if they think that’s a refreshing representation of their brand.

The only reaction you’ll get will be, “Er?”

It’s WI members in Bournemouth and retired doctors in Tunbridge Wells who build a brand like this, not questionably literate 20somethings working out of an excitingly-painted repurposed warehouse in East London. You can’t drive sales with ads that appeal only to people in Shoreditch.

(The oddest thing is that these ads come from AMV/BBDO, and David Abbott (the ‘A’ of AMV) absolutely personified the intelligent tea drinker. No sense of their own heritage, young admen today. If you haven’t heard of David Abbott, think of Economist headlines. But I digress.)

There are, horrifyingly, other executions. I haven’t seen the one with the girl rowing across a stormy ocean (apparently a metaphor for life’s ups and downs) but my girlfriend has, and thought it was for sanitary towels. (Well, at least she got the stormy reference. Now that’s what I call “assisted recall.”)

These ads will doubtless win awards; that’s the awards game – make something beautiful. But they’re not good ads.

You tie the Twinings marketers who approved this to a tree, and I’ll bring the kettle.

* Wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. Zoom in on any part of this advertising strategy, and you will find messages just as wrong as the entire advertising strategy.

Cue more nodding faces than a dubstep concert. (Or wherever the kids are going this year. I dunno, yesterday a 22 year-old said my “sex was on fire” and I didn’t get the ref.)

Tesco used to be my favourite supermarket, but it’s out in the open now: something’s gone badly wrong at the Big T, and I’m not sure it’s recoverable.

My fallen hero, there’s a simple problem: your food is crap.

Which hurts, because I know how difficult it is to do retail and Tesco is awesome at it. If I accidentally enter an Asda or Lidl, with their hunched masses of shuffling slackjaws – or worse, that TV woman slapping her bottom – I jerk backwards and grab the nearest blunt and heavy instrument*, thinking the zombie apocalypse has begun. Tesco has always felt like my supermarket, the place I’m happiest to invite into my kitchen.

(Waitrose is great, too, but the feeling I need to break out my tux and give my shoes a polish before entering is always a drawback. I mean, have you been to the Canary Wharf one on a Sunday morning? It’s more a dating club than a supermarket. They’ve got a wine bar and oyster restaurant right there among the aisles!)

Plus: Tesco does great credit cards. And of course it has ClubCard, probably the most worthwhile pointsback programme anywhere: some quarters I get thirty or forty quid in no-hassle vouchers in the post. (As a copywriter I’ve even written a few of their brochures, and enjoyed the experience.)

I think the chain started ossifying around the time it launched that ad campaign featuring talking trolleys. (You see two shopping trolleys in a park and what do you think? Blighted environment, that’s what.) But I think the real rot got a grip some years later, around 2009.

The shelves are well-stocked. The prices remain competitive.

But every dinner that began its relationship with you in Tesco is, today, a huge disappointment, isn’t it.

(Note the lack of question mark ending that last sentence.)

Tesco, oh Tesco. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice?

At the moment I’m working in cities a hundred and fifty km apart, and the limitations of a weekday rental make me more dependent than usual on stuff that’s top-oven-friendly. But the misses these days aren’t just outnumbering the hits; they are totally eclipsing them. Here are a few examples – and they weren’t hard to find.

Case Study #1: The not-so-Finest Pizzas. Has anyone in the Tesco boardroom actually eaten one of these things? If you drench one in olive oil and fresh herbs before cooking, it’ll be, at a stretch, just about edible… IF you also obliterate your palate with Dave’s Insane Sauce or something first. I mean, they cost up to £7 and they’re as blandly unsatisfying as Moshi Rox to a death metal fanatic. Appalling, especially when next to them on the shelf is Pizza Express at 2 for a fiver.

Case Study #2: A bunch of tasteless jerks. What on earth are those “Jerk [insert meat]” cartons that appeared around Q3? A box of lonely bones with a grain or two or rice spooned in? Trust me, the Carribbean contains few people who would recognise that ill-hidden strip of flesh under the jerk as chicken – and nobody at all who’d identify another dish as goat. What a shame; goat’s such an underrated meat and you’re turning off consumers at their first go. It’s an insult to goats (as well as to anyone who’s ever enjoyed a proper Jerk sauce.) I suppose I could make gelatine, but…

Case Study #3: The “Yes, We Mystery Shop in Marks and Spencer” Finest Meal for £10. The idea’s sound: main course, side dish, dessert and wine for a tenner. (I will make an allowance for the common supermarket lie “Serves 2″; everyone tells that whopper.) But my meatballs were like leftovers from a leather tannery. My potatoes had the generic consistency of yellowed lard. I don’t know what Gu thought it was doing, throwing that gritty white cake-like substance into the ring (I forget its name, but it doesn’t deserve to share space with their great chocolate puds.) And the wine? Come on folks, you wouldn’t sell that for £7 in real life.

Case Study #4: The Appalling Mr Hom. Tesco, this “Ken Hom” guy is widely known as a guy who can’t cook for toffee (including cooking toffee) – in America, a nation where half the population eats a minivan wrapped in carpet for breakfast. What’s your fascination with him? You’re not shy about pulling outside suppliers up by their bootstraps. Yet there, in the “Ethnic Food That Doesn’t Come In Jars And Isn’t Polish” section (okay, you call it “Chinese”) you give prime shelf space to a range of fried rice, spring rolls etc that are just appalling. Have. You. Ever. Actually. Tried. One? If your local Tesco isn’t open, go round the back and chew on a cardboard box retrieved from a dumpster to get an idea.

Case Study #5: I won’t rip you a new one over the takeaway sushi; supermarket onigiri are just too easy a target. But: if Lidl did sushi…

Case Study #6: A troubled relationship with alcohol. Now, most supermarkets are bad at wine (Waitrose excepted) but you’ve got noticeably worse since 2010. The white wine aisle is an endless acreage of Chardonnay, Chardonnay, and more bloody Chardonnay. If you’re really lucky, on the end of the aisle will be a chenin blanc, which is of course [Chardonnay]. There are other grapes, you know. I won’t go into here how alike the wines are – there’s barely one under £20 with any personality – because that’s just the market; most people like what they know. But c’mon, a little smoke or spiciness wouldn’t go amiss.

With great regret, it’s time to short Tesco. Could my future be that supermarket you never really notice… Sainsbury’s?

* Unless it’s the bottom. I mean, you can get arrested for that sort of thing.

A writhing, weaving, suffocating mass of organic matter infests the ancient streets of our capital. Like a Wellsian red weed, they enfold and engulf the cityscape, living prophylactics reducing its diverse qualities to a generic mulch.

I call them The Slow People.

They are everywhere. Moving with all the pace and alacrity of a Jamaican snail with some heavy shopping. When there’s clear paving ahead, they stay Slow, never seizing the opportunity to be Fast. When the crossing man lights up green, they hesitate. Often, groups of Slow People stop dead to engage in discussions concerning  matters pertaining to Slowness, preventing decent citizens from progressing. Families composed of Slow People tend to walk four abreast, blocking entire sections of pavement and turning Saturday’s vitality into mere Throng.

What defines The Slow People? Simply: they DO NOT WALK FAST ENOUGH. Their pace befits a Sunday ramble, not the world’s premier city. They move among us, but they do not belong with us.

Slow People come in all shapes and sizes; no group stands out. The old and infirm are excused my reasoned scorn; their membership of this group was not their choice. But the obese are not. Obesity, after all, is Your Own Problem. And while not all Slow People are fatties, all fatties are Slow People.

What’s wrong with these people? Exchanging two burgers for one bowl of green leaves three or four days a week is not a huge hardship; it costs nothing and will extend your life. (The developing world must look with bemusement at the number of TV shows in the UK about… people who are sad about having too much to eat.) 

Yet Slowness is not due to biology. Plenty of septugenarians and up traverse the streets with a sprightly gait and intelligence shining from their eyes; obviously their attitudes remain young. Being a Slow Person is in the mind.

And Slow People, of course, tend to breed Slow Children. The phenotype of being a lard-assed salad-dodging gut-bucket is, sadly, a persistent pattern in the modern industrialised world; but even among those of a healthy BMI there are plenty of Slow People. You see Slowness emerging in the limbs of their children; an ambling slouch without purpose or direction, like seaborne organisms doomed to a life of chance encounters with plankton, incapable of independent locomotion. Slow People cannot forge any distinctive path in life; they merely allow life to carry them along.

The Slow People are not going away. They may, in fact, get Slower.

They are The Slow People.

There’s an expression I use in meetings when people are engaging in wishful thinking instead of solving the problems at hand. When they’ve come to a convenient break in their flights of unproductive fancy, I jump in with:

In other words, I run a tight meeting. Get me leading a table and you’ll see decisions made and minutes acted on with a clear sense of purpose, everything tight as a drum. It’s not hard. Here’s how I do it.

1. Set a start time. And keep to it. It’s far too easy to lose 30 minutes or more waiting for stragglers to arrive. If the meeting starts at 10am, start it at 10, and anyone not there loses the right to be involved. They’ve missed the Chocolate-Frosted Choo-Choo that brings them to the meeting room, and they’ll have to stay over in Lollipop Land.

2. Communicate the meeting’s purpose. All meetings should have ONE purpose and ONE major outcome. Meetings are to decide things, not discuss them. If people start wandering off track, ask them how that conversation is contributing to the meeting’s purpose – or give them the line above. You may as well mention Sugarcane Mountain while you’re at it.

3. Tell people what their role is in the meeting. In other words, make sure everyone knows their area of responsibility. And don’t let them step outside it – because perversely, the best performers at work are often the worst at meetings: experts tend to think their expertise reaches beyond their area of knowledge, and will grab any opportunity to demonstrate this. Don’t let them. Every Yummy-Scrumptious Pebble on Lollipop Land’s beaches is different, but not one has more than one flavour.

4. Tell people it’s okay not to come, and that if they don’t, decisions will be made without them. You don’t want anyone there who doesn’t need to be. It’s perfectly possible to do this diplomatically – ‘If you feel this would not be a good use of your time, please tell me and I’ll cc you the minutes’. And while they’re in Lollipop Land, they can get you a cookie.

5. Practice lock-out for latecomers. People must understand that the meeting fulfills a business purpose and that if they miss it they’re preventing that purpose from being met.

6. Have a chairman. All meetings need a leader. And that’s not just a note-taker (ideally someone else takes the scribe role) – the leader introduces topics, summarises decisions taken, gets agreement, and moves down the agenda at a set rate.

7. Specify a finishing time. More important than you think. Few meetings need longer than an hour; most can be done in 30mins, and plenty can happen by phone or IM without travel involved. There’s no need to take the Choo-Choo all around Sugarcane Mountain when you only want to go as far as Gingerbread Station.

8. Issue the minutes. A single page with a title, participant list, date and time, a paragraph, and bullet points of what was done. The most important is the one-paragraph (even better, one-line) summary of what the meeting achieved, which should always include context of what needs to happen as a result of that decision.

9. Keep your eyes on the clock. If the first agenda item of 6 takes half an hour, you’re in line for a three-hour meeting – which is too long. Agree a set time at the start – say, ten minutes per agenda item. If the strawberry-shortcake clock in Lollipop town centre strikes 12, you might be stuck in Lollipop Land forever!

10. Close the meeting properly. When the end time approaches, the chairman should summarise the decisions and firmly close the meeting. If you let the conversation wander aimlessly or peter out, you’re on the fast track to Sugarcane Mountain. If you’ve dealt with everything early, then close the meeting early! ‘Fill all the time’ is never a meeting objective.

Lastly, the best advice of all: don’t go to meetings! At least 75% of meetings are unnecessary. Cancel three meetings a week, and you’re putting a whole morning’s worth of time back in your day. And over time, the quality of the meetings you do go to will rise – because people will assume if ‘the guy who doesn’t go to meetings’ is there, it must be important.

This story was about – has always been about – mainland Europe’s inability to service its debt pile. The economies of Europe spend too much on their public services, without a big enough tax base to pay for it.

(So does Britain, of course. But with a cost-cutting Conservative government in charge at least the markets understand our risk of succumbing to the same factors is smaller and falling. And this’ll continue to be the case as long as Cameron can keep the endless wailing of the public sector under control. Encouraging sign that last month’s public sector general strike was a bit of a flop.)

In the words of a Bloomberg commentator today: this sucker’s goin’ down.

Yet hordes of people with a claim on the public purse are coming out on the streets tomorrow. Waving placards about how unfair it is that, in straitened economic times, they might actually have to contribute a bit more to get benefits averaging 4.5x more than the average private sector worker receives. (That 4.5 figure is the one that really matters. To put it into perspective, the total NPV-adjusted pay and benefits bill for the 6m people in Britain’s public sector is more than the bill for the entire 23m-strong private sector. 6m people cost as much as 23m private ones. And these people have the gall to call themselves hard-done-by.)

So for any private sector worker, the principal question is: why? Why? Why? As a self-employed person for whom Risk is a middle name, I’d like to think the answer is “greedy bastards”, or “ungrateful wankers”. But it’s a bit deeper than that.

The reason public sector workers are striking tomorrow is due to their total lack of understanding of risk.

Risk in its most basic form: the understanding that things can happen that are outside your control, and you can manage for it, but not eliminate it. People in the public sector don’t “get” this. Ensconced in a nannying culture that protects its workers from the real world, they don’t quite connect the realities of macroeconomics with what arrives in their pay packet.

Why? Maybe because it’s just too big, the numbers too vast to comprehend. (After all, a single public sector organisation – the NHS – is the world’s third-largest employer, all on its own.) But this is the problem. Without an understanding of risk, you can’t function effectively as a society. It leads to bad decisionmaking. Inefficient resource allocation. Outcomes that improve lives for a cossetted minority, at the expense of bankrupting the economy.

(And yes, I know what this sounds like. But the banking crisis was a result of the same thinking: the risk-reducing nature of an implicit government guarantee allowed banks to borrow at unrealistically low rates. Once again, well-meaning public policy was responsible for a bad outcome.)

Being an effective human being means understanding that sometimes bad things happen, and you’ve got to deal with them. (It might not be your fault. But it is your responsibility.) Public sector workers bleat repeatedly about how the economic crisis “wasn’t their fault”; well, whether that’s true or not, you can’t suspend reality because of it. Public sector spending as a share of GDP has been rising for years – and under the last Labour government went wild. There are areas of the UK where the public sector is three-quarters of the economy.

And this can’t be sustained, because the public sector doesn’t create the wealth that’d sustain it. Any more than taking out £200 on your Visa card makes you £200 richer.

Not getting to grips with risk is why we stop our kids climbing trees (because they might fall), prevent our policemen saving a drowning pensioner (because they might get cold), and wrap simple decisions in layers of law (because people might not understand what they’re doing.) At the heart of all these well-meant rules & regs is a fallacy: that there’s a way, somehow, of eliminating risk from our lives. There isn’t.

We should not protect people from their own decisions, because doing so stops them understanding the consequences.

This is why the public sector today is such an obstinate beast – throwing up its hands in horror at being asked to make or take a couple of percentage points in cuts. Public sector: would contributing an extra 3p in the pound to your own pensions (tomorrow’s basic gripe) really be such a hardship? If you believe it would, ask any self-employed person if they’d like a guaranteed £5,600 a year on retirement, rising with inflation, every year, for the rest of their lives… for about £48 a month. They’d jump at the chance.

But because private sector workers have a better understanding of risk, their next question will be, “How can the country afford it?”

We can’t. And it’s stupid to pretend we can.

So the government’s threat to withdraw the existing (generous) offer is the right game to play. It’ll teach public sector workers that actions have consequences; with any luck, tomorrow’s strikes will backfire on them – badly. (As the transport strikes did last summer; notice how quiet Bob Crow’s been recently?) And they’ll end up with a worse deal than they could’ve got by not striking.

Fingers crossed. Make no mistake, Nov 30 is a showdown. And it’s all over a basic concept: risk.

My word. If there was ever a sentence that proves the law’s an ass, this was it.

The argument’s about who cooked up the sauce first. This judge is shocked, shocked that the sauce is not, in fact, an old family recipe developed over decades by Grandma Root from Jamaica.

Wow, what a sweetly innocent view; I’m not surprised Britain’s legal system so often seems divorced from anything I might call “justice”. I’m happy for Judge Pelling though: what a pleasantly rose-tinted life he must lead.

For Judge Pelling, even a simple supermarket visit is an affirmation of the goodness of Man. Selecting a box of “barn eggs”, he thinks fondly about the happy chickens inhabiting the bucolic meadow on the box.  Picking up some fish fingers for his grandchildren, he gives silent thanks to the kindly sea captain and the crew of underage sailors who caught them, tossing their nets over the side of a three-masted schooner. On family holidays, he has a choice of cookies, but always goes for “America’s Favourite”, because it must be true, right?

As for the case itself, nobody can prove one way or the other who cooked up the first batch or wrote down the recipe. But that’s missing the point: a recipe for sauce, written down on a sheet of paper, isn’t a business asset. There are thousands of jerk sauces cooked up every week in London kitchens alone, and you know what…

… they’re all good. I’ve never met a jerk sauce I didn’t like. And most of the middle-class white people who buy Roots’ wares couldn’t tell the difference between any of them. They’re not buying a tasty sauce for tonight’s chicken; they’re buying the story of a characterful black guy who once strummed a guitar on a TV show.

(Remember, “Dragon’s Den” has nothing to do with business, any more than Fox has anything to do with the news. It’s entertainment, plain and simple.)

Business is about stories. When people buy into the story, they buy the products. So marketing, for the vast majority of products, is about telling those stories. Whether the marketing is successful or not depends on how effectively you can lay a story down in the minds of your target audience. Consumers are smart and savvy, and they pick the stories they want to believe in.

Oh, how I wish there were more people like Judge Pelling. If all consumers were like him, we marketers would rule the world.

The concept is classic Benetton: shocking and iconic. This time it’s about clashing cultures. The first execution – the Pope kissing a Muslim cleric – is shocking in the right way, because it’s got a message: two religions not noted for their, er, *tolerance of alternative lifestyles* coming together in a liplock.

Fair enough. Even if you recognise the individuals, this isn’t an ad about two men; it’s about two belief systems coming together, and that’s a reasonable subject for an ad campaign.

(Actually, since both believe in supernatural beings it’s really only one belief system, but we’ll let that pass.)

The second ad, however – featuring Hu Jintao and Barack Obama – isn’t a good ad. Because this time, the execution isn’t about a clash of cultures, however different China and the US may be. It’s now just an ad about two straight men having a gay kiss, no more shocking than party lesbians in the West End on a Saturday night. (Well, OK, just a bit more shocking.)

And the message is lost, overshadowed by the actors.

Just goes to show: a campaign concept can so easily be obscured if you don’t get the execution exactly right.

In a display of the same intolerance both religions display towards gay men in real life, the Pope/Imam execution’s apparently been withdrawn after complaints.  (Benetton won’t mind; nothing builds a brand like having your ad campaign in the headlines.) While the politicians can continue slurping away, although I’m surprised Chavez the Chavster hasn’t said anything yet…

Despite my car’s oversized engine,

Like everyone who gets one, I felt unfairly victimised. It was just off the M4 so was still in a motorway mood… and why should I get penalised when cars were passing me as it flashed? (The answer: they got Fixed Penalty Notices too.) But the fine sheet had an interesting option: avoid points on my license… if I attend a “Speed Awareness Course” for first offenders. The shocking thing: it was actually quite good.

The first entertainment value came in the names of the presenters: Mr Neophyte and Miss Lightning. (You take all the laughs you can get at 7am on a damp Friday.) Despite his name, Mr Neophyte was an experienced driving instructor odd-jobbing for the Met, and his attitude was ideal. Whereas a Met man might’ve adopted a finger-wagging you-naughty-people approach (the attitude that’s led to a majority of white middle-class Londoners quietly withdrawing their support for the police) Neo prefers a regular-guy persona: I Understand, You’re Here to Avoid Points on your License. Which we are.

“We” are a bunch of 18 people. Most are from ethnic minorities; nearly all are male. But at this time in the morning, it’s probably the “professional” bunch: the folk who have jobs to go to. It’s good-humoured considering nobody wants to be here. But the mood is managed with skill.

First up’s a recap of things many of us haven’t revised in years: the Highway Code. Speed limits on Britain’s various road types. I get them all right but learn something too: do you know that if you see street lights without a sign indicating the limit, you assume it’s just 30mph? Interesting. Access roads to service stations count. Then comes the real stuff: the justification for why travelling at 35mph in a 30 zone can cost you your license (if you do it four times in four years

It’s all about curves, and I’m not talking rural roads here. If you hit a pedestrian below 30, they’ve got a high survival rate – over 80%. But for every mph above that, the chances they’ll die shoot off the scale – the graph’s like a hockey stick. By 40mph, you’re a death sentence for basically anyone you run into. And that’s the zone where most fatalities happen: on motorways you’re travelling much faster (70mph) and breaking the limit much more frequently (80-90mph) for far more miles… yet barely 6% of accidents take place on them.

So: for a course you don’t want to attend and feel victimised for being asked, the output’s not bad. I find I am thinking about speed more often, and paying particular attention when people are around. All in all, not a bad result.

“The richest 10pc of the UK population have a combined personal wealth of £4 million, million. A one-off 20pc tax on those people would raise £800 billion. Those people can afford it, they’d feel no pain, they’re so fabulously wealthy. With that sum of money you could pay off the entire government deficit. No need for any public spending cuts.”

“Protester Peter Tatchell” aptly demonstrates the biggest problem with the Left: its complete inability to do basic maths.Let’s skip over the fuzzymouthed phrasing (£4 trillion would sound less preteen, buddy) and take a look at what this socialist’s “solution” would actually involve…

He wants £800bn. So let’s assume that “rich” ten percent, 5.8 million UK residents, is okay with paying an average £137,000 each. Whoops! First mistake right there!

In Britain today, people at the 90th percentile (those Tatchell calls “rich”) earn about £40k. Hmm. That’s the income of a hardworking plumber or electrician putting in overtime. Are these people “rich”? If that describes your household income, “beware” indeed: the lefties want five years’ aftertax salary from you. My word, this guy’s truly from the Gordon Brown School of Public Finance, where taxpayers’ money is something that rains from the sky in infinite quantity.

A silly socialist, doing silly socialist things

But what the hell, this is socialist arithmetic. So they could sell their houses to be part of this socialist utopia, right? Hmmmm again. The top 10% of the UK possess average wealth of about £60,000, mostly in the value of their homes. So at his suggested 20% level, the average tax per person will be about £12k, and most people will have to sell their homes to pay it.

And wait, wait… that’ll raise less than a tenth of the £800bn he feels entitled to! What a silly little socialist.

Next up for critiquing: the “Tobin Tax” on financial transactions. Which would, in socialist speak, “reduce speculation and be good for the economy, and raise at least £100 billion a year.“

Hmmmmm once more. What happens in a global economy, Mr Socialist? When business feels squeezed, business goes elsewhere. Sweden had a nice little financial sector before 1984; when it introduced a Tobin Tax, they expected it to raise a billion and a half kroner a year. Nope. The business fled, and the tax never raised more than a twentieth of that level. Today, let’s just say if you want a job in finance, Sweden’s not the best place to look for it.

So, in summary: what this socialist suggests would raise less than a tenth of what he wants and throw over 5m people out on the streets. Perhaps that’s what he wants: socialists love the downtrodden.

Definition of a Socialist: someone who really, really likes getting his hands on someone else’s money. As I said, I wish I could at least respect them, even if their views are different to mine. But I just can’t.

It was obvious rather a lot of the audience were expecting a James Bond-style thriller. (Comments overheard on the way out: “appalling”, “junk”, “boring”, “slow”.) But I take that as a sad indictment of today’s want-it-all-now, over-stimulated, X-factor’d up society – a society of instant gratification where not having to wait for stuff is seen as a basic right.

But real films are narratives, not rollercoasters. To get this film you’ve got to sit quietly and actually listen. Which, let’s face it, is more than most people are capable of these days. This film is a piece of art – from its pixel-perfect 1970s sets (remember those funny-looking Saabs and cans of Harp?) to the quality of the acting.

I’ve never quite “got” Colin Firth – nor what women see in him; he always seems to spend about a third of his screen time blubbing. But he’s pretty good here – and it says something that in TTSS, he’s one of the worst-cast. And Gary Oldman’s George Smiley IS the Le Carre original. The slightly effete awkwardness of the harmless-looking middle-aged man who was actually the most effective agent on either side of the Cold War … Oldman captures every twitch and shuffle. The one occasion he holds a gun, it’s dangling unwanted at his side, a slightly distasteful accoutrement rather than a tool of the trade. And there are a LOT of extreme close-ups. Half the narrative is in facial expressions; this dialogue-driven film has relatively few words-per-minute. People are civilised, waiting for each other to finish a sentence before presenting their rebuttal.

(Is this gentlemanliness what’s missing from British society today? The chavster classes inhabiting so much of the mass media don’t have the wit or breeding to consider any situation not pertaining directly to themselves?)

And the narrative gains a lot from being pared back to a movie’s essential elements. The setpieces are terraced townhouses and workaday government offices; SiS high command inhabits a grimy Cambridge Circus building and the overseas headquarters are grimy import/export sheds. You get the feeling this is how intelligence work really was during the Cold War – a lot of dull hours waiting around at Teletype Terminals, where privileged but intelligent and civilised men pondered tiny scraps of information and deducted Red military policies and Kremlin power structures from a half-hidden salute in an old photograph.

(Of course, the blue connections and personal relationships of such groupings led to things like the Cambridge Five in real life, but the point stands: this film works.)

And because it was a more formal decade, protocol and procedure seem a lot more important. Simple acts like looking up files in a fifth floor archive are imbued with sweaty-collared menace … no Tom Cruise wirobatics, no webs of red lasers, just the clenching anguish of doing stuff you’re not supposed to be doing. Everyday tradecraft was about not leaving a paper trail, right down to swapping bag-check chits and leaving woodchips in the doorjamb. You never see James Bond walking around in his socks while a friend listens underneath to see if the floorboards will creak, but such details are what distinguish a good agent from a bad one. The beauty is many such scenes are never explained; you’re left to work it out for yourself.

Go and see “Tinker Tailor”. Chances are you’ll hate it.

And by the way, Odeon, your cinema is still crap. For future reference, it’s normal practice to TURN THE LIGHTS OFF BEFORE THE FILM STARTS, without members of the audience having to come out of the theatre to tell you.

*Possibly connected to me upending her popcorn before the film started.