Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Reflections from a fortnight on the road across Milan, the UK and Normandy.
1. Reflections from a busy fortnight on the road: 1
Sometimes it only takes a window seat on a clear day to remind you anew of the commonplace technological wonder that is modern passenger air travel.
From Milan, we flew down the Aosta Valley, with La Meije standing proud against the skyline to our left. Then directly over Mont Blanc and the Grand Jorasses (above) before crossing Lake Geneva, and then up to the French coastline at Le Havre.
Then, as we banked across the Channel, a view of the entire Sussex coast: from Eastbourne all the way down towards the Isle of Wight, with my old East Sussex stomping ground clearly defined in the foreground, and our new home of Bracklesham Bay just visible in the distance.
Vast swathes of my entire adult life viewed from above, from a perspective we take far too much for granted.
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2. Reflections from a busy fortnight on the road: 2
The sheer buzzy noisiness of modern life, as more and more fully adult humans deem it acceptable to wander around with their phones on speaker on full blast.
The trucker on the boat scrolling TikTok at deafening volume. The family in the restaurant conducting a raucous FaceTime with overseas clan members. The businessman holding a Zoom call on speaker at the breakfast buffet. The kids on the bus playing music and daring anybody to challenge them.
Technology cocooning us in our own solipsistic bubbles, with zero regard or even interest in the impact on our fellow planet dwellers.
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3. Reflections from a busy fortnight on the road: 3
An atavistic, naturalistic tableau from the front of the 8am Brittany Ferries journey from Portsmouth to Caen: colonies of gannets, fulmars and other seabirds hunting en masse across a huge territory, miles out in the Channel. A beautiful and timeless spectacle completely ignored by everybody else on the boat (yes, they were all glued to their phones).
4. Reflections from a busy fortnight on the road: 4
Don’t get me wrong. My phone has improved my life in many ways. But does Jony Ive lose any sleep when he witnesses with his own eyes and ears this evidence of the fraying social contract his fiendish invention has engendered? (Spoiler alert: does he fook.)
5. A return to Normandy means a return to the caravan, and normal podcasting service returning. In the pipeline: Johno Verity, Christina Koch, Maribou State and more.
6. As I prepare to rev up the podcast engine again, and go through the familiar “does anybody even care?” ritualistic self-abasement that attends the beginning of any creative bout, a welcome reminder from listener Steve Gibson of how far these things travel.
Steve got in touch to tell me how he’d attended my live interview with Yulex’s Jeff Martin and Liz Bui at the Finisterre store in London a year or so back. Afterwards, Steve grabbed Jeff to describe an idea he’d had: using Yulex natural rubber foam to reinvent the traditional neoprene can cooler.
A couple of years, and rather more development than expected, later, Steve’s Eco-Koozie brand - handmade in Lincoln from Yulex foam, recycled polyester and water-based inks, with small numbered runs - is up and running.
Showing up is important. You really never know where it will lead, or what impact it will have. Thanks for the reminder Steve.
7. I love this piece on how Arabic World Cup commentary follows a rich oral tradition of declamatory poetry.
8. Another plug for UN[PARA]LD, the collective with the grandest of visions: “embedding accessibility into the design, culture and infrastructure of the outdoors and sports industry - for every-body, as standard.”
This genuinely innovative initiative needs your support: back the crowdfunder here, and help them deliver their first round of prototypes.
9. Long-term Insights followers will be aware of my disdain for the sheer number of conventions in agency and marketing land that everyone quietly accepts, and almost nobody actually challenges (those clowns holding small mics against cut-out backdrops while proffering shonky brand marketing insights are a recent classic example of this).
And free pitching (or, even worse, free “gold/silver/bronze” bet-hedging pitching) is right up there, and it really shouldn’t take a seven-part investigative series to say what really should be quite obvious: pay for the work, or don’t ask for it.
10. This week's reading: Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929, the Billions writer's pacy account of the OG Wall Street Crash. If you believe in the lifecycles of history, we should have another one coming down the pipe any minute now. And you know what the last one led to...
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VERY excited to hear from Christina again!
On a recent flight, I lost a young man completely lose his mind when his phone ran out of battery mid-video. Raw panic. It was like watching a drug addict having his heroin taken away