The last post was written the day before it all kicked off in Tottenham, and I was so busy that weekend I didn’t see the news until the Monday.

When I did re-join the World, my first panic was for my daughter and her other half who were visiting friends in Tottenham, fortunately I found out later their weekend plans meant they were out of town camping in Dorset.
Another friend was Facebooking pictures from his hotel window of the fires in Croydon. The teenage sister of one of my Godsons just happened to be scheduled for working in a London branch of Boots that weekend and ended up behind a door fastened with chains, scared stiff and not doing what she was there for.

Fortunately, out of the dozen I knew were in the trouble spots, no one I know personally was injured or worse during the mayhem. I only wish everyone could say the same.

A week after the happiest day of the year eh?

As reams have been written and thousands of miles of video filmed (yes I know it’s not on tape anymore) about the so-called English Riots I’m not going to attempt to analyse the reasons for, the reactions to, or the no doubt two wrongs don’t make a right knee jerk reactions which will follow.

But I will humbly offer the following:

When I was a kid there was trouble on the streets, there was when my Dad was a kid and there was when my Grandparents were young – the further you go back the harsher the penalties for crime and disorder were – but it still happened. The difference today is there is no dilution.

Let me explain: When I was a kid, in walking distance, there were at least three youth clubs, two companies of Boys Brigade, three Scout troops and of course the opposite gender Girls Brigade, Girl Guides etc. The local Junior School hosted a huge group of Woodcraft Folk – there were always some after school activities going on – Art, Music and every type of sports team at virtually every school and every Church. In my Dads day they had fewer things going on but they had a little thing called World War Two to keep them busy once they hit 18.

This meant that although there were still gangs, bad people, crime and mayhem the scale was so much smaller, the majority of kids were busy being raised by the whole community – the scale of the most recent flare up had nothing to do with BB Messenger passing the word and everything to do with so many more young people feeling they have nothing to lose, nothing to live for and no understanding of what pain their actions will cause to others. Because no one has taught them the basic kindness they would have picked up naturally by being part of something bigger outside their own, often dysfunctional, families.

If you allow successive Governments and Councils to take away the facilities that keep young, energetic and wasted minds busy – what the bloody hell do you expect? The Devil makes work for idle hands as Grandma used to say.

If your childhoods and families and life don’t bear any resemblance to the attitudes and actions you saw on the street last week – if you don’t understand where they are coming from or think locking them up via what amounts to high speed kangaroo midnight courts; I would ask you to try for one minute to stop thinking how bad these kids are and just how lucky you are that someone somewhere took the time to make sure you were taught, inspired or raised not to be like them.

You were not born with the basic sympathy, empathy and kindness you take for granted or think should be the norm – someone else, probably a lot of someone else’s made you that way.

The kid that gets locked up, you may say quite rightly, this week for smashing a window or arson or nicking a pair of Nike – his family evicted from their council house and their benefits stopped (because thats going to make it easyfor them to stay out of trouble) ?

Maybe he just wasn’t as lucky as you.

Was it last Monday or last Friday? The day someone on tabloid morning TV informed the Nation that that day was the happiest day of the year? The day when most people were going to be happier than any other day?
There was some statistical reason to do with holidays and the length of the daylight hours and the lack of financial pressure and how people were happy because the kids were on their long summer break but school hadn’t been out so long the grownups had got sick of seeing them yet and those who had didn’t care because it was taking them a third of the time it would normally take to drive to work etc etc.
It is like a modern day festival of the equinox – we no longer see great portents in the sky at the longest and shortest days, we don’t sacrifice a goat and beg the Gods to give us a mild winter or a great summer or an abundant harvest – we have the saddest day where we are still giving most of our money to the Government and the days are short and dark and we all suffer from some degree of Seasonal Defective Disorder and there’s now the Happiest day (see above) pronounced over the airwaves by the great Druid himself Adrian Childs (is that is name – my remote finger flicks through the channels so fast I lose track of who’s who – you know the Brummy Football guy?).
Surely if we knew what made the majority of us happy or sad – we’d stop doing or start doing those things all the time – like building schools at the end of every third Road so parents in 4wd monster trucks don’t cause the world to move two thirds slower than it should every morning and every afternoon – we’d spread the holidays more so we could spread the happiness, we’d change the tax system so we had to pay less less often and we’d all permanently move to a warmer climate.
See; Silly Season explained and sorted in less than 350 words.

Next!

At the dawn of what was to become a long long journey not only through drawing pictures and writing words but that unavoidable bit you have to contend with if you don’t want to take orders from someone else – Business – I was moaning at a friend about some stitch up I’d found myself the victim of : I was very green at the time.

The friend had only been in business himself for two or three years but was a good 30 years older than me and so I listened when he gave me a particularly sage piece of unforgettable advice: “There are enough nice people out there; you don’t have to deal with the bastards.” It has become a bit of a mantra over the years – and a burden.

If, like everyone here, you go through life liking people in general, taking folk, and what they say at face value you find most people are “nice” so when they let you down, stitch you up or just don’t come up to your expectations you tend to feel more hurt than if you had expected the worse of everyone in the first place.

Recently we extricated ourselves from one such situation, with no real damage just a healthy dose of disappointment at what some are prepared to do to get their own way – a way that was obviously wrong and possibly bordering on the illegal – but which we could do nothing about without exposing the full extent of the not good stuff that was going on – which in turn would have hurt too many people who didn’t deserve to be caught in the fall out.

I’m sure if the boot had been on the other foot there would have been no hesitation regardless of the collateral damage – which is why we are no longer involved.

This morning with a final look over the shoulder we looked forward again and realised that everyone else we deal with, suppliers, clients and associates are all ordinary (often extraordinary) eclectic, interesting and very nice people.

So we can relax, pat ourselves on the back and bear witness to the truth of the mantra:

You don’t have to deal with the bastards.

Here at BSE Towers we are quietly chuffed with the new website – not because there aren’t, arguably, more technically efficient sites out there, not because there are very few sites as original and not because we have had universally great feedback (so far) but because it actually feels like us.

It was made that way by collaboration – everyone here made a contribution to every page, proving again that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

This is rare in today’s business world – too many template websites, too many new brands that look as though they have dropped off the end of a design conveyor belt.

The great global brands, which are almost all over a century old, were designed on drawing boards and sign shop benches – they were famously individual several decades before they ever appeared on a computer monitor.

(This is what we need to get back to – the hand crafted collaborative projects that make a firm unique. Since printing and sign making was dumbed down to allow for efficiency and feeding the machines this has had to come from the independent design houses; but too much of the industry is obsessed with the technology instead of the art.)

We want you to deal with this independent design house because you know we are as unique as you are. Because you feel at home, as though there is that personal relationship “fit” you feel when you are in the company of old friends; which is what makes a team work and because you want your firm to stand out from the crowd.

If you prefer to deal with Lord Sugar’s Apprentice style slick “professionals” you are not only in the wrong place you are also never going to be seen as different – and difference is what life is all about.

“If you want to be invisible look like everyone else” as it says on our website.

www.bluestrawberryelephant.co.uk

No need to say – that was not a good news weekend: All the horrific mayhem of Norway’s Friday followed by the almost tiny in comparison tragedy of another tortured artist going the way of far too many before her. Of course; tiny it was not.

In between these two, each in their own way historic events, what were you doing?
Getting on with the life that must go on? The usual shopping trip, household chores, some long planned or impulse bit of DIY? Or did you get to the Tramlines Festival in Sheffield?

If you had seen the papers all carrying the same unreal photograph on Saturday morning did wandering around the country’s biggest free music festival feel strange?
Personally, despite having seen the TV coverage on Friday night and read all the ‘I’ editorial over a coffee on the Station concourse it didn’t seem to sink in.

I was meeting a friend and a bunch of his buddies at Sheffield Rail Station for a planned day on a Real Ale Rail Trail – a first for me – with seven new friends in tow, We all swapped clichés and well worn phrases of regret over the deaths in Norway but were then taken up by which train, what ticket from where to what; and it became a really great day.

Breakfast in Leeds followed by a walk along the picturesque tow path of Skipton to the first pint in the Narrow Boat and then two more in the Cock & Bottle soaked up by Steak and Ale Pie with Chips and peas, with much unembarrassed Seventies style humour and ‘sodding the diet’, before continuing on to The Railway at Cononoly, The Boltmakers in Keighley and Fanny’s in Saltaire before heading back to Leeds and a change of train line towards a Fish & Chip supper in Barnsley and The Tap back at Sheffield Station.

We heard about the death of Amy Winehouse while waiting for the train on the single return platform at Saltaire.

Life was once again a picture of sharp contrasts, a delicate bright bubble resting between heavy oak book ends.

Where the news of Amy's death reached us Last stop before heading back south