Looking ahead

The Naming of Cats

I'm not quite sure when and how my mild 'wouldn't it be nice to have a cat' became 'we're adopting the four feral farm cats from down the lane'. Never mind, they are safe in the kitchen and now they need names - hence this musing out loud. With four new kittens to name all at once there seems to be the need to make a statement or tell a story through the interplay of their name tags.

An early suggestion to go with the readymade quartet of the Four Musketeers might have been tempting had it not been for the idea of calling 'Athos, Portos, Aramis, d'Artagnan' over and over from the back door. This 'back door' test is essential before landing on any cat's name apparently.

Other famous foursomes have made their pitch. John, Paul, George and Ringo - too obvious around here really. Richmal Crompton's band of Outlaws - William, Henry, Douglas and Ginger have a certain youthful appeal and ol' Ginger is easy enough to spot amongst our lot. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - not sure you want cats named after war, famine, conquest and death even as a joke.

Four seasons - bit contrived; four gospels - controversial; north, south, east, west - confusing for everybody. Earth, air, fire and water - still boy band country unfortunately.

So which are the most popular names for English-speaking cats? For the boys, it's:

1. MAX
2. BUDDY
3. JAKE
4. ROCKY

And with the girls:

1. MOLLY
2. MAGGIE
3. DAISY
4. LUCY

Short, punchy, crisp names with little sentiment or pretension - names for calling out clearly, spelling easily, remembering quickly.

So what's it to be? Movie stars, motor cars, favourite bars? Family members, old flames, names discarded for earlier offspring? Rhyming couplets, an alliterative string, four bad puns, feline onomatopoeia? Huddle, Cuddle, Puddle and Muddle?

You could over-complicate the whole selection process - all part of the onerous responsibility of new cat ownership - why not just go for four names you like?

Any ideas?

Conducting the choir

Robert Poynton of 'On Your Feet' - my improvisation guru - and the Danish choral conductor Peter Hanke, founder of 'Exart Performances', recently combined their two sister disciplines to produce a workshop in London's small and perfectly formed Amadeus Centre. After a brief welcome and warm up exercise, fifteen slightly nervous participants spent the afternoon taking it in turns to conduct a four voice ensemble rehearsing their madrigals. Using a well timed series of gentle interventions Peter nudged all his amateur conductors up the competence slope towards a firm base camp of confidence. As a demonstration of the leadership principle that you sometimes need to 'act yourself into a new way of thinking', the experience was full of sharp insights into our individual communication styles and interactions.

I walked out into the russet light of a London autumn evening humming what I fondly imagined to be a baroque melody and determined to listen harder and let my hands do more of the talking in future.

Welcome to my office

‘Welcome to my office,’ announced Maurice Ratsisakanana Besoa, our designated guide to the Andasibe Mantadia sections of the Perinet Rainforest Reserve some four hours by road due east of Madagascar's capital, Antananarivo. We were standing on a small wooden slatted bridge across a muddy red stream at the edge of a clearing in the Eastern highlands montane rainforest.

‘The office furniture is made from the finest hardwood,’ he continued developing his well rehearsed theme and stroking the lichen mottled trunk of the nearest tree, ‘and the birds are my telephone.’ We paused with him to take in a note or two of birdsong right on cue.

‘E-mail access?’ I queried in what I hoped was a suitable entry into the obviously playful spirit of this patter. At that moment the booming siren cry of the indri (largest of the lemur species) rang out across the clearing and was answered by another similar yodel from a distant mountainside.

‘It’s for you,’ countered Maurice with a triumphant twinkle in his gentle brown eyes.

Seeing the rainforest through Maurice’s eyes was a very intense and yet relaxing experience. He is a consummate professional in the business of subtly directing and shepherding his charges along the paths and towards the flora and fauna he knows so intimately. He is another who is fluent in at least four languages when it comes to opening and filing all the entries in his office marked lemur, bird, orchid, frog, chameleon, medicinal plant and tree. To these languages of professional guiding he adds the language of birdsong where he is an instant and irrepressible mimic of any notes he hears. Walking with him is like spending time with the conductor of a concert orchestra tuning up behind the scenes.

‘Lemurs don’t keep appointments in this office, unfortunately,’ he confesses and then adds with his customary wink, ‘but they are creatures of habit!’ And so we feel entirely confident that with the aid of this extraordinary man’s talent, we will see and hear everything that is on offer in this most green and peaceful of high places.

It’s a world of moss, fungus and lichen covered tree trunks varying in girth from fingers of trailing liana to the four-armed circumference of the forest’s oldest standing tree columns. In places you are surrounded by Gothic cathedral pillars of tree fern and spongy bark ascending to filigree canopy twenty metres high and in others you are hemmed in by thickets of bamboo and vine creeper. Ancient cycads at drunken angles look as if they may have been carelessly shouldered aside by a tyrannosaurus while a fallen log pillar stands waist high across the path finally felled in its long wrestle with a strangler fig.

In places, Maurice pointed out familiar names in an entirely exotic context – vanilla (an epiphyte orchid runner in its native form) or wild strawberry and asparagus. Sometimes the narrow path comes rushing towards you as a tumble of mossy rock like an arrested green waterfall, sometimes it falls away steeply down a buttressed ravine of roots. And it’s a rainy forest – the essential clue is in the name really. From time to time we pulled on and off our waterproofs never quite sure whether we’d be too hot and humid with them or too squelchy and wet without them. And then the sun would break through the spreadeagled shape of a vakona palm and light up a birds nest tree fern and a little gentle steam would rise from everyone as we dried out and kept tramping on in Maurice’s sure footsteps.

We were tracking a family of diademed sifakas. When we finally got within sight of them – our sight, Maurice had been observing them for some time – there they were contentedly munching their breakfast. Our breakfast of coffee and rolls was hours away at the Vakona Forest Lodge and the delicious looking honey and caramel diademed sifakas, like their chocolaty cream cousins the Coquerel’s, had the effect of making me feel instantly and ravenously hungry.

We made gradual progress as the sifakas chomped their way sedately through the forest. Maurice has the ability to tap into any of his passing filing cabinets and pull out a story about the medicinal qualities of a leaf, the camouflage of a gecko or the pollination routine of a flower. He also understands the immense power of silence when facilitating other people’s experience of their new surroundings and quite a lot of our time with him was conducted in the sort of hushed ethereal quiet that falls when you know you are somewhere special for a short space of time.

‘Stop,’ commanded our guide and proceeded to manoeuvre us skillfully into place between some slippery roots until we could get a clear view into the canopy of our next lemur appointment. ‘Common brown, red-fronted, male and female,’ he declared once we could see the pair now almost directly above us. We’d seen common brown lemurs in Anjajavy but of the white-fronted variety and they’re as different as Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen – although less argumentative than either species. We’d now seen two of the big three diurnal lemur species in this part of the rainforest which left just the booming indri or ‘Babakoto’ (father of the child) as he is known locally.

The name ‘indri’ apparently derives from the Malagasy meaning ‘up there’ and it was mistakenly believed to refer to the actual animal itself by the first European naturalists who were expertly and kindly guided around the same forests in the 1860’s by Maurice’s predecessors. The legend of Babakoto refers to a small boy lost in the forest who rather than meeting wicked witches, big bad wolves or evil hobgoblins is fortunate enough to be rescued by a large black and white primate looking somewhere between a panda and a koala bear. The story seems to reveal the essentially benevolent and symbiotic relationship which the Malagasy people still enjoy with their unique neighbours. The fact that they are in desperate competition for the same increasingly scarce resources of wood and soil has not altered the essential respectful bond between man and animal despite a ballooning human population (20 million today projected to double in the next 20 years.)

By the time we, or rather Maurice, eventually tracked down the resident indri troop, I felt as if I already knew the creatures from their haunting whale song calls and from their many poster boy publicity pictures and that I was simply being granted an audience with a local celebrity. They did not disappoint. Suddenly they were all about us overhead. Four big, heavy adults with their stumpy sawn-off tails and big teddy bear ears. When they opened their mouths to utter one of their by now familiar howls, their lips were a livid red and their heads snapped back sharply to help project the sound. It was more football terrace shout than grand opera it must be said but it more than commanded its auditorium. Like all lemurs the indri despite its size (approximately 2ft in body length and 4ft tall with hind legs fully extended and weighing around 12-15kgs) is an agile trapeze athlete and thinks nothing of a 10metre tree to tree leap without a safety net. Madagascar has never won an Olympic medal of any colour but the average indri standing jump would have won gold in every Games since 1896.

Yet despite its big, booming voice, size and athletic prowess, the indri is a sensitive soul much disturbed by habitat shrinkage and disruption to its food supply. An indri’s diet comprises over 40 different specialized forms of vegetation found specifically in certain eastern highland forests and to remove them from this environment is a certain death sentence. A team of primatologists from Duke University, North Carolina found this out to their cost when in the mid 1970’s they tried to encage a monogamous pair of indris in a purpose built enclosure deep in the endemic forest itself. Their methods were considered advanced at the time representing an improvement on traditional zoo capture and internment. However the indri quickly moped and died in forest captivity within sight and sound of their free bounding fellows. To this day no method of keeping the indri in captivity has been devised, thus restricting any breeding programmes. The animals remain free spirits calling out as the darkness closes on their wilderness.

We moved on from indri watching, or rather they moved on from lunching over our heads and made our way back down to the clearing and the bridge where we had first met Maurice. He had indeed shown us around his office and introduced us to his extraordinary world. I wondered about my ability to give him an equivalent urban jungle tour in a location of my choice. Downtown Cape Town perhaps? Shell’s offices in The Hague are full of strange creatures? The London Underground maybe? I’m not sure I could do anywhere quite the justice that this genuinely humble man brings to his daily commute and communion.

Madagascar dreaming

On the verandah rail of our beach villa looking out in the direction of the Comores, a collection of ‘les objets trouvés’ slowly accumulated during our week long stay at Anjajavy. There were scallops and cowries from the dazzling white sands immediately below us, smooth coral pebbles and foamy driftwood shapes from the tide line. Seedpods from the size of giant, hairy fist to fairy fingernails. There were wooden artifacts tossed aside in the making of boats, ox carts and fish traps - charred pegs, stone hammers and sharp hooks. There sat creature homes – bird-woven, bee-waxed, termite-chewed, snail-worn. Feathers of the Madagascar hoopoe and the helmeted guinea fowl. Fallen fruits – coconut, mango pip, lychee case, palm kernel, seed gourds. Each objet weathered, washed smooth and steered by the wind. A beachcomber’s careless trousseau of memories and associations.

Anjajavy itself is a wonderful place to contemplate the tides of life. A beach resort set on a slim peninsula of protected indigenous forest, it is one of those deliberately inaccessible places that makes you work and sweat to get there and then rewards you with the balm of a palm framed view over the Mozambique Channel, an infinity pool and a resident troop of Coquerel’s sifakas – oh, and ice cold Three Horses Beer in chunky Star Breweries brown bottles.

The Coquerel’s sifaka was our first lemur sighting of any kind and the first of the three members of the sifaka family that we were to meet in three different locations in a fortnight. Coquerel’s look good enough to eat only in the sense that they are smothered in a mixture of rich chocolate and cream fur. Luckily they are protected both by law and more powerfully by custom and taboo as they and other lemurs are regarded as representing the ancestors – ‘koomba’ or ghosts in the entirely friendly, reassuring sense of the term. Sadly their dry, deciduous coastal forest ranges, full of beautifully light and hard wood, have not been protected nor managed sustainably over the years putting their feeding and breeding ranges under intolerable pressure. Equally sadly they are not immune to the market forces for local bush meat and exotic pets. In Madagascar 20 million of the world’s poorest people share the island with 20% of the world’s rarest species and that tension is manifest everywhere even to the most hedonistic, camera happy tourist. In addition the population has doubled since independence from France in 1960 during which time half the natural forest cover has been consumed by ‘tavy’- subsistence slash and burn agriculture. In less than another 3 million years at the present rate of forest degradation and consequent soil erosion the island will be back to a flat floating vegetation mat with no more than a few hardy plants and animals clinging on for dear life.

None of this seems to bother the Coquerel’s troop who swing by Anjajavy’s Oasis garden sanctuary every afternoon around tea time. The Oasis is a limestone lined pond in a natural glade enhanced by careful plantings of splayed travellers’ palms, chameleon inhabited papyrus, scented frangipani, hibiscus, bougainvillea and plumbago blossoms. On a single, simply dressed table Darjeeling, Earl Grey and Rooibos tea are served alongside iced drinks with coconut macaroons or vanilla almond biscuits. Beside the monogrammed white crockery stands the most important single contribution to a pleasant afternoon’s tea in the shade - a spray canister of mosquito repellent. The sifakas are more interested in the leaves and shoots in the canopy of acacia, hackberry and tamarind trees. They do not drink any liquids at all and rely on their high fibre diet to provide its own moisture. The troop communicate with a constant running commentary of mutterings, squeaks and cluckings and are completely habituated to their daily rather daft sightings of cameras, camcorders, iPhones, binoculars, pith helmets and sensible walking shoes below.

When they descend to the red dusty floor of their forest, these sifakas find that their long, whippy hindquarters and finely furled tails which serve them so well when bounding from tree to tree are a bit of a drawback on the ground and so they resort to a series of manic forward hops like a small child astride its first bouncy spacehopper. Once they have traversed a leaf carpeted clearing successfully, they cling briefly and thankfully to the base of a tree and then leap explosively and yet as gracefully as any trapeze artist into the trailing creepers and branches above where they land and settle, bound by bound, as softly as a soufflé.

Coquerel’s sifakas are amongst the over 80 separate species of lemur found on Madagascar and nowhere else in the world. In our fortnight on the island we met representatives of just 12 of those species suggesting that at least one more serious lemur trekking trip may be required before my wife turns 100. The majority of lemurs are tiny creatures no bigger than your outstretched palm, nocturnal, solitary in their foraging habits, absurdly fearful of their very few natural predators (mainly birds of prey) and spend all day snuggled up together for warmth in nests and colonies which they rent from termites, birds and spiders. Our guide who first introduced us to this secret night life around the Anjajavy estate was Rasolofoson Radolalaina Patrick.

Rado is a born naturalist. An invisible bird calls a single note, a lizard scurries under a leaf or a mouse lemur twitches its tail and he has all four of its names in English, French, Malagasy and Latin at the tip of his tongue. He moves with that unhurried calm of woodsmen everywhere and his eyes light up excitedly when he sees that you share some of his sheer joy in his fragile world. We set off one evening for a stroll in the limestone tsingy rock formations which define this part of the coastal forest and mangrove system. The rocks themselves are spiky extrusions like huge, jagged pumice stones which may or may not have been coral reef formations in a previous life. Almost miraculously they sprout huge baobab trunks and melting waxy strangler fig roots from their gnarled crevices. Somewhere in the subterranean cellars of these tsingy outcrops are trapped aquifer chambers of brackish water sustaining life on their grey, razor sharp flanks. Rado guided us effortlessly through this terrain his searchlight bobbing up against the canopy looking for the telltale twin pinpricks of reflective lemur retina. “There, there – grey mouse lemur!”

That night we saw several of the teacup sized grey mouse lemurs, a golden brown mouse lemur, a rare white footed sportive lemur (only recently recorded as a separate species), a giant forest rat (a potential predator), a clutch of sleeping sifakas wedged into a tree fork, a zebra spider, Oustalet’s chameleon and a hairy land crab scuttling for its burrow and then suddenly standing its ground with its fighting claw raised defiantly like some sort of mutant ninja light sabre. We also heard a Scops owl calling, the plaintive infant cry of the sickle-billed vanga, the distinctive ‘pyok-twoop-twoop’ of the Madagascar nightjar and finally the unmistakable ‘pyop’ of a fine South African wine cork from Anjajavy’s open air dining terrace.

I know that I do not have the full palette of words required to capture the kaleidoscopic magnificence of an Anjajavy sunset. A few that I jotted down on a beer mat during our first brief dusk sit beside me now as a write at the start of a glorious English autumn and remind me of other glowing canvases to come: pink, purple, burnt orange, oyster, pearl, puce, pewter, mauve, taupe, dove, tobacco smoke, inked embers. A good night.

And still the collection of objets trouvés continued to grow. A pebble here, a nut there, a seed pod too tactile to resist. Contemplating my treasure trove at sunset one evening, it struck me that they could be used to tell the story of the island itself - that whole ocean bound evolutionary time capsule that is Madagascar.

Everything represented on our balcony was light enough to float and resilient enough to survive salt water. Animals had come to the island that way and adapted to tap into all the food resources that were lined up on the broad rail in the rapidly fading light. Birds came quite naturally from the African mainland and we had seen many familiar Southern and East African species but with a slight Madagascar twist or trill marking them as endemic to the island. Man had arrived as well in search of food, fuel and shelter and found them largely in the tree species whose pod shapes so attracted my magpie eye. And there were simple tools too represented in the collection – wood, bone, stone, string and metal representing successive waves of human technological evolution. I could have added rubber, glass and plastic from the seashore to help update the story but the balcony was already beginning to resemble some deranged pawnbroker’s groaning shelves.

Contemplating Madagascar

For years I have looked at the map of Africa with its great Madagascar outrigger island and happily assumed that in continental drift terms this massive fragment fitted snugly into its apparently matching curves due west about 400km across the Mozambique Channel – in other words into the ample eastward facing bosom of Mozambique itself. My recent and cursory research into plate tectonics and the Gondwanaland theory suggests that the whole floating ark that is Madagascar actually sheared away from what we now know as the coast of Tanzania and Kenya some 165 million years ago, thus belonging many degrees further north than I had it slotted away – much like a jig-saw puzzle piece that you have jammed into place because of where you want it to fit.

Furthermore I had not realized that the long straight edge of Madagascar’s east coast was once attached to the long straight edge of the Indian sub-continent – which must have been one of the longest, toughest straight edged rips ever - even in geological history. Amazing to think that it was once possible to walk from Mombasa to Mumbai overland by tackling the small mission of crossing Madagascar’s mountainous spine. A mere training run for Sachin Tendulkar.

Madagascar is big. It’s approximately the size of Texas or Botswana and bigger than Spain, Sweden, Japan or France. It’s as if you took all that dough that was used to make the roughly rectangular pie crust that is France and rolled it into a fat, crusty baguette instead. And while we are with the food theme, if you sniff around carefully in your fridge or biscuit tin, you’ll almost certainly find a small part of Madagascar as the island accounts for over half the world’s vanilla bean production.

The island has long held other fascinations for me. Gerald Durrell was largely responsible for the majority of them. His descriptions of searching for mouse lemurs by torchlight, his meeting with the near mythical fossa cat, his fight to save the endangered and incredibly gentle aye-aye all fired my boyhood imagination and fuelled my entirely unfulfilled ambition to become a game ranger. Durrell once described the island as looking like ‘a badly presented omelette’ on his map of the world. I grew up poring over a large wall map of the world in the back room off our kitchen where my mother baked scones. I needed a little footstool made by my grandfather to help me examine the further northern climes in detail – Madagascar on the other hand was close enough to the ground for me to trace its outline at about eye level to a six year old.

Madagascar for me held all the mystery of Narnia, all the menace of Gollum, all the magic of Doctor Dolittle of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. Was it not the island of Sinbad’s encounter with the Roc, surely Gulliver had visited there on his travels? So when I asked my wife where she wanted to go for her 50th birthday and she said ‘Madagascar’, I knew she must have been listening to my various travel fantasy ravings over the years. Oh dear.

While doing the research for a holiday there, I was struck by the number of different names the island has attracted over the years. ‘The Great Red Island’ is how early Portuguese navigators saw it rising out of the sea – a sort of maritime Ayers Rock image. ‘The Island at the End of the Earth’ is attributed to ancient Chinese cartographers who obviously got about a bit but decided they had to draw the line somewhere. ‘Le Grande Isle’ countered the French, who set about turning Madagascar into a colonial market garden and refueling station in the 1880’s - what with the Cape Town stand on the route to the East already being taken.

Marco Polo is credited in some quarters with having coined the term ‘Madagascar’ having confused it in his jumbled explorer’s mind with ‘Malaysia’ – both being ‘down there somewhere’ from Venice presumably. Funnily enough this was exactly the same confusion that the first travel agent I approached was suffering from – which makes you wonder about which agency old Marco used and where he was really trying to get to?

Another nickname that I like for Madagascar is, ‘The Eighth Continent’. It’s more commonly billed as the world’s fourth biggest island behind Greenland (which may in fact be three congealed islands under its increasingly gooey ice cap), New Guinea and Borneo (which both have rather messy country boundaries striped all over them.) However, rather than the dubious distinction of fourth place, I prefer to think of Madagascar jostling Antarctica and Australia in the queue for full continental recognition (‘we’ve got a shelf and all…’) If it’s a Malagasy queue, it could take some time. But then the place has already been some time in the making because the title that is indisputably Madagascar’s is that of ‘the world’s first and oldest island’.

Back to Gondwanaland, the mega-continent, breaking apart all those millions of years ago. I have always struggled to find my frame of reference within geological and evolutionary timescales. The only trick that has come close to working for me is the one where the earth’s entire estimated existence from Big Bang to Big Brother is reduced to the scale of a single calendar year. I find it easier to imagine that great jig-saw of continental land masses cracking up and drifting apart around about early July with the first completely isolated fragment, roughly comprising modern day India, Pakistan and Madagascar, fully surrounded by the one mega-ocean by the end of the month. Then a further crack appears in August shearing off the larger Indian section to begin its headlong charge northwards crashing into the Eurasian plate around mid-September causing that almighty fender bender of a smash that we now call the Himalayas. Madagascar meanwhile floats serenely south across the equator and comes to its gentle bobbing berth a respectable distance from the mother continent by early November. About a month after this continental upheaval settles down, the first lemur wakes up.

The original proto-lemur ancestor was apparently an African who got so fed up with being beaten to a pulp by her rapidly developing gorilla and chimp second cousins that she and a couple of the kids hopped onto a passing vegetation raft in early December and floated across the Mozambique Channel in search of some peace and quiet and a food supply that she could call her own. Luckily she was light enough not to sink her leaky craft on its 400km crossing and sleepy enough not to notice that there were at least six different baobab seed pods on her floating mat. Once they arrived on their new island home, the family fanned out in search of food in an evolutionary process that we now call ‘adaptive radiation’ whereby animal adaptation to the environment is determined by the constraints of specific food niches.

And so today we have the over 80 different fruit and leaf and bamboo and insect and grub eating lemur species. Luckily for all of them all their major predators - not to mention the large and frankly tiresome African apes - had not made it across the water. In fact life really was bliss for the lemurs for a while because the first human settlers only showed up right at the end of December and of course immediately started to cut and burn their forests.

These first human settlers on Madagascar were an intrepid bunch in their own right. They had floated, surfed and occasionally paddled their dug-out canoes complete with balsa wood outriggers and palm fibre sails from India, Indonesia and possibly even further abroad, driven by the trade winds, pelted by monsoons and dragged by all the swirling currents of the Indian Ocean. Madagascar’s eastern seaboard with its lush tropical rainforest running down to white coconut fringed coral sands must have seemed every bit as attractive as it is portrayed in today’s travel brochures. Evidence of this early human settlement can be traced back just over two thousand years (we are already at December the 31st by our one evolutionary year calendar) by which time the Chinese, Egyptians, Malians and Romans had been crawling all over their known worlds for centuries – or seconds depending on your chronometer.

Much of Madagascar’s heritage remains visibly Indo-Malay - the single, polysyllabic language uniting the whole island; the abundant rice paddies in the monsoon facing valleys of the eastern highlands; the pragmatic acceptance of Christianity as just another ancestor-based form of spiritual sustenance; the whistling rickshaws and gaudy taxi-brousses of downtown Antananarivo. And yet there are clear African footprints as well – the widespread currency of zebu cattle; the triangular sailed dhows off the west coast; the baobab groves with their sacrificial offerings; the screaming presidential motorcade on its way to the airport. “We are of Africa but not African,” said our guide at one point. He spoke both French and English impeccably but unfortunately supported Chelsea.

He went on to apologise for the fact that Madagascar’s politics are in a state of extreme flux with a transitional government trying to hammer out a compromise constitution. In the meantime the reins of power seem to be in the hands of a young president who was once mayor of the capital, Antananarivo, and before that a radio DJ. Now Boris Yeltsin was known to seize a baton and conduct a military band and Bill Clinton was elected partly because he played the saxophone on late night TV but Madagascar is the only country I can think of which can claim to be run by a full-time, disc-spinning, headphone-wearing professional DJ. Cool.

Leaving Madagascar

‘Think of it this way.’ said Lalaina, our overall tour guide and mentor in all things Malagasy, ‘every bump in the road takes you closer to what you’ve come to see.’ As a philosophical mantra it was flawless, up there with Proust, although as a travel forecast it had an ominously uncomfortable ring, more Moby Dick.

The road in question lies between the crumbling colonial era seaport of Fort Dauphin on the south-east bump of Madagascar and Berenty Lemur Reserve and Research Station approximately 90 bone-shaking kilometers into the dry, deciduous scrubland of the island’s deep south. Did we have experience of other poorly maintained, permanently pot-holed, flash flood ravaged roads our solicitous guide enquired – building hard on his earlier philosophical soft sell. We most certainly did…

One or two sprang painfully to mind and were not easily banished over the next five hours. The Kampala-Entebbe road shortly after Amin’s tanks had churned it up; Richards Bay to Kozi Bay in Kwa-Zulu Natal along the old, sandy coast road; creaky Land Rover forays into Khutse in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Park. You can be mentally prepared but you cannot hide from the sheer humpty-bumpty, stop-start grind of a truly ghastly broken metalled road surface. You long to be driving the crate yourself rather than riding it as you dimly realize what all your unfortunate passengers on previous switchbacks must have endured. Slowly the stoical, semi-rhythmic silence of shared misery descends on our car load much as it must have sounded in the bowels of a slave galley just without the occasional swish of an overseer’s whip.

The scenery on the drive itself is a welcome, rollicking distraction. The lands immediately around Ft Dauphin are still the remains of the well watered highlands – the tailpiece of the mountain rainforested spine of the island. Paddy fields and mango plots, hands of green bananas beside the road, occasional water meadows covered in immaculate water lilies and here and there the strange concrete obelisks erected in clusters as monuments to the ancestors. Lalaina (his name means ‘beloved’ much akin to ‘Amanda’) explained to us the rudiments of ancestor based worship which is intricately tied to the land and food and family and which is the basis for so many of the major and minor ‘fady’ taboos which govern daily Malagasy life like an invisible protective shroud. The whitewashed and plain concrete cenotaphs are dotted along this road in family plots and often marked with sacrificial zebu skulls mouldering to dust at their base.

As the road deteriorates rapidly, the land begins to dry out, the mountains turn to ash blue in the distance and the scrub takes on a dusty olive green sheen which suggests that it has settled in for a long thirsty wait. This transition forest is marked by more and more unusual trees. The triangular palm puts in an appearance with its triangular boxed cornice supporting its fronds at the top of its rough pillar. It’s endemic to this one particular patch of Madagascar. The travellers’ or ravenala palm is more widespread and appears in clumps here and there as a reminder of its role as a national symbol with the navigationally useful east-west orientation of its splayed trunk. The transition forest is traversed by a few slow, silted rivers carrying the interior topsoil inexorably to the coast. The rivers have been crossed by old railway style bailey bridges, square, rusty and rickety - momentary relief from the shake, rattle and roll of the road.

And then the terrain shifts another gear. Rather than expectant thirst, the tone becomes parched resignation. The softness of the occasional palm stands has gone and is replaced by the strange spikiness of the alludia. The alludia is neither tree nor cactus to my non-botanical eye. It’s a great spiny collection of tubes each with rows of tiny succulent leaves and thorns – as if somebody had left sets of giant pipe cleaners dotted around the desert. The alludia is rightly prized as a Madagascar special with its valuable core of dark hardwood. There are more bulbous baobabs, ripe flowering succulents, familiar aloes, Christ thorn euphorbia, sandpapery pachypodiums and that extreme bad hair shrub - the wild and woolly octopus plant. This great outdoor hothouse of endemic xerophytes has been overrun by any number of alien Mexican invaders - cactus, prickly pear and the original culprit and ultimate bandit plant – sisal. For mile upon mile of our journey we passed through one of the world’s largest sisal plantations. As a monoculture crop sisal takes some beating for bone dry boredom. Even the last desperate flowering of the grandparent plant, which shoots its giant prickly stalk towards the stars in one final firework display of pollination, isn’t enough to alleviate the real dreariness of sisal.

The plant was first introduced from Mexico to the south of Madagascar in the 1920’s as a response to growing industrial demand for rope and hessian lagging. Recently, demand has been re-stimulated by the call for bio-degradable, re-cyclable supermarket packaging. In one of those terrible paradoxes of modern green consumerism, the laudable desire to carry off our supermarket purchases in fashionable hemp bags, has condemned yet more acres of vulnerable dry indigenous forest to being slashed and cultivated. However in the midst of this vast rather depressing southern plantation there remains one beautifully preserved island of Madagascar’s Eden – Berenty.

Berenty is in a sense a small triumph of enlightened commercial self-interest. The local feudal De Heaulme family first arrived in 1928 under very frugal circumstances. Slowly they built up a plantation empire drawing on first colonial, then wartime and now European Community sisal subsidies and established a strong working understanding with the local ‘people of the thorns’, the Tandroy. They also paused in their planting and harvesting of sisal to draw a line around a patch of native gallery forest on a bend in the Mandrare River which today is the Mecca for lemur lovers everywhere whether inspired by Gerald Durrell as I was, or Walt Disney as a later generation have been or possibly by another remarkable naturalist with the popular touch – Alison Jolly. Less well known than Diane Fossey and her gorillas or Jane Goodall and her chimps, Jolly and her ring-tailed lemurs of Berenty have recently enjoyed a burst of BBC publicity. They have played host to what must have been an exhausting succession of comics and celebrity presenters – Douglas Adams, David Attenborough, John Cleese and Stephen Fry although, as Cleese hastens to point out, surprisingly not Michael Palin. It can’t be long before Palin shows up possibly with Geri Halliwell or Joanna Lumley in tow. When they get there Berenty will be ready to host them with its own brand of unhurried 1950’s Rhodesian National Parks charm.

The only evidence that we could find for Madagascar’s most intriguing bird of all time was a single prehistoric intact egg fossil unostentatiously preserved and displayed in Berenty’s small Androy natural and ethnic history museum. The Roc or the Elephant Bird was a giant flightless bird big enough to make an ostrich look like a goose. It has been variously referenced in Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit writings as either similar to the Phoenix or the Griffin or as a mighty raptor of the kind that attacked Sinbad’s boat with an aerial bombardment of large rocks. The last roc specimens appear to have been hunted for their bulky supplies of meat and died out as a result shortly before the Dutch ate the last dodo on neighbouring Mauritius in the mid-seventeenth century.

We finally arrived in Berenty camp after dark and were assigned to a bungalow that was described in the literature as ‘Spartan’ but which in fact was perfectly comfortable with a nice line in bamboo ceiling panels and a scalding hot shower. The generator packs up at 22h00 at Berenty which was some time after our road weary heads had hit our dormitory thin pillows under individual mosquito nets. Waking at first faint light the next morning and walking in the cool morning air, you became aware of what a captivating slice of wildlife has been preserved amidst the sisal ruins. In the gum tree behind the bungalow were two roosting white-browed owls who gave away their post by hooting loudly. A branch or two to their left was a whole row of sleeping ring-tail lemurs, their trademark tails wrapped around the outermost bulges of the group. On the roof of the bungalow itself a red-fronted common brown lemur was helping himself to a drink from a rusty water tank. In the eaves a gecko scuttled for deeper cover.

Our subsequent easy strolls around the stick broom swept paths of the reserve slowly revealed more and more bird, lemur and reptile life. Amongst the autumnal yellow glow of tamarind leaves in the early sunlight, we met whole families of ring-tailed lemurs – matriarchical clans of cat-like creatures sunning themselves, sleepy-eyed on their haunches with semi-opposable thumbs clasped in Zen-like yoga poses. We disturbed a clutch of sifakas in a banyan tree who gradually stretched themselves out along the length of their overnight branch and began their desultory pre-breakfast toilet. We were taken in careful silence to the foot of huge tree colony of the Madagascar flying fox or fruit bat. It’s difficult not to think of them as furry flying lemurs – yet another evolutionary quirk in this fairytale forest.

The undoubted stars of the show here are the dancing Verreaux’s sifakas. Cleese described their antics on the forest floor as the prancings of ‘a deranged Edwardian waiter’ and proceeded to demonstrate exactly what he meant by reprising one of his Monty Python routines straight out of the Ministry of Silly Walks. Once they descend from the trees where they are as acrobatically at home as any lemur, all sifakas have their distinctive ground game which marks them out as the Gene Kellys or John Travoltas of the primate world. The Coquerel’s that we’d seen in Anjajavy hop forwards from a full frontal start and look a little like participants in a sack race. The Verreaux’s on the other hand are sideways movers who flip in mid stride from leading with their left to their right profile. They could be footballers skipping sideways around those little plastic cones or cricketers warming up in the nets with a few dummy bowling run-ups. Whatever favourite sporting or dancing projection you put on their skipping routine, they are endlessly entertaining performers.

Before leaving the island I had two unfulfilled commissions – one from a lifetime Manchester United fan who wanted a picture of a fellow fan in tribal dress (away strip would do, I guess) to add to his collection of similarly attired local supporters in almost one hundred countries around the world. I failed this one so there is still a Madagascar sized hole in his collection. The other was a family interest in visiting a Shoprite supermarket – one of five recently opened on Madagascar by the South African retail giant as it reaches out into Africa. Unfortunately they were closed for trading when we passed the branch closest to the airport at some unearthly hour of the morning. Retail is detail.

So I didn’t actually get to do any grocery shopping while in Antananarivo nor while passing through innumerable villages on our roller-coaster road journeys to Andasibe or Berenty. However I was fascinated by the range of items and produce on sale in town itself, at every taxi-brousse stop, around Total, Shell or Jovenna petrol stations or simply from dozens of wooden market stalls strung out along the main (and often only) road.

The dominant product is charcoal sold in sooty plastic sacks tied together with palm string. Increasingly this charcoal demand is served from the replacement eucalyptus plantations as the once plentiful hardwoods retreat to the most inaccessible reaches of the land. After charcoal comes rice sold in small twists of raffia or huge, industrial sized sacks and every type and volume of container in between. Rice is everywhere and everything - it is a staple, a shaper of valleys and terraces, the destroyer of the forest, a living link with Asia, the feeder of families, the keeper of the hearth. Zebu cattle come next as a measure of wealth and homage to the ancestors, a walking, grazing, fat storing bank and temple on the hoof.

The market places are all tireless industry and ceaseless exchange. Casava, sweet potato and manioc roots, bamboo and sugar cane shoots and all their pestle-pounded extracts. Hats and combs, mats and lambas, tyre sandals and golf umbrellas. Bicycle bush mechanics with piles of spare parts enough to service the Tour de France. Chinese takeaways with counters of glazed duck stalactites and pork samoosas stalagmites. Butcher stalls adorned with streamers of tight little sausages and every possible raw pink cut of zebu hanging from vicious meat hooks. Tailors, carpenters, cobblers, hairdressers, knife sharpeners, blacksmiths, stone masons, watch repairers, medicine men and coffin makers. Soap and palm and coconut oil potions of every unspeakable variety. Bakeries piled with golden pyramids of baguettes and carefully arranged mounds of fresh, sweet bread rolls. Banana fritters, doughnuts, sugared dumplings and biscuits for the sweet-toothed. Colourful stockades of fermented pineapple, lychee and jackfruit juice with much prized bottles wild honey in recycled Jack Daniels bottles. Water cress, dried anchovies and duck eggs all originating from the flooded hand-worked mud-dyke rice paddies which are never far from any settlement. And a little way outside most settlements stand the brick kilns, sawmills and lumber yards of rural light industry. It’s a vivid reminder that four-fifths of the world’s population would not find the subject matter of my market pictures at all strange but rather wonder at my pale legs and enormous camera lens.

And so our magical time suspended in Madagascar’s time warp began to draw to a close. We still had to face the spine-numbing prospect of the drive back to Ft Dauphin airport, a further round of entirely misleading Air Mad flight announcements, a short drive through Antananarivo’s market stall lined streets and some time to be killed writing post cards at Ivato International Airport before catching the Air France flight out to Paris and a whole different world.

I flew out of Madagascar filled with a determination to go back one day as an ardent eco-tourist, armed with a proper wildlife camera and tripod and contributing to one of the many excellent NGO sustainable tree-planting schemes which we had seen in operation busy building green ‘carbon corridors’ between the isolated pockets of remaining indigenous forest.

Velume, Madagascar, Salaam. Big and old, wet and dry, sweet and sour island, home of the lemurs.



© James Gardener September 2009

The Village Shop

The road is long
The woods are old
The car is new
The wind is cold.

First stop back
The village shop
Potato sacks
Newspaper rack
Cash register
Clickety clack
Spiked receipts
In a stack
Mrs Sharp
Out the back.

Where has it gone?

The tennis balls,
The balls of string
The pinball machine
The magazines
The sherbert bombs
That took so long
The liquorice strings
The sticky bun things?

A screen door bangs
An old flame flickers
Mum’s gone
To a home
They closed us down
There’s one in town.

Coming home
Is never neutral
Never the first time
Never the last,
Coming home
Is long and old
Lost and found
Bought and sold.

© JB Gardener
2009

Harry Patch RIP

It seems like quite a lot to ask a one hundred and eleven year old man to carry. Harry Patch's death as the last surviving British World War One serviceman, the last direct link with the horrors of Passchendale, has set off a train of sombre reflection on the essential futility of all wars. As a Victorian, Harry was seemingly being asked to pack a full kitbag of nostalgic connections with a simpler, gentler, sweeter age. As the last Tommy, he was being asked to hump around a universal disquiet with senseless killing. He appeared to carry his burden lightly, describing war as "organised murder" and televised Remembrance Day ceremonies as "show business".

His obituaries have, sensibly, lacked sentimentality. Rather they have chosen to reflect his West Country common sense, the plumber's practicality, the gritty salt of the common man. At 111 his age alone with its three century spanning, prime, Nelsonic and Bilbo Bagginsy overtones, is cause for amazed reflection and deep respect. His quiet dignity in a wheelchair, his rasping vowels lingering on the radio, his uncompromising faith in family and hard work are all that's needed to mark the passing of a remarkable life.

Harry Patch RIP.

An Italian Chapel

The Orkney Islands are full of surprises. One of the first is that the inhabitants don't really regard them as islands at all in much the same way that Venetians have long ceased to think of themselves as marooned on a collection of islands in a muddy lagoon.

Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, is situated on a narrow, natural land bridge connecting the two halves of what is known as 'the mainland'. It's difficult to know exactly where this mainland ends as a string of smaller islands stretching away to the south-east were linked up by causeway during World War Two to help re-inforce the wartime naval base of Scapa Flow. From the air they look like a giant island kebab. This system of causeways was named the Churchill Barriers and the work on them was largely completed by Italian prisoners-of-war who were interned on the Orkneys (or 'in Orkney' as they would have learned to say) for much of the war.

Today the most poignant reminder of their time of incarceration, exile and hard labour is the small chapel on Lamb Holm which overlooks the Barriers from the site of their camp. The story goes that one of the POW's, the indomitable Domenico Chiocchetti, persuaded the camp commander to allow the prisoners to spend their spare time converting a pair of Nissen huts into a chapel. It must have been a relatively easy call for the mild mannered, Italian-speaking Major T.P. Buckland who then watched with growing admiration and wry amusement as Chiocchetti wrangled and wheedled every ounce of spare concrete and ingenuity out of his 550 fellow inmates and proceded to create a minor masterpiece. The spirit of da Vinci and Michelangelo captured in plasterboard, painted concrete and painstakingly re-worked barbed wire.

The effect today is of walking into a school theatre set skilfully knocked up by the woodwork teacher, lovingly decorated by the art master and cunningly dressed by a devoted parent drawing on a basket of old props. Indeed Signor Chiocchetti had staged full-scale operatic productions featuring cardboard gondolas and canvas and chicken wire palazzos before he turned the force of his creative genius to the construction of the chapel.

Behind the altar Chiocchetti painted a fresco of the Madonna and Child copied faithfully from a post card sent by his mother in Moena that he carried with him throughout the war. It is a most serenely beautiful piece.



At the end of the war, Ccioccetti remained in Orkney to complete his legacy and then returned in 1960 with members of his extended family and old comrades to re-consecrate his place of wartime worship. It's easy to picture him fussing over the positioning of the carved wooden stations of the cross or polishing the wrought iron railings of the rood screen one last time.

Before he left the mainland, he wrote an open letter to the people of Orkney. In it, he said "The chapel is yours, for you to love and preserve. I take with me to Italy the remembrance of your kindness and wonderful hospitality. I shall remember always, and my children shall learn from me to love you." It is difficult to craft a more resounding statement of reconciliation between peoples that that.

Perhaps every man is an island after all.

gr8

gr8 is one of those handy text abbreviations that saves you two keystrokes and a couple minimiligigs or whatever of memory - easy enough to grasp with the same mentality that we used to approach penny-a-word telegrams (see Dog Sense in an earlier posting.) I had reason to use this little shorthand text recently while waiting for the ferry from Gills Bay to St Margaret's Hope, Orkney.

In 1496, James IV of Scotland - a keen harbour and ship builder - sent for a Dutch ship's captain to establish a new ferry service across the Pentland Firth from the northern tip of mainland Scotland to the newly enthralled islands of the ancient Norse domain of Orkney. He was particularly keen on getting a Dutch mariner to run this new service because of their reputation for fine seamanship, sharp business sense and dogged determination. And who better in Holland to provide this maritime entrepreneurship than the de Groot brothers - or so James IV's envoys reported after some heavy negotiations in an Amsterdam alehouse.

And so the de Groots ran the royal ferry to and from the Orkneys for over two hundred years charging a groat a ride for most of that time and becoming well established local landowners into the bargain. The head of the family in the early 1500's was Jan de Groot who had seven sons all competing for a slice of the by now lucrative family business transporting dried fish, whisky, wool, hides and beef from this northerly natural pantry to points south. At one annual de Groot family dinner, held every year to commemorate winning the royal contract, a nasty quarrel broke out over the seating plans with each of the de Groot boys demanding equal access to their father's favours. The salty old mariner sent them all packing and told them to come back to next year's AGM feast and he'd have a solution to their dispute.

Jan spent the intervening year devising a solution that was ingenious, entirely practical, wholly egalitarian and yet loaded with low cunning - James IV would have expected nothing less from his Dutch CEO. When the brothers arrived armed with their reports of another year's successful trading, they found that the old man had spent his time constructing a new octagonal house complete with eight separate entrance doors and an eight-sided board room table. The sons took their seats suitably impressed and mollified - Jan, Oh Gr8 one of them muttered - or John O'Groats as it has come down to us over the years.

One size fits all

News that the major mobile communications companies have begun to collaborate so as to produce a single, universal charger which can handle all makes and models of mobile phone has the makings of one big tick on my short list of 'Things To Do To Create One Genuinely Global Community'.

Other outstanding items include:

• One standard electrical domestic plug and socket set
• Consistent coding of hot and cold water taps
• Universal keyboard notations for all non-alphabetical keys
• Agreed On/Off positions for wall switches
• One shoe size convention

Perhaps if we could get some of these little issues sorted (or crowd sourced?) it would provide the necessary impetus to connect up with the other ninety-eight percent of the world's population who are not in a position to read this and for whom clean water, electricity, new shoes and internet access are dreams deferred.

Or maybe we just live with it?

Where were you?

"Where were you when you heard of Michael Jackson's death?" is set to join that pantheon of similarly poignant questions - uniquely personal moments spun into a world wide web of connectivity.

My answer to this latest 'meme' is in a conference hotel in Frankfurt where I was helping a group of leaders think about how they could communicate more effectively with their sprawling global organisation.

Amidst all the usual welter of flip charts, pocket cards, powerpoint slides, laminated posters, nifty newsletters, electronic templates, gleaming video-conferencing displays, virtual webinars and even the unreliable glimmerings of holographic beaming, there were eventually just two questions that resonated with me:

'What did you do to delight a customer today?' and 'How can I make it easier for you to do your job?'

Imagine if these were the two standard management enquiries woven into the very fabric of a business, embedded deeply in the DNA of an organisation's discourse, the very yin and yan of your next workshop? They reminded me once again of the power of the open question, the importance of its careful, simple framing and the remarkable energy that it can generate through an honest response.

Because, unlike the 21st century's constellation of global superstars, I suspect that most leaders in large organisations will be remembered for the quality and tone of their questions rather than for the weight and length of their answers - and certainly not for the sublime beauty of their dancing.

Where were you...?

Dinner in the souk

I've been working here in Kuwait for this past week (the Kuwaiti weekend is Friday/Saturday with work starting again on Sunday) and have managed to find a free internet station at the airport on my way out to Amsterdam via Bahrain tonight.

Last night we were taken on a tour of the old souk downtown in Kuwait City where traders in traditional desert robes and sandals sit comfortably alongside their fruit, fish, dates, nuts, honey, watermelon, spiced tea, carpet and prayer bead stalls and pass the day in animated conversation.

After several hours wandering around admiring this giant Arabian Nights emporium, we were taken by our dutiful hosts to an outdoor restaurant for a traditional Kuwaiti meal drawn directly from the generously laden tables of the souk. After about an hour (and a dozen tiny glass cups of sweet, minty tea) the uneven, rickety trestle tables in front of our party of ten were suddenly swamped with battered tin platters of saffron goat mutton and rice, steaming curried lentil and bean curds, drifts of crisp wild rocket, lemon and coriander salad, a whole shoal of grilled Red Sea prawns, honey and jasmine baked cashews, a small bucket of parsley encrusted houmous, a thicket of moulded, minty lamb koftas impaled on their silver skewers and the incidental matter of six barbequed sea bass caked in caramelised onion and tomato.

"Malesh (no worries)" announced our host, the very generously girthed Hussain, and proceeded to demonstrate just how to attack the nearest pile of food by tearing a corner off a mound of freshly baked, wafer thin, bubbly crusted bread and using it to scoop a portion deftly past his beard and into his maw. We all followed suit politely, gingerly and deliciously. Luckily it is considered good form to leave food on the platter to indicate that one has had an elegant sufficiency.

I'm looking forward to my ham and cheese toasted sandwich for breakfast in The Hague tomorrow!

(22 April 2009)

Keeping calm

Rocket science

I made my first batch of wild rocket pesto yesterday. And no, it's not particularly demanding of either my culinary skills nor any weekend intellectual processes. Until I got thinking about the incredibly complex web of supply chains that intersect to emerge as a warmly oily, slightly astringent, livid green paste in a recycled baby food bottle now nestling in the fridge.

There's the olive oil itself which my local supermarket shelf assures me is of Greek origin and the outcome of extra virgin pressing and then the fragrant pine nuts, resinous little seeds first harvested on some North American conifer plantation, freeze dried and container shipped to complement the salty tang of Parmesan cheese, smug behind its EU protected placename. The rocket and garlic heart of the concoction come from my allotment where their rampant seasonal profusion have forced me to go into semi-industrial production. All this simple stuff spiflicated in a German food mixer and poured into a little bottle of unknown origin with its Swiss label scrubbed off.

An idle calculation of the economics of my modest enterprise, suggest that at commercial quantities and prices, this perky little supplement to pasta dishes carries a substantial retail mark-up even taking bottling, distribution and branding into account. Lucrative enough to investigate with my local farm store. Although then again, the food miles tally should really disqualify me from the trade description 'local ingredients'. And I've no idea how to indemnify myself against nut allergic customers...

Maybe it is some form of science after all.

Pen66

"How many pens do you possess?" It seemed like a slightly quirky but innocent enough question ironically delivered amongst friends around a restaurant table in The Hague a couple of weeks ago. Once we'd scratched around and actually unearthed one between us to help calculate the bill, the original question elicited a whole range of responses from, 'Only ever one at a time' to, 'None - I believe in the collective and universal ownership of all writing materials'. From,'I have at least one special one from every decade I've lived in' to, 'I'm probably in the top one percentile globally' and, 'I couldn't possibly count - the things seem to stick to me like flies'. This last response was mine and led me up a fascinating little cul de sac. This one.

Back home I got out the large shoebox where I have carelessly deposited the sort of pens that I seem to inherit routinely from conferences and corporate workshops, trade shows and training courses, hotel rooms and car hire firms, airport lounges and sponsors' tents. I was amazed not so much by their quantity (660 by a rough count for my more competitive readers) as by their essential similarity despite their apparent diversity from jet black to irridescent party sparkly mauve, from slimline executive silver to orange gel-bloated clown, from click-top Bic to slide and twirl Pentium, from Wal-Mart check-out to Louis Vuitton gift case. I began to wonder just how big the complimentary pen market must be world-wide. Are there any major corporations who have not branded and distributed the humble ball-point pen at some phase in their marketing cycle? Are there conventions for pen designers and if so what on earth do they use as freebie giveaways?

What to do with this accidental and faintly ignominious collection? Thank you for keeping some of your more outrageous suggestions to yourselves. As it happens, an old friend is organising a school trip from the UK to Malawi later this year. Suffice to say their party will be carrying with them bundles of ball-points sufficient for them to be classed as commercial importers although actually intended for distribution amongst rural schoolchildren and households.

Many of 'my' pens will be used long and laboriously for school assignments, marking attendance registers, completing fee records, writing appeal letters. Others will find their way into bakeries, garages, furniture workshops and bottle stores as indispensable tools tucked behind ears or tossed into cash registers. Some will be used meticulously to record anti-retroviral drug taking regimes, some audaciously to bet on football scores. Some may save lives, others witness their disintegration; all will inevitably expire themselves.

If only those pens could write.

Snowflake

Stories

I was running a workshop in a small country hotel in the Netherlands a couple of months ago. It is a quiet tulip-decked, canalside retreat and I had seen a pair of spring hares shadow boxing in their meadow as I arrived to set up the event.

On the ubiquitous, waxy, slightly wobbly hotel flipchart, I had written some suggestions for certain qualities that people looked for and expected in their leaders, amongst them the art of storytelling. I had expected this to be a fairly uncontroversial claim and possibly even a gentle bridge to eliciting some leadership stories from my group of participants - thus quite neatly validating my contention. Not so fast, Mr Facilitator...

The term 'storytelling' obviously touched a raw nerve or two somewhere - whether in its Dutch translation or its playground connotations, I'm not really sure. 'Storytelling', I was told with no little vehemence, is what 'management' have been doing to us for years. 'Every day there's a new story which contradicts the old one. All they can do is tell stories instead of giving us the facts!' I was snookered and not for the first time by my desire to represent the workplace as a more poetic, engaging forum than it actually can be in widespread, weary experience. We completed a fairly prosaic workshop together thereafter in perfectly good spirit and with the timely aid of some excellent, freshly-baked almond marzipan 'gevullde koeken'.

On returning home to reflect on my Dutch rebuff, I took down Anette Simmons' enchanting 'The Story Factor' from my shelves and re-read it. She makes a simple and persuasive case for all those charged with the leadership of organisations large or small to be able to call upon a fund of six generic stories, all true, concise and authentically told. These big six according to Simmons are:

'Who I am' stories
'Why I am here' stories
'The Vision' stories
'Teaching' stories
'Values-in-Action' stories
'I know what you are thinking' stories

She goes on to illustrate through her examples a number of compelling points that link narrative coherence to leadership charisma. Great leaders, it transpires, tell great stories. It's often the simple page-turning power of wanting to find out what happens next that drives followership.

What's your story?

Time to sit and think

Jazz economics

I was driving through Delamere Forest this morning listening to one of Kenneth Clarke's profiles of great jazz musicians on BBC Radio 4. He was reviewing the career of Milt "Bags" Jackson, peerless exponent of the vibraphone. Clarke's own tones are well suited to radio and his choice of easy, fluid tracks made for a sublime moment bowling along the ancient hunting tracks of the forest. For a politician presumably busy grappling with the most intractable economic conundrums of our times, our radio DJ seemed supremely relaxed and completely immersed in a medium he so obviously adores. It was strangely reassuring to hear an ex-Chancellor thus.

There is something to be had in metaphorical comparisons between the global economic crash of 2008/9/10 and the world of the jazz musician. Nobody has the faintest idea what the score is and where the next big gig will be; payment is arbitrary and never guaranteed; all we can do is keep playing a few familiar, jaunty riffs and hope that somebody somewhere picks them up. And yet maybe, just maybe there are a few underlying certainties and reassuring patterns beneath the surface cachophony. As Ken's studio guest said, 'you just have to keep your ears wide open'.

Keep whistling. Somebody may hear you.

The healing power of nails

This afternoon a small volunteer working party tackled the task of carrying out essential maintenance work on our village cricket pavilion. It's a long, low wooden slatted structure that once saw service as barracks on a World War Two military base in Shropshire. Forty years after the war had ended, and the base was finally being dismantled, a previous cricket club working party rescued the old hut, transported it to our village ground and re-erected it on the spot where it has stood as changing rooms, scorebox, pub, community dance hall and winter cricket kit storeroom for twenty-five seasons. It is a building of little architectural note yet boundless symbolism and timeless charm.

Today's issue was the rotting timber joists where rain had got in through cracks in the creosoted slats. As we began to tear open the work of our predecessors of twenty-five years ago, it became apparent that the whole structure was held together through the liberal and imaginative use of every type of nail imaginable. I counted fifteen in one three foot piece of 2x4.

Nails. Twisted and rusted, bent and arthritic, straight as a sweet cover drive, crooked as a dropped catch. Tiny rows of thumb tacks and great, stonking pile drivers; headless slim ones fissured into a beam or fat flat headers ribbed and rasping against the grain. Between them they formed and held the very fabric of the building. You could hear the thumb bashing curses of cricketers past echoing off the rafters. I imagined the sigh of intense satisfaction as a final, clean hammer blow drove home that last match-winning shot.

Painfully we clawed at each metal splinter and eased them out one by one, tossed them aside in a tinkling heap and swept them up in a pile of pre-season debris. Except for one - which I have kept on my desk with my odd collection of rescued detritus. Six inches of smooth, cool, gently browned nail, perfectly balanced in my palm and secure in its twenty-five years of impeccable service upholding a village treasure.

A sacred relic; a carpenter's tool; a reminder of the healing power of nails.

Ships? What do you mean, ships?

The story is told of Captain Cook's seventeenth century voyages of exploration to the South Pacific islands. On some he was greeted with spontaneous hospitality, on others with quite natural hostility and on a few with completely blank incredulity. It's easy enough to understand and explain the extremes of human warmth and warrior aggression that his arrival in tall ships, with funny hats and firesticks provoked but it's perhaps more instructive to think for a moment about the blank stares of total incomprehension.

Those Polynesian eyes were not seeing anything at all because there was no response from the brain when it was required to provide a stored reference point. We can't see things at first that are outside our experience. We do however manage to see things that aren't there because want them to be there or because they were there last time we looked. We look with our imagination and in our past.

Derivatives? What do you mean derivatives?

Unlearning

I heard about an interesting experiment the other day.

Two groups of subjects in a memory trial were gathered together and set the same task. One group were all chess grandmasters; competitive, rational, highly disciplined thinkers, specially enrolled for an important experiment. The other group were a random selection of teenage students rounded up from a local school, earning a bit of pocket money as lab. monkeys.

Both groups were briefed together and set an identical set of tasks. They were shown flash images of chess boards with the pieces arranged in classic game formation, as if an actual game had been interrupted mid-match, and asked to memorise the placings. On average it took the grandmasters 2-3 rapid 10 second flashes in order for them all to reproduce the exact game placings on their individual blank grids. The teenage students struggled for much longer and it took anything up to 20 flashed repetitions before some of them produced a perfect replica pattern.

Then the rules of the game changed. The chess pieces were replaced by an unfamiliar collection of shapes and the placing of these new look 'chess' pieces became random rather than classically patterned. The grandmasters continued to work individually on trying to remember which piece was placed where on their grids. The students were told they could work together.

The results in Round Two of this experiment? Almost an exact reversal of Round One with the grandmasters floundering to fit unfamiliar shapes into uncomfortable, meaningless patterns on a grid they thought they knew so well. Meanwhile the students quickly devised a rough and ready system of watching out for different areas of the grid and shouting out pieces and positions to one harried recorder who was then able to present her accurate answers within 2-3 flashes.

I thought there was a lot in this story that speaks to the need for rapid and fluid 'unlearning' in a context of constantly shifting certainties and the rapid melting of traditional boundaries to knowledge boxes and collaboration fields.

I wish I knew who had carried out this little experiment...?

Dealing with interruptions

A participant in a recent workshop interrupted me while I was in full flow on the subject of 'challenging conversations' to ask me for any tips I had on dealing with interruptions. As a piece of faintly surreal improvisation by both parties, it appealed to my sense of the absurd. I think I responded something along these lines:

On the whole I find that interruptions when I'm speaking can be characterised as either helpful or unhelpful. There's the short, helpful variety that buys you time to think, allows you to re-focus, gives you confirmation that you are getting your point across or a vital clue that you are not. Then there's the longer, rather less helpful kind that demonstrates that your conversation is a long way from closure, there are whole mounds of unshared assumptions between you and that there's still much hard work to be done in building any form of consensus. And of course we have all experienced and launched the frankly subversive interruption which is an ill-disguised takeover bid - a not so subtle conversational coup d'etat.

Interruptions are frequently culturally conditioned and significant. In many situations youth will not interrupt age; subordinates will not challenge power by speaking up before they are invited to do so and women will defer to men in sustained, pained silence. To interrupt is to disrupt the social order and disturb much more than a train of thought.

So when it comes to 'dealing with interruptions' as a team leader, technical expert, subject presenter or workshop facilitator, it's useful to have a small tool-kit to hand which can mean that a far greater percentage of the inevitable quota of interruptions that you will experience can become useful ones and not roadblocks, threats or mere irritants. Here are a couple of the tools I use:

When the interruption comes, resist the urge to fight it by simply raising your voice, your speed, your tone and probably your blood pressure. Roll with the interruption early, like a martial artist embracing its momentum. Use the pause in your own broadcast to ask yourself the question, "what's the purpose of my presentation or conversation - what does a successful conclusion really look like, sound like, feel like?" This of course works best with the short, helpful, clarifying or generally supportive interruption.

If the interruption persists or sounds as if it is never going to stop, you may have to get back into the conversation using the "blinking word" technique. This is a simple process of waiting long enough to hear a particular word on which the speaker is laying great emphasis by repeating it or using it in a exaggerated manner, at which point you are at liberty to counter-interrupt with "what exactly do you mean by...(and quote the "blinker")?" This helps to re-balance the conversation and may even take it down a surprisingly useful path.

If neither of these tools is sharp enough to do the job, you may have to use a more emotionally charged and thus dangerous tool. First ask yourself, 'what am I feeling about this interruption right now and why?" If the answer is one of the negative, destructive emotions, you need to move rapidly to the moral high ground of tolerance, good humour, genuine curiousity or gracious humility. After this brief internal examination, you should be ready to deploy one of the big guns in dealing with interruptions. "wait a minute, this isn't working" or "ok, we'll have to agree to disagree here' or something similarly hard-edged and definite.

Ands then of course you're right in the middle of yet another 'challenging conversation'... and so, back to my subject. Thank you.

Everything's an Offer

This little review appeared on Amazon recently after I'd bought a book written by a friend and colleague, Robert Poynton.

Poynton reveals himself as a master of fresh air and fun - however he is never lightweight nor frivolous and displays real humilty in the face of the systems complexity and organisational noise he uncovers. As he determinedly follows his educated nose in search of the fine truffles of improvised learning, the overall aroma of his writing is warm, earthy and pungent. Highly recommended.

Hercules - the endgame

Task Eleven: Acquisition of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides

Hercules' penultimate task involved a quest for the golden apples of wisdom and beauty secreted in the remote and carefully guarded garden of Hesperides. To accomplish this task Hercules has to call on all the managerial and leadership lessons inherent in his ten previous tasks:

1. know your own strengths
2. tackle the root causes
3. look for the win/win
4. acknowledge and move on from your mentors
5. mobilize the system to your advantage
6. take a time-out when you are tired
7. challenge your customer
8. hire good people
9. play the politics when you have to
10. beware the unexpected consequences

Needless to say he succeeded - unerringly guided by the scrupulous application of these deceptively simple management aphorisms - and delivered the golden apples to his odious customer, King E. who promptly and ungratefully set him his final task.


Task Twelve: Capture of Cerberus in the Underworld

The ultimate leadership task represents overcoming the fear of fear itself. Critical to the successful accomplishment of all of Hercules’ tasks has been an inner belief in his own managerial competence and a confidence to test himself against the biggest and the best in the business. Cerberus, the three-headed hound guard of the gates of hell, represents the ultimate threat of career ending disaster and corporate suicide.

Hercules’ passage into the underworld to confront Pluto, its morbid CEO, and to capture the hound dog is marked by a surreal confidence in his essential ability, reputation and experience. He transcends the quite natural fears of the unknown, the unquiet and the unreasonable and quite simply outmatches Cerberus, pound for pound on merit. The result is his ultimate liberation from the corporate threats of rejection and redundancy. He is finally sling and arrow-proof.

In passing he secures the release from the underworld of his old friend and colleague, Theseus, thus repaying a long-standing debt of comradeship. Never forget the friends you make on the way up. His return in triumph to the kingdom of Eurystheus ensures the ultimate collapse of the customer-driven tyranny that has ruled his life.

The tasks are complete and at the same time irrelevant. Hercules himself ascends to the rarefied heights of consultant, management guru and wise mentor to a new generation of would be managers. His successor, Atlas, strives to hold up pillars of the known world. That’s another story.

Mergers and Acquisitions with Hercules

Task Nine: Acquisition of the Girdle of Hippolyte

The challenge of acquiring the celebrated girdle of the fragrantly fierce Hippolyte was one fraught with political rather than physical danger. The girdle itself was a symbol of Amazonian sovereignty and capturing it represented mounting a challenge to one of the most significant power bases of the ancient Greek mythos. This was the corporate equivalent of closing or restructuring an entire regional or functional division.

Hercules’ first move was to assemble a powerful leadership coalition. Theseus, Telamon and Peleus were persuaded to join him in a combined attack on the Amazon queen. Interestingly, Hercules’ first tactic was flirtation and a mild seduction of Hippolyte which could well have been successful in acquiring the girdle were it not for the intervention of Hera, a sworn enemy of Hercules amongst the gods on Mount Olympus. (Hera was the wife of Zeus betrayed at the time of Hercules’ conception.)

Faced with Hera-inspired political resistance from the Amazons, Hercules reverted to forceful type and slaughtered a few of the warrior women before making off with the girdle. Victory at all costs was declared but his entrenched enemies remained at large.

The Hippolyte girdle incident represents Hercules in his role as change manager tasked with overcoming entrenched political positions by fair means or foul. He makes all the right initial diplomatic moves but when confronted by a show of real resistance, reveals his hard core managerial instincts and bulldozes through to the required and pre-cooked solution. No more Mr Nice Guy.

Task Ten: Capture of the Cattle of Geryon

Hercules’ tenth labour involved taking on the triple-bodied monster, Geryon, who controlled extensive head of cattle on the island of Erythia and as such represented a lucrative takeover target. This was a classic case of corporate acquisition of a vulnerable stock. Flock.

Hercules’ takeover strategy was head on. He stormed the island and took on the monstrous shepherd, Geryon, and his hideous dog, Orthrus, and defeated them both in a simple trial of strength. Thereafter began the real problems with this attempted merger: quarrels with the regulatory authority, Apollo the Sun God; hostile takeover bids from the predatory giant, Cacus; legacy claims from the sons of Poseidon; courtroom battles with the litigious King Eryx; constant political sniping from Hera, still bitter over the Hippolyte girdle debacle.

Hercules overcame all these challenges with the calm task-focus of the uber-manager that he had become, secure in the belief that he was operating under higher guidance and with a rapidly approaching retirement date in mind.

On a roll with Hercules

Task Six: Killing the Stymphalian Birds

The second half of Hercules' career illustrates the law of diminishing returns for the manager tasked with simply doing more of the same.

Killing the man-eating Stymphalian Birds required a certain amount of cunning to distract this flock of giant storks after which they were easy prey for his poisoned arrows. Inevitably, frustration with his apparently endless set of penances set in. Hercules began to question the purpose of his mission, the futility of his endlessly acquisitive tasks and the weariness in his bones at the end of each notionally successful project. He needed a mid-career time-out. Instead he got an overseas assignment.

Task Seven: Capturing the Cretan Bull

The challenge of capturing the Cretan bull offered Hercules the opportunity to travel to the island of Crete and pit his warrior wits and skills against a savage bull busy terrorizing the streets of Knossos. The showdown was spectacular and brutally efficient with the victory going to the proven turnaround manager. Cowabunga.

One interesting side effect of this successful project was the reaction of King Eurystheus, Hercules’ customer for the performance of all his tasks. The unreliable and frankly intimidated king reacted to his star manager’s latest accomplishment by locking himself away in a brass lined bunker and refusing to have any dealings with the all conquering hero. From now on tasks and targets were communicated by written memo only. The headhunters circled overhead.

Task Eight: Killing the Mares of Diomedes

The notorious man-eating mares of King Diomedes were Hercules’ next target. This was another one-off mission to rid the known world of a declared menace. Hercules settled into battle-hardened project manager mode and hired a team of contractors to carry out the mission.

The ferociously demented horses were successfully subdued by his well directed team and Diomedes was ceremoniously fed to his own carnivorous herd. Harsh but fair.

This task marks Hercules’ ability to delegate and direct operations from a distance. He has grown in stature to the point where his very association with a project all but guarantees its success and where others look to him for both strategic and operational direction. He has become a management brand.

The Fifth Task of Hercules - showtime!

Task Five: Cleansing the Stables of Augeas

The next task is amongst the most intriguing examples of problem-solving undertaken by the experienced and successful Hercules. Augeas the King of Elis had not mucked out his three thousand head cattle stables for ten years. In management terms this was the equivalent of taking over a subsidiary company with environmental liabilities and data integrity problems a mile wide and two miles deep.

Following his first site visit to the stables, Hercules sat down with the King and negotiated a performance-related contract and set of stock options. He asked for ten percent of the King’s head of cattle if he was able to clean the stables of their accumulated mire. Agreed. No idea how to do it.

Hercules sat on a hill overlooking the Augean Stables for a while and contemplated the problem in hand. It was not an heroic arrow and club solution. No amount of patient tracking nor skilful trapping would shift the shit. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for this conundrum of a challenge. As the sun sank, it reflected off the waters of the River Alpheus running past the stables. His solution simply emerged from the natural environment as he sat there enjoying some 'blue sky' time.

The next day Hercules dug ditches and diverted the river so that it ran through the filthy stables and scoured them clean before returning to its natural course.

Although impressed with the results, the King refused to honour the 10% deal invoking a clause about unnatural forces. Hercules’ response was ruthless. He deposed the King and installed his son as a subservient monarch thus effectively securing 100% direct equity in the kingdom.

The Augean Stables represent the peak of Hercules’s powers as the hero manager. He has demonstrated his ability to move beyond simple brute force solutions and through the sheer power of innovative thought has delivered outstanding operational results and superior shareholder return. He's also in danger of believing his own bullshit - literally.

Tasks Three and Four for our Hero Manager

Task Three: Capture of the Ceryneian Hind

The next project ran for a full year. It involved the tracking, trapping and translocation of an exquisite deer sacred to the hunter goddess Diana. Unlike his previous targets, the sacred deer had to be captured and brought back alive and unharmed. This task was really a test of Hercules’ ability to stick with a project over time where the goal was clear from the start but where the terrain over which the animal had to be pursued was entirely uncharted.

Having captured the hind through months of patient stealth and astute reading of the environment, Hercules is confronted by Diana herself who is determined to preserve the integrity of the animal under her divine protection. The successful hunter is forced to justify his capture and ends up striking a deal with the goddess that he will guarantee the hind’s safe release once he has presented it in the flesh to his insatiable customer.

He delivers on this deal and in so doing provides one of the moments in the parable where the hero’s moral universe requires that a balance be struck between short and long term outcomes. Diana, bless her, demands and gets a sustainable solution.

Task Four: Capture of the Erymanthian Boar

In pursuit of his next task, Hercules faces the test of confronting an old and respected mentor. The target this time is a vicious wild boar that rampages around destructively in the forests of Erymanthus. The physical execution of this task, given his bloodied club and poisoned arrows, is relatively simple. It’s another day at the office for our hardened hunter-manager. The real difficulty lies in an unexpected encounter with an old relationship along the way.

Chiron the centaur is an old and highly influential teacher of Hercules. He owes him much of his undoubted skill in the arts of hunting and single combat that have served him so well in his career. In the path towards his quarry, Hercules stumbles across Chiron and a collection of his more boisterous centaur chums. A heated argument ensues and a fight breaks out in the course of which Hercules fatally wounds his former mentor. It is another defining moment in his leadership journey.

Hercules is hit by conflicting emotions - remorse for his role in felling a role model and yet relief at the release from his shackles. He can hang back and mourn or he can move on and perform. He chooses to continue the pursuit of the boar and is successful.

However, from now on it's increasingly lonely as his successes mount and he becomes more insular and isolated further up the greasy pole.

The second Herculean management task

Task Two: Killing the Hydra of Lerna

The Hydra was a venomous, swamp-dwelling, multi-headed water snake. For the task of exterminating the serpent, Hercules is assigned a management trainee, Iolaus.

Hercules’ initial approach to tackling the Hydra is to employ the same strategy that had worked with the unfortunate Nemean lion. He plunges in directly, wielding arrows and club and the first couple of heads are successfully severed. The problem here is that the harder Hercules clubs away, the deeper he sinks into the foul mud of the swamp and, to complicate matters, for every severed head, the Hydra instantly grows two more. Iolaus persuades him to withdraw and conduct some form of mid-action review. Time out, buddy, you're making things worse.

Their eventual solution is crude but effective teamwork. Iolaus helps Hercules to brand each severed head in turn, thus cauterizing the bleeding and neutralizing the creature’s exponential reproductive powers. Hercules dips his arrows in the Hydra’s dying blood thereby equipping himself with a lethal set of missiles for subsequent encounters.

A couple of things seem to be happening here. Firstly, our hero has encountered the familiar management syndrome of ‘the more you succeed, the worse the problem gets’. The more accounting errors we uncover, the more we are aware of on the next project. The more controls we put in place, the more deviously they are circumvented. He is forced by a junior but perceptive team member to back off and then tackle the problem closer to its root cause. He is fortunate in that Plan B, robustly implemented, proves too much for the exhausted serpent.

Saved from his own strength, Hercules is free to move to his next task.