The peculiar pressure on farmers

I'm on my way back to London after ten days in Australia, most of which was spent on the farm where I grew up in central NSW.  The focus of the business is mostly cattle and I spent the week lending a hand as it's weaning season.  I'd like to think that I haven't forgotten everything I knew about working in cattle yards and I don't think I totally embarrassed myself.

Farming, or more specifically what is called 'grazing' in Australia (ie producing food from livestock not crops) is a strange business because the only thing that you can definitely count on is that something will go wrong.  The scale of the setback can range from minor inconvenience of, say, a cow barrelling through a fence and away from the herd, to existential crises such as bushfire or an outbreak of foot and mouth.  Last week it was the cumulative effect of the minor things that struck me most.

You make your livelihood working with massive animals which, if they could be said to have any sort of agenda, have no earthly reason to make life easy for you.  Why should they?  At some stage they or their offspring will be sold as meat.  Of course whatever sentience a cow has stops along way short of this but they instinct tells them that humans are to be feared.  Luckily this means that mostly they run away from you.  Mostly but not always.

On a good day the things that go wrong are minor irritants.  Locating the newborn calf that was separated from its mother during the move is a annoying but rewarding part of the job.  It's sort of the rural parallel of the document that didn't get backed up.  Time and energy will be needed to rectify the situation.  The difference is in the timeliness.  The longer the document us left the more times and energy will be required to rectify the problem.  Still, not much truly suffers if it isn't until Monday that the document is rewritten and resent.  If the newborn calf is left that long it will die cruelly.

On a good day the entire herd runs through the gates and into yards in a smooth and orderly way.  Nothing jumps a fence or barrels past you as you're drafting.  The drenching or marking or whatever you're doing goes well and you get home yourself at a reasonable time.  There aren't that many good days.  Something always cocks up and yet again you're finishing work in the dark.  This is why no one working with livestock is ever consistently on time.  It isn't because they haven't organised their worklives as well as office workers but rather because the environment is that much more haphazard.

The management consultant who declares that human beings to be 'the most unpredictable of all animals' has never had to anticipate exactly how a distraught cow will act when she hears her calf bellowing from two paddocks over.

Germans with Suntans

I'm on a flying visit to Australia and much as I love the country of my birth the oh-so-negative national mood can be a bit much. Sure, the national political scene is a cruel joke and the misallocated bounty accruing from the decades-long mining boom is distorting the wider economy but, jeez, can't you all just lighten?

The once healthy scepticism of politicians is now an outright contempt that has seemingly bled over into every sphere of life. Just as all achievements are the consequence of unearned luck all setbacks are deserved. Australians don't save enough. Don't pay enough taxes. Don't do enough for the poor or the sick. Don't care enough about the marginal lives of the original inhabitants. Don't feature on the world stage for any worthwhile purpose. Except that they do. They do all of these things and more.

As I've said before in these pages, the national psyche we resemble most in Europe is the Germans; law-abiding, sober and with a wary eye on the future. But try telling that to an Aussie without creating offence. So there's obviously something (bad) going on here that I'm missing.

That's the problem with flying visits - by the time you've sorted through the distortions you're already on the flight out. Then again, on Sunday night I did see a guy sleeping rough outside the Salvation Army passing the time by watching a film on his MacBook Air...

Gross Südland

"What you have to understand," I told an old friend as we sat in a waterside cafe in Sydney drinking wine, "is that the Greeks just don't pay their taxes."

"You mean they don't like paying tax.  Who does?"

"No.  They just don't pay them.  Anyone who pays tax is stupid.  At a barbecue you'd boast about how little the government got from you last year."

"But, but you have to pay tax.  You just have to.  I don't understand.  If you don't pay them then nothing works."

When back in Australia a few months ago I had this exact conversation - my take on the Euro crisis - again and again.  Whenever the discussion got to the Greek's diffidence to tax the reaction of my family and friends was the same: disbelief and barely suppressed outrage at a nation blithely refusing to pay its own way.

In Europe only my German friends react this way.  It occurred to me that this is no coincidence because: -

Of all the countries in Europe, including Britain, the country with which Australia most shares an outlook is modern Germany.

We may speak the same language, play the same sport and share a similar sense of humour to the Brits but our wider attitudes are increasingly Germanic.  We work hard and expect other to do likewise.  Driving on either the autobahn or its Australian equivalent there is an understanding that if the law is sensible it will be obeyed.  In a world of Keynesian pump-primers, both countries are run by deficit hawks who are paranoid about inflation above all other economic woes, although Australia's scars from the 1980's are nothing next to the rise of Nazism.

Although we play English sports we approach them with a German attitude.  Cricket is a game to be won not merely played.  Ditto rugby.  Our reaction to the Olympic team returning gold-less from the 1976 games (for the only time in our history) was to found the oh-so scientific Australian Institute of Sport.  We then staffed it with German coaches.  The backhanded English compliment "the Australian approach to sport" is essentially analogous with "the German approach to business": methodical, hard-working and intolerant of failure. 

Australia and Germany each struggle to reconcile the sensibilities of the dominant culture with the needed changes brought about by Islamic immigration.  The word 'genocide' appears in both histories, albeit unfairly in Australia's case.  The merest whiff of racism is rightfully exposed and condemned from all sides.  We are the only G20 nations where the Green movement has serious traction.  We see ourselves as the 'grown-up' country in our region so of course each pay our taxes, grudgingly perhaps but always in full.

We each drink lots of beer.  Not as much as Ireland or the Czech Republic but we both make the Top Five per capita consumption.  Then again, it's only beer, surely the most benign of alcoholic beverages.

I find working with Germans a far easier proposition than with the French, who intellectualise everything, or even the English, where every comment needs to be run through a decoder.  And Germans do have a sense of humour, however, it only appears after you've proven that you're not going to waste anyone's time.

When the comparison first occurred to me I was horrified and this theory still horrifies my Australian friends.  But if we have to resemble anyone then why not a country embarked on an ongoing project of national reinvention built on hard work and innovation without resorting to callous American inequality?  So sing it with me: -

Australien uber alles...

Holidays

 One way to get to grips with the opening premise of Friday’s post is to consider our attitudes to holidays.

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.

Holidays are an annual ritual in paying real money to calibrate our ambitions with the pace of the world.  If you want a week of sleeping, eating and reading you buy a ‘fly’n’flop’ at a child free resort somewhere sunny.  To reconnect with your preteen kids choose Euro Disney.  Because our own scarce resources (time and money) are at stake any dissonance aggravates us so much more on holidays than in usual life; “It wasn't like this in the brochure” is a near-universal lament.

 

For eight years my family ran a 3½-star hotel on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland. I looked after the marketing on a part-time basis, which was a pretty cool job.  How could it not be when this is your workplace?

In our day Castaways on the Beach was a pretty modest operation whose prime selling point was the location.   The property had a longstanding reputation for being ‘family friendly’, offering easy access to a vast waveless beach, lots of suites with in-room cooking facilities and a short walk to a town centre that featured lots of relatively inexpensive dining options and a small supermarket.  Our in-house restaurant also offered an extensive children’s menu.  As everyone knows (or should know), ‘family friendly’ is code for “There will be screaming kids everywhere.  If this is not want you want on your holiday then best you go someplace else.” Families with younger children were consistently our most satisfied customers, not least because our business plan didn't rely on corralling our guests into the dining room three times a day.  What parent doesn't find it galling paying for a full breakfast buffet when all the kid wants is a bowl of cereal?

 

Our least satisfied customers were always honeymooners who had locked onto the picture on the website and the 3½-star tariffs but (often willfully) ignored the ‘family friendly’ signals.  Signals that included the literal words ‘family friendly’ on all our brochures, billboards, website, etc.  We accepted that our offering couldn't match the ambitions of most loved-up newlyweds and instructed the booking staff to gently warn off such customers.  Over the years we invested quite heavily in improvements to the property but intentionally stuck to the 3½-star bracket.  We were happy with our positioning at the ‘family friendly’ end of the market.

 

I have no children and a relatively high disposable income but we never attempted to build an offering that would appeal to people like me and in 2007 my family sold a thriving business.  The new owners, who have far more access to far more capital than we did, spent an actual fortune taking the place ‘upmarket’.  They refurbished the public areas, reduced the pool size to increase the bar area, added a day spa, removed most of the in-room cooking facilities and upped the tariffs by about 60%.

 

I was back in Mission Beach last July and to my childless eyes the place looks amazing.  But to a family on a budget with a brood of young kids the whole package screams “Stay Away!”  The word around town is that Castaways Resort & Spa is for up sale again.

 

The need to purchase a world that temporarily matches our ambitions is the reason why we expend so much energy researching our holidays.  We only get to spend this time and money a few times a year and it's personal.  This is why holidaying with any but the closest of friends is rarely a good idea ("It’s my holiday too, y’know") and why most of us revisit those trusted holiday places again and again and again.

Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

Funny. And good in bed

My wife and I are back in Australia. We're staying with her mother and family in Sydney for a week or so. Almost everyone in the household is either self-employed or working for a start-up, which offers up some really interesting compare-and-contrast breakfast table conversations.

Hal has had several successful careers but now works from home as a foreign exchange trader. The arrangement is that he trades for himself but as part of a global cohort whose aggregate efforts are on behalf of an investment fund.  The business follows a sort of league table approach whereby as he proves his abilities the organisation allows him to trade larger amounts and so earn more.

After a year or so he's developed a keen sense of the market and is highly aware of the the combination of volume and volatility (driven by planned and unplanned news events) he needs to thrive and has climbed several rungs on the ladder already.  To do so he's adopted all the necessary professional behaviours that I would say are actually more important when working from home than anywhere else.  He'd no more trade with a hangover than I'd walk into a training room naked.

As I looked at the procession of charts and numbers flickering across the three screens on his desk I thought, "I could do that."

Of course I did. Men of my age and education all reckon we're the funniest guy at the party, a porn star in the bedroom, a Navy SEAL in a bar fight and a 'big swinging dick' in front of the trading screens

Inclination v. Obligation

Work is an obligation. Even if I really like my job (so much of the time of inclined to do it) I'm obliged to do it regardless of any momentary preference.

When our weekends and holidays 'feel like work' it's because we find ourselves obliged to do things during time we'd mentally put aside to pursue our inclinations. We like our friends because they're similarly inclined to us; time spent with them doesn't feel like an obligation.

I'm visiting Australia again in a few weeks and there's nothing like a trip home to focus the mind: which activities and engagements am I obliged to do, which am I inclined to do and which ones sit happily in the centre zone of a simple Venn Diagram?

This trip will be far more complicated because my wife and I are traveling together. As our separate and collective diaries fill up we're negotiating a much more complex Venn Diagram: there are things that are inclinations for one but obligations for the other, things that are obligations for us both and happily a few things that we're each inclined to do.

Travel alone and the trade-offs are purely internal. Travel with someone else and the negotiations need to be overt and honest otherwise we end up dragging the other person to events that we're only attending out of obligation anyway.

Adult life is a lesson in compromise and never more so than when returning to the sites of your childhood.

Waiting for a life-changing event

"A lot of farmers," said my brother-in-law, "won't move from their unsustainable farming practices until they have some sort of 'life-changing' event."

We were on a tour of the farm where I grew up in the 70's and 80's that he now runs with my sister and he was lamenting the unenlightened habits of many Australian farmers.  As I've mentioned before, he's an enthusiastic (evangelical) proponent of holistic farming.

I suppose the 'life-changing event' he imagines is some not-quite-fatal event like a heart attack or having the bank seriously question whether the farm's debt should be allowed to roll over.   But as any doctor will tell you non-fatal heart attacks are rarely life-changing.  We're humans and we hold our habits, good and bad, far closer than we'd like to admit.

It is useless to try and reason a man out of something he wasn't reasoned into.

Jonathan Swift

My brother-in-law has it wrong.  The 'life-changing event' he's seeking isn't for the farmer but the farm.  The best hope for changing practices on a given bit of dirt comes with change of ownership through inheritance or sale; and new ideas are far more likely to be trialled under totally new ownership of the asset.

The land we drove over was first used for grazing cattle in 1819 by a man named William Lee who helped build the very earliest road over the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney.  Lee was granted title to something like 60,000 acres in 1832.  Over the years that holding was broken up into smaller properties although the Lee family are still prominent in the district.  My father bought our farm (4300 acres) from the Lees in the early 1960's.  The land has been owned by only two families in the almost 200 years since white settlement reached that part of Australia. Not a lot of scope for 'life-changing events' in that timeline.

It's a great modern example of the most persistent economic unit in history: the family owned and operated farm, reports of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated.  That persistence is borne of an old fashioned mindset; farmers who create a life that serves an asset that will outlive them.  This is at odds with the way that almost everyone in the rich world lives; we build a life that serves the personal needs of our families and ourselves.  We build unremarkable bourgeois lives instead of creating then stewarding some good thing that will outlive us.

As much as we freelancers believe that we're different from the wage slaves we used to be, in this respect we're exactly the same.  Seriously expecting your son to one day take over your web design business is as weird as assuming that he'll ascend to your regional sales manager role.

We have to admit that we're not building assets, just lives, and the best we can hope for is that most bourgeois of aspirations: leaving enough cash in the kitty for our kids to have their choice of futures.

Negativity bias

I am a social creature.  I enjoy the company of others and have always made an effort to maintain friendships despite living on the far side of the planet from the people I knew growing up.

Technology makes this much easier to achieve than in times past.  Facebook means we can keep up with the smaller details of others' lives and Skype affords us cost-free face-to-face interactions whenever both parties are at the computer, which is most if the time.  Still, there's no substitute for being in a room with a friend so that's how I spent much of my time in Sydney last week.

As I've mentioned earlier when an ex-pat comes home after an extended absence a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't mechanism kicks in.  As with any scenario where resources are finite (i.e. my time in this case) but demand is practically infinite, a zero-sum game develops.  Time spent catching up with one person is unavailable for any other purpose be it work, sleep, exercise or seeing someone else.  This fact is as obvious as it is brutal but its very obviousness creates a different, more subtle problem.

Most of my friends and family in Australia lead successful (read: boring) lives so these one-on-one catch-ups often turn out to be boring conversations that go something like this: -

Me: So how's everything with you?
Old Friend: Great.
Me: Family?
OF: Great.
Me: Job?
OF: Great.
Me: Parents.  How're your parents doing?
OF: Good...

Quickly pressure starts to mount under the conversation.  We both feel it.  After all I've made time for this one person to the exclusion of all others and we can't seem to lift the discussion out of bourgeois banality.  My old friend feels the need to somehow sing for her supper so she drags something out of left field: -

OF: Did you hear about my sister-in-law?
Me: No.  I don't think I know her.
OF: Oh, I'm sure you would've met her at something.  Anyway, her father has been diagnosed with Parkinson's.
Me: That's dreadful.  It must be very hard on everyone.
OF: Well, they live in Melbourne so we don't really see them that much but it has been hard on my brother.
Me: I think I might remember meeting him at your wedding...

We've moved on from personal banality to surveying the horizons of our person existence for second- or even third-hand suffering to make sure that our time together isn't wasted and by the end of the catch-up we're both a little exhausted.  An entire week of this can leave a guy not only wrung-out but thoroughly depressed as a negativity bias kicks in.  I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not getting a true snapshot of anyone's life.

We want our friends to be there to support us through the bad times so maybe there's a tendency to road-test the disaster scenarios that lie in each of our futures just to see how it feels.  Of course when the truly bad stuff has been and gone we joke about it.  The easiest, funniest conversations to have are the ones where there's true sadness at the heart of the story: -

OF: Did you hear what happened when my Dad got arrested?
Me: No!  I never even heard he'd been in trouble!
OF: It's hilarious really.  Anyway we get this strange call from my stepmother late at night...

All of this effort and analysis is a poor substitution for propinquity but it's all we ex-pats have to offer.

London. Dawn. An uneasy peace prevails

Got back to London yesterday after three weeks away. Mostly I was catching up with family in Australia in Far North Queensland and western New South Wales but I also managed the best part of a week seeing friends in Sydney and Wellington (NZ). With all the bad behaviour in England this week I found it harder and harder to 'sell' the UK as a sensible place to live when Oz is an option.

I like Great Britain and I love London but the ambient anger we've seen this week isn't going to dissipate until the city / country regains some sense of shared opportunity. I'm still trying to work out where I want to grow old but I'm not sure I'd stay in the UK if I were still young.

Something bigger than a career

A few years ago in the context of showbiz careers I mused as follows: -

Isn't a successful career just one where you do what you love until you don't have to do it any more?

As I get ready to leave the farm I how this thought might apply to owner-operator agriculture.  Farmers' bodies wear out quicker than most and yet as in Australia 50% will die within five years of retirement, quitting doesn't seem to be much of an option.  If you stay you wear out.  If you leave you die anyway.

'Secession planning' is a growing industry in the bush as smart farmers look to 'step back' and hand the business over to the next generation whilst still retaining some small role for themselves instead of selling the business outright before heading to the coast to die.  Done properly this is a way to extend the enterprise past 40-50 years but done badly it turns into a defensive exercise in personal survival that mortgages the prospects of the next generation.

The critical issue is in the word 'career'.  Your career terminates when you do.  Whereas a successful business is a bigger thing that can (should) outlast you.  Headcount: 1 enterprises are careers that die with us; they can no more be handed on to the next generation than an actor can bequeath her role in a sitcom to her daughter.

The difference is in the asset mix.  Farms must be 'asset-heavy' to flourish whereas any career based on personal talent can function 'asset-light'.  Successful consultants, actors, writers and the like take the fruits of their labours and buy real estate whereas ambitious farmers buy more land, stock and equipment.

This is probably obvious to anyone except a farmer's son who chose to use his brains to make his way in the world rather than stay at home and build a life based on his brains, physical effort and the farm where he grew up.

2B or not 2 B2C

On Thursday I did what I suspect was one of my last ever stand-up gigs.  I'm not sure when the absolute last one will be but it's fair to say that I have many more gigs behind me than ahead.  It was a pleasant enough show run by an old comedy friend in a country pub.  My set went well but it's a long time since a gig felt like a portal to anywhere special and in the five years I've been learning this craft my life, especially my business life, has moved on.

This was crystalised for me by a throwaway line in a podcast about the 90's Dotcom boom.  The discussion centred on the two basic business models operating at that time:-

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) versus Business-to-Business (B2B)

A distinction that perfectly illustrates the divide between my comedy and my consulting.  It is the divide between Art and Commerce.  As much as I like to think I have something to say to other individuals (B2C, Art), I have twenty plus years evidence that what the cosmos wants to reward me for are my insights into how companies operate and how they could do so better (B2B, Commerce).

Set out in print it's obvious.  I am a journeyman comic who's happy to pick up a few quid for a twenty minute set in the back room of a pub in rural Wiltshire but I am also one of the highest paid consultants in my field with clients all over the globe.  My ability to make a few punters laugh on a Saturday night is passable whereas the effect I will have on your pharmaceutical sales/marketing operation is unsurpassed.

From an early age it seems as if we're programmed to aim first for Art.  My parents stumped up for lessons in music and drama and art.  They spend their weekends ferrying me and my sisters to performances on stage and sporting fields across rural NSW.  Yes, I know that a child's participation in sport or art is its own reward but buried in there somewhere in there was the message that if I had the talent then Art (including sport) was the direction my life should take.  How many conversations have we each endured with disillusioned friends and colleagues revealing that they were actually 'quite good' at some Art or other, lamenting the day they threw it over in favour of the financially secure embrace of Commerce?

Commerce is Plan B.

In generations past Art was something that you did on the side.  Few people could afford to give up their day jobs.  Nowadays new media's appetite for 'content' has led to rampant inflation in the earnings of our top sportsmen (but not sportswomen), actors, comics and the like.  Papers and magazines responded by overpaying snarky columnists to retain readers.  Needing something or someone evermore 'outrageous' to write about they in turn opened the door for the BritArt master branders like Tracey Emin and especially Damien Hirst to parlay scarcely deserved notoriety into massive financial windfalls.  For a chosen few Art now pays like never before.  The rest of us stand, necks craned, on the far side of the velvet rope.

I've suffered ferocious writers block with my comedy for almost two years.  It's gotten so bad that in the cause of generating interesting and unique material I've contemplated taking on some strange, arduous new experience like the Three Peaks challenge, the Alpha Course or fatherhood.  This is what middling comics do when they've extracted all available humour from their upbringing and neighbourhood.  Yet my experiences as a stand-up have helped take my consulting to another level.  Not only has my ability to command attention in a room been strengthened but my arduous experiences in comedy have also afforded any number of interesting and unique angles as a consultant.  Oh, the irony.

I am a quite exceptional marketing consultant and an entirely unexceptional stand-up comic.  My talents obviously lie in B2B.  Why is it so hard to admit this fact?  When I meet someone at a party why do I want to describe myself as a performer and writer rather than as 'a marketing consultant who helps drug companies sell their drugs better'?

What isn't to be just isn't to be.  I think I'm sufficiently free of self-delusion to know that I'm not just one more stand-up gig away from fame and fortune.  The fortune is more or less covered.  It's the fame I'm denied.

Happy Australia Day

Five takes on Australian identity: -

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found in the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses.  It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their nation.

Robert Menzies
Prime Minister 1939-41, 1949-66

Not lip service, nor obsequious homage to superiors, nor servile observance of forms and customs...  the Australian army is proof that individualism is the best and not the worst foundation upon which to build up collective discipline.

General John Monash
Commander of the Australian Corps 1918

When you play test cricket, you don’t give the Englishmen an inch.  Play it tough, all the way.  Grind them into the dust.

Donald Bradman
Cricket Captain 1937-48

You feel free in Australia.  There is great relief in the atmosphere - a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form.  The Skies open above you and the areas open around you.

DH Lawrence
Visitor to Australia in 1922

A fair go for all, regardless of ethnicity, race or religion, except for Poms, Seppos and Kiwis.

Anon