Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Ireland by Frank Delaney

    Frank Delaney’s Ireland was one of the most enjoyable books that I have read in a long time. The book has been compared to James Michener‘s books and Alex Haley’s Roots – fiction based on history with more elemental truths in it than most non-fiction.

    The book is complex and multi-layered, but easy-to-read. The story focuses on a young boy in a middle class household in rural Ireland during the 1950s and how his imagination and interest in the country’s myth and history is fired by a traditional storyteller. His search for the storyteller unravels some of the elements of his own family story which people have sheltered from him.

    The book accurately reflects the social environment of my parents Ireland. A rural-based community bound by morality, coming to terms with its fractured identity post-independence and oppressed by its own family secrets. It highlights the reasons why I used to get chastised as a child when I was willful or bold (and I wasn’t actually that bad) with ‘you’ll disgrace us’ or ‘you’ll disgrace the family name’.

    The clash with modernity lived on in the small farms that I grew up on for much of my childhood. Electricity made it to my uncle’s farm when I was a toddler and I can remember helping to foot the turf, drinking stewed tea and red lemonade along with a packed lunch as we worked in the bog, filling the high sided cart with sods of turf to be dragged home by a donkey and stored in a shed down the yard.

    I was in primary school before they moved away the traditional cocks of hay to bales and sudden bounty of shiny nylon twine that tied the bales was a wonder material that held fittings, extended electric fences and acted as a temporary way of securing a gate to a post. The excitement of making silage with all the heavy machinery running around the place compensated for the eventual reduction in the nylon twine supply.

    My only criticism is that the book portrays this rural life in a rosy way like the Famous Five books of Enid Blyton and her ‘scones and lashings and lashings of ginger beer’. Whilst the upside of a closely knit community would have been more a sociable people that cars, a faster pace of life and commuting no longer facilitate. Life is hard and it requires commitment to get up and ‘fodder’ animals in the early hours of a winters morning, clear out stables, dig out potatoes out of a storage heap that’s frozen over, pull in hay in the baking sun, dig a turf bank or repair ditches.<

    The Raleigh bicycle with one gear and a heavy frame that you could get in any colour so long as it was black was the standard mode of transport. They lasted forever, it would be common to see these rust covered scrap heaps parked up and then the owners come along jump and go. This was also the only way to get your shopping (or messages as it would be called). It had levers rather than brake cables with thick chromed steel rods and linkages running to both the front and the rear brake pads. That may mean a round trip of 14 – 20 miles with your shopping on a bike.

    The only concession to modernity would be a seat protector – there would be a plastic fitted shower cap put on over the leather coil sprung seat so that when the owner came out to ride the bicycle away he would not have the discomfort of a wet bum. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Loose connected networks

    In order to tell you about loose connected networks, I wanted to tell you about my friend Heather. During the dot com era when I started my agency career, Heather and I were pod (as in cubicle) neighbours at the same agency for 2 1/2 years.

    The last time we worked together was almost five years ago. However we have managed to keep in touch over the past five years via email on an irregular basis, the occasional phone call and kept up to speed with the happenings in each others lives.

    Heather is a classic example of a loose connected networks within my professional life.One which would not have been realistically possible without the benefit of email. This network maintenance with people who I have known through different phases of my life is a key example of how the Internet has altered our social fabric and social networks such as LinkedIn, SoFlow and Orkut have tried to codify this process.

    The value of loose connected networks to me is very tangible. I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley whilst at Yahoo!. Heather met me at San Francisco airport, gave me a tour of Silicon Valley and on my one night off, took me to the Sunnyvale town market and custom car show.

    Being in a strange place and being able to kick back with a friend who is a local, but at the same time gets where you are coming from was priceless. Being able to find a bar with a proper Irish fry up with black and white pudding makes her even more valuable!.

    I got to see a more human personal Silicon Valley than some of my peers who dismiss the place as being dull.

    Certainly Sunnyvale felt small, but then why wouldn’t it when most of the major employers provide most of lifes requirements on giant campuses and you can buy everything else at the out-of-town Walmart or Target store. Being a European I was reminded of the small town mythology perpertrated in US films like American Grafitti, Back the Future and ET. Having been to Sunnyvale it all made sense. More ideas related content here.

  • Sean Coombes reinventing his label

    The New York Times has an interesting article about how Sean Coombes is trying quite successfully to walk his urban fashion label out of the cliche it had become. Though his business is worth some 400 million USD annually, Coombs has seen the writing on the wall of the scene and rather than cater for the limited market of Ali G impressionists is trying to move more upmarket. The urban fashion scene has become as tired as the sound of R&B and rap music, in the way that 80’s rock got into treading the same groove over and over again to make money.

    In the US, labels like Ecko, Sean John and Phat Farm have been co-opted by preppie clientele. There is a certain irony in this as Phat Farm often aped preppie and collegiate looks for the hip-hop community. Now Phat Farm has been co-opted by desperate brands such as Motorola looking for a hook-up, Russell Simmons sold out leaving the company to an international conglomerate. Brands like Gap and Abercrombie and Finch have stolen much of the look. While in Europe, genuine workwear brands like Carhartt and Dickies that were part of the real prison yard baggy look have combated the new pretenders by acknowledging their fashion customer base and participating in associated activities like music and extreme sports.

    Coombs is using his womenswear range as a Trojan horse to get into the department stores that otherwise would not have carried his usual clothing range. More on fashion here
    –

  • Level3

    Totaltele.com had an interesting report from Dow Jones Newswire how Level3 the backbone network provider had been exhibiting Enronesque traits.

    Level 3’s capital-intensive business model is questioned (subscription required) by Helen Draper highlights how Level3 is having to invest huge amounts of money to make just a little money back, hurting its working capital. This was one of the factors that encouraged all the creative accounting at Enron.

    I have a bit of related history. Back in the day I was involved in launching Enron Broadband Services in Europe. The operation was a start-up with just three bright Americans who were sent over to kick things off. I got them sorted with their first UK mobile phones, which were prepaid devices on Orange.

    My team was responsible for introducing them to the European telecoms media, the telecoms analyst community and key contacts at the major peering networks in London. I thew the most awkward party ever. A whole pile of UNIX and Cisco experts ate nouveau cuisine in a minimalist restaurant that required a cloak room assistant to help you find the exit door in the bathroom. My job at that time wasn’t made any easier by Level3. In a classic case of the Emperor’s new clothes or dot com hubris, Enron had a complex PowerPoint deck and a story that  didn’t make much sense. At the time Level3 was both a supplier of capacity to Enron Broadband Services and a determined critic.

    It’s then CEO James Crowe was a vocal critic of the Enron Broadband Services business model according to journalists that I had spoken to. Which made my job so much harder.  Of course, some of Crowe’s criticism was justified and none of us really had an idea of how much of a mess Enron actually was. It is ironic to think that Level3 might be treading a similar path. More telecoms related content here.

  • Breakfast clubs

    Its easy having worked in the media to lose touch with what happens in society. When I read in the FT on Saturday about Greggs the Bakers’ school breakfast clubs I was impressed and disturbed at the same time.

    Firstly the disturbed bit, I went to school in a hardship hit area where many kids queued to get free school meals, I managed to avoid it myself as my Dad managed to keep working. The recession hit 80s I thought were long gone, its a lot easier to get work now. The breakfast clubs reminded me that the child poverty one associated with my parents day and before; despite family credit and new deal schemes designed to alleviate real poverty. It seemed like something one would have expected when there were the dark satanic mills and dank industrial landscapes portrayed in LS Lowry paintings and sketches where working-class people toiled on the edge of existence and children were at risk of catching rickets and got their shoes from a ‘boot club’. Instead of the dark satanic mills, there are now warehouses with zero hour contract employees. This isn’t even the old day wages suffered by construction workers and stevedores working day rates pre-containerisation on the docks. 

    If this carries on the political centre won’t hold with this level of poverty.

    I was impressed by the way Greggs have taken positive steps to help communities deal with this by funding the food and equipment like toasters and having their own staff train volunteers who cater for the breakfast clubs. Breakfasts improve punctuality and help the children concentrate on their morning lessons, since many of them would not have eaten until lunch time. The campaign seems to be a text-book case of corporate and social responsibility activity. Apparently the scheme costs them in the region of 250,000GBP per annum and puts to shame the Big Food companies who have far more resources at their disposal and are in desperate need of far more goodwill. What do you think? More related posts here.