I want to be alone? Or maybe not.

 

Nivea must have waited a long, long time to find its purposeful answer to Dove, the great grandmamma of all purpose campaigns. But here they are, and the societal issue they’re tackling is a biggie.

The global loneliness epidemic.

A new film, created by Publicis One Touch, spearheads the campaign. The central idea is “We are not alone in feeling alone” (thanks, Sting!). The film uses ET-style aliens to represent that feeling of “being from another planet” when you don’t feel included and part of things. But the melancholy aliens quickly metamorphose into humans with friendly words and kind gestures.

The film is part of a  long-term campaign package to fight social isolation, called NIVEA CONNECT.  

Now, I think the good people at Nivea and their agencies have their hearts in the right place, but there’s another connection that's missing for me.

Why Nivea? What has skin cream to do with loneliness? I can understand someone like Telekom picking up on human connection - or a food or drink brand that’s shared. In fact, Cadbury’s in the UK have had a campaign on the theme of kindness and generosity for years. 

And ... there’s Coca Cola. The Nivea film reminded me of an ad from 16 years ago:

The creative idea is related - but in my view much stronger.

What stays in my head from the Nivea film? A rather mawkish melancholic mood, depressing depictions of victimhood. 

And from Coca Cola? 16 years later it’s still bringing a smile to my face and I’ll be humming the song all day. 

BREXILE: Never Turn Back

 

Unlike this sleepy swing, things are moving pretty damn quickly with the Brexile plans. Quicker than I would have liked, ideally - I have accepted an offer on my house. The last few nights have been as good as sleepless, wondering What On Earth Have I Done? 

This is going to hurt. A lot.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I wrote the following back in Feb 2021, mid-pandemic. It’s without doubt the most personal thing I’ve ever posted on this blog. A few months later, in June 2021, I spent a quarantine summer in the house, alone. That’s when I took the photos. It brought me closer to the place once more - and made those ties even more difficult to sever. 

But the longer I leave it, the more formidable that cloud becomes.

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NEVER TURN BACK

 

‘It’s a forever home,’ said the taxi driver in a twinkling Sarf London accent as he pulled into the drive. I looked at my mother’s house – like one of those social media memes where children’s drawings are brought to life – and nodded. We’d talked all the way from the airport, me about my ageing mother, he about his plans to retire in Spain. He was the sort – a Dave, or Phil, or Kev – that I’d been to school with, and had spent my twenties and thirties trying to escape. And now here we were, he ready finally to flee the Home Counties nest, seeking adventure, and me returning to my roots.

 

My parents always told me that I chose the house. I’ve never been quite sure if that was one of those semi-truths that parents explain to indulge their offspring that eventually take on mythical status in the grown offspring’s mind. I do have a very, very vague recollection of dogs, dogs in the quiet cul-de-sac of shiny new houses. I was obsessed with dogs as a small child. Maybe I chose the dogginess, not the house.

 

The house is (give or take) the same age as me. Twenty-seven detached houses were built in the grounds of a grand house that was repurposed as an Old Folks’ Home, as such places were called in the 1960s. The houses all bore the same style but varied in the brick colour – reddy-pink, yellow, or white stucco, like the layers of an Angel Cake. Some more generously sized, others smaller. All with a miniscule (to 21^st century eyes) single garage, the doors painted in cheerful Matchbox toy colours. Ours was a summer sky blue, next door’s a British Racing Green.

 

We moved in in the spring, as the horse chestnuts on either side of the hill were in bloom. My bedroom was at the back of the house, overlooking a garden with lavender, snapdragons, roses and apple-trees. And oak woods at the back. 

 

Together we’ve climbed hills and trees, 

Learned of love and A-B-Cs, 

Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees 

Goodbye, my friend … but no, not yet.

 

I could walk to school from the house, to Scottish dancing, and ice cream with tinned fruit salad if we were lucky, prunes and custard if we weren’t. Netball games and making cross-stitch tray-cloths. Poetry (of a certain kind) also featured on the curriculum and two poems stayed in my mind – in fact, I probably did what I’d now call a mental mash-up of the two. Hardly surprising as they were both on the same theme, and probably written around the same time:

 

I remember, I remember

The house where I was born,

The little window where the sun

Came peeping in at morn;

 

… and

 

… It made the Paradise complete:

My early home was this.

 

But a paradise is never stable. As I grew, I accumulated thoughts and ideas that didn’t fit in that “bower of bliss”. It became a prison in my mind. I didn’t want to have friends round as I was ashamed of my father’s posh voice and my mother’s fur coat. The garden became a chore, the bedroom – now decorated in turquoise, olive green and orange – somewhere I hid furtively to write pretentious poetry and cut pictures of dubious rockers out of the NME. We drank tin party barrels from Watneys in the woods, made bombs, and experimented with smoking sunflower leaves.

 

I couldn’t wait to leave.

 

In my twenties, I bought my own flat – decorated with one or two bits and bobs from the old place that I considered ironic in their slight tackiness, but otherwise all furnishings were new. My parents would talk about me coming home for Sunday lunch, but I saw it otherwise. Going to Camberley was a duty, a rather arduous one at the time, which inevitably involved drinking sherry on top of a hangover at some ungodly hour. Home: unwittingly, I drifted into being someone that didn’t really have a home. I lived in hotels, slept on aeroplanes, kipped round at friends’ places at weekends and disappeared off to weekend cottages with gangs of chums, in a Richard Curtis film sort of way. I was one of those devil-may-care Anywhere people. Wannabe global elite. Probably quite obnoxious.

 

In March 1996, I jumped the great ship Britannia as she sailed towards the island of Cool. My one-way ticket cut through the Heathrow fog like a landing light. Terminal 1 echoed with finality – no going back? London still slept but my mind already marched to the beat of the Teutonic clock. My heart followed more than willingly, long lost in the mists of a fairy tale. My mother, in some of her more dramatic moments later, called this an abandonment. I didn’t see it that way. I was European. I could come and go as I pleased. It was only later that I realised that this wasn’t about me. It was about my father, by that time already ill. 

 

The last years of the 20^th century were probably the furthest I’ve been, emotionally, away from my early home. The new Millennium marked my slow return. A birth and a death in unbearably quick succession. Taking my infant son back to my family home for the funeral meant the aviation genes in his blood would be stimulated, and he’d grow up knowing this place too.

 

It was a rediscovery, each time we flew across to the UK. The swing in the garden, painted dark green by my late father, the oak woods waiting for us, along with the toys in the toy box, the Puffin books, the sherry in the cocktail cabinet of the Ladderax, and my mother’s fur coat which Marius could dress up in and pretend he was going to snowy Narnia. I’d toppled off the career ladder (was I pushed, or did I jump?) and didn’t really give a toss. I now had Somewhere – two Somewheres – two Places for Us to accumulate not just stuff but memories, opinions, friends, hobbies and responsibilities, all in a glorious binocular muddle.

 

When one Somewhere became too much, I’d know the other was waiting for me and jump in the car.

 

Before she died, my mother asked what I’d do with the house. I was honest and said I didn’t have a clue – there were more pressing matters on my mind, like how long she had left, and whether she was in pain. 

 

‘Perhaps you’ll live here,’ she said, hopeful as ever.

 

The pandemic has put its killjoy foot firmly down on my double life and my flitting across the channel. The neighbours sent jolly pictures of bunting for the VE Day Anniversary Street Party last year, and recently crocuses from the wooded area up the hill. My brother checks on things, rather half-heartedly. This friend or that one makes helpful suggestions. You could rent it out. It’s a good time to sell. People are moving out of London. You could turn it into a writing retreat (I know, I know – they mean well).

 

In my sleeping and waking thoughts, the house lurches around from being the most cumbersome, resource-leeching and ridiculous of white elephants, to being some sort of paradisical life-force source, to being a magnificent mythological cabinet of curiosities, to being a domestic disaster waiting to happen.

 

In German, there’s a verb abnabeln – translated as “to cut oneself loose”, literally, to cut the umbilical cord. I know this is what I will have to do one day. But currently I cannot begin to countenance it. The pandemic is a frustration, but also an excuse. We all like to wallow in the comfort of helplessness. 

 

When I do summon up the wherewithal to say goodbye to the old place – at least in its bricks and mortar form, I hope I can heed the words of aviatrix and adventurer Beryl Markham: 

 

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

 

It’s going to take every ounce of courage I have not to turn back and take one last look at my early home. 

 

Wish me luck!

 

P.S: July 2025

… The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I have learned it late.

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RETROWURST: documenta July 2007

 

This month’s Retrowurst is a step away from the vulgar world of commercial creativity into the world of art for art’s sake. 

Or is it?

See what I had to say about the frankly weird experience that is documenta, back in July 2007.

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This month, Extrawurst is going to be a little different. I am not going to write about brands or marketing as such, but about an event. But, perhaps, as brands are meant to be moving towards becoming total experiences, this will not be totally irrelevant.

 

The event in question is “Documenta”. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Documenta is an exhibition of contemporary art, held every five years in the town of Kassel. Artists from all over the world are featured and I suppose it is Germany’s version of the Venice Biennale.

 

Documenta was founded by the artist Arnold Bode, and the first exhibition was held in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural show) that was taking place in Kassel at that time. We are now onto Documenta 12 this year and the exhibition runs for 100 days through the summer months.

 

Before I get on to my experience of Documenta itself, it’s worth taking a look at the home of Documenta, Kassel. To be quite honest, Kassel seems an almost bizarre venue for such an international art event. For those of you who have been to Venice during the Biennale, I am sure you’ll agree that the whole thing “fits” somehow, with modern art works taking temporary residence in some of Venice’s most famous ancient buildings as well as the specially constructed country pavilions, themselves of architectural interest.

 

Kassel, however, is a lump of a town with a decidedly split personality. Although it is in the middle of Germany, topographically, it is a town that really feels as if it is in the middle of nowhere. There are no major airports nearby and one travels on the train towards Kassel through what seems like unending (if pleasant enough) countryside of rolling hills and fields. Kassel itself is dominated by fading Teutonic melodrama. A huge statue of Hercules stands atop the hill that overlooks the town. Beneath Hercules are the Schloß and its park – all grottoes, follies and classical temples. But Kassel also has a huge industrial area and one of the highest crime rates in Germany.

 

During Documenta, the town takes on a different face. Not only through the throngs of visitors from all over the globe but also from the works of art that incorporate themselves within the town. This can be in a way obvious to all, like the huge poppy field accompanied by “revolutionary songs” by a Croatian artist that has turned the conservative Friedrichsplatz into a “red square” for the summer, or the 1,000 Chinese nationals who have been invited by a Chinese artist to Kassel to “be” in the German city for a few weeks. Or it can be in a more subtle way, noticed only by visitors, as provocative modern works hang side-by-side with “Flemish painting of the nobility” in the Kassel gallery.

 

For Documenta this year, the main Leitmotifs have been based on three questions: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and What is to be done? Whether it is a result of these questions or not, many of the works of art on show are very heavy, dealing with war, dispossession, rape and torture, refugees and the aftermath of colonialism: all in all, Documenta 12 doesn’t exactly make for a fun day out for all the family! In addition, most of the visitors seem to be of the particularly earnest sort, scribbling in notebooks and fiddling with their glasses.

 

The result of all of this über-earnestness is that the German media and general public love to poke a bit of fun at Documenta, even if one senses a little bit of hidden pride behind it all in the “we’ve got our eccentric and creative types, too” sense. One artist ran into trouble with the Kassel Straßenverkehrsamt or municipal road authorities when she changed the white lines on some of the roads in Kassel to crosses. This conflict between German rationality and artistic creativity made for a few good news stories. Or there was a touch of Schadenfreude when the severe storms resulted in the collapse of a sculpture outside and part of the main pavilion being under water. In the first case, the artist declared his sculpture to be more beautiful in its collapsed state than in the original, so all was well in the end.

 

I wondered if these paradoxes are what give Documenta its charm. As an event it is unexpected and almost eccentric. It would simply not work as a concept on paper because the bits don’t really fit together. Another part of its charm is that it is almost utterly devoid of any signs of commerciality. The only sponsorship that I saw was from Sparkasse (the Savings Bank) who had sponsored the audio guide. And although a design agency had been commissioned to create signage, a “look” for the attendants and an orientation system, this was unobtrusive to the point that it was fairly easy to become disorientated and lost. But this was, in reality, not a bad thing, as the disorientation led one to works that one normally might have missed.

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I became quite a documenta fan following that visit. I attended documenta 13 in 2012 and 14 in 2017. If my memory serves me correctly, Ben and Jerry’s did some brilliant branding at 2012 which kept a certain young lad from being completely bored out of his skull. And 2017 took place partly in Athens (although I only made it to Kassel) and I recall a brilliant work which was a Parthenon-style installation of banned books.

But I didn’t go in 2022 (15). I wasn’t the only one. Like so many things these days, it all got nasty and ugly and political. Not what I needed just as we were emreging from the Covid Hell. 

And 2027, documenta 16? Who knows. One thing is certain, though. I don’t think any multi-millionaires will be tempted to hold their nuptials in Kassel.

Station to Station

 

As far as trains go, I’m rather “admire from afar”. I never did Interrailing in my youth. And while I’ve nodded off on a few train journeys, I’ve never travelled in a sleeper car. The only times I’ve slept properly on a train were under a table on the way up to Aberdeen from London on a night train. And in an absolutely charming little restaurant/hotel in Germany whose name evades me - but this was a few repurposed dining and sleeper cars from an old train - a delightful experience.

Other than that, my mind has a romanticised Wes Anderson-esque view of night trains, fuelled by Agatha Christie films and the gorgeous Auden poem “Night Rail”, above.

Normally when I hear about something new from a “Berlin-based startup” I assume it’ll be something techy and not relevant to someone making serious thoughts about retirement. 

But.

Maybe by 2027 I will indeed be retired and very keen to give Nox a go. 

What a splendid thought - overnight trains across Europe with 100% personal rooms - for the price of a cheapo airfare. The plan is to connect over 100 European cities by 2035. I’m already dreaming about Budapest, Vienna, Linz and now Györ (which I had to look up) - the connections already shown from Frankfurt.

Wishing Thibault Constant and his colleagues all the best with getting this on the road - I mean tracks. 

Potemkin Perfection

 

I don’t often read recently-published novels. Probably due to my weird penchant for living in the past, and I often think the old stuff is going to be more enduring. But now and then I have a go at something new, and, in the case of Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, I was pleasantly surprised.

Here’s what I made of this tale of two digital nomads set in the first two decades of the 21st century:

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This is a brilliantly observed novel, describing in detail the life on- and offline of a young couple, from the early 2000s to 2019. I say “the life” in singular, as Anna and Tom, digital creatives, are written mainly as one entity. The pair are originally from Italy, but find their way to buzzy Berlin at the time of the digital boom and the rise of social media.

Reading the first few pages, you wonder if you’ve stumbled into a talking IKEA catalogue or similar. The style is unemotional, descriptive, rather flat. This is curious initially, but soon mesmerising as you drift into a curated, algorithmically determined world where the public persona rules supreme and reality is “stuffed away into huge, clear storage boxes.”

Of the couple, the author writes: “Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating”. Their Instagram world of curated ephemera includes vintage clothes, cupcakes, crystalline coastlines, airy apartments, flowers and book covers. And “they would find themselves utterly mesmerised by the apartment, kale salad or kitten of someone living two blocks or two continents away. They would get worked up about silly fights between strangers.”

Offline, Anna and Tom live in a similar bubble, together with kindred ex-pat creatives. They frequent trendy clubs, Instagrammable restaurants and edgy art exhibitions. This bubble is like a 21st century global digital version of a Potemkin village - curiously flat and lacking in substance.

Gradually, the pair recognise a lack of purpose or fulfillment and attempt to rectify this via volunteer work in a refugee camp. But their digital creative skills cannot be usefully deployed here.

As the years pass, the couple sense the pain of a generational change and leave Berlin, returning to Southern Europe. Although the ending hints at a new stability, one cannot ignore the date - 2019. My mind continued to tick over when I’d finished the book, wondering what happened to Anna & Tom (and their ilk) in the pandemic.

Insightful, thought-provoking, well-written and translated, “Perfection” evokes the spirit of the early 21st century in Europe (almost) perfectly.

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And even though I’m a little older than the protagonists, I had several ouch-been-there-done-that-moments.

Needless to say. I read Perfection on my Kindle, as is my wont these days. I still hanker after real books, to be honest, yet this was the perfect book to read on Kindle, which enhances that flat, Potemkin village feeling. 

Just as I’d finished the book, though, I saw a wonderful sight just down the road which could just be the start of the way back to real books. It’s kind of the opposite of a Potemkin village - an inside-out bookshop - Bruchköbel’s very own bricks and mortar brand.

Our relocated local bookshop, the Rathaus Buchhandlung, designed by the Artbau Gruppe. Congratulations to all concerned, and much success with the new shop. 

 

RETROWURST: Kik June 2007

 

What surprised me the most about my article about the fashion discounter Kik, back in June 2007, was the Creative Director asking “who?” Blimey, I thought our echo chambers were bad enough now!

Anyway, here’s how the wonderful world of Kik looked 18 years ago:

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This month, it is the turn of one of Germany’s fastest-growing retailers to be the subject of Extrawurst. A couple of weeks ago, there was a comment on one of the Brand Republic blogs about the brands “loved by metrosexuals” that seem to creep into every seminar and conference like the usual suspects. Brands like Apple, Nike and Innocent. The author called for celebration of Unfashionably Brilliant Brands such as Argos, National Express and Travelodge. Well, you will be forgiven for not being familiar with the brand I’m going to write about if you live in the UK, but I was a little worried recently when a creative director here in Germany had to ask “who?” when I mentioned this brand, so far away as it is from the world of advertising agency folk!

 

In fact, it is funny that this retailer should be a candidate for being Unfashionably Brilliant because it is a fashion retailer, Kik (www.kik-textilien.de ). Obviously the fashions that Kik sells are not really de rigueur in the creative departments of Hamburg and Berlin but no-one can deny that Kik is one of the few home-grown success stories of recent years in a somewhat lacklustre market.

 

If you have never experienced Kik, I can only say that, being kind, it is rather like a market (Wembley, if it still exists, rather than Camden Lock) or one of those “everything a pound” bazaar places. Being unkind, it is a depressing sort of jumble-sale with fashion mistakes from the last few years served up in sizes up to 6XXL!

 

Kik started 12 years ago in Bönen, Westphalia and now has over 2,000 stores with sales of around €1.2 bn (2006 estimated). The objective of the retailer is to get to 2,500 stores by the end of 2007. As Lidl has 2,750 stores here, you can get some idea of the size of the operation. The stores were originally in out-of-town locations, on bleak industrial estates but Kik is now going increasingly for city-centre locations.

 

The concept is incredibly simple: do what Aldi and Lidl do for food, but for clothing. But before you start thinking that this is a sort of German Primark, please stop. While Primark has some aspirations to fashion, style, service and even shopping experience, you can forget all of those with Kik. Kik is deliberately cheaper and no-frills-er than anyone else in the business. There are no shop-window displays or dummies in Kik. There are no bags unless you pay for them. There are no nice carpets or luxurious changing-rooms. There are a couple of mirrors in each store and a couple of tiny basic cubicles (without mirrors) should you want to try on a bikini. Generally, trying-on is discouraged as Kik worry that seeing yourself in an orange, purple and turquoise kaftan in the cold light of day could put you off purchase. On the other hand, they make a big thing of their “exchange without discussion” policy: being cynical, they probably think that, at these prices, people won’t bother to bring something back.

 

Kik relies on the impulse additional purchase. The way to the till is via a bazaar-like collection of bargains: toys, sweets, make-up and perfumes, greeting cards and wrapping paper and household goods such as rubbish bags and batteries. Most of these items sell for €1 or less. And the clothes are amazingly cheap: a T-shirt at €1.99 is cheaper than buying a pack of 8 toilet rolls!

 

Although the quality is not first-class, it is reasonable, especially for the price. Kik has some “minimum standards” ensuring that, while most of the clothes are produced cheaply in Asia, child labour is not used, nor are there any dodgy chemicals in the clothes. Although one gets the feeling that no more questions are asked than necessary about suppliers, Kik does make some effort in the direction of CSR with the “Help and Hope” Foundation, formed in 2005 to help children in poverty. However, it is not one of the top places to train or to work: there is a large turnover of staff and these are not really trusted or well-looked-after in the way that IKEA, for example, does.

 

But, going back to the clothes, one can’t really argue with the prices. Kik proclaim that you can “dress yourself for under €30” which they can certainly live up to. T-shirts are €1.99 and jeans are €7.99 – with no price increase since May 2002! Three pairs of socks will set you back a mere €1.99 and children’s jeans can be had for €4.99. In the non-clothing lines, the look-and-smell-alike perfumes are €2.99 and greeting cards and gift wrap €0.49.

 

Advertising and promotion are loud and cheerful, as you’ll experience if you click on the website link. Kik do a roaring business in outsize and there is no pussyfooting around here with size 14/16 models – the guys and girls that model the XXL collections are BIG!

Kik have found a very upfront and prominent form of promotion in terms of football tricots. As well as a number of major teams in the Bundesliga, Kik supplies kit to all manner of local and junior teams. And, when you can kit out a complete team (with a bag and ball thrown in) for a mere €99.99, who is to argue?

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Interesting that Kik foresaw and acted on the whole Plus-Size models thing - a pioneer of inclusivity if ever there was one!

In 2025, Kik are still plying their wares, successfully - with 4,200 stores across Europe. Sales have doubled to £2.4 bn since 2006. I haven’t been in there recently, but I had a quick look at the website and the usual suspects are all present and correct - paper plates with rainbow princess unicorns, sequinned denim jackets, garden gnomes. You can still get jeans for under €10 and a T-shirt for €3.49.

There was even a phase when Kik parties were a hip thing to do.

Kik have even more competition these days - not just from Aldi and Lidl - but there’s a whole army of discounters for textiles and bits & pieces - from TEDi to Takko. We’ve got a new Woolworth opening up round the corner, too.

One thing I omitted to mention in my original article is where the name comes from - it’s an acronym for “Kunde ist König”.

The customer is king (or princess). And maybe that’s less about a seamless customer journey/unique branded experience or whatever the latest buzzwords are, and more about a constantly-changing range of cheap and cheerful tat that’s within the reach of anyone’s wallet or pocket money. 

 

Heads or tails?

 

I got the sad news yesterday that the headmaster of my first school passed away recently - although he did achieve the grand old age of 96. There’s a Facebook group for ex-pupils of the school and I spent some time browsing old black and white school photos. These were taken on a summer lawn, in front of the rhododendrons, many moons ago. 

The photos were usually arranged so that there was a group of taller, wholesome-looking girls standing in front of the prize cups and trophies. A combination of being small for my age and slightly precocious as far as learning went meant I was never destined to stand behind the cups. I’m somewhere off to the side - in one photo with a badly concealed snigger. I was prone to giggles about absurd and puerile things in those days. Still am.

When I reached secondary school, the teachers were probably relieved I didn’t seem quite as oddball as my brother, who was rumoured to "drink ink and play his trumpet in the toilet.” I was never the out-and-out rebel, bad girl or geek, but I did have a slight dusting of eccentricity and subversiveness. 

Bookish and useless at most sports, I never really wanted to be like David (or Davida) Watts, in the words of The Kinks’ song (performed here by The Jam). When I got to the Sixth Form, almost everyone was made a Prefect. I was one of the few that wasn’t. That changed when I passed the Cambridge Entrance exams, though. I think the head of sixth form even invited me for a glass of sherry in his office. But I shrugged off the smarminess for what it was, played the game and wore my Prefect badge with apparent pride. Although I was more likely to have my nose in something like Colin Wilson’s The Outsider than be patrolling the corridors during Prefect Duty.

I did manage to collect a couple of “Head” titles during my career. I was “Acting Head of Market Research” during our boss’s maternity leave, then later “Head of Planning” at Saatchi Frankfurt. But along with this, I can remember at least one telling-off from a (female) boss about my dress sense. I sat there wearing a long yellow-gold jacket, leggings and pointy black shoes with gold embroidery, like some sort of gender-fluid member of Showaddywaddy. If I’d been tarty or scruffy, it would have been easier to deal with. All the boss could come up with was that the outfit didn’t convey “corporate gravitas” or some such. Again, I shrugged and smiled. Weren’t we an ad agency? Not bloody McKinsey?

But there were plenty of colleagues who did tow the line. Stick to the agenda. They were safe pairs of hands who’d probably stood behind the cups in the school photo. I note that a lot of the women I worked with in the past are now OBEs and Dames. Of course, there were the out-and-out rebels, too - and they were celebrated accordingly.

But I was always a "neither-nor" case. A bit of a chameleon, fitted in when it suited me. Had my independent thoughts but often kept them to myself. 

I found this blog post about “Head Girl Syndrome” a few years ago. It’s a little dated now and has a rather bitter tinge - and something of that "either-or" binary. But a lot of it resonated with me. A Head Girl is “a good all-rounder - pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved.” The description has never fitted me particularly well. The long yellow-gold jacket was better. The author points out how the Head Girl type is favoured by committees, peer review processes, voting and anything that favours consensus. And how “modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes, hence there is no place for the creative genius.”

There is a place for the creative genius, of course, but it’s not at the top of a government or commercial organisation. 

Since 2013, when that article was written, we’ve seen yet more dumbing-down and risk aversion in politics and commerce as these are further driven by frameworks, processes, ideologies and dogma. There's a distinct lack of emphasis on independent thought. And it’s pretty obvious that the advent of AI will advance all this normalising and homogenising further despite a lot of noise about neurodiversity. Head Girl CVs are a very attractive catch for AI.

This is a brilliant article by James Marriott of The Times (sorry about the paywall) in which he bemoans the “normie-doom spiral”. In essence:

21st century Britain is beset by mediocrities who rise to the top not by doing anything right but by not doing anything wrong.

Now, I’m certainly not dumping all ex-Head Girls and Boys in with this. I’ve come to terms with my own lack of Head-Girlness. Nor do I hold myself up as a some sort of wronged and unrecognised creative genius. 

I certainly haven’t got all the money that David/a Watts has got - but I’m not a “dull and simple” lass, either.

I’m the Tail Girl. Wagging most of the time, doing the stuff I like, rather than being a nodding dog. 

But I have a sting tucked away, too.