Red Spider Blues

It was with great sadness that I heard that one of my planning heroes, Charlie Robertson, has gone off to the great spiderweb in the sky. Charlie was one of the second generation of sparky British planners who worked in the London ad agencies of the early 80s - that generation which includes Paul Feldwick, Leslie Butterfield and Damian O'Malley.

Although I say second generation, Charlie was no follower. Having worked at the places to be in London in the 80s - BMP and BBH, he founded the planning department at the Leith agency up in Scotland, where he preferred to raise his family. Charlie already knew London wasn't the be-all and end-all of everything, and this led to his masterstroke - he founded Red Spider, the world's first virtual planning and strategy agency.

Why should strategy, and the bright minds behind it be confined to four walls in Soho, or Charlotte Street? This was pioneering with a capital P.

By the time I became associated with Red Spider, in 2003, the web had spread. I spent an enjoyable few years as an associate Spider, under the guidance of Charlie and George Shepherd, running training workshops on strategy tools and busily devising "Brand Redprints.". Those tools - which Charlie and Co. were generous enough to make public property, more or less (on the assumption that anyone can pick up a paintbrush, but only Picasso can create a Picasso) - are still being used around the world today. It was Charlie who urged me to join Facebook and a whole load of now defunct social media sites back in 2007 or so.

Charlie was astute, witty, sharp as a needle and humane. His hair seemed to have a life of its own. He didn't shy away from saying exactly what he thought and he was an enemy of both blandness and bullshit.

He'll be much missed. I'm grateful to have known him.

The spider and the fly

On holiday, I went semi-voluntarily unplugged. Not being near a computer to look at e-mails or the internet was easy enough for two weeks, but I also became disconnected from the mobile phone when the wretched thing stubbornly refused to have any reception from the moment I landed at Vancouver airport. (I must ask T-Mobile about that: my husband's phone seemed to have no problems...strange.)

Anyway, once I had got used to the idea, I felt a wonderful sense of freedom and release. I asked myself: why is it assumed, these days, that you have to be connected, that you have to have your network at your fingertips, that you have to be "in touch"?

I think a lot of us kid ourselves. We think we're spiders, spinning our wonderful complex nets and webs, in full control, at the centre of things. But away from it all, I realised that I am often just a poor fly, caught up, buzzing helplessly in a sticky, suffocating net of someone else's making.