On the Mic - Surrey Life - April 2013

Harris and Hoole have been good to me. I produced a radio discussion about them on LBC. They were the subject of my first report on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show. They made for a nice little blog post on here, which got a few hits, because for a while, if you googled Harris and Hoole, it was in the top 10 results. It also made for a column in Surrey Life's April issue, which I can now re-publish (with a few tweaks) here. Enjoy, perhaps, over coffee.

The county is under attack. Just as HG Wells’ nineteenth-century Martians scrutinised and studied decent invasion sites near Woking, twenty-first century Surrey is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than our own. 

Stimulant-mongers. Corporate drug pushers. Coffee sellers.

As a recovering breakfast show presenter, my relationship with the bean is deeper and more complex than that of a ten year old boy with his first Panini football sticker collection. I know exactly how and when to deliver the precise amount of liquified granules to my system in order to ensure optimum performance and concentration levels at unholy hours of the day. 

But I know what I’m doing. I understand the risks. I’m a professional. What worries me is the creeping colonisation of our town centres by caffeinated drug dens, indiscriminately emptying their black gold into the veins of an unthinking populace.

At first coffee houses seem benign. Warm, welcoming and comfortable. But then more appear, and soon everyone is wandering about clutching giant cardboard beakers, yabbering incessantly with wide-eyed abandon. Enough is enough. Surrey is in the grip of an addiction. It’s time to to wake up and smell… er… no… hang on...

In my town, it's completely out of control. When I moved to Walton-on-Thames seven years ago, we had Starbucks, Caffe Nero and a couple of independents. Now we’ve also got a massive Costa, a Muffin Break (?!), three more independents and pretty much every pub and restaurant flogging the stuff. The local mini-Waitrose has even started selling takeaway cappuccinos, just in case anyone can’t finish their shopping and make it to the nearest dispensary without grabbing one for the road. 

Which brings us to the Tesco-funded Harris and Hoole. With a name like that on the shop-fitter’s boards I guessed, before it opened, a new chain of ambulance-chasing high street solicitors would be alighting in Walton. 

Then - bang! - without warning, another retail space full of comfy seats, intoxicating, steamy smells and funky but unobtrusive tunes appeared.

Excitingly, it’s from within this controversial new set-up your intrepid reporter is communicating with you now. I’m in the belly of the barista!

Like its competitors, Harris and Hoole make buying your drink a challenge. I asked for a medium-sized strong-ish coffee with hot milk. I swear this is the conversation that followed, verbatim:

“Filter?”

“No, freshly brewed.”

“Our filter is freshly brewed.”

“Well I don’t want filter. I want it made through the machine - an Americano with hot milk.”

“Ah yes! An Americano. Well, actually it’s not an Americano here, it’s a Long Black.”

“A Long Black then.”

“What size would you like?”

“Medium.” [I already said that]

“And do you want the hot milk in it or on the side?”

“I don’t care.”

“Do you have a loyalty card?”

“Yes please”

“No - do you have one?”

“No.”

“Do you want one?”

“Is this a test?”

Even after paying I wasn’t allowed my coffee. I was given a black plastic slab with red lights on and told not to return until the lights started flashing, which they did as soon as I sat down.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like Harris and Hoole. All bare brick, wooden floors, free wifi and friendly smiles. I was going to mention I don’t really rate their coffee, but having hinted as much a couple of minutes ago to the lady clearing my table she has insisted I try two other different coffees for free. As a result I’m completely off my nut, unable to coherently enunciate my own name, let alone decide whether I’m ever coming back. 

Maybe a county full of coffee shops isn’t a bad thing. It used to be estate agents, and it’s impossible to have a nice sit down in one of those without someone trying to sell you a house. 

You can’t help  wonder how we survived perfectly well before this bizarre mania got hold of us. But they said that about dishwashers, tablet computing devices and Mr Whippy ice-cream. The modern world is exhausting. But at least there are plenty of places round here for a pick me up.

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March 2013 - There was NO column in March 2013...

February 2013 - on turning 40

January 2013 - why January should be about headaches, mild depression and whisky

December 2012 - on doing more stand up comedy

November 2012 - on stopping doing weekday breakfast

October 2012 - on trying to engage brain and mouth on air

September 2012 - on my BBC microphone

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

On being asked to write a column for Surrey Life magazine

On the Mic - Surrey Life - Feb 2013

On turning 40, in February.

It’s my 40th this month. February 7th to be precise. A birthday I share with Charles Dickens and Jimi Somerville. Woo.

It has to be better than my 39th. Despite feeling unwell the day before, I decided it wasn’t anything I couldn’t cope with and my breakfast show on BBC Surrey would be fine. Whatever was trying it on with my immune system had other ideas. 

I woke sweating and delirious. Trying to string a coherent sentence together at 6am when you’re running a temperature and dripping snot on your equipment is not a good look.

So fingers crossed, this time round, I won’t be ill. I also won’t be on air, as my birthday doesn’t fall on a Saturday. 

I suspect I shall have a party. Mrs Wallis turned 40 in September. We put a marquee in the back garden, got some caterers in and really went to town. It nearly killed us. For five hours it was the best fun we’ve had in years - it was the five hundred hours of preparation that left us wondering if we’d made the right decision. 

Still, if you don’t mark it properly, what are you going to do? Wait until you’re 50?

I think 40 is a significant age for so many people because you become aware how fast the clock is ticking. You look at what you have and what you’ve achieved. You also start to worry how you are going to finish off. Poor? Miserable? Happy? Rich?

Up to now, I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to do what I want and get paid reasonably well for it. I suspect that is about to change. The rewards at the top of the game for broadcasters and journalists can still be huge, but that tapers away quickly. 

It’s possible to make a living, but in recent years pay has remained static, and as we all know, the cost of everything has shot up. When you throw in very little in the way of job security, you start to wonder if you’re doing the best by your family.

I met up with an old friend the other day. We were in a (terrible) band together when we were 18. Like me, he’s now got three kids. In an alternative universe (where we had been blessed with any talent whatsoever) we’d have met up to drink champagne in one of Surrey’s best restaurants and plan our next world tour. 

Instead we nursed a few cheap bitters before he made his way back up north to be with his family. He looked tired and - may he forgive me - old. I suspect I looked the same to him.

But amid the constant drudgery of childcare there are moments. Having responsibility for three beautiful little ones can provide some of the most meaningful experiences life has to offer. And there’s fun to be had away from the joys of bringing up a family, as the monthly pub meetings of the Walton-on-Thames Knackered Dads Society will attest.

There are worse places to turn a significant age than with your family and friends in the best county in the best country in the world. All I can hope is that I’m still contemplating a knees up and few drinks in 40 years time. 

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April's edition of Surrey Life is on sale now for £3.25.

Previous columns:

January 2012 - why January should be about headaches, mild depression and whisky

December 2012 - on doing more stand up comedy

November 2012 - on stopping doing weekday breakfast

October 2012 - on trying to engage brain and mouth on air

September 2012 - on my BBC microphone

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

How I got to write a column for Surrey Life magazine

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Bankers, bureaucracy and blogs

Tweetdeck is my favourite twitter interface. It presents a cherry-tree of tantalising options, laid out on a continually updating grid. I like to survey my feeds as they scroll across the screen, dipping in and out of the informational foam before magisterially alighting on something promising.

On this occasion, alcohol was the trigger. I'm not drinking for Lent, so when a Guardian article popped up announcing we are all boozing and smoking much less than five years ago, I took the bait.

The article basically confirmed my suspicion that saying we're drinking less than we were five years ago is different from actually drinking less.

I reached the end of the piece, and instead of going back to my feeds, saw a link to a rant by  Simon Jenkins, bashing bankers. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the government's attempts to scupper an EU directive limiting bankers' bonuses to 100% of their salaries. Jenkins tackles the same subject with furious, spluttering incredulity. It's a fine piece of work, but terribly (and possibly knowingly) simplistic. So I dipped into the 600+ comments for the counter-arguments.

Among the dross, some gems. The best broke the situation down into a social problem. It's not the bankers who are to blame: we all are, for buying into a cockeyed winner-takes-all system predicated on greed, consumption and owning stuff. It's a choice, and we went for demented free-market capitalism, rather than... say... morality, helping each other out and trying to leave the place more or less as we found it.

No matter how good the comments below any piece are, I always feel like I'm wallowing in vitriol, but before I clicked out, something shiny caught my eye. One commenter had linked to a hilarious pamphlet published in 2007 by a pair of senior free-market Conservatives. It decried the dead hand of state intervention and pervading evil of regulation thus:

"Government claims that this regulation is all necessary. They seem to believe that without it banks could steal our money, bakers would put nails in our bread, drinks manufacturers would water the beer, pie makers might poison us, and builders would construct houses that fell down when the wind blew. This shows ignorance of how a competitive market works."

As Simon Jenkins points out, the banks have stolen our money, one of the biggest brewing houses on the planet is being sued for allegedly watering its beer and the thought that something in a meat pie may not be what you think it is..? Neigh, never.

Although I was now getting into serious rabbit-hole territory, I couldn't help clicking through to read more. The document was so conveniently ridiculous, I wondered if it might be a spoof. Especially as the site which hosted it was a blog called "Flip Chart Fairytales". Click, click again... and I got a surprise.

Flip Chart Fairytales is not a mad person's fantasy. It's a beautifully thought out, well-constructed blog, concerned with, as it says:

"Business Bullshit, Corporate Crap and other stuff from the World of Work"

I urge you to take a look. Bureaucracy is bad, right? Wrong. Entrepreneurs and small businesses are the future of the economy, right? Wrong.

I love it when someone who can write casually dismembers a whole bunch of sacred horses.  And I love finding this sort of stuff by accident. 

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Productivity and communication, nineties style

I worked in an office when emails were in their infancy. I set up the company email addresses at the music PR company Media Village in London in 1997, but my colleagues barely used them because their clients didn't.

Every hour our 28K modem would noisily dial in, pause, and then deliver an occasionally useful missive before crashing. It was a source of wonder to me.

The primary way of doing business was verbal. Firing information back and forth across the office, or out of the building on landlines. Meetings happened a lot.

The two sacrosanct items in the office were the fax machine and the A4, lined, hardback phone messages book, which had a pencil attached to it by string.

If someone was out of the office or unable to take a call, you got up from your desk and wrote down who had called, their number and what they wanted.

The fax machine sat on a pedestal in the middle of the room. I remember occasions when an important fax was due, we would crowd round the machine as it spluttered into life. A confirmed deal meant we would all get paid at the end of the month.

But mostly it was phone work, calling people to shoot the breeze, hustle, set up another meeting, remind them you were there or share opinions on new records or gigs you'd seen each other at the night before.

Doing business this way is a dying art. Email, as David Hepworth notes, has taken the performance element out of it.

This morning I wrote five emails before 7am. In 1997, the earliest I would call a non-colleague was 9am and that was only if there was something very urgent going on.

The same was true of other companies. The phone would only ever start ringing in the office at around 10.30am. People just wouldn't be in the right frame of mind to have a telephone conversation before then - it was just rude to think they would.

Often the person you were calling wouldn't be in. You'd leave a message with a colleague (presumably to be written in their phone messages book) or, if they were a big deal, their PA.

If they wanted speak to you, those calls would come back in the afternoon. If they didn't, etiquette demanded you wait until the next day before you call again.

Or you'd write them a letter, which seems positively Victorian, nowadays.

On the Mic - Surrey Life - January 2013

A slightly re-written version of my Jan 2013 Surrey Life column. How the black majesty of winter’s bleakest month became just another cog in the never-ending retail cycle.

I’m not going to pretend I like January. It’s horrible.

The feasting and bonhomie of Christmas and New Year has gone. The weather is grim and wet, and the county’s poor, huddled commuters gather once more to board virus-filled trains, silent and miserable in the morning darkness.

You don’t enjoy January. You get through it. Or at least, you used to.

In recent years it's changed. Instead of retreating into the warmth of our homes, venturing out only to work and buy necessities, we are being encouraged to treat the entire month as a giant weight-loss opportunity.

The fitness DVD adverts start on Boxing Day. The newspapers start using the d-words - detox and diet - in the run up to New Year.

Why do we do it to ourselves? Why massively over-indulge through the Christmas period and then pretend we’re going to live like ascetic monks from the first Monday of the New Year? 

Because we’re told to, by people who stand to make lots of money from it. Fatten up, little piggies, now join a gym and get on the treadmill.

Last year my producer Emma ran away from the BBC to work as a PR for the charity Alcohol Concern. Emma is brilliant and surpassed even herself when she told me during her interview she asked if the staff ever went for a drink. That could have gone badly for her, but she got the job.

Emma’s big project for 2013 is a campaign aimed at encouraging us to dry out for the whole of January. The idea being you try not to drink any booze for a month, whilst people essentially bet you do, by way of sponsorship. Any money raised goes towards helping people with alcohol problems.

I’m not going to do it. 

It’s taken me a long time to realise moderation is a laudable aim. In the run up to Christmas that means giving mince pies a hard stare, rather than a cheeky, conspiratorial wink. In January, it hopefully means I don’t have to join the temporary teetotallers, forever boiling strange lumps of vegetable matter in the office microwave whilst pretending to enjoy their herbal tea. I’ve been there, and I never want to do it again.

My New Year’s wish for the readers of Surrey Life is that together we stop doing what we’re told to and remember the true meaning of January - headaches, mild depression and whisky. 

Cheers.

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February's edition of Surrey Life is on sale now for £3.25. 

Previous columns:

December 2012 - on doing more stand up comedy

November 2012 - on stopping doing weekday breakfast

October 2012 - on trying to engage brain and mouth on air

September 2012 - on my BBC microphone

August 2012 - on the Olympics

July 2012 - on being on holiday with three small children

June 2012 - on joining a gym

May 2012 - on making live radio

April 2012 - on being ill

How I got to write a column for Surrey Life magazine

Nick Clegg on LBC

Nick Clegg's phone in on LBC was was a masterclass in making the most of an excellent opportunity.

Securing the Deputy Prime Minister's time for a weekly phone-in was a coup in itself, and the station rightly went to town when it was announced on Monday. No other serving cabinet minister has signed up to present a weekly phone-in radio show before. LBC described this as "historic". It is.

I am a big fan of what LBC does, and did a number of production shifts for them before and after Christmas. As a result I'm listening to as much as I can (whilst also staying loyal to BBC Surrey, of course, where I present a weekly show).

Throughout this week on LBC, every presenter I heard flagged up the deputy PM's debut, and the schedule was liberally sprinkled with pre-recorded trails so regular listeners knew to tune in on Thursday at 9am.

On the morning of the broadcast the entire station was geared towards turning "Call Clegg" into Event Radio. The news bulletins and the breakfast show presenter Nick Ferrari primed us, as did tweets from the main LBC account and the staff working in the building. The live video feed started rolling, the live blog kicked in ("8:45: Nick Clegg is almost ready.") and the deputy PM's name began trending, as did the hashtag #callclegg.

The broadcast itself passed off smoothly. The listeners were polite and respectful, even the one who told Nick Clegg he'd ripped up his Lib Dem membership card because the party had betrayed everything it said it stood for. That confrontation gave the bulletin and print journalists eg (Mirror, Daily Mail) their news line.

Nick Ferrari did a faultless job in pushing the DPM when his answers avoided the question, yet still backed off and gave the listeners space to make their points and have their say.

You got a sense, as the broadcast was progressing, that LBC's audience felt this was their opportunity to hold a powerful politician to account.

For me, the real masterstroke was the debrief. Rather than just leave it to the bulletins desk to pull out the strongest audio, and trail ahead to next week's appearance, in the final half hour of the breakfast show, Nick Ferrari got the station's political correspondent Tom Cheal in to talk us through the "historic" broadcast.

Tom gave some relaxed and authoritative analysis on the serious side of what the DPM and the listeners had said, mentioned that #callclegg was trending worldwide ("above Justin Timberlake at one stage") and rightly pointed out Nick had a scoop when a listener prompted Nick Clegg to reveal he owned a onesie. This, said Tom, was something that was very likely to inspire the next day's newspaper cartoonists. It did.

Onesiegate is a political sketchwriter's dream. The BBC, Guardian, Telegraph and Spectator all used it to to get into their pieces and even The Independent's fashion blogger got on the case. Each article was suffused with a tone of grudging respect for LBC, which is about the highest praise you're going to get from competitors.

©hmatthews92

Back at the ranch, James O'Brien devoted the first hour of his mid-morning show to a debate on whether the listeners were prepared to see Nick Clegg in a new light as a result of his decision to do a regular phone-in on LBC.

I didn't hear all of it as I had to do something for Radio 2, but there were the beginnings of a fascinating discussion on the deputy PM's poll ratings and the direction he'd taken his party.

As I was driving the girls back from their swimming lesson yesterday evening, I tuned to LBC, heard Nick Clegg's voice and assumed I was listening to the 7pm news bulletin. No, they had taken a chunk out of Iain Dale's programme to repeat the entire half hour phone-in from 7pm. Iain (who I like a lot) has written a good blog post on Clegg's performance and what it means for the station.

In summary, the activity around a simple piece of phone-in radio was a lesson for all of us in ambition, execution and promotion. LBC is going places. Nick Clegg will be back next week.

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I have not asked for permission to use the images in this post, although I have used a credit and/or linked back. If you are the copyright owner and want your image removed please let me know and I'll take it down immediately.

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Harris and Hoole and Me

I seem to have become something of an expert on the Harris and Hoole story.

I first came across them when shop-fitters boards went up outside the old Clinton Cards on our High Street. It announced that Harris and Hoole was coming soon, but didn't say much else beyond a series of hieroglyphic clues. I deciphered one as Pan+Knee+Knee and realised we were looking at the arrival of yet another coffee shop. 

I assumed it was a chain, as no independent would have gone for a teaser marketing campaign like that. Turns out they are, and they're 49% owned by Tesco.

This is a problem for some, who don't like buying fake authenticity because it makes them feel like stooges. Others don't like it because they think it's putting independent coffee shops out of business. The Guardian newspaper has written extensively about this. The CEO of Tesco has blogged about it.

I suggested it as a subject when I was producing Andrew Gilligan's show on LBC last week and the phones lit up. We had café owners who claimed to have been put out of business by corporates muscling in on their trade, and plenty more who felt they'd been sold a pup by Harris and Hoole, but would still be going back.

Two days ago I wrote about the coffee shop invasion for Surrey Life magazine, whilst sitting in Harris and Hoole. Today I was there again, adding some colour to a debate with the brand's owner on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2.

Not a cup of coffee, or an Americano. In Harris and Hoole, it's a Long Black.

People who use coffee houses tend to be an articulate, middle-class bunch, and I quickly gathered a range of opinions from people exiting the shop. Some were surprised and felt a little cheated when I told them about Tesco's stake.

Others knew and weren't happy about it (but still liked the product). Two business people I spoke to had just found out about Tesco's investment and decided to boycott Harris and Hoole, telling me they had made a decision to hold future meetings in Walton's remaining independent cafés.

Harris and Hoole will live without them. In fact, they will thrive. The Walton H+H has some of the most helpful and willing staff I've met in any retail outlet ever, it has free (and very easy to get into) wifi, and the USP is the sheer amount of space. 

Take a buggy into the Costa in Walton and you spend your entire time apologising and re-arranging the furniture as you fight to get to your seat. H+H could've doubled the number of tables in the space they have available, but they choose not to. Even those enormous side-by-side buggies can get to any table with ease. In a town like Walton, this matters.

It's a shame the coffee tastes so grim. Other far more sophisticated palates disagree, but having had quite a few Harris and Hoole "Long Blacks" now, I just can't get on with it. Too sweet. 

My favourite brew in Walton is made by Le Petit Café, a more cheap and cheerful independent set-up which was here long before the Neros and Costas of this world. The fella in there knows what he's doing, and he's friendly too. 

But if I have a buggy, or I am going to be using my laptop, or I want to sink into an armchair for a bit, H+H will get my custom. Next time I'll just order a nice cup of tea.

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