Some time I ago I wrote about a peculiar anti-busking sign by Southwark Council that employed a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Now a second gem from the Council’s resident team of poet-bureaucrats has come to light. This one was spotted and snapped by Karl Sharro (who, by the by, writes brilliantly here). Once again, it’s an intriguing mash-up of quip and quibble. There’s another line attributed to Wilde that might work well as an addition to the sign: ‘Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.’ Or better still, this: ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’

Spotted by fellow copywriter Mike Reed, who rightly comments: 'If music be the food of love, this is a famine.'

Tone deaf

You’ll find this sign down by the Thames, on London’s Southbank. The setting explains the allusion to Shakespeare – the Globe Theatre is nearby. So you can imagine what might have happened here: A brief to create a warning notice about busking surfaces in the council’s communications department. Someone with a touch of culture flowing through their veins thinks, ‘Hmm, buskers are performers, so let’s create a friendly notice that picks up on the link to Bill, while gently pointing out that you can’t perform here.’ Hence that rather nice idea to lead with the line from Twelfth Night. Perhaps their original draft then went on something like this:

We all love music, but there are times when we all need peace and quiet too.

Unfortunately, busking can be a real nuisance for the people who live in this area.

So we ask would-be performers to please find another spot – somewhere you can play on while everyone enjoys your performance.

Thank you.

It’s not the height of poetic expression or clever copywriting, but it links the Shakespearean reference with the communications objective in an engaging way. Unfortunately, the version that made it into the public realm transforms the warm voice of culture into a crackling megaphone announcement from a crotchety, authoritarian bureaucrat. The ‘but do not play on here’ is a sharp linguistic slap, while ‘busking causes a nuisance to local residents’ seems an obscure way to ask for consideration of others. They then paste in a statement from the legal department, but this distracts from the first two points by introducing other reasons why you can’t play on – obstruction and unlicensed selling. So, in fact, the ban isn’t entirely intended to combat anti-social artistic activity, it’s about policing commercial activity in a public space too.

The design language of the sign reflects the bossiness of the words. They use hyphens instead of dashes or bullet points, and the second dash is pushed up against the word ‘busking’, so it looks like a word is missing. Bizarrely, they add a stop after the first point, but not after the second. And they start each line from a different place, instead of ranging it all left, or centering it.

The message ends with a more personal element – the name ‘Southwark’ rendered in handwriting. But another side of the council’s personality has already stamped its mark on the language. It seems a long way from the nicely expressed celebration of the area on their website: ‘Borough and Bankside has a reputation as the racy side of the river across from the City. History shows the area as a roistering quarter of theatres and taverns with rich and poor all out to party like it’s 1599.’

In Shakespeare’s time many of the locals disliked the play houses and the lively crowd they attracted. Perhaps their spirit lives on.

Tim
PS Thanks to Mike for permission to show his shot.

I discovered that curating a show like WORDSTOCK requires a kind of pragmatic theatricality. Communication is all about conveying information but the way you tell it must be dramatic. People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. 26 is packed with extraordinary people who have broad terms of reference. Once the word was out, offers to facilitate events poured in and the WORDSTOCK programme began to firm up: A writing workshop exploring the crossover between words and music; A discussion around linguistic analysis, metaphor and brands; Two best selling authors on the dynamics of agents, editors and publishing; A group therapy session for timorous Tweeters; The launch of a new 26 project inspired by litter; A case study of 26 Flavours – a Cornish festival of food and language; Advice on how to keep the inspiration bubbling faced with looming deadlines; A smorgasbord of activities investigating music festival nomenclature, song lyrics and memories provoked by golden oldies; A performance around verbal seduction and how to make yourself a more attractive proposition to potential partners – business and pleasure.

Come the big day, the halls were decked with weeping willows, mountain ash, ivy clad pergolas and autumn leaves. I have never experienced such drive from a group of people so determined to make something extraordinary happen. I’m increasingly convinced that authentic change is not achieved by grandiose schemes, but by incremental interventions that gather momentum through sticky enthusiasm: Conjure up a loose framework that bristles with opportunities, stand back and watch the sparks.

So here are my 12 Top Tips for designing and running a fruitful festival.

1. CONSTRUCT & DECONSTRUCT. Create an ambience of heightened awareness around a fixed timetable allowing plenty of room for idiosyncrasy.

2. FOCUS & CONTEXTUALISE. Create themed centres of attention with a few signature landmarks, and set the scene with inveigling temptations.

3. INVITE & ENGAGE. Begin with a chaotic icebreaker that inspires participants make their own marks and establish terr

4. FASCINATE & PROVOKE. Provide concurrent choices of speakers and events offering challenging content and thoughtful interaction.

5. STROKE & EVOKE. Provide counterintuitive encounters that inspire people to turn abstract meanderings into tangible experiences.

7. REFLECT & ABSORB. Give participants the time and space to explore themselves and bring back even richer gifts back to the table

8. OUT & ABOUT. Break the day with a blast of fresh air and an ambulatory workshop to trigger pollination and serendipity.

9. IMAGINE & INTUIT. Draw upon rich veins of subliminal memories and amplify them in Technicolor.

10. HARMONISE & BOND: Create magnetic attractions that dissolve inhibitions.

11. LIBERATE & ANIMATE. Peel away years of socialisation and encourage all that visceral stuff to emerge.

12. ASSERT & EXPRESS. Fuse the new empowerments into triumphant expressions of lusty joy.

Tom

I was rather taken with a poem they have in the window – a characterful piece of DIY brand writing that says so much about the history of the shop and the attitude of its owners. I imagine one of the modern Verbeeks sitting down to write this, their hands still stained from a hard day’s pursuit of the perfect colour. I love the final line – can’t imagine many corporations having the confidence to make such a claim. Here are the words:

The family Verbeek is here, foremost, to serve you,

So please don’t let waiting your turn unnerve you!

What you choose will be up on your walls forever —

So rush, haste and impatience are useful…. Never.

They put their whole hearts in their work, it’s clear —

And Delft is more lovely because they are here.

Some more colourful language is to be found when you visit the shop’s website. Here’s my simplified (and probably simplistic) edit of a basic translation – I’m sure the original is far more rich, nuanced and bawdy:

If the majestic plane trees of Delft could talk, they would tell wonderful stories… About the farmers on Thursday, clapping and herding their cows and sheep to the market. About the inescapable stink that rises from the thick layer of straw and shit on the roads. About the lascivious, short-skirted girls from the treacle factory, who call out to the horny men passing by… And about the heady smell of linseed oil, turpentine and beeswax that wafts out into the square when the door of ‘the cheap paint shop’ is open.

Tim

If you go down to the Southbank today you’re in for a big surprise. The huge wedge of the embankment between Waterloo and Hungerford bridges has been transformed into a celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain and asks the question: Who does Britain think it is in 2011? The four-month summer fete is the vision of Jude Kelly (Artistic Director of the Southbank) who has done so much to integrate this jumble of cultural bunkers and open it up to the public.

I was commissioned to help the festival find its voice by Shân Maclennan (Creative Director, Learning and Participation) who coordinated and focused the designers, curators and consultants. The brief was to honour 1951 and explore contemporary British-ness through installations, environments and exhibitions. At first, no one was sure what role the words would play other than delivering a narrative. But as our understanding of the scope evolved, the language became a fundamental element.

The festival is loosely structured around four ‘LANDS’ borrowed from 1951: PEOPLE OF BRITAIN, POWER & PRODUCTION, THE LAND and SEASIDE. After meeting the other participants, I put together a presentation reflecting Jude’s thinking, Festival of Britain literature, documentaries and press reports. Then I added observations from British writers, artists and musicians on the struggle for creative identity (William Blake, Ray Davies, Tracy Emin, Tony Harrison, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Christopher Reid), and these perspectives began to suggest possible routes.

I proposed that we should use rhyme and rhythm, symbolism and allegory. The language should be evangelical, heroic, and encourage visitors to become part of the drama. We should echo the happenstance that occurs when millions of people converge on a public space, and we must amplify the creative spirit of the Southbank. These criteria triggered discussions around 21^st century vernacular. Could feral language such as texting and Tweeting, lyrics and slogans, sound bites and catch phrases help us reach audiences who never use the Southbank?

Festival of Britain 1951: The Way To Go Round

The 1951 festival recommended visitors follow a proscribed route – ‘The Way To Go Round’. But today’s Southbank is so porous on so many levels we decided the narrative should be deconstructed. It would run like a ribbon throughout the site, signalling the contents of each LAND and prompting visitors to tell us their own stories. I emailed batches of texts to the designers and they bubbled with responses for look and feel and substrates. We needed high visibility vertical beacons that would act as landmarks and carry the graphic identity, map and streams of information. But we also required lateral sequences of words to define and contain the Southbank canyons. Budgets were extremely tight so options were limited, but eventually we decided on zinc plated spiral tubes for the beacons, and printed fabric for the horizontal wraps.

To see the words writ large and knitted into the architectural infrastructure is thrilling, but the big buzz is watching people interact with them. In The Marketplace, lovers pose to be photographed by phrases that say something about them: BRAVE HEARTS / SERIOUS FUN / FIND YOURSELF. The behaviours of families on the Thames Beach are subtly influenced by messages tied to the railings: BUCKET AND SPADE / WISH YOU WERE HERE.

Words trigger emotional reactions

Groups of friends gazing out from the Riverside Terrace have no idea they are underlined by emotive phrases: MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN / ARE WE THERE YET? Picknickers sitting amid the flowering shrubs on the Container Staircase debate whether they have ANALOGUE OR DIGITAL personalities. Every visit reveals another performance. It’s a theatre of collisions. A word close by lines up with a word far away and they merge into an unholy alliance. It’s an encapsulation of the creative process: when ideas are let loose they develop a life of their own.

A theatre of collisions

Words had to travel beyond the Southbank site and sell tickets for Ray Davies’ MELTDOWN, Tracey Emin’s LOVE IS WHAT YOU WANT at the Hayward Gallery, Lang Lang’s piano workshops, and events from April to September.

Spreads from the Southbank monthly diary

The factual stuff can speak for itself, but the festival needed a linguistic framework to leave an indelible impression on websites and posters. It had to tickle people’s curiosity, and carry a wide range of emotive references. I played around with the FESTIVAL-OF-BRITAIN structure and found that using the ‘OF’ as the link, I could generate unlimited couplets that conjured up different aspects of British-ness and the exhilaration of creativity: HEARTS OF OAK. BAGS OF ENTHUSIASM. LEAPS OF IMAGINATION. LEG OF LAMB. FLURRY OF KISSES. LOADS OF MONEY. TEARS OF JOY. ALL OF YOU. LOTS OF LOVE. CUP OF TEA. Accessible ideas with strong rationales allow other contributors to express themselves, and Southbank staff dreamed up wonderful variations for different communications. The solution was not to create rigid language guidelines that had to be complied with, but a series of springboards everyone else could leap off.

Words provoke curiosity: Buds of May - RIP

The stream of consciousness below is one of many texts that emerged from countless conversations, and helped us all articulate the festival content.

PROPAGANDA OF THE IMAGINATION

The Festival of Britain emerged from the ashes of a tempest. World War 2 had blown everything apart; physically and psychologically, emotionally and sensually. But despite the sorrow and trauma, the people of Britain found the strength to envisage a future where freedom of expression, free healthcare and education would be an inalienable human right. The jamboree was dreamed up by the Labour government, hungry for a cultural awakening. It was to acknowledge Britain’s contribution to the arts, sciences and technology. After so much suffering, the British needed a party and they declared it ‘A Tonic To The Nation’. Bright young things demobbed from the services were hired to design the future on a bombed out bend of the River Thames. Its mission was to reach out to the shiny shopping precincts, frothy-coffee bars, community centres and model council estates of the burgeoning welfare state.

Throughout the summer of 1951, eight million people clicked through the Southbank turnstiles. Millions more experienced local events across Britain. Four Festival of Britain Routemaster buses kitted out with displays and information desks toured Scandinavia and Europe. The festival ship – HMS Campania – chugged around the coast visiting Southampton, Dundee, Newcastle, Plymouth, Cardiff, Belfast, Birkenhead and Glasgow. The idea that humanity could unite for good – as opposed to ill – was a cause for rejoicing. This was such a huge shift of emphasis – from the aggressive masculinity of war towards warmth, playfulness and inclusiveness – the organisers dubbed it ‘Propaganda of the Imagination’.

Explaining the educational choices of the Welfare State

The Festival of Britain opened to storm of media hyperbole. It was a “flight of surrealist fantasy and a mirage of hope”. All 22 acres bristled with “zig-zag patterns, jazzy murals, café society and foreign food in exotic restaurants”. You could “dance through hanging gardens to salsa combos in the shade of the Dome of Discovery”. The illustrator Beresford Egan hated it:

“Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and lovers were still being slaughtered in Korea which struck a discordant note in the symphony of jubilation. It must have been enormous fun wasting money on ineffectual frivolity. It suggested a skeleton wrapped in a Joseph coat of many colours, banging a tamborine with Salvation Army zeal.”

Dylan Thomas recorded his impressions in Quite Early One Morning:

“Here they will find no braying pageantry, no taxidermal museum of Culture, no cold and echoing inhuman hygienic barracks of technical information, no shoddily cajoling emporium of tasteless Empire wares, but something very odd indeed, magical and parochial: a parish pump made from flying glass and thistledown gauze-thin steel, a roly-poly pudding full of luminous, melodious bells, wheels, coils, engines and organs, alembics and jorums in a palace of thunderland sizzling with scientific witches’ brews, a place of trains, bones, planes, sheep, shapes, snipe, mobiles, marbles, brass bands, and cheese.”

The festival dazzled the populace steeped in rationed clothing, brown paint, fuzzy grey television and black & white movies. The installations were bursting with novel applications for light, glass, water, metals and plastics. Synthetic colours pierced the gloom of pea-souper London bringing puce pyjamas, day-glo laminates, purple loafers, saffron nylons, peroxide bee-hives and sky blue pink wallpaper.

60 years on, and the Southbank believes that the imagination is a powerful driver for building the future. Out of the rubble of memories, it has proved that art is a safe place to talk about dangerous things. Our 2011 festival is an opportunity to ponder what the next epoch might look like. If we had to fight for something about our culture – what would it be? The enduring symbol of the Festival of Britain is The Skylon, and this quote from 1951 says that no matter how much you talk about the purpose of art and culture, there is something beyond the idea of words; beyond anything practical: That by understanding what something isn’t…we discover what it is.

‘The Skylon has no purpose. It’s not functional in any way. It does not light the Festival, it burns with its own inner light. It’s not even a phallic symbol. Or a totem pole. It has no social significance. It does not stand for democracy, or future happiness. It does not stand at all. It could stand on the ground but it doesn’t.”

By understanding what something isn't, we can discover what it is

People of Britain

Riverside Terrace by the Queen Elizabeth Hall

We want this 2011 festival to become a hall of mirrors through which we can look at ourselves and each other. The arts speak a universal language that encourages people to cross cultural divides. When we are moved by a creative experience, it becomes a part of us and we pass that heightened awareness onto others.

The pavilion that portrayed British-ness in 1951 was called The Lion and The Unicorn. The lion symbolised bravery, the unicorn represented imagination, and

together they embodied liberty. Of course the lion is not indigenous to Britain and the unicorn never existed, but that was the whole point. Great Britain is a myth. Our hybrid identity has always been a hotchpotch of fairytales and contradictions. My red, white and blue blooded, Union Jack toting, Eastenders addicted, Arsenal devoted neighbours originate from Vietnam, Iraq, Chechnya, Serbia, China, Turkey, Somalia and the Caribbean. The British Museum is a cornucopia of stolen goods. Our Royal Family is a smörgåsbord of mongrels. British Airways, British Gas and British Telecom are owned by multinational pension funds.

English is a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up wonder

The English language is a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up wonder and the great leveller we all have in common. It’s a rogue virus that morphs into esoteric strains and thrives on idiosyncrasy, slang, tribalism and humour. We bend it, warp it, stretch it, mash it and stick our fingers up at it. But because of this it can condense lofty concepts into spiky axioms. Take these terms of endearment we use to describe each other: champagne socialists, feckless misanthropes, cowardy custards, chinless wonders, suburban guerrillas, stuffed shirts, love rats, moaning minnies and national treasures. Simply colliding two elemental words can unleash an explosion of expression.

The Land

Royal Wedding diaspora

For many city dwellers rural Britain is a theme park. Sunday drivers clog country lanes hankering after the perfect cream tea in the quintessential gingerbread cottage. Highways Agency road signs point us towards Health & Safety approved beauty spots where we devour Excalibur Cornish Pasties washed down with Old Speckled Hen. But back home in our semi-detached realities we feel mildly cheated, so slump in front of celebrity hosted nature programmes and get goose bumps over CCTV footage of gambolling badger cubs, oblivious to the urban foxes rooting through our dustbins.

New kid on the block

The snow flecked peaks and dappled dales on our kitchen calendars were never begat by Mother Nature. They have been manufactured over centuries by vested interests. Nothing is natural. The British rural landscape is as much a construct as Blake’s Satanic Mills. The shimmering copse where the cuckoo sucks was formed by an iron age smelting plant. The blasted heath where fallow deer frolic was once an oak forest that built the fleet that defeated the Armada. The quaint parish churches were instruments of repression. The Lords of the Manor were despots. The women and children were serfs. The young men were cannon fodder. Beneath the joyful harvest festivals and blithe spirits rumbled bitterly contested territories.

Everything worth something has to be defended

But the ploughing, tilling, furrowing and reaping invested our rural communities with an entrenched authenticity. Extended families survived poverty and famine through mutual support. These rooted places came to represent the cycle of life according to the seasons and the geological particularity. The customs and indigenous knowledge sprang from a direct response to the land. Animal husbandry, crop rotation and woodland management were passed down the generations; the lay of a dry stone wall indicates the characteristics of the mason – as well as the rock below. Everything worth something has to be defended. Traditions kept alive. Folk songs sung. Rights of way campaigned for. It’s up to us to decide what we want our children to inherit.

Power & Production

WW2 triggered an orgy of industry bent on destruction. The Festival of Britain demonstrated what the new production methods and materials could create. The welfare state directed massive investment into schools, hospitals and public housing. Peacetime invention went into overdrive, and designers, engineers and architects competed to build the brave new world.

Despite the horrors of Hiroshima, nuclear fission became a symbol of hope. Atomic motifs appeared on tea towels, curtains, coffee tables and lampshades. This Promethean method of generating energy promised clean and affordable power. But 25 years after Chernobyl, we are still in denial about the safety, cost and disposal of nuclear waste. Climate change is happening but still divides opinion. Industry is reluctant to act because reducing energy consumption to cut carbon emissions threatens profits. The power hungry countries of the BRIC economies feel that NOW their time has come. But we have to start working with the planet – not against it. Sustainable power and production does not have to be a ball and chain. Gobal energy consumption of fossil fuels could be cut by 75% without any loss of productivity or mobility if used more intelligently. Equatorial countries investing in extensive solar farms will become major power suppliers.

The white heat of technology

Over the last half-century, advances in technology, software and logistics have changed the way we produce. In the 1950s, just down the River Thames at Ford’s Dagenham plant virtually all the components for every Zephyr and Zodiac were made in-house. In 2011 a car is conceived and designed in Britain but the parts are fabricated in Taiwan, Korea, India and Brazil, then aggregated in China for assembly. Superstores like ASDA use containers as warehousing and have more muscle than manufacturers. Just-in-time-production enables companies to minimise costs by following the skill base. Container ships come to the UK bulging with cargo and leave full of fresh air.

The idea of ascension has always been at the heart of power and production – from raising standards of living to exploring space. The dizzying potential for power and production is so beyond our comprehension, it dangles the possibility that nothing is impossible.

Seaside

Are we there yet? Well we all like to be beside the seaside, but why? Escapism? Regression? The Big Blue Yonder? A rogue gene kicks in. Alter egos go bonkers. Sod the daily slog. Swap sensible for silly. Wrestling billowing windbreaks we morph into suburban Bedouins. Or snug as bugs in beach huts we snooze on wheezing Li-Los, our names spliced together in salty bliss: Will & Kate’s Love Nest. Pete n’ Jordan’s Shag Shack. Chez Nick & Dave.

But the seaside is not just KISS ME KWIK and candyfloss. Our ports once fuelled the British economy. In 1951, 70,000 registered dockers handled millions of tonnes of freight. Cruise liners, destroyers and aircraft carriers slid down the slipways of Tyne, Wear, Tees, Mersey, Forth and Belfast. Fleets of trawlers regurgitated mountains of fish for the metropolitan markets. The working classes boarded trains and flocked to the seaside during factory fortnight. But now the cash cows are the giant sea container-dromes, the nuclear power plants, and refineries converting oil into petrochemical miracles.

Vikings, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Frenchies and Spaniards couldn’t keep their hands off our coast. You can still see the Martello Towers that put the wind up Napoleon staring across the Channel. When the Nazi war machine licked its lips in the Pas de Calais, our beaches were blockaded with pill boxes and anti-tank spikes. Our resorts were press-ganged into the Defence of the Realm. Elegant hotels that hosted palm court tea dances became frontline hospitals putting soldiers back together. Even the saucy seaside postcard was recruited. But instead of wenches blushing at embarrassing bulges came steamy temptresses carrying the warning: Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb – Careless Talk Costs Lives.

Our seasides are also places of solace and contemplation. We come to find and lose ourselves. Dunes and shingle bristle with lovage, santolina, hore hound and spiky marram grass. Every salt marsh bred seafaring folk who made ends meet through oyster rearing, winkle picking and samphire harvesting. Their descendents are the arcade proprietors, mobile home operators and B&B owners struggling to stay afloat. Paradise & chips. Utopia on toast. Shangri-La in a basket.

The Festival of Britain ran for five months. It was loved by most, loathed by a few. It was lambasted for squandering public money and diverting precious resources when Britain was crippled with post-war debt. After winning the 1952 election, the new Conservative government sent in the bulldozers. The Skylon – which represented everything Churchill despised – was hung, drawn and quartered, and dispatched to the corners of the earth. But the festival gave licence to an iconoclastic generation who changed the face of fashion, music, dance, poetry, painting, performance, sculpture, architecture, theatre, film, writing, graphics and product design in the 1960s.

And that energy still burns bright in the Southbank today. One of the biggest problems I have as a freelance consultant is persuading clients to be more courageous; to do what they dare not do. When clients reject the generic and take enlightened risks, the branding, campaign or identity still sparkles years down the line. Everyone I met at Southbank seemed to be driven by a fearless sense of collective creativity. There were no egos quashing rival initiatives or insecurities determining the outcome. Everyone just gave for the good the whole and the effortless integrity shines through.

Big thanks to Jude Kelly, Shân Maclennan, Alan Bishop, Steve Smith, Jon Norton, Colette Bailey, Clare Cumberlidge, Michael Marriott, Andrew Lock, Miranda Melville, Laura Pace, Natalie Highwood, Richard Parry, Roger Nelson, Cathy Mager, Laura Hough, Deborah Moreton, Susie Hopkinson, Bea Colley and Rachel Harris.

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/

Tom

The wearer of this garment hereby pledges:

Love — Of your fellowman or woman, and life and every living thing

Peace — An end to all human conflict, this our love for each other will surely bring

Soul — Shall be the feeling derived from each loving and peaceful act – may the sign of the clenched hand hold this pledge firmly intact.

What great writing. Full of warmth and attitude, with easy-but-not-obvious rhymes that add flow to the prose and bring you to a feeling of completeness at the end. Rather like a song.

Back in 1972 would these words have sounded cool or corny? Rebellious or try-hard? Excitingly political or simply commercial? I don’t know. It might have depended which side of the tracks you were from. Reading them today, it’s rather wonderful to see a brand talk about big things like human conflict, peace and love without linguistically blushing. I can’t imagine any contemporary fashion brand demanding that a potential customer make both a pledge and an overtly political gesture. Makes the loudmouths of fashion like French Connection look rather fey.

The red stitching of the mantra is a nice touch. I also love the logo, especially the huge green hands. The third hand is a pretty good representation of a fist, given the designer is working with cloth and stitch.

I suppose the top was part of a brand extension from the Soul Train TV show and music business. First broadcast in 1971 on public access television, the programme featured live performances and dancing from a studio in Chicago. A charismatic civil rights-minded broadcaster called Don Cornelius developed the format, partly because he wanted to show black people in a positive light on television. There’s more on the history of Soul Train and Cornelius here. Don was clearly onto something because his show ran for 35 years. Talking about it recently, singer Eric Benet said: “When I was growing up there wasn’t a whole lot of room for AfricanAmericans on television. As African-Americans we set the tone through out the world what was cool: Your sense style, the music you listened to, how you should talk, walk and dance if you were hip and was wit it. ‘Soul Train’ was the visual to that barometer. That’s an institution that you can take off the air, but the impact is going to resonate for decades to come.”

Magic Johnson might agree. He is set to become Chairman of Vibe Holdings, the company that owns the brand – which is now celebrating its fortieth year. I might be wrong, but the fashion label seems to have disappeared (apart from some bog standard T-shirts for sale on the Soul Train website). If anyone has some knowledge to share on the subject please add a comment. I have nothing to offer in return except Love, Peace and Soul.

Tim

Drawing the pitch, Essaouira, Morocco

Beautiful literary footwork from Eduardo Galeano, with some photographs from my ongoing collaboration with Lesley Katon, World of Good.

“Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”

La Clinique du Ballon, Marrakech

Football street art, East London

“The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.”

“And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.”

PS A fine World Cup read: Soccer in Sun and Shadow

Hope and fear: Arsenal V Manchester United, Champions League 2009

This year, Blake chaired a deeply revealing conversation with the great American storyteller Richard Ford at International Pen’s FREE THE WORD festival. On the closing night – a celebration of revolutionary writing – he read an electrifying excerpt from his latest novel, The Last Weekend. I met up with Blake in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank to discuss the festival, International Pen and the political role of writers. You can read the interview here.

Tom

John Betjeman refers to a Tortoise in his poem ‘Christmas’:

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain.

But it would be churlish and unseasonal to leave you streaked with winter rain. Instead, here are some words on spring, from D. H. Lawrence:

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

‘The Enkindled Spring’

Tim

Honor

Everything is sold at the market

At its price, without discussion,

Except your honour as a man among men.

Torn honor cannot be mended

Even with real silk:

The cloth gave way, you can put your fingers through it.

Honor among the well born

Is a brilliant, clear crystal.

If it breaks

There is no mender who can mend it.

Tunisian folk poem

Tim Tim Rich 66000 miles per hour