Hello again, been a while etc. Thanks to all the cats who have Updated you in my absence over the last wee while. This will be a relatively short Update – most of you are away, it’s silly season and I have no doubt you have other things to be doing.
Before I start properly though, I hope all the Scotland-based families with school age students who got their grades yesterday are doing well – I know other, lesser parts of the UK get results in a couple of weeks, but yesterday was the day up here. Not that you’d know that to listen to the news or read a paper. We will have to wait for the creepy Hellograph pictures of teenage girls jumping off steps clutching their certificates.
It strikes me that in all my years and with all the people I’ve hired both in corporate life and here at the lang cat, I can’t remember a single time where I’ve thought “oooh, she only got a B in Geography, not an A – into the bin with you!” It’s good to have goals and to push yourself to do as well as you can. It’s much less good to think that life is over at 17 or 18 because you fell on the wrong side of a boundary. We all get where we’re going, somehow.
As we get into the summer, our thoughts turn to our Edinburgh event in the autumn, which we call HomeGame 6. Obviously I’d like you to book tickets to come along; we think this is the biggest adviser event in Scotland and last year’s New Blood extravaganza in Glasgow was a record-breaker for us. But outside of that, we are going to do some other new and potentially very stupid things at HomeGame in Leith, which will involve the audience much more than usual (don’t worry, you don’t have to stand at the whiteboard and discuss your team’s work), and I would like very much to check our thinking about how to run it with anyone who’s into that sort of thing. That sounds cryptic and it’s meant to, but if you’re intrigued then get in touch with me and I’ll explain, and we will do Nice Things for those who help.
In a pretty much content-free week, then, let’s just finish off with what will probably be a tiresome thing I noticed while away in the Val de Loire over the last few weeks. Some of you may know that I’m a wine bore – just one of a range of subjects on which I am a bore – and I had a nice time bopping around some domaines in Saumur Champigny and Chinon while away.
The thing about this area is that most of its wines are red, they’re sort of fresh and zippy and not like big Burgundy wines (not that there will be many of those this year after the fires). You can put them in the fridge and drink them cold, which I discovered is a great thing to do in 40 degree heat.
Most wine places I went sold a really lovely two or three year old basic red, just done in stainless steel tanks the way Nature intended. Generally well under 10 euro a bottle, perfect. But the makers struggle to make ends meet with those, so they start ageing the wine more, farting around with different oak barrels and trying to create premium versions of their basic wines. What I noticed is that the more they do this, the worse the product got, with very few exceptions. What was pretty much perfect as it was started to become something else. Instead of light and fresh, the wine started to try and become big and chewy and to take on the kinds of characteristics you’d get from somewhere much hotter and further South. That’s OK, but when you’re drinking a 10 year old wine that’s 25 quid a bottle in French prices, and the maker is telling you it needs another 5 or 10 years before it’ll be really good, then you can kind of tell something isn’t working the way it’s meant to.
So that’s my wine story. Sometimes staying focused, basic and doing something really really well has to be good enough, and if commercials are tight then trying to move into another category isn’t always a great idea. Someone is probably doing it already, better than you, and no-one asked you to go there. I am reminded that in almost every category, the things I like best do one thing brilliantly, and that’s good enough for me. Are there examples where that rings true in our little corner of thisbusiness we call show? Maybe, maybe not. Go have a ponder and a glass of chilled red, and enjoy your week.
You’ve had it far too easy for the last few weeks. Your music choice, then, is a really quite lovely mix of black metal, shoegaze and sort-of operatics. You’re already like “yes Mark but what about just doing one thing well?” and I’m straight back with “yes but what if the one thing you do well is a really quite lovely mix of black metal, shoegaze and sort-of operatics?” Never quote me to me. Anyway, here’s Cairiss with Nervosa, which is well worth your time. Not quite so sure about the video, which left me with questions about how the dancer lady manages to go the toilet with those fingernails. I have lived too long.
