Watch With Mother

My earliest world was a hearth and a glowing coal fire behind a metal mesh guard. In front of the fire was a clippy rug made from cut up rags, carefully stitched by hand in to a woven backing. The linoleum was frayed where it met the hearth and there in cracks I could find silver fish that left a powdery deposit in their trail.

To the left was my toy cupboard where I stored my teddies, the big brown one (daddy), the grayish one (mummy) and the small sandy one (teddy) which, I guess, was me. It was difficult to open the cupboard door because of dad’s chair that sat in the same corner.

I liked Tuesday because Tuesday was ironing day after Monday (wash day) and my mother would be in the one place, by the side of dad's chair with her ironing board. On the other side of the hearth was the black and white television and I really did “Watch with Mother.”

The only problem with the Tuesday programme was Andy Pandy. I couldn’t abide Andy Pandy in his striped pyjamas. This was the period in the years before infants’ school but even at that early age I must have been aware on some subliminal level of homosexual potential and Andy Pandy had that in spades. I only watched because I liked Teddy, Andy Pandy's sidekick. I recall some discomfort about the idea of Teddy and Andy sharing the same box, a picnic hamper. It didn't seem healthy. My interest would have waned had it not been for Looby Loo, the rag doll; not that she was my type either.

The Thursday programme was Rag, Tag and Bobtail a show that featured three animal glove puppets. Maybe I knew they were glove puppets, maybe not. I just knew that I never saw their legs. When, one day, one of them took a tumble revealing a pair of waving legs the surprise was enough to imprint itself indelibly in to my memory. I couldn't have been more shocked had the Queen broken off her Christmas Day address to perform the Hokey Cokey.

The high spot every week was the Flower Pot men on a Wednesday. Their gibberish, unintelligible to parents, was perfectly understandable to me. Little Weed, their friend, the all-knowing flower, was an object of unreserved admiration and respect as she teased us with her “Was it Bill or was it Ben?” question relating to some minor misdemeanour or misjudged assumption from one of the boys. “It was Ben, it was Ben," I would scream, then clap my hands in delight if I got it right.

It was never less than astonishing to be told: "And I think the little house knew something about it! Don't You?" What the hell did the little house have to do with anything?

It seems odd that at the same time that I was attending my first Sunday school classes I put far more store in the teachings of Little Weed than I did in Jesus Christ. But that was the truth of it. I could not relate to an all-knowing supreme being. My god was an artificial dandylion.

Kilmainham Gaol, Croke Park and rugby union

It's always good to go to Dublin for the Ireland v England match. This year was special because of a change in venue. Ireland's Lansdowne Road stadium is being refurbished so the fixture was taking place in Croke Park run by the Gaelic Athletic Association.

But Croke Park is not just any old stadium. It's a very well appointed modern venue, the third biggest sports stadium in Europe with a capacity of more than 82,000. Yet hitherto it has confined itself only to Gaelic sports such as the all-Ireland Gaelic football and hurling championships.

There is a reason for this since in 1920 Croke Park was witness to one of the most notorious events in Ireland's long struggle for independence. The ground had already achieved some symbolic significance in the use of rubble from buildings wrecked in the 1916 Easter rising to construct one of the terraces, thereafter known as Hill 16.

Bloody Sunday

Then, on Sunday, November 21, a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary was brutally interrupted when police auxiliaries entered the ground and began firing on the crowd. The police were responding to a co-ordinated series of killings that morning when agents working for the British military had been murdered by hit squads loyal to Michael Collins, the Irish Republican leader.

Whether or not the shooting was a deliberate act of reprisal, or whether it was triggered by a nervous response to shots, real or imagined, from somewhere in the panicking crowd, is still far from clear. But at the end of the shooting some 14 people: 13 spectators and one player, Michael Hogan, the Tipperary captain, were dead or dying. Confusion in the aftermath was very similar to that after the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry when members of the British Paratroop Regiment shot 13 people dead during a civil rights march.

Ancient history? Not in Ireland. There was a great deal of heated debate before the Croke Park administrators agreed to host the six nations rugby internationals. Some in the press had predicted crowd trouble. But only those who have no knowledge of rugby or its supporters would conceive of such nonsense.

I travelled over with six friends - seven of us and six tickets, not the ideal combination, but a better position than the group of twenty England supporters we met who had a single ticket. They wouldn't part with it to make their misery and our happiness complete. Irritatingly we had been covered for tickets but due to a mix up in communications a couple of tickets had been let go elsewhere.

At some stage we would need to draw straws. The last time it happened, some who had put tickets in to the kitty had lost out when the names were drawn out of a hat. This time there would be only one of us out of luck. Everyone had fingers crossed.

Firing squad

We spent the Saturday morning at Kilmainham Gaol where, in May, 1916, fifteen of those who had organised and led the Easter uprising were taken out in to the prison yard and shot by firing squad. One prisoner, James Connolly, dying from a serious leg injury that had turned gangrenous, was brought from his hospital bed and strapped to a chair before he was shot.

I can recommend the prison tour for those who seek to get a better understanding of the events surrounding the Irish rebellion. The story of the prison was harrowing enough without any need for embellishment by our tour guide, Ciaran, who delivered an excellent and even-handed narrative.

Walking to the ground - yes I was one of the lucky ones - we saw two men standing with a poster in memory of Michael Hogan. There was a delay before the British National Anthem as Mary McAleese, the Irish President, was shown to her seat. The press reported that the mainly Irish crowd was respectful of the National Anthem. That was an understatement. I saw some wearing the green who were singing God Save the Queen and at least one in front of me removed his cap - more than I managed to do.

There was near silence on the few occasions when Jonny Wilkinson kicked for goal. The rest of the time the home supporters were raising the roof as the Irish ran up an embarrassingly convincing win by a thirty point margin: 43-13.

Hen parties

As others have said, there is a new spirit in Ireland that may not have forgotten the past but which no longer feels weighed down by history. That's a good thing. The slightly sad aspect of this, however, is that the centre of Dublin on a Saturday night is a succession of hen and stag parties dominated by the alco-pop crowd whose appreciation of history extends to last night's TV.

The singing pubs and their singing clientele seem to be disappearing in the trendier parts of Dublin where gastro-pubs are beginning to compete with the drinking only bars. Our post match sing song was confined to the trip back to the suburbs on the Dart railway ahead of an early ferry the next day.

We always sing, win or lose, but after a loss like that we might have been excused if the chariots were not on fire that night.

Enough said

All these different words and "said" is still the best every time. The site goes on to suggest that some of my favorite words such as "but", "good", "so" and "then" are overused. I have a word for this advice that should be used more often: tripe.

Newspapers and the web

In 1999 I took a year out of the FT to write a history book about work. On my return I was offered a secondment to create and edit the editorial side of FT CareerPoint, a newly established business managed by Peter Highland, an experienced and well respected manager from the publishing side of the newspaper.

It was a separate enterprise within the FT and we were starting from scratch, creating our own website from nothing. The FT already had FT.com up and running. I didn't think much of FT.com at that time. It was an unwieldy, over-engineered, over-manned and over-ambitious attempt to put the FT online that for the first few years of its life drained the profits from the newspaper. Countless millions of hard-won profit went down that particular hole.

Groping in the dark

The real problem with FT.com is that conceptually it was all wrong. Rather than explore the possibilities of this new web technology, the thinking behind it was what you might expect from people who knew newspapers. I distinctly remember David Bell, now director of people at Pearson, then chief executive of the FT, telling the troops that FT.com was going to happen. I'm quoting from memory, so these may not be his actual words, but he said something like this: "We don't know what the internet means but we think we have to be there." It was a pioneering spirit. It was also groping in the dark.

The result was rather one-dimensional. As far as I could see all that FT.com did that was different from the newspaper was to launch some stories faster than the daily publication schedule could achieve and store stories on line for later reference.

Storing stories would have been useful but the search mechanism was hopeless. At last, eight years on, it has been put right and the new system actually works. Hurrah!

Even the faster publication was not so significant a benefit since one of the greatest selling points of the FT was, and continues to be, the strength of its analysis. Any ticker tape can break a story. FT journalism fills in the details and adds a bit more. It is thoughtful journalism, the sort we still need.

I was proud of my time at FTCareerPoint because we tried to do some things that FT.com was not doing. We were trying to utilise the benefits of the web for storing data and lists that could be cross-referenced from the newspaper. We had salary details of every director in the FTSE 100; we had psychometric tests, we had "pass notes" on management gurus: all gone. People wonder why Craigslist is so successful. It is because there is so much stuff there, easily accessible. It doesn't try to be something it isn't.

We weren't afraid of experimenting. I told our web designers I wanted something that was human-looking and did not have lots of straight lines and clinically clicky boxes.

Early designs

I was amused to find this morning some of those early designs. If you look at the deliberately badly-drawn doors and the stick man you can see how that thinking was interpreted. Sadly our drafts were subjected to the scrutiny of the FT.com thought police. We had few friends there. I can't tell you how much they hated the stick man. I can't tell you how much I loved him.

Well the stick man was scrapped, the doors were straightened up and the site went live in late 2000. It was doing OK a year later, just about breaking even, but the FT.com losses and a big fall in the FT share price had led to crisis measures. Many of the smaller satellite projects were rolled up and ours was one of them. We had a great little team and every one of those people left. It was a crying shame.

I left too, very quietly. Even two years later many people on the newspaper did not know I had gone since my weekly column was still there. The FT was good to me. It was good for my career and we parted on good terms. In fact, six years on I do two regular columns and various other projects for the newspaper so it's still an important part of my income and, to be corporate for a second, my "brand". Today I think of myself as a kind of associate member of an exclusive club.

Many readers assume I am an employee. But I am not. Moreover I am proud of my independence. I continue to enjoy my connection with the FT that for all it's failings and it has them, like any family, is still one of the world's great newspapers. It's in safe hands too. Lionel Barber, it's editor, is a very fine journalist.

Magnate for minds

The old guard, or what's left of them, are spread around but they're in places that matter. I keep an eye out for my old friends Neil Buckley in Moscow, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Paul Betts in Paris and Victor Mallet in Hong Kong. A couple of years ago there was an Ex-FT reunion and I was astonished to see so many who had left.

We had some great times in the 1990s. The BCCI story won the reporter of the year award in the British Press Awards. That plus work we did on the Midland Bank and the arms-to-Iraq story won the FT Newspaper of the Year award in the What the Papers Say Award. Those really big awards have been thin on the ground in the past 10 years. But I shouldn't dwell on the past.

The internet is changing the newspaper industry. Some say newspapers are dying. But newspapers will still be there, long after I'm gone because they still work so well. The best of them are collectives of excellence. Today excellence is clustering , by choice, in various areas of the web. News organisations like the FT must learn to draw in that external thinking with a web-based offering that is broader and more immediate than a letters page. Blogging is one way. Instant commenting is another. If the FT can prove itself an accessible magnate for the sharpest minds its future will be assured.

Football and the big stick

Why don't people learn? I'm not talking about just anyone here but about large organisations and people in influential positions. Specifically I'm talking about the football authorities but I know the question can be applied elsewhere.

In the UK the footballing authorities did not learn about the dangers associated with large stadiums and ground behaviour before a series of tragedies: Hillsborough, Heysel and the Bradford City stadium fire during the 1980s. There have been others: Rangers, Spartak Moscow, River Plate to mention just a few of them, but that cluster of disasters in the 1980s did much to concentrate UK thinking on remedies.

Big stick policing

In many of these situations crowd control measures relied on "big stick" policing and containment measures that viewed the people who watched football as little better than animals, hence the fences that caged-in football crowds throughout the 1970s and early 80s. I was shocked to see that the cage-like fences had been retained in the Lens stadium that hosted the Lille v Manchester United match last night.

Not only that, police at football matches, particularly in mainland Europe continue to treat football supporters as an unruly mob that can only be pacified by shields, batons, riot gear and tear gas. If you treat people like animals they begin to behave that way.

In the UK football clubs (because they had to do so after the Taylor report into the Hillsborough disaster) introduced all-seater grounds. That one remedy did much to reduce the mob-like behaviour that inflicted football in the 1970s. Family enclosures, supporters clubs and improvements in marketing have all helped to lessen football hooliganism immeasurably since the bad old days of the 1970s.

But not until football clubs are confident enough to mix-up home and away supporters will you get the kind of congeniality that exists in cricket and rugby grounds. Does anyone think that rugby supporters do not want their team to win? Of course they do. But they know that the game matters more than any team.

I have been going to rugby matches for years and the behaviour between rival supporters is always a matter of banter and nothing more. It's not unusual for a group of supporters to "adopt" a couple of rival supporters in the pub or on the way to the match. OK, the Welsh can get a bit uppity but they're sentimental people and their game means a lot to them. The English are still getting used to having a good rugby team (or they were).

The same applies to cricket. The banter between England and Australian fans can be incredibly cruel but it's almost always good natured and if it ever risks boiling over there are enough sensible supporters to police themselves.

Don't blame drink

Some have blamed drink for crowd violence. It's nothing to do with drink. The Guinness will be flowing this weekend in Dublin before the Croke Park match - and I will be having some myself - but there won't be any trouble. It's just as well because I have been in the thick of some real crowd squeezes at the old Lansdowne road. No one pushed. No one panicked.

Football hooliganism became a way of life for some young people in the 1960s and 70s. They grew up on the mean streets and took out their frustrations at weekends. Most of the people who watched rugby, on the other hand, played the game where the violence was confined to the pitch. Both codes have cleaned up their acts on and off the pitches. So it was a great shame to see police responding so inappropriately towards distressed fans when a crush happened at Lens. To fire tear gas at people struggling for space was inexcusable.

It was a shame, too, to hear the televised match commentator assuming that there was crowd trouble created by unruly supporters. If you assume the worst in people, expect them to repay you in kind. Any sports crowd should be a mixture of team colours. Segregating people, whether in sport or anywhere else, is a recipe for factionalism.

End segregation

Unfortunately this still goes in football. I have a good friend who supports Newcastle who took a friend from Manchester to St James's Park a little while ago for a Newcastle v Manchester United match. They were standing near the front of the Newcastle end when Manchester scored. The Manchester supporter cheered but it did not go down well. He might in fact have been tolerated by the crowd but the stewards were taking no risks and frog-marched him out of the ground. This a middle-aged chap in a respectable profession. This is one aspect of football that the clubs still need to tackle. But it has to be on a European scale.

There shouldn't be a ground left in Europe that still contains football supporters within fences. Opposing fans should be encouraged to mingle, not discouraged from sitting together. The days of police escorts for visiting fans should end. The people best placed to make these changes are not the authorities but older supporters who should set standards for the youngsters. Insults and obnoxious or aggressive behaviour should be stamped on through peer pressure. If clubs pass on this message the core support will understand.

Psychometrics and the obsession with "g"

Over the years I have completed more psychometric tests than I care to remember. If you have never taken one of these they are the kind of test you may be required to do if you are seeking a job. If you are old enough to have done the 11 plus test for secondary school you will know the form. That one was an ability test. The British Army uses similar IQ-type tests for officer selection.

Psychometrics covers two main fields of testing: ability tests and personality tests. These latter tests which have grown popular in recent years are not really tests at all but questionnaires. The answers you give to the propositions on the questionnaires reflect your personal preferences. A classic here is a series of questions designed to find out the extent to which you are gregarious or introverted; so you might be asked whether you prefer to be socialising at a party or to be tucked up with a book.

Like me, you may be thinking "it depends". But the questions are trying to force a choice and they will come at the subject more than once. I'm not a great fan of personality tests but I can see how someone wanting to put together a traditional sales team might want to find outgoing people rather than those who prefer their own company.

I think that says as much about the nature of selling as the people engaged in it. There are different ways to sell a product that might well benefit from approaches other than those used by sales staff who want to be your biggest chum within the space of two minutes.

I took a test the other day that I'm featuring in my FT column this week. It was a Gallup test designed to find your five greatest strengths. One of mine, apparently, is seeking to put things in context. When confronting a concept or some development I like to get back to the beginning, asking "Where did it come from?" I used this method in my book, Blood Sweat and Tears, The History of Work. In fact I used it in a chapter on the history of psychometrics.

Whenever I'm trying to work something out in psychometrics there are a handful of occupational psychologists I return to again and again. One of these is Steve Blinkhorn. I first came across him when I found that he and Charles Johnson, another respected psychologist, had written an article saying that personality tests could not predict future job performance.

This is a contentious issue, one that has been rejected by SHL, the big test publisher. But Blinkhorn and Johnson have never stepped back from their assertion. The point they make is that a personality test will tell people about your working style but it won't say anything about the quality of the finished product.

You may, for example, demonstrate that you are, to use the jargon, a "completer finisher". But what you have dashed off with the utmost efficiency in a few minutes might be a load of rubbish. On the other hand you might be a perfectionist and take forever to get something done. There are issues here on both sides and that's why people still need to be managed or to find ways to manage themselves.

Blinkhorn is a historian too. A week or two ago he told me he had found the original research used by Charles Spearman, a pioneer of factor analysis in the study of human intelligence. Spearman built on Francis Galton's studies of correlation - a way of drawing apparent relations between random variables such as age and height, for example. Sometimes it is used to imply causation. With age and height that seems reasonable, at least in our earlier years. We grow up as we grow older. But with other variables a causal relationship is less apparent and may not exist at all.

Spearman came up with "g", his definition of general intelligence that led, inevitably, to the development of the IQ test. His work was based on a group of boys in a school where he used to teach. What Blinkhorn has done is to track down the school records of this study group, a group of 13-year-old boys. It seems that if one of the boys, missing from school at the time of the study, had been around at the time, then the research outcome might have been quite different.

I sometimes wonder whether we would have been better off if "g" had never been discovered at all. It is "g" that makes some members of MENSA, the IQ-obsessed organisation, wonder why their membership is the best thing they have to show from their high IQs. The problem with "g" is that it doesn't mark you out for riches, for great discoveries or for a position of power and influence. On it's own it might be helpful for doing Sudoku puzzles but not much else. For those other things you will need other qualities and you may not need to be overloaded with "g".

In selection one of the main question facing recruiters is "g" and what else?

The Kite Runner

Sometimes a book grabs you so much that you stick with it until the end, allowing a few breaks for eating and sleeping. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini did this for me this past weekend. It's a marvellous read, very moving, very well plotted, in fact everything you could want of a story. If you can get to the end with dry eyes I would like to know your secret.

It's about two boys growing up side by side in Kabul during the 1970s. It's about friendship, jealousy, cowardice, shame, honour, love, betrayal, redemption. If you haven't read it, drop everything until you have. You won't regret it. Remember how a few years' back you couldn't get on a tube train without seeing someone reading a copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin? Well this is the book of the moment. It comes out as a film in November so there's not much time. Let's hope they don't wreck it as they did with Captain Corelli. With Marc Foster as director it should be in good hands.

Flexicurity

Not the greatest of words but it's one you need to know about if you are wondering what kind of employment reforms are cooking away in Brussels just now. It was the topic of my FT column this week.

My initial column mentioned the draft of a green paper produced late last year by the European Commission. But after submitting the piece I discovered that the green paper had been revised so I updated the article to take account of that.

The FT had the updated version in plenty of time but a lapse in communication (not mine) meant that the first version was the one that was subbed. It didn't make much difference and it's water under the bridge now.

But it means the version that I wanted to publish can only be read on my website here. Euro-watchers will note that the Green Paper was change significantly from the first draft. If you sift out the specific changes you can see they reflect an awakening that the labour market is changing gradually with increasing numbers of people in temporary and part-time work. The first draft was thought to be too "anchored in the past" to paraphrase my own comments on EC policy.

Somewhere in the piece I make the point that the old "jobs default" is changing to a "work default". Perhaps the use of IT terminology was a bit clumsy but I wanted to get across the need for employers and employees to get away from thinking about jobs and start thinking more about the work that needs doing.

For individuals the need is to think more holistically about work and life, not so much about work/life balance, but about the way that we live, the things we do (in work and socially) and the way we think about our lives. Work and our lives outside our work need not be parcelled in to separate boxes. Some of it can and will spill over and merge.

We are all going to need our earning work but we shouldn't be thinking about earnings all the time. In fact some of the most successful careers have developed when people have simply tried to tackle a problem or to meet a need. That's the thing about work. The best of it is stuff that needs to get done. If it needs to get done it isn't going to go away.

Of course we can prioritise. We can ask ourselves whether the car really does need washing this weekend or whether we want that crisply ironed shirt or polished shoes. That kind of work is a matter of choice. But we don't always have choices about some of the thankless tasks we have to do in our jobs.

It's easy to say that "somebody has to do them". But if you can find a way of doing a job better or if you can eliminate a piece of work, you've done everyone a favour. There is no virtue in doing work for work's sake. There is no virtue in preserving or creating jobs that are not needed. Therein lies the fundamental flaw behind the Lisbon target of 20m more jobs in Europe by 2010.

What really matters is that work is distributed equitably and efficiently among people who have been equipped with the right skills and education to meet the demands of a modern industrial economy that must innovate or die. That should not mean shorter working weeks by compulsion. It should mean greater choice for people about where their work is undertaken and, how they do their work. Employers too must have flexibility to dispense with work or to shift work around.

If people have the skills to work anywhere it shouldn't matter if their jobs disappear. Going in and out of work should be as easy as a trip to the supermarket. A dynamic economy demands that kind of movement. I like the Danish model but it depends on high taxation and an efficient public sector. The new challenge is to adapt the private employment system to feed the labour market so that income tax rises to fund training and education are not an inevitable consequence of a strong welfare safety net.

Pancakes and Lent

Four days to go and it's Pancake Tuesday. I love Pancake Tuesday, partly because I love pancakes but mostly because the days are getting brighter and spring really is just around the corner. February has great light because there are very few pollen particles in the air.

While I'm not particularly religious (what does that mean?) I do try to give up something for Lent (Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday). Last year it was gravy. This year I have decided that it will be potatoes and bread, so no chip butties.

No jacket potatoes either. My favourite meal is an oven-cooked jacket potato with butter, grated Cheddar cheese, and tuna with mayonnaise on top. So why don't they do that at the Savoy Grill? And why, if I was eating at the Savoy Grill would I order something other than jacket potato? I suppose it's because you can have jacket potatoes any time.

Also, if it was jacket potatoes every meal time you would soon get fed up of them. So that's why Lent is so useful. To deny yourself something for 40 days makes you appreciate it all the more when the time's up.

Better than sex

But first, before all that denial, there are the pancakes. Here's how to make pancakes. Well why listen to me when Delia is only a click away? [As an afterthought I'm adding this for those who can't be bothered with the Delia stuff: For 10 to 12 pancakes you will need 8 oz (200 gms) of plain flour, two decent eggs and a pint of milk (the same stuff you use for Yorkshire Puddings). Whip the eggs in to the flour in a basin, then pour in the milk gradually to avoid lumps. No need to let it stand. No more effort needed than that.] A non-stick pancake pan is ideal but a frying pan will do otherwise. Put a bit of olive oil in and make sure the pan is hot. Ease the pancake with a spatula or something like that to make sure it's loose then flip it with confidence. Blokes should be good at the flipping bit. Whimps should flip over a clean floor so they can scrape up the bits.

Ignore Delia on the filling. This is what you need:

Some orange quarters
Cointreau
Double cream,
Golden Syrup

First squeeze your orange on to the pancake, then add a bit of Cointreau, next some cream and finally drizzle on some syrup, then fold up your pancake and tuck in. Better than sex. Well as good as. Some may say better with sex but I'm not going there. Save to say that with Lent just around the corner this is a great opportunity to indulge ourselves just a little.

Unique users

My website recorded 10,000 unique users in December. A unique user is someone who comes on and stays a while visiting a number of pages. I like the term. It makes you feel kind of special. We're all unique and the world wide web is gracious enough to recognise that.

I would rather be a unique user than a mass consumer.

I was telling someone about the number of visitors I get and he immediately wanted to advertise. So in a day or two you're going to see my blog sponsor on here. The boss of the company is a nice guy and I assure you he didn't pay me to say that. He believes in his business and he used to play rugby. You can't ask any more of a sponsor.

We shook hands on the deal. That is good enough for me.

It has made me wonder whether I should be taking advertising and sponsorship a little more seriously. As a newspaper journalist I can tell you that traditionally the advertising department was viewed with suspicion, part of the "dark side", not like the journalists who brought in the news every day. The advertising people viewed the journalists with equal suspicion since the ad people were those who brought in the money every day.

In reality the journalists and the advertising staff needed each other. A web site like this doesn't work quite like that. It was not started as a commercial venture. I envisioned it as part marketing tool - a sort of "this is me" site, and part repository for my work. Now I'm thinking it can be more than that.

I want to expand on my work and fishing sections. I'm thinking of adding a film reviews page for my son, John, who knows a lot about the cinema. Just now he's taking an MSc at CASS Business School in London in film industry management. I would like a forum too, although I'm not sure how this might work. But I don't want to sell things other than my writing and presentational work. People try to order fishing flies but I don't do that. Still, I'm hoping to get a sponsor soon for my fishing section.

The work section is available for sponsorship also and then there's the biggie - full site sponsorship. Best to get in at the ground floor. That's what I always say.

A Tate Modern death

Matthew Courtney, a 27-year-old lawyer at the City Law firm, Freshfields Bruckaus Deringer, fell 80 ft to his death within a stairwell at the Tate Modern art gallery. The London Evening Standard said that the police were treating his death as suicide. He was reported to have been working 16-hour days, seven days a week, and had spoken with senior partners about his difficulties coping with the workload.

There has yet to be an inquest but the Evening Standard appeared to have made up its mind about the cause - death through overwork. We do not know whether it was the workload that led to his death. His parents have rubbished the suggestion he was working constant 16-hour days. We do not have an inquest verdict and have not heard the evidence surrounding the circumstances of his death. It may be that it was accidental.

But that has not prevented the newspapers using the story to raise the issue of overworked City employees. Nor has it stopped people debating work-related suicide on web-based forums.

Brilliant and gifted

Matthew, the son of former World Cup referee George Courtney, was an Oxford University graduate described as "brilliant and gifted" in the Standard. There are hundreds of brilliant and gifted people working in the City. At a recent Oxford careers seminar, when the audience was asked if anyone there wanted to work in the City, more than two-thirds of them raised their hands.

The City offers big money. Seriously big money. As a junior associate Matthew was reportedly earning £55,000 a year. Within three or four years his salary would have been in to six figures. As a partner he could have moved in to the seven figure bracket. Beyond owning your own business or running a big public company there are no more than a handful of professions that can deliver that kind of financial reward.

But there is a price to pay for big money earnings. You must give the best part of your life to your work. If you enjoy your work, if work is where you find your friends and maybe your partner, if you thrive on pressure and know how to put any mistakes or criticisms in perspective, then all well and good. But I don't know many who could tick all of those boxes.

Of course there is another way to earn big money. But, for that, Matthew would have needed the talent and social skills of a Jade Goody or Shilpa Shetty. That is to say he would not have needed any talent, any academic qualifications, any skills or abilities whatsoever, other than a willingness to behave outrageously on telly. Even then there is a price to pay, apparently. Miss Goody spoke of suicide (according to the Sun) after leaving the Big Brother house. Whether the feelings were genuine or more publicity-seeking nonsense is neither here nor there. We know, from other examples, that fame too can extract a ruinous price.

We may discover that there were other, more telling factors, in Matthew's death. Perhaps he simply tipped over the rail accidentally. Whatever the cause, it will not put an end to the cycle of high work demands in return for big rewards. But it will lead to yet more stories on work/life balance that depend on the premise that work and life are two distinct entities. This premise holds that work is something we would rather not be doing. I understand this definition. It is the truest definition I can use for much of the work I see today.

Signs of pressure

I do see people who are loving their work, who couldn't think of anything they would rather be doing. But not many. Even among those who profess to enjoy their work, you can see signs of pressure.

I see people looking constantly at their watches during what should be a pleasurable lunch; juggling their diaries; grabbing for what they think could be the main chance; agonising about their boss, worrying about deadlines, bitching about their colleagues and sighing. Yes, that very audible sighing. Sometimes I do it myself. Sighing over work is stress.

If I were writing this for a newspaper, as I could be, I guess these words would be classed as work too. But I don't have to write this. I don't have an editor breathing down my neck. I don't have anyone saying they would rather I wrote about something else. I don't have that here. So here, right now, you know I am thinking about Matthew Courtney, a life so full of promise, now gone.

Billable hours

I don't want to get sentimental. Having just read a book about the horrors of World War I, I am quite aware that other generations have suffered from far worse stresses than those caused by overwork. But it's difficult to gain that perspective in the face of demanding clients and systems that insist on billable hours.

The billable hour, beloved of professional service firms, is one of the worst measures of service and work I can think of. I know that law firms agree. But the billable hour started with the client who wanted to see evidence for the charges imposed by consultancy and law firms.

When asked to justify his fees for "two days labour" as an artist James McNeill Whistler said that his client had been paying "for the knowledge of a lifetime". It is quality that counts, not quantity, and sometimes quality is measured in what is not said, what is not written. Is good law defined by something the size of a telephone directory? No, it is defined by common sense.

There doesn't seem to have been much sense in Matthew Courtney's death. There is no sense at all in 16 hour days; no sense either in brilliant academic careers if we cannot give ourselves the time to sit and look at the snowdrops.

Big salmon, tall story?

We spent a snowy weekend in Wales, walking by the River Wye. The landlord of the pub where we stayed had a lot of old rods and fishing memorabilia strung across the bar. He pointed to one of the rods that he said was the very one that was used by Georgina Ballantine to catch the UK record salmon, 64 lbs, on the Glendelvine beat of the River Tay in Scotland, October 7, 1922.

Even with a few drinks inside me I was more than a tad sceptical. This is the fishing equivalent to finding the cricket bat used by W G Grace when making his highest score (344, made for the MCC v Kent at Canterbury in August 1876). I asked the landlord if he had the provenance. He said the chap who sold the rod to him still had all that. Why would you buy a rare item and let the seller keep its provenance?

I don't know much about the rod that was used by Miss Ballantine but it was probably made of greenheart wood. This rod may have been greenheart. It was a fly rod. I tried to read the inscription on one of the brass mounts but it was a bit dark and the rod came away from the wall to the landlord's dismay.

I know that the Ballantine catch was made not with a fly but with a dace harled from the back of a boat rowed by her father. But the rod she used may have been a fly rod. The account I have read is not clear on that. Still I hope that the landlord did not pay too much for his antique.

I'm wondering now what did happen to the Ballantine rod? Do you happen to know?

Where there's muck there's beauty

My son, George, tells me there is a new craze among children for making dirt balls. It was mud pies in my day. But these are something else. The Japanese call it hikaru dorodango.

Train etiquette

The heading is a misnomer since there isn't much etiquette, not on the commuter trains I take to London. I love London. I hate the getting there. One reason I hate commuting is the selfishness of some of my fellow commuters.

They probably hate commuting too and that, no doubt, manifests itself in a desire to shut themselves off from others. But certain strategies adopted in doing so are simply not acceptable.

The worst of these is "seat hogging" where a passenger will place their bag and coat on the adjoining seat. This is the most common and one of the most selfish strategies employed to secure both seats for a single passenger. On a train with plenty of seats no-one is going to mind. But on a crowded train it amounts to rudeness.

Worst of all is using the same hogging tactic on a window seat so the seat hogger is placed between the seat and aisle. I have seen timid passengers standing in the aisles rather than ask for the empty seat.

I make a point of targeting the hoggers. If there is a seat with a bag and coat on it and an alternative seat without this baggage I will ask to sit at the "bagged" seat.

There are other common displays of bad behaviour: feet on seats, for example. Teenagers get a bad press but in this case they earn it. I have only seen young people with their feet up on seats.

Table hogging with computers or newspapers is not uncommon either. I know that a crowded train is little better than a chicken coup but does it have to bring out the worst in us?

Jonny Wilkinson discovers levitation

England v Scotland, Twickenham, 2007 : a match that will linger in the memory for those who follow the English Rugby Union team through thick and thin. There has been more thin than thick of late but this match made up for all those miserable performances in the last couple of years.

The pre-match preparations in Richmond were as intensive as ever. Early doors in the pub, money in the kitty, serious drinking then down to the bus, top deck, and the start of the singing, including a few Scottish anthems in tribute to the visitors.

This was the first game back in an English shirt at Twickenham for Jonny Wilkinson since he kicked the winning goal in the 2003 Rugby World Cup. Some of us wondered whether he would last the first half but as soon as we saw the familiar bum-jutting, leg-jiggling ritual ahead of his first penalty kick the memories came flooding back.

Wilkinson doesn't miss many kicks. His ability to put them over from the touchline and rack up the points gives confidence to forwards and backs alike. His tackling and positioning stiffens the line and this time his battered frame stood up to the punishment. New cap Andy Farrell still feeling his way at inside centre, must have been glad that there was someone to share the attention.

It wasn't just Wilkinson either. Jason Robinson was back and, even without too many of his trademark jinking runs, still managed to score two tries. But it was the strength and punch of Harry Ellis that had us talking after the match, that and Wilkinson's precision kicking. OK, he might not have quite mastered the art of levitation, as it seemed he had with his one-handed try in the corner, but he was walking on water as far as we were concerned.

Post match we always sing, win or lose, but this was one of the classic sing songs with everyone standing on their chairs in the pub singing, "We're climbing up the sunshine mountain." There's still a big mountain to climb before the World Cup but it's nice to enjoy some sunshine at last.

The Scots tested England with some penetrating kicks and two deserved tries but really there was only one team on the day. Ireland at Croke Park will be something else. England will need to play out of their socks to beat an experienced Irish side on their own patch. But if Wilkinson can stay injury free, and that's a big "if", anything can happen. A new season, a new coach and everything has changed.

Former coach, Andy Robinson, said he would not have played Wilkinson. Few would have criticised him for that. But sometimes - as new coach Brian Ashton might argue - sometimes you have to take risks and sometimes you just get lucky. Whatever happens for the rest of the season after this 42-20 win, this was one for the memories - the day that Jonny Wilkinson returned and all of us fortunate enough to have had a ticket will say: "I was there".

If you love fishing....

If you love fishing and want to do your bit, why not join the Anglers' Conservation Association? I've included links to this and other conservation groups in my latest fishing column . There's also a chance to bid for some great fishing if you move smartly.

I notice that the Wild Trout Trust auction includes a Hogwarts' Express train set autographed by Harry Potter stars. I wondered what that was all about until I was told it had been donated by Emma Watson who plays Hermione. Emma was introduced to fly fishing by her father.

Sustaining sustainability

I'm pondering on my FT column for next week. Somewhere it will feature something about employment measuring. I went to a Best Companies accreditation event on Wednesday that discussed a couple of interesting measures.

The Best Companies measuring should blend nicely with an interview I had on Thursday with Andy Taylor, the boss of Enterprise-Rent-A-Car, the biggest car rental company in North American (more than $9bn in revenues last year).

I have written quite a bit about Enterprise because it uses an interesting customer-feedback measure and links the feedback it gets to staff promotions. Needless to say, it ensures the staff stay pretty focused on keeping customers happy.

But not every member of staff is happy at Enterprise and this was something I had to bring up with Mr Taylor. A while back I came across a web site called JobVent.com. This is a site that enables employees to rate their companies, awarding them plus or minus points depending on how much they love or loath their jobs.

I was surprised to find a lot of negative feedback on Enterprise based on 239 reviews to date. The feedback puts it in fifth place on the "I hate my job list" that is topped by United Stationers. Mr Taylor didn't know about the list. He does now and I can imagine there is going to be a bit of reading homework for Enterprise managers over the weekend.

I don't like giving people bad news and I'm confident that Enterprise is the kind of company that can deal with it positively. But that doesn't mean it is going to change its style. This is a family-owned company, reared on homespun mid-western values. It's the kind of company that, if you work hard, have the right attitude and learn the business you could go far on a traditional promotion ladder.

But this is car rental. It's not the film industry. It's not glamour work. It's about delivering good service which, after all, is what we want of any company. You start at the bottom in this business and that means washing cars from time to time. "I still wash cars, haven't got a problem with that," says Mr Taylor. But it seems that some of the graduates who have entered the business may not feel the same way. I have plenty to say about this because it shows how attitudes are changing in the educated young. Nobody wants to do the dirty work anymore.

I have it in my family. A house doesn't run itself. Floors, bathrooms, kitchens all need cleaning. Lawns have to be mowed, dogs have to be walked and, yes, cars need washing. Who ends up doing most of this work? Our young and able boys? No. Mr and Mrs Muggins.

I'm not saying that the grousing about Enterprise is unfair. But I am saying that too many young people are focusing so much on their education - encouraged by parents, like myself, who want the best for them - that they forget that hard physical work is still necessary in this world and an education should not make us believe we are exempt from that.

I must leave space too for a mention of H. Lee Scott, the president of Wal-Mart. I saw him yesterday afternoon speaking at the Banqueting House in Whitehall at an event organised by Cambridge Programme for Industry that administers the Prince of Wales's Business and the Environment Programme. Prince Charles was there.

There is an impressive throne at one end of the large room but the prince wasn't going to sit there. He had his tatty red chair and cushion installed on the front row. The Banqueting House is not a great place to linger if you're royalty. Charles I was executed on a scaffold in front of the house in 1649. Since that time the royal household has prudently decamped to palaces a little further afield from the Palace of Westminster.

The Scott speech was incredibly worthy. I can't recall the number of times he used the word "sustainability" going so far as to hope that "we will make sustainability....sustainable".

Wal-Mart is in eighth place on the JobVent "I hate my job" list but that is based on only 82 reviews. "Not many given that we have 1.8m employees," said the Wal-Mart executive sitting next to me when I told her about the site. Not the best conversation starter, I know, but it's a long time since I read Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

The worthiness factor was maintained on a slip of paper in the information pack that was handed to everyone who went to the event. It said:

"In order to reduce the environmental impact of this event CPI will estimate the CO2 produced by your transport to and attendance of the event and will offset this."

It's a pity no-one had mentioned this to the chauffeurs of various company bosses whose Mercs and BMWs I saw outside ticking over steadily to ensure that everything was warm for the "top people" when it was time to leave. Mind you a chauffeur-driven Mercedes is easily sustainable on the salaries of these company bosses.