Overcoming the monster and a thrilling escape from death

I'm nearly four weeks in to my novel. It's absorbing most of my waking hours. All the people I have come to know this last month are those inside my head. The book is set in the future and I'm bursting to tell you what it's about, but you'll have to wait. I don't know all the story myself yet even though I've written a detailed story plan. Things keep changing.

This morning it was the second chapter. The chapter reads fine - about 4,000 carefully crafted words but something wasn't right. I have been reading Christopher Booker's book, The Seven Basic Plots - or rather bits of it. This is frustrating because it's a very well written and readable book and I would like to read it from beginning to end, but there just isn't time. Besides, I'm also reading Andrew Roberts's great book, The Storm of War, covering the second world war.

Roberts has some wonderful little snippets, including something picked up from the war diaries of National Labour MP Harold Nicholson. Writing in early 1940 during the so called Phoney War, before the Germans moved in to Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, Nicholson recorded that British aircraft had dropped some two million copies of a leaflet over Germany. Ministry of Information censors, however, had refused to publish the contents of the leaflet on the grounds that "We are not allowed to disclose information that might be of value to the enemy."

But back to Booker. His seven basic plots are: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. As you might guess from a book of 700 pages it's a little more complicated than that. I was reading last night about a sub plot of "overcoming the monster". This is the so-called "thrilling escape from death". Reading my plot again I decided I had just a few too many thrilling escapes from death. Maybe I have been over egging the pudding. So it has been back to drawing board with the creation of a new character, a powerful and rather aggressive woman who, I should add, bears no similarities to any of the individuals discussed in my previous blog.

A friend asked yesterday whether one victim of the forces of good and evil might be a prominent pink-paged newspaper. In a novel, the options are not so much about intent but choice of weapon. It's like Bruce Willis as Butch in the gun shop in Pulp Fiction, choosing between the sledge hammer, the baseball bat and the chain saw before settling on the samurai sword. It's tempting to nuke a previous employer but not very subtle and far too indiscriminate. Besides there's a fate worse than death for the Financial Times and that's a takeover by Rupert Murdoch. So maybe all my characters will end up reading an online Wall Street Times. Or maybe the FT, if it features at all, will end up having a thrilling escape from death.

No FT, plenty of comment

It was good to see old colleagues at a get-together for ex-Financial Times journalists in London last night. A lot had retired but many have gone on to glittering careers - two to the House of Lords, one in Government, two on BBC news (constantly), two Fleet Street editors and one running the Confederation of British Industry.

The gathering was special for another reason. It's not often that you come across 150 journalists in a bar, buying their own drinks out of their own pockets with not an expenses receipt between them. How times have changed. "At least we were never taking money from the taxpayer," said an old colleague, reflecting on the MPs' expenses scandal.

I had a hot tip from one, confident in his insider-knowledge, that Ed Balls had definitely got the chancellor's job. And it may well have been true, but political events are moving so quickly and that was before we had the news of James Purnell's resignation. Purnell was the man being sounded out for Balls's job at Education. So Alistair Darling stays put for now and so does Balls, his ambition to run the Treasury as yet unrequited.

Balls wasn't there last night but I can never relate to him as a politico anyway. Instead I recall Ed as the centre forward who gave our old FT football team a bit of aggression up front. Ian Hargreaves, former editor of the Independent, was also there. Ian was a gritty midfielder, never afraid to bite a few ankles.

A lot of the chat was reminiscences and gossip - the stuff I miss most from my days on the paper. A few of my old colleagues liked to lunch in a certain style. David Churchill, former leisure industries correspondent, had his favourite tables at Orso's and Joe Allen's restaurants - indeed still does. One lunch time he arrived at Joe Allen's only to find that Joan Collins was sitting at his table. A word in the ear of management and she was summarily shifted elsewhere.

The Foggitt files

One of the best things about working in provincial newspapers was the way that certain characters would stamp their imprint on a locality. On a light news day at the Huddersfield Examiner we could rely on eccentrics such as Jake Mangelwurzel mentioned here.

At the Yorkshire Post we could call on Bill Foggitt for a prediction about the weather. When I began writing about Foggitt in the Financial Times twenty years ago a lot of my colleagues believed he was a fictional character.

Far from it. Bill, who lived alone in Thirsk, was a shy but slightly mischievous character who was more of a co-conspirator rather than a straightforward source for these snippets on weather lore. The Foggitt reports appealed to my former colleague, the late Malcolm Rutherford, who edited the FT diary for a while. Malcolm had his own eccentricities so that might explain his liking for this oddball take on the weather.

Oddball or not, I still take note of where the frogs are laying their spawn in the pond.

I have collected most of the diary items here in my archive under the heading: "The Foggitt Files" which includes a feature on Foggitt the man.

No Comment....No FT

I'd like to thank all those friends, colleagues and readers who have written to me in the past few days with such kind remarks about my Financial Times column. Yes that really was the last one but the FT tells me that there will be something in that space in future, written by one of its staffers.

I wasn't quite ready to give up the column but I was told that the newspaper had to make economies and staffers come before freelancers. I know how it is. It's going to be tight in the Donkin household too for a while so the FT subscription has had to go. No comment....No FT.

Engaging behaviour

I've written a column for Thursday's Financial Times looking at employee engagement. It's an odd word, engagement, when used as human resources people use it, to describe discretionary behaviour among employees or what I would call goodwill.

My dictionary doesn't give any such definition. As I said in the column, if you asked most people what it involved to be engaged, they would tell you that it meant either committing yourself to marriage or sitting on the toilet.

The thing is that human resources consultants just can't get enough engagement right now because it's turned out to be a good money earner. Companies all want engaged employers ready, in management parlance, to "run the extra mile."

I haven't seen many postmen running extra miles recently. In fact I have never seen them running. I don't believe that most people get up on a morning thinking "I can't wait to get in to the office so that I can get on with making money for my bosses and the company shareholders."

But a lot of people go to work wanting to give of their best. The problem is that when they get there they are confronted with so many obstacles, often created by unreasonable management demands such as "drop what you're doing and do this," that stress levels begin to increase and people simply become pissed off or what HR people would call "disengaged."

Engagement is not a quality that needs to be created. It's something that's natural, like curiosity in children. But just as school stifles curiosity so the workplace often stifles the goodwill of employees.

The answer is to ensure that people, including managers, know exactly what is expected of them and for the owners and heads of companies to get real about the human capacity for work instead of constantly upping targets and demanding ever greater efficiencies.

No wonder increasing numbers of young people are turning their backs on big company careers opting instead to join start ups or create their own little businesses. Sure, they will miss out on management training but much of this today is about management conformity. There's nothing like learning from your own mistakes. I do all the time.

The dustbins of history

I have just been speaking to an old friend and colleague, Robert Taylor, who was employment editor of the Financial Times before he retired in 2001. We were discussing the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington that I had visited in the summer.

The museum is a thoughtfully put together record of the Holocaust but I thought Robert made an interesting point when he asked why it should be in the US rather than Europe.

"Why don't they have a museum that documents the killings of North American Indians or slavery in the US?" he asked. "Is that too close to home?"

It is time that the US came to terms with both its slave-owning past and its treatment of Native Americans. One of the finest displays of Native American clothing and artifacts can be found in the Museum of Natural History in New York. There was nothing I saw there, however, that told the story of the Indian wars; nothing about the way the native people were moved out of their hunting grounds on to reservations and deprived of the food source - the North American Bison - that had sustained their way of life for hundreds of years.

Each visitor to the Holocaust museum is given a card with the name and details of someone who was persecuted in the Holocaust. The idea is to remind us that each of the six million victims of the camps and those that survived was an individual. Robert said that on his visit he found many of these cards discarded in the trash cans outside the museum.

Bragging rights

Never boast about yourself, my mum always said. So I never did. Instead over the years I have polished my skills at self-deprecation to the stage where I believe my own press.

I write about the fish I lose. If I fall in the river everybody gets to know. I can't spell, can't remember things and sometimes forget before I get to the end of a sentence. I fluff my lines in a presentation and you have a big laugh at my expense.

So I stumble along as the little guy. I pack my job in and nothing bad happens. Quite the opposite; lots of good things happen. I launch my web site with no real business strategy and it brings in business. I start a blog and my web site visitor numbers really start to take off - 17,000 last month with more than 1,000 visitors a day for the first time on peak days. Thank you for looking in. Take note sponsors.

Then this week I get my copy of Human Resources Magazine and find that I have been ranked at number 10 in its Top 100 most influential people in HR list, and one of the five highest climbers. This in a year that I seemed to have done more fishing than writing. They sent me a little certificate. I haven't had a certificate since swimming for the school team at one of those cheapskate swimming galas where they couldn't run to a medal.

Oscar ceremony

Of course, if I hadn't made the list I would be saying: "What nonsense. Why is so-and-so not there?" I could give you many reasons why this listing doesn't matter or why it's undeserved but I'm not going to. Instead I'm going to do the Oscar ceremony thing and thank all those who voted for me.

The thing is, it's true what people say about work - a bit of recognition goes a long way. So if you are up there mum looking down, forgive the boasting.

I noticed that my old editor, Richard Lambert, now director general of the Confederation of British Industry is named at number 38. Now that isn't boasting anymore. It's gloating and unforgivable.

Fair boss

What I will say about Richard is that he was a fair boss. I remember the exchange we had at our first meeting when, as Deputy Editor, he was interviewing me for a job at the FT. He leaned back in his chair and asked:"Why should we employ you at the Financial Times?"

"I have no idea," I said. "But you asked me down here. I didn't apply for a job."

After that it was a sales talk. "You can do percentages," he said. "Yes," I lied. "Well that's all you need." It really was as simple as that.

A good lunch

There was fishing to organise so it called for a lunch. I do like a good lunch. For years it was the institution of business - a time and a place to gossip, learn stuff and make deals. Some of my best journalism commissions have come out of a lunchtime conversation.

But lunch has to be with people you like or people you find that you like over lunch, and the best lunches tend to involve a drink or two. In the past few years I have had the occasional lunch that just involves water. In fact today, as often as not, abstemiousness is assumed. These puritanical American-style "meetings with food" start promptly and end quickly because they're shoe horned in to a schedule.

It's worse still if the venue is one of those fashionable glass and steel echo chambers designed to create "instant atmosphere". I can't hear what's being said. I've noticed that women often pick these places.

I've always enjoyed the company of women but, just as some choose badly in love, they do so at lunch. They pick fancy places to eat, typically somewhere "that I've never been to but I've heard it's good". A few scraps of vegetable and maybe a sliver of meat are piled on some mush in the middle of the plate with something dark drizzled on top. After the main course - which can be consumed in 30 seconds - the woman is desperately wanting some pudding but she denies herself and sips water throughout with one eye on the watch.

At this week's fishing lunch in the Boot & Flogger, one of our group was an hour late but it didn't seem to matter. True, this particular lunch went a little bit beyond what would strictly qualify as lunch and ended in some singing, but that's not necessary for a good lunch. A good lunch develops; it happens; it can't say "good lunch" in your diary although sometimes you have an inkling about the possibilities.

Everyone ordered rib-eye steak with chips. There was nothing drizzled and no white space on the plate. Real food, real people and real conversation in a real wine bar where it would be impolite to drink too much water.

In the 1980s when I first joined the Financial Times, every department head was given access to the private dining room three or four times a year. The idea was that you hosted a nice lunch for a few guests or "contacts". Mostly, however, it was an excuse for a department blow out. The dining room was in the bowels of Bracken House where nothing could be disturbed. There were several courses of top nosh with a great selection of wines. It helped that Pearson, the parent company, owned Chateau Latour at the time. Then there was brandy or port (or both) and cigars. And some of us still managed to get a story written before heading home.

Over the years successive economies, a move to a smoked glass box at Southwark Bridge, and a focus on the bottom line, changed everything. The vineyard was flogged off, in-house dining curtailed, drinking discouraged and the whole working environment was effectively "delunched" through this creeping sobriety so that the snack in front of the computer terminal has become the norm.

Having sampled both the old regime and the new puritanism, I know where my preferences lie. Today we have instant news, instant everything. But the best news is slow cooked and the best writing, well seasoned, if no longer slightly pickled.

Hair today....

How times change. Twenty years ago when I joined the Financial Times the idea that the newspaper would have featured a news story about a popular television show would have been laughable.

Today I see there is a front page story about Big Brother and four other pieces inside. The decision by Carphone Warehouse to suspend its £3m sponsorship is business news. The show's impact on chancellor Gordon Brown's tour of India is political news.

Celebrity moves everything these days. It even moved Clay Harris to comment in his FT Mudlark column after spotting an advertisement on a tube of hair restorer endorsed by Cheryl Baker who used to sing in a pop group called Bucks Fizz.

As Clay writes, it didn't say "formerly of Bucks Fizz" or "of Bucks Fizz fame." Instead it said: "formerly of Bucks Fizz fame." Good one Clay. Now what were you doing looking at tubes of hair restorer?

Money down the tube?

I spend most of my working hours these days, writing, thinking and speaking about work. But for many years at the Financial Times I worked on corporate investigations. In fact it would be true to say that I joined the newspaper with something of a jaundiced attitude towards the City.

Late in 1987 when I joined the editorial, the City had been indulging itself in a financial feeding frenzy that ended on Black Monday, October 19, when stock markets crashed around the world. By the end of the month the value of UK shares had fallen by more than a quarter.

This was the age of the yuppie (young urban professional), parodied by the comedian Harry Enfield with his character "Loadsamoney" who would brandish bundles of money to advertise his obnoxious behaviour.

Whether or not my attitude was justified is a matter of debate but any illusion that the City was populated solely by gentlemen brokers working to the principal that "my word is my bond" was destroyed by the subsequent scandals at Lloyds, Homes Assured, BCCI, Polly Peck and the Maxwell Corporation.

This was the era when the City discovered one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history - a cure for Alzheimer's disease. The treatment involved a lengthy trial for insider trading. Little wonder, then, that Ernest Saunders, the former chief executive of Guinness, is the only living beneficiary of this sophisticated remedy. He had shaken off the symptoms of "pre-senile dementia" after serving just 10 months of a prison sentence that had been reduced from five to two-and-a-half years by the time of his release from Ford open prison.

So why should I mention any of this now? Well I'm wondering as we enter the closing years of the decade just who among the current stars in the corporate firmament are going to transform their businesses in to imploding black holes in to which shareholders' investments, pension funds and undeserved reputations will disappear? We can only imagine the flurry of headlines, political recriminations and told-you-so columns penned by those same supine dogs who always fail to bark.

I have one or two ideas but why not do your own spotting? Watch out for those companies that have risen from nowhere, particularly where the chief executive is perceived to possess the Midas touch. Look at the ultimate ownership and evidence of offshore registration or financing.

Is there an elaborate corporate structure with obscure shell companies? If so, ask yourself why it exists and beware the silver tongues who justify such arrangements in the name of tax efficiency. It is no co-incidence that many tax havens are also noted for their secrecy.

Another feature of the markets in the coming year or two may be the fall out from the most recent manifestation of the kind of irrational exuberance that characterised the dot com boom at the end of the 1990s.

There's a new twist this time. On the last occasion the internet business was novel and untried. People threw money at ventures that spent millions trying to grab market share on the strength of their marketing spend rather than on the quality of their service.

This time companies are buying businesses that have grabbed apparent market share (but not earnings). I'm thinking here of ITV's £120m acquisition of Friends Reunited and Google's $1.65bn purchase of YouTube.

I'm wondering whether either of these acquisitions will amount to anything more than a money sponge. Both Friends Reunited and YouTube are communities of interest. But are they great businesses? Do their communities represent a market in any real sense any more than the membership of the Boy Scouts, The Women's' Institute and the Church of England?

Millions of people choose to go to church every Sunday, but their church membership and church going habit does not amount to a commercial enterprise. Why should the behaviour of those who post on YouTube be perceived any differently?

Good luck to the founders of YouTube and Friends Reunited. You have found your place in the sun. I hope that the purchasers of your businesses find lucrative markets among those researching their family trees and those tracing old school friends. But I doubt that they will. People have traced their old school mates and moved on. Interest in family trees will wane.

The problem for YouTube meanwhile is its ubiquity. The internet population is a fickle community that moves locust-like from trend to trend. In their own ways these sites have proved remarkable, transformational communities, phenomena of their time. But are they built to last? Let's wait and see.

Fanning the kipper

The best bit of Christmas is the games and the best game is fan the kipper. To play: Cut some sheets of newspaper into fat fish shapes. These are your kippers. Get two dinner plates and place them adjacent to each other but spaced apart at one end of a room. Clear furniture/people/dogs to the edges of the room. Get some magazines or newspapers; these are your fans.

Now draw up a list of all those there, put their names in to a hat and have someone draw them out to establish the order of play. On a sheet of a paper draw up a tree-style framework like those that are used for a knockout cup competition - finals, semis, quarters etc.

If you have 12 people, say, in your family group put four blank pieces of paper in the hat to signify byes in a draw of 16. In this way the competition will work itself fairly through the rounds. If you get the luck of a draw you have a bye through to the next round.

Choose your kipper and fan. Now you are ready to start. In each match two people "fan off" against each other. The object of the game is to fan your kipper down the room and on to your plate so that no part is touching the floor. The one that achieves this first is the winner.

Our family kipper trophy is a silver rabbit that was given to me many years ago as a corporate gift. As an employee of the Financial Times at that time, the policy was to hand over gifts for a charity raffle among staff. I handed in the rabbit, then won it back. This year I won it again.

I could never bat for England or turn a cricket ball but if fanning the kipper is ever granted international sporting recognition the manager of our national team could be comforted that in one small corner of this great country there is a pretty mean kipper wafter just waiting for the call.

Christmas card anxiety

Angst over the Christmas cards. For years we've sent ones with Madonna and child motifs cherubs or trumpeting angels, a Murillo or a Raphael radiating with godly intent, peace and goodwill to all men (and women too for heaven's sake, no intent to be sexist here).

This year, just to be different, we chose cows wearing Santa hats, cuddly penguins and 1930s bathing bells throwing snowballs. Now I'm reading in my Saturday Telegraph, self-styled arbiter of middle class behaviour, that its columnist, Jeff Randall, has declared his intent to tear up any card he receives that does not mention the word "Christmas".

"Outrage against non-Christmas cards growing," says the Telegraph headline. I check out our cards. "Merry Christmas," say the penguins, "With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year," say the cows. "Season's Greetings," say the bathing belles. Season's Greetings? Is that the best they can muster? What are we to do? Half of our Christmas card output this year has failed the Randall test.

Ah well, it wouldn't be Christmas without anxiety over the cards. For as long as I can remember I have felt guilty over corporate Christmas cards. In the good old days when I first worked at the Financial Times, all the reporters received a fat allocation of tasteful cards with a pile of highly sought after FT desk diaries to dispense among favoured contacts.

People would sell their grandmothers for those diaries. But to give them out was to create a climate of expectation. Resentment over not receiving one after a run of diaries in past years was almost as great as the initial gratitude.

Then there was the Christmas card design. A lapse one year in to corporate tastelessness led to a sharp rebuke from David Lascelles, the then banking editor, who set himself up as the editorial Christmas card guru. Cost cutting did for the diaries in the same way that it did for the long lunches and, finally, the Christmas cards, although an amount is designated now to charity in their place.

But cards continue to arrive from contacts. I don't have a secretary with an easily accessible list of names and addresses so I expect I will settle for a message on my web site. I know there is as much thought there as there is in some of the cards. I had one from a car company executive who I could barely recall. For him, I'm sure, the contact was similarly vague, only he passed my calling card to his secretary who noted it on the list. Come Christmas, the list is converted to cards, the cards are in a pile awaiting a signature and the card is sent. It's a process. But it's not a thought process. So, if it's the thought that counts, this ritualistic exchange of cards doesn't amount to much.

That's why the personal message is so important, only this can really pile on the guilt when it has not been reciprocated. In the past few years I have joined the much criticised set who send "round robin" notes with their cards. I would have ended the practice but people tell me they like them. Sometimes people get a round robin note and a personal message. If that doesn't give them a little glow I don't know what can.

Bathing belles throwing snowballs? Thank God Jeff Randall isn't on my Christmas list. Imagine Jeff's card collection this year. It's going to be overflowing with godliness, plum duff, holly and fat-belted Father Christmases. On second thoughts I might just send him my bathing belles, complete with a corporate calling card with wishes for a prosperous New Year.