Fat Boy Slim and the Blue Horizon

TV beauty contests were all the rage when I was a young lad and the biggest of these was the Miss World Show. It always concerned me that, whilst most nation's representatives choice of national dress was a no brainer, Miss England always struggled in this section and I can vaguely remember, for instance, a furore the year she was decked out as a Beefeater.

So we have no national dress, no national anthem (ours is unique in giving praise to our monarch rather than the land)and a patron saint from Persia which we share with several other nations.

I'm currently reading "The Angry Island" by A A Gill, friend and literary twin of Jeremy Clarkson. In it he offers opinions on why the English are good at war and war memorials, bullies and self deprecating in our humour. He reckons he isn't English himself and gets incandescent if given this attribution. He takes the view that being born in, and spending the first few months of life in Edinburgh makes him Scottish, despite subsequently spending the rest of his life based in/from London...writing for The Tatler and The Times donchaknow?

The book is a great read, chock full if opinion, a lot of which I take issue with but which does provide food for thought. For instance, I've lived in Yorkshire and points north for twenty years. I remain a southerner not because I was born in the south, but because that is how my friends and neighbours percieve (label?) me. Complicated innit?

What about the sporting stars who use English ancestory as a flag of convenience? Are they English? Lennox Lewis, Zola Budd, Greg Rusedski, Owen Hargreaves? If they are, what makes them so?

Do other countries worry about implied or imposed nationality? The USA certainly doesn't and Canada doesn't seem to. How will the countries new to the EU classify it's citizens who leave in their hundreds of thousands for the more wealth countries of the union? Perhaps because of our geo-political milleu we are faced more regularly with defining ourselves - are we English, half-Scottish, British, European etc etc.

My father was Scottish and I return to Scotland regularly. My total time spent in Scotland easily exceeds A A Gill's first few months of life. Do these credentials make me more Scottish than him, less English than him?

In the end, apart from sporting contests and wars, does any of it really matter? At times I'm proud to be English (Concorde, The Beatles, the much maligned NHS) and at other times I'm ashamed (troops in Afghanistan, the Highland clearances, football hooliganism) but most of the time I don't even think about it. Would I miss being English? Miss England if it wasn't there? Would you?

Forgive me reader for I have skimmed, it has been a month since my last confessions...
Well, I did say that I would write when I can - and today I can!

I could decide to write a blow by blow "what I've done while I've not been here" and "why I haven't posted here" thing but hey, who wants to read that? I know that I don't. No, what I will do is share a story instead.

I'm working for a few days a week at a new - to me - factory at the moment (my work involves getting sent to my company's various locations to help the folks there to "sing the company song" on health and safety). The honeymoon period was great - they didn't know me or how I would be working with them and all was "nice to see you" and "would you like a cuppa".

Then I made a move - I thought I would make it clear who I am and what I am there to do. Sure, the management had an idea about this already but I wanted to make sure that the "coalface workers" did too. So I made an A4 poster introducing myself and expressing my keeness to work with everyone to maintain and improve the factory's safety standards. I put it on noticeboards around the place. No...my principal method of communication is not via noticeboards!

I had already seen lots of grafitti written on machines around the place and so wasn't suprised that my poster was first drawn on and then some torn down. It would have been easy to feel wounded by this behaviour but I wanted to see beyond the simple destructiveness of the act. What was not being said? I took an educated guess that the grafitti was an attempt to communicate frustration of the "no-one listens to us" variety. I was already aware from conversations with various employees that some share the view that I am just the latest in a line of initially enthusiastic but ultimately ineffective agents of change because "nothing ever happens here as a result".

What could I do? I have no formal authority in the factory, no budget and no control. What I do have however, is that false magic power of having come from outside. Having looked at how many things needed to be improved I was initially overcome by the enormity of what I was trying to do and it looked like I would have to "boil the ocean" - impossible. I talked it over with my boss and we have decided that, instead of putting in the much needed systems that would manage safety procactively rather than their currently preferred firefighting technique, we would force a practical, highly visual and obvious action.

So this is what we are going to do: there is a lot of fork lift truck (FLT) activity and these are dangerous bits of kit - did you know that about 100 people a year die in FLT incidents every year in the UK? There is also a substantial amount of redundant or mothballed machinery in the factory around which the FLTs are driven. We have persuaded the factory manager to hire warehousing off site and remove all of this kit. The place will be less cluttered, the internal traffic can move more freely, there will be more storage areas for raw materials and product. From my point of view, the workers will have had a highly visible demonstration that things are changing. Now I can't guarantee that we will all join together and storm the barricades in a re-enactment of Les Miserables or do a Gracie Fields "Sing As We Go" thing (you have to have seen the film to get the reference) but its a start.

I wonder if I will continue to feature in grafitti? I'll keep you fly-posted.

Talking about fly-posting, I'm writing this in Edinburgh where I have come to sample the delights of the Fringe. I alays learn something from this fantastic experience. It is pretty certain that I will share my learning with you too so stop groaning - resisitance, both to my intra-factory activities and to my proseltysing is futile!