Dowsing in St James'

In 1971, I visited London with my friend and flatmate Simon. This was still in the "far out, man" days, and London was still a place with w-i-l-d fashion sense. I remember buying a pair of remarkable vivid lime-green crushed velvet trousers in the King's Road, which never looked quite as marvellous when I got them back to Edinburgh. However...

In our quest for cosmic consciousness we decided - no, it just seemed like a good idea at the time - to go dowsing in St James' Park. We each appropriated a forked twig, and with eyes closed wandered around the park chanting mantras and searching for oneness with nature. Simon almost immediately had things happen with his twig; it started twitching and bending, and drawing him around behind it, just like the books said, in fact.

My own experience was a bit different. No twitching, but I started to feel a tingling in my hands which got me excited. Until I opened my eyes to see that my palms were turning bright red, and my fingers were starting to swell to an enormous size. Instead of divining the earth's mysterious forces, I was suffering from an allergic reaction to the twig I had chosen. Bummer.

That was the moment I realised that Joni Mitchell wasn't going to sing a song about me. Stardust I was not.

In praise of a poor memory

I have always had a poor memory - or perhaps more accurately a poorly-disciplined and untrained memory. And for most of my life I have bemoaned this as a real disadvantage, while continuing to do nothing to try and improve the situation. I forget names, routes, facts, almost anything but especially jokes.

Lately, however, I have been wondering whether this can at times be an advantage, not just in the sense of being able to revisit books and films for the fifth time with almost as much pleasure as the first, but in the world of business. My thought is that a poor memory acts against the forming of strong preconceptions, formulaic solutions, or mental comfort zones. I realise that, by not having a vast memory bank of reference points to draw on, I tend to approach situations relatively openly. As I obtain facts, I'm not usually mapping them against an existing model, because I've forgotten what those models were. So if there is an advantage to a bad memory, it might be that any new case is judged on its specific merits, not against a history of similar but perhaps entirely misleading cases. The downside is that this potentially makes for a longer, less efficient process. The upside is that any solution offered is as unclouded and fit for purpose as I can make it.

Of course I would say that, wouldn't I?

Taste where?

About 25 years ago I guess, there was a hilarious ad on television for Brooke Bond Red Mountain instant coffee. The theme was rugged outdoors Americana with a throaty male voice extolling the virtues of the coffee in song. One line has stuck with me over the years which began: "You need a bigger taste..." and then "...right in your coffee cup". It's the word "right" that always got me going. Not just in your coffee, but "right" in your coffee cup. Somehow it evoked an image of aimed accuracy ("right in the bullseye"), and of other coffees getting the whole thing wrong and ending up with their bigger taste somewhere else, maybe the sugar bowl, or over the table cloth. I know it's just a lyric, and lines have to scan, but still. Where do you want that bigger taste, sir? Right in my coffee cup, waiter, if you'd be so kind.