This past weekend we headed off to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east coast and rented a cottage for six of us, that’s the in-laws too.

Funny old place Robin Hoods Bay. the cottages are lovely and being at the seaside is always brilliant, but it’s just a shame that it’s the east coast where the sea so often just looks a bit grim. Still, that didn’t deter us from having a top old time.

The trip was for a wonderful old lady’s 90th birthday and family had come from all over the place, including her son from Canada. Poor fellow confided in us that even though he has lived in Canada longer than he did in England, his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for going.

The high point for me was a hard but brilliant walk along the less obvious beach to the north of the town. It involved clambering over all sorts of rocks and boulders, many of which were fascinating as they held fossils of all sorts of ancient creatures. The first fossil you see is an amazing experience, but then before long you will have seen so many that one has to be truly special for you to stop and share it with the gang.

Our cottage needed some work, but it was very comfortable and spacious, and best of all you could pretty much roll out of the door and down the hill a hundred yards to the beach.

Blinking tired today though. I reckon I’ll be off to bed soon.

But I’m not sure!

Hiros came up for the night last night. He’s going to meet clients in Darlo today and so it was a good excuse to get together again.

Having had such excellent food down in Manchester I decided that the only think I could do was to cook a curry from scratch, and I ended up doing three. I made a keema peas, minced lamb with muttar – or peas, I did sag paneer, which is cheese and spinach, and then the main dish was a slow cooked lamb rogan. All in all it was quite excellent even though I say it myself.

The trouble was I had told Hiros that I was going to made curry, so he brought beers, lots and lots of beers. All different, all strong and all completely delicious.

We probably only had five pints in all, but some of them were eight and nine percenters, and even though we drank water too I woke up feeling rotten this morning. It’s the first proper hangover I have had in ages and I know I should know better. The funny thing is that I’m actually quite enjoying doing nothing as it takes its toll. A cup of tea out in the garden, back in for a lie on the sofa. It takes some beating!

Right now I’m looking at how I can help my younger brother get the cash flow issues sorted with his business. He is doing well, in three years he has gone from just surviving to supporting a few staff as well, but his trouble is that the gap between invoicing and getting paid means that he goes quite heavily overdrawn each month meaning that sometimes he doesn’t take any money from the business for several months at a time.

It’s a crazy situation as he’s properly successful, yet lives as if he’s broke all the time.

I’ve been looking at Touch Financial factoring advice and working out for him whether credit factoring, or discounting as it’s often called, would be right for his business. Basically it means that he gets his invoices paid almost straight away when he writes them, then the factoring business chases them up. He’ll pay a few per cent as a fee, but that has to be worth it, it’s probably less expensive than his overdraft anyway.

I expect that I’ll get roped in to actually getting it all signed up and underway, but he’ll pay me a bit so that’s OK.

Hiros once reported to me, and then got given my job after I fell out with the boss to such a degree that I basically had to leave the company.

I didn’t resent Hiros getting the job. In fact I helped him a lot in the first months, getting him the right contacts, even checking some of his work for him.

Now, from time to time me meet up and banter feverishly for a few hours, ideally over dinner. We vow to repeat the performance within a couple of months, but in fact it is nearly always six or more before we get together again.

Last night we went to Aladdin’s on the border between Withington and Didsbury.

We ate wonderful Syrian food served by two pretty Syrian girls who knew how to smile at the customers. They didn’t flirt, just said everything with their beautiful near black eyes, and intriguing accents. If we hadn’t gone so long without seeing each other then I’, sure we would have chatted to them a little, got their views on the conflict back home, and maybe took recommendations for our dinner. But as it was we hardly looked up from our conversation that was falling over itself in an effort to keep up and keep the stories coming.

I think my favourite Middle Eastern Food  is babba ganosh, no idea how it is supposed to be spelt – but it sounds like what I have put here.

And we finished with the lovely Turkish coffees thick with fine ground coffee, rose water and cinnamon. Hiros will be staying up here with us in a couple of nights. And unusual double date – I can’t offer him anything as exotic I’m afraid.

I was banging on about how abusive use of direct mail by so many businesses in this country has turned it from a successful business model into a plague and a menace.

I think that fact is largely responsible for the fact that as a nation we rarely respond to anything any ore.

If something doesn’t demand a response – like “tell me no or I will definitely take the money from your account” type of message, it seems that generally folk just can’t be bothered.

Mind you, some of that comes down to language. If you end an invitation with words like “Tell us if you can make it” then you’re asking not to be told when people can’t make it, but then also left hanging not really sure whether folk will arrive or not.

This whole rant started when I did some work for a big company recently.

I slaved away at it, crafting a piece to ensure that it was just right, after all, I stood to make a decent amount of money and maybe find a route to earning a bit on the side to top up the pension.

I duly sent it in and waited in eager anticipation of their comments.

And then waited in slightly frustrated anticipation.

And then after a week I actually rang and asked if they even received it – and just received a cursory brush off and the comment just send us the bill.

I suppose that was the go ahead, and I should be grateful, but I was too annoyed to ask if there was anything else I could do.

I guess that’s old man talking to young person who holds the budget. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like it.

I think the constant noise, throng and costs would drive me to distraction if I tried to move back, I’m rather senior these days after all, but I love a short break.

We have just been staying at The Jesmond Dene Hotel which is where we often go as it’s a good price and so convenient. You can just wheel your bags across from St Pancras or Kings Cross and then walk everywhere. The walking can get knackering and next time I’ll take my wonderful bus pass, but this time around we had allowed ourselves a generous budget, so rather than make do with sandwiches we ate in cafes and restaurants as and when we fancied it. You can get so tired if you don’t stop and eat often enough.

I particularly wanted to go to the Lichenstein exhibition at the Tate Modern. It makes me laugh when people look at me and wonder why an old geezer would be interested in pop art – well Lichenstein himself is a lot older than me!

I don’t care though. It’s fun to show the kids that I know more about the stuff they may be studying than they do themselves!

The price of beer always comes up after I’ve been to London, and this time I was pleasantly surprised. I actually reckon I didn’t pay more than 20p a pint more than I would have done in the north. I did drink in some dodgy dives though!

People would then keep much of the direct mail they received behind the mantle clock, in case they might need the product at a later date.

Not surprisingly direct marketing was hugely successful back then.

One of the master figures of direct marketing, a real life Mad Mad fellow called David Ogilvy could spend days crafting a letter, and test several versions.

Ogilvy’s agency still thrives www.ogilvy.com although it has had various different names over the years.

They’d be long letters, but that didn’t matter, because every word was relevant. But they might also be used to sell seriously expensive products – such as a Rolls Royce. One of his famous direct adverts of the 60′s was a long copy piece telling you that at 60mph the loudest sound in the car was the ticking of the clock. Wow!

As with any success story the principle was milked, weakened and abused.

We were bombarded by DM as even conversion rates of 0.1% sill meant that many products were worth selling using the medium. But of course that meant that you were selling to one person in a thousand. What impact did that have for your brand on the other 999? MOst didn’t care probably, but some of them would have been pissed off – meaning that you were spending money to piss off potential buyers.

Insane!

Actually, I’m warming to this topic, but I haven’t even got to the crunch point yet. I think I’ll carry on tomorrow as I think that the failings of communication between folk today stem from the excesses of the 80s and 90s when we were practically taught, or driven, to ignore communications from people.

Loyalty to your friends? Loyalty to family?

Which matters most?

There are of course people in your family who you have chosen – and therefore they are hopefully both your family and friends.

But  parents? Aunts, uncles?

And to what point? How big a test do we need before we cave in and back down.

There was an old boy on the radio this morning, talking about his fighting in the Korean war, I think that was late 50′s.

He was talking about a mate being shot down, and how he went to get him, then ended up getting his arm blown off. I wonder how much of the courage he showed that day would have been there if he had the chance to reflect on the danger. Are great acts of courage acts of loyalty, or driven by adrenaline.

Should you be loyal to a company?

Especially knowing that when the time comes to make cuts it is unlikely that loyalty will feature in anything but the size of the payoff they hopefully give you.

I’d like to keep this concept in mind and share it in type at least over coming posts. But trouble is my posting is a tad erratic at the moment, I do try to keep to every few days – but I’m just not loyal enough to the cause!

I was destined for such a fall when one of the lads down the road came to ask for some help with his homework. He calls me uncle, but in actual fact it’s just because I’m good mates with his dad. I don’t have any real relationship to him. Anyway his subject was social anthropology, and while I have no knowledge of the topic as a study, I though that I’d be able to help just on the strength of my interest in people and people systems, what makes us tick and the like.

But I was stumped straight away by the terminology the questions were using – I had views, but I just had no idea of how to express them. I did some on line searching and didn’t find anything that’d help until I came across something called Marked By Teachers where you can buy essay examples. What a genius idea – I wish there was something like that around when we were at school.

Although having said that I guess there was, it was just that it wasn’t online and the bigger truth was that I just didn’t pay attention to very much anyway. How cruel is it that learning just didn’t seem interesting when it was free, and close to essential, whereas now that I do it just to stay interested in the world it is somehow fascinating.

Anyway I saved face with the lad, which was most important.

Yesterday was a brilliaant afternoon.

I caught the train down to Brum and got there at about 12.30.

Blimey it was busy!

Walking up through town was good. I worked there many years ago and still have a real love for the place, the silly accent, and jolly outlook.

The lads – all of us old timers now, were meeting in O’Neills on Broad Street which is the dreadful clubbing street that every big town has.

Beer at just past noon isn’t my scene, but the first one slipped down well, as did the second, third, and many more.

There were a group of Irish lads behind us drinking funny looking drinks from funny looking glasses like this: (hopefully I’ll remember to pop the photo in here when I can find my phone again).

So being the daft old farts that we are I went to the bar and said – we’ll have four of what they’re drinking. I’m probably the oldest person the girl has ever sold a VRB, or vodka red bull as I now know its called, to.

They just slipped down our throats. As did the next ones and the ones after that. Yet, miraculously we didn’t. I guess it was the intense conversation that kept us going as I reckon I feel asleep within minutes of sitting on the train home.

I didn’t feel too great today – but then it is a long while since I’ve had 7 pints, and I have never had four VRBs!