Out on the French Road (so-called for being tree-lined) conkers drop with woody knocks and split open at our feet. I tell Poz the new baby is like the brown nut of a conker, nestled in Mummy's tummy. He runs off to find a stick to whack things with.
I'm looking forward to spending a bit more time with him and I've requested some holiday to stretch out my pathetic standard allocation of paternity leave. 'Exciting times’ says my boss, with typical Scottish understatement. The company is also going through changes, all part of being absorbed into a far larger organisation. It’s a painful process and I'm glad to be getting temporarily shot of it.
It strikes me as odd that brands invest so much in establishing character, to distinguish themselves from the competition, and yet there appears to be little room for individuality in a corporate setting. Homogenisation seems to be the aim and as far as I can tell the systems won’t run properly unless everyone plays along. At Jaguar this process was called 'getting your green injection'. All a bit Stepford Wives.
I suppose it’s about control. I was once criticised for being ‘off message’ when I wrote a number of supposedly ‘whacky’ newsletters as the editor of jaguar-racing.com. They were tame but too individualistic for Jaguar Cars’ marketing sensibilities. I discovered this when I was mistakenly (or purposely) copied in on a string of emails that had bounced around their office in a frenetic cadence. A customer relations girl who I'd met in a meeting, where she just stared at me in a slightly weird way, made the 'off message' comment.
After blinking at the thread for a minute, in a state of mild shock, I decided that if it wasn't important enough to speak to me, face-to-face, I'd just keep on doing what I was doing and if anything I stopped self-censoring and upped my score on the whack-ometer in successive months. I remember inventing Jaguar Towers, as my futuristic tongue-in-cheek base. The fans certainly recognised something different was going on, as I found out later at a couple of fanclub meets - 'Oh, you're the one who writes the newsletters' they said, eyeing me up.
The CR girl never could look me in the eye again, it was all a bit silly. In the end, Old Hodge, our fearsome Cars liason man, called it 'the Jaguar difference', which is how they were strapping stuff at the time anyway. He was a difficult man but soon after this episode we got on a whole lot better. He wasn't going to stick his neck out for me again but he saw how ridiculous the situation was. A line had to be drawn under it.
Old man Hodge had a well-honed way of doing things that wouldn't put his neck on the block. You could say he cascaded his learning downstream with a set of benchmark behaviours, or you could stick to plain English and call him a corporate survivor. I was out of the door a few months later.
