The Silence of the Tills

A long weekend in Massachussets visiting my grandchildren, and a visit to Emerald Square Mall in Attleboro on Friday morning. Where have all the shoppers gone? I'm used to bargains after Thanksgiving, but the holiday season sales are early this year. The discounts were massive, with ticket prices slashed and with further discounts for newspaper coupons and store-card account holders. So where was everyone at 10.30 on Friday morning? In recession, no doubt, Later, when we went to a children's party on Saturday afternoon, the Mall was once again almost deserted. It's sobering, and it's scary for any business as the psychology of recession affects everyone. The catch is that I sincerely believe that it's the 80/20 rule: 80% of any recession or boom is in the mind and only 20% is real. This was highlighted in an article in Monitor on Psychology earlier this year, following research at the University of Hawaii. So the answer is simple: go on! Have a drink! Cheer up! You could reverse the trend with a bit more positive thinking. Meanwhile, I'll get back on my hobbyhorse about linguistic confusion.OK - you think I'm nit-picking again, but it's that word "momentarily," in the phrase 'This Ticket Counter is momentarily not occupied' [- and let's overlook the fact that ticket counter isn't a proper noun or title so doesn't justify any capitalisation.] Momentarily in Oxford English means for a moment or an instant, 'the light flickered momentarily and then all was dark,' but in American usage it generally means either 'currently' - as in the sign on the unmanned ticket counter above, or 'in a little while' as in 'the waitress will be with you momentarily.'
I find Anglo-American language differences fascinating, especially when they become quirkily contradictory to an almost British extent. One favourite is the immigration form when I land at Logan airport, which demands that the date be entered DD/MM/YYYY while all the rest of America writes MM/DD/YYYY. Good on you USA! You can be as amusingly inconsistent as a British municipality - like my own in Royal Tunbridge Wells.


We now have new litter laws in town. Instant ticket fines of £75 (about US$120) if you drop a cigarette butt or scrap of paper. But this scene in the park the other Sunday morning proves the old adage that it's one thing to make a law and another to enforce it. So, what's the answer? Surely it's the same as the boom and recession problem. It's all in the mentality of the people, all of us. If we believe in our country I honestly think we can keep - at least - our internal economy buoyant. And if we take pride in our environment, we'll look after it. Mind you I've been "thinking thin" for years and it's not yet done anything to reduce my waistline!

Column-Inches

In the London Times, nestling next to the announcements of the Royal family's engagements for the day, in the "Personals" section where you expect to find discreet classified advertising for "Personal Services," you would - last week - have found the genteel announcement that put Lehman Brothers into administration.

It's been quite a time, hasn't it, these past few weeks?

Meanwhile I've been chasing around with a standing-room-only workshop in Birmingham at the Chartered Institute of Management's Annual Convention, followed swiftly by a flying visit to Frankfurt for the International Book Fair.
Here it soon became clear that publishing is no longer just about books. I was delighted to find that foreign publishers were encouragingly enthusiastic and receptive to the concept of linking the book series to the Tork & Grunt website, and to the audio-introduction CDs that we recorded to accompany each title. It's nothing revolutionary, but while it's been commonplace for self-publishers to generate "product" for back-of-the-room sales, it's not something the big imprints have yet much cottoned onto.

And, as you'd expect, it's the Koreans who take the lead in multi-media exploitation. My Korean colleagues at Thenan publishing had asked for a meeting to discuss various developments. You can imagine my delight when they asked if I would support their proposal to develop e-learning programmes based on the Tork & Grunt series. Now that's exciting - and as far as I'm concerned - it's worth a few column-inches in the London Times.