Austerlitz

My friend and ex-colleague at Interbrand, John Simmons, contacted me on Friday. We’ve made plans to meet up in London following a workshop I’m running for the Media Trust next week. Although we were a close writing team for five years earlier this century, we haven’t seen each other for some time. We do have intermittent email conversations, in which Shakespeare regularly features. The latest has been about blogging. Both of us have come rather late to this world whose extremes seem to be advertising your latest product and telling people what you’ve had for tea. I enjoy Twitter and my time spent with you right here. John is bemused by Twitter and has begun to stretch his writing muscles in the blog on this new website www.26fruits.co.uk/blog/. We’re both aware that people are fascinated by writers, even those who do not read books or rarely put pen to paper or tap the keys. For us, there’s the choice of demystifying or occluding the activity. We both lean towards the former, while recognising the glamour of the latter. For we’re both writers for business (but then, wasn’t Shakespeare?). For me, writing is not my life - although it is tightly bound up with self-expression, which is. As a writer for business, I recognise that writing is not nearly as important or woven into the lives of the people I work with as it is in my own. Yet, it is my task to build a greater connection between people and language. This can and should lead to a meeting of minds. And curiosity – the questions people struggle to ask, often without uttering a word. How do you end up being a writer, crafting crystalline elements of brand strategy, producing books, helping other people to write better? What was your journey? How did you get here? The answers we provide are in our blogs, both in and between the lines. Blogging is revelatory, or it is nothing but noise. Everyone or everything I name here is meaningful in my life in the past, present or future (you know how I feel about time - it’s all grist to the millenarianism which hasn’t quite left me). So, today, for example, I find that the recently crowned world snooker champion, John Higgins, is 34 - the same age as David Beckham. Kissing the pink every day is obviously a stressful life. Toyah Wilcox is 51, which never seemed likely when Derek Jarman‘s film, Jubilee, emerged in 1977. OK, Rick Wakeman is 60 today, so Yes…Wreckless Eric is a magisterial 55, despite living up to his name in an exploration of the whole wide world these last thirty years. And I’m dubious about mentioning that Nobby Stiles turns 67, because I never intended to talk about his profession in this blog (my one taboo). No, today is ultimately significant in the course I’ve taken to become who I am because it would have been W G Sebald’s 65th birthday, had not this most modern and exquisite of writers expired in a car crash in 2001. So, my gift to you today, because I know you won’t have read it, is Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz. John would understand.

Mark Griffiths http://www.idealconsulting.co.uk/