NotebookLLM Deep Dive Audio review of this article can be found here – https://schl.cc:443/gm
It’s 10.30pm, Saturday evening, 21 December, and we’re watching BBC2, a night dedicated to Annie Lennox and her singing.
Lennox’s life exposes all that’s so wrong, yet brilliant about the way individuals have been able to grow up in the UK during our parallel lifetimes. Her work captures the smallness of growing up in a closed, Scottish community up to the grandness of being the best in our generation.
When I say wrong, she was permitted to join the Royal College of Music age 17 and drop out, these days that would be regarded a ‘safeguarding’ issue. Long before Simon Sinek, she asked (1992) the question ‘Why’; for over a decade she’d empowered (along with Bowie) an understanding that life could be androgenous, and none were required to make a choice they might later feel uncomfortable about.
At the close of yet another year in which the natural order of things is in complete turmoil, from the things we know (Austerity, UK bankruptcy, VAT, government incompetence) across the insoluble (Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Climate change, Poverty) to the unknown (dark energy, Farage, Musk & Trump), I feel moved to put in print a few words I’ve spoken frequently about over the year.
Change has been with us with such increasing frequency that it’s become the norm. As a consequence, almost all organisations of scale have lost contact with the corporate memory of how they got there in the first place. And of course, the very nature of democratic choice is that if a new team (red) is elected, then all existing (blue) ways of working will be cancelled. This leads to major government departments having to give press releases supporting the ‘new’ orthodoxies, which must taste like sawdust in their mouths.
For us long-standing leaders of our generation, it’s both exhausting and inexplicable; how can government agencies move from swearing that ‘4 legs are good’ without recalling the antics described in Orwelll’s Animal Farm. Orwell would be regarded these days as a failure, dropping out from school before going to college. How is it possible for the Oxbridge/UCL educated intelligencia of 2024 not to appreciate that they’ve adopted the ‘Newspeak‘ Orwell brings alive in his statement of the future ‘1984’, now of course 40 years old?
For at least most of this century, we’ve been lied to by our politicians, from ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the ‘Ponzi’ scheme that lead to the 2008 Wall Street crash, Brexit and the stolen US election of 2020. It’s ever been this, and will remain so I guess.
Lennox’s longevity remains an inspiration; as culture, gender, politics, technology and life itself have been little more than ‘quicksand’, she’s floated and stayed ahead of the game. I’ll leave you with her reminder of where ‘sweet dreams’ are made – but preface that by my thought that ‘When surrounded by ‘Shit’, all you can do is ‘Shine”!
A Principled view 