The angry brigade: why are Liverpool fans perpetually annoyed?

The vilification started within minutes of Luis Suarez sinking his teeth in Branislav Ivanovic's arm. Forums and social media networks buzzed with anger, and by 7pm the villain of the peace was being hung out to dry by fans, incandescent with rage. The villain being Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers, who had the temerity to point out at a  press conference that, no matter how good they are, “all players are replaceable”.

Later, Ian Ayre, the club’s Managing Director, would also feel the wrath of Scouse social media mob for his handling of the incident – though his competent performance, and action of getting Suarez to apologise within a couple of hours of the event, was in sharp contrast to the bungling that characterised the Evra affair.

Yet Suarez, whose moment of toddler-like madness started the storm, escaped the worst of the criticism. On Twitter and the forums – and it's the forums that dictate what being a Liverpool fan is these days – some Reds criticised our mercurial Uruguayan, but others, many others, laughed it off, and directed their vitriol at the manager, Sky TV (and its “agenda”), Sky’s pundits, the press, the FA, Chelsea fans, Liverpool fans, Ivanovic. Everyone except the man who’d started the whole thing off with his bizarre impression of Rod Hull’s Emu.

To an extent, this is understandable: Suarez’s presence has far more of a bearing on Liverpool’s fortunes at the moment than Rodgers’ (or if he were to come back, Rafa Benitez’s) tactics. But this wasn’t really about matters on the field, this was about turning to what has become the default position in the red half of the Scouse nation over the last few years: anger.

Quite simply, Liverpool fans are seemingly in a perpetual state of annoyance. There was, in the not-too-distant past, a “Liverpool way” that was defined by a devotion to the men in red, a sportsmanship that involved applauding those who’d performed well against us and an ability laugh at both ourselves and those unlucky enough not to be Liverpool supporters.

And it wasn’t purely a myth, this Liverpool way – it was, bar the odd “welcoming committee” for away fans in the late-’70s to mid-’80s – real. Real enough that even today, one of the main accusations against Suarez is that he betrays it. Far from hating us, the individuals who make up the modern media grew up admiring Liverpool, supporting us in Europe as a surrogate for the poorly performing England team. We revelled in our status as carriers of the Scouse flame, an exotic strain of Britishness, part Beatles charm, part well-travelled merchant seaman. For the most part, others fans didn’t want to fight us when we came to town – they wanted to look at us, meet us, be us.

So what happened? When did we become so sensitive? When did jibes about the lack of employment opportunities really get to us? When Man United’s fans sing about us, why does it prompt pages of outrage on our club forums? Seriously, who cares? If you went to Anfield in the mid-’80s when we were at our peak, United got it in the neck every week. And not just about their lack of success on the pitch.

A Liverpool fan recently said to me that the club’s supporters had become “addicted to negativity”, and there’s something in that. When Liverpool’s Spirit of Shankly fans organisation formed to combat the cancer that was the leveraged ownership of George Gillett and Tom Hicks, its brilliant campaign helped end the Americans’ reign at Anfield, bringing Liverpool supporters together into a cohesive unit, making them realise just how powerful they could be. And that felt good.

On the field, the Yanks’ disastrous tenure led to the downgrading of the team and eventually the sacking of Rafa Benitez, who spotted they were shysters from the off, and called them out on it. When he was sacked the fans protested once more, as was their right, and again made them feel part of something, a rarity in modern football.

Since then, we Liverpudlians have revelled in our anger, felt it out, got used to its power. When the Suarez/Evra affair took off we defended our man to the hilt, researching the street slang of Uruguay to – in our minds at least – prove his innocence, forgetting our reaction was based purely on the fact he played for Liverpool (the same, of course, could have been said about United).

Yet when Suarez then went on to embarrass the club’s greatest ever player, Kenny Dalglish, by refusing to shake Evra’s hand in the return match, we blamed Sky, Man United, anyone – except the player himself. “He’s like a Scouser,” we told ourselves. “He’s one of us,” – forgetting the long-lasting effect he had on a man who really did sacrifice everything for Liverpool FC.

We fumed and fumed, and even abused Liverpudlian journalists for expressing honestly-held opinions that didn’t follow the standard Kopite response. But when people who love the club are “cunts”, what does that leave us to say about vermin like Kelvin McKenzie?

Since then we’ve fumed about the press conferences of Brendan Rodgers, the refereeing of Howard Webb, the supposed Manchester bias of the Football Association, the songs of Sunderland and Man United, and Evra’s joke with the plastic arm at Old Trafford when United won the league. When we got knocked out of the FA Cup there was a weird sense of satisfaction because it meant we weren’t following the now-hated “traditional” priorities. Scouse not English at the expense of everything else.

Supporting a football club is supposed to be fun. It gives a predominantly young audience the chance to travel, bond and witness moments of the highest drama in the flesh. But at the moment, following Liverpool feels like entering a perilous den of mistrust where the slightest word out of place can result in castigation.

Today, with a team that’s languishing just above mid-table, the voices demanding the removal of Brendan Rodgers are getting stronger, as Liverpudlians realise once again that they hold the career of another man in their hands. The fact that with our matchday revenue dwarfed by that of the Top Four, there isn’t a manager alive who could make Liverpool a title-challenging force again is irrelevant. The knives are out. And to those who wield them, it feels good.

The Brompton bicycle: a bone-fide British classic

This article appears in Issue Eight of Umbrella magazine. See it here

It seems fitting that one of the TV programmes of the last year featured prominently one of the defining objects of our time, too. The show was the brilliant Twenty Twelve, the so-true-it-hurts comedy that satirised the actions of the team working on the delivery of the Olympic Games, a group led by the long suffering Ian Fletcher, who turned up for work on a bike that sums up perfectly the modern urban experience: the Brompton.

The Brompton folding bicycle, built in a factory in Brentford, west London, is a beautifully designed riding machine – a bike that goes from nippy road runner to hand luggage in less time than it says, “Actually, it's not as heavy as you think.”

With cycle crime at epidemic levels (533,000 offences in 2010) this piece of fiendishly clever British engineering can be carried from meeting to coffee shop to office desk without having to give London's bike snarers the chance to prove their skills. Sure, if you drop it in the canal it's not going to float, but the Brompton offers a freedom that no other bike can match.

It also, once you get over the shock of its small 16-in wheels and curved crossbar, looks fantastic – taking it from utilitarian mode of transport to object of desire in just a few moments. See a Brompton, want a Brompton.

Folding bikes have been with us since the late 1880s, but the Brompton takes the idea and reduces it down to its most beautifully basic level. On a Brompton, nothing, from the tiny wheel on top of the mud guard (for ease of portability) to the folding pedal on the left side, is superfluous. There are other folding bikes around, but they look clunky and ungainly – especially in their folded state – compared to the Brompton.  

Brompton began life in 1975, when engineer Andrew Ritchie began designing folding bikes in his flat overlooking the Brompton Oratory in west London. In 1980, after several prototypes had been produced and tested, Ritchie manufactured his first 30 machines for sale. When large scale investment arrived in 1986, the new bike company was ready to enter the mainstream  market. By 1987 the Brompton was in full production.

Our possessions say a great deal about us, and this is particularly true of the Brompton. Riding to work on one is like shopping at Waitrose – it shows that you're willing pay more money than is necessary for an experience that chimes with your values. It also says that you either live in a tiny flat where's there's no room to store a bike or so far out of town that riding all the way in is an impossibility – but you're happy to have a quick pedal to the station. 

In short, there are few more succinct definitions of how modern urbanites lives. And with the Brompton Dock cycle hire scheme starting next year at 17 UK train and tube stations, its visibility can only grow.

Beanie or bobbles: why mainstream fashion editors don't understand men's style

It started with beanie hats. Or rather, it started with a column in the fashion section of The Times about beanie hats late last year. A column that typified everything that’s wrong about style journalism in the UK.

The gist of the story was that the writer had noticed with the onslaught of the cold weather, men had started to wear beanie hats. This was backed up by pictures of young chaps in said hats mugging for the camera in a satisfyingly urban location in London. A nothing piece.

But the story infuriated me – not because I particularly dislike beanies – but because it completely ignored that the real winter hat of the moment was not the beanie, but the bobble, worn by ‘himalayan scallies’ and ‘heritage’ types the country over for the last two years. Anyone with an interest in men’s fashion would have noticed this.

It may only have been a small piece but it symbolised how uninformed mainstream fashion scribes are  – and always have been – about street style outside London. If this writer, the paper’s fashion editor no less, had even bothered to leave the chummy, mwah-mwah capsule of the capital then she’d have witnessed disparate men’s fashion scenes flourishing all over the country. And, probably, the odd bobble hat.

From End Clothing in Newcastle to Eleven in Sunderland, Oi Polloi in Manchester and Weavers Door in Liverpool – British menswear has undergone a revolution in the last few years with a look coalescing around workwear, preppy, mod, casual and extreme weatherwear. And it’s been ignored in favour of fawning pieces on designers whose clothes we’ll never wear and whose reference points mean nothing to us.

Great Britain is not a big country – a trip to Manchester or Liverpool takes two hours from London, while another hour will get you to Leeds or Newcastle. But if you’re writing about men’s fashion it might as well be the size of Brazil, such is the coverage these cities receive. It’s no coincidence that the London press completely missed the advent of what would become ‘casual’ in the late 1970s and Madchester ten years later. If it wasn’t in Soho, it wasn’t happening.

A couple of year’s back, The Sunday Times Style magazine devoted a whole issue to “the new style tribes”, a mish-mash of imagined whoppers and whopperettes living some privileged  Performance-like existence in Westbourne Grove where beautiful rastas share their weed with Jemima and her oh-so-bohemian pals.

And they got away with it. They got away with it when British menswear blogs like Oneupmanship were charting the rise of workwear and the frenetic trading in brands like Façonnable on ebay. They got away with it as young men in their late teens and early-20s tried to relive the casual era of their fathers by buying T-shirts that referenced the period in their tens of thousands. They got away with it, because those who knew what was really happening had no way of contradicting those who didn’t.

This isn’t a rant about or against London by the way. The magazine is based in the city, and we consider it to be one of the greatest places on earth. The anger comes the laziness of the capital’s lifestyle journalists and the fact that actually finding stories comes a poor second to getting free clothes and going to parties you’re not invited to.

As journalism becomes increasingly badly paid and jobs only open up to those who can afford to work for free for years on end, the gap between the style press and regular men who have a real interest in fashion will just get wider and wider.

They’re not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes.

The Gangs of Brazil

This piece originally appeared in Nuts magazine

Brazil is on the up. As the sixth largest economy in the world, it’s going to spend the next few years under the global spotlight while it hosts both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

There’s just one problem: its one of the most deadly places on earth, with criminal gangs and police stuck in a cycle of indiscriminate killing that leaves thousands dead every year. Only the drug producing states of Colombia and Venezuela have a higher murder rate in South America.

Two weeks ago, Brazil’s biggest city, Sao Paulo was plunged into chaos as gangsters and cops indulged in an orgy of killing which saw 140 people murdered in just two weeks.

Sao Paulo is not alone: the northern city of Maceio, has become the murder capital of the country while Rio de Janeiro, traditionally the most violent city in Brazil, is trying to change the impoverished conditions that allows crime to flourish. Murders are down, but they remain at levels unthinkable in Europe.

So, what’s the reason for this bloodshed? The answer is drugs – and one in particular.

Brazil is the world's largest consumer of crack cocaine. The right to control that market is simply too lucrative for criminals to ignore. And they’re willing to kill to get their share.

Here, Nuts lifts the lid on Brazil’s cities of murder.

Sao Paulo
The biggest city in South America (pop. 11m), Sao Paulo hit the headlines a fortnight ago when police and gang members brought bloody war to the streets. The city’s main gang is the ruthless “Primeiro Comando da Capital” which has controlled the drugs trade here since its formation in 1993.

For years the PCC were seen as peacemakers in Sao Paulo, keeping crime down by their total domination of the streets. But crackdowns by the police led to resentment and the targetting of cops by the PCC. This year alone 92 policemen have been gunned down by the PCC – murders often ordered by gangsters in jails. Overall, 982 people were killed in the first nine months of 2012.

The PCC is run like a legitimate organisation with members (called “brothers”) paying a monthly fee of around $270 – used by the gang to buy weapons and drugs, and to finance bail for members under prosecution. Each PCC soldier also has to swear an oath of loyalty, and once a member has joined, leaving is not an option.


Rio de Janeiro
One of the most beautiful cities in the world, but also one with terrible levels of inequality, Rio has been plagued by gang violence since the early 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the gangs dominate the <favelas>, the slums that cling to the city’s hillsides.

The main criminal gang is the “Commando Vemelho”, formed in the 1970s when left-wing revolutionaries were put in jail by the right-wing government of the time. Once imprisoned, they got together with traditional criminals, and on release used guerilla tactics to take over areas of the city, just as cocaine use exploded and with it the chance to make previously unimaginable amounts of money.

Its enemies are the “Terceiro Comando Puro” and the “Amigos dos Amigos”, which vie for control of the drugs trade with the CV, though all three gangs have been hit by the city’s “pacification” programme which has helped to reduce the city’s murder rate.

Instead of fighting it out with the criminals on the streets, the Special Police Operations Battalion (or “Bope”) now swamp an area, drive out the gangsters and set up community projects. But with only 19 out of 130 favelas pacified, it’s a long journey – especially when a teenage boy can earn around $1,000 a week working for a gang.

The murder rate may be down since its 1990s peak but the ruthlessness of the gangs shows no sign of abating – only last month, traffickers threatened to kill one of Bope’s most successful cops – a sniffer dog called Boss.

Macieo
With an enviable position in Brazil’s tropics and miles of sandy beaches, the capital of the Alagoa province should be a paradise on earth. But as the holder of Brazil’s highest murder rate, many of the locals claim a place in heaven by the most horrific means.

With 104 out of every 100,000 people dying violently here, the city has been transformed by the huge numbers of crack addicts in the population. Whereas Rio and Sao Paulo are controlled by mafia-like organisations, Macieo is murderously chaotic with addicts and dealers shooting each other over debts of just a few dollars. One man recently told the AFP agency he’d lost five of his sons this way. Their highest unpaid debt? Twenty-five dollars.

Local police, for years underfunded and disorganised, have been powerless to stop the 185 per cent increase in killings over the last ten years, while rumours of corruption at local government level refuse to go away. Funding is on its way, but it’s too little, too late.

Writing short stories for Robbie Williams' Farrell brand

It can be hard coming up with creative, original content for fashion companies

So, when I was approached by Robbie Williams’ Farrell menswear brand to create five festive “updates” for their pre-Xmas campaign, I decided to write a short story in five parts based around the lead-up to Christmas and the brand’s impeccably laid-out fashion shoots. This would be something customers could actually engage with.

Rather than just listing what I saw in the shoots, I came up with the idea of Farrell as a character – a sarcastic, smart northerner trying to make his way in London. The story reflect his slightly detached view of the world and the (forgivable) flaws that lie at the heart of his personality.

The inspiration for the brand came from Williams’ granddad, who mentored him as a child, so “my” Farrell had to have his values of self-respect and individuality  too. As the company says:

“The brand is named for Jack Farrell, aka Jack the Giant Killer. Jack was a notable dresser, a Stoke-on-Trent native, who lived a hard life but lived it well. A strong man, Jack believed in honesty, integrity, good manners and a sense of honour.”

Writing stories for brands – in whatever medium – really helps them engage with their customers. It’s simply not good enough to throw adverts up and expect people not to get irritated by them. Today, if people are going to give you their time, brands have to give them something back. You can read all five parts of the story here – or start with part one,
The Office Party, below…

It may be the naffest event of the year, but the office Christmas bash is not an excuse to let standards drop. Farrell keeps men looking sharp with tailored jackets, traditional shirting and just a hint of stylish rebellion

That time of year again.

Graham, the boss, is in his office slowly turning the colour of beetroot as it dawns on him that the deadline that “simply has to be met” has wilted in the face of that all-consuming enemy, the staff Christmas party. Should he ring the MD now to break the bad news or do it after the Secret Santa? Only one answer to that.

Out in the “breakout space”, Farrell sips the Lambrini that Faye’s brought in. He knows too much about wine and the provenance of the grapes to drink this stuff, but it doesn’t half bring out the taste in his Tangy Toms.

The rest of the team – they’re actually called that – are preparing to leave for the party. Graham’s booked the Greek restaurant near the station, plenty of plates to smash and ouzo to drink, clarion calls of a good time for people for who don’t know how to have one. He checks his box of northern soul 7”s – why is he DJing for this lot? ’Cos if he doesn’t someone else will.

He buttons up his cropped frock coat, wraps the fringed scarf round his and sticks on his felt trilby, a nod to the effortless style of his granddad, who even did the gardening in a shirt and tie.  Faye catches his eye and smiles, topping up the Lambrini.

“I know it’s not Jacob’s Creek,” she says, giggling. “But it’ll do.”
He nods.
“And so will you,” he says. “Cheers!”

Why The Cinematic Orchestra’s Every Day just won’t go away

Some records seem to get better, and often more popular, with age.

It’s like we’re not quite ready for them when they first come out, but over the years snippets seep into the public consciousness through films, television programmes and the playlists of tastemaking DJs until the truth of their greatness finally hits us.

Perhaps the best example of this is The Cinematic Orchestra’s Every Day, released in 2002 and still sounding as vital today as it did back then.

In the 15-year-long burst of creativity that followed the dance music awakening of the late 1980s, bands like The Cinematic Orchestra received more press than they could have hoped for thanks to the open-mindedness that house music brought in.

House was – is – like that. On the foundation of that relentless 4/4 beat anything can be hung, whether it’s rock, new wave, disco ambient or jazz. In fact, especially jazz. In 1995, the French producer Ludovic Navarre released the album Boulevard under the St Germain tag, a smokey collection of deep house clothed in the most atmospheric of jazz clothes.

Add to this the ground that had been made fertile by trip-hop (oft-derided as a term, but actually perfect ) and groups that would have never got any further than the racks of Ray’s Jazz Shop had an audience a world away from the serious – and they were always serious – jazz fan.

Into this came The Cinematic Orchestra. If ever there was a band in search for a film to soundtrack the er… Cinematics were it. Their first album Motion released in 1999 was certainly well received, especially in the “downtempo” reviews sections of the dance music press, but it was 2002’s Every Day that defined them, in particular the track All Things To All Men, the epic slow-burner with a rap from unthreatening London MC Roots Manuva. 

You may have no idea who the Cinematic Orchestra are, but you’ll know All Things To All Men, specifically the opening two minutes, which have been used on films and TV shows like Kidulthood, Wonders of The Solar System and somewhat improbably, Hustle.

With its gentle opening and catchy horn refrains, the tune is sofar, so soundtrack, but that doesn’t prepare you for The Big Fuck Off Beat that comes in at 1:42 – <bum-bum-ba-cha> it goes, bum-bum-ba-cha!

If you’re making a documentary, drama or advert and you’re filming a section where the pace changes, this is the bit you use. It’s absolutely awesome.

Sadly, most TV producers or ad directors never get to Roots’ lyrics, which is a shame as they’re as evocative an autobiography as you’ll ever hear on record. But no matter, those first two minutes alone are reason enough to seek out the track, and in truth, the whole album.

Since 2002, The Cinematic Orchestra have released constantly great records, but it is only Every Day that has transcended from the narrow world of the head-nodding muso to the casual TV viewer who turns to her partner and says, “What’s this music, it’s really good?”

Two minutes is all it needs. Two minutes.

Obsessions: match tickets – a life story told in ticket stubs

The original of this article appears in Issue Seven of Umbrella magazine


If there’s one thing that the Obsessions features prove, it’s that men are seemingly addicted to keeping a record of the things they’ve done and places they visited.

In the age of the smartphone, everyone is free to archive every moment of their existence, as can be seen by the countless held-aloft phones at big concerts, and more embarrassingly, football matches.

But the ultimate “I was there” memento isn’t a digital file or photograph. It’s something real, an otherwise ordinary piece of paper that just happens to have the good fortune to have something important – to the owner at least – printed on it. We’re talking, of course, about tickets.

Ever since I went to my first away football match I’ve kept the game’s ticket stub, an immediate ‘aide mémoires’, taking me back to a day that otherwise would be lost forever. 

The first one is a ticket for Coventry’s Highfield Road – now replaced by the soulless Ricoh Arena – followed by stubs for Old Trafford, the Victoria Ground (also gone) and Derby County’s Baseball Ground (sense a pattern here?). Later, come tickets for Wembley, Villa Park and most poignant of all, Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, dated April 15, 1989.

The designs change, too. Even in the 1980s the digital hand of the computer is found, but as we enter the new century, multi-coloured printing comes to the fore with holographic images and flash sponsors’ logos. The prices change too, ever upward into the inflation stratosphere. 

These tickets tell quite a story then, not just my own, but of the role of entertainment, particularly football, in this country. It’s not just soccer matches, the difference in cost between Spike Island (£14) and Heaton Park (£55) demonstrates how “being there” is something people are prepared to pay a premium for.

And just as some like to watch a gig through the lens of their iPhone, so a number of ticket collectors may prefer the experience of slipping the stub into their album rather than actually witnessing the event the ticket is for. It may sound mad to some, but to me it makes perfect, and very orderly, sense.

Hillsborough: the truth at last

Hours after David Cameron’s apology in the House of Commons I’m still shaking.

But that’s what 23-year-long battle for justice does  to you.  

When I stepped onto the Leppings Lane terrace at Hillsborough on April 15, 1989, I was just like any other 17 year old from Merseyside: a supporter of one of our city’s great football teams, obsessed with the game and the culture that surrounded it. When I came home to Liverpool that evening, that version of me was gone for good.

If you went to football games in the 1980s, getting caught in a crush was part of the matchday experience, both in and outside grounds. We fans were treated like cattle – prodded, shouted at, put in our place by the police and football authorities, who like large sections of polite society, hated us. We expected nothing else.

Twelve months before in the corresponding fixture, it had been so congested in pens three and four of the Leppings Lane terrace that I’d been taken out, breathless, panicked but alive.
So when, a year later, Liverpool faced Nottingham Forest once more in the FA Cup semi-final, I chose not to go down that sloping tunnel into the central pens, but to an unmarked entrance on the right. This would save my life.

The whole country now knows what we’ve been fighting for since. From the orchestrated – and now proven – cover-up by South Yorkshire Police to the disgusting lies printed by The Sun, the establishment sought to shift the blame for their ineptitude onto us. And their efforts worked.

Over the years people have talked about Liverpool as a “self-pity city”, while visiting supporters sang “You killed your own fans” when they came to Anfield, seemingly unaware that Hillsborough could have happened to them. No wonder we felt increasingly estranged from the rest of the country. “Scouse not English” became our motto.

What hurt most was that we knew we were right, that those 96 people had died because of the disastrous mismanagement overseen by Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, a man so overwhelmed by what he’d unleashed that he was briefing against fans within hours. A fool, a liar and a coward.

The supporters who’d saved countless lives by dragging people from the crush while the police watched on were castigated for "being drunk" or "arriving late". Can you imagine how different the reaction would have been if something of the magnitude of Hillsborough had happened to spectators at Twickenham or Wimbledon?

Today, the injustice that’s hung over us since April 1989 has been banished. The strength and fighting spirit of the Hillsborough families has been nothing short of inspirational; dignified but unbowed in the face of extreme provocation, unbending in their determination to get to the truth. Now they have it.

I’m still shaking.

The last battle of the American Civil War

Self-employed? How to cope with quiet periods

No matter how successful you are as a small businessperson, you’re going to have periods when the work dries up. Now, if your business is going so well that a few weeks without having do anything comes as a relief, then you can go back to the sun lounger and ask your PA to stick some more factor 12 on your shoulders. For the rest of you – here’s a few tips that can make those periods seem easier to bear, and hopefully inspire you to get more out of your business.

1) Accept the situation. This sounds odd but the key to getting through times when work stops coming in is to accept that this is exactly what’s happening. Don’t ignore the tightness in your stomach, it’s there because you know that things aren’t going well. You may be a freelance sub-editor whose bookings have dried up or an online bookseller with no orders coming in. Whatever, accept your situation with clarity and without blaming yourself or anyone else – that leads nowhere. Once you do that, you can take action.

2) Chase up invoices. No-one likes doing this, especially with people whose money keeps us in business, and when the money’s rolling in, we’re all liable to let the odd invoice go unpaid a little longer than is advisable. But when work’s scarce, you simply can’t do this. Check out which customers owe you money and get on the phone to them, gently reminding them of their responsibilities to you. Even if their monies aren’t due yet, you can still ask them to get a payment rushed through. If you’re a valued supplier, they’ll be keen to keep you happy. Give it a go – it works more often than you’d think.

3) Take control of your business. Once you’ve done everything you can with regards to cashflow, you should then start looking seriously at your operation and what you can do to improve it. This can be anything, from getting in touch with regular customers with offers or pitches, to looking at the design of your website or the wording of your email newsletters. In a quiet period, the worst moments are when we feel powerless. By channeling your anxiety into creative thinking, you’re laying the foundations for new opportunities.

4) Learn to let go. There are just some days when the last thing you want to do is work for what can seem like very little reward. If you feel like this, take a break – and don’t beat yourself up about it. Tidy the house, make that meal you’ve meaning to for ages, meet a friend for coffee – you’ll come back clear-headed and ready to go again.

5) Ask for help. This isn’t ideal, but there may come a time when finances are such that you may be forced to ask someone for a loan to keep going. No-one is pretending this is easy, but if you have family members or friends who are in a position to help, it’s better you do that than go to a money-lender or bank. Don’t make unrealistic promises about when you can pay it back and don’t take offence if someone doesn’t want to lend you money, but swallowing your pride could help put you back on your feet. A word of warning: don’t let this become a habit – even the most generous person can become resentful if you take them for granted.  

This post originally appeared on the excellent Intuit Small Business Britain blog

How social media can help your business – without turning you into a teenager

This article originally appeared on Intuit’s excellent Small Business Matters blog. For experienced – ahem – media professionals – lots of this will be self-evident, but the world isn’t full of latte-drinking wankers on fixed wheel bikes, and it’s those who this is aimed at. 

1) If you’ve got a Facebook page, make it fun. If you try the hard sell on your ‘friends’, people will just switch off. Instead, fill your page with videos and articles that they’ll love – and importantly, share, because in the digital era content really is king. Intel’s brilliant Museum of Me project is exactly what I’m talking about.

2) Update customers (both real and potential) with an email newsletter – you can ask an IT type to put a ‘subscribe’ button on your site. Say you run a small business concerned with technology, send your customers a mailout with interesting tech links in it, perhaps making one of the links go to something you’ve put on your site/Facebook page.

I edit an online men’s magazine, Umbrella and we update our readers with a weekly newsletter which not only entertains them, but drives them back to our site. We use Mail Chimp for this – great for email campaigns.

3) Have a conversation with your customers. By telling them about interesting things that are going on in your chosen field, you become someone they’re happy to interact with. Write a blog on your company website, and like the Facebook page, update it regularly with interesting stuff. Once they’re on your site, they’re more likely to to use your paid-for services.

4) The best use for Twitter is as a filter to the net. ‘Follow’ and ‘re-tweet’ journalists and experts in your field, because they’ll point you to articles and trends that you may not have heard about. You in turn can use those ideas yourself or link them back to your Facebook or website. There’s a whole world out there – be inspired by it.

5) Don’t get lazy. Facebook, Twitter and blogs rely on people updating their profiles. Like it or not, the state of your social media says a lot about your company’s attitude. If you haven’t added anything to your blog in three months, it’ll look like you’re closed for business and people will go elsewhere. You might not like it, but that’s the way it is.

London for visitors: a predictable 'alternative' guide

The Guardian's very pleased with itself thanks to its not-in-any-way predictable "alternative" London visitors' guide. Needless to say it's not funny, but is this going stop me doing my own version? Ha! I don't think so. The only downer is I'm not on some monster wedge to knock out this sort of gumph. Anyway, without further ado, here's my London tips

– Play "Find a Cockney". A near-impossible game which involves tracking down someone actually from London, and not a blandly accented phoney whose left-wing credentials haven't stopped them pricing out locals from the East End. One of them might be Banksy. Yikes!

– Keep count of the amount of meals that are served on enormous white plates/dishes in gastropubs. After a week you'll be in the hundreds, and you'll have eaten enough pork belly to last a lifetime. Note how old people have been clinically removed from these places, a bit like in Logan's Run

– Keep a record of everything you've done, then in two months time write an "alternative" guide to London for your local broadsheet newspaper. Concentrate on the East End and how its reinvented itself into a "virbant/edgy quarter" full of artists/software designers/anyone else who was crap at sport at school


– Start arguments in pubs. There's nothing more British than getting glassed. It'll also give you the chance to try out the NHS and see what G4S are like at mopping up blood

– Eat our amazing selection of crisps. Seriously, they'll make the piddling efforts in your Mickey Mouse country look like dog biscuits. That'll be a pack of prawn cocktail and one-nil to us, Jean-Pierre!

– Sleep with one of us. Seriously, we're easy and we'll do literally anything (including you-know-what) as long as there's some grog in it for us. Why go Faliraki for crap sex when you can come here and do some cool museums in your down time?

Ormskirk: rebranding a north-west market town

Ormskirk is a town in north-west England. It lies on the outskirts of Liverpool and boasts a university, Edge Hill, that's one of the fastest growing in the country. Smack bang the most densely populated areas of the UK outside London, and with a population that's overwhelmingly middle class (and that includes the 25,000 students), this largely pretty town should be buzzing – but it's not. I also happened to be born there.

Like a lot of similar places around the country – and especially those in the north – Ormskirk town centre lies empty for much of the week, in this case because shoppers get one of the four-an-hour trains into nearby Liverpool or drive to Southport. The market may be the draw, but it's more Albion than Borough. 

Happily, a group of shop owners and business people have got together to try and do something about it. They call themselves Love Ormskirk and they're attamepting to get funding to improve the place as part of the Portas Pilot project. 


Inspired by their efforts I designed these posters as a way to highlight 'Ormy's' best qualities – shopping, history, nightlife and restaurants. I also make a lot of its proximity to Liverpool, firmly attaching it to the unbeatable brand of the city. 


How their bid gets on isn't clear yet, but its caught people's imagination, including my own, and that can only be a good thing.