Happy Friday #4
A few thoughts at the end of the working week
Hello dear Aargh! reader,
This week I celebrated a birthday. Does this mean that the ‘Age-activated’ component of the Aargh acronym - Age-activated rage, grumpiness and humour - might become even more pronounced? We’ll see.
On his seventy-second birthday, that wonderful old trouper à la française, Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972), was asked how he viewed his advancing years. He replied:
Considering the alternative, it’s not too bad at all.1
I second that opinion. If you follow my Life & Times of a Social Experiment recollections you will know that I am already older than Chevalier was then. Closer in age, in fact, to former French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) who, on seeing a pretty girl on his eightieth birthday, exclaimed:
Oh, to be seventy again!2
I long since reached an age which, when I was a young buck, I would have considered the realm of the ancient and doddery. And I’m confronted by the phenomenon of seeing the present as different - not necessarily worse, but unfamiliar - from the past.
Mind you, as you may gather from some of my scribblings, I do believe that we really are all undergoing one of those every-couple-of-centuries shifts which makes absolute sense of L.P. Hartley’s line that:
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.3
With reference to this, one of the most perceptive statements of all about aging was made by Maurice Saatchi, Lord Saatchi, when he addressed a gathering of advertising industry creatives in London:
We are victims of a drug administered by the Gods to all humans. As people grow older, they grow more disillusioned. The Gods are being cruel to be kind – it is easier to leave the world if “The country is going to the dogs” or if “It’s not like it was in the good old days”. The only known antidote to the drug of disillusionment is creativity. If the pursuit of happiness is truly the right of every human being, then creativity is the means to that end.4
Creativity, the key to ongoing fulfillment! I like that! And I guess it’s what, with your continuing indulgence, will keep me pedaling away at the old steam-powered keyboard, with particular emphasis on:
Thoughts about changes in the world and, particularly, changes in business practices with particular emphasis on goings-on at the Customer-Supplier Interface (Sales, Marketing, Branding etc.)
Thoughts relating to the unusual circumstances of my genesis
Thoughts about other things that spring to mind
… which, is, as one might say, a fairly open brief.
If you have any opinions or requests do please let me know in the comments. And do feel free to recommend a subscription to your friends. Many thanks.
If you have been, thanks for reading.
Freedland, Michael. Maurice Chevalier (1981)
Agate, James. Diary, 19 April 1938
Hartley L.P. The Go-Between (1953)
Saatchi, Maurice. Address to Creative Britain in Golden Square (16 September 2008)
"Creativity, the key to ongoing fulfillment! " I like that. I've just started writing poems as an art form I can do with one hand and almost useless legs.