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Apart from making me look like a raving tea loon on the front page, this was a nicely sympathetic, although not altogether accurate, piece in the Lancashire Evening Post.
If you want to read the story online go to http://www.lep.co.uk/week-ahead/Teatea-race.3102766.jp
The good people at the Aughton & Ormskirk branch of the U3A (University of the Third Age) gave a nice plug to the Original Tea Bag Designs products in their latest newsletter.
July 31 Overlooking
the great Mersey river in a very comfortable penthouse at the top of a Liverpool
docks development, Dr Ahmed Sahab, his wife Jo and family of five children together
with their Eritrean maid welcomed me for tea. In fact, two teas – one a ‘red’
tea for elevenses, then, after they insisted I stay for lunch, green tea with
ginger.
“In the Gulf, people will drink red tea all day long. When you go to people’s homes they greet you with two things: Arabian coffee which is in small cups served with cardamom, and then the tea comes. Today people are more health conscious so I see more people drink green tea. I don’t care too much for red tea as a family, not as a culture, we drink green tea and ginger which is very good for digestion. It is a part of daily life.
I’m an electronics engineer but I make my living in computer science and technology. I’ve done a lot of work for government but now I’m an IT consultant and also a businessman investing in R&D in companies.”
Is there much call for that
in Liverpool?
“We have an expression: “The carpenter’s door is always broken”. So
I try to make sure my door is not broken – I use technology to be fully
flexible to manage my business world-wide – working in Liverpool or Dubai or Riyadh or Canada or Bosnia or Russia
or whatever. We have partners and projects wherever it takes us.”
Are you investing in
certain types of businesses?
“No. IT is IT. Solutions, services but also processes, knowledge management and consulting. We are talking to some partners here right now. We are talking to some social services they have good systems but they’re not talking to each other. They have a lot of knowledge in their head. When they quit or die the knowledge goes with them. A lot of companies or government agencies are not benefiting from the 20, 30, 40 years worth of knowledge, they take all the experience with them when they leave. They hire a new person who makes all the same mistakes and starts from the beginning. You lose time, effort and they can’t find information.
So they should build knowledge bases, the best examples is Google. If you take that same model and use it in an organisation you will save yourself all that time.
We built some natural languages to teach it how people think but it needed a lot of research and only succeeded on things that are systematic like military weapons – the military has used it a lot. We don’t invent so much as utilise what already exists.
The Internet is the greatest thing we can utilise, only terrorists are making use of it.
So these are some of the things we’re involved with. We’re three or four years ahead of what people are doing now. Out of 10 things we probably hit one or two, which will give you 50 times, 100 times revenue share. If we’re there first we have no competition.”
Turning back to tea …
“In Saudi Arabia
we would say schai for tea but in Iraq
they say tchai, in Morocco
they would say atay where it is more of a ritual. They put a lot of sugar and
cook it, cook it, cook it. I think Morocco would be the best country
to go to to represent the value of tea. It is done by the book: the making, the
pouring, the taste. Are you going to Saudi Arabia?”
I wish I was but I’m not
sure I can get a ferry from Saudi to Sudan.
“There is - from Jedda to Port Sudan.”
It was also difficult to
get a visa for Saudi.
“I’ll send you a visa. I can get you a visa for your passport anyway if you decide to change your mind.”
What’s life like for you
here in Liverpool?
“My wife is a dentist. She came to Liverpool
to train. We’re here mainly for the weather. I know the English people they
hate this weather but because the weather now in our country is 38 or 40
degrees every day my wife wakes up she prays for rain.”
Advice for the trip?
Jo: Be careful about your health and drink a lot of water
Ahmed: Learn your survival words for Food, Directions, and bring a paragraph explaining what you are doing; bring dates for survival; bring gifts for the people you meet
February 20 A lightweight in his prime, Paul Burke can't be far off his ideal fighting weight of 9 stone 8lbs. Although he hung up his gloves
about nine years ago, Paul still exudes a conspicuous aura of well-being and unsullied
good health, the kind that only comes with extreme physical conditioning. He
now owns and runs Paul Burke’s Physique@Preston, a new gym in the centre of Preston.
I was keen to get him to talk about his years in the ring, so as soon as he put two mugs of tea down between us I asked directly how he got into ‘the fight game’.
“I began boxing when I was 13. A large crowd of us kids began
attending a local boxing club, and as some of the boys dropped out it made me
more determined to stick with it. Eventually they all dropped out; by that time
I discovered I was really good at it. After leaving school I was going to a
boxing club in Manchester
two or three times a day for training, as well as early morning runs - although
I got fed up being stopped by the police every morning and asked why I was
running at 5 o’clock. It was obvious what I was doing. It was often the same
policemen, too. It was crazy.
I had plenty of fights but you don’t earn a lot boxing, especially
when everyone wants a cut, and they’re always pushing you to take on the next
fighter. And I had my share of bent trainers and agents. Some would wear a
hidden tape recorder to blackmail or bribe people later in their career. You
certainly get some characters in the game. Anyway, eventually I was fighting
for titles; I was British champion and Commonwealth champion but there were two
things I always wanted to achieve in boxing: one was to fight in the States and
the other was to fight in Africa. I never got
to the States.
There was a dodgy decision for the light welterweight Commonwealth
title in 1997 when a British fighter beat a Zambian guy and definitely
benefited from a local referee and English judges in London, it was a stitch up. Anyway, later
that year the title came vacant and there was a purse bid won by the Zambian, a
guy called Felix Bwalya, and I had to go to Zambia to fight him. Although I
really wanted to fight there, the trip was definitely out of my comfort zone; I
had to go on my own with no trainer, no representation, just me.
But when I got there, from the moment I arrived, I was treated like a superstar and couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed by the locals, it was amazing. They put me up in this fantastic hotel right next door to people living in shacks! You can’t believe it until you see it.
But the fight itself was a set up. I beat him up. He was on the deck
three times in the final rounds and they literally had to pick him up off the
floor to declare him the winner at the end of the twelfth, then dumped him back
on his stool. He was in a state. There was nothing I could do about it; I’d
lost my title, I was on my own, I was in a strange country, and the bent fight
that Bwalya had lost in London
came back to haunt me. It was a fight I couldn’t win.
Next day I saw him relaxing by the hotel pool and walked up to him
and told him straight that he didn’t win the fight. He just looked at me and
shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t seem to care; he had the Commonwealth title
and was happy enough. Although my flight wasn’t leaving for a few more days, I
just wanted to get back to England.
After a couple of days I heard that Bwalya had been taken to
hospital with headaches, and then slipped into a coma. I’d heard he went on a
drinking binge after the title win but I never saw any of that. He seemed a
quiet sort. I went to visit him in intensive care at Lusaka University.
Conditions were terrible: bare concrete floors, hardly any medical equipment, poor
sanitation. He was just lying there, nothing seemed to be happening, no doctors
around. I thought ‘shit, I’m glad it’s not me in this place’.”
Paul maintains that he feels no responsibility for his opponent’s
death, claiming poor medical care finished off Bwalya. But he also believes
that if he were the one injured that night in Lusaka it may well have been he who died because
of the rudimentary medical support ringside and the pitiless facilities at the
hospital. Paul’s dream of fighting in Africa
had become a nightmare.
The fact is, someone died, and Paul was the one bashing the bejaysus out of him beyond the point at which his opponent’s corner should have thrown in the towel. Paul would not be human if he didn’t reflect on the circumstances of that night and appreciate the occasional opportunity to talk about it.
Paul’s boxing career didn’t last much beyond that traumatic night. Later the following year, after being British champion for the best part of twelve months, he was obliged to defend his title.
“I knew it was going to be my last fight if I got beat. If I lost, that would be it. The split decision went against me, and immediately the trainer wanted to arrange a re-match. But I just said ‘no way, that’s me finished’.”
Advice for the trip?
“Keep going, and don’t look back”
July 27 With
a history that goes back to 1844, the Co-operative Movement began when 28
working men set up the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society. Their shop, opened
on Toad Lane in Rochdale
It was a great moment for Lancastrian ingenuity and far-sightedness, and a tangible confirmation of the belief in the socialist principles so important to life in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Fast forward to 2007 - Debbie Robinson is director of marketing for
the Co-operative Group – the world’s largest co-operative society. She is
responsible for shops, products and communications: she designs the look and
feel of shops; is responsible for anything that carries the Co-operative brand
– over 4,000 products in the stores; and takes care of the press, TV and radio
advertising. About 200 people work under her in Manchester.
Not only did I catch her on the very day she was starting a new job and moving offices, but I discovered that she has never, EVER, had a cup of tea! But was happy to meet me for a cuppa.
“Do you know I’ve never had a drink of tea or coffee in my life, for no reason other than there is a life stage when you migrate from child drinks to adult drinks that I didn’t do. So what I don’t know is at which stage in your life you start drinking tea or grown-up drinks.”
I think you’re missing out.
Tea is one of the great things of the world.
I showed Debbie some Original
Tea Bag Designs products and told her about its ethos.
“I feel very strongly that there is no point in just giving something; actually, what you need to do is trade effectively and the sense of fair play comes through that. I’m impressed with the quality of the tea products, I think there is really something quite beautiful about them. Super.”
What’s your background?
“The socialist ideals and values were in [the family] so I had a lot
of empathy with [the Co-op]. I started out as a clerk in milk distribution. We
had creameries in Scotland and Wales,
we were the biggest supplier of milk on doorstep deliveries in the nation. Then
I moved into food manufacturing, we had plants in Lowestoft
where we were canning vegetables, developing ready meals. Then I went into
buying, then into products, then format development for the shops, then I was
looking for the perfect job and I went for it and got it. I‘ve been doing this
job for the last couple of years, until today, which I’ve just found out about,
which takes on responsibility for over 3,200 Co-operative stores – pretty much
throughout the country. I try to represent the customer; I’m there championing
what the customer wants and I do that by on-going usage and attitude studies and
periodical market research.”
Fair Trade is important not
only to the company’s profits but also aligns with its idealistic roots and its corporate
desire to ‘play fair’.
“We were the first retailer to sell Café Direct and in 1993 we worked with the Fair Trade foundation on the development of the logo and developed the very first own-branded Fair Trade accredited products, and we still carry the largest range of fairly traded products of any retailer [including] bananas, teas, the entire range of coffee and the Co-op chocolate range,. Turnover is about £300m in fairly traded products – three times bigger than the premium range of products we sell in the store.”
A tea company I was speaking
to indicated that Fair Trade was an administrative nightmare.
“Administratively it is a nightmare, absolutely, because basically the demand for the products has grown so rapidly and the foundations themselves have not been set up to develop at the rate that the market’s grown, so when I say it’s taken eight years to develop fair trade tea, I mean that. It takes that time to get them visited because there’s a full audit process to make sure that the surplus you’re paying is used wisely. So it is true that Fair Trade is very bureaucratic - if you don’t give a damn how you trade then yes you may be doing it for marketing advantage, but if you’re an organisation like the Co-operative Movement whose very presence has been about fairness it means a great deal to us because the alternative to Fair Trade is unfair trade. You have to trust that the system is protecting the individuals concerned.
It’s not about ‘it cost that much to produce the product so therefore I’ll give you that much’ - nothing grows, nothing changes in those communities they just carry on doing that.
What we try to do is work with the community so the surplus is
assigned to a specific project and that varies enormously across the world, so
the ones in South Africa
happen to be in day-care centres for children - that is what they need. In South America it’s usually water or books.
We’ve just done a project with One Water the organisation that makes
contributions to the production of water; it happens to be in South Africa,
so the whole of our current branded water is becoming One Water. Five pence from
every bottle that we sell goes straight back to the project. This year we have
opened 14 water wells and next year plan to open about 40.
[The water wells] are little children’s roundabouts that pump water from the spinning action; the water is pumped from underground so the play area is used permanently. Traditionally you would have to pump the water on need, what actually happens is the children play whenever they want to play, [the action of which] pumps the water which goes into a reservoir and then it’s available when people want the water. So there’s health, fitness, co-ordination, development, fun and a great by-product which is clean water.”
Advice for the trip?
“Take a smile with you. A smile gets you out of anything.”
July 19 Dr Alex McMinn measures out three
spoonfuls of loose leaf Earl Grey and despatches them into a teapot. Biscuits
are offered, welcomed, and appreciated. We’re having elevenses at a Scout &
Guide HQ in Aughton, near Ormskirk, Lancashire;
which is curious because downstairs there are around 100 retired individuals milling
around attending a meeting of the University of the Third Age (U3A), a branch
that Dr Alex formed some years ago.
A medical scientist by training, Alex taught the subject in universities before working for the World Health Organisation in the field of medical education and training. He helped structure curricula for universities and training institutes around the world.
He worked for WHO in 40 countries and has taken tea in all of them, including sub-Saharan Africa in Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia and Chad, and north Africa in Libya and Saudi Arabia, and more … Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Darjeeling and Nepal.
You’ve done what I want to do. Have tea around the world.
“Yes, but not on a
motorcycle! When you phoned me the first thing that came to mind was my first
overseas trip. It was quite traumatic really because I was thrust into Africa at the end of the Biafran war. I hated the hotels
in Lagos and I eventually went to stay with a lady who ran a mission station in
the days when missionaries of all sorts would arrive by boat in Lagos and then take
the route up to the Sudan by road, and she ran this compound with very basic
bungalows but it was secure and I was there at the time of the revolution. She
was a Cameroonian accountant, her husband was a head teacher, and they ran this
station where I would spend six weeks at a time because the WHO station was
just down the road and every afternoon at 4 o’clock she thought that every
Englishman sat down and drank tea and ate biscuits, so every afternoon she
would make cookies and I would sit on this balcony with her, her name was
Comfort Bambuju, and she was like a mother to me in a way. We would often have
lemon tea sitting on the balcony talking to her about England and she talking to me about Nigeria and Cameroon. Comfort, although she was
African and had never been out of Africa,
thought she was replicating what we did. Whether she saw it on films or not I
never stopped to ask her. I guess wherever you get an ex-colony, you’ll find
the same thing. I found the same in India - afternoon 4 o’clock tea.
It was the end of the Biafran war so there was a lot of tension around particularly between the tribes, even on our own station in a little town called Yaba just outside Lagos, we had three different tribes working as drivers or cleaners or what not and you could never take your eye off them because they’d kill each other or kill the Ebus at least, the weakest of the group.
What is it about Africa that’s
holding it back? Why are so many governments so corrupt, with all the help it’s
getting why can’t it drag itself up?
I don’t know whether this theory is right but when I first went to Africa there was a coup, a very dangerous time and fortunately I was living in this missionary compound with high walls and the guy came in to be President of Nigeria – Gowan –a very even keel sort of president. He came to a Commonwealth conference at Keele and while he was there they deposed him and the general that took over had a reputation during the Biafran war of having killed 6,000 of his own men and kept their salaries for six months, so he didn’t come in with a brilliant reputation, although he reigned for a long time.
I remember discussing this in the confines of this compound and what the Africans couldn’t come to terms with was at that time we had four or five ex-prime ministers walking around the streets of Britain, and they couldn’t believe that they didn’t have any protection, because what happens in Africa when you’re deposed you run for your life. Idi Amin ran to Saudi, and if you’re going to run somewhere when your time is up you’ve got to have a lot of money to pay the Saudis, your own personal bodyguard and some level of opulence. If he is sending money out of the country, as they did in those days, his finance minister is also implicated and also civil servants who were enabling it to happen, so the corruption filters down. You can go to an African country and deal with a minister today and sign a big contract, go away and then the minister’s changed. So they have to make their penn’orth for the day when they are side-kicked and no longer the big man in that ministry. There isn’t the stability or the systems to prevent it.
One incident shows
what happens. I was asked to be an external assessor for the appointment of a
new vice chancellor of the first university of a South African homeland. When I
got there I discovered none of the candidates were any good. I said: “To be
honest I wouldn’t appoint any of them.” They said, ‘No, in fact it was you we
wanted’. I was then working for the UN. So they showed me this beautiful
university and the house where the vice chancellor would live with beautiful
gardens. I couldn’t say on the spot that I didn’t want it or I might’ve got my
throat cut; I said I had to go back to England to see how I could get released
[from my contract]. We were invited to the president’s house for afternoon tea,
a beautiful white marble villa. The president had been delayed at a cabinet
meeting and Mrs President hadn’t been told so she was still in bed, the
security people opened up the house and the butler goes up and tells Mrs President.
She comes down, she’s clearly just thrown a dress on, bleary eyed, her English
isn’t brilliant, so we say “Have you ever been to England?”
“No,” she said.
“Have you been to Europe?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Have you been to Switzerland?”
“Yes,” she said.
Now my wife is cringing because she knows exactly where I’m going with the questioning.
“Have you been to Zurich?”
“Yes, we’ve been
to Zurich.”
“Do you know Paradeplatz?”
“Yes, that’s where we go.”
That’s where all the banks are. My wife was furious with me. We just hoped we could get out. Now that guy was obviously going to Paradeplatz to visit his Swiss bank account and he was setting himself up for the day when he’s no longer there.
So the continent is finished?
“Aah. You can’t walk away from it can you? You’ve got to keep trying.”
A poll of
office workers suggests that the long-gone tea lady is much missed by pen
pushers in the UK.
They said ‘old fashioned’ traditions such as the lady with the tea trolley made
their office a more sociable (59%) and more relaxed (55%) place to work, while
28% felt more motivated.
A secretarial recruitment company polled 1,067 office workers about traditions they would like to see return. Here are the ones they missed most:
It’s hard to believe that anyone would vote against some of those.
What’s interesting is that the tea lady was only the fourth most missed old fashioned tradition and yet it was that element that the BBC has led on all day.
Tea – always a reliable story in the silly season.
Mike Finnigan is an inspiration. He has the ability to make people
feel they can do anything they decide to and ‘get out of their own way’ as he
says. In his book ‘They did, You can’
(now renamed, the new version aimed at the younger reader is here), he interviewed people who took a major
turn in their lives or overcame amazing odds to succeed.
In a similar way to Mike meeting and writing about people who have taken a journey, so I want to write about the people I meet on the trip through Africa, many of whom have a much harder journey, day in and day out. But as Mike pointed out, attitude has no barriers. He believes that his ideas and techniques can help everyone to find their own ‘blinding light’, and make their own dream a reality. His seven guiding values are plain to see in his office underneath a reproduction of the Magnificent 7: Belief, Courage, Desire, Fun, Honesty, Never give in, Trust
Mike talks very fast; although this represents just half the Tea Encounter, the only way to give a flavour of his breathless style is to reproduce him more or less verbatim.
“I was a sales trainer and I had a life that inspired me but not a
job that inspired me. My joy in life at that time came from my wife and two
children and work was something that funded that – I think a lot of people are
in that space. Then I went on a course to teach me to be a psychometric tester
which I thought would make me more interesting as a person and more help to my
clients. I paid a lot of money for it, a full week’s course. The guy, called
Art, was 63 and from Chicago.
He had me in the palm of his hands within the first five minutes of his course
- I was hooked. It transpired in the course of the day that he had worked for a
guy called W Clement Stone the founder of an insurance corporation. His big
thing in life was positive thinking – how to make the best of what you’ve got
in all situations. On the first night I took him out for dinner and I basically
hoovered his brains out about this guy Clem Stone.
On the Friday when we had our one-to-one he said ‘I’ve been really interested watching your behaviour this week and I really think you’re in the wrong job. You shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. You should be a guru like me, kind of’. Basically what he was saying was, he’s learned loads of things from this Clem Stone and he’d been looking to pass it on to somebody, and he’d never met anybody who was that interested in it but he was hoping he always would before he retired. And he said ‘here I am three years into that search and I think I’ve found him’. He decided I was the one he wanted to pass on all this knowledge to that he’d learned from this great man. So he spent five years teaching me about all this positive thinking stuff he learned from Clem Stone. And then at the end he said ‘right, I think you should teach it, I think you’ll be awesome, better than I ever was’.
So in 1996 we formed Advance, which was designed basically to go out there to tell people how great they are - because they are, and they don’t know. You’re not teaching them anything, you’re just slapping them around the face; that’s all you’re doing really. Give them some tools, hold they’re hand, and then basically they’re away then.
From that moment on I honestly don’t think I’ve worked a day, it’s just been a joy whereas up to then it was always work that took care of the bills and my joy came from life with the family and now it’s in equal proportion, so it was the best thing I ever, ever did.
I remember thinking ‘do you know what, I can be the best in the world at this’. And I’d never had anything I could be the best in the world at except maybe a dad and a husband – we can all have a crack at that – but to get a glimpse, when you’ve almost settled for mediocrity in your working life, of something much better … I was alright as a sales trainer but there are millions of them. I was never going to be the world’s best sales trainer, so I sat back and started looking at all the other people who were doing what I was doing. And I started thinking ‘I’ll be better than that’.
Well, it says on my biog “Failed astronaut”, because when I was seven I wanted to be Virgil Tracey and fly Thunderbird 2. I thought that was a job I could apply for. “Failed footballer”, because, you know, I signed for Blackburn Rovers and never made it. “Striving father, striving husband” and humbly pursuing that goal of W Clement Stone’s dream, his blinding light was ‘to create a better world for this and future generations’. He did insurance, that was his job, but he did it because he wanted to create a better world.
So now “Mike Finnigan is a guy who is striving to create a better world for this and future generations”. Not just by being a good dad and husband but hopefully by having a massive impact on people by getting them to wake up to their potential, and to stop seeing it as out of their grasp and to see it as within their grasp. That’s the talent I’ve been given, to convince people of that and make them carry that forward and it would be quite remiss of me not to fulfil that. So I suppose Mike Finnigan wants to leave a legacy that said he made a difference, made a difference to a lot of people by teaching them how great they were, and I’m very committed to that. I think if you’re given a talent you’ve got to make sure you make it shine for yourself and for those around you, so I’m committed to be that person who sets that example.
I was talking to somebody else who asked me ‘what do you do for a living?’ I said ‘If I say a phrase to you, you say what you think I do for a living … We help you get your head round it’. He said ‘round what?’ And I said ‘you tell me’.
We help people to ‘get out of their own way’ because they can do it. People come to us with a common problem, which is ‘my attitude needs to be sorted first’ and if you can sort that you can pretty much sort anything. We have courses comprised of a huge variety of people but they all walk away with the answer they were looking for because their problem is always the same. ‘It’s me!’ It’s not really the competition is it? It’s me! Like the people who are talking about doing your trip but not actually doing it. All they see are the obstacles.
When you come to one of our conference speeches that we do that last
an hour or so you walk away feeling really good because you’ve been entertained
and inspired by some idiot bouncing around on stage but you don’t learn a lot because
you can’t learn a lot in an hour, but if you give us a couple of days -
basically we did nine years of research about this stuff - and in three days we
give it to you. We say ‘here, now you know what I know so go away and use it’,
and because I’m further down the road than you are I can be your tutor and
mentor and help you cross the hurdles that I had to cross maybe ten years ago.
So we’re teaching people to fish
rather than giving them a fish, which
is why I think your comment about helping people in Africa
through employment is the key because of self-sustainability. We don’t want to
hand you the knowledge we want to show you how to use it.
We worked with the South African cricket team for two years. One of the reasons we got involved in that was because we want to help change things. Our message about that self-reliance and that winning attitude works for everybody, of all ages, of all cultures, for all stations, wherever you are in life your attitude can get you to where you want to be and should be. We’re doing a little bit of work at the moment for Digby Jones, the Skills Envoy, and we said to him look at all these people, they need skills (as they do in Africa) but actually until you get the attitude right first it won’t work; and they say ‘I can make this work, it’ll be great, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me’, and as long as you approach it with that kind of mindset it will be. But what often happens with these skills projects is the people they’re talking to are saying to themselves ‘why is this nice bloke doing this for me? Who am I? I don’t understand it. It’s too hard.’ So they’re doing themselves out of it before they even give it a go and approaching it in a negative mindset. We wanted to take on the work with the South African cricket team so it would give us that platform to be able to say at some point in the future ‘hey look at us, we can help you with your social issues, we can’t do the skills stuff but we can sit a bunch of kids down in a classroom and talk to them about self-esteem and self-confidence and valuing themselves and seeing themselves in a brighter future’.
It’s useful anywhere. When I taught this stuff to snooker player Jimmy
White back in 1998, Jimmy can’t read and write, I just spoke to him for two
days, he didn’t write anything down, he just listened. And it made sense to
him. I talked in plain English in a way he could understand. He then went away
and transformed his fortunes based on what he gained from the conversation we
had so it’s not something that has an academic barrier to it, we can make it
very simple. It’s not something that has cultural or religious barriers to it,
and what we’re good at is translating the message into a language people can understand.
We are creating a South African franchise of Advance so that we can make
changes over there. In order to get to that stage we need to get some serious
muscle so that when we knock on someone’s door they’ll listen to us, like Bob
Geldof. If I was a really famous businessman and asked someone for £10m to
irrigate Africa you’d listen to him but right now you just think he’s some
crank from Lancashire who needs to be avoided.
Life’s about having dreams to do something great to make you feel good. Because whatever you give away comes back to you. Whatever you give on this trip you’ll get back in spades and I just think people sometimes lose sight of that and get caught in the drudgery of what they’re doing.
That’s what will create a better world for this and future
generations – it’s the driving force behind our business. Don’t get me wrong we
all want to drive big cars and have big lifestyles, of course we do, we’re
capitalists aren’t we, but it’s kind of caring capitalism I would hope in a big
way. We’re convinced that if you looked at troubles in Northern Ireland or troubles in Iraq, anywhere,
social issues or political issues, there’s an attitudinal linking that’s
missing that stops it going ahead, and we want to play a part in that. We don’t
know how, that’s just one of the little steps along the way isn’t it? The
blinding light for us is that we’re going to play a part in stuff like that. I
feel like a Miss World contestant now ‘I’m going to bring world peace’ but you
almost need that amount of naivety.
And it will appear, Alan, the ultimate thing will come.
And the good thing will appear at the right time. George Bernard
Shaw said ‘some people look at things and say ‘why?’ whereas I look at things
that never were and say ‘why not?’’ You’ve got to be able to create it in your
mind first and then it comes out from that desire. It’s an awesome power we
have.
You’ve given the advice to me. ‘Never lose sight of the blinding light’. For me, that’s the only piece of advice people need in life. When I meet people who are lost, drifting, it’s because they haven’t taken the time to sit down and define a piece of blinding light for themselves. And what you’ve done is taken the time to do that. And as long as you keep that then whatever happens to you on the trip will seem like a molehill because the blinding light becomes the mountain and everything else is the molehill. What happens when you lose sight of the blinding light is that the blinding light becomes the molehill and the puncture becomes the mountain, and you can’t see round it and you give in.
So my one piece of advice would be to remind yourself why you’re doing it and what it’s going to be like at the end then you’ll be absolutely fine. I would give that advice to anybody chasing anything. I think if you’ve got a dream in life (Martin Luther King unfortunately nicked that line!) life’s great and you’ll breeze through it. The low points (if there are any) will be when you’ve forgotten how great it is, what you’re doing and how much fun it is.
Awesome! Never lose sight of the blinding light! That’s it!
There is a massive difference between a goal and a dream. The dream encourages you to keep thinking about how great things are instead of how hard things are.
You love the bike and tea - you’ve created something that encompasses it all. Martin Luther King didn’t say ‘I have a goal’ that wouldn’t have bloody worked would it? Who’d have remembered that? ‘I have a dream’, there’s so much in a single word. He didn’t say ‘I have a specifically written down goal to which I am committed.’ ‘O, shut up, Get rid of him’ they’d have said, ‘he’s no leader’.
Tune your wireless to BBC Radio Lancashire on Tuesday August 14 at 10pm to hear me chatting to Carole Turner (Later with Carole) about the African Brew Ha Ha over a cup of famous BBC tea.
Twirl your dial to 95.5, 103.9 or 104.5 FM, and possibly www.bbc.co.uk/lancashire/ after Tuesday.
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