Bah Humbug!

Bah Humbug! Christmas is over! Or is it? For sitting in my hall are four boxes of presents all in their bright tinsel wrappings and complete with the buttons and bows that took me until half-past eleven last night to affix: the children's (and the children's partners) presents. Yes, today is another Christmas and day of feasting.

For me this has been a sort of 'before and aft' Christmas, starting with one great family party (over two days) the weekend before and finishing with today's extravaganza. But of course it won't end there, for there will be something no doubt at New Year, followed by something else on New Year's Day and then our traditional Twelfth Night entertainment on 6 January, to test the stomach just when it thought it was recovering.

For the first time that I can remember we actually spent Christmas Day alone this year and it was wonderful! Just to be able selfishly to listen over breakfast to the News Quiz review of the year and then to 'With Great Pleasure' on Radio 4. To be able to cook something simple - we chose to have a venison casserole - and afterwards to curl up with a Christmas present book. Knowing my love of history, J had bought me 'The Other Boleyn Girl' - the fascinating account of Anne Boleyn's younger sister. In the evening we watched 'Love Actually' - not the greatest of films, indeed positively silly and cringe worthy in many places, but infused with such happiness as to make almost perfect entertainment.

All of which prompts me to ask - what, exactly is Christmas for? Now that may sound like the sort of question asked by every vicar in every pulpit at some point in the festive season - but Christmas, in Britain at least, ceased long ago to have any relation to the religious festival that is held confusingly at the same time and under the same name.

The religious festival I can understand - it is the rest of it that has left me grasping for the plot in a manner that happens frequently when I am trying to follow Midsomer Murders. What are we all really trying to do - for what happens in my experience bears as little relation to the ostensible objective of 'having fun' as ice and snow on Christmas cards do to the mild wetness of a south British December.

I mean if you are really wanting to eat well - then why on earth eat Turkey, which is held in such low esteem the rest of the year that it is one of the cheapest meats you can buy? Do people's taste buds become anaesthetised in December so that cardboard tastes suddenly succulent?

And why if we are wanting to enjoy a family day do we so arrange to eat and drink ourselves into a kind of stupor, sometimes even before we sit down? In the middle of the day excess alcohol is just about the biggest antidote to pleasure that it is possible to imagine

Presents are supposed, one imagines, to give pleasure both to the giver and the receiver. But frequently it seems the only person that benefits is the shopkeeper.

The value of a present does not lie in its bigness, or brashness or even its price; it lies in how appropriately it fills some little niche in the receiver's life. There are few people who know how to give presents. Whole books ought to be devoted to this for most of us are hopeless at it. How often do we ask - what would you like for Christmas? - worse we give our families vouchers and tell them to choose a present for themselves - a classic opt-out from the difficult, though rewarding business, of present choosing.

That defeats the whole object of a present, which is the surprise and delight at receiving something, however small, that you would never have thought of buying for yourself but which is so geared to one's fancies that it is precisely 'right.'


My neighbour, Annie, who happens to be French, is an expert at this. She doesn't buy much - but everything usually turns out to be a delightful surprise. Somehow she manages to tune in to some inner need and suddenly there is something priceless in the foil wrapping.

LETTER TO A 13 YEAR OLD FENNIE

Being tagged is a mixed pleasure: on the one hand one is pathetically pleased to be remembered; on the other it means that the mind can no longer roam free over the week’s events in search of something to set the keys a-clattering. Being tagged in fact actually forces you to think, which is what I have been trying to do, since I stumbled across the flattering message from ElizabethM and the summons to confront my 13 year old self.

Now my 13 year old self (a kind of sad cross between an erstwhile Mademoiselle Grognonne and Minnie the Minx) has long passed into history and a good thing too. But since being resurrected, last Friday, she has hovered again inside my head like the ghost of Christmas past, reminding me of all sorts of things I thought had been well and truly consigned to the oubliette of history. This experience has been akin to finding an old newspaper at the bottom of a drawer and marvelling at the gaucheness of the advertisements for soap.

Still I am not sure that the fads and fancies of the 13 year old Fennie - or Fenella - as she was in those starchly cold days of the waning 1950s, would really make amusing reading. Like every teenager she was a complete cake mix of hormones, nerves, angst, trauma, chronic mental instability, rebellion and general sadness. She longed to ‘grow-up’ - something that her parents promised would happen with unfailing regularity, but which never quite did.

Indeed, one of the most disappointing moments in young Fennie’s life was bouncing out of bed on her first teenage morning only to find she was exactly the same person who had gone to bed the evening before. Instead of being greeted in the mirror by a young Aubrey Hepburn look-alike, all smiles and confidence, there appeared only the same unflattering bundle of frizzy hair and spots.

Of course every teenager, believes, indeed knows for an incontrovertible fact, that the angst they are experiencing is the severest angst ever to have been experienced by anyone, anywhere, at any time. To imagine that grown-ups might have experienced the same thing is quite beyond comprehension and certainly just about the least comforting thing a teenager might ever wish to hear.

Besides Fennie at 13 was a little pig-headed. Everything that adults said was a plot to sabotage her free-spirit. Trying to work matters out from first principles is a slow and painful way of proceeding, though as a way of getting practice in ‘pick yourself up dust yourself down,’ it cannot be faulted.

So, little Fenella, I don’t expect you will heed any of the advice I shall give to you. But there are things that you don’t recognise now as important, partly because of your age and partly because of circumstances. So I shall confine myself to four pieces of wisdom - from which you neither need to recoil or rebel.

First, pay attention to family. Divorce has shattered yours but in later years you will come to appreciate the usefulness of being related to a wide web of people. You will bring happiness to them and they to you. Time invested in family affairs will bring dividends out of all proportion. And never be afraid of hugging!

Secondly, you know that what you get out of life depends on what you put into it. However, what you put in must be what life wants to have, not what you decide is good for it. If someone is hungry there is no point in giving them gold. Everybody needs something - possibly something as small as a smile. Learn what each person wants and give them that. Do not give what is not wanted.

Thirdly, learn to do the minimum. This may seem strange advice. Doesn’t everyone tell us ‘to do our best?’ Most people attempt much more than the minimum; they may aim high but they rarely achieve that minimum, properly and completely. They deliver not enough of what is really wanted and too much of what isn’t. So ask yourself always what the minimum is. Then deliver it - on time, properly, without fuss.

Fourthly, in a few short years you will be embarking on a career. My advice is to choose something that will always be in demand, which you can practice in any country, which you can step away from and if necessary go back to. Something like medicine, for instance.

Do not expect instant success. Do not expect to be a film star, or a great writer or to marry a fortune or any other shortcut that girls dream about. You have been through and will continue to go through some tough times. But soon you will shed your adolescent coat. Look inside yourself in the quiet moments and you will go far.

FRANZ KAFKA WITH LOVE FROM FENNIE

Country bumpkin that I am I had never until a week ago visited Canary Wharf. In the days when I lived in London that part of the East End was left blank on the map and carried the legend 'There Be Dragons' or so people told you. Kids sidled up to you with an evil look and a demand to 'look after yer car;' one journeyed there at one's peril they said - though I suspect on reflection this 'keep out' persona may have been something invented by East Enders to hold the snotty West End folks at bay and house prices within reach.

Anyway there I was, summoned by a UNESCO meeting, emerging out of the new Jubilee Line tube, into this fetching imitation of New York. Skyscrapers on every side and designer labelled people rushing hither and thither looking terribly serious. As the sky was as grey as the concrete architecture I have to say I found it all rather soul-less.

In one of these buildings was my meeting. I clacked across acres of marble to the reception desk with a lone uniformed man behind it. Had he sported a touch of gold braid I could have mistaken him for a species of despot half-hidden by his elephantine marble desk. Apart from me the place seemed to be empty. I wondered if I had fallen into some Kafquesque novel from which there was no escape.

However, I was directed out of my reverie to an escalator and to another reception desk on a higher floor behind which this time sat four young women speaking language school English in a variety of accents. Everyone was polite and helpful. I smiled, they smiled. One gave me a pass, I said thank you. From the cinemascope window I noticed I was looking down on the Millennium Dome - it looked quite small - and sand dredgers on the river. This too was faintly bizarre.

I had travelled up from Wimbledon where I had stayed with some lifelong friends in their beautiful house which they have inhabited for more than twenty years, steadily extending upwards and outwards and which conveniently is a quick ten minute walk from the station.

The morning journey into town had been almost normal journey except that the public address system on the train seemed to have no idea of where the train actually was.

A woman with an elegant voice, who sounded as if she might in former times have done voice-overs for the Wombles, kept telling us that we were about to arrive at the station we had only just left. When we were about to enter Waterloo she announced that this was the train for Guildford. My collection of Kafquaesque experiences grows longer each day.

After the UNESCO meeting I had to rush home again as our local drama group were holding their Christmas party. My contribution to these proceedings involved stumbling through AA Milne's poem about King John's Christmas, which is all about...er...King John and his wish for a big red india rubber ball. It contains the couplet '...when by the window, big and red, there whistled by the royal head and bounced and fell upon the bed, an india rubber ball.'

Obviously my bizarre experiences were not an end for on a walk the next day, head down against the gale, there came bouncing towards me (and almost whistling past my head).....a red ball. 'Apt,' I thought, if a day too late. Anyway I couldn't resist picking it up while looking around for the likely lass or lad to whom it might have belonged, for I discounted the possibility that it might have been dropped by a passing Royal. It was not made of india rubber, but of a light plastic, though there is not a lot of difference in the gathering dusk of a winter afternoon.

As no wailing child hove into view and as I felt a bit silly dropping the ball back on the pavement (I could have got myself arrested for littering) I placed it in my right pocket and continued on my way. Imagine my surprise then when a little further on I found a pink ball lying at my feet. Had someone been playing snooker in the heavens? Was there now a whole frame of balls dotted around these streets? I picked up the second orphan ball and put it in my left pocket.

Ah well, Christmas is coming. I shall put the two balls in someone's stocking. Perhaps I shall hang one up specially and put a tag on it that says 'Franz Kafka with love from Fennie.'

THANKS TO WAITROSE, I CAN BE REINCARNATED AS A DUCK

Maybe it is the result of dental drilling, of which this week I have had my fill, so to speak, but I find my thoughts turning towards the Grim Reaper and what happens after he has reaped. On a previous visit my then dentist cautioned me against cremation on the grounds that he wanted me dug up 3,000 years hence so that the quality of his dentistry might be appreciated anew. Alas, nemesis invariably follows such hubris and his beautifully crafted filling was the very one to crack in two, necessitating this week's painful excavation operations. If I wasn't dying, then it felt like it.

All this put me in mind of Saki's disconcerting exchange between Laura and her friend Amanda.

“You’re not really dying?” are you, asks Amanda.
“I have the doctor’s permission to live until Tuesday,” replies Laura.
“But today is Saturday; this is serious,” gasps Amanda.
“I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” says Laura.

Laura’s unconcern about her rapidly expiring mortal status is down to her belief that she will be reincarnated as an otter. Such beliefs are comforting and are fast becoming fashionable, especially, I am told among today's minor ‘celebs.’

Reincarnation, you see, offers the opportunity for prolonging one’s existence without having to contemplate the baffling inconsistencies of paradise, or for that matter being examined on arrival like a naughty child, which is what more conventional beliefs seem to require.

Lying in the dentist's chair I reflected on another advantage. If you are reincarnated presumably your teeth are reborn too, whereas if you merely ascend to heaven you will find yourself having to put up with the ones you've got. Still perhaps in paradise dentists work on a Sunday.

Had the idea been put to me at an early enough age, I might even have joined Laura in desiring rebirth as an otter. The thought of that effortlessly svelte figure, hair that didn’t frizz uncontrollably in the wet and the prospect of lunching on salmon every day could well have appealed. However otters in my childhood were noticeable by their absence, both from the banks of rivers and the pages of my reading matter. Beatrix Potter, AA Milne and Enid Blyton appeared never to have heard of them.

So my choice fell on the humble duck which seemed to offer several advantages to the would be reincarnatee. As a human I could only splash about ineffectually in shallow water, but a duck could really swim properly, and dive too. And should terrestrial locomotion not suffice, a duck could always shoot up into the sky after the fashion of Wonderwoman. Wow!

Feathers, I thought, also offered interesting possibilities. I liked the idea of living perpetually in a warm eiderdown; besides, I had been impressed by the decorative properties of my aunt’s feather boa! I knew farmyard ducks didn’t actually wear feather boas, but Beatrix Potter had drawn a duck with a muffler around its neck so I felt it was just a matter of choosing carefully the type of duck I wanted to be.

Ducks were also much more sensible about reproduction. None of that messy and unspoken business of producing babies from within one’s bowels! Eggs could be laid without any fuss at all. Had I not once observed a strolling goose simply dropping an egg on the soft grass without even breaking stride? And then to have infants - genetically programmed to follow you - I mean how cool is that? Any parent who has ever experienced the sheer unfathomable horror of 'losing' a human child, if only for a few minutes, will know this must be true.

Yet despite such advantages, what finally put me off the duck reincarnation idea was foie gras - that exquisite paté made of fat goose or duck liver that the eighteenth century wit and gastronome Sidney Smith, said should be eaten to the sound of trumpets.

But....as you probably know, foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks and geese a mixture of fat and grain so that their livers swell to five or six times the normal size. From this gross distended liver the sublime paté is made. Most people hold this to be very cruel.

Despite my fondness for my web-footed friends, I have to confess I have eaten foie gras on rare occasions when French hosts have served it. I cannot personally vouch for the trumpet experience but I have tasted foie gras accompanied by Chateau Yquem, one of France’s most delectable and sought after wines, and the combination was quite beyond words. Never has the conflict between morality and gastronomy been so acute.

But wait - help is at hand. Clever people at Waitrose Supermarkets have had the elementary idea of combining two by-products from normal table ducks into a new delicacy. What is foie gras, they ask, but liver and fat?

Now as it happens the said by-products are just that - duck liver and goose fat - and at present there is little market for them. The clever idea is to whisk them together in a blender to produce 'Faux Gras.'

It tastes, say testers, almost the same as the real thing. Perhaps not a perfect imitation but certainly most palatable. In any case a little experimentation will surely improve the recipe.

So when the time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil I can at last become a duck without fear that I shall be paying for the sins of this life by being stuffed with greasy muesli three times a day. Like Tobermory, another of Saki's creations, I may have more than one life, but I have only one liver and I intend to keep it the size that nature intended. I have had quite enough filling for one week.

MISSING DISCS FOR THE GOVERNMENT, SANDWICHES FOR ME

I was reminded this week, as scandal after scandal rocked the leaky boat of government, of a wonderful sketch written by Peter Cook and performed as part of the ‘Pete and Dud’ series. Peter is explaining, or trying to explain, acupuncture to his dirty rain-coated colleague. “Let’s say you’ve got a pain in your head,” says Peter. “Well this acupuncturist comes along and sticks a needle in your arm, so you forget about the pain in your head and worry instead about the pain in your arm. So the acupuncturist then sticks a needle in your bum – so you forget about the pain in your arm and concentrate on the new pain.

“In the bum,” says Dud. “In the bum,” says Peter – or words anyway to that effect. And with it he creates the splendid illusion of the acupuncturist breathlessly chasing all over the body sticking needles hither and thither to keep one step ahead of the developing pain.

This prompted my tongue to venture deep into my cheek and suggest that maybe the reason child benefit discs went missing was to take our minds of Northern Rock. Then the latest funding scandal arose to take our minds of the missing discs. The only problem is that sooner or later the acupuncturist is bound to run out of needles, leaving a bruised and battered patient unable to sit down behind him. Sooner or later the government equally will run out of scandals, too, I suppose.

As my connections with Northern Rock are limited to it being Younger Daughter’s mortgage provider of choice and as I have long given up claiming child benefit, I am reasonably well insulated from the chaos going on around me, though I am checking my bank account just in case someone has tried to use my name to donate thousands of pounds to the Labour party.

Al the same, I do find myself wanting to shout aaaahhhh! at the seeming incompetence of it all. I want to tear my hair and grind my teeth, particularly over the case of the missing discs, which just seems somehow typical of the culture of the bureaucratic institutions these days.

More and more it seems as though these institutions – like Revenue and Customs - that are meant to serve us, have become instead our masters. They make regulations for our lives, which somehow don’t quite seem to apply to them, but which make me feel like some inmate in an institution for the senile. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

This week I fund myself in a government building, ‘assisting’ at a UN event, part of the run-up to World Aids Day on 1 December. As the timing of the event coincided with lunch, sandwiches had been provided. Very thoughtful, I thought.

However, we were downstairs and the sandwiches were upstairs. Can we not move the sandwiches downstairs, we ventured? No, came the equally inevitable answer. There seemed no good reason other than bloody mindedness unless it was a desire to increase the nation’s fitness by making everybody troop unnecessarily up and downstairs. Aaaaahhhh!

No doubt there was a reason, perhaps something to do with Health and Safety – a sandwich on the stairs could, after all, trigger a fall and the resulting compensation would need to be on the scale of a government grant.

But then I wondered if the sandwiches had perhaps not been provided from generosity and thoughtfulness, but had been themselves part of another Health and Safety in public offices decree? Could we all have sued otherwise for negligence of our rumbling stomachs?

Everything now seems regulated. People can no longer ‘do’ simple things that seem to them sensible at the time, everything has to be done according to the book, or according to advice. How often have you heard people say when turning down a request ‘there’s no precedent for that’ as if doing something for the first time was a sin against the Almighty.

When I grew up the quality most appreciated by those in authority over us was initiative, sometimes called resourcefulness or ‘nous.’ For the boys, I seem to remember, it was showing OLQs - ‘Officer Like Qualities,’ but whatever you called it, it always boiled down to the same thing, which was: if the unexpected happens, as it always does, can you cope?

Someone who can act on their own initiative doesn’t need regulation – they make their own regulations as they go along and the world moves rather faster as a result. That is anyway the world into which I grew up in which you coped as best you could and doing something differently was at least a sign that some grey matter was functioning. Which is not something that could be said in the case of the hapless individual who put the 25 million personal details unregistered into the post. It may have been novel, but it was not coping.

REFLECTIONS ON A MID-WALES DRIVE

I had a long drive to make last week - up to Caersws in Mid Wales - and on one of those perfect autumn mornings that seems to call you to make a start just as soon as it is light enough to tip jugs of warm water over the car’s frozen windows.

It was a simple drive, up the A470, the ‘spine’ road of Wales that runs supposedly from north to south, except that it is not a single road but a collection of bits and pieces, cobbled together on the map, no doubt, by some enterprising engineer sitting in a London office in the 1920s without much else to do. All the same it makes for easy navigating.

The route traverses magnificent scenery and on this morning of sharp frost and bright sunshine, the countryside white with ice crystals, the air still, the sky blue and almost cloudless, the light translucent and brittle, every feature was thrown into the sharp relief.

Passing Garnant lake in the Brecon Beacons National Park the black water shimmered smooth as glass. Away on the far side a patch of mist floated ethereally a foot or two above the surface in the crisp morning stillness. I reflected how timeless this scene looked, how it would have been instantly recognisable to our ancestors two thousand years before. Indeed how Celtic it appeared, with its themes of water, air, light, mountains.

So strong was this resonance that I half expected to see though that patch of mist an arm rising out of the lake holding a jeweled sword - beckoning to a future King - and an old man in a wizard’s hat sitting on the bank.

I progressed onwards - and as far as Wales was concerned - upwards towards the softer Montgomeryshire landscape. The temperature dropped steadily. Passing Cardiff it had been 2 degrees. At Merthyr Tydfil it had dropped to zero, was minus one at Becon and minus two at Builth, where the River Wye tumbles along among the boulders of the river bed.

Near Rhayader, with the temperature still falling, a large raptor, flapped lazily out of a wood and laboured slowly across the road in front of me with the unconcern of an elderly pedestrian oblivious to the traffic. For a second or two the bird was a few feet from my windscreen; I could see every detail of its markings and its long yellow legs that trailed behind it. I took it to be a honey buzzard, but my bird knowledge is scant and it may well have been something far more exotic. Anyway it seemed to know it was a protected species and I found myself braking hard to avoid it.

I was meeting UNESCO colleagues in a small country hotel - one of those interminable all day meetings that seem to characterize anything to do with government. To remain alert is an effort, so I was happy to be distracted by an urgent message on my mobile. I excused myself from the table and went to stand beside an eternal window to make a call.

Then I noticed a robin, hovering at the height of my nose, a foot away on the other side of the glass, its feathers puffed up against the cold. Some see robins as birds of ill omen - but the poor little beastie just seemed to me cold and thin - envious of the warmth and plenty inside. So I filched one of the hotel’s biscuits and went outside where the robin had been and left the biscuit broken up on an old flower pot. I hope the robin found it.

Eventually the meeting ended and I went out to the car park through the bar, which seemed strangely full for the late afternoon in those underpopulated parts. I first noticed the tipplers’ boots. Most sported those expensive and superior Wellingtons with straps and buckles of the sort favoured by shooting parties and similar folk. There was a press of male laughter, loud, slightly aggressive, which made me feel uncomfortable and on which I was happy to shut the door.

This was indeed a shooting party. Rows of bright autumn pheasants hung in braces over the car park railings beside the mud-spattered Landrovers and 4 x 4s, in the gathering twilight.

Shooting always induces a conflict in me. My head tells me that I would far rather be reincarnated as a pheasant and take my chance with the flying lead than to be a battery chicken. Still less a sow, tethered in a concrete stall. I know that shooting is an important source of countryside income and that the destruction it causes is balanced by a considerable amount of conservation. I know that the pheasants are raised and so in no danger of extinction.

But my heart always winces when I see a beautiful cock pheasant tumbled out of the sky and lying dead and bloodied on the ground while fat business men with more money than sense stand jesting around it.

HOW I FOUND FUN IN A TURBOT

While on the delicious subject of literary quotations I cannot let pass 'Vanity Fair' and the exclamation - was it from old Mr Sedley? - to the effect that he would 'bring home the very best Turbot in Billingsgate.' At the time I first read that I am not sure that I knew for certain what a Turbot was, still less how to cook it. Nevertheless it sounded very good.

We didn't live, of course, in Mr Sedley's century. Despite appearances to the contrary I assure you I am not that old. Nor did I grow up anywhere within striking distance of the old Billingsgate fish market. No worries: on every high street in those dim and far off days was a chain store selling fish of every description under some wavy blue and white lines, which, now that I ponder the matter, must have been there to represent sea.

This was MacFisheries - though I am not sure about the capital F in the middle. The idea of littering the middle of words with capital letters seems to have been an invention of the eighties by which time MacFisheries - along with the likes of the Home and Colonial and the daring International Stores - had long joined that register of dead brand names in the sky.

(Whence just possibly it has been reincarnated. In a curious mixture of Apple computers and recreational fishing, which you can view at Macfisheries.com, you can learn about Arkansas Fly Fishing while downloading MacScrabble. You couldn't make that up, could you?)

Now selling fish has always seemed to me a hazardous and horrible occupation - almost on a par with catching the beasties in the first place. Anything to do with fish is cold, damp and malodorous with the added threat of slicing your finger in two along with the fish guts. At least if you work in a fish store you are reasonably assured you will not die from drowning but then selling fish and preparing it for the table must be so singularly uninteresting that the occasional spot of drowning might almost be welcomed as light relief.

Nevertheless, selling fish, along with all those preparatory jobs involving ice and sharp knives, has to be done by someone - at least until they get a better offer. Then they can hang up their industrial brand of apron and rubber boots for the last time and look forward to smelling of something slightly sweeter than fish heads. But in the meantime, guys, welcome to the cold, damp and smelly version of hell.

Or not as the case may be - for Elder Daughter, who makes it her business to know about these things and could make even a plum pudding smile and sit up at the table with a positive attitude - tells me that by applying a few simple techniques the guys at the Seattle fish market turned it from hell to a kind of heaven on whose door members of the public were clamouring to get in.

They even wrote a book about it, apparently, which, though I do not know for certain, presumably provided its authors with a better offer and escape from filleting fish.
Called FISH it seems to reduce to some very simple principles for turning a nasty, boring, sniffy job, working among the smelly and the slimy - and that's just the people - into something of which Seattle residents dreamed so much that they became sleepless.

Four principles standout - these being first to 'Be Positive.' Well, that is hardly original, is it? We all know the power of being positive, of not complaining or being 'chippy.' Yet how many of us put it into effect? We whinge constantly. And what we don't realise is that one person's whinge may destroy the carefully cultivated positive thoughts of an entire team.

Second principle is 'Be There.' Give everything you do, everyone you speak to, your full and undivided attention. Don't try and do two things at once. It doesn't work. Especially with people that need your attention.

Third principle is: 'Make someone's day.' And what a nice warm and glowing principle that is. And how easy it is to 'make someone's day.' Some of us have such awful days that our day can be made by a smile, someone remembering our name. It doesn't have to be a big thing. What do I know about this person that I can do to make them feel special?

And the fourth principle is: 'Have fun.' Work does not have to be monotonous and boring. You can let your hair down. Even the dreariest activity can be made entertaining and fun so long as that activity involves people acting and interacting positively.

So there are the four principles of FISH and blogging about them is my way of making the job of remembering them fun. And who knows, if you like them to I may just, but only just, have made a contribution towards making your day as well.