Fun in the sun? Well, we certainly had fun....

I shocked myself this morning when I realised that I’ve been blogging here for just over 12 months. It was on June 6 2011 that I first put finger to keyboard with a piece about my interest in a wide-ranging number of sports. That first post ended: “Those that can play sport, do; those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, write about it, talk about it, express views of varying relevance and validity.... With a nod in the direction of my other interests, including real ale, as well as an occasional look at my professional life as a magazine editor, that is what this blog will do.”

In the 12 months since, I hope I’ve lived up that promise. It’s certainly been an enjoyable 12 months and if you delve into the archive of this blog, you’ll see that it has indeed been wide-ranging.

Football and ale have featured prominently, politics has nudged its way in occasionally, I’ve covered journalism, naturism, genealogy, business networking, my loathing for Dominic Littlewood..... I’ve never been short of topics and if there has been the occasional hiatus, it’s simply been down to time constraints rather than lack of ingenuity on your blogger’s part.

However, one thing doesn’t seem to have changed in 12 months - the dismal British summer weather. My third post, 366 days ago today, was about Nudefest, British Naturism’s annual seven-day extravaganza at Newperran Holiday Park in Cornwall. While acknowledging that those present had really enjoyed themselves, I posted: “The weather? Oh, the weather was dreadful. Howling gales, pouring rain, glowering stormclouds, only brief glimpses of the sun which is supposed to be the raison d’etre of naturism.”

Nudefest 2012, which took place from June 10-17, was equally storm-tossed. When Mrs W and I arrived on Thursday at about 1pm, there were already campers packing up their battered tents and heading home after less than four days. Once again, events which were designed to provide fun in the sun were moved indoors or simply abandoned (indoor nude archery, anyone? Thought not...).

It seemed to rain constantly, with an accompanying storm-force gale, from about 2pm on Thursday until late on Saturday evening and it was frustrating, to say the least, to wake on the final Sunday morning to see light clouds, blue sky and more than a hint of sun.

Still, as we did last year, we made the best of it and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The editor of British Naturism magazine gave a well-received talk about his work, a visit to Skinners Brewery in Truro will hopefully be repeated in 2013, the Eden Project played host to what I am told was an entertaining evening on the opening Sunday and there were pub games and a riotous quiz, as well as some excellent musical entertainment. 

BN members Billy Bottle and Martine played a unique brand of soulful music at what should have been ‘Picnic in the Park’ but which twice became ‘Picnic in the Bar,’ the traditional sing-along around the piano on the final night seemed to be delivered with more gusto than ever before and Nudefest gave a couple of excellent young student musicians the opportunity to shine before an unexpected audience.

Lily and Meg are first-year Popular Music students at the University of Falmouth. A chance conversation saw them become part of the programme at the Eden Project evening, before they wowed a crowd of over 200 naturists at Newperran on the final night. I’ve seen a fair few musicians at BN events in my time, but never have I seen a hushed room so spellbound by what they were seeing. 

As we made our way to our caravan late on Saturday evening, still full of adrenalin from conga-ing through the bar, out into the car park and back to the strains of “Is this the way to Amarillo?” Mrs W turned to me, smiled broadly and said: “You know, I really enjoyed myself tonight.”

Given the appalling weather, there can be no better praise for Nudefest 2012 than that.

Growing my network - and yours?

One of the hardest things about working for myself from home is the isolation that can come from working five days a week (often six), with only the family pet for company.

 Ideas that sound great when I run them past Muffy sometimes sound stupid when I mention them to a client. Convincing myself that I am doing the right thing, when there is no-one in ‘the office’ to agree or disagree, is more challenging than I would like.

 Which is why a lot of owners of small businesses go business networking.

 A whole raft of groups have sprung up across the country offering breakfasts, lunches, or evening events, where we can go to widen our business network, enhance our ability to pitch for business and get invaluable tips from those who are in the same situation.

 I’m currently a member of two of the more well-known national groups and since I started networking regularly, I’ve found that business opportunities are becoming more common.

 I wouldn’t yet say that Martin Warrillow Publishing Services is anything like a roaring success, but I do feel much more confident about the future than I did six months ago.

 If you’re a part of the networking world, you probably won’t need to ask the names of the well-known groups; if you aren’t but feel you should be, reply to this blog and I’ll email you some details.

 One of the things I’ve learned about networking etiquette is that you should never denigrate another group in public. It can be embarrassing when someone you meet turns out to be a member of a group which you have just been loudly denouncing in another conversation ten feet away.

 So I won’t do that but I will tell you about one of my favourite groups. Shortly before the end of summer 2011, a friend who is a lifecoach and fellow naturist told me about the Nationwide Alliance of Business Owners. He is a member of one of their groups in Leicester and although I felt that was too far to travel at 6.30am every other Friday, a spot of Googling uncovered a group in Solihull. That’s just half-an-hour down the M42 at that time of day, so I decided to give it a try.

  Part of the secret of business networking in this fashion is finding the right mix of people.  I’ve been to groups where you could feel noses being turned up at you. I’ve been to groups full of interesting people, but out of which I was never going to get any paid work.

 And then there was NABO Solihull; I’m not one for joining things straight away (I can’t afford it) but I joined after just one two-hour meeting. It was full of friendly people going through the same problems which I was facing, as well as people with years of experience who knew how to put us right.

 We had a laugh and a smile, some interesting discussion and I felt this was going to be the right thing to do. Within two weeks, I had won enough work to pay my annual membership fee.

 Since then, a lot of the group have become good friends, people I can turn to for advice as to how MWPS can move forward. That’s what business networking is designed to provide but I think very few groups do it as well as Solihull NABO.

 Our members include a web designer, a couple of business advisers, a learning and development consultant, three accountants, an acupuncturist, some life coaches, an estate agent, a photographer.....oh, and a freelance journalist and writer.

 But we would like some more members; it’s a cliche of business that if you stand still, you go backwards, so we are keen to increase our membership. 

 We meet every other Friday from 7.30am-9.30am at St John’s Hotel, Solihull. Breakfast costs £12 (although we do a starter deal for new members) and if you’re interested, I can let you have details of annual fees. Just reply to this blog

 And if you decide to try us, you’ll hear some of the best elevator pitches on the circuit...

Warrillow - that's an interesting name......

It is rather inevitable that with my surname, I am regularly asked: “That’s an unusual name, where does it come from?”

 And believe me, I’ve tried to find out. Even before ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ became a hit on the nation’s television screens and even before censuses stretching back to the 1870s could be easily searched on a computer screen, I was looking for my ancestors.

 I’ve trawled through ancient records books and newspaper files in libraries as far apart as Worcester and West Yorkshire; I’ve spoken to my few remaining elderly relatives; I’ve stood in graveyards in Bewdley and Dewsbury looking for signs on gravestones. And I’ve come up with........... precisely nothing.

 Watching ‘WDYTYA?’ drives me to distraction because the celebrities featured obviously have teams of archivists and researchers searching through the records before the programme is even commissioned. I, as the only son of an only son, have just me to do the research.

 And as the years go on and I become ever more aware that, as the childless only son of an only son, the Warrillow line will expire when I do, I become ever more determined to find some answers.

 So here’s where we stand at the moment. My father, whose 76th birthday on May 18 2012 coincides with the writing of this post (Happy birthday, Dad!) lives pleasantly and healthily in retirement in southern Spain.

 The death of his father is my first memory of the loss of a close family member. My grandfather spent all his working life in a carpet factory in Kidderminster, in the days when the industry provided employment for almost all the working-class men of that Worcestershire town.

 He retired in 1972 and like so many men of his ilk, even today, had no clue what to do with himself when going to work in the factory didn’t dominate his life.

 I still remember the telephone ringing early one Saturday morning in 1973 and waking me up, before my dad rushed out of our house to where his father lived, less than a mile or so away.

 I don’t remember my great-grandfather - and that’s where the problems start. Albert Warrillow appears to have been born in 1872 and died in 1963, a year before I was born. If you follow the obvious trail through websites such as ancestry.co.uk, it leads you back to a family who lived in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent in the 1830s. Yet family stories put the Warrillows in the 1870s in West Yorkshire, somewhere around Heckmondwike or Batley. It seems that they moved from there to Kidderminster, following the carpetmaking or woollen trades from the White Rose county.

 And I can find nothing in the records to support this. It seems that my great-grandfather was married twice, following the tragic early death of his first wife; when asked about it by my father when I was still a toddler, his second wife appears to have refused to say anything. These things were not talked about in Victorian England.

 So here is where the brick wall starts to be constructed. I have found records which suggest that Albert Warrillow was either born in or placed into a workhouse; I can’t find anything to confirm that. I have a piece of paper which purports to be Albert’s marriage certificate; where his father’s signature should be, there is a simple ‘X’

 This, of course, is not wholly surprising because many working-class people in these times were barely able to read and write - but it is of no use to those of us trying to trace the family history!

Now, I may have a name for Albert’s second wife but if you key that into the 1911 census records, it brings up roughly a dozen possible answers. The researchers and genealogists on ‘WDYTYA’ may have time to sort through them all in search of the right one; as a freelance journalist trying to keep the financial wolf from the door and the bills paid, I don’t.

 So I guess this post is aimed at those of you out there who have done this and succeeded. Is there a right and a wrong way to go about it? In the internet age, is it still necessary to spend hours in libraries and local records offices trawling through ancient documents?

 Of course, I don’t expect to find the answer in five minutes; I would just like to know that I’m going about it the right way - and that my dad and I can discover it before it’s too late.

How to lend a hand to British Naturism

Regular readers will have noted that there hasn’t been much activity here in recent weeks. Having initially started with the good intention of blogging at least once a week, it has slipped back since the New Year to being once a fortnight and this is my first post in almost three weeks.

 Shameful.

 Of course, blogs aren’t like newspapers, which have to come out on a particular day; that’s one of the good things about 21st-century technology but something which those of us weaned on daily press deadlines have to get used to.

 With blogs, you say something when you have something interesting to say and have time to say it.

 This hiatus hasn’t been due to a lack of ideas - my life is so full of interesting stuff these days that I could think of six different subjects a week - but rather a lack of time. I’m pleased to say that while my business career isn’t exactly booming, there seem to be enough things going on to keep me busy and, crucially, to keep financial despair at bay.

 But Mrs W and I have just spent the weekend at an event which I couldn’t fail to blog about - the first-ever British Naturism National Convention.

 Held at the picturesque Ilam Hall, a National Trust property right on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border and high in the Peak District, NatConv was a conference and training weekend for everyone involved in the naturist community – clubs and swims, regions and individual members. 

 BN hoped that members would see it as inspiration to ‘do something’ with their interest in naturism, rather than just lying on a beach or jumping into a pool.

 Despite having around 11,000 members and putting on events all year round including extravaganzas such as Nudefest and the Alton Towers weekend, BN has a full-time staff of precisely zero.

 There are three ladies based in Head Office in Northampton, who do all the administrative work on a jobshare basis; there is general secretary Tracey Major, who oversees them and there are three paid consultants including commercial manager/marketing supremo Andrew Welch and yours truly as editor of the BN magazine.

 A lot of members think Andrew and I are paid employees whereas in fact, we are on annual contracts and have other work outside BN.

 Given that, how do we put on events such as AT, Nudefest, Great British Skinny Dip, Natconv and all the swims, saunas and ‘Big Days Out’ programme, as well as do all the promotional, marketing and campaigning work for the cause of making naturism ever more   acceptable?

 We do so with the sterling help of a small band of volunteer members, who give up their time to devote some effort to a particular little part of each project. That group is difficult to quantify, because people like to help out with things going on in their area, so that someone living in the south-west may put a lot of effort into Nudefest in Cornwall, but may not even attend our Blackpool weekend.

 So we are always in need of more willing help and NatConv was a weekend of talks, workshops and practical sessions designed to broaden the number of members equipped to help make a difference to naturism in the UK.

 The sessions included looking at how we sell naturism to the media, getting the best out of BN’s regional and club structure, a look at the progress being made on BN’s rolling three-year plan to improve the organisation and so on.

 It sounds quite intense but the 80 members who attended between Friday afternoon and noon on Sunday thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and all said they came away inspired to do their bit for naturism in 2012.

 That’s crucial; it’s a mantra of ours that although the age profile of BN members is not exactly teenage and the organisation could always do with more money (why not leave us £50 in your will?), BN wouldn’t die through old age or lack of cash, rather a lack of hands to help put on the growing list of events that help improve our revenue streams.

 Our growing band of Young British Naturists members (for the 18-30s) is really helping to spark some positive things, but more members mean more hands, more brains, more ideas... 

 If my ramblings encourage you to try naturism this summer (yes, we will have summer eventually!), why not join BN and get involved? It costs less than £1 a week for a couple, you could meet some fabulous people, visit some great events (Nudefest 2012, our week at Newperran in Cornwall, is just five weeks away)...and enjoy the special experience which is naturism.

 You could be helping keep BN alive for the next generation of naturists.

Dominic Littlewood, Dr Feelgood - and Alan Sugar

What’s the answer when you have a string of ideas for a blog post and not one of them is fully-formed? Steal an idea from one of my favourite columnists, Bob Crampton in The Times on Saturday and merge them all into one.

 So..... why did the lady who took my blood test yesterday fail to find more than a thimble-ful and thus have to resort to the other arm (and twice the pain) when Mrs W, a trained children’s phlebotomist, found the middle of the vein instantly when I told her what had happened? 

 Why did I take my eye off the online order form for a split second, so that a dress Mrs W has bought online from a well-known High Street chain will be delivered to a house ten doors down - and why is the occupier of that house on holiday for a week during Easter?

 How do I explain to Mrs W why I put my hand up when a friend was looking for someone to take 14 years’ worth of CAMRA’s monthly What’s Brewing magazine off his hands? And why have I stored them on the top shelf of my wardrobe, convincing myself that at some point in the next millennium, I will get round to reading them?

 Why are Tamworth stumbling towards the finishing line of the Blue Square Premier season - and who decided that the Telford away game, abandoned in a monsoon on Bank Holiday Monday, would be replayed next Tuesday, when I will be in Northampton all day at a British Naturism marketing committee meeting and unable to get to Shropshire in time?

 Why have Facebook unilaterally changed the design of my page without telling me? And yes, I know I get a valuable social networking resource for nothing, so why am I complaining?

Dominic Littlewood - why?

Why did I stay up until silly o’clock on Sunday night watching the play-off of the US Masters and drinking red wine and whisky?

 Why aren’t Dr Feelgood, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and Wilko Johnson more widely acknowledged as musical geniuses?

  Why did my Easter weekend pass by in a haze of furniture polish, carpet dust and cat hairs?

   Why has it taken 25 years for one of my local pubs to wake up to the fact that it needs to advertise its wares outside the village and try to attract custom from the ‘posh’ side of Tamworth?

  Why have I allowed my briefcase to accumulate two years of ‘stuff’ which is undoubtedly important, but which I never read and probably ought to throw out?

  When am I going to complete the aforementioned throwing-out?

 How proud am I at having filled an A3 sheet of paper with ‘things to do’ this week and almost having completed the job by 9.30pm on Wednesday?

 Why, after 20 years, do I still not have a plan for making sure I read the Saturday and Sunday Times by midnight on Sunday - assuming, of course, that I have already thrown all the advertising nonsense, as well as the property and motoring sections, in the bin?

 And talking of the Sunday Times, why haven’t I shared with more people A.A Gill’s fantastic description of Alan Sugar in last weekend’s paper? For those of you who don’t know Gill, he writes the restaurant reviews in the Style section. Unrepentantly London-centric, he can spend 800 words discussing anything but the restaurant before approving of/condemning it in the final few paragraphs.

Last weekend, he was talking about a restaurant in Essex into which the supremo of The Apprentice has put some money; in the course of which he offered up this. “Alan Sugar, a man who looks like an angry testicle....”

 As several people have said since, they will never again be able to watch The Apprentice with a straight face.

Doing the consumer a dis-service

Customer service. A simple term, defined by that unbeatable and all-encompassing fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, as “a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

 For anyone in business, it shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. Someone is sufficiently keen on what you are selling to want to give you money for it, whether it be sandwiches, lawnmowers, pints of beer or a new suit. Therefore, it is your job to send the customer away happy with their purchase and feeling good about the transaction.

 Why is it, then, that rather too many British businesses haven’t the slightest idea of what constitutes good customer service? Why is it that in rather too many shops, the staff are too busy deconstructing last Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent to help my wife look for a blue cotton top in the sale in a size ten? 

 Why can I spend ten minutes wandering around a store which is attempting to sell good-quality outdoor clothing without the proprietor even bothering to ask if she can help me?

Why does a well-known national pub chain (a clue - there seems to be one in every town) appear to have got where it is today by a) seemingly not bothering to employ staff at all in some of its pubs? b) failing to train the staff it has in order that they know what a decent pint of real ale looks, smells and tastes like?

 And why do some famous tourist attractions send you from pillar to post to buy a ticket, then shut down at 4pm on a glorious spring day in mid-March - when there is at least another two hours’ worth of good daylight available and willing customers queueing to hand over their cash?

 This latter incident happened to me on a day trip to Liverpool last week. Mrs W was with me by the banks of the Mersey, hoping to ferry ‘cross it (as you do...) as the highlight of an excellent day. Various different members of staff pointed us in various different directions for the ticket office, so that we spent a good 20 minutes wandering up and down the Docks until we finally were able to attempt to buy a (very reasonably-priced) ticket.

 At which point we discovered that we had just watched the last ferry of the day pull away from the dockside some five minutes earlier - it was just after 3pm.

 We consoled ourselves with an excellent 45-minute open-top bus tour of the city. Yet when we got off, after the tour had finished, we found several people hoping to join the next bus only to be told by the driver: “Sorry, that’s it for the day.”

 It was just after 4pm. 

 All of these are examples of how too many British businesses won’t go the extra mile to market themselves to bring in more customers, or create the right impression so that the customers they do have will come back.

 I’ve recently learnt of an organisation which devotes itself to providing training in customer service for retailers. I’m sure they do a great job and a campaign with which I am involved is hoping to use their services in the near future.

 But surely all of the above should be second nature to anyone running a retail business. As a freelance journalist, I know that if no-one knows I exist, then no-one is going to offer me work (which is part of the reason I write this blog). I also know that if I get the chance to work for someone, I have to do it to the best of my ability in the hope that they will remember me in the future.

 Yet too many retailers in the UK don’t seem to get it; it’s too easy to blame the economic downturn and the fact that ‘nobody’s got any money’ for the ills of their business.

 I’m sure businesses in other countries don’t adopt this attitude; they realise that the consumer is king and if people are keeping what money they have in their wallets, you have to work that little bit harder to prise those wallets open.

 Until retail businesses who are supposed to be a major driver of our economy understand that, Government tinkering with tax rates will not make one jot of difference.

A nose for news - and those who want to snuff it out

When I was a young news reporter on the Tamworth Herald in the late-1980s, our first job every morning was ‘police calls.’

 As we were a weekly newspaper with no urgent deadlines and our office was a five-minute stroll from the local police station, one of us would arrive at the station at 9.15 every morning and the duty sergeant would painstakingly take us through the incident book from the previous 24 hours.

 Much of it was mundane; minor house break-ins, car thefts and so on. But almost every day, there was at least one story which would result in what journalists call a ‘page lead’ - a story good enough to be the main story on a page in the newspaper.

 Often, it was a major robbery - of a post office, a shop and so on. Perhaps it would be the details of a court case which we had been previously prevented from reporting for legal reasons.

 Whatever it was, we would race back to the office and tell our news editor - a fearsome boss, but a brilliant journalist of a kind which is now all but extinct. He would take in all the details, know instantly the facts which we had missed but needed to find out - and then tell us not to come back into the office until we had the story in full.

 Even I, who was so good at ‘door-knocking’ that I retreated to an office-based job after less than four years in the trade, would do it willingly.

 Quite often, if the story was really good, the news editor - I’ll call him ‘JB’ because that’s what we called him - had a way of finding out any details which his reporters had been unable to unearth. In the days before smoking indoors was banned, he would reach into his jacket pocket, pull out a packet of 20, put a cigarette in his mouth with one hand (and light it at the same time), pick up the phone with the other hand and put in a call to the local police station. 

 Ninety-nine times out of 100, within seconds he would be talking to anyone from the duty sergeant upwards and would have the details. Because they all knew ‘JB’. It was his job to know them and it was their job to know him; it was his job to get the story and it was their job to make sure that the public whom they served knew what was going on in their town in terms of crime.

 And then, one day, after I had left the news reporters’ world for the milder climes of the sports desk, someone invented the police press officer.

 The press officer became the fount of all knowledge; often based miles away - in the Herald’s case, more than 30 miles away in Stafford - they decided what was news and what they would tell you. There were no more personal visits, the reporter was simply another voice at the end of a phone. 

 It was authority’s way of stopping journalists from uncovering the awkward, the unpleasant, the mildly embarrassing. And as staff cuts took an ever greater toll on newspapers, who no longer had the manpower to devote to chasing good crime stories, it did the job.

 Now, of course, press officers are everywhere; every football and rugby club worth its salt has one. Their job (and I acknowledge here that I have a number of friends who are football club press officers) is to tell the story as the club want it told; to be, if you will, a sporting version of the political spin doctor; to regulate access to players and backroom staff who would, less than 15 years ago, meet journalists after hours in the local pub and give them tips for stories.

 I mention all this because I have been listening this week with increasing irritation to the Leveson inquiry getting het up about ‘journalists bypassing the press offices and talking to police officers,’ in pursuit of a good story. 

 As someone has said to me today: ‘most of the police press offices were pretty clueless and didn’t actually know anything.’

 Which is why any good journalist, from ‘JB’ to Neil Wallis, Graham Dudman and Fergus Shanahan, would ignore them and go to the proper coppers.

One more thing.... on occasion, ‘JB’ would meet the senior coppers on our patch and have a drink and a meal with them. I don’t know for sure, but it’s not inconceivable that at Christmas, a bottle of something warming and Scottish may have changed hands.

 Is that corruption? Is police officers telling journalists something the public ought to know but which their bosses would rather keep quiet ‘leaking’?

 Many years ago, I heard this definition of a good news story: ‘Something which someone, somewhere, would rather the public didn’t find out about.’

 I do hope someone acquaints Mr Justice Leveson with that.