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There are few things to be said in defence of ugly ponies.
It is possible to make excuses for them and to explain how it is not their fault that they have such short legs and convex midsections and messy manes and hair especially at this time of the year. And it is possible to argue that it is not excellence in personal grooming that enables an ugly pony to survive in snowbound fields but rather its capacity to ingest quantities of pony pies and store the nutrients therein for a long time, however unattractively. But that is all.
If you had a conversation with an ugly pony you'd have to steer the conversation away from ugliness or anything to do with short legs or hair-dos in the way that you can never let the conversation with a chronic halitotic stray into areas like toothpaste or the importance of flossing.
But it would be difficult and in the end probably not worth trying because there are no lines of human and ugly pony experience that intersect in an uncontroversial place.
Late on Wednesday afternoon, the little red train that knows it can and knows it can and knows it can all the way up the hill from Landquart to Davos was in a race to get to the pretty Dorf station before the British Prime Minster began his big speech in the main Congress Hall at least forty minutes before if any of the great and good on board were to make it to the hall in time - though of course the train was no more aware of that than were the ugly ponies of their aesthetic shortcomings.
There are about two thousand of the great and the good in Davos and probably all of them would have liked to have spent the week talking about ugly ponies but it was not to be and instead Mr Blair has talked about poverty and Africa and values and so has President Clinton and Bono and Bill Gates (part III) and so those are very much the themes and we must follow their lead because they are very, very great and very, very, very good or in some cases simply very rich.
But there are other themes too and if Davos is about anything it is about sampling the id膫漏es de nos jours and this happens in the dozens of lunches, dinners and small seminars that have titles like "What are the dangerous ideas" or "Do leaders listen"钮 or "Making dreams come true" and when there is a meal involved it always involves salmon and chicken and sometimes mushrooms.
As well as improbably small quantities of wine some of it, sadly, Swiss.
As far as I can tell, the id膫漏es de nos jours are, and in roughly this order; that values matter more than results for business and for politicians; that we really are going to do something about poverty this time; that we're sorry for (business) excesses of the 90s and it's not like that now; that you need to be in touch with your various selves to be a leader these days; that force can't solve problems; and that broadly and without being too loud about it the world might be just about to become a smidge better though let's keep our expectations in check. Make of this what you will.
This is hard work unless you are one of those who thinks that brain work can never be hard and that even then it will never make the ugly ponies any less ugly nor bring them to understand why they are.
But it is also a privilege.
On the eve of the Auschwitz commemoration, for example, it was possible to ponder the lessons of the second war and the holocaust with a former Archbishop of Canterbury, a director of the Simon Wiesenthal centre, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and a Dutch Rabbi who, as a baby - had been hidden in a suitcase with air-holes punched in it by a German family so that the Nazis would not find him as they had found his parents. It is very humbling.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this it is necessary to travel mentally back to London because on Thursday morning "Feedback" wanted to do an interview about an interview on the Today Programme earlier this week. Let us hope that they edit it well otherwise they will have to come onto Today to do an interview about the interview about the interview.
And this indeed is a very strong strand of current thinking in the new climate of cost saving, that we could use a single really controversial interview as a seed to spawn interviews about it which would then require interviews about those and so on and one mathematician we asked to look at this idea reckoned that - with a carefully managed system and using 24 hour news broadcasting - within a month we would have enough material at almost no cost to fill about a thousand hours a week but that the problem would be what then? It would be a bit like Three Mile Island and would go critical and we wouldn't be able to stop generating interviews about interviews about interviews and by about the middle of March everyone alive on the planet would be involved one way or another with derivatives of this original interview and the only solution would be to push graphite rods into everyone. Or something like that.
The other problem with this "Feedback" interview was that it had to be done on a mobile phone with almost no power left in its battery, while trying to find a quiet place which is not easy since the great and the good are very good at speaking with very loud voices.
All of that might have been fine had it not been for the nosebleed.
This is no reflection on Mr Roger Bolton for whom I have the greatest respect but the very moment he began his first question a great gush of blood spurted from my right nostril. A sensible person would have stopped right there but then a sensible ugly pony would stop being ugly and the problem was that it wasn't just a case of dealing with the blood and the quizzical but non-intervening attention of passers by - it was also a case of dealing with breathing.
The point about breathing is that you do it through your nose most of the time but especially when you're speaking and with one nostril out of action the breathing thing is half as effective especially at (relatively low but still significant) altitude and you get about half the words per breath than normally which in most cases is less than a sentence. There is no way of knowing how the "Feedback" producers will deal with what will no doubt sound like criminally heavy breathing but one can only hope it is with some sympathy. Unfortunately, I will not be here for one of the highlights of Davos' Friday's late-night discussion of Star Power and Social Change. It features Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone, Peter Gabriel, Richard Gere and Lionel Richie and it is chaired by Jim.
"Who are all those people with Jim?" I would have nudged my neighbour and said had I been able to stay but instead I will be rolling downhill on the little red train shaking my head at the ugly ponies and wondering why.
Kevin
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