They bug people, because, I suspect, they are, on the surface, well … vacuous. They portray quite unquestioningly, unreasonably, unfashionably aspirational worlds.

Aarons came from a troubled childhood, passed between relatives and ending up in an orphanage. He went into the Army at 18, saw unimaginably horrible things in WW2, and won a Purple Heart. After he left the military, he took up commercial photography for magazines and Madison Avenue, and famously opined that the only beach worth landing on was “decorated with beautiful, seminude girls tanning in a tranquil sun.”

Weber is complicated in other ways. Married lifelong to his agent and companion Nan Bush, he has assiduously created the most solidly homoerotic corpus in photographic history. Robert Mapplethorpe ‘fearlessly’ bared his sexuality because he knew it would shock and fascinate. Weber, working contemporaneously, kept oddly quiet about having any preference, yet seemed to fully immerse in it and rub it gleefully all over himself.

It is hard to imagine two people who *wanted* more what they’d chosen to document.

But I love them because, in an odd way, they were also ‘outside’. They were never themselves, part of the worlds they wanted so much. Sure, they were there, but as observers. By that, though, I don’t mean they were by any means ‘journalistically’ detached; in fact, they were complicatedly in love with their subject. Aarons obviously worshipped a glossy international jet set who almost certainly would never have invited him to dinner. There’s no sneaky satire in his work. He’s not photographing some millionaire, slyly staring at his young wife as if he owns her. There isn’t that Diane Arbus ‘behold the disgusting wrinkled reality of the rich at play’. He just bloody loves that he’s there. He wants that beach so bad it hurts.

Similarly Weber. It would have been so ‘clever’ to let just a hint of the meathead self-regard of some of his young models bleed through in those pristine black and whites. It could have been a timeless ‘comment’ on the dead-eyed vacuity of fashion at the peak of the Reagan Era. But no. Bruce wants to lick every one of those beautiful, gilded youths like an ice-cream. He wants to take each towering, heroic, Leni Riefenstahl demigod, and climb him like a fucking tree.

There are plenty of far worthier, far less problematic photographers on the shelf, but these two speak to me - and possibly not through their actual images. Their lives had made them greedy enthusiasts for very particular things, and they, in an inspiringly direct way, lived out their enthusiasms through their work. And the enthusiasm... the love... transcends the content.

As it happens, I think some of Aarons pictures have achieved a status of ‘unintended’ art, by a combination of vintage, evocativeness and sheer technical skill. (The Winged Victory of Samothrace almost certainly wasn’t the most significant piece of art in the world in the C2nd BC... but it’s technically excellent and it’s the only example we have to work with.)

Arguably, Weber’s work was significant in a larger cultural movement changing public attitudes to beauty and sexuality. Some of Weber’s films achieve a degree of artistic acceptance. Possibly because they were pitched into the smaller, more pointedly un-commercial world of pre-digital independent film, rather than International commercial photography.

But we are emphatically not talking about high art here. Both photographers shot for magazines and fashion houses. They were enmeshed in commercial mass communication and made no attempt to subvert it, to distance themselves from the influence of their clients, nor to express higher ideas...

... except love. And that, rather successfully.

This is the finest example I can find of ‘vicariety*’. Both Weber and Aarons make pictures in which their vicarious pleasure is explicit. That gives us permission to join in the enjoyment, through, and with them. Their work is populist, in the sense that it speaks directly to something shared by a vast number of people who wouldn’t know an ‘art’ photograph if it fell off a gallery wall and crushed their foot.

So why am I talking about this?

Because Jim Harrison wrote about food like this. So did MFK Fisher. So does Nigella Lawson. So does Marina O’Loughlin about restaurants. Weirdly, I don’t think Bourdain wrote like that, but it was the absolute core of his style as a TV presenter. Andrew Jefford writes like that about wine. So does Dan Keeling.

Because I think Aarons and Weber, weirdly say something about the writing I admire. About what I write, and why I write it, and the direction in which I want to take it.

In short, I aim for greater vicariety. And, inspired by Jim, Mary, Nigella, Marina, Anthony, Andrew and Dan, I’m striving to get Slimmer, and more Bruce.

*I apologise for a shameful coinage. This is something I’m working on at the moment, and it’s occupying my mind disproportionately. It comes out of a strand of conversations with various people, about ‘What AI can’t do’ - a sort of exercise in ‘Reverse Benchmarking’. I’ll explain more fully as soon as I’ve worked out a coherent argument.

But I wanted to share a story that you won’t hear elsewhere.

I’d idolised Deighton for his amazing cookbooks long before I had any pretensions to write myself. And I mentioned the fact to Dan Saladino, with whom I was working at the time on the BBC R4 Food Programme. Though Len legendarily never gave interviews, Dan persuaded him to come into Wogan House for an hour and asked me to interview him.

It was a ludicrous privilege - and extremely brave of both Dan and Rich Ward who produced. I’d never done a radio project of that scale before, and I was as nervous as hell. I’d prepped hard - I even had a timeline of his life on a roll of paper so I wouldn’t get lost. But Len turned out to be a superbly kind man. I think he liked the paper roll. Maybe in hindsight that was a very Deightonesque piece of research. Or maybe he recognised a grammar school boy who was way out of his depth.

We ended up talking for the full hour and then overran for another. He was intense, precise, and utterly inspiring. You can still listen to the interview here.

I had taken along all my Deighton editions like some mad stalker fanboy. (Who was I kidding? I was a mad stalker fanboy), including my treasured first edition of The IPCRESS File.

“That’s nice, he said. I don’t have a copy of that,”

They only printed a short first run, he explained, which sold out so fast that he never got his hands on one.

“Then you’ve got to have this one!” I said. 

He took it, turned it over and over, smoothing the cover with his hands.

“No, he said, passing it back. You keep it.”

I found out later that his publisher had refused to pay his friend, Raymond Hawkey the £50 they’d agreed for designing that unbelievably cool cover. They offered £15 ... and Len paid the difference himself. 

I remember every single detail of that recording. His quiet voice, his scholarly precision. His gentle diffidence. His kindness.

Have a look at the back cover. It’s one of my favourite pieces of jacket design. An excellent potted author’s autobiography. Functional but also spare and packed with self-deprecating wit that tells you about five times more about the man than the words actually mean.

It’s also the same madly innovative thinking about media that made him turn recipes into comic strips.

Len was impossibly kind about my writing and gave me a generous quote for the cover of Knife. Later, he designed two original cookstrips to go into Steak. 

He didn’t have to do either.

He was just a lovely bloke.

Look. This is a tough job. Every single day, I wake up. I sit at the damn keyboard and I’ve got to describe food.

It’s not easy.

Words are the raw materials and I’m in the same position as pornographers and writers of press releases... constantly on the point of running out of ammunition. I need as many as possible, and I am not a man who will easily let go of one of our limited armoury of adjectives.

OK. Anyone who types the word ‘flavorful’ (sic) should have their hands smashed with a mallet, but otherwise, no. We need every single purple descriptor we can lay our fingers on...

... except ‘Tender’.

I’m sitting... I admit, too late at night, watching re-runs of ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’ on cable and I know that is not a position from which to construct a reasoned argument. But... seriously? WTF is it with ‘Tenderness’

We need to work out how the hell we ever got to where a texture that favours the toothless became a measure of quality for good food.

At first, I thought it was perhaps the Tyranny of the Vox Pop. If, in their unhinged pursuit of relatability-at-all-costs, programme makers shove the mic up the nose of a civilian, we might expect banality. It’s possible that there’s some good ol’ boy at the counter, just waiting to opine that ‘Miss Ellie’s cole slaw sure do counterpoint the voluptuous richness of the breadin’ on her chicken fry steak an’ ah sure do ‘preciate’ her hot sauce. Why, it’s almos’ málà in it’s numbin’ intensity.” But more realistically they’re going to crash cut between three Sheldon Scale 7-1-1 Extreme Endomorphs, saying “Melts in the mouth”, “ Flavorful”, and “Mmmm. Tender”.

We have astonishing dentition. Highly evolved apex predators, we are also equipped as omnivores. Our incisors can rend flesh. We have canines that can grip while our powerful and adroit hands tear. Our molars can exert a crushing force of around 600 Newtons - more than enough to grind nuts and small bones. If our skulls were the same size as baboons or chimps... we’d have stronger jaws than them. Have a go. Have a little chew. You can bite harder than all but the most weapon of domestic dogs. Yet, a couple of weeks ago, someone I was eating with actually turned down sourdough in a restaurant because they ‘couldn’t be arsed to chew it’.

We accept it in small children. My own daughter used to prefer her dinner mashed up, at least until she got used to having teeth (to be fair, she also ate PlayDoh and thought peas went up her nose, but that’s not entirely germane to my logic flow here). We accept it in the old and sick.

I once pitched a story on Harvesters. I like roasts; I like institutional food. I thought it might be something I could amusingly reappropriate. The huge tranches of meat were, indeed excellent. The potatoes and heaps of veg were enormously competent and the gravy was plentiful... but what was terrifying was how thoroughly every diner in the place mashed their veg into their gravy.

It didn’t take us long to learn that we should slurp ramen loudly, that we should twizzle pasta round a fork, that it was OK to eat a taco with our hands. But I had to go to a Harvester to learn that an authentic step in the ritual of our National Meal, is to reduce the constituents to paste.

The problem with ‘tenderness’ is that once you realise, you can’t go back. I used to like an occasional Big Mac... but then I realised its most outstanding quality is the absence of resistance to the bite. Commercial fried chicken has a thousand things to recommend it until you ask yourself, ‘what the fuck did they do to this animal that the meat slips off the bone like an oily sweat sock?’ When was the last time a Pret sandwich took you any more effort to consume than your latté?

But this isn’t just about highly processed ‘fast’ food.

Once, there was a meal in a Manhattan Steakhouse. I had dreamed for decades of sitting at the white-clothed table, sinking a contemplative martini, then wrapping my face around a 16oz USDA Prime Porterhouse. The flavour was there, the smells, the seasoning... but it was so... so tender. The American Bovine, selectively bred over centuries, fattened with corn, its movement restricted, slaughtered while young. Certified ‘Prime’ so I could be assured that my purchase, according to the Dept. of Agriculture, would be “... tender, juicy, and flavorful”.

Look. I’ve got deadlines. If you’ve got any spare adjectives over there, sling them my way. My DMs are open. But can we fight back against tenderness?

If we don’t want to use our teeth, we probably deserve to lose them.

I think I must have been in my 20s and living in San Francisco when I picked up a very well thumbed second-hand copy of Tom Wolfe’s “The New Journalism” and was instantly, irrevocably hooked.

I’d never had the slightest notion of writing. As a kid, my handwriting was so bad that I rarely finished an exam paper. I loathed and feared ‘writing’ so much as a physical process that it never crossed my mind that most of it went on in the head.

But the ‘New Journalism’ just blew me away. People who wrote in such a fluid... kind of un-mannered way. Capote, Thompson, Talese, Southern, Herr, Didion. I just drank them in. My US copy was two broke back inches thick, and I took it in two straight sittings. Then I started at the beginning and did it again.

By the end, I knew exactly what a writer was and what they did. I still didn’t think I’d ever have the faintest chance of doing it... but God, I wished I could.

I read a couple of chapters again last night. Old favourites. Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and, naturally, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” by Hunter Thompson.

I guess like every other hack, my brain is boiling these days with thoughts of LLMs and losing our gigs in a tsunami of slop... and this is the first time I’ve revisited the Old Masters since the Rise of the Machines.

What really struck me was this. Turns out I never gave a toss about the Kentucky Derby. Nor Khe Sahn. Nor Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s flat. Nor Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Mohammed Ali. None of the actual content of the stories stuck.

This was what really pissed off the Old Guard and thrilled Wolfe... and me. What all these writers had done was bypass the rigorous detachment of traditional journalists. They hadn’t just failed to professionally quarantine themselves from their subjects; they threw themselves in and wallowed like hogs. It’s precisely why I didn’t give a fart about the moral right and wrongs of a motorcycle gang; I wanted to either be Thompson, or be with him as he experienced one.

That was what was ‘new’ about the New Journalism, and a lot of it looks dated and overblown now. But it changed everything, and we can’t go back.

For the last couple of days, the full PR Squadron of the Ramsey Empire has been on manoeuvres, trying to spin up some sort of beef/mince about restaurant critics. Particularly how they’ve lost all their influence to, well ‘Influencers’.

It’s a daft, half-squib of an idea, but it leverages his unpleasant and aggressive personality to promote his collaboration with TopJaw. I don’t know where you stand in the debate; I certainly don’t know where I stand, but it’s very noticeable that Rameses still couches his carefully reasoned critique in the notion of restaurant writers sitting in judgement. And he measures success on how that judgement affects consumer behaviour.

“Critics don’t have the skills/right to judge, and nobody listens to them anymore anyway”.

It’s very true that an online thing can put many more customers into a restaurant than a written review. But I don’t think anyone writing about food in the UK has positioned themselves as an arbiter, or seriously believed that they could reliably affect footfall, for years. That’s not what it’s about anymore.

Anyone who thinks that a critic’s opinion is that significant to a business probably also believes that the people who read our recipes actually cook them. The adman in me really hates it, but we basically don’t understand how our work is being consumed.But I’m starting to think that maybe the immersion specialists, the embedded, the Gonzo writers had a clue.

A vanishingly tiny number of specialist nerds want to cook our recipes or visit the restaurants we get to visit. Like a tiny number of people want to get stomped by Satan’s Slaves at an acid-fuelled 3-day party at Bass Lake. But millions want to do it vicariously with someone they can like, someone who speaks to them as an equal, someone who makes them laugh, or think, or feel.

It may be one of the ever more desperate and crumbling intellectual defences against Artificial Intelligence, but, I don’t reckon a machine can ‘be the person who wrote it’.

If you think about good writers, columnists, even one or two critics, there’s a symbiotic thing between their work and their person (I don’t want to say ‘personality’ can we settle on Imago?). The work reinforces the mental image of the writer; the writer writes themselves more and more into the story.

An AI can’t ‘go’ where the thing is happening; it can’t convince a reader that it’s been there.

I think this might be one of the few intangibles that machines can’t conquer. On a physical, intellectual, or philosophical level. They can’t ‘lie’ that they were there. Will readers accept something that’s written with a ‘personality’ that doesn’t exist. What are publications going to do? Make up a name for a sclerotic old soak? AI a masthead picture of his ravaged features and retcon a life of unremitting self-abuse?

Like the early ‘New’ journalism, food writing is reported experience. It’s not about the precision with which you predict the next mot juste - which LLMs do so very well. It’s not even about forming a well reasoned argument - which LLMs can manage with astonishing ease. It’s about being there. Which LLM’s can’t.

An AI can already turn out a reasoned thousand on Cabbage-based foodways and Eastern European Identity. An AI can do a very usable consumer report on a restaurant - well researched from customer reports on TikTok, and actually rendered into readable English. An AI can find three reasonably correlated examples and extrapolate a ‘Hot-Right-Now’ filler. But food/politics writing has always been cripplingly otiose; reviews that attempt enumeration and forensic examination of multiple courses, value for money, and the cleanliness of the toilets have always been useful but criminally tedious. Trend pieces have always been shit. But we can let the AIs deal with those.

Until your laptop can eat a pie, get arseholed, stagger home and bang out 900 words on the experience that you actually want to read, then we’ll always stay the last line of defence. Bravely stuffing ourselves and then, with rather too much relish, telling you how it felt.

Partly, it makes you wonder what made these often unassumingly direct cookbooks so timeless. Partly it reminds me of something restaurant critic Andy Hayler said in a recent Vittles interview - “... everyone’s frantically trying to be innovative, but most of the really good combinations were discovered 100 or 500 years ago.” Partly it makes me wonder what 90% of the books on my shelves are ultimately for. Endless pointless twists and takes.

I realise that all the books that have really stuck for me are not invention but respectful retelling. Not creating art, but transmitting folklore. All of which brings me to Pete’s Pans... and why I can’t resist it.

‘Pete’ is Peter Hanley, who makes brilliant online videos about cooking. He runs the Culinary Academy of the Pyrenees. I haven’t been able to find out much more about him except what can be gleaned from his output. He seems to own an RV in which he drives all around southwest France, over to Spain, up into the Pyrenees, and he cooks local traditional dishes on a gas ring. There must be a camera operator. Either that, or Hanley is more than just talented. He’s also a contortionist with a very steady hand and a three metre long arm. But both clearly know what they’re doing. This stuff is better shot than 90% of current food TV.

We need to talk about Hanley’s voice. It is frankly gorgeous. Unreconstructed RADA. Not a dropped H or a regional vowel, and he presents brilliantly in the passive voice. The effect is genuinely superb. Under normal circumstances, ‘Recipe Passive’ drives me batshit crazy. “The meat is browned and set aside” is not how real people speak. But Hanley, a polyglot and language teacher, understands language. The way he wields it, it’s the erasure of self in passing on. They used to train presenters to talk like that. Think of Raymond Baxter evangelising the eye-popping wonder of supersonic flight - without having to tell you his ‘emotional’ lived experience as a Spitfire ace. It’s like Pete and the cameraman (who I imagine is ex-BBC and called ‘Geoff’ or ‘Brian’) got in that van around the time Floyd was still a going concern and set off to parts of the world where the BBC doesn’t reach.

Today, I’m doing a Gascon beef-cheek daube. It’s interesting because the beef cheeks are left whole, a little more like a pot roast or a gedempte fleisch. It’s not ‘Pete’s Twist on a Gascon Daube’. He doesn’t slide it toward the camera and smugly intone, “So! That’s my Gascon Beef Cheek Daube with Morels.” He lifts the lid off the pot, as if he’s sharing a discovery and celebrates that he’s done something so old, so perfect, so traditional. He shows heartfelt enthusiasm for sharing knowledge. He presents, delivers with the professionalism that officially went extinct two decades ago.

I’ve cooked a run of Pete’s recipes recently. I have a couple of people I cook for regularly who really appreciate that kind of food. Every one of the dishes has been a revelation. It’s almost as if I’ve accidentally stumbled on why I first loved Food TV, back when it was a professional enthusiasts’ game, not a subset of ‘celebrity’ or ‘reality’. Pete’s Pans always teaches me something and, more importantly, fires enthusiasm and joy in me. And I am completely seduced.

I’d thank him in person, but he’s probably halfway up a mountain somewhere, deglazing with a splash of armagnac. Track him down yourself.

(Pete’s Pans is splendidly ubiquitous online. He ‘broadcasts’ regularly on Tiktok and YouTube. I follow him on Instagram. The Culinary Academy of the Pyrenees is here and can be regarded as ‘Pete Central. For true Pete Aficionados, I found this incredible old Wordpress Food Blog, called Menu Classique floating in a back end of the web)

(Pete himself has contacted me to gently point out that he is much more organised than I’d first realised - I’d just not looked hard enough. The above has been slightly edited to reflect this)

I have no wish to sound like a worn and bitter hack, sand-blasted by weltschmerz, but I don’t have many ambitions left.

It’s not like I want to write the Great Western Novel. Who the hell reads anymore? And all the stuff in other people’s bucket lists is either athletic or pathologically unimaginative. I blame adverts for this. Left with nothing interesting to say about their products, ads are now indiscriminate 30 second reels of yoga/skydiving/surfing/beaches/hiking/streetfood in Singapore or star-watching in Machu fucking Picchu. God we’ve become dull. Even our ‘wildest dreams’ are commoditised and fully predictable.

I think I only ever declared one ambition, publicly. It was around the time I graduated. I was to die as spectacularly as possible. Specifically, being smashed on top-grade narcotics, driving a GT40 through the safety barrier of the Great St. Bernard Pass and plummeting to a fiery doom while distracted by a hand-job from a young Angie Dickinson. That one still works for me as an ambition… though most of the parts are no longer available.

The only other thing I’m determined to achieve before that glorious end is, on the face of it, much simpler, yet practically, even less likely.

I want to wear a white shirt to dinner.

I’m not talking about going to a black tie event, where you flop the old soup-and-fish out of its bag, still redolent of wee and kippers from the last rout, and slip on the crisp, clean Marcellized dickie before hopping in a cab. That’s easy.

No… what I’m aiming for is that thing that Hollywood leading men have always pulled off so brilliantly. Standing on the red carpet in a dark suit. Regular white shirt open at the tanned neckline, collar tips tucked just inside the jacket so it doesn’t look like you’re showing off. But still enough flare to hint at a collar bone and understated musculature. Clooney does it to devastating effect (note to British celebrities… you look ridiculous if your teeth are whiter than your shirt).

I have the shirts. Certainly a few Brooks Bros in their sharp-as-a-tack, high thread-count Egyptian cotton. At least two collar styles. Some classic for the ‘I’ve just slipped my Sulka off’ look. Maybe a couple of subtle, but still possibly regrettable ‘cutaways’ for that ‘Rat-Pack’ vibe. I’ve got a few cotton Oxford button-downs too. For the preppy, Redford/McQueen thing. They’re in the wardrobe. Pristine. Pressed. Ready to go every morning.

I’ve tried. God know’s I’ve tried. But they never get through to the evening.

The first risk period is breakfast. I’ve rendered a shirt useless within 22 seconds of donning it with splashback from the coffee pot.

I know… helpful people squeal “quick… run it under cold water” and yes… it’ll lift the stain in a physical sense. But moisture… scrubbing will have destroyed, in one tiny patch, the starching, the sheen from the Hoffmann press. Nobody will see… but I will know. Christ I’d rather walk into a meeting with an unnoticed bogie hanging from my moustache, or a ‘Map-of-Ireland’ on my cavalry twills than a psychological weak point in the shirt.

Because of where I live, I have to travel to get anywhere. Travel requires carrying things. Bags with straps, backpacks. Things that press the shape out of shoulders. That’s even when they’re not heavy. Anything bulkier than a credit card and a mobile and suddenly your body betrays you with its own moisture. A seven minute saunter to the station in complete calm and you might have hope. Anything more hurried and you are slowly but surely degrading the shirt from the inside.

I don’t know why it is, but people can’t simply shut the fuck up about a cravat. Google up a picture of Cary Grant in casual ‘sportswear’. Open neck white shirt, the collar lined with a rolled Hermes to protect it from unbecoming perspiration as he glides around the tennis court. Perfection. But if you wear one, everyone will comment.

‘Oooh. A cravat’.

You know how, if you see a swan, someone has to say the thing about breaking your arm?

Seriously. Strangers will cross the street to point and say ‘A cravat!’. It’s entirely bewildering because, if you then ask ‘Yes. Do you like it?’ they’ll invariably look confused. Panicked. “I didn’t think I was supposed to have an opinion! You were wearing a cravat! I had to say something. It’s the law.”

Actually a cravat looks great… you just have to have balls of steel to wear one. Which is odd, thinking about it, because it’s precisely the opposite of what it’s telegraphing.

Returning to the matter at hand. If, hypothetically, I could have got off the train with the shirt intact, there would be lunch.

A white shirt has been part of a gentleman’s dress for countless centuries, but it’s only in maybe the last few decades that informal eating has made them impractical. Think, for a moment of any historical images of a man at lunch. Everyone from Beau Brummel to JFK. Always seated, always with knives and forks. God knows, I’m not complaining, but lunch in a big city today will come from an entirely unprecedented palette of ethnicities, with dozens of traditions for consumption.

A white shirt can’t even survive a bowl of spaghetti, at a table with napkins, let alone a hand-thrown bowl of fire-cooked Thai ‘Jungle’ curry, shovelled with sticks while perched at a bar and jostled by plaid-clad elbows. Pristine linens and ramen slurping cannot co-exist… and very definition of ‘street’ food is that you should be able to consume it with fingers and standing up. Though physics has yet to entirely catch up with my thinking, I’m pretty sure that the attraction between crisp, pressed cotton and any chilli-spiked oil is basically gravitational.

The more you think about it, the more absurd my ambition is. I want to be that guy, slipping onto the barstool at six, ordering a martini, and clocking just the faintest admiring glance for looking properly turned out, considered, put-together. But it can never be.

I’m trying to write a pitch at the moment. A radio documentary on the nature of time. No… seriously.

All that stuff about Time’s Arrow, and ‘you can’t unmake an omelette’ and entropy… and I’m beginning to realise that unless we can manage time travel, so I can step away from my wardrobe and immediately slide onto the barstool… then the passage of time and intervening entropy will always destroy the shirt.

Maybe George Clooney is a Time Lord!

Christ… that’s not where I expected to end up.

Probably the best thing about being freelance is that you’ll never, ever again, have to experience the hell of a Strategy Awayday - 8 hours you’ll never get back, indulging in the collective delusion that there’s something you can actually do to control the plughole-circling of your enterprise, the increasing indifference of your audience and the epidemic slack-jawed incompetence of your ‘team’.

I used to organise these things for other companies and I don’t think there was ever a time when ‘strategy’ was formed, (or even informed) during an actual awayday. Our job was to create a few hours of a Montessori environment where everyone could experience ‘empowerment’, so they would ‘engage’. But the ‘Key Takeout’ would be that the top dog would achieve total ‘Buy-In’ for whatever bit of batshit-crazy, self-deluding, hubristic horseshit he’d picked up from one of the high-level Creative-Ideation courses (which we also taught).

Truly... in a gold rush, the wise man sells shovels.

These days, I’m a sole operator (up to a point - see sidebar later) so I don’t have to do awaydays, but I’m also enough a of a marketing geek to schedule a bit of quiet thinking time, in advance of the new year, to try to rack my thoughts into a line about what’s going on in my business. I usually take a couple of weeks over it and, because it’s the easiest way I know to police an idea, I write it out.

A couple of days ago Rory Sutherland crept into my feed again. I have very mixed feelings about Rory. Partly, I don’t like his politics; partly, I get an overwhelming sense of fellow feeling when I watch him present. The art of being a planner is to identify something so bleeding obvious that nobody could possibly disagree, then reframe it. The trick then, is to deliver it with such self-assurance that everyone believes you instinctively and, therefore, in the hugeness of your intellect. He’s a sort of living antithesis of Imposter Syndrome. And I, with a much higher degree of cringe, identify with that.

He’s also, damn him, quite brilliant at it.

His most recent gift to us was this...

…an excerpt from a talk in which he explains “Reverse Benchmarking”.

I’ll summarize briefly.

Clients are predisposed to look at what competitors are doing better than them, and ‘benchmark’ themselves against it.

Instead, says Rory…

(It’s the Avis, ‘We’re No.2 So We Try Harder’ strategy, for the true wonks)

He then goes on to explain how the tendency to benchmark against peers is unhelpful, because...

1. It ultimately devalues the category because there’s less diversity in the category.

2. It makes individual businesses less valuable because they’re focused on internecine competition that they ultimately can’t win.

3. Consumers lose variety, differentiation and choice.

Then, he sums up; “When businesses in an area become less differentiated, everybody suffers. But they all think they’re doing the right thing.”

So why is this occupying my invaluable strategising headspace at this crucial time?

Possibly because the last thing I’d Post-Itted on the metaphorical fipchart was…

“Everybody is shitting themselves about AI... and they are absolutely right”

What’s most noticeable about writing, particularly journalism, is that we entirely develop our work, throughout our careers by consumption and assimilation of others.

It used to be that a great journalist was somebody who’d read all the previous great journalists, had learned and synthesised. Journalists, quite rightly, regard themselves as craftspeople, not artists. It’s why they set store in apprenticeship and learning from The Greats.

The problem here is that “AI” is better than any human at reading widely, learning, absorbing and synthesising. (The clue is in the name. An LLM works by Modelling its output on an extraordinarily Large amount of Language).

We will never never beat an LLM at that.

Previous Annual Strategic Dumps have usually resulted in a ‘strategy’ of “Keep doing what you’ve always done, only read more, write more and do it faster. (Also negotiate up)”.

And that made sense before. Before LLMs.

Sutherland is writing about competition between large product or service companies, but the logic extends to my area. It’s the definition of the ‘competitive set’ that’s a little more complicated. At last year’s Awayday, the ‘competition’ was half a dozen other writers. This year, all of us are actually facing an entirely new, huge and relentless competitor.

Back to Rory. In competition against LLMs (because that’s the Threat in our SWAT analysis), ‘doing what we’ve always done, only better’ is precisely what an LLM will do, eventually better.

Our aspiration used to be easy. You’re trying to establish a ‘voice’, a coherent position. You want to turn in a product that’s recognisably ‘you’, following the conventions of your craft. Ideally in 800 word weekly blocks. But what’s suddenly different is that, without really noticing, that aspiration is exactly what LLMs are daily getting better at.

That’s not a battle I can win. I need to identify what an LLM can’t do and concentrate on ‘doing that really, really well’.

That means humour, feeling, emotion, quirkiness, appropriate rule breaking, cleverness, smartassery, snark, transgression, provocation, playful or unusual use of language, allusion, rumination…

Y’know, once you start actually typing them out, the list of things an LLM can’t do is reassuringly endless.

So need to concentrate on these things. The things I can do better than “AI”. The things of which an LLM is structurally incapable.

Which is where I need to take on Sutherland’s second point - “tell people what you are doing”.

Sidebar Begins

I’m working on another piece, a long and formless screed at the moment but I’ll summarise it here quickly.

Most of us are motivated by a very fundamental belief that our job is a direct contract between the Writer and the Reader. We write the stuff... they read it and the less crap gets in the way, the purer the ‘Work’.

This is why writers are so excited by Substack. Because it’s the ultimate pure connection between my mighty cerebellum and your justly hungry eyes.

Except that’s bollocks.

I know. It seems hugely old-world to even think about going cap-in-hand to the Gatekeeper at a newspaper, magazine, publishing house or broadcaster - controllers of the Means of Production - and increasingly we just don’t need that Fascist Groove Thang. These days, with Substack and YouTube we can all own our own media. Most of us can get stuff out there faster and wider than anyone we work for.

But I’ve grown to understand that the really important thing about getting published isn’t the gates they keep. It’s that they make you work with someone else.

It seems weird if nobody’s thought of this, but writing is a uniquely solitary creative pursuit. Musicians work in bands, actors in casts, film-makers in crews, photographers with art directors. The writer, meanwhile sits alone and transfers thoughts to ‘paper’. But the the minute you slot into any of the traditional publishing models, they superglue you to a partner. Someone who understands audience, medium and making your stuff successful. An editor, a commissioning editor, a sub, a publisher, a producer, a series editor. And they get to shape your ‘work’.

We can make our own stuff and get it out direct to readers in ways that would have made Malcom McLuhan’s head spin. But if we try to do it without the feedback loop... it all turns to shit.

I’d have to be an arrogant idiot to believe that I existed without the Others. The communication from writer to reader only happens when mediated by other people.

(And we can’t, by the way, expect our audiences to magically help us shape stuff. Their contract with us is essentially passive. In this model they either ‘like’ us as we are or they quietly evaporate.)

If this - by which I mean things like Substack and podcasting and YouTube channels - is how it’s going to be, then online creators are going to have to find a way to replace the balancing controls of the editors, the partners, the others we no longer have.

Or we entirely disappear up our own fundaments.

Sidebar Ends

So, ‘strategically’, I’m going to think about writing a little differently this year, but I’m going to have to tell people. I’m going to have to bring the Others along.

Unless these creative partners agree that we need to take on a slightly different set of criteria for commissioning, editing and publishing, then it’s a waste of time.

I don’t want to write new rules - that should never be our job - but I think I’ll endeavour to get quiet agreement that we’re looking for something a little different to the long established models. Maybe we all need to find a way together.

Maybe the best way to start is to look at everything I produce and ask ‘could an LLM have done that’. The people I work for should ask the same question.

I want to write things that an LLM never could... but the good news is that will be original, funny, human, quirky and might not look entirely like the stuff we’re all used to. I hope that’s what they’ll want to commission and publish.

So. Thanks in part to Rory...

That was my Awayday, and this is the document.