My contribution to the iconography of the Wild West. I designed this record cover in 1977 in homage to pulp westerns and played bass on this turkey, a rare record which fetches £250.00 in vinyl marts, largely because of its 'absurd' graphics.

In respect of his morals, JT was typical of any middle Englander –  because that’s precisely what he was. Born in Derbyshire, he spent much of his later life in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, home of the pork pie. An erstwhile postman and fish and chip shop owner when he wasn’t writing, like Dr. Johnson, he claimed he only did it for the money. The writer of ‘A Horse called Mogollon’ and ‘You’re a Texas Ranger, Alvin Fog’ was wary of horses and claimed to have no particular affinity with the United States, though he was a fierce advocate of Texan values, up to and including his generalisation that Texans were discriminated against, specifically in Kansas.

His Wild West was hewn from his imagination, the product of an overdose of Randolph Scott, John Wayne and Audie Murphy pictures when cooped up in barracks during his stint as an army attack dog trainer. His Wild West Weltenschauen was as valid as anyone else’s: John Ford was 2nd generation Irish from Maine, John Houston was Irish, the great Hollywood studio bosses were New York Jews. JT just didn’t stray far from the badlands of Coalville. That’s all she wrote.

Edson’s oeuvre was not confined to westerns.He was also an admirer/imitator/plagiarist of the great Edgar Rice Burroughs, science fiction writer best known for Tarzan, who described his start in writing, (after a stint as a pencil sharpener) thus:

“…if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

So it came to pass that another JT hero, James Allenvale ‘Bunduki’ Gunn, was adopted by Tarzan after his parents were murdered by the Mau Mau. Bunduki married Tarzan’s great-granddaughter, Dawn, a Roedean-educated martial artist related to Bulldog Drummond and John Wesley Hardin. The happy couple were transported to the counter-earth planet Zillikian where they fought baddies, wild west style, in the grand tradition of Buck Rogers. Dawn’s weapon of choice was a Randall fighting knife.

My favourite JT title, ‘Wagons to Backsight’ was recommended to me by my first boss, the brilliant schlock publisher Brian Babani, who employed me to put captions on Marvel Comic strips. Working from From our dream factory above the Owl Bookshop on London’s Kentish Town Road, I was Captain Jack, agony uncle/letters editor in ‘Forces in Combat‘, a weekly compendium of particularly violent comic strips – Deathlock the Demolisher, Rom the Space Knight, Nick Fury, Agent of Shield et al – and production manager/editor/colourer-in for the first Dr Who Comic.

I wrote most, if not all the brilliant cover lines on Forces in Combat issue 8. No wonder I'm burnt out 30 years on.

I sat up late into the night, ruinously drunk, with comic artist legend, Paul Neary, letrasetting headlines such as ‘Together Again for the First Time’ to describe the merging of  SpiderMan and Incredible Hulk strips in frequent showcase editions. It was left to me to fend off the tiresome protests of the Dr Who Appreciation Society, who had the power to annoy the BBC into suspending our merchandising licence, which hung by a slender thread. “What’s wrong with describing the Krynoid as a giant alien cabbage? That’s what it is. Now fuck off and get a life before I drop the lot of you out of a high window,” I’d tell the Who groupies, conveying the spirit of Brian’s message but omitting the defenestration part. What better use of a First in American Studies? I was proof positive of the value to society of a liberal humanities education.

Why oh why did I stray from the shining path of churning out words for money? JT was right: liberals ARE wankers. Look at them today, ruining the country, nancing about marrying Tories and running off with former lesbians while allegedly getting off driving bans by pretending to be their wife. To think for a time I did their bidding, drank their vinho verde. JT never had a problem with writer’s block. Neither did I in those halcyon times.

I left Marvel Comics for The Economist and lost my way.  Since then, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, writing economic and political analysis, indictments of savage regimes, describing ‘high level’ management malarky and penning books and arts reviews.

Belatedly, I now see all this as a lower category of war crime. Re-acquaintance with Edson has reminded me on which side of the line I stand. Henceforth, there will be more along the lines of robot shops, Yuri Gagarin, skull rings, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, whippet racing, the curse of the middle classes, aquarium kitsch, the folk art of ice cream vans. Maybe then I can write a title as compelling as ‘Hints on Self-Preservation when attacked by a War Dog,’ knock predictable flaneurs like Philip Roth off their perch and turn round the ailing fortunes of the British publishing industry.

John J Kelly

You are held in a queue until someone can be arsed . . . .

Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, exponentially increasing computing power, lowering costs and putting Star Trek devices within the reach of the Kalahari bushman. Though I personally think Intel founder Gordon Moore was reaching for a soundbite when he made his famous prediction 46 years ago, the general principle has held true. The average mobile phone, much less smartphone, holds more processing power than the average desktop computer of a decade ago. Much good it does us.

The Thus Law of Modern Communications states that the ability to get a timely, logical, sensible answer to a phone call decreases according to the number of technology-enabled ways people can employ to avoid responding. In the mid 1990s, US researchers coined the phrase ‘Slamdown’ to describe the reaction of 65% of callers directed to voicemail instead of a human being. Since that time, ‘developments’ in voice recognition software, menu-driven automated roulette and general customer-hating jiggery pokery have made a routine call to buy or enquire about everyday goods and services, especially from banks, financial services providers, government, utilities and, most ironic, communications providers, a time of dread, humiliation and frustration for the majority of citizens.

If we don’t hear: ‘all of our operators are busy responding to other customers,’ there is a good chance that we’ll be charged to listen to a list of options followed by a robot voice advising that the most convenient way to deal with the query is online. Finding a telephone contact number online, meanwhile, has become increasingly and deliberately difficult, as ‘customer facing’ companies herd clients into the ether, deploying the hideous doctrine of ‘planned avoidance.’ For the companies, the principal ‘advantages’ are headcount reduction and the ability to log calls to serve as evidence in the event of a legal dispute. In many cases, the customer not only bears the cost of the transaction but pays to do the company’s work – giving a meter reading, entering credit card data, buying insurance, making a travel booking etc. Customer service doyens such as the lovely RyanAir innovated by charging a premium for telephone bookings – and now actually charge a ‘service fee’ for online bookings. Companies profit from transaction cost savings: the customer loses.

WB Yeats' visionary pose, anticipating mobile phone ennui by a good 70 years: Things fall apart; the (CALL) centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Despite the fact that ‘We are helpless, helpless helpless, helpless’ should be the default call centre music on hold, instead of Vivaldi or Sounds of the Seventies, we replicate this crassness in our private lives.  Routine avoidance of personal conversation has become pernicious and commonplace – except, it seems, on public transport, where people babble on mobiles, whilst avoiding eye contact with fellow passengers. ‘Leave a message’ is the likely response to a dialled number, itself accelerating the trend towards ‘responding’ by text or email. I’m finding that increasingly people can’t be bothered to respond by email or text either. Perhaps I should change the header from: ‘Pick up the phone or I’ll chop your head off next time I see you you’ to something less strident.

In Victorian times, there were between ten and twelve mail deliveries a day, enabling multiple correspondences across the capital within 24 hours. Technology has enabled a near-instant response, but the Second Thus Law of Modern Communications states that getting a timely reply is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of finding anyone willing or able give one. We are well and truly wired into an Age of Rudeness, disabled by technology and heading inexorably towards digital oblivion. And no, the irony of writing this message on a computer hasn’t escaped me, nor has the sad fact that due to spamming ratbags, I’ve had to temporarily disable the comments feature on our website. You’ll have to Twitter. God help us.

John J Kelly

PS. Not that anyone should give a monkeys, but the twatter suing Twitter is flying down the wing in a red shirt at the age of 38. His opportunist should be red carded for giving him such bad advice and ruining his hitherto – deserved – reputation for level headedness in a world of airheads.

Will and Kate on the great day, as depicted by the Brick Lane Robot shop's artist in residence

Although not overtly monarchist –  the Brick Lane Robot Shop has nevertheless bowed to public pressure and issued its own unique Will and Kate souvenir wedding memorabilia. In line with our recent policy of shameless product placement, our Will and Kate wedding statuette has also been inducted to the rapidly-expanding Thus Quality Hall of Fame. Observant readers might note that the couple bear a passing resemblance to San Simon and Catrina, Oaxacan Dia de Los Muertos figurines also sold on the Brick Lane site and described as: ‘this middle-aged, loving couple are clearly middle class, happy and still in love. Pity they’re dead.’ Will and Kate are neither middle aged nor dead, and for all we know, they are happy and in love (with each other) unlike Will’s ma and pa on their great day. Kate was middle class but as of tomorrow will be catapulted to the apex of the Upper Classes. Will’s mum likewise, until she fell from grace, became a slapper, then an immaculata after dying in a paparazzi-induced Paris car crash.

The Brick Lane Robot Shop’s Will and Kate Wedding Couple have also been voted ‘Best Royal Wedding Exploitation merchandise’ by our team of judges. And they have added value. After the Royal Wedding, they may well become ‘Dodi And Di at Will and Kate’s Wedding’ souvenir statuettes, particularly since Di appears to be wearing Harrods Green – but am I veering off into the hinterlands of dubious taste here?

John J Kelly

50 years ago today, the first man in space, now commemorated with a plastic table lamp. The House of Thus also has some Gagarin pencils and keyrings, but we're not selling any of them because we like Yuri and always have. He was one of us.

50 years to the day after orbiting the earth for 89 minutes in a tiny capsule jettisoned from the mighty Vostok 2 rocket, Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was awarded another gong. A plastic table lamp constructed in his honour has been inducted into ThusMagazine’s Quality Hall of Fame. The event, widely leaked on the Brick Lane Robot Shop’s secretive Facebook page, has thus far attracted no comment from Russian officials, nor has it featured on BBC Radio, seemingly obsessed with Gagarin chitter chatter on this momentous day. The award judges, long time Gagarin admirers, as opposed to Yuri-come-lately bandwagoners, have stated that both the timing and the bestowing of this honour are entirely coincidental.

Yuri Gagarin table lamp - another quality object from the House of Thus. Note the Vostok 1 scale model at its apex.

The Yuri Gagarin plastic table lamp has been chosen for its unique aesthetics, its ingenious use of a 240 volt AC/DC currency transformer to power a tiny flashlight bulb and the incomprehensible but mystical symbols surrounding its base. The lamp, imported by the Brick Lane Robot Shop from a source in the Ukraine, possibly survived Chernobyl and certainly survived Parcelforce, the brutal UK shipping company which subjected it to six weeks in orbit around various depots. The lamp, which glows in an unusual combination of red and green, often buzzes when left on for more than a few minutes, suggesting preparation for lift off. In short, the Gagarin lamp fulfills most if not all of the Thus Quality Hall of Fame criteria: it is what it is because it is Thus.

I first became interested in Yuri Gagarin as a young man when a Leeds traffic cop pulled me up for allegedly speeding on my motorbike, with the words: ‘Who the fxxx do you think you are? Yuri Gagarin?’ Wearing a helmet and sharing the same physical appearance as Yuri – short, stocky, clearly highly intelligent but wearing the tragic demeanour of somehow missing out on life after displaying early promise – I could see how the policeman might have been mistaken.

I have always empathised with the first man to see the earth from space but was never given another chance to check out the details he no doubt missed on the first, all-too-brief  recce. Some say it was because he put on too much weight on his constant round of victory tour banquets and couldn’t fit in the capsule a second time round. Others say the risk of his dying in space on a second trip was simply too great for a Soviet Deputy of immense public stature and PR value. I tend to believe the latter.

Yuri visited Manchester three months after his triumphant flight – and, like me, survived the experience. He came from a poor background in Siberia, was a modest family man to the end who liked his pint and was a great fan of tinny space hardware. Apart from Siberia, we are also alike in these respects. The enduring popularity of Yuri Gagarin, apart from his brilliant name, is that he was a man of the people: everyman and superman. His achievement lit the blue touch paper under the space race, which gave us non stick pans, pens which wrote upside down and Bowie’s Space Oddity, amongst other priceless cultural adjuncts. (Incidentally, while NASA spent millions developing upside down space biros, the Soviets simply used pencils).

Yuri Gagarin hologram keyring, another life-enhancing gem you missed because you were too lazy to visit the Brick Lane Robot Shop

In celebrating Yuri’s life and achievements, we should not forget that the youth of today take space and its oddities for granted. I recently gave away a priceless holographic Yuri Gagarin keyring to my robot shop neighbour, brilliant wedding photographer Nick White, in exchange for a hideous 1960s side table used for the Robot Shop Day of the Dead skeleton Christmas Tree pageant. ‘It’s great, mate, but who the xxxx is Yuri Gagarin?”He’s the inspiration behind the Yuri Gagarin Chernobyl table lamp. That’s who. Without him, there’d be no satellite TV,’ I replied, with a heavy heart. Nastrovye, you crazy diamond.

John J Kelly

I stayed in this roundy cottage in Portmerion and was given a whole lot of stuff to think about

Back from the Clough Ellis vision of Italianate Arcadia, setting for the surreal 1970s spy series, ‘The Prisoner,’ I struggled to synthesise what I heard, present it as a General Theory of Universal Knowledge, flog it to a New Age business publisher, save the planet, buy myself a converted trawler with a bikini bird crew and bother Japanese whalers (with the bikini bird crew pole dancing round the mizzen mast).

Frankly, I was plaiting sawdust until this morning, stuck at the general theory of universal knowledge bit, and not for the first time. The whole save the planet/get some cash/buy a trawler/bother the whalers with pole dancing sirens scheme looked as dead in the water as my chances of becoming foreign policy advisor after telling Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, another Portmerion guest, that the UN resembled a second rate, more corrupt, version of FIFA. Then I awoke to the epiphany that we are names, not numbers. Every life form on the planet  has a unique individual identity, dignity and purpose. Nature indiscriminately abhors entropy. Humans, the last, lunkheaded twirl of the evolutionary dice, persist in the deadly fallacy that they are above, not a part of, creation. Their high-handed, cack-handed interventions, based on mathematically impossible attempts to exclude uncertainty and randomness from the infinite possibilities afforded by an ever-expanding series of variable circumstances will, by nature, always generate unforeseen, counter-intuitive consequences. The more binary data we collect, the greater the hubristic illusion of control in a quantum universe. We are the deadly meddlers, psychopathic intellectual delinquents with yottabytes of information but no understanding of the tendency of exosystems to deliquesce. Or something along those lines.

Just then another thought hit, me like a great wave biffing a Japanese nuclear plant: ‘Jesus, it’s 8-30 already. I need to walk the whippet. I’ll park this stuff until I’ve seen what the others have written and knock something off tomorrow after I’ve bought a few robots and done Waitrose.’

Firing up my ecologically incorrect 1972 Beetle convertible, partly compensated by its unique interior rainforest microclimate of continual damp and lichens, I was soon yomping round Hampstead Heath, London’s last great wilderness, with no sighting of any other native species apart from George Michael and packs of exotic dogs and their walkers, dressed for the mild weather in North Face Arctic survival parkas. Coffee beaker in one hand, dogpoo bag in the other – careful which one you lift to your lips – I relegated the Mission to Explain to an internal rant about Arsenal’s inability to grasp the essential notion that the purpose of football was not to create the perfect balance sheet but to win the occasional trophy. I was considering whether a latter day Christopher Marlowe would have substituted the tale of Arsene Wenger’s Icarean 49 match unbeaten run followed by six years of no silverware for Tamburlaine the Great when I thought I saw a huge white airbag, bouncing at great speed across the manicured blasted wasteland. As everyone who wasted time in front of the TV in the 1970s instead of revising knows, whenever he tried to escape Portmerion, the Prisoner was engulfed then herded back by a giant chewing gum bubble. The genius of the series was the ambivalence as to whether the village, its inhabitants and the sheepdog bubble itself (called Rover) were real/partially real or whether we were observing the Prisoner’s dream state, induced by his captors to find out how much he knew. Was this why I had been transported to Portmerion?

This will happen if you can't remember what you learned at Portmerion

Hardly. I didn’t put my hand up once to ask a clever question, fearing the bubble would drag me out as soon as I brought tin robots or whippets into the Big Conversation but nobody noticed, much less dragged me off in an airbag. My engulfing bubble on the Heath was the dread of explaining to Julia that despite inviting me to the most stimulating and sometimes surreal weekend I have spent for a very long time, in the company of some of the most stellar minds in this or any other chiliocosm, my tendency for transference activity was once again getting the better of me. For example, revelations from Nassim Taleb that the best laid plans of mice and men always conform to SNAFU were merely reinforcing my resolve to arse around in life and achieve little. My new best friend Sylvia Earle’s plangent exposition of the wanton destruction of our oceans moved me almost to tears but didn’t stop me from discussing 1950s American nudist postcards and the vanishing folk art of ice cream vans when I sat next to the great lady at dinner.

I walked on the beach with Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted and Sylvia Plath, two of my favourite poets, an original bard herself and a painter of profound physical and psychological depth, discussing big motorbikes (Frieda rides one, in mitigation). At breakfast with Human Rights diva Baroness Helena Kennedy I turned the conversation to Glasgow hardmen. I simply frolicked in the anarchic slipstream of my heroine, Miriam Margolyes. But I was one of the lads, to all intents and purposes. The genius of Portmerion is partly the geniuses but also the Thusness of the whole shebang. We’re all names, not numbers, individuals with collective responsibility to do the best we can. Julia’s genius is her understanding of the palette of personalities.

The overarching message, if there was one, was probably wasted on me, like the time I met the Dalai Lama and spent the few seconds in the presence of a Realised Being wondering if he was wearing a Casio or a Rolex. But if you get the chance, go to the Editorial Intelligence Names Not Numbers Symposium. For a taste of the Portmerion conversation, listen to The Forum on the BBC World Service. Make an effort to see Beeban Kidron’s documentary on the Devadasi. iPod the EI podcasts. Read anything by Frieda Hughes and Sylvia Earle’s ‘The World is Blue.’ Imagine Simon Schama having a bloody good knees up in the bar at 2 am then delivering a multidimensional summary of all the big ideas of the past 2500 years six hours later. Try to understand Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan then imagine he was sitting next to you on the bus, which, by the way, was one of those executive football team coaches with leather seats and a big round sofa at the back with loads of snacks and Sky TV  . . .  Jesus, is that the bubble again? Be seeing you.

John J Kelly

PS. Here’s a handy link to all the videos and podcasts from Portmerion

Sex on legs: Venus, a rare ladybot, with telltale tin boobies and paperclip earrings

If my previous post gave the impression that any fool with an unhealthy knowledge of vintage robots and space toys, brightly coloured tin, Mexican death symbolism, a penchant for loud, obscure, smoking rhythm and blues, religious kitsch and clockwork automata could become a retail czar, then I apologise. Robot shopkeeping is no sinecure.  I recall dark days when the only customers to cross the threshold were shoplifters, Belgians or the middle classes – more about them later. There were days when the rain fell relentlessly, the robots refused to walk, when my closing pitch to a shop full of robot fanatic oligarchs was nuked by a leery Red-Stripe- toting transient crashing into the pecking chicken display. Pay days were terminated by the dreaded collectors – loud bearded middle aged know-it-alls declaiming the value of their collection ‘vintage’ robots – ‘not like this cheap Chinese crap.’ In my darkest hour Tower Hamlets’ Trading Standards Thought Police threatened to close the shop down on the grounds that the robots were a potential danger to small children, despite labels declaring ‘for adult collectors only’ on each and every box: ‘doesn’t matter – they look bright and shiny. Kids might try and play with them’.

Balanced against this were strokes of retail genius such as the brief but spectacular run on luminous rosaries, sparked by a single purchase by an exotic beauty, later joined by her sinuous posse. The rosaries were used, allegedly, not to amass afterlife novena credits but as props for a naughty nun turn in the dark recessess of a steamy Shoreditch strip club (of which there are legion). The lapdancers returned to buy robots for unspecified purposes, always paying cash and often hanging around at closing time prior to the early shift. The fact that I was left with a gross of unsold re-orders and no further visits from religious pole dancers is heavenly retribution, I suppose. Anyway, enough already with the sex part.

Terror, leaving aside Belgians and the middle classes, took the form of a visit from a representative of the local Bhangla boys who swaggered into the shop and asked if the robots worked on petrol. I answered what I thought to be a reasonable technical enquiry by telling him that no, virtually all the robots were clockwork, apart from a few battery-powered Japanese examples. He looked nonplussed, flashed the Manson Lamps and muttered something about the possibility of petrol bombs. I told him with no hint of irony that we didn’t sell petrol bombs – for all I knew, he might have been another undercover Tower Hamlets trading standards gumshoe – but that I’d get back to him if our policies changed. Then the penny dropped and I advised him that however slim the pickings might be in the protection racket industry, shaking down the local robot shop was at best a tangential strategy and that he was on CCTV. He didn’t return: probably a nutter, almost certainly the most incompetent gangster ever to strut his stuff on Cheshire St.

Far more trying were middle class rubber-neckers, fresh from holidays in the souks of Marrakech or Istanbul, who thought it infra-dig to haggle over the price of a £2.50 jumping frog or a holographic bleeding heart of Jesus postcard which morphed into the Virgin Mary. Worse were the Belgians, who would not only attempt to barter but would justify their parsimony by asking ‘but what is the point of this object?’ Belgians, of all people, should recognise the logic of charging surreal prices for a pointless service.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past . . . selling religion to sinners and hopping frogs to Philistines, sidestepping petrol bombers, council jobsworths and Brussels on the street of dreams . . .

On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker has just bought a string of plastic skeletons and a tin heart pierced by an arrow for his bird for six quid. Life is sweet.

John J Kelly

The second, more potent reason for my unusual verbal continence is that my recession started earlier than most, forcing me to become a retail tycoon. For the last 18 months, amongst other things, I’ve been been selling tin toys, robots and Day of the Dead stuff in a shop near London’s raffish Brick Lane. For a while I was also living in the shop: no, not above, but actually inside, among the robots, Mexican skeletons and tin ducks on trikes. At night, suspended on a platform bed, inches from the ceiling, huddled under my John Lewis Egyptian cotton duck down duvet – got to keep up standards somehow – I listened as carousing Shoreditchers stabbed the shop window and drunkenly promised to buy each other ‘one o them fucking cool robots.’ I even heard people claiming that they had actually met ‘the robot bloke’ – my opening hours, dictated by fate and other expediencies, boasted a sign which said ‘often open at random.’

The Brick Lane Robot shop at night, guarded by a savage devil dog - alright, my whippet, William

Entombed in my fortress of solitude, besieged by revelling 2 am window shoppers, I mused on wiring up a robot, programmed to start marching and  beckoning while a loudspeaker intoned ‘buy me, then, you twat’  in a Dalek monotone (not dissimilar to the Shoreditch accent). I got as far as briefing my new friend Ben, a Fabricator – more about these Brave New jobs later – to work out the mechanics of such an automaton, which has precedents in the scary mannekin midget shoemakers (sometimes monkeys) occasionally seen eternally hammering soles in the windows of old-fashioned cobblers. But like many of my schemes, cost and effort got the better of me so I endured enforced insomnia sustained by only the imagined prospect of revenge. Plus, by day, these middle class sans culottes were my customers. And the customer is always right.

Brick Lane Robot shop, Christmas 2010

The shop started out under the name of Thus, but unsurprisingly, everybody knew it as the Robot Shop. As a shopkeeper, I became an Illuminatus of the Brick Lane pageant. Aloof from the paddling hoi poloi whose role was to wander aimlessly, gawping at less-than-worthless multicultural tat, gobbling Ethiopian vegan lemongrass burgers, served by Cambodians from trestle stalls, I was a baron, a seigneur, a bloke with a shopfront and stock. People were drawn like moths to the flame by my George Wallace ‘Stand up for President’ 1968 election campaign buttons, plastic prison rosaries designed to stop religious perps strangling themselves and others, elephants on Lambrettas balancing beach balls, Colin Powell GI Joe figures. The list was endless, and I haven’t even got to the robots – I probably will, later.

Like Microsoft, Apple and the Body Shop, the Robot Shop was an accidental empire. Thrown out of home, I rented the storefront premises from an eccentric friend who had bought cheap land in a desolate area of Sweden to pursue his dream of living in a 10 foot hut in the style of Hojoki. In true English middle class fashion, this required 25 acres and a large house, but was entirely consistent with living in a shop – but not trading – for the past 12 years starting at a time when the street vied for the title of London’s most dangerous – certainly most seedy – thoroughfare. (The opening shot of ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was filmed on Cheshire St). My retail odyssey began on my first lonely weekend at the shop, in the dog days of a hot August, when I lined up a few tin robots and a couple of Turkish Iznik plates in the shop window for decoration only and left the door open to dispel the stifling heat. I was affronted when a couple of scarecrows wandered in and started browsing my stuff. Two hours later I had sold the robots, some books and refused offers on my dog. I sourced more robots from the internet, put up shelves, bought a credit card machine, carrier bags, an open/closed sign and a till. The rest is history.

Actually, it will soon be history, for success breeds failure in enterprise Britain. Although the robot shop, like most of Cheshire St, traded to subsistence levels on the crumbs of the footfall from the Sunday Brick Lane market and echoed to the cries of midnight drunks returning from student shebeens the rest of the time, the landlord’s response to the recession has been to double the rent on my expiring lease. So London’ only robot shop will soon cease to trade and I will be obliged to think about doing something serious about my Micawberish situation.

I’ve been thinking of opening a branch in Bloomsbury, where I now live, and extending the franchise to include counter-cultural artefacts, bottle gardens, bonzai trees and coral reef aquariums. But it’s still at the planning stage. As a retail guru, I need to check out whether the 30 Minute Fancy Dress Hire premises which I have the option of acquiring failed because the idea was completely and ingloriously hatstand, the shop was painted fluorescent puke green with a strange golden throne as its centre piece and the owner and staff could not speak English.  The USP was possibly flawed: I guess that too few of the baffled tourist punters wished to wander in and around the British Museum dressed as March Hares, Beefeaters, Batman, gorillas, vicars, tarts or the Queen of Hearts, especially in the teeth of the worst British weather for 100 years, even if the security blokes had let them in. If I were New Labour, I’d employ consultants and focus groups to give me the answer. But since I’m not, I think I’ll go with my instincts. Expect robots in Bloomsbury some time soon, unless I get a better offer.

John J Kelly

David Miliband/Ed Balls/Ed Milliband/David Balls - the new face of New Labour

Responding to a question from Peter Allen on BBC Radio 5 Live , Balls claimed that the £6 billion UK emergency budget cuts announced today would cost ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs.’ When asked to clarify, he repeated that the £6 billion cuts – many of which are earmarked to cull quangos, civil servants’ travel expenses and the like, would result in many hundreds of hundreds of thousands of  job cuts.

In perspective, UK unemployment increased by 53,000 over the past quarter alone to reach 2.51 million, the highest figure since the three months to December 1994 (three years before the New Labour project). By this reckoning, the Balls boys could have fixed the economy and romped home at the election for less than the price of an RBS bailout.

But they didn’t.

Oxbridge taught me the value of a banana. Let me lead you.

Balls had the further audacity to claim that the Lib Dem/Tory Coalition was bent on doing ‘what the Germans have told Greece to do’ – as if this was some sort of madness on the part of those whacky spendthrift Krauts. He furthermore blamed the UK recession on global economic conditions but claimed we were better off than most because we entered with lower levels of debt – oblivious to the fact that New Labour inherited a budget surplus from the Tories but have left the UK in its most indebted state since the Second World War.

As most people in the real world know, the £6 billion cuts announced today are a prelude to very scary and probably destructive slash and burn measures later this year, as the world’s credit markets, under pressure from Euro defaulters and other scallywags, take an increasingly dim view of Britain’s Stalinist-inspired cardboard economy and question our ability to repay burgeoning debts with exports of talent shows, sweary celebrity chefs and private equity Ponzi schemes.

Keep that banana away from me. I know it's not Fair Trade.

There is no question that we cannot continue to run a balance of trade deficit and public sector debt on anything like existing levels, but the question facing the Coalition is how to stimulate export trade in what increasingly looks like another downturn while enacting necessary cuts without choking off the domestic economy. By anyone’s definition, the UK is in crisis. Anyone but Balls, that is.

Andy Burnham: turned out nice again? No, it hasn't

The Rocky Horror Show

New Labour, meanwhile, is staging a talent show of its own. Ed Balls, running on the Gordon Brown’s posterior ticket is jostling with Banana Boy David Milliband, running on the Blair Duke Nuke ‘em ticket, Ed Milliband, running on the Eco-by-gum Worzel Gummidge ticket and Andy Burnham, running on the George Formby Blackpool tram ticket. Diane Abbott, running on the black, proud-to-be-working-class and never mind about sending my kid to public school ticket and other, yet-to-be-revealed whack-jobs may yet emerge to remind us that our politicians are a reflection of the economy – weak, preening, deluded, second-rate.

The one thing they all have in common is that they all went to Oxbridge, as did 18 members of the Coalition Cabinet. What does this tell us? This is Britain, where every middle class white person (and the occasional VERY CLEVER and VERY PUSHY black person) has the right to become elitist, useless and destroy the economy. All you need to do is blag your way into Oxbridge.

I have very little confidence that the Coalition will do the right thing and enact genuine efficiency initiatives, sensitively protecting the jobs and services provided by front line workers while cutting the cadres of overpaid middle managers who have mismanaged the public sector to its present parlous state. I know this because they are incapable of listening to the people who know how to get the work done, and cannot possibly empathise with the people for whom the work needs to be done. That’s because they were educated in dreaming spires from which they never saw the need to emerge. How do I know this? because I went to Oxford. I left after a term, though that’s no excuse.

Oxbridge is the problem, not the solution. Maybe the cuts should start there. But they won’t.

Queens University researchers have discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that

Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

Few would argue that Quality, Service, Value are the cornerstones of a happy, prosperous and competitive economy. It is not good enough to explain the recent painful economic downturn on global macroeconomic conditions and wait for the upturn. No amount of economic or political smoke and mirrors will save a company, much less an economy, from the inevitable consequences of charging too much for indifferent products and services, produced wastefully. A high cost economy with diminishing competitive advantages cannot afford a £130 -160 billion budget deficit, growing at a rate of £11 billion per month.

The CQI is committed to opening a transparent debate as to whether UK Plc wishes to reaffirm its commitment to quality or continue as a casino economy with a few beacon enterprises but a static domestic manufacturing sector and an increasingly outsourced service sector. Politicians acknowledge that cuts in public spending will be necessary to make inroads into this unsustainable deficit, mitigated by improvements in efficiency and productivity. But this begs the question as to why this didn’t happen earlier. The answer is that quality management, in its absolute sense, took a back seat when cash was king.

Public sector net debt has risen from 50 – 60% of UK GDP since 1999 and public spending now accounts for over 43% of the UK national budget, or £13,000 for every adult UK citizen. Unless radical inroads are made to the cost of providing services – or radical cuts - the UK’s credit rating will be downgraded. This will not only affect the government’s ability to borrow,  but will impact on every business left standing.  Only a concerted, nationwide drive towards reducing costs – not reducing the numbers of people in work, by the way – waste reduction but, above all, realistic, sustained continuous improvement, in the way we work, in private and public sectors, will reduce the deficit between what we make and what we consume and enable us to export our surplus, competitively, thus creating jobs. Failure to do so will cripple our economy. This much is self-evident.

The CQI argues that the alternative to slash-and-burn is a root and branch revisiting of the Quality ethos. This in itself begs the question as to how and why we lost sight of these principles. One fundamental reason is that there is a fundamental semantic disconnect between the consumer perception of Quality and its technical application. Consumers value quality. Companies demand it from suppliers, but a significant number of businesses associate the term with quality assurance, compliance and conformance, which they regard as costing time, money and complexity whilst creating little added value. Standards and targets are important – the opposite is no consistency and no goals - but the first is an audit function and the second is an aspiration. The earliest formal definition of Quality states that:

Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow full customer satisfaction. (A.V. Feigenbaum, 1956, Harvard Business Review).

The logic is simple and incontrovertible. Development, maintenance and improvement efforts are the basis of sustainability. Maintenance is relatively easy. Development should be a continous effort, but analysis of successive business cycles have shown that Quality is all-too-often a crisis driven initiative. Step changes in waste reduction, increased productivity, more satisfied customers and higher profits are often followed by a period of maintenance, characterised by audit and target-setting. But without holistic continuous improvement, entropy is inevitable and the root causes re-emerge. At this point the patient blames the medicine and fires the doctor and reaches for a new panacea.

Quality -or whatever you want to call it -  means making and doing things well and then working out how to do things better, at prices people can afford. There is no quick fix or magic potion – quite the reverse. We need to realign the ‘Q’ word and all its powerful nested values, tools and techniques, and rally our workforce around the slogan ‘making things better makes everything better.’ Customers need to be assured by the value and pleasure they derive from buying and using the best products and services that money can buy, not by adherence to international norms and standards. Workers need to be proud to deliver these goods, confident that in doing so, their careers and futures are assured. Anything less is simply not Quality. This much I know.

John J. Kelly