LIVE24SEVEN // Business THOUGHT S FOR DEC EMB E R 2 0 1 7 Digby Lord
You find me, Dear Reader, on a crisp, sunny autumnal Sunday morning, settling down to write a few reflections for your delectation with my mind full of, “I cannot believe it!” from Board Breakfasts yesterday and today.
My small firm, Digby Jones LLP, provides my services as Chairman, Director or Advisor to AON Risk Solutions, Triumph Motorcycles, Thatchers Cider, Celixir Stem Cell Research, Argentex Forex, On-Logistics and Urica Invoice Discounting and also supplies me to all those conferences, lunches and dinners where I am fortunate enough to speak. It isn’t a limited company providing services, the sort being attacked as a type of tax-avoidance by the Chancellor, but a Limited Liability Partnership that has just two self-employed, risk- taking, tax-paying partners – my wife Pat and me.
Jones
Lady Jones certainly contributes to the success of the firm, she isn’t just a decorative partner – no matter how attractive that situation may well be. One such contribution is our regular Board Meetings over breakfast at weekends. A couple of hours discussing the week just gone and the week to come, crystallising thoughts, changing stuff and sharing successes, but also talking about (and taking lessons from) outcomes that may not have been amongst my more memorable moments, or rather may well have been, but for all the wrong reasons!
We also have a good trawl through the weekend Times and Financial Times and a catch-up courtesy of This Week. It is this trawl that often leads, over the toast and coffee, to a fair few outbursts straight out of the Victor Meldrew playbook. I thought, as you leaf through the pages of this excellent magazine, you may care to let me share a couple with you, as who knows, you may feel that you’re not the only one thinking like this, or indeed, you may alternatively consider me irredeemably on the wrong side of the argument...a position often taken by Her Nibs whose response to my enquiry as to whether she will still love me when I am a fat, bald, old and objectionable bigot was, “But I do”!
So on 11th November, when at 11:00 the entire country silently remembers those of our countrymen and women and those of our Allies in Freedom who, regardless of the colour of their skin or the God they worshipped or the amount of money they had or the home they came from, paid the Ultimate Price so that we may be free, it was galling to read that a Cambridge University tutor has been admonished for emailing the poor little snowflakes starting their university course this autumn with the blindingly obvious fact that it was going to be necessary to work hard, to be focussed on the subject matter and to concentrate so as to derive the greatest enjoyment from the course they had chosen. Evidently the vulnerable, delicate strawberries (they bruise easily!) complained that their mental health was at risk from the imposition of such pressure and they objected to being told they were going to have to work hard! No wonder they want someone else (us, the taxpayer) to pay for their three years at uni when they don’t intend to do what they’re there for in the first place! My VMIR (Victor Meldrew Impersonation Routine) was developing nicely.
Then I entertained my Wife and Business Partner to a letter in the Times from a lady called Jane. (By the way, my father always said I was to treat females as ladies until they proved themselves otherwise!) In the light of the huge number of scandals and revelations engulfing show business and politics, Jane wanted us to know that a long time ago a colleague at work put his arm around her in a taxi; she was pleased to report that this disgraceful act of sexual predation led to the miscreant and she being happily married for some thirty-five years!
Most definitely, alleged acts of abuse, sexual assault and rape should lead straight to the judicial system and the (normally) women who have been subjected to such appalling behaviour should be supported and encouraged all the way, but I can’t help
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