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It’s the end of the Leicestershire Innovation Festival 2024‘s first week and we’re all feeling very loved up! So, the million dollar question this Saturday morning is ‘Who Loves Ya, Baby!’

Beatrice and Benedict are egg cooks par excellence. What they don’t know about how to cook an egg – scrambling, poaching, filleting – isn’t worth knowing about and over the last couple of years they have carved out a small but ongoing enterprise in Leicester fulfilling their customers every ab ovo need.

True, it’s quite a niche market and they don’t have a lot of customers – but it’s big enough to help them pay their cooping needs. They’ve reached the point though that the constant scratching around in the dirt for some more regular income has gotten tiring and they’re faced with an unpleasant truth: it’s time to either give up or grow up and turn their eggy activities into an egg-citing new business start up.

They’re approaching this choice with a degree of trepidation. They’ve both been comfortable so far and are still wrestling with why they should go down the business start up route. They’re particularly struggling with what running a business means – things like insurance, budgets and corporation tax. ‘Why do we have to get into all this nonsense?‘ muses Benedict.

It’s a good question. Why would anyone want to shift working on what they love into working on activities which fill them with dread? They’ve spent years avoiding the skill sets needed to run a business and have run miles from the drudgery they see that defines what running a business means.

But the fact is that if they want to grow, if they want to place their work on a wider public stage and share their love for eggs and their innumerable ways of being cooked, they will have to bring another skill set in to their cosy partnership.

This doesn’t mean that they have to involve someone just like them. Quite the contrary: they need to bring in someone who has no idea about how to coddle an egg – and even less desire to want to learn how to coddle one – but who does know how to communicate the benefits of the process, who can generate enthusiasm for eggs a la Beatrice and Benedict and who knows how to present the consequences of their activities to those distant authorities of the tax man and bank woman.

The first step for them is to find someone who loves them and their work as much as they love producing it; someone who can get enthused about the range of eggy product available and who can communicate that enthusiasm to customers who don’t yet know they’re customers.

This isn’t a straightforward process; in business as in life, finding someone who loves ya is never a straight forward process. But to misquote Kojak’s rhetorical question, ‘Who Loves Us, Baby?’ is a question new start ups would be well worth asking themselves in the search for not only new customers but new advocates, sellers and followers.

The trick is that you have to love them and what they bring to the business and not expect them to be just like you with your own preference for sunny side up.

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Here at the Leicestershire Innovation Festival 2024, we find ourselves pondering, what is it to actually be in a. festival. We’ve remembered advice from one of Leicester’s favourite music sons, Richard Haswell.

Richard Haswell, once advised me as we looked over the wastelands of Wirral Waters pondering the wisdom of holding an arts festival there, that there was much more to a festival than having a band on a stage in a field.

There had to be an air of festivity about a festival: this might involve things like celebrating local and ancient myths, establishing annual rituals and dressing up in strange clothing; it might include being prepared to spend days up to your eyes in mud: and it would almost certainly involve the proximity of intoxicating substances on a very large scale meaning that if you were a festival goer, you would, before long, be out of your mind due to the combination of your creative expression through contemporary dance, blocked Portaloos and the most recent legal highs extracted from horse dung imported from Patagonia.  You would have made the transformation from festival punter to festival celebrant.

The business opportunities at festivals are of course immense (especially those festivals which celebrate the act of business itself) but as a young start up, you need to be careful that you don’t get drawn into so called festivals which are nothing more than the equivalent of a couple of bands on the back of a tractor attached to a spluttering generator.

A new start up needs to watch with a degree of caution the promotional opportunities that present themselves as ‘Walking Festivals’, ‘Chess Festivals’ or even ‘Festival Festivals’ as there is a strong likelihood that there is nothing festive about any of these events. Instead, they are more than likely to be incoherent programmes of activity which are dressed up as essential festival content and which try to persuade you that you’re a celebrant when in fact you’re nothing more than a punter.

If you are faced with the opportunity to present your business at the next big un-festive festival, ask yourself 6 things about that event:

Is there Ritual? Myth? Debauchery?

Will I be able to establish long term relationships with other festival goers?

Will I be able to sell more than it’s costing me to attend?

Am I a seller?

Am I being sold to?

If your answers become increasingly of the ‘yes’ variety as you work your way down this list, then you’ll be a field with a load of other punters listening to some lousy cover band banging out some-one else’s top 10 hits: if they become increasingly of the ‘no’ variety, you’re more than likely to have a life changing transformative experience in the strangest of places which will do wonders for your life, nevermind your business.

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Every religion has its God(s) and every human activity has its own patron saint to pray to: if you’ve lost your car keys, a prayer to St Anthony can help you find them. If you’ve joined a lost cause, best pray to St. Jude Thaddeus and if you’ve recently opened a coffee shop and can’t find your customers, a call to St. Drogo (patron saint of coffee house owners) might put you back on the right course.

Whilst Charles Landy’s book ‘Gods of Management’ has become an international best seller, no-one has yet  identified the deities who help make business start ups more likely to succeed than fail. Forget business plans, cash forecasts and equity traps, the future of the successful business start up is in the hands of the gods and it would be wise, if you’re a striving entrepreneur, to get your head around them as quick as you can.

Rather than attend interminable networking meetings in future in order to meet new customers and suppliers, why not pray to St. Bénézet, the patron saint of bridge builders? A few words in his shell like will guarantee you an unending stream of potential buyers and sellers, without having to go to the trouble of eating those faddish fiddly finger food buffets at those tedious afterwork bashes which fizzle out just as the going’s getting good.

St Cajetan, the patron saint of the job seeker and unemployed is clearly a saint worth cultivating if you need to grow your workforce quickly, without having to resort to the troublesome practice of zero hour contracts for potentially troublesome staff. Caj (as he’s affectionately referred to) will ensure the very best of the long term unemployed turn up at your enterprise incubation unit, washed and brushed up and raring to go from the first moment they switch on your erratic laptop.

And whilst we’re on the subject of IT, don’t forget to genuflect to St. Isidora of Seville, patron saint of computer workers, technicians and software developers (I’m not making this up by the way). Isidora is renowned for her ability to undertake a 240 Volt reboot in the blink of her unblinking eyes – aka as ‘the switch off / on’ button in the trade.

But head of this particular catholic and apostolic church is St. Homobonus, the patron saint of business and enterprise. A quick prayer to him – coupled to a friendly financial handshake in a brown paper bag – is guaranteed to ensure that your business start up is looked after by the capable hands of those who know and those who can and those who do.

Business plans? Who needs a business plan when you’ve got the Saints on your side?

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Today, we’re marking the 4th anniversary of Brexit by fondly remembering one of the Aunt Sallies of the European project, the ‘European Jolly’.

“It’s like you’ve got to get to know each other at 60mph!” Monica wryly observed as we all piled into a minibus at midnight at Vilnius Airport.

We were truly a motley crew: Brits, Portuguese, Greeks all gathering for an EU funded Adult Learning Project in the Creative Arts with a couple of stray Estonian old farm ladies who looked like they’d taken the wrong bus in Tallinn and now had found themselves in an international minibus which was tentatively negotiating the ice and the slush out of the airport.

But Monica was right: by the time the minibus had driven us out of the airport and towards our destination in what felt like Outer Mongolia ( even if it was Inner Lithuania), we had all become best mates ever, swapping stories of family, football, long kept secrets we never thought we would ever tell anyone, and remarking on how beautiful Lithuania looked in the black of night when the conversation showed signs of flagging.

EU mobilities – which is what we were all examples of on that icy Vilnius night, albeit semi-comatose examples – are strange phenomena. You fly hundreds of miles, get driven to some town miles from any international airport at the wrong time of day; arrive in a hotel after the bar has shut and all the local restaurants have closed for the foreseeable future; check into a room which hasn’t been occupied in the foreseeable past; struggle to find any broadband connection and only then realise you’ve forgotten your international plug adapter.

So you settle back for 20 minutes of Eastern European TV before the bling and razzamatazz of Polish sausage adverts starts to get tiresome. You observe at 3am after two hours of no sleep that you were, in the parlance of those back in the office, ‘on a jolly’ so you may as well try and damn well jolly yourself up before the first formal session starts just after the crack of dawn (which is some 7 hours away given that we are in the northern most reaches of the northern hemisphere at this point in time). ‘

Being on a jolly‘ according to those back in the office consists of dry martinis in the hotel bar at 6pm before a luxurious 3 course dinner with erudite, witty, charming, intelligent, attractive and sophisticated colleagues who were fascinated in you, fascinating to be with and whose fascinators never stopped fascinating all week long, come rain or hail, sleet or snow.

In actual fact you’d be lucky to find a kindred spirit who was equally unfascinated by the porridge the hotel would serve up at breakfast – and they’d be lucky to find you dressed in anything more fascinating than what you had set off in from the UK just 24 hours earlier.

That’s another aspect of the EU mobility: time doesn’t merely stop. It stretches, shrinks and distorts in ways Einstein could never have foreseen. What happened yesterday seems like it happened a month ago; what happened just five minutes ago gives you an eery sense of deja vue; and plans for the day after tomorrow when we’re all due to go on a social trip to an obscure European forest may as well be planned for the turn of the century.

Our planning faculties desert us in those early hours of the mobility and it’s all we can do to find our bedroom after breakfast, never mind consider the challenges of getting on another minibus with our new found stranger-friends over two days into the future. That’s 48 hours away! 2880 minutes! 172,800 seconds! A whole life time of generations! Best get my laptop switched on and look like I have some important emails to attend to before the work starts in earnest.

And we are all very earnest, our gang of stranger-friends whose new found friendships have been forged across the Byelorussian plains of Lithuania. We had probably travelled along the same tracks that the Cossacks would have ridden hell for leather over from Russia, riding roughshod over farmers, labourers and land workers up to their knees in shit dealing with the latest manifesto from the commissar and the scientists of the Ukraine, driving on to commit various atrocities before hammering it back to St Petersburg, horses snorting, their large heavy bear coats steaming with the exertion and pulling their spoils along behind them in ramshackle sleds, desperate to get back over the borders before the Poles could catch up with them and exert their bloody revenge.

Those Europeans certainly knew how to invade and annex their neighbours property, land and chattels in fascinating ways. Whilst bouncing along in a decrepit minibus with 12 stranger-friends didn’t quite have the romanticism that marauding Cossacks did, we were comfortable in our knowledge that our kind of European mobility is less about pillaging strangers and more about turning them into longer term friends who have one thing in common: none of us could sleep the night before and we all got bored with the adverts for Polish meatloaf.

Part of the back story to The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player is the story of tennis ornithologist, Mrs Hacienda Buscando Stanley Carter (aka Phoebe Snetsinger).

This is her first observations of Lord A.J.P.G.R. Murray in the field: and the story of her first fatal mistake.

You can read all about the prequel to this story Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player ⁠here⁠.

Or you can order your copy of The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player ⁠here⁠.

Check out what’s inspired our publication of Confessions of an Ageing Football Player through some of our podcasts here!

Episode 1: Brazil, 2014, My Team 2015. – The ‘Confessions’ Sports Player Series

Relive your glorious early footballing moment just in time for the Qatar World Cup! Prefer to read the book than listen to the podcasts? You can buy your very own signed copy of Confessions of an Ageing Football Player here.

Episode 4: Into the Heart of Darkness. – The ‘Confessions’ Sports Player Series

In which our hero i.e. me learns to become a permanent surprise to the opposition and the guerilla in their midst. Prefer to read the book than listen to the podcasts? You can buy your very own signed copy of Confessions of an Ageing Football Player here.

Fancy some more? Just subscribe here to hear the rest of the book!

And said, ‘You’re on a pre-war footing chaps, best get ready.’

So what was the talk around the water cooler about, amidst all that sweating and huffing and puffing?

You can imagine. What it meant to be on a pre-war footing. What it meant to be a member of Dad’s Army. What ration books meant. What conscription meant. How we needed to think about getting our nearest and dearest signed up to get ready for the hun or the jerries or whoever it was who was in our line of fire these days.

Not that anyone could be certain about who was on our line of fire these days.  Was it the Muslims, the Jews, the Gentiles or the EU?  Probably the EU, considering the EU are the fault of pretty much everything these days. 

When push comes to military shove, and we’re going to be on a pre-war footing, its best we know whose line of fire we’re in and whose feet we want to stand on.

Bearing in mind our gym is in Lincolnshire, perhaps it’s not surprising that the water cooler talk easily accepted the notion of being on a pre-war footing, especially after that General somewhere down south remarked that we should be thinking about conscripting all those able-bodied persons who could lend a foot to whatever war effort we were about to embark on. 

Being in Lincolnshire, the armed forces are prevalent in our gyms, supermarkets and pubs, so they probably have one up on the rest of us mere civvies who are hoping to avoid another war effort, especially one which is going to involve a lot of feet being stood on.