An interview with Martin Harrison, co-founder of Copify

A while ago I wrote about the copywriting-services company Copify on this blog, and then I wrote this follow-up article for the Guardian.

For the latter I conducted an email interview with Copify co-founder Martin Harrison (as well as three other writers). Due to the constraints of the word-limit, much of this interview was not published as part of the latter article; so Martin has given me permission to publish the Q&A in full on my blog.

Here it is:


Alexander Velky: You originally positioned Copify as "A platform for publishers to source written content quickly, easily and cost-effectively." That seems a pretty neat summary for clients; how would you sum it up to a prospective contributing writer?

Martin Harrison: A platform for you to earn money as and when it suits you, without the hassle of having to prospect for work and sending out invoices that may, or may not be paid.


AV: How do you vet would-be writers' credentials? And how do you decide whether they are "professional" or not?

MH: Writers are assessed based on their CV and a written sample. Around 90% of writers approved start out as standard, and based on feedback are considered for promotion. Only writers who are exceptional, based on their experience and their written sample are approved immediately as a professional.

We reject 60-70% of all applications.

You can read more about what we look for in applications here.


AV: You charge different rates to clients for using professional or non-professional writers. What's the thinking behind this? And what's the take-up like for each option?

MH: I wouldn't describe any of our writers as 'non-professional', the term we use is 'standard'. The reason we have a separate 'professional' tier of pricing is twofold. Some clients want the assurance that their copy will be written by a more experienced writer and some writers deserve to be rewarded for their experience by being paid more. 

In terms of take-up, the split between standard and professional is approximately 70/30 in favour of standard, which should tell you a thing or two about attitudes towards pricing.


AV: From a writer's perspective, are they only shown job adverts corresponding to their level of professionalism?

Professional level writers can access all orders, standard level writers only those at that level. 


AV: When talking to clients in public you've frequently advertised fees as low as 3p per word. The lowest price I saw on Copify offered to a writer was 1p per word. Does this mean you take, on average, a 66.67% cut of the total fee charged to clients?

MH: I'm not going to comment on what exactly our average cut is, but I can tell you that it is far lower than this when you factor in the costs associated with running the business. And just to be clear, we don't offer 1p per word on every order, far from it.


As a professional writer (as your site described me) I was offered 1p per word jobs. Do you think this is an attractive proposition for a professional writer?

MH: Clearly not for you Alex! But we wouldn't be in business if there weren't some writers who were happy to work for this amount, and paying customers who were happy with the end product. It all depends on your circumstances.


AV: What's the lowest rate offered to non-professional writers?

MH: 1p a word is the lowest we have ever offered. I can't see us ever offering any less than this.


AV: The Professional Copywriters' Network (with whom Copify has exchanged argument on several occasions, I think) says "By the word pricing positions copywriting as a commodity rather than a professional service", and discourages the practice. Do you agree with their statement?

MH: No. Our clients like to pay by the word so they know exactly what they are getting. They are not comfortable with paying for an indeterminate amount of copy. It has nothing to do with being a 'professional service'. There is no viable alternative to this model for a business like ours.


AV: Do you feel by-the-word pricing can be reconciled with professional practice? (If so, even at 1p per word?)

MH: If someone can come up with a practical alternative to by the word pricing then I'm all ears! But but so far, in all of the debate we've had, no-one has actually suggested anything that is viable. Alastaire Allday wrote a piece about this last year and his conclusion was ultimately that the solution to content mills was to create another, more expensive one!


AV: Would you agree that Copify is a more attractive proposition for aspiring writers rather than professionals?

MH: No. As I've said before, it depends entirely on your circumstances. Yes, we like to give aspiring writers a shot but we also have plenty of experienced, agency staff and freelance copywriters on our books. They use the site when in need of a bit of extra income, or maybe when they are a little slow with other business. 


AV: One ambivalent blogger (Andy Maslen) suggested copywriting could never be a "profession", but that it was a "trade"; do you think this is an important distinction? (And why?)

MH: I think he is right to an extent. Until there is a recognised union or trade body to govern things then it is something of a 'wild west' industry and it will be difficult to call it a profession. The PCN have tried to be this body, but as I've said previously, until they get real about pricing they're going to do more harm than good.


AV: I wrote a blog about my experience with your site and you pointed out in a threatening but not unreasonable manner that I'd breached site T&Cs by mentioning a client's name; would it be a breach of those same T&Cs if I'd tried to use work submitted via Copify in a portfolio either published online or sent privately accompanying my CV?

MH: If you hadn't been granted permission then technically yes it would. That said, unless there was a serious conflict of interest, we would probably turn a blind eye to our writers using a piece in a printed portfolio or emailing it to a prospective employer.

Publishing on the web, however, is a big no-no. This might be seen by some as pretty extreme, but there's a very important reason that we do it. In many cases, our customers are punting on our copy as the work of their internal 'team of writers' and usually at a vastly inflated rate. Were your blog post to have been indexed by Google, we would have been in hot soup with the client, and they with theirs. 

Ironically, the furniture company you were attempting to name and shame probably had no visibility of the process at all.


AV: What makes Copify preferable (or a viable alternative) to the well-trod path of an unpaid copywriting-internship at an agency?

MH: Again, this all depends on circumstances and the type of copywriter you want to be. An internship is as much about getting an insight into the world of work (which for me as a lazy graduate was a pretty rude awakening!) so I'd always recommend that people go down this route if they want to work in an office.


AV: Presumably you're a professional writer yourself. (I haven't seen that many typos in your blog posts.) How might you have used Copify to further your career when you were younger?

MH: I am yes. I've been a staff copywriter agency-side, a freelance copywriter, a contract copywriter client-side and in my last role before joining Copify full-time I was in charge of copy in the SEO team of one of the UK's largest retailers. All of this has given me a pretty well-rounded knowledge of the industry and crucially, the commercial side of things. This is something that a lot of our detractors don't really have a handle on.

I've gone on record as saying I would have given my left arm for an opportunity like Copify when I was starting out and I meant it. Bar one or two outrageous day rates, the sort of rates that we pay are what I was accustomed to when I was freelancing. 


AV: How quickly could you satisfactorily complete a typical 1p-per-word brief?

MH: Me personally? Well that depends on a number of factors, the word count and the subject matter primarily. Let's say for argument's sake that it's an article of 400 words on a subject I have covered before, therefore not requiring hours of research. I could probably write a  decent piece in half an hour.


AV: Do you agree that "[Your clients] don't require writers; just people who can type"?

MH: No, not at all. If this was the case, why wouldn't our clients just do it themselves?


AV: Tom Albrighton (of the PCN) has said "Your best chances of republication (propagating backlinks across multiple domains) come with a compelling, high-quality article." Are the sorts of articles produced for your clients (particularly at the 1p-per-word) ever likely to be read from start to finish by a human being (as opposed to a crawler)?

MH: Yes, the days of copy being written and published purely and simply to be crawled by Google are over. 


AV: Your background is in SEO; do you think it's fair to say that SEO practitioners tend to be reactive rather than proactive?

MH: It's a generalisation to say that all SEOs are reactive, it really depends on how good they are. With regards to content, however, my experience is that the SEO industry has very much been forced to react by Google's recent algorithm updates.

'Content is king' is a phrase that is often bandied about, but very few SEOs were really practicing what they preached until recently, when they have been forced into it by penalties for low quality and duplicate content. Some SEOs are now even rebranding themselves as 'content marketing specialists'!

Up until now, there has very much been a 'cheap as possible' approach, which is why sites like Textbroker have flourished. Now there is a great deal more editorial integrity, which is why SEOs are investing sensible money in content, rather than seeking to have it written overseas for $0.000003 per word. 

That said, I'm still frequently challenged by SEOs for being 'too expensive' which always makes me laugh when I consider the rates that are supposedly fair according to the PCN.


AV: A friend of mine once described SEO practitioners as "snake-oil salesmen". As someone who described all SEOs but Amazon’s as “a little bit grey,” do you think there's any truth in that?

MH: It's important that I clarify exactly what I meant by this. I was referring to the fact that almost every SEO has to bend the rules a little bit in order to get things done. For example, Google openly condemns any form of paid linkbuilding, but I don't know any SEO who isn't buying links in one way or another. 

There are some 'snake oil' SEOs out there for sure, but also some very good, innovative SEOs who appreciate the value of great content.


AV: You've been going for a few years now: You must be doing something right. Do you ever worry that clients won't see the return on investment they expect from the sort of articles you're able to provide at the prices they're willing to pay?

MH: Copy alone is something that is very difficult to put an ROI on. You can write articles until the cows come home, if you're not promoting them in the right way you won't see much of a return.

We frequently supply articles that are published on websites like The Independent and Marie Clare. There is a relationship between our client and these publications, but the copy would not be published if it wasn't up to scratch. 

Bad Language: Deconstructing BAE Systems' FAQs copy for WHICH COUNTRIES DO YOU SELL TO?

BAE's upside-down flag.

Which countries does BAE Systems sell bits of murder-weapons to?

It's a simple enough question, and one which is asked sufficiently frequently to have its own page on BAE Systems' frequently asked questions (FAQs) website section.

But, judging from the shocking ineptitude of their answer, I imagine people will be continuing to ask with frequency for years to come.

Observe:

I remember, back when I used to leave the house sometimes, I'd see bad adverts – usually on billboards – and then write about them. One such advert I never got around to discussing was a BAE billboard that towered over the teeming masses at Waterloo Station in London town. It was a giant union flag (upside-down, mind you) with a short strapline about how great, and (I guess) British, BAE Systems is.

It was a bad advert – vague, pompous, loaded with all kinds of unnecessary baggage. Flags will do that to your adverts. Especially huge brazen ones the like of which are only normally seen accompanying royal celebrations or far-right rallies. (Or both.)

But what alternative is available to BAE? They can hardly depict children in far-off countries being blown to bits by the cluster bombs they once had no qualms manufacturing. It would be the equivalent of Ronald McDonald showing you a clogged artery or, I don't know, tobacco companies showing you a cancerous lung. (Oh, wait...)

But the economy is more important than anything else, and we know this because BAE isn't legally obliged to show shrapnel-ravaged corpses in its advertising properties. It is allowed to claim ownership of the national flag, however, because of its importance in its contribution to UK employment, trade and international diplomacy.

But, leaving all that aside, let's copy-edit that terrible FAQ answer into something actually resembling an answer to that damned pesky frequently asked question. And let's do so making the ridiculous assumption that the brief is to tell something close to the truth.


BAE says: 
"Like all companies we have to prioritise where we do business."

I say: 
[Nothing. That sentence is utterly meaningless and could happily be discarded.]

BAE says:"In setting these priorities we take into account a wide range of commercial, legal and reputational factors."

I say: We'd rather not tell you which countries we sell to. 

BAE says:
"BAE Systems will only pursue business opportunities when we are satisfied that our strict policies and governance systems can be complied with."

I say: 
But we'll sell to pretty much anyone we're allowed to.

BAE says:"The sale of export equipment, whether it is the sale of weapon systems, platforms, equipment, and/or services is highly regulated."

I say: It's tough being an international arms-dealer these days.

BAE says:
"BAE Systems works closely with and maintains a regular dialogue with governments in our home markets in relation to all our export sales."

I say: 
Especially when Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US spend such little time invading people.

BAE says:"All export licence applications are considered by governments on a case-by-case basis and take into account the proposed customer country, the type of product or service to be exported, and its future use."

I say: The government frequently tries to piss on our chips.

BAE says:
"Our applications comply with trade regulations and the requirements for end-user undertakings."

I say: 
But even they cannot deny that murder is good for business.

BAE says:"Our Responsible Trading Principles help us make informed decisions about the business opportunities we pursue and help employees apply our values in their decision-making."

I say: We do what we want, as far as they'll let us.

BAE says:
"See more on export controls." [Linked.]

I say: 
Now piss off.


That's it.

So, my rewritten FAQ answer in its entirety goes... (all together now)

WHICH COUNTRIES DO YOU SELL TO?

We'd rather not tell you which countries we sell to, but we'll sell to pretty much anyone we're allowed to. 

It's tough being an international arms-dealer these days. Especially when Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US spend such little time invading people. 

The government frequently tries to piss on our chips - but even they cannot deny that murder is good for business. We do what we want, as far as they'll let us.

Now piss off.

For anyone actually wanting to know which countries BAE sells to, reportedly: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Tanzania. Anyone who'll buy, pretty much; countries with dubious regimes, often using BAE's products to persecute minority populations and... well, what do you expect people to use murder weapons for? Defence???

In future I suggest such answers are filed under an FEQs section – for frequently evaded questions. And one can file this blog under an FRLs section in tribute to everyone's favourite far-right Hungarian political party's "frequently refuted lies".

Now that's copywriting.

How I joined, and quickly left, the "Online Copywriting Service" Copify – and how they threatened to sue me

***Update: after reading the original post, Martin Harrison co-founder of Copify sent me a threatening email alleging I'd breached some T&Cs I agreed to upon signing up for his website. The following post has been amended to conceal the name of the specific client the job advert herein refers to – even though it was but one example of many – and I've added a postscript to clarify this.***

I'm a copywriter and I'm looking for extra copywriting work; so I decided to join Copify.

I decided to join Copify even though I'd heard numerous tales of their low, low rates and controversial payment-per-word policy (handily rounded-up here by Andrew Nattan) – and even though I'd accepted by implication of my membership of the Professional Copywriters' Network their own (quite specific) rates as a "starting point for negotiations".

I decided to join Copify because some extra work I was expecting to kick off recently has fallen through, and I could do with a few extra gigs to keep me in Pinot Noir and HobNobs. And I've not lately got any work through the Professional Copywriters' Network, or People Per Hour, or oDesk, or any of the other jobsites I'm signed up to.

So I thought I'd sign up to Copify and find out for myself – because one ought to find things out for one's self – just how viable their offering is for a jobbing freelance writer.

To prove my credentials I had to provide references from satisfied customers, people I'd worked for or former course tutors write 200 words about how the "London Olympics" – not the official title of the event, but that's what they called it – had impacted the local environment.

This task was eerily reminiscent of a question in my A-level General Studies exam, which I aced with a smooth D-grade by answering via the medium of a crude pencil-sketched diagram.

My pencil kept breaking on the screen though, so I wrote this:

The 2012 Summer Olympics, imaginatively branded as London 2012, was an international multi-sport event that took place last year, mainly in the capital city of the UK.  

The successful bid to host the games was welcomed as a victory for the UK’s international profile; but the controversial nature of such large-scale events soon brought out Britons’ inherent factionalism and reduced politicians and people alike to argumentative wrecks. It was said that the games would either be completely brilliant and unmissable – worthy of booking extended holidays on the off-chance that the soon-to-be notorious ticket lottery would deliver – or an utter disaster, reducing the capital to a state of smouldering rubble habitable only to mutant viruses and refugees from war-torn third-world nations who had made their way to London 2012 under the guise of expert pole-vaulters, etc. 

In reality, it was fine: buses ran on time; nobody famous was killed; and even the most cynical among us ended up watching some on TV and enjoying it.  

There is, however, a tall building in Ilford comprising serviced apartments which is officially branded as “Stratford East”, despite being a good four miles east of where the games took place.  

This is known as “legacy”.

To my surprise, given that I hadn't actually addressed the subject matter satisfactorily, this was accepted within 24 hours and proved sufficient to earn me a little "professional" badge on my profile:

At least that's what I saw when I logged in to my dashboard. I presume nobody can view my public profile as I haven't yet been rated, or indeed completed any jobs for Copify's clients. Nor do I intend to. And here's why:

The above is a typical job ad on Copify.

First, I draw your attention to the payment: £2.00. (Two pounds.)

The company (CENSORED: no referred traffic for you, small furniture company) would like a 200-word blog on the subject of "British Bespoke Furniture". They say the purpose of the blog is to "inform the audience", but they are lying through their bespoke maple-veneer MDF holes; no 200-word blog required to include the "keywords" "British Bespoke Furniture, Bespoke Furniture Manufacture" naturally - not stuffed, mind you - within its famine-starved 200-word body is intended to inform any furniture-buying audience about anything, regardless of the catchiness of its title.

Unless said audience crosses over on the Venn diagram of bespoke-furniture-website-visiting-morons into the "people with a passing knowledge of SEO trends over the years" circle; because this kind of bloodless digital swill that blogs up the arteries of the world-wide web exists solely as the result of clueless retail hacks acting on the ill advice of near-sighted SEO agencies who were no doubt paid far more for their shit ideas stolen off equally shit online forums than a "professional" "copywriter" ever will be to churn out this vapid bullshit into an unsuspecting digital wasteland.

But imagine how many you'd need to complete to 

feed your hamster, let alone your family of five?

Nobody will ever read this proposed blog post.

And, whatever your rubbish SEO agency has told you, Google will not reward you for flinging this kind of sand-blasted gristle into its face. Search engines are already becoming fairly able to tell the difference between "informing" articles and pointless content pages that nobody ever spends more than three seconds on after following a link.

By peddling these blogettes on the subject of nothing, each revolving around the antiquated concept of a couple of keywords, all you're doing, [Furniture company name CENSORED], is chucking two-pound-coins at a brick wall. Or, perhaps more accurately given the horrible reality that must lie behind the existence of this job-ad, at a tramp in an internet cafe.

Hopefully nobody will ever write this proposed blog post either. If only my blog had more existing furniture credentials I could pretty much guarantee it by changing the name of this post to "Informative Bespoke Furniture Blog" or something similar and stealing your coveted #1 slot on the SERPs.

I have hidden my account and will delete it as soon as I can work out how. Not surprisingly, this option is not immediately apparent on Copify's dashboard. Obviously the whole thing is a ridiculous sham and no more attractive an option for any self-respecting writer (professional or aspiring) than an unpaid internship; indeed, less so, as this will only give you a portfolio of bilge.

Who's to blame for all this then?

I don't blame Copify; Copify are providing a service that (really badly run) businesses are happy to exploit. They are a blameless boil on capitalism's bum. Admittedly tweets like the below show a contempt for my profession that could perhaps annoy me, if it was in any way an unusual spectacle:

The targeted client turned them down on this occasion, preferring the option of someone who would "become part of the team". An admirable sentiment; almost as admirable as paying them in the first place would be. But when some writers can afford to work for free for a while, that leaves those who can't (as I could not, when I arrived in London with my writing MA, my debt, and my call-centre destiny writ across my forehead for all but me to see) in a bad place. The sort of place where they insert overwrought parenthetical clauses into sentences willy-nilly.

So, are the writers to blame? These writers, if writers they are, are the sort of writers who sit there frantically banging out 200-word blog posts in the internet cafés and public libraries across the land, their super-noodles going cold in the polythene cup at their side, and half-crushed cartons of Um-Bongo clenched between their brown and crooked teeth. One cannot blame such.

I don't blame the Furniture Imbeciles of the world either. One can't expect them to know anything about the internet, or to care about paying writers a decent wage to do a decent job. They don't want a decent job done. They don't require writers; just people who can type.

Ultimately we must blame the terrible Luddite SEO-agency scum who know all the facts of how the web used to work, but understand nothing of the universal and timeless fact that quality (as a noun, not a fucking adjective) will always win.

And if you can't afford it, you won't get it.


***POSTSCRIPT***

As mentioned at the start of the article, the inclusion of the client-company's name in this blog post was deemed by Copify's co-founder to be in breach of point-four of the terms-and-conditions I obviously didn't bother reading on signing up to the site, and therefore excuse enough to threaten me with legal action.

His email included these lines:

"I'm all for freedom of speech and although I'm obviously unhappy that you have decided to go down this route, I'm happy to let this stand. One thing we can't allow, however, is the publication of the name of the client for whom the copy you have mentioned was ordered. We have a confidentiality agreement in place, (section 4 of our terms of conditions -  http://uk.copify.com/pages/terms) which your use of the site is legally bound by. This blog post contravenes this clause, which means that we have grounds to take legal action. 

Please remove all references and links to the client's site within 48 hours and refrain from using screenshots or other images elsewhere. Otherwise, we will be forced to instruct our solicitors. 

Martin Harrison
Copify Ltd."

Of course I am no longer using the site, but no doubt remain bound by the agreements I made on signing in.

I'd hate to force anyone to do anything so foul as consort with lawyers, and it's no skin off my nose to deprive a cheap furniture company of the visits it would have got from the links in this blog post; even though said visits (while unlikely to "convert") would undoubtedly outnumber those garnered from the above article for which they paid a writer the princely sum of £2.

I do find it amusing though that somebody who is "all for" freedom of speech would go on so swiftly after reminding me and himself of this fact to articulate a threat that seems to directly conflict with that sentiment.

But this is the same man who uses weasel words to pretend his website pays something resembling a reasonable fee for writing work, which – as someone who has logged in and witnessed that desolate world – I must say it's my opinion that it does not:

He's also unduly fond of using the hashtag #FACTS, implying either that he's sure many people will be interested in his accompanying tweets with reference to their interest in the general trending topic of things factual, or that he doesn't understand the world of Twitter very well just yet. As to whether he understands the world of copy and content at all, or whether his low, low prices for clients ever equal a minimum wage for the website's writers, it's surely not best for me to offer an opinion.

You must decide for yourself.

Bad Language: Picking Punctuation Nits in the M&S Café

This is odd, isn't it?

It's unusual to see dashes used on signs in general; but here we have one hanging off the end of a compound noun to introduce a list.

This sign is almost entirely wrong in terms of punctuation and grammar, but let's start with what's right – which is very rarely right in such instances, or ever, nowadays – at least the dash isn't a hyphen.

Now before you get on your high horse and say I've done the same thing just there; I haven't. Those are en-dashes. I copied them from Wikipedia. That's how I roll. (Slowly.)

Yes, I spent most of my time in my only ever full-time corporate copywriting gig trying to prevent people from using free-standing hyphens, and encouraging them to copy-and-paste laboriously from Wikipedia or learn alt-codes. And I spent the rest of the time making tea. Because these are fights worth fighting and nobody else will fight them. Everyone else can have poverty, world hunger and child-abusing African warlords; I'll have free-standing hyphens. Now I'm unemployed freelance I do the same in my spare time.

Okay, now to what's wrong with it. First up: that's a freakin' em-dash. I know an em-dash when I see one. They're all the more conspicuous for almost never being seen outside eighteenth century novels; so, yep: that's definitely one.

But why?

An en-dash would suffice here. Much as the en-dash's bigger (or at least fatter) brother is a pleasing sight in print, the en-dash is really the only dash you can get away with in web use, ad copy or sign-writing. That dash, partly on account of its width, is as likely to introduce itself to the brain as a (pretty negative) mathematical symbol as a bit of punctuation introducing a list.

Also, em-dashes traditionally have no gaps on either side. This is one of the other reasons they rarely introduce clauses in the way en-dashes have done increasingly since the days of modernism, Joyce, Woolf, stream-of-consciousness, evenings spread out against skies like etherized patients, etc. I just checked that poem actually, and Eliot used em-dashes. Bit of trivia for you there. And a bit of a slap in the face for the point I was just making.

Either way, M&S ain't no T. S. Eliot and that em-dash needs to go on a diet or sidle up to the word "coffee" pronto.

Actually, no: it needs to bugger off entirely. Because you can't use a dash to introduce a list. Even if you can, you certainly shouldn't; that's what colons are for.

And while we're on the subject of lists, that list of items ain't too clever either. Aside from the indiscriminate capitalization (another 18th century quirk that's also occasionally used by US hip hop artists on Twitter for some reason, I've noticed), that list is punctuationally defunct. You need either bullet points, semicolons, or to put an "and" between the last two items out of the three. You can have the comma or not. You decide. Depends how much you like Oxford, I guess.

The final thing that annoys me about this inane piece of coffee-themed puffery on the M&S café wall in Haverfordwest that I have to stare at every time I drink my Chai latte while the baby stuffs ham sandwiches into its mouth or actually don't really have to stare at but seem to find that I usually end up staring at anyway is that "peace of mind" is a noun, while both the other listed virtues are adjectives.

If you ever write a list of three things (or any other number) and you're puzzling over it for hours and it still seems shit even though you've listed all the qualities (or defects) you meant to and you've no idea why and you're making a "duuuuuuh" sound and drooling a bit, I can guarantee you 100% of the time it's because the different listed items are different speech parts and do not therefore sit comfortably side-by-side in this manner.

You might say that by going adjective, adjective, compound noun there's a certain kind of adspeak copywritten poetry at work here. You might say that, but you'd be bang wrong.

And who even puts a full stop on a wall? After a 10-word non-sentence? And then not on other bits of wall where they've written stuff?

Whoever wrote this. (Or should that be "whomever"?)

As a closing note, the lack of punctuation in the below farewell incorrectly identifies the visited article as an uncapitalized noun (whether a place or person nobody knows) whose name is "see you again soon".

I'm pretty sure this is not what was meant; and you may think I'm being picky, but I think that if you're a corporate entity – as opposed to say just some dude writing an email, or a memo, or a pornographic missive on a public-toilet wall – then you ought to write your messages properly or else you may as well just poo in your hand and smear "BUY STUFF" on the glass panes of the sliding doors at the entrance to your shop.

Why even shell out on paint if your budget won't stretch to an education?

Or a copywriter?

Yours, invigorated,

A (but not The) Velky.

Bad Language: Justice Secretary Chris Grayling and the English gendered-pronouns problem

As far as grammatical problems go — and indeed problems of sexual inequality — this one's pretty rare in that almost everyone who uses English as their first spoken language is aware of it.

Perhaps an even higher proportion of second-language speakers are aware of it; it sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.

For those who don't make grammar a hobby, this is the problem:

You know when you talk hypothetically about "a person", and that person usually ends up being male? Yeah. That's the problem. It's sexism by convenience, and the best solution anyone's come up with thus far is the one most of us — consciously or otherwise — fall back on: pluralising said hypothetical individual.

This means he or she (more on that later) becomes "they". And everyone knows "they" is (ahem, are) plural. There are more than one of them.

So when you're in an important business meeting (as I frequently am) and somebody starts a sentence with "When a customer signs up to our website to make a purchase ..." chances are they'll finish it with something like, "They'll leave and never come back." Depending on how good their website is.

If they finish with "He'll ..." chances are someone will pick them up on their use of needlessly gendered (AKA sexist) language. Even if they're not doing so in earnest. This linguistic point is so well-known as to be more-or-less impossible for even the least-interested individual to let slip. Even if you just want to get one over on a colleague/friend/enemy. Even if you are just a mainstream pedant.

So what do you say instead? Well some people deliberately use "she" by way of trying to address millennia of sexual inequality. This is fine in the instances where the hypothetical person is demonstrably likelier to be female; as it would be completely justifiable to use "he" if the reverse were true. But you can't fight millennia of fire with fire. And "fine" and "justifiable" still aren't synonymous with "ideal". I don't want any hypothetical individual, who represents a wider group to which there's any chance I might belong, represented using a pronoun gendered to a sex to which I definitely don't belong. Thank you very much. And not because I'm hyper-sensitive or difficult; it's just because there's no real need for it. It's stupid.

You could say "he or she" instead, but it sounds arch and clumsy, and it still puts men first. You could say "she or he", or you could switch between the two. But someone might hear you use just one and misunderstand your motives, or — worse yet — someone might have to listen to you he-sheing and/or she-heing your way through a PowerPoint presentation (or a relationship problem) to the point that you actually annoy that person to death. Somebody might be friends with you and witness it regularly and decide not to be friends with you.

You can avoid the linguistic construct entirely if you like. There is no utterly necessary occasion where it simply has to be used; where a decision between he, she and they simply has to be taken. (I guarantee you I could rewrite any such imagined instance you're burdened with. For ten pounds.) But — this hot, gendered potato aside — it's a completely fine and often quite useful sentence structure. There's no sense in culling it like a septic badger.

Chris Grayling: or was it? (Or were they?)

It rears its head almost daily, but I heard a very pointed example this morning on the radio. A Tory MP who may or may not have been the justice secretary Chris Grayling was being interviewed on the news section of BBC 6Music. (Or his interview was being broadcast there at any rate.)

He was talking about new laws that would allow home-owners to stab, skin, slice and dice burglars — and cook them in a stew, or what have you. There was some typically vague legal term like "proportionate force" or "reasonable force", just to give judges a creative way to ensure lots of poor people, and no rich people, end up in prison as a result of this. (Right, comrades?)

The Tory began the recorded section of his interview by referring to the imagined hypothetical home-owner with a male pronoun: "he". A voice in his ear, either real or imagined, started furiously remonstrating with him about how old, white, rich and sexist he would no doubt appear if he finished the sentence in the same way; and by the next time grammar dictated he had to reach for a pronoun he picked "they".

Before spin or good sense could save him, the Tory accidentally, and in a half-arsed way, implied all home-owners likely to be provoked to using reasonable force to defend their domiciles from ruffians were men. He probably meant all home-owners. Indeed, he probably meant everyone. That's how grammar used to work, you see.

Yes, in the Tory's defence  "he" was officially endorsed — not just tolerated — as the hypothetical pronoun of choice for just over a hundred years. And before that if language wasn't being sexist it was only because people hadn't had the time to think of ways in which it could be, what with all the plague and cholera and witch-burning and everything. This "solution" to the problem was called The Universal He, putting one in mind of such archetypes of masculinity as He-Man, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, I don't bloody know, Greg Rusedski.

But linguistic philosophy and second-wave feminism put paid to this in the twentieth century — some while after the average Tory MP studied grammar at Eton. I guess the crux of the combined arguments is that our language is largely geared toward representing men, and concealing women. And that even though it's only language, this has an effect on how we view the world, especially as we acquire the language as small innocent gendered or genderless children. If every hypothetical person is male, every significant person must surely be male too. This is the point in the argument at which certain types of person (many male, but not all) raise objections. But they didn't read this far anyway, so never mind them*.

The plural pronouns employed to indicate the hypothetical dissenters in the last sentence of the previous paragraph are valid, as the sentences are constructed (not contrived) to discuss people in the plural, not one hypothetical individual from a greater mass. This is one tactic for dealing with the issue.

The MP could have said something along the lines of: home-owners have the right to defend their estates from marauding chavs with as many balls as they can let fly from their multitudinous cannon. but for some reason people like the hypothetical one to be singular. It seems to have more clout; perhaps because the listener can imagine itself being that "he or she"? MPs love pretending to talk to individuals as much as they hate actually having to do it. I guess this is why my own proposal — no doubt offered many times in the past, even perhaps by greater grammarians than I** — hasn't yet caught on.

My proposal was soft-launched in the middle of the previous paragraph, indicated italicised, underlined, and in bold, and it amounts to no less than using "it" and "its" instead of he, her, his, her, they, theirs.

Why don't we do this already? Well, because "it" is a pronoun reserved for non-human objects (boxes, breadbaskets and strap-ons), intangible concepts (love, rheumatism and ornateness), and — apparently — "lower animals", like (presumably) moss piglets, spider mites and chow chows.

People would be affronted if you referred to them as "it", possibly even more so than if you referred to them using the opposite gender to which you declare affiliation. Indeed "it" is also reserved pejoratively for people of indeterminate gender who do not deserve — in the creatively nasty grammar-abuser's imagined world — a definite gendered pronoun.

I know this from experience; not because I have personally made the effort or put in the thought to be confident in describing myself as "transgender", but because sometimes — usually when you're a teenager, and at your most vulnerable — people feel the need to make such decisions for you.

Yes, having frequently being referred to in my beardless formative years with such linguistic stews as "that man-woman thing that sits on the window ledge," I've thought about the reality of being described as "it" for a long time. And I quite like it.

"It" is genderless, unsaddled, and therefore wild. If a horse is a higher animal, and spends its days for the most part toff-ridden — being ridden by toffs — that's a privilege I can forgo. Indeed, I haven't looked this up, but I'm pretty sure most of these alleged "higher animals" are afforded their status not by any kind of special power they possess (see moss piglets), but by centuries of selfless service to humans: either by carrying us into battle, fetching our pipes and slippers, or displaying traits we seek to emulate. Probably masculine traits. (I'm taking a pitch at lions being included here.)

If you're happier for your gender (or someone else's which is not your own) to be included as information in a sentence where it doesn't need to be, than you are for your solidarity with lower animals, non-human objects and intangible concepts to be made apparent in that same sentence, then I have no place for you on my Christmas card list.

I ask you: are you truly more inclined to align yourself with He-Man, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, I don't bloody know, Greg Rusedski — or indeed their exact female counterparts: She-Ra, Minnie Driver and, I don't bloody know, Maria Sharapova — than you are to buddy up with moss piglets, rheumatism and breadbaskets? Why, you idiot?

I guess this is where we spare a few words for the currently-thought-correct plural pronoun "they/their". This option, deemed the hazily inoffensive neutral-ground by the faceless masses of the political-correctness-resigned bastard public, is the worst of the bunch.

Why? Because it's grammatically a non-starter. It's stupid. I don't care if Shakespeare used it. As if that's a bloody argument anyway; he couldn't even spell his own name the same twice. He was an unrestrained loon, and no gatekeeper of Good English.

So use "it"; "it" is the only right and proper pronoun for this use.

Alternatively, use "the fool".

As in, if a baker charges sixteen pence for a baker's dozen of jam doughnuts, how much does the fool charge for a regular non-baker's dozen?

Now before you get all creatively critical about how many bakers own the concept of not being able to count properly, we're not talking about apostrophes today. And you can pretty much guarantee that about 90% of men and women (and bakers) are fools, but you can never — without revealing yourself to be a massive sexist — guess how many people are male, or female, or can transform themselves in the duration of a sentence from being one or the other (or both) into being an indeterminate number of "people" in the plural.

Only X-Factor's Multiple Man can do that. And he's pretty freaking gendered.

The end.

Love,

Alexander V


Images free or copyright-free.

* It's a similar point to that which politely suggests a newspaper regularly showing famous sportspeople, businessmen and politicians — mostly male, especially the "businessmen" — alongside almost-completely-naked teenage girls is not a newspaper that is symptomatic of, or even helps works toward, a sexually equal society.

** I'm pretty sure this is a joke, because probably that ought to say "me". If indeed I was accidentally right to use "I" then please ignore my mistake and take the joke in the spirit it was meant: smugness.

Bad Adverts — Racist Squash and Poo-in-a-Boat, or Why I hate the Olympics

No amount of familiarity with the brand that was universally derided upon its launch is breeding anything in my brain but further — faster, harder, stronger, more tumescent — contempt.

I was always likely to hate the ad-frenzy surrounding the Olympics anyway, because I'm a miserable sod who is bored by televised competitive sporting events, except on those rare occasions when I can pretend it has some higher allegorical significance than I know it really has. And this is no such occasion.

The London 2012 Olympic branding is a snapshot of a blink-of-an-eye era of bizarre nouveau-eighties/nineties design: a sort of new-rave mistake that's achieved the previously unthinkable feat of pissing off self-appointed design critics nationwide and, erm, the Islamic Republic of Iran in equal measures.

The wind changed, and we're stuck with it.

But far worse than anything the people responsible for the event itself could cook up is the cavalcade of loosely tied-in crap that makes up the piggyback ad campaigns of the official sponsors.

At least the cynical cash-ins of the unofficial sponsors are unintentionally funny. Like Subway with their Z-list celebs, training hard and eating shit with some of the least healthy fast food the USA can muster, and boxing, basketballing and pole vaulting (yeah, bloody pole vaulting of all things) their way to mediocrity.

But there's something truly, supremely ghastly in the self-satisfied circle-jerk of the Official Sponsors' output. It's like they really haven't tried. They don't care. They're official so they know they're the best. The rest writes itself, right?

Wrong.

I've noted the sponsorship = concept foible before, as I'm sure have many more serious bloggers. But this time it's gone postal. They're so bad they're not even funny.

Rather than giving them the undue honour of an exhaustive list — and, let's face it, there are probably at least a hundred examples of bad Olympic ads — I thought I'd single out the couple I have really noticed: the two pitiful examples of imagination-free boilerplate dross and, respectively, bizarre and ill-advised flights of wimsy that have assaulted me over recent weeks on my daily commute. As is often the case, they're billboards.

So, the dross first.

Vitamin Water / Racist Squash

"Worldwide partner and best mate."

Because there's no friendship without the exchange of contracts.

This is one of those hot new energy water things that's basically branded squash, but posing as something that operates on a much higher plane: a veritable mesospheric nectar of the gods. Special squash, if you will. And if you won't, that's probably why I wasn't hired for this campaign.

(It's officially not nutritious mind you.)

Their unique spin on this whole Olympics thing is obviously that Olympians drink this special squash to make them better at running, jumping, whacking balls, chucking objects and brushing furiously at artificial ice with specially designed brooms.

I'll buy that. The pitch; not the product, obviously: the product is an even more pointless thing than bottled water. At least bottled water is useful where no bugger will provide you with filtered water out of a tap for free, which ought by now to be a human right. This stuff is just for people who want squash on the go but can't be bothered to think ahead. I have no place in my world for such people.

No, my real problem with this though is that they've plagiarized the BNP's logo. And that's just not cricket. Is cricket an Olympic sport? Who knows? Who cares? All I know is that Racist Squash is a first, and probably a last, on the billboards of Dorset and Hampshire. And I'll have none of it.


EDF / Poo-in-a-Boat

Second up, and last — lest we get too carried away — is secretly French EDF's poo-in-a-boat billboard, which presumably ties in with a much grander poo-in-a-boat campaign, with a poo-in-a-boat backstory and poo-in-a-boat tone of voice.

But let's just deal with one mistake at a time, shall we, and look at the billboard, which is what looks at us while we wait for our trains, which have been made late by the rain, which was sent by God to prove how much he's already bloody bored to tears by the Olympics.

How we've come to live in a world where something as oblique as "energy" needs branding is beyond me. But then, so many things are, so let's get on with it.

This poo-in-a-boat is sailing for some distant shore and has some characteristically modish copy (with full stops where other punctuation points ought to be) nestled in the corner.

This is what I think about what it says. What it says neatly sums up their main message in two easy-to-digest and entirely unconvincing snippets, needlessly separated by a full stop. Then it says "relax". Like, hey, we didn't even need a third thing. Get over it.

But nobody cares what I think about what it says — even less than they care about what I think of anything else, which is already very little. And this is at least partly because there's a poo-in-a-boat in the middle of the picture.

Show me a poo-in-a-boat most days of the week and I'll do nowt but shrug. I might shake my head at you, or tell you to bugger off if I'm in a particularly bad mood. But show me a poo-in-a-boat while you're trying to sell me energy — in a non-consumable capacity, at that: not even in a can or a fat sandwich or a bottle of special racist squash or anything — and I'll actually be less likely to buy energy from you than I'll be to buy it from any given unbranded non-official Olympic sponsoring competitor of yours.

Go a step further, if you've the temerity, and show me a poo-in-a-boat with an Olympic logo in the corner, and then what do you think's going to happen?

Well, all I'm going to have in my head is Paula Radcliffe pooing on the side of the road in the name of athletic endeavors: pooing on the side of the road like there's no reason not to and jogging on to win or come fifth or whatever it was in the race or marathon or whatever it was (who even cares?) and just shrugging her shoulders and saying "I think it was the tuna", like that's how we deal with having pooed on the side of the road — and not just the side of a quiet country road, but a big important road that everyone's watching you run down and filming you running down and filming you pooing on.

And I've heard it opined that Ms Radcliffe is a great athlete and it's a shame that she'll forever be remembered by most of the bastard public (of whom I stand up and count myself as one) as that woman that pooed on the road because, let's face it, most of us don't give a good God-damn who runs where and how fast they go. Good luck to them. That's their hobby. Glad they're free to do it.

But pooing on the road? That's something I do care about and, coincidentally, I'm dead against it. I dont think anyone should poo on the road in a country where effluent disposal areas are called "public conveniences" for a bloody reason; and much less do I think that if they do — and then run off nonchalantly saying "maybe it was the tuna" — that they should have the luxury to be remembered primarily for something else that they did on that day or on any other.

But that's just my opinion. Nobody cares about that, and why should they? We've all got one and most of them stink, etc.

What I do care about as a proud footsoldier in the ad industry is that some genius at EDF thinks it's a good idea to take Paula's stool and recast it. Up there on the billboard, no longer is her poo an abandoned embarrassment of a poo at the side of the road to athletic achievement; now it's the hero of the story: sailing from the water's edge of ambition to the far shore of accomplishment. The poo in a boat that could; the poo in a boat that did.

And I know this is that self same poo because even though at first glance it looks like a healthy solid sort of poo, you soon notice the moist point at its head, where its mother anus birthed it, that betrays its position on the Bristol Scale: it's a 4, deep down, even though it may look like a 2 or a 3. And this is exactly the sort of poo produced by a long-distance runner if they've eaten more than they should (or else what they should not) have the night before.

Racist-pilferers and poo-apologists, the lot of them.

And so, EDF and Vitamin Water exemplify all that I find distasteful about professional sport: that I am expected to have more respect for a human being, in this day and age, because they can run faster than me, or swing more gracefully than me, or throw an object at a more careful angle than me.

Newsflash: We outran all our predators years ago, folks. We invented cars.

And even our computer screens are rarely so heavy nowadays that one needs a person of unusually great strength, for example a Russian body-builder, to lift them.

Nobody has truly needed to throw a javelin, or a hammer, or a discus exceptionally far since the invention of nuclear ballistics.

The great achievements of our age are not of the body. They are of the mind. It's taken us years to get here: to the place where Stephen Hawking has more societal worth than any given cage fighter. And you lot with your gung-ho, poo-in-a-boat spirit would rob us of that achievement.

Female athletes strive hard to become the best woman at any given event: exerting themselves beyond most people's imaginations' bounds just to be second to men in the only thing in the world that men will ever have a guaranteed natural advantage in — coincidentally the only thing that matters less and less with every passing day in the civilized world: physical strength.

You lot with your racist squash would have us believe the measure of a great nation is not its contributions to art, to literature, to science; to furthering the cause of world peace, or to tackling the cruel disparity in the distribution of our planet's resources. You'd have us believe greatness is measured in kilograms, in metres, in minutes, seconds, milliseconds; in arbitrary numbers on white bits of cardboard held up to quantify a display of synchronized swimming that could — perhaps, at a push — but for its dogged and dumb desire to please, perhaps also be thought of as art.

And you're wrong. And you know you're wrong. And you hate yourself for it.

Which is why you can't wait to buy my poetry collection which will be published in December for the very reasonable price of £9.95, and which is current and relevant and important (much more important than sport) and which is a much greater achievement than anything sponsored by McDonalds or EDF, and which cannot be measured — no matter how you might try — in kilograms, in metres, in minutes; or in arbitrary numbers on white bits of card.

Got that?

Great.

In the meantime, though, if you want to hire me for my creative copywriting skills — second only to my poetry skills and curling skills — DM me on Twitter.

Your bemused pedestrian and cultural cog,

AV


Amazing photos by me. Main image: "Sex Olympics" by Zef Cherry-Kynaston.

Why I hate the Union Flag

For a start off, I just want to make clear that I don't hate the Queen.

Or any of her kids. Or her husband.

I'm not that keen on her genocidal Belgian great great great uncle — however many times removed he was — but he's dead anyway.

I don't think there should be a queen. Of anything. Anywhere. But I don't think there's a god either (not the one I've read about in Genesis), yet I love the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and think almost everything he says is right.

If the Queen's on TV, and she's given a speaking part, I'll often listen to what she has to say. She's eighty-odd and she's been a lot of places and seen a lot of things. She has a pretty interesting job. She knows a thing or two.

I don't think that her job should exist — just as I don't thing Dr Williams's job should exist. But that doesn't mean I don't think they do their jobs well and are well-deserving of them.

But in anticipation of the Queen's 60th year in her job being celebrated this coming weekend I've found miniature plastic Union Flags (or Union Jacks — call them what you will) festooned over my country, my town, indeed even the outside of my house.

This blog is about why that doesn't make me proud or happy.

The Union Flag

The Union Flag is badly designed.

If it were returned by a design agency nowadays the client would surely dismiss it as not fit for purpose.

The asymetry of the bisected red saltire transposed over the white cross of St Andrew is irritating once you take note of it.

A lot of people probably still think the flag is horizontally and vertically symetrical, as well as having a pleasing turn symmetry of two, which means you could never accidentally fly it upside down. If the former were true it would probably give the flag all the aesthetic supremacy with which it's often falsely credited; it'd be streets ahead of those funny off-centre cruciform colourways favoured by the Nordic countries.

But no, whoever updated the Union Flag from its original bipatriotic design decided to complicate matters to the point that any given individual drawing the design freehand from that point onward to the end of time would probably get it at least 30% wrong.

It's also ill-suited to adaptation. Sure, it's all over cushions and tablecloths and flasks and dog blankets and racist tattoos and seasonal bottles of Pimm's, etc. But as soon as you use the exhaust fumes of aircraft to try and recreate it, it becomes French, Hungarian, Russian, Dutch: anything but British. Our pilots just aren't good enough to match that complexity. The same happens if you turn it into triangular bunting: you're suddenly anonymous, at an international level.

But these minor quibbles are expressed partly in jest; it's a striking design, and much better than a lot of the rubbish out there. Take Nepal's irritatingly shaped broken Christmas decoration, the recently removed flag of Gadaffi's Libya — which displays a shocking lack of imagination, or the forgettable and derivative attempts belonging to any number of commonwealth territories across the globe.

No, what really makes me say it's not fit for purpose, is that it doesn't satisfactorily represent that which it claims to: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

"Our" flag in its current design is over a hundred years old, which any historian worth its salt will tell you betrays a neglectful attention to detail on behalf of its custodians.

The Union Flag essentially represents two of the four major territories that it's supposed to, and one that it isn't supposed to. Let's start at the beginning.

England

St George's cross, the flag of England for hundreds of years — although not before it was the flag of medieval Georgia — is well-represented with pride of place along the central axis of the Union Flag.

This makes sense. As with most unions, everyone knows this isn't an equal partnership, so of course England goes in the middle and everything else works around it. (Where's the capital, folks?)

Red is a primary colour often associated with anger and other high passions, probably because of its close resemblance to blood and possibly something to do with it traveling faster than other colours; and white is a good neutral base (which saves on dye, too); so that's a good starting point right there. Good flag, England. And so far, so good for the Union Flag.

Scotland

Scotland comes second. (Which is probably why a lot of Scots are keen on jacking in this whole union thing, but let's put that aside for the moment.)

St Andrew's saltire — white on blue — is a perfect complement to the starting point of St George's cross. It goes the other way (diagonal), and contains another classic primary colour: blue. Blue is probably the second best colour after red, and symbolic of cooler and deeper emotions, as well as water, and fish, and blue Smarties and loads of other stuff.

Transposed behind the English flag, it occupies four equal rectangular quarters quite nicely without losing too much of its own identity or taking up too much space around the English flag, which, as I mentioned, obviously comes first — that's clear to see.

This was the original design of the flag, or the one that had the best pitch and managed to stick, at any rate. This was used for a good while, until somebody noticed another nearby Celtic landmass that hadn't been under the yoke of any Anglo-Saxons lately, so Ireland was invited to join the party.

Ireland

Yes, you see, the flag was adapted to incorporate Ireland. The whole of Ireland. Not Northern Ireland, which didn't exist then, and only exists now in the minds of about a quarter of the territory's inhabitants.

Most of the Irelanders in that area apparently argue* between belonging to the Republic of Ireland (whose inhabitants nowadays have their own flag with not a trace of red or blue in it) or the United Kingdom, whose flag we are currently unravelling, and which — unfortunately for those who fancy it — might not exist for much longer.

(*Actually, a lot of them probably don't argue. A lot of them probably just try and get on with their lives and keep their thoughts to themselves.)

But back in the past, which is a terrible place,  Ireland — the whole of what was then called Ireland: the whole island — was, erm... invited into the Union in such a way as it simply couldn't refuse. And at that point, sort of like at this point, nobody could get every single person on that island to decide which flag best represented the lot of them and, you know, how they felt their place in the world was best defined.

They had a saint mind you, and like the Scottish and English saints, he was a man, and a man with a common name, and with a cross made out of a combination of one primary colour and some white (to save on extra dye). St Patrick the snake-hater's flag was a lot like the English flag, only rotated so that the red cross hit the corners instead of the sides.

Perfect! Only there was already a saltire on the Union Flag, so this one — some pillock decided — would be chopped in half across each of its vertical axes and overlaid on top of the Scots saltire in a sort of haphazard manner reminiscent of a sad child trying to rearrange the shards of its mother's favourite vase.

England was first and foremost; Scotland was next; and Ireland was shoehorned in to look like it was a bad case of sunburn on one side of Scotland's sleeping face.

The overall effect was smashing! And most people were delighted. Because most people, in the Union, were (and are) English.

Look at our awesome flag! They would yell, probably, while drinking tea, or harvesting diamonds, or whipping Indians. It looked like St George's cross on acid. Or St George's cross going to war. Or St George's cross with level 35 magic armour. Or something...

But then actually Ireland suddenly had always hated being in the Union, it turned out, and actually wasn't invited so much as coerced. So then most of Ireland left, except for the bits that mainly contained Scots, or something.

It's very complicated, and I'm not actually writing this for the purpose of offending anyone, so let's just say it happened, and the Union was left with...

Northern Ireland

The problem with Northern Ireland is that it's not necessarily a country. Everyone knows that a country is a bunch of people all in the same place, all worshipping the same god — or at least pretending to, all eating the same food, listening to the same music, and being jolly well happy to see one another any time the burdens of capitalism necessitate that they have to leave the comfort and safety of their own homes.

Oh, and it helps if you have a flag.

Northern Ireland might not actually be a country — nobody really knows. And I'm not being wilfully provocative by saying this (only a third of them would be provoked anyway, because the rest are pretty sure it's either the UK, or Ireland); it's actually a fact, inasmuch as what makes something a country is other people's legal documents agreeing that it is one. Scotland's a country. England's a country.  Kosovo may or may not be a country (or may be a particularly naughty part of Serbia), depending on who you talk to. But nobody knows what Northern Ireland is.

And despite what people might have told you in the past about Northern Ireland's flag being represented in the Union Flag — it isn't. How could it be? Northern Ireland doesn't have a (country/province-specific) flag.

The bit of the Union Flag that one might presume to represent Northern Ireland ought, ironically, to only appeal to those Northern Irelanders in the Union that don't want to be in the Union, and want to be in the Republic. (Of Ireland.) Because the saltire of St Patrick represents all of Ireland, most of which has its own flag thank you very much. So the Union Flag — just to really hammer this point home — claims ownership of a country that left the Union, effectively destroying the Union as was, about a hundred years ago.

There is, however, another country that's part of the Union and is as yet not represented on the flag. It's a little country in the west. A little country where I spent most of my life. You might have heard of it...

Wales

I grew up labouring (well, more often idling) under the misapprehension that Wales wasn't a country. Not a proper country, anyway.

Otherwise it'd be in the flag, wouldn't it? Like Scotland. And Northern Ireland.

It was also convenient for me to believe Wales wasn't a country, because I grew up there as an English boy and was frequently reminded by my peers (the one's who didn't like me, usually) that I had not that special god-given birthright of Welshness. That I was not Welsh and did not belong to the land in which I lived.

Bollocks to that, I thought, but rarely said. Wales belongs to England. Everyone knows that. Look at the (UK) flag.

Mind you though, the Welsh had a story that there was once a big red Welsh dragon that beat a big(ish) white English dragon in a fight, and that red dragon now adorns their national flag. The white English dragon isn't on the English flag so I guess that's proof that it's dead.

While it may have been true for a long time that Wales wasn't a country (ever since Wessex and Mercia and all the rest of them were swallowed up into England, along with Wales), it definitely is now. So I apologize to anyone who I have previously misinformed about that. Ahem.

And Wales has its own flag. And that flag is nowhere to be seen on the Union Flag — nor are any of its elements.

It would be perfectly possible to transpose some green onto the bottom half of the union flag, or better yet stick a massive dragon in front of the various crosses on the Flag — just to tart it up a bit. But that doesn't seem to have happened. According to the Union flag, the Union still includes Ireland, and doesn't recognize Wales as a country.

Hell, they could even fit one of either version of the flag of St David onto the Union Flag if they wanted to keep it cross-centric. But no. None of it.

The Union

I suppose what this proves is that what really bothers me about the Union Flag is the "Union" bit.

I've always been interested in flags, and yet the more I've grown up and the more I've seen (and read) of the world, the more I've hated the notion of nations: the concept of countries. Especially all-powerful bullying dominant countries for whom the flag represents not union, not hope, not equality, not greatness; but subjugation, empire, and shame, shame, shame.

How can a Queen in London rule in New Zealand? What the hell's with that?

It's as nuts as Moscow telling Prague, or Talinn, or Samarkand what to do.

We hate seeing our own worst traits in others, and most English people are quick to condemn the cultural or political bullying of modern powers like the USA, China and Russia. But we're happy to fly the Union Flag. Indeed, our right wing politicals (who rarely bother to differentiate the UK and England from one another unless it's especially convenient for their current argument) tend to dislike the European Union because all the decisions get made far, far away in Brussels, which — last time I looked — is actually situated in the far West of Europe, a mere hop skip and a jump from London.

How do they think people in Inverness or Truro or Aberystwyth feel?

Estonia is often cited as a success story against the backdrop of failing economies that plague the less-mighty EU nations. It's one of those new Eastern European countries — "new" if you completely ignore it's pre-Soviet history, "Eastern" if you discount that most definitions of the geographical midpoint of Europe place it closer to the centre of the continent than England is.

Estonia — like a wounded hedgehog escaping the clumsy paws of an old bear — shook off the iron hand of Soviet rule in the early '90s and sought solace in a new pan-European family, whose centre was even further from its capital (Talinn) than Moscow was. They invented Skype (small wonder!) and they've never looked back East (except perhaps on stormy nights when they hear thunder).

If Scotland wants to follow in Estonia's footsteps, and Montenegro's footsteps, and South Sudan's footsteps, I say that's a good thing. If only because we can finally take down that damn flag and just stick and English one up in its place. Or a Welsh one. Or... well it depends where your flagpole is. I suppose the Northern Irish could keep the Union Flag if they liked.

What a lot of flag-wavers don't seem to understand is how justifiably offended a lot of people are by the Union Flag. I'm not comparing the United Kingdom with the USSR; though widdly now, it's been far more successful over the years — it's lasted much, much longer despite enforcing London's ideology and its monarchs' rule on perhaps even more people across the globe (in the past few hundred years) than Moscow ever managed with the Soviet Union.

And, as there were then millions under the boot of Britannia, there are peoples across the globe today who occupy places that are essentially as much a country as the next, but for the fact that they're not allowed to fly their flags on government buildings. There are even places like Abkhazia and Transnistria and Somaliland that are to all intents and purposes, flag-flying countries, but which have no UN recognition.

There are regions within established and recognized countries across the globe where if you fly a certain flag that identifies you of a supporter of a concept that could — just maybe — one day be a country, you could be imprisoned or worse.

These are the flags that interest me. These are the flags worth hoisting, worth thinking about, talking about, worrying about: worth loving.

What's ours? A relic. A mass-produced rag too ubiquitous to even be considered an antique. There's no bravery in it, no hope, no glory. There surely was in the past, for some, at certain times. Now it's nothing but proof of our collective ignorance and unwillingness to move out of the 19th century, and the 20th century, toward a brighter future.

I'm not saying the EU is the way forward. But it's a healthier concept than the UK ever was, even if it dies a younger death. It's a better idea: a collection of millions and millions of people with cultures diverse but interests (sometimes) common. Don't hate it because it's plagued by bureaucrats. We're all plagued by bureaucrats! Make it better. Fight for it. Try.

What's the UK for? What's the point in it? What does it achieve?

Keeps Anglo-Saxons dominant over Celts? What a thing to strive for. And it doesn't even manage that! Two of our last three Prime Ministers were Scots!

Those countries I mentioned earlier that aren't countries — or countries that used to be countries; or countries that may one day be countries — Wikipedia tends to call states with limited recognition. Some of them are tiny and, sadly, insignificant on a world scale. Some of them are huge areas of war-torn desert in Africa. Some are stretches of well-defended land in Eastern Europe or the Caucasus. Some of them are Israel, or Palestine. Two of them are China.

I call them antenational countries, because it seems to me they're in front of something big — usually wary neighbour or international body — but often poised, themselves, on the brink of some greater sufficiently significant recognition.

By my definitions, the UK — England, Scotland, Wales — Northern Ireland: we're all antenational. Because I don't know about you, but I never know what to write when I have to fill in a "nationality" form on a job application. I don't know if I'm British, English, Welsh, Polish, Lithuanian, Wessexishish...

But it's not my national identity that I'm concerned about when I see Union Flags fluttering about in the wind; it's bigger than that.

Nations, countries, are tiny, insignificant, pathetic things. Even Russia, in its way. We need to think bigger than that if we're ever going to make a better life for (yes, I am going to say this) our children.

Countries in the style of the UK inspire a jealous and arrogant brand of patriotism. It's jingoistic posturing built on nothing worth shouting about, and I never wanted any part of it. There's always lots to love about where you're from (even if you're from the Isle of Mann), but it should never be about trying to prove you're better than everyone else. Especially if you're not.

And I seriously believe that breaking up these failed countries we have is a good thing — the United Kingdom, the USSR, the USA — go a step further maybe: England (bring back Wessex! Wooh! Yeah!), Russia, Belgium, France, Iraq, China, Sudan (again). Do any of these big countries really work the way they were supposed to?

Does the EU?

Does the UN?

I don't have many answers. I'm more of a questions person. But this is the first thing I've been sure about in a while, and it's taken me a while to decide I am.

I don't think taking down the Union Flag means we can't all still be friends. I think it means we can start to be better friends.

At least let's stop sewing it onto cushions in the shape of a heart. (The BNP kind of own that now.)

Thanks for reading, if you got this far your reward is a Billy Bragg video and my proposed reworking of the Union Flag in the event of Scottish independence.

Equality is better for everyone.

Ask any feminist.

xAV