Family Affairs

I had a lovely day yesterday – full of meetings that didn’t really feel like meetings and I managed to keep my mouth shut during most of them, taking the following advice from my father in answer to the email I had sent him:-

“I’ve got a very important meeting on Thursday this week with a view to talking about concerts in Africa.  We are meeting the man who runs all the festivals and I’m going with several people who know all about how Africa works.  WTF am I going to be contributing to the meeting you may well ask?…..

Not sure myself.

Ideas to make myself sound knowledgeable and useful gratefully received”

To which he replied:-

“Thinking …………. thinking ……….

However, I don’t really understand the concept. Presumably it’s a charitable one ……….. after all, the citizenry of Kenya are not going to meet Glastonbury prices, and western pop fans aren’t going to Kenya for a one-night-gig (saying that, I suppose the idea is a festival –  over a week or whatever).  I do recall, however, in the dim & distant past, a Clay /Foreman boxing extravaganza being held, I think, in the Congo ……….. & that must surely have been initiated for commercial advantage. Possibly there are a host of Afro-American rap groups prepared to make their contribution; and the likes of Madonna, Geldorf, Bono, Paul Simon, etc etc, with Afro-associations.  Sub-Saharan jazz has something of a global appreciation these days. There must be hosts of artistes in South Africa to be roped in.

If it were Zambia it would be pretty obvious to focus any festival around a few show football matches with top UK teams (of course, including Beckham   –  Terry & Bridge could stage a mock fight halfway thru).

Kenya is a LOT more sophisticated than Zam (hardly difficult). Any promotion should have, as its ultimate focus, identified and targeted investor attraction  -  but how that might work, I’ve no idea. However, having assembled something for Nairobi, it might make sense to then move it south, to Lusaka or Livingstone, and then further south again.

So……….. your question is your contribution, & my answer is WTFK.  I imagine your best position is to say very little, to nod frequently, and remark occasionally that hosts of ideas are formulating in you Einsteinian mind, and which you will develop with your awesome, African, pop, and celebrity related contact base, and then revert (a quick Wolesey breakfast should be all that’s needed). By this time, hopefully, the meeting will have progressed to the point at which your potential role becomes clearer.

In short, I’ve absolutely no touchbase for this kind of thing, but look forward, with interest, to the outcome”.

So, after an hour and a half of fascinating conversation to which I added 5 words (”I’d love a tea please”) we appeared to reach the conclusion that hosting a festival in Africa was not going to be an easy task by any stretch of the imagination.  The guy we were talking to literally runs Glastonbury, Reading, The Big Chill, several more abroad – what a VERY COOL job and the one thing I wanted to say but couldn’t was “do you have a few spare, maybe 4 x Glastonbury tickets and 8 x Reading tickets for my children please?.

Really none of us quite knew what we were doing there.  We all had some ideas about how to find alternative ways to finance development in Africa and given that even Dambisa Moyo thinks that “Africa suffers from appalling PR” we were looking at ways to improve a positive economic message without the obvious foreign aid – enticing all those gap year students somewhere interesting to merge with all that local talent……oh well, maybe one day.

I went to the “Destinations Holiday and Travel Show” at Earl’s Court in the morning and stood around looking pasty and desperate for somebody to invite me on holiday somewhere hot.  So depressing to look at all those posters of tropical islands and Orangatangs and not be flying off to Malaysia immediately.

Anyway.  There are many places I now need to go.  At the “Wanderlust” magazine award ceremony I was interested to note that their readers had voted Berlin the best city in the world.  My friend’s sister is an artist there.  So I’m going to make sure I go ASAP.

Their readers top three countries in the world were:-

1. Namibia

2. Oman

3. New Zealand

Anybody know anything about Namibia?  I want to go there now.