philcain

I sent an email on a whim at 3am. And now here I am in the cavernous, gold-leaf rococo reception room of a legendary athlete’s Palm Beach residence, with a rare chance of an interview.

For once the word “legendary” is not hyperbole. We all grew up hearing about that race, imagining what it must have been like to be there in the crowd, or even to be in the race itself. I was no different, so seeing the very plimsolls worn by Mr Tortoise all these years later is a moment of quiet reverie. I don’t know why, but I never imagined he wore four.

“The boy done good,” I whisper  under my breath. From humble beginnings in Stepney Green, East London, he ends up in this place. Yes, the boy really did done good. This is the residence of a true victor, with splendour worthy of the Sun King himself, and a small army of attendants, and its very own nine hole golf course. The golf course is all the more luxurious because Mr Tortoise, being a tortoise, is unable to play golf.

One attendant, a woman in her 20s, beckons and I follow her down a hallway. It is lined with pictures of the world-renown resident pictured celebrities and politicians. It begins with shots of him alongside Marie Lloyd, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Bob Hope, Ronald Reagan, Mohammed Ali, Ronnie Corbett, Sue Barker, Desmond Lynam. Tortoises live a very, very long time. Luckily it is a very long corridor.

We make it to the conservatory, or should I say, one of 15 conservatories, fierce tropical heat being his preferred climate. It must be well over 30 degrees. I find Mr Tortoise in a tracksuit on a towel on a sun lounger. Without a word he motions for me to sit on a wicker chair opposite with a slow but authoritative sweep of a front leg. The air is not only stifling hot but thick with smoke from a hookah from which he sips smoke every minute or two. This is no ordinary athlete. He eyes me with one jet black eye, then moves his head to fix me with the other.

“So, whadda you wanna  know?” he says,  in a curious american-cockney draw; which combined with the tracksuit makes a menacing combination. I ask him to tell his story from the beginning. describing in great detail what I imagine was the life of an East End tortoise born around 1910. Nobody knows exactly the year. 

For a physically slow creature he is a surprisingly fast talker, but evidently tortoises apparently live not only long but largely uneventful lives. Or, at least, their perception of what may be interesting is not necessarily shared by other species. But, after many stories of lettuces, carrots and hibernations, and just as I was close to passing out from heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation, it finally started getting interesting. This comes from a transcript of that tape.

“… We were friends, me and Mr Hare, good friends. Not a lot of people know that. We grew up in the same area, and had the same taste in food. And it was over a meal he suggested he would put me in touch with Aesop, ‘Aesop the Greek’ they called him, or just ‘Aesop’, because nobody knew any other Aesop. He was the local fixer, this Aesop, small time stuff, you know, getting in extras for music hall gigs, arranging stuff. And, to cut a long story short, this Aesop agreed to take me on his books. So he is managing both me and Mr Hare.”

“But there was not much call for tortoises in those days. We do not have much stage presence, they say,” I shrugged. “Nobody wants to see a tortoise pulled out of a hat, do they? Nobody pays good money to see someone tame a tortoise,” I said I might. “Well, things might have changed, but I can tell you, back in those days they did not. Did you ever see a tortoise on stage?”

“Only the ones on Blue Peter,” suddenly regretting my ten minutes of research. 

“That BBC thing for kids? Goddamn amateurs,” he said, with chilling venom, coughing violently. The room went silent for a second or two. A pendulum of phlegm hung from his mouth. I dare not mention it. I had not expected him to be quite so cranky. Still clearly agitated and rumbling with catarrh, he continued.

“So, anyways, a few weeks later Aesop finally has something for me. He tells me he is putting on a series of skits, little shows, and had one he thought would be good for me and Mr Hare. It was some kind of race. It must be some kind of betting racket, I thought. Who ever would put a hare and a tortoise in a race?”

“What kind of betting racket?”

“I don’t know, like that old Xeno’s Paradox scam. Roll up, roll up, who is gonna win, folks? Achilles, literally the fastest man alive, or this lousy tortoise, top speed 0.5 miles an hour. Luckily for Xeno there was always some smart-ass who bets on the goddamn tortoise.”

I would google it later, I told him, provoking a bronchial rumble.

“Anyway, you learned not to ask too many questions in that neighbourhood where we grew up, so long as the money’s good you say yes and keep your thoughts to yourself,” he extended his neck from its shell, tapping his nose. “All I knew was it was five hundred big ones between us. We would be set for years. You can buy a hell of a lot of fruit and veg with five hundred quid.” He was right, and you still can.

“The story was simple, he said. We show up. We race. I get beat, but I keep going on to the end. The payoff of the story being to keep on trying, do your best, it’s not the winning but the taking part, yadda, yadda, that kind of thing. People love that kind of thing, especially parents.”

“We settled on 300-quid for me and 200 for Mr Hare, on account of the extra hours I would have to put in. We would both go home quids-in. Simple. Easy money.” He paused and fell back on his lounger, exhausted from the effort of telling the story. Then leaned back up again.

“Well, you know what happened next,” he says, taking another pull on his hookah. “It all goes to plan up until the point Mr Hare—who was out the night before having a couple of drinks—sneaks off for a nap mid-race, because he’s feeling lousy. And, yes, he is out cold for hours! So I am there plodding away as usual, not realising the thing has gone haywire. I must have passed him. It gets dark and then light again. It’s only when I get in the last few hundred inches that I see the finishing tape is unbroken, and that I am about to win the damn thing. I looked over my shoulder and there was Mr Hare maybe a quarter of a mile away, desperate to catch up.”

“I didn’t know what to do. I would have stopped. Nobody would notice. But then I heard Aesop in the crowd shouting, ‘Keep going, Tortoise, I have an idea for a brilliant rewrite.’ So, he is the boss, so I carry on and maybe a minute-and-a-half later I am over the line, flashbulbs popping. 

“The whole thing is crazy, absurd. A tortoise winning a running race! I had not even done a minute of training. Why bother? If you are as slow as me it hardly matters.” Mr Tortoise is glassy-eyed, his head outstretched moving from side to side, as if reliving the moment. Then he fell silent again, thoughtful. 

“Our lives were never the same again, not mine, not Hare’s, not Aesop’s even. In that moment I went from an unknown heavily-armoured, reptile bit-part player to being a global megastar. Aesop started cashed in millions on his royalties for the story, the book and movie rights. And, Mr Hare, well, poor old Hare was the eternal laughing stock. The poor bastard. He even had to plead with Aesop to get his 200 quid.”

I asked him why he didn’t speak up at the time to say it was a mistake?

“I was too ashamed to admit I was the unworthy beneficiary of what was simply a terrible mistake by Mr Hare. And, let’s face it, I was having too much goddamn fun being that beneficiary. A tortoise winning a running race with a hare? Are you serious? It is outrageous and I felt like the luckiest tortoise ever. And, let’s be honest, I really was the luckiest tortoise ever. Who is going to pass that up?” 

I was unable to contradict him. Did you ever say sorry to Mr Hare, I ask him? 

“Of course, I wanted to. I was his friend. Imagine being a hare who is beaten in a running race by a tortoise. What does that do to your self-respect? He was completely destroyed. He wanted a rematch but Aesop wouldn’t have it. The money was rolling in. The last thing he needed was to kill the story. He did give the hare a payoff to keep quiet. Hare was never short of dough, but he never recovered either.” 

A darkness had come over Mr Tortoise. 

“I loved that hare, like a brother, but we never spoke again, not really. And then he went on that TV show and made such a damn fool of himself, ranting and raving. He was dead within weeks. They live such short lives, hares. He never, ever forgave me. I am not sure if I ever forgave me either, or Aesop for creating this mess, for that matter.”

Without warning, Mr Tortoise waves his arm dismissively, his watering eyes close and he slips back into his shell, from which a wisps of hookah smoke slowly rise. On the wall above his chair I notice a framed image of Mr Tortoise on the front cover of Time magazine. There is a black and white photograph of him outside a two-up two down in Stepney Green. A few minutes pass. There was a polite cough at the doorway and I turned.“Sorry, he does that,” says the assistant who showed me in. “He gets terribly upset then goes into his shell,” She looks upset too. “It could be days.” The interview is over. She asks if I might like a round on the golf course? I decline. It feels like an opportunity missed, but I have too much to process to play golf. ■

Giants who carry off townspeople or who trample crops can expect to be barked at quite loudly from tomorrow, according to the latest light-touch regulatory scheme.

“We have created a vocal new guardian of the townspeople, empowered to bark at anyone over five-foot-three who might be up to no good,” the king’s town crier roared.

Critics of the scheme, which was proposed by giants, point out that the new regulator, Fifi Trixibelle, is a toy poodle only sixteen inches tall who is fed and watered by the giants.

Fifi’s barking will, however, supporters say, be based on the recommendations of an Independent Complaints Panel which will assess any written reports of marauding in detail.

“This is a cutting edge form of self-regulation, striking the perfect balance between the interests of villagers and giants,” said one of the king’s men, a part-time adviser to giants.

There were 4,535 townspeople carried away by giants and 1,445 acres of land trampled last year, up 20%, according to the Office of Town Statistics. ■

Strategic Communications secured an interview with the elusive Alan Davis, CEO of the Kudos Academy at the Ivy, London. We are in a “golden age” of communication thanks to the normalisation of the breaking of the truth barrier since the 90s, he argues.

What was it that started you off?
It was the 90s, you are probably too young to remember clearly, but it was an exciting time. The Cold War was over and there was a buzz, a relief, an ebbing away of the fear that had gripped us all since the end of World War Two. I was a young advertising executive, just cutting my teeth. But this also left a vacuum, a need for new challenges, fresh anxieties, fresh opportunities. What would we do with all the energy we had used fretting about nuclear armageddon? And in this new carefree world stepped a new kind of US president, Bill Clinton. For the first time ever there was this cool president. After the stiff conservatism of those Cold War guys, Reagan and George HW Bush, he was a breath of fresh air. This was going to be how it was from now on in this new no worries world.

What in particular impressed you about him?
It was the whole package. He was so charming he could sell ice to the eskimos, if he needed to. He was effective in what he did and that impressed me. But the moment which really stayed with me, and a lot of people, was in 1998, during his impeachment hearing, when he flipped that question about whether he had sex with Monica Lewinski saying “that depends what the definition of ‘is’ is”. It was a moment of sheer brilliance for someone like me, as good as any sidestep from Pelé or Maradonna, or a Michael Jordan slam dunk. But it was so brilliant, audacious and perfectly executed. What was more important for me, though, was that I knew it was unachievable for most people. Few of us could have seized on the distinction between “is” and “was”, as he did, and have the sheer nerve to use it to defend themselves in front of hundreds of millions. He broke what I called “the truth barrier”, there and then, like a daring test pilot breaking the sound barrier or a rocket going into space. It got me thinking, stuck as I was selling baked beans: How could I help more ordinary people achieve something close to what he did?. What I wanted was to invent the equivalent of a kind of Concorde for liars, so anyone could do it, from any walk of life, so long as they could afford the cost of the ticket.

So you wanted to democratise subverting the truth?
I would put it exactly like that, it makes it sound underhand. I would say I wanted to provide a way to allow ordinary people to achieve their personal goals while largely sticking to the facts. There had to be simpler ways to do it. People need to achieve their goals without being the equivalent of Maradona or Pelé. Equally we should all be able to “break the truth barrier” without superhuman skills. Clinton had a huge natural talent for it, rather like those legendary football players, and he also had a huge amount of experience too. Before taking the presidency in 1993 he had been the governor of Arkansas for all but a couple of years since 1979. His innate skill had been honed for over a decade.

And what was that way?
There were two things to look at. The first was to ignore what Clinton said, but instead look at the response, its structure and evolution. Of course many were outraged by his warping of their simplistic definition of the truth, including many of his loyal Democrats. But then, more importantly, there was also a huge number who didn’t care too much either, for many it was simply a confirmation politicians “lie” [Davis adds the inverted commas with his fingers], not just Clinton. And there was another section who rather admired or envied him for it, they saw it as chutzpah. They might even think it was positive. If he could do this he was surely able to outwit his opponents or America’s enemies? And a whole lot of people were publicly outraged while privately wondering if they might do similar, or much worse, if they were the most powerful man in the world. 

You said there were two things?
Right, yes, the second one was that Clinton showed that ur moral outrage can be extremely intense, but also that it always has a very short half life. We cannot sustain it indefinitely, even if we think we should. It tails off within days, or weeks at the most. Those who cause such an outrage simply need to recognise this hunker down, shielding themselves from the blast, reassuring their supporters it will die down. It may feel like the whole world is crashing down, but it is not. That is an illusion we have got past. People in this situation would give in, or their bosses would sack them, but now thanks to these insights they look to weather the initial storm.

Have the changes in media helped?
Yes, absolutely. During Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 the media as we know it was in its infancy, there was no internet to speak of. Rolling news like CNN had only just started. But the effect it had was tremendous, massively speeding up the half-life of outrage. The internet has only intensified the phenomenon. There is not only the phenomenon of the outrage half-like but also “outrage paralysis”, where we can put our opponents into an endless outrage cycle, unable to act for themselves. This is what people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have been able to achieve. People like Blair and Clinton broke the truth barrier perhaps 10% of the time, but for the new generation it is their base camp.

And what do they do beyond the truth barrier? Lie?
What we talk about at the [Kudos] Academy is not lying, which is a very crude concept. What we do is help clients focus on the impression they wish to give to reach their goal, regardless of the facts. We then offer creative strategies to help them achieve this impression, while remaining as much as possible within the parameters of the facts. What we are really talking about is “goal-oriented communication”. Truth is not absent, but it is secondary.

Can you give an example?
Let us look at Tony Blair, a different person, but also a long-time Clinton admirer. You can see the same kind of goal-oriented communication at work. Did Blair say there were weapons of mass destruction ready to strike the UK in 45 minutes? No, not exactly. Was he quick to correct stories based on what he said which gave this impression? No. It was not his job to correct mistakes. His goal was to convince the public that invading Iraq was a good idea. And, in that, he succeeded. This was successful goal-oriented communication in action. Politicians, companies, all of us to some extent, are doers, not truth-seekers.

Does this connect with what you have called our Golden Age of communication, rather against what many see?
George Orwell got a lot right in 1984 about the way we can manipulate the truth. But one thing he missed was that the future was not just about a totalitarian authority with a monopoly on the media. It is more everyone manipulating one another. Take any number of people and communication is always imperfect. Communication, miscommunication and their exploitation are all part of the same thing. The media technology does not sort it out. So having more media technology does not help, it creates at least as much confusion as communication, perhaps more than ever. We have far fewer filters, with, fact-checked media and trusted outlets facing long-term terminal decline. So, while it may be a disaster for truth seekers, it is a golden age for doers. Kudos is on the side of the doers.

At this point Mr Davis took a mobile phone call and motioned with his finger as left, leaving the bill unpaid. ■