The modest president who “sat in awe” by the Queen

We’re drowning in a sea of jargon

At this time of year, many of us castigate ourselves for not having achieved more in the past 12 months, says Camilla Cavendish in the FT. In truth, more and more of our time is being soaked up by things beyond our control: compliance, “computer says no” systems, and, most importantly, “the forces of verbiage”. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would enable his grandchildren to work a 15-hour week. But Keynes didn’t foresee the proliferation of “word salads” and corporate jargon. The average FTSE 100 annual report now contains more pages than a Charles Dickens novel. Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper describing the molecular structure of DNA, by contrast, is only a few pages long; Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which “moved a nation”, was 10 sentences.

“When you write more, people understand less.” Those are the sage words of a UK government design manual which urges officials to write shorter sentences, in plain English. Unfortunately, that message is being lost. Sitting in a café in Massachusetts a few months ago, I tried not to listen to a woman on a lengthy call about whether her presentation should say “key learning objectives” or “stakeholder outcomes”. The introduction of a report by a consulting firm (about, ironically, productivity) that recently landed on my desk included the line: “a lack of absorptive capacity can easily become a critical bottleneck for continuous innovation”. This verbosity – or what the former Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge used to call the “anxious parade of knowledge” – makes us unproductive and miserable. No one wants to be invited to an “ideation session”. Let’s cut the gobbledegook and get to the point.

I was once a hardened raver, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Then I morphed into the kind of person who only dances at weddings, and eventually into the type who spends Saturday nights ferrying children to parties. But then 2024 brought the rise of “Old Lady Clubbing”: nightclub events for the over-30s which happen during the day. “It’s like going back in time, but better.” I know to wear a big coat, instead of “shivering glamorously to death”, and because I hit the club at 3pm, I’m home for the 10 o’clock news and “blissfully asleep by last orders”. With British nightlife on its knees, perhaps we oldies can be redrafted to preserve it: “a gleeful flotilla of the middle-aged and definitely not done yet, riding to the rescue like some kind of mad sequin-clad Dunkirk”.

The pirate DJ who washed his socks in champagne

Johnnie Walker, who died this week aged 79, was a “rebellious, scandal-prone but immensely popular” radio DJ for over half a century, says The Daily Telegraph. He courted controversy at Radio 1 in 1975 after describing the Bay City Rollers as “musical garbage” and telling their fans to “take a running jump”, and left soon after. He was booted off K-SAN in San Francisco for telling listeners the station’s name “sounds like a lavatory cleaner”, and lost a local radio gig in London for saying people would be “dancing in the streets” over Margaret Thatcher’s resignation. He once lamented that DJs who were forced to play from set playlists – as he was at Radio 1 – couldn’t help but sound banal. “It’s very hard,” he explained, “to find interesting things to say about music you find bland and predictable.”

Born Peter Waters Dingley in Solihull, West Midlands, in 1945, Walker began his DJing career with a Friday night slot in a Birmingham ballroom. He made his name on Radio Caroline, one of the pirate stations operating from ships in the North Sea, and relished sea life, washing his socks in champagne during water shortages and requesting deliveries of marijuana live on air by asking for “more tea”. When the Caroline was towed away because of debts in 1968, Walker joined many of his former colleagues at the newly launched Radio 1. “I was invited for lunch and we met on a canal boat,” he said. “The BBC thought I would feel more at home.” After his various scuffles with employers, he eventually settled down when he joined Radio 2 in 1998. “I think I have survived by moving with the times,” he said on his final show on the station in October last year. “My interest is still, as it was with Caroline, music.”