I’m a celebrity for hire. I do good causes for free — makes me feel good, dunnit? That’s the deal. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Be delighted to open a Fairtrade event in Witney. Be lovely.’
‘You’re doing what?!’ said Mrs Neate James on Saturday morning. ‘You’re going to Witney? Well, that’s lovely for you. I’ll look after the kids as well as being pregnant and working full-time, shall I? Huh. So selfish.’ She’s had a rough week, started a new job in fashion. There is only one time zone in fashion and that is ‘right now’. Tattling twits from America have been calling her at two o’clock in the morning, wanting to know if Cornwall is in Devon and whether it will be sunny there next Thursday. Unbelievable.
I’d imagined us all going to Witney together, singing along to the Stranglers’ Greatest Hits, cutting the tape at the town hall, grabbing some Nicaraguan coffee beans and then dashing off to Woolworth’s to go mental on plastic toys made in China. But she’d had 500 emails, voicemails, texts and instant messages while she slept, the kids had been to Witney the day before and it was raining. So I went on my own.
Parking hadn’t been part of my Witney dream, either. Eventually, I wedged the thing in somehow into a 30-minute spot and, noting a traffic warden, dashed in late.
Then I was holding an eight-foot inflatable Fairtrade banana and, for some reason, André Gide suddenly sprang to mind. Gide believed all our actions are ultimately selfish. Still holding the banana, I mused on how far we’ve come. The subsequent generation of French Thinkers believed that life was pointless. Any quest or need for deeper meanings in human existence seemed redundant concerns as I stood there grinning for the cameras with a gaggle of ecstatic prizewinning children and holding my gigantic, reasonable banana. It was profound. I was resonating in harmony with something pretty enormous, or whatever the opposite of nausea is. It is fair to say that everybody there was keen to make the world a better place for no other reason than it is the right thing to do. Gide! Pah! Married his cousin, too. I thumbed my nose at those historic consecutive wrong turns of shoaling French intellectual traffic and went for a sniff-round.
Fair trade is one of the most potent marketing catchphrases in circulation. The supermarkets are smoking it, but not inhaling. They would probably get cancer if they did. The idea of asking big businesses to play fair is, on reflection, like asking for armies not to be violent. Fair trade is still in its early stages as a concept, and the only thing you really get for your money at the moment, most of the time, is the dream, which is not really fair on the customer. I support the dream, it is a dream that will, ultimately, triumph, but the reality is disappointing.
The Fairtrade decorated eggs illustrated the nub of the situation. There were these eggs: hand-painted eggs from somewhere or other. They were amazing to look at. Painting on a curved surface is like talking while holding your breath, a remarkable achievement. Brilliant, but the wrong kind of brilliant. Who wants a decorated egg? Who wants a decorated egg? Who? Who in Witney wants to buy a decorated egg from the town hall when Woolworth’s has got chocolate ones?
Fried egg. Yep. Pickled egg. Yummy. Easter egg. Could definitely have worked. Fabergé egg. Obviously. I’d love one. Decorated egg. What? A lot of people had spent a lot of time and effort on those eggs, but I think to buy one would be like giving money to a tramp. It’s sending the wrong message to these traders. It’s not trade. It’s charity. You can’t get decorated eggs in Tesco, simply because nobody wants to buy them. Can someone not tell these people, wherever they are, to stop wasting time fiddling about painting eggs and to consider other ways of presenting them? There are definitely opportunities for the right kind of egg, but these painted eggs, they’re not going to work. Actually, forget the eggs. Send us the chickens, we’ve run right out of them.
I think people in developing countries deserve access to world markets, which is why I went along, but fooling around painting eggs isn’t very realistic in the 21st century. In order to prosper, it is necessary to understand marketing, and that’s what the little guy needs to do, in this country as well as in less prosperous ones. As soon as you’ve got something good to sell, we’ll bite your arm off.
I had a wonderful morning. I was presented with a huge bunch of roses for Mrs Neate James. What lovely people they all were. I’m on board.
Comments