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0161 723 2000
8AM to 5PM
It never ceases to amaze me how shallow people are, they take a quick at what you’re wearing and make a quick decision about what sort of person you are… based on whether you have on jeans or a suit and a tie.
30 odd years ago I said to myself, when I own my own business… I’m never going to be forced to wear a suit just because somebody else thinks I should. I should be able to wear what I’m comfortable in and just be ‘myself’. I’m intelligent and articulate and professional, I just don’t ‘conform’ to the dress standards set by ‘society’….and if I want to have a pink Mohican hair cut – then that’s exactly what I’m going to have …
Fast forward 30 years and I’ve achieved pretty much everything I’ve set out to do (even a pink Mohican) – I have a series of reasonably successful businesses, I employ 30 odd staff over a variety of companies – yet I still get people calling me a scruffy bastard….!
What amuses me more is that the people that often call me ‘scruffy’ are wearing Marks and Spencer suits with a crappy shirt, cheap shoes and an unreliable watch. They turn up in their Vauxhall Astra or their cheap Mercedes thinking they are the dog’s bollocks when truth be known they have so little imagination about anything worthwhile that it’s amazing they manage to get dressed in the morning.
Anyway, putting all this to one side, having done exactly what I want for the bulk of my business owning career, I now find myself as chairman of the Invasive Non Native Species Association (INNSA – www.innsa.org) and as such I find myself having to ….conform….
I was due to give a presentation to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (the CML) last week and asked my fellow steering group members as to whether they would prefer me to wear a suit?
They responded with a loud ..YES…(…you scruffy bastard)
On arriving in London at my Hotel I noticed a new Bentley parked in front of the main doors – on enquiring what the car was for, the hotel advised that it was for guests to use instead of black cabs….
So it was that last Friday I found myself wearing a suit and tie, being chauffeur driven in a brand new stretch Bentley* to a meeting at one of the smarter London boutique hotels….and boy can I tell you does it make a difference to how people treat you!
I had gone from suspected criminal …to Royalty…nothing was enough trouble for the obsequious staff who treated me as if I was god’s gift to business… and…bear in mind this was the same hotel that wouldn’t let me in when I was wearing jeans and a shirt…I’m the same person goddamit…
So what do we conclude from this little episode…hmmmm…not sure really?
Maybe I need to learn a lesson and wear a suit if I want to make the right impression?
…but… do I really want to make this much effort?
To be honest I’d rather just be myself and lose a few arsey clients…
Mike C
*NB all paid for my me personally not by INNSA!
Have you seen the film ‘Blade’ with Wesley Snipes?
Wesley has all the strengths of a vampire whilst keeping the ability to be a ‘day-walker’ and isn’t killed by sunlight. So he has all the positive vampire traits and doesn’t have any of the weaknesses (apart from a hunger for human blood which he counteracts with a specially devised serum that he injects) …so he is a hybrid…that thrives to the determent of all of his enemies.
Hybridization is the fundamental mechanism by which rapid evolution can occur in invasive species. If a hybrid shows increased vigour this would significantly contribute to invasion success.
CABI (www.cabi.org) have carried out a comparison of Fallopia japonica and Fallopia sachalinensis and the hybrid Fallopia x bohemica in competing against experimental communities of native plants. It was found that the knotweed hybrids performed significantly better in competition with a native community and that they strongly reduced the growth of native plants.
Of the parental species F. sachalinensis regenerated significantly from rhizomes suggesting allelopathic* inhibition by native plants.
The study found great variation between the various taxa but the hybrid proved to have the greatest success – thus proving that invasive knotweed hybrids are indeed more competitive than their parents.
We already know that Japanese knotweed has no natural enemies in the UK – (apart of course from the Psyllid aphid released by CABI as part of the Government bio-control strategy) – so with a mutational hybrid being even more efficient at spreading than the all-ready prolific plants that we struggle to manage – we could be in an even worse position…
Mike C
With thanks to CABI
NB: *allelopathy is the secretion of chemicals by plants to inhibit growth of other species
