Post #42
Nov 4, 2020
Claire Bodanis
A Christmas message from Claire on behalf of the FW team – along with some 2021 thoughts for the corporate reporting fraternity
I had a joyful afternoon yesterday – I was singing! Christmas music! Together with my choir! In a church! (Including accompanying the swoonsome Damian Lewis reading the story of the 1915 Christmas Truce.) We were recording the annual Charlie Waller Memorial Trust Carol Service, which is being broadcast next Monday at 7pm (link for tickets below if you’re so minded).
It was also a reflective afternoon, because CWMT, whose carol service we’ve been singing for nearly 20 years, is a mental health charity for young people. It was set up by the Waller family in memory of their son Charlie, who committed suicide when he was 28 after suffering from depression. What stood out for me today were the words of Dick Moore, former headmaster, now youth mental health expert and campaigner, who introduced the service. He said: “I expect the work of the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust will only be more needed in the coming year.”
This moving message particularly resonated this afternoon because it echoed what I was (literally) writing about while the choir was between takes and the readers were doing their thing. Full confession, I was hiding in a pew with my laptop, busily scribbling instead of listening to the others, but Dick’s words were so arresting that I couldn’t help but stop and listen.
And what was I writing about? The words I hope we’ll all be able to leave behind with the passing of 2020, and those I hope we will all be taking with us into 2021.
I spend a lot of time thinking about words. Anyone working in reporting has to, given how precise and nuanced statements have to be sometimes. Luckily, I love words – so pondering on what exactly a word means in a particular context, and what it might convey to different readers, is hardly a chore.
But what of 2020 words? This year has had its fair share of new words – or, perhaps more accurately, new meanings of pre-existing words. And there are many whose new meanings I long to forget – masks, tiers, elbow bump (is that a new compound word?), Zoom, Teams, circuit breakers, flattening the curve, and, probably the one I loathe most of all, self-isolating, with lockdown and social distancing coming a close joint second.
Why these words in particular? Because for me, these three encapsulate the greatest casualty of this virus and of this whole year – which is also the reason CWMT is worried about the year to come. And that casualty is real, genuine human contact.
I imagine almost all of you reading this will have made do with online platforms this year – and thank God for them – but in my eyes, it is no more than making do. Connecting on screen does not add up to what I would consider the real purpose of living, which is to be properly in community with other people. And I don’t just mean our chosen communities of families, friends, colleagues and so forth. I mean everyone we come into contact with both by design and by accident: those interactions with others are what make us human.
So I hope very much that 2021 – with a vaccine on the horizon from those splendid folks at AstraZeneca, Pfizer and so forth – will see those meanings becoming obsolete, a relic of a pandemic that tested us, but did not destroy our spirit, or our ability to be in community with one another.
And what supports that hope – along with a new President in the White House – are four words, the power of decency, which, as many of you will know, are part of the title of my husband David’s latest book, The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean.
I don’t usually plug David’s books on this blog, since, while always a brilliant read, they’re not always directly relevant to you lovely readers. But the message of The Art of Fairness, summed up in the glowing Sunday Times review I posted on LinkedIn, is hugely relevant to everyone. And particularly, I’d argue, to those embarking on the challenge of writing the annual reports of 2020, which must also set out the company’s vision for the future.
That message? That despite so much evidence to the contrary, good guys can succeed without losing their souls. And it isn’t a matter of chance or luck – niceness on its own won’t achieve much – but of highly skilled people sticking to a set of principles based on fairness and decency that enables them to succeed, not just for themselves but for those around them too.
The power of decency, then, are four words that I hope will inspire many companies in their approach to shaping the post-Covid world (and reporting on it too), and ones that I hope will inspire governments and anyone else in a position of power or influence as well.
They certainly inspire me, and I’m glad to have had the chance to share them with you in this final FW blog of 2020.
On behalf of the whole FW team, I’d like to wish you and yours a happy, peaceful and safe Christmas – and a much happier 2021.
Support CWMT and enjoy a lovely carol service
Monday 7 December, 7pm (via YouTube) – tickets are £25 per household from the CWMT website.
An inspirational read for Christmas and 2021 – David Bodanis: The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean
Buy it from Waterstones.