Fri 26th June 2009 01:31pm

GEOFF ON THE WEB

I recently performed my first live web broadcast seminar for “Highlands and Islands Enterprise”. You can find the talk online at: http://www.zolk.net/hie/learningworksvc2.php?conf=4

Also, some scamp has found footage of me performing at the Comedy Store! Not my ‘usual’ material, but you can find these videos at YouTube:

Bongo the Bear
American vs UK Business
The world has changed




Thu 12th March 2009 11:51am

LIVING ON THE EDGE
THE STORY OF A CREDIT CRUNCH

By Geoff Burch

There was a land that was on the edge of the highest of high cliffs. The people of this land toiled and worked and struggled to make a living. They made things and they grew things. They lived by the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brows.

This life made them strong and resilient and they were proud to tell outsiders that they lived on the edge. They were very competitive with each other and always tried to better one another. Despite this they considered themselves close-knit, probably because they were united by their dislike and suspicion of outsiders.

So, you can imagine their consternation when a strange, silent young stranger occupied a deserted cabin in their land. They decided to check this guy out and it didn’t exactly put their minds at rest to discover that he was exiled from his previous land for treason and sedition. Apparently when he was a young boy, the king of his land had ordered a fabulous magical suit from some internationally renowned tailors. The enchantment of this fabulously expensive bejeweled garment was that if you were stupid, the suit became invisible to you. The king subsequently appeared naked to this boy who was therefore clearly stupid and instead of quietly admitting his disability, went around shouting that the king was “in the altogether!” Fortunately, despite rumours and fairy stories to the contrary, this disgraceful behaviour ceased when the heartbroken tailors gave him a good kicking and the king exiled him. Everyone watching acknowledged their own intelligence and admired the fine suit.

Now, this boy – older and somewhat wiser – lived among the people on the edge and they weren’t happy. Sometimes they would challenge him to say anything critical about them, but he had learned his lesson and said nothing – which gave them no excuse to get rid of him.

Then one day there was a miraculous event. The people awoke one morning to discover that from the top of the cliff, a small bridge had grown. At the other end of the bridge was a small pink fluffy cloud. For weeks people came and viewed the bridge but no one dared set foot on it, but the one day two intrepid young men crossed the bridge into the pink cloud. In there they found a sunlit land with blue birds, rabbits, and trees laden with luscious fruit. On the ground were a scattering of precious gems and metals. The young men picked fruit and treasure and returned across the bridge a lot wealthier than they had been before. Soon more people crossed the bridge to harvest the bounty of the pink cloud. The people celebrated their luck and the only sour note was that the path to the bridge had to pass the strange young man’s cabin – and when he stood outside and watched them, they felt he knew something they didn’t. Sometimes folk would challenge him to tell them.

“OK, what? Go on, what? What’s your problem?”
He would pull a face, shrug his sad shoulders and disappear back behind his front door.

A strange thing about the bridge and the cloud was that the more they were used, the bigger they grew. The bridge became a magnificent sight to see and the cloud was huge and so was the land inside it. In the land was a very beautiful kind of tree that had been in blossom ever since the place had been discovered. The people had wondered what fabulous fruit it would bear. Finally the tree produced large pods which before anyone could pick them erupted into coloured fans. On closer inspection it was clear that these fans were wads of money! Everyone laughed. Their parents had always said, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Well now it did. People surged across the bridge with barrow loads of cash, treasure and fruits. Again the only downside was that young man just watching.

With so much wealth literally falling from the trees, why break your back in the fields, wear your fingers to the bone at the lathe, or sweat your life away in a kitchen. People in far-off lands who mainly survived by growing stuff and eating it wanted a share of this wealth. So they either sold their crops to the people on the edge or they started making things for them or they moved to the edge themselves and did the toiling for a handful of the cash.

The people on the edge realized that all this success could be attributed to their superior intellect and that physical effort was far beneath them. They also knew that they never wanted their children to toil with their hands. Intellect brings better rewards. So they built schools and colleges where the young could get intellect from the people who had chosen themselves to be professors.

One of these mighty brains prepared mathematical formula which would show birds how to fly. He crossed the bridge and as the young bluebirds hatched from their eggs, he strutted about holding his lapels reciting this formula to them.

A few weeks later, amazingly, the bluebirds flew. He was carried shoulder-high back across the bridge and given a big gold cup and his own university to be in charge of. Another professor watched the bridge grow and could predict its size each day. The people would gather under his balcony at his university and he would say things like,

“I predict bridge growth to be between 12 and 16%”

And the next day, when it was clearly 15% bigger, he got a cup too!

Another amazing event happened. One day a man harvesting money in the fluffy cloud-land, dropped a bundle down a rabbit hole. He didn’t notice until he got home and realized that he was short a bundle of money. He went back the next day and searched about the tree. Putting his hand down the rabbit hole, he realized that not only was the bundle of money there, but it had doubled in size. For a while he tried putting the odd wad of cash in the rabbit holes and overnight they always doubled. He shared this secret with a very few friends and out of those few friends, this phenomenon only worked for some of them but that didn’t matter because those with the gift could double anyone’s’ money. These men declared themselves bankers or barons of the bridge. Soon the traffic had reversed and everyone was bringing home loads of cash back over the bridge to the cloud.

The young man just watched with that funny annoying puzzled look on his face.

The people from the foreign land were soon handing their cash to the bridge barons to have it doubled. The money doubled, the bridge doubled, and the pink fluffy cloud just grew huge. The more cash they piled into the rabbit holes, the bigger the cloud grew.

Then the people woke up one morning and the bridge had completely collapsed. It had cracked and crumbled and hundreds of pieces had tumbled into the gorge below. The people watched as the pink cloud, now not anchored to anything, started to drift with the wind, which tugged and blew as little wisps and tendrils like candy floss disappeared into the turbulent air. Before their very eyes it was pulled into smaller bits until it was gone as if it had never existed.

“We are ruined!” the horrified crowd cried.

“All our wealth was in that cloud”.

“And so was ours” the people from the foreign land cried angrily, “We will have to go back to growing stuff again.”

The cry went up, “Why did the bridge collapse?”

The professors didn’t know despite their intellect. Then someone said,
“I bet that sly kid knows why the bridge collapsed”

A huge mob went to the young man’s cabin. When he came out they cried,

“Alright smartarse. Why did the bridge collapse?”

The young man sadly replied, “You foolish people. You are asking the wrong question. The question I have been asking myself every day, and what you should have asked yourselves is not why it collapsed, but why it stayed up. What was holding it up in the first place?”





Mon 2nd March 2009 11:51am

THE SAD STORY OF THE NUMPTIES

As a Martian, it is very difficult to explain the tragedy of the sad little folk known as the Numpties but let me try.

First a bit of background. Sometime ago, the Numpties who live in Numptie land worked very very hard making things. A long time before that, they lived very simply growing stuff and eating it but it is always wet and drear in Numptie land and this created an itch they could never scratch – in other words the Numpties always wanted more so they started to make things. The cleverer Numpties invented artful things such as Bykees, machines that Numpties could sit on and, by whirling their legs round, they could travel faster. Numpties love to go faster – to where I never really understood – but by golly they got there quicker and quicker. Some Numpties were artful at making money; some were artful at making bykee bits. The ones that had the money made the ones that built the bykees work very hard for just a little bit of the money. This, some Numpties said, was unfair and they got very cross and sometimes refused to get out of bed to make bykees, which made the rich ones cross and worried. Then someone invented the haulers – big metal boxes that burned the underground stuff that the desert people had but didn’t want because they had bumpy animals to ride around on. These haulers meant that rich Numpties could whiz about even faster without whirling their legs around and they soon got the clever Numpties to work in big sheds making Haulers. The clever ones got even crosser because they wanted Haulers so that they could whiz about without whirling their legs.

Now it is at this point that we have to understand the Numpties obsession with money. Money is little bits of paper with a number painted on it and a picture of their Queen, but that simple description cannot give you a clue of how important these bits of paper are. There is a strictly limited amount of this paper which is literally a measure of the Numpties life. If a Numptie makes bykees for one hour, he will receive a piece of this paper. At the end of his life the number of these bits of paper that he has is literally his score and his value – and the more bits of paper he gets each hour say how valuable and important he is.

A time came that clever Numpties were getting so tired, grumpy and difficult that they had forced the rich Numpties to pay them ten bits of paper for every hour that they spent making bykees and haulers. As a bykee takes twenty hours to build, it cost two hundred bits of paper to make, but to buy a bykee also costs two hundred bits of paper so the rich Numpties started to stop being rich. They wailed and gnashed their teeth and fought with the clever Numpties. Then they discovered a far-off land where lived some people called Ayshuns who not only were extra clever at making stuff, but were very poor and never expected ever to be rich – or even own a bykee. They hardly ever even saw a Hauler. The rich Numpties asked the Ayshuns if they could make bykees. They said they could and would for just one piece of paper each hour. This meant it cost just twenty pieces of paper to build a bykee which left a hundred and eighty pieces for the rich Numpties who of course became richer and richer.

I know you are wondering that if all the other Numpties have no jobs, how can they buy the bykees? Well, now we come to the really weird thing about Numpties. Because their bits of paper are so important to them and ultimately are the value of their whole life, before they die and things are totaled up they scuttle about collecting stuff like nuts and wood and rocks and other things that they try and compare in value to their bits of paper. As I have said, Numptie land is very wet and muddy – in fact there has always been plenty of mud so the Numpties build their shelters of mud. They claim a patch of mud and pile up lumps of baked mud on it. Of course this takes time and to a Numptie time is bits of paper and their pile of mud is even more value to them than their bykee or even hauler. They buy and sell these piles of baked mud for sometimes more than the paper it cost them. This makes them feel safe and happy.

Every now and again, the Numpties choose a parent. For some time, the Numpties had a horrid strict parent who would smack them when they were naughty and wouldn’t let them have the things they wanted. This parent could see that if the Numpties didn’t work harder for less bits of paper they would all be in trouble. She made the Numpties feel very dark and sad and grumpy so when they got the chance they elected a new parent who would be nice to them. Because he smiled all the time and was always nice they called him Toe-knee (I know, it doesn’t make sense, but that’s Numpties for you). Toe-knee loved to be loved and said that every day would be cringle day and if every Numptie would put up a tree, Toe-knee would leave a present every day. True to his word, Toe-knee left train sets, dolls’ houses and even bykees. This made the Numpties very happy and time and time again they chose him as their parent.

At about this time some bad folk did a dreadful thing by getting poo (yes, poo!) and convincing Numpties that it was worth paper. Afterwards this crime was called the Plop Con bubble and it worked like this. Numpties biggest failing is believing someone is doing better than them and it drives them crazy. The bad folk would stand with a bucket of poo and the Numpties would point and laugh. “Ha Ha, why have you got poo? You are stupid!” They would reply, “I gave ten pieces of paper for this poo and it is now worth twenty pieces. You are the stupid one because you have got no poo and I have doubled my money, ha ha!” The next day, this person would have two buckets of poo and would say, “I gave twenty pieces of paper for the second bucket and now they are worth forty pieces each. You sure are missing the boat!”
This went on until the buckets of poo reached one hundred and even two hundred pieces of paper. The Numpties believed that if they didn’t hurry they couldn’t even afford one bucket and had to borrow just to buy one, but they thought what an easy way to make pieces of paper. The bought and sold these buckets and with the extra they bought bykees and haulers and were happy. Toe-knee was happy because a lot of the poo profit came his way and he explained that because underneath it all nobody did any work, they had now got a surface economy which would make everyone happy but in the Numptie society there are very annoying folk called Smart Harris’s who tell the truth and that is very inconvenient.

One day a Smart Harris pointed to a Numptie and said, “That is just a bucket of poo and it’s worthless.” With that, all the Numpties scampered about crying, “Urgh, poo!” and lots of them lost all their paper. The bykee makers had thousands and thousands of bykees coming in from the Ayshuns and were worried that Numpties with no paper could not buy bykees. But, their parent, kind Toe-knee smiled and said, “The Plop Con bubble gives me an idea! The magic of paper from poo only failed because it was poo but baked mud – now that’s another thing. We could raise the value of baked mud shelters for ever>”

Everyone who heard this clapped and cheered because nobody really wanted to go back to working hard again, as they liked the surface economy. Soon baked mud was gaining value faster than poo ever had and because most of the grown-up Numpties already had a shelter of baked mud that had cost them very little and now was worth lots, they felt very rich. They borrowed money to buy big treats, bykees and haulers for themselves. The bykee makers didn’t know what to do with the huge amount of extra paper they were making. Kind Toe-knee said to them kindly that they were making too much and he would have to take a bigger share if they didn’t do something with it.

At this time the old clever Numpties said to their children, “Don’t be clever and work hard and be poor like us. Instead have clean hands and be rich.”
So when the big sheds that made things shut, Toe-knee was not sad. He called them Universe Cities – places of excellence – where Numptie children went and did team-building, management, Numptie resources and all kinds of other completely useless things. The bykee folk built big glass towers with their extra paper and filled them with eager young Numpties who didn’t want to be clever and work with their hands. They were paid lots to go out and buy bykees and haulers. The boy and girl Numpties wanted families of their own and they needed baked mud shelters which were now very expensive but they could borrow paper from lenderers and it didn’t matter how much they borrowed because their baked mud was always worth more. Sometimes it became worth more so fast it earned more than they did, so some Numpties borrowed twice as much and bought two lots of baked mud just to watch it grow. The lenderers made paper by asking for extra paper on top of that borrowed, but because paper was limited they sometimes couldn’t get enough to lend. At the same time the Ayshuns had too much paper so the lenderers sold the debt to them for a profit and could start all over again.

Lenderers were not always good and in a far off land lived the Merry Cans who in a lot of ways were stranger than the Numpties. Their land was much much bigger but they still treasured their patches of mud – so much so that they always walked about with their sleeves rolled up and if a stranger went on their patch of mud they were allowed to kill them, because they said it was their right to have bare arms. But they had a lot of poor folk who, you would think, no one in their right mind would lend money to. Then some wicked lenderers thought a nasty but clever thought. If poor folk found it hard to borrow, you could charge them even more which was very profitable, even though it made them poorer. Then they would get so poor that they couldn’t pay and you could take their patch of mud away and have it for yourself. Very very very profitable.

Remember how the Numpties always think that someone is doing better than them? Well Numptie lenderers were jealous of the Merry Can lenderers and paid lots to get a share of the poor peoples’ mud. Then strange things started to happen. First, because everyone was getting rich, the Merry Cans, the Numpties and even the Ayshuns, all bought bigger and bigger haulers. The desert people, who had the underground stuff, realized that it was running out and charged more. Toe-knee said “This is bad. underground stuff costs more than food so we must burn food in our haulers.” Which made food very dear and the poor folk went hungry. Because the poor people couldn’t eat and at the same time buy the mud, they gave their mud back to the lenderers. Then Smart Harris said, “That is mud, its not worth anything!” The Numpties decided to go to the lenderers and get their money back but when they got there the lenderer had gone and so had the money. Toe-knee said, “Don’t worry, I will pay what the lenderers owe you.” But secretly he was very worried. He had a sour goblin that helped him to look after the money. He knew the goblin had always wanted his turn at being parent so with a smile he gave him the keys and ran off. When the goblin and the Numpties got into Toe-knee’s room, they found all the tons and tons of unpaid bills for all of the presents.
“Well” said the goblin, “No more presents – I can’t even afford to pay for this lot.”
“We hate you” said the Numpties, “We need a new parent”
This is when they realized that the values of their patches of mud had started to fall and fall because anyone can see (except a Numptie) that an economy based on the value of mud, where nobody works, well just doesn’t work! The Ayshuns didn’t fare much better because they had put all their money into making bykees that now no one wanted to buy, so they were ruined too. Everyone cried out, “Toe-knee was nice, let’s find him and ask him what to do.”
“Well” said Toe-knee, “There is not enough of anything to go round, there are too many of us and we hate to work hard to live. The solution is simple, we should eat each other.”




Fri 24th October 2008 04:31pm

CATCH UP ON THE SHOW

If you didn't catch my new TV show on Tuesday night at 7:30 on BBC Two, don't worry, all is not lost!

Thanks to the wonders of technology, you can catch last week's show on BBC iPlayer by following this link.