It’s not that I am Bah Humbug!, it’s a simple case of economics running two beauty salons that rely on customers coming through the door.

In January 2010, we had prolonged snow lasting for around a week and we lost a lot of money. I still have to pay staff; I also still have to pay rent and all other utilities.

And it’s not just me. I was chatting to a restauranteur in Basingstoke today who reminded me of the snow before Christmas in 2009, which wiped out one of his busiest weeks of the year.

Spare a thought for your independent retailer this snowy season.

I found at at 7.15pm…via Facebook.

Before long, many of my Basingstoke friends had mentioned it in their feeds and Twitter was also buzzing with the news. Even more amazing was that by 8 o’clock there was a user generated video on You Tube:

People Are Fascinated

Yesterday, it was the ninth anniversary of 9/11. Imagine if that event happend now with Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. Watching the Twitter feed of someone there, living it.

You may hate the idea that this is now the case, but it’s no different from us pouring over newspapers / 24 hour news and documentaries about such events, it just makes us closer to the event.

As human beings we are morbidly fascinated. We’re quite happy to spend a Summer Sunday watching the events of Diana’s death unfold and talk about the London bombings of 7/7 over dinner parties as if we are experts having read an article or two in a Red Top.

Social Commentary

When the earthquakes hit Haiti in January, I heard a Haitian student based in England talk on the radio about how her friends were buried under rubble asking for help via Facebook. I can’t even imaging living out that scenario.

These events become more real the closer they are to us. As the masses stand open mouthed tweeting, taking photos to paste on their Facebook profiles and sharing videos, the unlucky ones (and their families) are living the panic and horror. Not only fo they have to cope with the unfolding uncertainty, they have to watch it happen in public as if living in a goldfish bowl.

As the ground breaking TV show Big Brother finishes, perhaps we’re all now living in a reality programme.

2 Cross Street is in the old part of Basingstoke and as such has quite a history. As part of my research, I turned to the Internet, which drew a blank, so I ended up in the tried and trusted local library, finding a book called “Basingstoke Directory Entries 1784-1935″.

It’s a book that lists people and businesses, with an overview of the town at different moments in time. For instance, 100 years ago, Basingstoke Parish had just 11,450 people living here. Now it is well over ten times that amount.

Anyway, my point…

Reading through the directory listings I have come across a whole host of people trading as tanners, staymakers, a Woollen Draper and Breeches Maker, Coal Merchants, Brewers, Clothes Makers and the list goes on.

If anything, it shows me what this ‘new’ town used to be like before the growth thrown on it in the sixties.

What it also shows me is that back then there must have been a need for these trades and from the beginning of the book to the end, I can see the trades evolving as the world (and peoples needs) changed.

Which begs the question.

In a hundred years from now (not that we may be particularly interested ourselves) what will a web designer or games programmer be? Or, maybe we will be asking ourselves that question in 20 years time?

• For starters, the snow was forecast with the phrase “heavy snow” in the afternoon.
• This same scenario happened last year, and a couple of years before that.

The fact that it snows so infrequently in Basingstoke that we may not have all the right kit for the job (chains and 4×4′s), surely we have a little hindsight in the shape of experience and memory.

The same could be said for a number of other instances in humanity including the  current global economic situation based on greed and the cycle that we get a recession every 7 years or so. I’m sure that in a year or so, it will start all over again.

Learning is a part of life. But so, it would seem, is forgetting.

Last year, I read in my local paper about a guy (who turned out to be a neighbour) who was rowing the distance of the circumference of the world (some 44,075 km) – a challenge that was taking him 3 years to complete. Not on the sea mind, on a land rowing machine in Basingstoke Town Centre – The Malls.

I love a good charity challenge so I contacted him to see how I could help and the initial result was World Record Row website.

Now, Dave relies on donations in his quest to raise £55,000 for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, mostly so far from the generous people of Basingstoke putting coins in his bucket. He is currently (as of today) on £10,765.00.

But, I’d like to do anything I can (bearing in mind I am too lazy to row for 6 hours a day) to help Dave raise his amount. We have about 12 months to raise the remaining £44,235 – that’s quite a tall task.

So here’s some ideas I’ve had:

• If you are a business and you want to donate, why not donate online and claim back as an expense? This means your £100 donation will really cost you £80 with a basic tax write-off, not to mention the tax efficiency relating to saved income tax and National Insurance.
• If you donate £50 or more, I’ll even add a link on the website to yours. Yes, I know it’s not worth £50, but this is a charity donation so this may help sweeten the deal. When you donate, be sure to contact me to tell me.
• Any donation amount is good – as a business or personal -  no matter how small.
• At the very least, you could just add a web banner on your website.

One quick last thing. Next year as the rowing challenge draws towards it’s conclusion, I plan to leverage as many business contacts as I have and do what I can.

And, although I am just one person (as is Dave), life and success is all about the things that one person can achieve. Sometimes these things may seem small but they have a huge impact, like a pebble in a pond rippling out.

Any ideas you have that may help to promote Dave and his challenge, any contacts you can leverage, why not contact me. We can become a barrage of pebbles in multiple ponds and help Dave raise a massive amount of money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer in this challenge of a lifetime.

It’s an interesting incentive, as is the intention of Destination Basingstoke, the organisation looking to promote the town and I am actually quite proud to be involved.

My Basingstoke

Having lived in Basingstoke all my life I am now raising a family and running a business here and have seen the town develop into something very different from my childhood of the 70s and 80s. The thing that gets my goat, and why I am keen to actively promote Basingstoke is that the town that is often derided is the Basingstoke of my childhood, not the one I live in now 30 years later. When I look at this video of Basingstoke town centre in the sixties, I understand why. But, it’s not the town I live in in 2009. What if we did the same for Milton Keynes, Manchester, some parts of London, or even Dubai?

Image Problem

Of course, Basingstoke is not alone. I could quite easily sneer at other towns with the same image problem, such as Crawley and Slough, but to be fair, I’ve never visited either, so I can’t comment. But, having been involved with the Destination Basingstoke project earlier in the year, I was actually amazed at some of the statistics available and astonished that we still have this image problem. For business, living and leisure, the marketing proposition for Basingstoke is actually quite compelling.

Of course, being that much older now, I can also see the bigger picture. The job situation, economic stability, healthcare, etc. Stuff I would take for granted ten years ago, but not now with a business and young family.

Every town has it’s problems and some of them may even be irreversible and like all marketing propositions, towns should perhaps be trying a little bit harder to differentiate themselves, and this is why I was attracted to this project. On a personal note, I could cite selfish reasons for my family and business but  I would also suggest element of civic pride (for want of a better phrase).

Local Pride

I have a friend in a Welsh town where young men would fight over local pride, with generations of family growing up in the area. Basingstoke doesn’t have that being an London overspill town of the 1960s. Many people I speak to who lived in the area before that time, aren’t impressed with the ‘progress’ and to be fair, some earlier planning in the seventies wasn’t that clever. And, perhaps newer residents are just apathetic.

But, there is somewhat of a necessity for civic pride in this new millennium. Localisation of trade, especially for small businesses, versus global  competition – we need to be clever and compete on different terms than 100 years ago for business and residents. Why Basingstoke when I have all this other choice?

Summary

It’s early days for this project and I know that it will take time – probably a lot of time – but it is doable. What’s more, I have found that there are more crazy people like me who feel that they want to promote the town they live in – even people born elsewhere. I commend these people, no matter how much piss taking commences because of it,however small their contribution, because they will be the ones to shape this town and leave some sort of legacy.

I know for me, I’d much rather build on my own identity as a Basingstoke citizen, than to pretend otherwise. As Ian Brown used to say:

“It’s not where you are from, it’s where you’re at.”

Picture Credit: Fred Fish

*NB. I am involved with Destination Basingstoke, the marketing organisation behind the Basingstoke Ambassadors scheme. This in turn had followed a two year relationship with the organistiona, which recently involved the commercial delivery of the website by The Escape (my day job) as a precursor to my involvement.