Viva Aviva.

So Insurance giant Aviva – from historic cathedral city of Norwich – has been accused of slightly squandering M£80 on it’s rebrand campaign.

Now, money thrown at branding is always an easy rant; it’s sometimes just a less personalised version of the old essay: Why Build A Gallery For All This Art Crap When There Are Kiddies Dying. People matter, stuff doesn’t. Especially just decorative stuff.

Sounds true, as a statement. But we’ll talk about wellbeing and the exploration of the human soul and reasons to get out of bed in the first place, as well as effective financial administration in humanitarian crises another time.

But branding stuff is, after all, really about reaching people – so that the people doing the reaching get to take a pay cheque home to their families. So any criticism of a rebrand should be entirely judged on its effectiveness at reaching people. More than that – connecting with people. It’s not about the logo, it’s about the lingo.

Well, whatever. And maybe the jury’s out on that for Aviva – though their ads are surely getting seen. What people think Aviva means to them is another thing. >YAAAAWWWWNN< probably.

My point is the chuffing idea. If you’re going to spend squillions on something – at least make sure it makes SENSE.

“Would this have happened to Walter Willis?”

Yes, Bruce, you berk.

You might not have wanted them calling you Wally, but even then – you’re Bruce. Walter. Whatever – you. You’re cool and balding and look great in a sweaty vest. Who CARES about the name? You’re either any good or you’re not.

Two words: Englebert Humpadink. It’s as if he’s proving a point – by changing his name TO something freakishly stupid.

Bit of a Vauxhall Aviva, if you ask me.

Tweed and Twit.

I seem to have been caught up. Not in revelry, or in some religious ecstasy, but with work ‘n’ stuff, I guess. For whatever disappointing reason, anyway, I haven’t put pen to blog in a couple of weeks. But I’ve moved on as a person in that time. For a couple of reasons.

I could say it’s musically, as I have discovered Donald Byrd and George Duke, who are each adding to Momo’s faux-70s working atmosphere very nicely. But it’s not that. It’s in two key respects that I have developed socially of late – and I’m not sure which of them is really a step backwards.

—

Firstly, I spent my first weekend in tweed.

Now, itchy and hot it may be. Apparently ill-suited to go karting it is. But this robust material of chap choice does sort of, well, help one’s countenance.

It’s not simply that it feels a little like it might be stab proof. If not a complete country house alternative to kevlar, it does give one a feeling of security around the vitals, if wearing the full three-piece. It also just, well, helps you stand up straight. The kind of help I really need.

—

The stag do in London for Jules went off fine. I was robbed of at least a silver trophy on the karting track, smug tweeds under my jump suit and helmet not withstanding; after winning two heats, I was on the grand prix grid in third out of eleven and had comfortably taken second place by the second lap and was chasing Mike Lander for tea and medals when I was scurrilously black flagged. Pulled over for… a flapping chin strap. Mention it not. I finished one from last.

My winning find in Clobber on Friday – the work of a mere forty minutes from leaving the workload to returning to it – was a much enjoyed element of the chappish shenanigans, though I must say that Jules also wore his blazer and panama for most of the day and Mr Parker’s country jacket and cap were surpassed only by his nifty hip flask of snifters.

Of course, it says something of your age when what you really fancy doing of a Saturday night in London, on a hearty fellow’s pre-ennuptualment rollocking, is knocking a bobby’s helmet off as a jape, in the hope of ending up in Marylebone clink for the night. Either that or taking to the roof tops for a spot of light-fingered cat burglary for diamonds.

It says, of course, you’re not cut out for the real world.

Which, sitting there in a bar in Brick Lane at one in the morning in a tweed suit and still toying with my brolly, just didn’t seem to matter.

Jules pulled an essentially great gang of chaps around him that night, that’s the point, and it was good to see them each. ..But it was even gooder to come home thinking: now I know tweed.

—

Secondly, however, and possibly to my detriment, I have signed on to Twitter.

Why? Why why WHY?

I fear I may become as wired to it as every other of its converts – if I can work out how to come up with different status updates and items of news about my largely not at all interesting ordinary life for the blog, MySpace, Facebook and the big Twit.

Oh. That and actually service my clients. Of. Course.

I’m on simply as ‘Momotempo’ anyway. Twit me if you fancy.

Though, perhaps there’s a third way that I have moved on at last, in the last two weeks. For – news to follow imminently – I’ve actually gone and finished a music project.

“Infectious, gay music”.

I’ve bought an odd collection of musical items this week.

I’d say that the ones to have given me the most instant gratification would have to be those which I came home with this afternoon, after a few hours lazily trawling the charity shops between Southbourne and Boscombe.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone in the western world would bother putting a price tag of “20p” on anything in 2009. It’s also hard to understand how some classic charity shop bargains of yesteryear can still be found, in this nouvelle-student, post-ironic world. But they can. For, browsing the modest LP section of Help The Aged’s Boscombe shop, I found the Torero Band’s Tijuana Sound of Brass, from 1968, and its remarkably suitable bedfellow A swingin’ safari by Bert Kaempfert and his orchestra, from 1963.

The title track to the latter is, it turns out, every lazy bank ad’s soundtrack of choice – the one that goes: ‘duh-duh DUP duh-duh DUP, duh-duh DUP duh-duh DUP, duh-duh DUP duh-duh DUP, duh-duh duh-duh dah’ on two penny whistles. Oh, you know the one. It’s Mr Kaempfert, anyway – who knew?

And the very pre-Avengers lady on the cover, clicking her fingers and doing a toe point while dressed in pith helmet and khaki shorts, with a couple of lank leopard skins, a rotten djembi and an old ficus from someone’s living room sort of all placed around her in an otherwise conspicuously un-dressed white photographer’s studio, is a period delight. Certainly very Kaempf.

Meanwhile, the ignominious Toreros may patently not be Herb Alpert’s more legendary outfit of Not Ironic, Mexican horn grinners, but on this playful long player they’re delivering some of the same classic numbers I’d been pining for for years, such as Spanish Flea.

I’d been pining for these, in fact, since I first discovered the arduous side of graphic design. Working the final weeks towards my degree show in ’93, I well recall how someone found a copy of Mr Alpert’s greatest hits in an equivolent of Help The Aged in Leicester at the time and brought it in to cheer a stressed, overworked studio of students – only, also taking the trouble to deliver it with the added creative inspiration of recording the old LP at the record speed of a seven-inch.

My subsequent memory of hearing this essentially Pinky & Perky-ed version of what is already undeniably some of the campest lift music in the world – under the susceptible emotional conditions of workload nervous meltdown, of course – is among my fondest in life.

People were coughing up organs with laughter. Bless me – I can still see myself, lying there on the floor, turning blue for lack of oxygen and all but filling my trousers with the convulsions.

To have found almost the equivalent today, for 20p, was a gem. And, at my age, normal speed seemed pleasure enough somehow.

The sleave notes describe the Tijuana sounds celebrated in these recordings as: “the newest, freshest, gayest Latin tribute to popular music”, ramming home its point in the next par by emphasising it was “infectious, gay music which reflects the land of sunshine and wild scenery”.

No one would wish to argue a single moment with that.

—

Earlier in the week, I came home from an arduous daytime forray to the far side of Poole and back with three distinctly differently-sized and shaped boxes. A big, square, heavy one; a little, flat, light one, and a medium-sized triangular one.

When I’d arrived at Absolute Music Solutions that afternoon, I’d thought that I should come clean and play the Dim Momo Doofus card fairly strongly, as I later put it on Facebook. Not a sausage of knowledge did I have about any of my utterly random collection of requirements, as I smiled good-naturedly at the polite music expert behind the sweeping showroom desk.

But, none the less, I left their good patronage some thirty minutes later with some new monitor speakers, a looping DJ widget of some kind, and the ugliest, “most offensively cheap” guitar they could sell me, as specifically requested. “Parts of it look like they’re from discarded 70s prosthetic limbs” I had said flatly, as I and the store chap had stared down at the offending implement. “You did ask” he then pointed out simply, and I handed over my credit card.

—

I’m just so very bad at getting around to some things. The boring things. The boring but essential things – like having speakers in my studio of aspirationally-professional musical creative that are at least almost as good as the cheap set in my invisibly grease-draped kitchen. Or having at least a basic way to chime out some bad chords on one of the most fundamental instruments in modern music.

Or being able to at least see the floor of my aspirationally-professional workspace for boxes, leads, job bags, drums, things that clack, things that shingle, CDs, proofs, old magazines and random clothing.

This last point I plan to work on before the long Easter weekend is out. Really. On the other points I now have no excuse.

Still, since when was I interested in taking music that seriously?

Monkeying.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really had a thing about primates.

Those hairy, goofy guys. I can only say that, having finally visited Dorset family attraction, Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre, for the first time at the weekend, I was disappointed on a number of counts. Not once did we see lemurs, chimps, baboons or gibbons:

1: making tea.
2: moving pianos.
3: serving on the turnstiles.
4: jamming.

Now, call me old-fashioned. But I think Tara, Ryan, Caroline and I were all disappointed when we asked one of the keeper ladies “where they set up the drums” only to be told that “this is an ape rescue centre. We don’t encourage our monkeys to form jazz bands”.

Obviously the delightful niece and nephew suffered the kind of disappointment grown disproportionately fast by a 45-minute drive with a hyping uncle, but still. No swing? In a monkey house? C’maaan, lady.

We did however learn a couple of things I had no idea about, including:

1: Orangutans are found only in Borneo and Sumatra. That’s it.
2: long-tailed Lemurs are found only in Madagascar.
3: loads of the really cool monkeys and apes are stupidly close to extinction.
4: uncle Tim looks like a lot of them.

Obviously had some idea about point 4, but my overall point is that Monkey World is a great day out with kids. Or it is if the sun shines all day and you have two such basically gorgeous young people with you as we did. If I ever actually get to pretend to be a parent for real, I’m not doing it unless I get a couple of little monkeys like them. And that’s that.

So anyway, in the words of Michael Jackson: “Mama se, mama sa, moo marmoset”.

—

Previous weekend saw a bit of monkeying around too. Year two of our Eight Men Rolling Manfully Around The Solent weekend and we had a grand time, yawing and jarring our way up and down the coast of the Isle of Wight in the very good ship Mawimbi. Thanks in huge part to the good skip, King. Steve once again put together a good crew of easy guys to hang off a sheet with.

Young Chris, the only cast replacement, turned out to have a sager head and more practical hands than most of the rest of us and even managed to scale the 46-footer’s imposing mast, just to amuse us all. He didn’t hang off the top spreaders by his knuckles exactly, but he did sit perched up there for an hour as we cruised around Cowes.

I cooked a hack’s galley meal on the Friday night and managed not to tank the ship into anything during manful moments behind the wheel.

In fact, the boat and the sailing weather and the ambience in harbour were all so good, we expended more energy bickering about cheese and music choices than anything else.

Of course, while carving your award winning local soft blue, from the late night speciality deli, I personally think you can’t go wrong with a nice bit of swing.