Spring, and I'm writing

But today blossom is emerging in magentas and yellows, joggers are wobbling or striding along the riverside walk, kids in vests are chucking frisbees, and Brits are playing impressively bad tennis (why doesn't Nick Bollettieri open an academy here? Brits just can't teach tennis like the Yanks can). 

It's Spring, finally, and even though I have a temperature and I appear to have swallowed barbed wire, life is good.

I feel like writing, and while I have a pen all I have to write on is a Sunday paper, but I scribble in the margins and it's great to be back on the creative journey.

I'm reading one of Julia Cameron's lesser known writing therapy books, 'The Sound of Paper', and feeling really inspired. Her prose and her advice are priceless. (Check it out here)

I love Julia Cameron (note earlier post from a year or so ago)

Her creativity is all-inclusive. We are all creative if we can find, in her words, our Vein of Gold. When I worked in big agencies, I always thought the idea of 'creative people' slightly preposterous - and agencies fostered the notion of these strange touched people, eccentric of habit and clothing, who always did everything in pairs. 

Of course, I was 'a creative' too, but I always saw creative people far outside the boundaries of the agency. I had a barrister neighbour who was a concert standard improvisational pianist, I knew an account man who wrote better headlines than any writer in the agency, I knew a receptionist whose observational diary would have yielded myriad Hollywood-standard scripts.

But still strategists and planners (or spanners as I loved to call them in my snide youth) cling to the notion that great strategies can only come from agency planning departments, and great creative only from 'creatifs'.

Richard Huntingdon, the Saatchi planning guru pours scorn on the notion that 'ideas can come from anywhere' on his blog here

This is the man who told me 'straplines are dead'. Yeah right. 

I totally, utterly disagree. How arrogant to think that only big agencies can come up with big ideas - which is what he's really saying. That is totally Jimmy Bullard.

His whole pitch is about being radical, and yet he entraps himself in 'rules' supported by labyrinthine thought processes. Our business is really much simpler than that.

Our own Elle John this week pointed out a screamingly obvious great line around a project we pitched for on Friday. So obvious that none of us had seen it until Elle, not a planner or creative but a suit, nailed it. 

Of course great ideas can come from anyone. Especially on a Cobalt day in Battersea Park. Here's to Spring.