Christmas Eve - A Fairy Tale

I almost forgot! A Christmas story or two, just a little bit late...

Christmas Eve
By Sarah McCartney

Eve was born on 24th December and her parents named her after her dad’s grandmother. It was only after they’d signed the birth certificate and the registrar laughed a little and said,
“That’s funny, naming her after Christmas Eve,” that they realised what they’d done.
All through her schooldays people thought it was funny to say, “So it’s nearly Christmas, Eve!” She could stand that, but what she really hated was that although her brother and sister both got birthday presents and Christmas presents from their friends and family, she only ever got one.
“We got you something bigger to combine birthday and Christmas,” they said, but the presents were never twice as big, just around 10% larger. What was worse was that she was never allowed to open them on her birthday; they had to be saved for Christmas Day, so that she wouldn’t be left sitting there with nothing to do while everyone else ripped through the recycled packaging of their Christmas gifts.

One Christmas Eve, Eve was sitting by the window staring at the crescent moon.
“Eve” whispered a clear bell-like voice that she’d never heard before.
She looked down into the garden but there was no-one there, although she was sure the voice had come from outside.
“Eve, out here!” the voice called again. Looking outside she noticed that the moon seemed to be waving an aura of sparkles at her. It was frosty outside and she didn’t really want to get cold, but she opened the window and called quietly,
“Moon? Is that you?”
“Yes! Of course it is,” said the moon and send a shower of sparking moondust down a moonbeam straight into Eve’s bedroom to keep her warm.
“I’ve got something for you,” said the moon, “and it’s for your birthday when everyone forgets about you but me.” The sky turned from cloudy grey to a deep purply blue, the moon itself glowed an amazing bright golden yellow and Eve could smell flowers, even though there were none in the garden. Then a small, glittering parcel shot down a moonbeam right through the window and landed on her bed next to Theo, her teddy bear. It unwrapped itself and revealed a deep blue bar with a golden moon on top; its perfume was a blend of exotic jasmine and calming ylang ylang, just right for melting away all her anxieties and worries about the unfairness of being born on Christmas Eve.
“Put it in the bath, Eve,” said the moon, and every time I see you, I’ll send you another one.”
Eve never actually spoke to the moon again. Sometimes she opened the window and waved, hoping to start up another conversation, but probably the moon was a bit busy talking to other children. But every now and again, when she’d had a bad day, Eve found another magical parcel on her bed.
“Mum, Dad! I’ll just have a bath!” she would shout, and they were delighted that Eve was so keen to keep herself clean, and they never did work out quite where that beautiful scent came from.

Want to Believe
By Sarah McCartney

“Father Christmas is coming tonight” shouted Emily, all excited. She would be awake every hour wondering if he’s got there, running into her brother’s room to see if he was ready to go and look under the tree for presents.
Joe wasn’t so sure. People at school had told him that their parents gave them their Christmas presents and that there was no such thing as Father Christmas, no reindeer, no sleigh and no coming down the chimney. He was sure he had heard him the previous year, but perhaps it was his mum and dad after all.
“Is there really a Father Christmas?” he asked them at tea time and he saw them glance at each other quickly.
“It’s like this,” said his dad, “If you believe in him, then he’ll bring your presents, but if you don’t, then we have to do it for him.” This was a dilemma. Joe was a very considerate boy and he didn’t want his parents to have to buy things out of their own money just because he doubted the practicalities of the Father Christmas myth.
“I do want to believe,” he said and got on with eating his pasta.
He asked his grandmother what to do.
“Gran,” he said, “If I don’t believe in Father Christmas, I’m going to put mum and dad to a lot of expense, but I don’t really see how a sleigh can fly or how a fat man can get down the chimney. What can I do?”
“Hmmm,” said his gran to buy some time, “There is one story that says that if you are good you will get your presents but if you are bad, you will get a lump of coal.”
“I’ve been pretty good, I think,” said Joe, who was quite a good boy most of the time, “So I want to believe that too.”
Joe was confused, but it wasn’t enough to keep him awake. In the morning Emily woke Joe up, leaping around and giggling with delight at the lovely things Father Christmas had brought her. Joe looked and saw a pile of coal at the end of his bed.
“Oh no!” he wailed, “Everything’s gone wrong and it’s all my fault.” Then he picked up the coal and noticed that it smelled sweet; he licked it and found that it tasted of sugar; he bit it and it was delicious! Downstairs he found a stack of presents and they all said, “To Joe, with love from mum and dad.”
“I’m sorry you had to buy them, but I couldn’t believe any more,” he said to them giving them each a big hug.
“That’s OK Joe,” said his mum. “We wanted to buy them for you anyway.”
Then Joe remembered the pile of coal sweets upstairs.
“Thanks for the sweets, too” he said.
“What sweets?” asked his mum and she looked at his dad with her eyebrows raised. His dad gave one of those “don’t look at me” glances and shook his head.
“That was odd,” thought Joe. “Even though I don’t believe in Father Christmas, I definitely believe in something.”

Father Frost - A Morality Tale

Father Frost
Father Frost is a northern European winter tale that turns up with slight variations. Here's a new version, from Father Frost's point of view.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Once upon a time in December, Father Frost was travelling north. He'd spent most of the year camped out at the pointy end of Patagonia where it was as frosty as the frosting on a frozen ice cream cake. He also rather like watching the penguins. Humming his favourite Beatles song, he guided his sleigh with a skilful flick of the wrist so his three faithful reindeer knew just where to set him down in northern Russia. The air crackled as he inhaled the reassuringly cold atmosphere, cold enough to kill any normal man. This was his land, his territory and he was reclaiming his kingdom where he reigned unchallenged every Yuletide.

Each year he hoped to find a worthy companion, someone he could trust, someone who didn't just want to be by his side because he was powerful or rich or famous or dangerous. He was all of these things and old enough to know that they usually attracted exactly the wrong sort of people.

As he glanced around his kingdom he saw something move in the forest, so he headed towards it. It was a girl, a pretty girl who was shivering with cold, and dressed in what looked like last year's summer party clothes, anyway they were hardly adequate for the occasion. In the distance, he saw an old man walking away with his shoulders hunched; he looked as though he was sobbing in pain and misery.

"Here we go," thought Father Frost, "yet another example of the appalling behaviour that I've come to expect from these people." As he got closer to the girl she started to shake with terror as well as with the cold. He had this effect on people as soon as they recognized him. Nevertheless she looked him straight in the icy blue eyes and said politely,
"Good afternoon, Father Frost. I hope that your journey wasn't too tiring."
"It was fine, thanks," said Father Frost, "and how are you? Not too cold out here?" He smiled rather wickedly at this challenge and wondered which of the many lines he'd heard before she would try out on him.
" I'm great!" she said as cheerfully as she could manage through chattering teeth. That was a new one. Usually they begged for his pity, asked us to be wrapped up in his nice warm cloak and attempted to wheedle their way his affections. Sometimes it worked, but he would get bored with them, and gently freeze them to death with one ice cold breath.
"It can't last,” he thought to himself and asked her again but every time she told him she was doing fine even though it was as clear as an icicle that she was about to drop dead with cold.
"Could it be?" he wondered, "that I have finally found a genuinely unselfish human being?" and he decided to reward her for her patience. He wrapped her up in furs (because in those days there were no synthetic fibres and no animal rights campaigners) and whisked her off to his palace, where she had a nice warm bath and found the most beautiful blue velvet clothes waiting for her, some stunning silver jewellery and a great big box of treasure.

"This is really very kind of you, Father Frost," she said, "but I can't possibly accept them. Besides, now that my stepmother has thrown me out of the house, if I go back there I'm sure she'll have my dad put to death and I couldn't bear that to happen, so if it's alright with you, I’ll just take the cloak and a good pair of boots and be on my way."

Father Frost sent the reindeer and the sleigh off to bring her dad back to the palace, then loaded the treasure, daughter and dad onto his magic vehicle and sent them back home. Occasionally he liked to set up a little scenario and watch how it played out but this one was worse than he could have imagined. When she saw all the precious things, the evil stepmother, who had sent our lovely girl out to the woods to die, decided to send her own rather unpleasant, greedy daughter out there too. It didn't go well. The greedy girl complained, moaned, whinged and whimpered until Father Frost was so bored, he exhaled on her and turned her to snow then blew a bit harder and caused a blizzard in Stockton on Tees.

Now that he had finally found someone who could be trusted, he invited his new friend to help him give out all the good children's rewards at Yuletide. He didn't ask her name. He decided to call her Snowflake and asked her always to wear beautiful blue and silver clothes. Even though she was quite an independent minded young woman she decided that this was fair enough, considering the circumstances. From that day onwards she accompanied him around the world and really enjoyed watching the penguins in Patagonia.

To my local council

Dear whoever sent me a letter,

Account number: 4******5

I got a letter from you on 20th October, but I don’t open the post very often as it’s usually quite tedious.
Anyway, it said I owed you exactly £100 in “instalment arrears”.
I pay by bank transfers which I set up at the beginning of each council tax year so I looked it up just now and found that I’d mistakenly entered £98 for September instead of £198.
I’ve now sent you £100 to make up for it.

The letter also says that my instalments will be cancelled and recovery action of the full balance will follow without further notice, whatever that means. However, you can’t cancel my instalments, only I can, so you didn’t. October’s had been paid nicely as usual.

So I hope we are all friends again, as was quite obviously a genuine mistake, and didn’t really deserve an unsigned
letter with red type on it.

I wonder if you might consider sending your people to my writing workshops. I’ve worked with Legal & General and Aviva, among others, to help them write to people in a warmer, clearer way, not using phrases like “recovery action on the full balance” or “in accordance with the scheme notified” or leaving them unsigned, which might give the impression that you are a cold, bureaucratic organisation with no interest in keeping your local people happy.

Yours,
Sarah.

Why Brucie Must Go

It's the sheer arrogance of the smarmy old git.
Brucie appears to believe he is the centre-piece of Strictly Come Dancing. He seems to think that the place will fall apart without him. Last week it didn't. Yes, it fell apart, but only because the director insisted on dumping an un-rehearsed (or underqualified) Ronnie Corbett into the space that Brucie usually occupies. In the hands of the delectable Claudia (who only pretends not to be in control) the programme would have run perfectly.
Bruce is now an embarrassment. He overestimates his public appeal. He insists on telling his tedious jokes, irresponsibly holding up the entire BBC1 programme schedule, just because he can, to make a point about how he won't be rushed.
He was once successful and rich, and actually very very funny, and hence managed to snag himself a collection of decorative wives. He's now fooling himself into thinking that he has innate appeal to womankind. He does a couple of nifty steps to keep us interested; instead we fear that he's going to keel over with a coronary.
Ever second that Brucie spends talking could be usefully given over to watching people dance and listening to relatively intelligent critisism.
Take my share of the licence fee and pay him off. Let him not ruin another minute of prime time television.
And while you're at it, please ban Aleysha Dixon from ever speaking in public.
Please join me in a campaign to put him out to pasture and send him off to a golf course. For ever.

The Mice's Tail

One more seasonal story.

Once upon a time there were two mice who were getting by quite nicely in a medium-sized house in Bloomsbury, the literary part of Victorian London. They spent most of their time in the basement which was where the kitchen and pantry were, and although the kitchen maid kept everything scrubbed very clean, the cook dropped enough nuts and raisins about the place for them to live really rather luxuriously. They would sleep during the day, curled up behind the fireplace, which had all the modern conveniences including a built-in oven and a place to heat the irons.

At night, when the servants had finished washing all the pots and pans, scrubbing the floors and hanging all the washing out to dry, the mice came out to play. They were fairly careful not to chew through anything important; they realised that it was a very good idea to let the household think there were absolutely no mice there at all. They had observed with horror what had happened next door when they'd brought a cat into the house.

One winter it was terribly cold in the basement at night so they decided to venture upstairs. Squeezing under the living room door, they found themselves in a magical fairyland and were astonished by the beauty of what they saw. In the middle of the room was an enormous tree, as high as a thousand tiny mice. But what really astonished them were the hundreds of little pink mice who were sleeping in its branches. The two London mice had never really stopped to think what colour they were, but once they realised that they were a nondescript shade of dull grey, they began to be a little disappointed.

"Pink mice!" called the first mouse in a shouty whisper but not a single one of them moved so much as a whisker.

The second mouse joined in and the two of them spent a good 20 minutes making as much noise as they could to try to wake up the pink mice so that they could all play together. Nothing! Not a thing. Not even a polite "hello".

"I wish I could be pink,” said the first mouse. "I wish they would tell us how they got to be that pretty colour."

"I would like to live in a tree where everyone could see me," said the second mouse and they both set about jumping up and down shouting again to see if they could get some answers to their questions.

The mice got so tired that they decided to give up and go to sleep, but they were so impressed by the beauty of the big tree with its beautiful glass decorations and its immense pink mouse population that they curled up in a corner of the sitting room instead of going back to the basement.

The next morning the mice were woken up by three boisterous children who bounded into the room followed by their nanny then their mother and father. Watching carefully from their viewpoint underneath the piano, the mice waited to see what would happen. The children are raced over to the tree and all shouted,

" Please, please! Mummy! Daddy! May we have a sugar mouse?"

"Of course you can, my darlings,” said their beautiful mother in a soft voice which was very different from anything they had ever heard in the kitchen. The children raced to the tree and each one of them grabbed a pink mouse from the fragrant branches. Our two little grey kitchen mice were a little bit envious to see the affection shown to their distant pink relatives. Then, horror! They shivered with fright when these apparently pleasant children grabbed hold of their mice and bit their heads off! They retreated as far as they could, pinned themselves back to the wall underneath the piano and stayed there for the rest of the day shaking with fear until it was dark and quiet again.

When they were convinced that there was absolutely no one left awake in the house, and after a few false starts, they crept more quietly than mice had ever crept before, back down to the kitchen and the safety of the little hole behind the fireplace. They feasted on a sultana and thanked their lucky paws that they were grey.

Cinderella - a new approach

The second in a series of new fairy stories; this one is based on a traditional tale.

Cinders
Once upon a time there was a very beautiful girl who lived in a big old house with her father, ageing stepmother and two older, slightly overweight, overdressed and very badly made up stepsisters. Her name was Helen, and her job was to keep the big old house clean and tidy. This was before the days of Hoovers, Flash and even electricity; what she had to do the work with was a wooden bucket, ice cold water that she had to fetch from the well and a set of brushes that she'd inherited from her grandmother. Suffice to say, the work was never finished. Her clothes were filthy and her personal hygiene was none too good either.

Her stepsisters didn't call her Helen, they called her Cinderella because she slept by the fireplace to keep warm and often got covered in cinders. She hardly ever saw her dad because to be honest he was a bit afraid of his second wife and her two daughters who had made it quite clear that he wasn't to be seen socialising with his daughter. She only had one friend, Buttons, the lad who looked after the horses, the coach, the kitchen garden and all the outdoor house repairs.

One day, the king and queen sent out party invitations to every unmarried woman in the land. They wanted to give their son a chance of finding a decent wife because he was dragging his heels a bit when it came to getting married and settling down. He was one of those 32-year-old commitment phobics who was waiting for "the one". He was familiar with most of the single women in the countryside anyway, and he wasn't looking forward to the ball. The two stepsisters were out of their minds with excitement at the thought of going to the ball and possibly snagging the country's most eligible bachelor. Helen wasn't all that bothered. Besides, she didn't even have a dress and it would take months to scrub all that muck off.

The sisters and the stepmother set off for the ball early, taking the carriage and forgetting about the dad. He arrived down at the kitchen, where Helen and Buttons were sitting in front of the fire, which was glowing red orange and yellow and crackling as the wood heated up. Just as he came through the door, the windows flew open and in floated a rather elegant, grey-haired fairy of a certain age.

"Cinders," she said gently, "would you like to go to the ball?"
"No," Helen replied, "I'm fine here with Buttons and my dad."
"Think about it for a moment," said the fairy, "You could have a beautiful new frock, shoes made of crystal, a golden coach, a whole team of servants and we would do your hair and makeup. The Prince is certain to fall in love with you, you'd get married and live happily ever after."
"Honestly," said Helen, "I’ve met the Prince and he's not all that, although he certainly thinks he is. It wouldn't be long before he decided to look elsewhere and I'd be stuck there pretending to be happy. It would never work out."

The fairy had to think again. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. But as she watched the three of them having a glass of mulled wine and chatting, she thought of a new plan. She quickly flew down to the Palace, stripped off one of the sisters’ terrible makeup and gave her a natural look, put her in a beautiful, simple dress and a pair of killer heels and planted her on the dance floor right in front of the Prince. Ace. Love at first sight. She also fixed up the second sister who was more than content with the Prince’s footman. With her daughters set up at the palace there was no way that their mother was ever going back to the big old house.

Without the ridiculous expense of the stepmother's clothing, hair and personal maintenance budget, Helen's dad found out that he had plenty of money to employ a few more helpers around the place and do up the decorating a bit. Buttons plucked up the courage to ask Helen to marry him and naturally she accepted. Even though they had the choice of some lovely big rooms in the newly restored old house, their favourite place was always sitting by the kitchen fire, drinking mulled wine, watching the flames and listening to the crackling cinders.

A New Fairy Story

Earlier this year, I wrote some new fairy tales for Lush's Christmas products. I thought you might like to share so here's one. If you like them, I'll follow up with some others. Please feel free to read it to any handy children, and to pass it on, just remember to say where it came from. Thanks.

The Star Sweetie

By Sarah McCartney
Once upon a time, before there were so many streetlights in the western world, we could all look up at the sky and see millions of stars every night. (Except when it was raining, when you look up to the sky and just get raindrops in your eyes.) There are more stars in the sky and there are grains of sand in the world, more than we can possibly imagine stretching further away than even the smartest scientists can comprehend. Most of them are enormous balls of fire, bigger than our own sun, but a handful are very small indeed. A long time ago, one night when it was dark, one of the tiniest stars got a bit bored with hanging around in the sky and decided to visit the earth.The physics was rather complicated but to cut a long story short the star floated down towards the Earth's surface and steered itself towards Yorkshire, for no particular reason except it had always rather admired the cliffs at Whitby.

Not having much control over its flight path in the Earth's atmosphere it slightly lost its balance and tumbled through the open window of a seaside sweet factory. Fortunately, it landed softly in a barrel of icing sugar, jumped out, tripped over and fell into a bucket of the most deliciously scented sweet flavouring, specially blended for a batch of sugar candies which were going to be given away at the town hall Christmas party the following evening. After its journey, the little star was a bit tired and it fell asleep.

The next morning all the workers arrived at 6 a.m. start their preparations for the Christmas party. Before the star had had a chance to wake up and remember where it was, it had been put inside a gift box and tied up with ribbon.

That evening, when the Lady Mayoress opened her presents, everyone was very impressed when a sugary star shot out of the box and lit up the whole town hall with its incandescent light. The owner of the seaside sweet factory pretended that he had been planning this all along, but refused to give away the secret. The little star loved all the attention it was getting, but felt a little bit claustrophobic in the town hall after the freedom of the infinite night skies. At midnight when the doors opened to let everyone go home, tired but happy and full of chocolate, the star zoomed out and straight up, off into the sky.

It's difficult to see these days, with so much artificial light coming from the earth, but if you look carefully sometimes you can see a pink star and now a slight whiff of candy in the sky. That's him, swooping in to take a closer look and wondering whether to come back and light up another party.

© Sarah McCartney 2009.

Wake Up and Smell the Roses

This week I was invited to spend a morning working with business students, pushing them to invent a new product to raise money for a good cause, and create the campaign to go with it. Our two hours were organised chaos, just the way I like it, and by the end of the session we had three decent ideas which I can present to the Lush creative team (if the students remember to email them to me). One man was the bounciest, noisiest and most enthusiastic; he got his idea through by sheer determined but good-humoured domination. When I worked as a lecturer, I was always told to make sure everyone got an equal hearing. In real life, if this had been a Lush recruitment session, he would have been the one who got the job.

That evening, I was in the smart end of Victoria, Belgravia perchance, at the delightful little posh scent shop, Les Senteurs, for their 25th birthday celebrations, Marie- Hélène Rogeon of Les Parfums de Rosine and her expert perfumer, François Robert, came to talk about their range of rose scents. Marie- Hélène has a passion for roses which she grows in her own garden. She also has a perfumery heritage; her great, great grandfather made Eau de Cologne for Napoleon III. When she recreated designer Paul Poiret's 1911 perfumery, she invited François - already a respected 'nose' - to develope fragrances to match the widely varying scents of her own roses. As they talked about their different rose perfumes - one that smells of oranges and lemons (and roses of course), another of mint, then ginger, saffrom and even chocolate - a picture developed of their creative process which goes something like this.

Marie- Hélène: I've a rose that smells of lemons.
François: That's impossible. Roses don't smell of lemons.
Marie- Hélène: No really! I'd like you to create a scent that matches my lemony roses.
François: Roses smell of rose.
Marie- Hélène: I'll send you some of them.
François (as he opens the box of roses): OK, I see what you mean.
Result: Un Zest de Rose, a fresh, light lemony rose fragrance.

After going through a similar process with the ginger scented roses, the sand roses that smell of sea salt, the mint ones, the blackcurrant and the ginger ones, François Robert was convinced. Roses don't just smell of roses.

So, after a couple of glasses of Les Senteurs' delicious champagne, I asked M. Robert if his advanced technical training had shackled his imagination. He laughed kindly and explained that in perfumery, there are two rose scents: absolute and essence. Rose absolute is light and fresh. Rose essence is deeper and heavier. Both are excruciatingly expensive. Working with Marie- Hélène had obliged him to accept that the rose's natural fragrance is rather more intriguing and variable than he had imagined. He's off to visit David Austin's extraordinary garden soon but said that his favourite is the simple rose that grows at the roadside in hedgerows. He also thinks that unscented roses are pointless, no matter how beautiful they look.

Marie- Hélène and François make up a creative team which works beautifully. Passion, inspiration and confidence, matched with technical pefection, skill and even more (but quieter) confidence, Marie-Hélène knows what she wants and François Robert knows how to create it. The result: works of art. (IMHO.)

There are three parts of creativity: ideas, skills and the ability to get it done. Sometimes they exist all in one person. Sometimes it's a duo, sometimes a trio. When it's successful it can turn into a whole company. Occasionally creative people are criticised for not having all three. Don't let that put you off. Spot your strengths and find people you can work with who have the ones you lack. Then things start to happen. What you do need, like Marie-Hélène or my bouncy business student is the determination to go get 'em.

Footnote: If you think that wearing scent is a trivial luxury, bear in mind that the world of fine perfumery fills fields with flowers, bees and birds employs Europe's travellers to pick the petals and changes our mood for the better. Put one one your Christmas list. Don't buy a big bottle of the cheap stuff instead; get a small, precious pot of the real thing.

www.les-parfums-de-rosine.com
www.lessenteurs.co.uk

Quoting Mr Jim Alfonso Laurel

I don't usually nick other people's words to fill up my own space - in fact this is a first - but Jim Alfonso Laurel (this may be his pen name) deserves credit. When I'm working with writers my aim is usually to get their work read and acted upon. How can you make your writing interesting enough for your reader to start at the beginning and keep going until the end, then do what you want them to do? In fact, I shan't be doing what Jim Alfonso Laurel wishes, but I couldn't help reading to the end. His is only a slight variation on a theme with which most of us are unfortuantely familiar, but I do like his approach. Back soon with some of my own words. I just hope I can make them as compelling as Jim's.

Don't call him though.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Before I proceed, I must first apologize for this unsolicited letter to you. I am aware that this is certainly not a conventional way of approach to establish a relationship of trust, but I do have limited choice. My name is Jim Alfonso Laurel a Solicitor working with HMCS(HER MAJESTY COURT SERVICES), London United Kingdom. Actually, I got your contact address from the internet while searching for a reputable business partner in your country's public records. My Late client, a business mogul who had casinos and restaurants, lived in Spain for many years, my client, his wife and their one child were involved in an underground train crash in the eastern city of Valencia as Victims of the Tuesday, 4 July 2006, Incident that befall the Spanish You can confirm through this website

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5143738.stm)

Before his death, on my advice as his lawyer he deposited One Trunk Box, containing the sum of $7.3M (Seven Million, Three Hundred Thousand US

Dollars) as a family valuable with a security company here in London, on a highly security form but he did not disclosed the content of deposited consignment to the Security company, for security reasons. The security company has mandated me to present any family heir/next of kin for claims, before the consignment gets confiscated or reverts to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, as unclaimed consignment. So I decided to search for any of my late client's relative which has been very difficult for me, as he did not declare any other person, address, partner or relatives in the official paper works of his consignment deposit. He was my private client.

I will not like you to involve any third party in this transaction, just me and you .Besides I am doing this on my own personal capacity and do not wish t o bring my office into it.

Against this backdrop, my suggestion to you is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the next of kin to my client, with my position as his lawyer, I will now appoint and recognize you as the heir/next of kin.

I will obtain every relevant document from the probate to make your claim legal. Note that this process is not risky in any manner and it is completely legal but might not be justified morally.

Once the deposit is released to you, I am proposing 20% of the total sum to you for your involvement.10% would be set aside for any expenses that could be incurred during the transaction. I would retain 50% for myself.

Note that when the whole documents are ready, I will direct you on how to approach the security company and make application for the release of the consignment to you.

If this proposal does offend your moral values please pardon me otherwise reply via my private email address: jimlaurel@mail.kz for further clarification. Please be kind to get back to me if you are not interested so that I can further my search for another partner.

Regards

Jim Alfonso Laurel (ESQ)

+44 704 570 4325

+44 704 577 1083

When Marketing Turns to the Dark Side

This week I got a text message that said:

FREEMSG: Our records indicate you may be entitled to 3750 pounds for the Accident you had. To claim for free reply with YES to this msg. To opt out text STOP.

So my first question to myself was, "If I text STOP, will they do so?" I thought, on balance, not. They'd already lied to me. I haven't had an accident (let alone an Accident) and I'm not on their records, unless you count them gleaning my number from somewhere public. So, their records can't show I've had an accident so that's lie number one. Would they charge me if I texted STOP? It doesn't say, so I suspect the answer is yes.
Would they charge me if I text YES? They say not, but I'm guessing that they would. All we know about them is that they are liars.

Another question was , "Shall I forward this to my friend Dave in the Met's Fraud Office?" I wonder if the police can do anything about scammers who earn £1 or £5 or who knows how much, by sending out mass texts.

Question number three is, "How many idiots are there in the world who would text back YES in the hope of being awarded 3750 of our British pounds for an accident they haven't had?" Enough to run a company? Or are they hoping to make money from the decent people out there who next STOP in order to prevent the scammers from trying again.

I've had cold calls from people offering to help me claim for "the accident I had recently", from companies who ignore the telephone preference service list that restricts my number. They try to talk me into "remembering" that I have had an accident. If not me, then perhaps a family member has had one, they suggest. A former neighbour spotted a dent in my vintage Saab (done by a large tattooed man wearing a vest and driving a truck) and told me he could get me £3500 compensation for my injury. "But I wasn't in it at the time." I said. "You just say you were," he told me. He said it was a "Win win." For him perhaps. Not for all of us who pay monthly to insure our cars, it's not. Not for me either, because even if I'd had the extra £3500 in the bank, I'd know that I'd stolen it and that would make me feel guilty and hence miserable.

It's calls, conversations and texts like this that tempt us to believe that business is all run by money-grabbing charlatans and marketed by crooks. But it's not. There are many of us out there doing business and being fair, working for organisations we're proud of, Let's not allow the scam artistes to take over marketing. By all means make a profit - how else are you to stay in business and pay the bills? - but let's be fair and honest and hold our heads up high. It's time to reclaim marketing for decent people. If you've got good examples, let me know. In the meantime, I'll report on the ones I spot, on the dark side and the bright, with the occasionally merely murky one along the way.