the caffeinated life – part two

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Caffeine was a ticket to ride. We were invited all over the world to work. And when we travelled and worked together, we always took the time to enjoy and explore the place. Caffeine took me to places I loved and to countries and cultures that were fascinating. My first official gig overseas (January 2007, just four days after we opened our doors for business) was speaking at a conference in Siem Reap, Cambodia. My last gig for Caffeine in 2017 was in New York. In between, we Caffeinated Tokyo, Milan, Hong Kong, Goa in India, South Africa, Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Geneva, Singapore, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, LA, Moscow, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Beirut, Prague, Budapest, Dubai, Barbados, Malaysia, Macau, Shanghai, Valencia, Jersey and Bahrain.

Looking back, we had no idea how lucky we all were. We used planes like taxis. We thought nothing of hopping on a flight to attend a meeting with a client – that was perfectly normal. Hotels were luxurious. We travelled in the front of the plane, in business class (see blog Turning left). We stayed for extra time rather than rushing back (executive air lounges are always full of people rushing from the airport to the meeting and straight back to the office – where’s the fun in that?). Sometimes we spent days enjoying the place we had flown to. There was no pandemic. No war zone in the middle of Europe. There was no imminent danger of nuclear armageddon. China was an exciting opportunity. Russia was under control. Travel in Europe was seemless – the UK was still a member of the EU and Brexit just a spectre. There wasn’t even a sign that any of this would change before 2016. We felt this was normal. It wasn’t. The peace we all enjoyed our entire adult lives here in the West was, in reality, just a 70 year holiday from history. It’s all up in smoke now. I took it all for granted. But the Caffeine years were golden.

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I remember looking down on the shanty town slums of Shanghai from my full length plate glass bathroom window at the hotel I was staying at for an Ogilvy conference on their Unilever business in 2009. It jarred with me. Me up in secluded splendour, thousands of people financially and physically below me, scraping a living on the streets. The disparity between the rich and individualistic west and the poverty of most other people was at its starkest in that view. The servants who waited table and ferried the food to 500 executives at The Banquest of the Damned (as I called it in another blog) in the middle of the Cambodian jungle saw our presence as something very other to their own existence. We are always oblivious. We are always entitled.

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Caffeine business was conducted in a bubble of privilege. In South Africa, LJ and I did our three day gig in Jo’burg and were about to depart to run the same programme in Cape Town when the local client called it off. But we were already 12,000 miles from home and the hotel in Cape Town was booked and paid for. We went anyway and spent three days exploring the Cape. Which was marvellous. On a subsequent trip out there, I managed to get Sam a placement at the advertising agency for two weeks in return for running the programme they had cancelled the previous summer. Sam and I stayed in Cape Town together for a week and then I departed for home, leaving Sam in an apartment on his own for a week. He did work in the townships and they were generous hosts. however, they expected him to bicycle back all the way across the city, in the dark, every night, aged just 18. A white boy in a threatening and sometimes violent neighbourhood. The middle class management didn’t think anything of it. They all drive to work. But the more junior people told Sam not to cycle home. It was too dangerous. So they arranged lifts home for him every night.

This is the kind of oblivion haze we all inhabited. On my first trip, I hooked up with my old school mate Mark Heywood and he showed me around Soweto. But this is all poverty tourism. In the west we are so isolated from the experience of most of our fellow human beings. Life in the business class lounge, commuting across continents to dinners and conferences in air conditioned offices and hotel rooms ain’t bad; it’s a very civilised lifestyle. But as you look down from 30,000 feet up in the air, or 35 stories from your bath onto the streets of Shanghai, it’s not always that comfortable in other ways.

Would I trade it? Definitely not. Do I owe something to the world? Definitely yes.

All this travel has brought me untold happiness. Much more than the beers and the cocktails and the company and the money. It changed my life. It brought me my wife and a whole new life. When Chris and I landed in Moscow, I had no idea that our gracious and generous host, Tanya, who took her Sunday off to take us to Red Square, would, six years later, marry me. Emily is just as much a Caffeine baby as she is a Google baby. Google may have paid all the hospital bills for her birth, but Caffeine brought her parents together. I wish I still had the picture she took of Chris and I standing together in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. It was taken on my Blackberry (remember them?) but has long since disappeared along with the device.

There are other memories carved into my memory which sadly have no photographic memento to mark them. Standing in Bar Street in downtown Beirut with Danny Herbert in 2013. At either end of the street, twin armoured personnel carriers both with mounted machine guns. Having a cocktail at 3am in a war zone was surreal. Or working quite literally on the road to Damascus about eight kilometres from the Syrian border on another trip to the lovely Lebanon with Andy. The girls in our group asked if they could go for an early morning jog and were told that this was Hezbollah territory. That’ll be a ‘no’ then. There are few pictures of our adventures in Prague or Budapest when Andy and I worked with Richard Bonner-Davies. Or in our towels at the Kaiser’s favourite hammam in Istanbul in 2010. Or with Chris Cowpe on his and my one week trip to Santa Monica (see blog At the raw bar with Cowpe)

Parties – Xmas and summer

Beirut with Danny

The Road to Damascus with Andy

Eddie Moutran, Saudi, Istanbul.

Great clients. Simon T, Elske, IMAP, Miles, Mayo, Paul H, Jose, James Farrell, Kara Lemont, Fatos, Imer.

Work proud of: Farfetch, Ogilvy,

Caffeine was always fun. If life in someone else’s company is restricting, having your own enterprise is fantastically liberating. Not only do you get to call the shots and say what you think to your clients – as opposed to reporting into dead eyed money men and toeing the company line – you also get to set the tone and atmosphere you like. We always strived to make the time we spent with our clients stimulating and enjoyable. Sometimes the work or the job we had to do was tough and not everyone in our clients’ organisations liked us or found us an easy ride. But that’s okay. That’s being an outside consultant. That’s because making things and people better often entails pain. Ask any surgeon. But we always brought them new ways to grow and their interactions with us always either yielded terrific results or received brilliant feedback. We always created a mood of optimism and playfulness and an atmosphere that left them wanting more.

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