Holly Seddon

I’m no hottie. I’m five foot three in the morning, I wear my hair in a style I like to call ‘drunk ballerina’ and I walk like the missing link. So why, whatever time of day or night, do I get beeped walking down the main road to my local train station?

Almost every day, often more than once, a loud honk breaks the tranquility. Occasionally, this rude toot has been accompanied by something indecipherable yelled from the passenger window. It’s easy to blame our ‘big rig’ brethren, but other than a few white vans stuffed with gaggles of labourers (I think) this has generally been men, on their own, in family cars. Sometimes I’ve made out empty toddler seats in the back.

As I said at the top, I’m no stunner. I’m not the kind of woman anyone screeches the brakes on for, so I’ll bet this stretch of road can be far worse for other women.

Aside from the gender issue - my husband had never been beeped and he’s way more an attractive man than I am an attractive woman - it’s the motivations that bamboozle me. I would genuinely love to ask them. It can feel menacing and threatening. When it’s dark, it’s easy to panic and think about women’s bodies being found at the side of bypasses… Until sense prevails. Beepers, announcing themselves and their registration plates with a cheery toot, are pretty much the opposite of sneaky, cunning murderers.

Is it a compliment? Are they trying to make friends? Are they shy and this is an outlet for them, the only way they can communicate with women outside of their immediate circle, protected by the speed they’re going and the fact it’s nearly impossible to stop on a dual carriageway? Perhaps they feel strangled by a world of family cars and toddler seats and they rebel with an almost unconscious reach for the horn. Is this a manifestation of the classic ideas and accepted behaviours - perpetuated through a gazzilion years of fine art and fashion photography - of men as gazers, women as the gazed upon?

Or are they just fucking idiots? Do they really think that a lusty beep might be met by a wave and a beckon: “Hey car man! Nothing is more attractive than a balding head in a Ford Focus ruining my peace at 7.15am! How about you find somewhere to pull over so we can tangle in your car?!”

And then I laugh and think how pathetically misguided that would be. And then I stop laughing because I remember that sometimes, my 11-year-old daughter has been beeped. That is something way worse than pathetic.

Since July 2010, those words have introduced Vine Magazine’s final page. I’ve written about accidentally racially abusing old ladies while jogging, rubbing chickens’ bottoms, dust-ups in car parks and full-body gardening gloves. If this hasn’t put you off, and you’d like to read more, here’s the link: Mumblings in Vine Magazine.

Originally published August 2011

I was driving along the road headed for the supermarket about two months ago when an interview on the radio grabbed me by the throat. I was so moved by the story of the interviewee, and his gentle manner when describing even those who had really seriously wronged him (and wronged is a euphemism for beaten and abused) that I had to pull the car over because I was getting too tearful to see the road properly.

Originally published February 2010

When a person phones a confidential helpline, irrespective of the organisation running that helpline, they have to have faith that the confidentiality offered is real and assured.

If there is doubt – or worse, proof that it plain isn’t confidential – the effect on end users is clear: trust is broken, they won’t call. And sadly, if faith in confidentiality is rocked at one organisation, why would vulnerable end users trust any organisation?

Confidentiality is a black and white issue. It either is there, or it isn’t. Confidentiality doesn’t come with conditions. It is a true or false state. You can’t have confidentiality… oh, unless you’re telling us something really juicy. Confidentiality assured… well, unless we take umbrage with what you’re telling us. Sure it’s confidential, unless you’re dobbing on the office of a man who one of our patrons is in direct opposition to*.

Because there is the rub, whatever ‘reason’ for the statements to the media, however Christine Pratt sold it to herself, the National Bullying Helpline naming an office from which several confidential calls have been made, is wrong. And one of her patrons thinks so too, and has quit.

The Samaritans, for example, often take calls on, arguably, more serious subjects. They take calls from paeodophiles and rapists. The content of some of the calls is, I’m sorry but it is, worse than those from someone being bullied at work. And they don’t tell. They don’t name any specifics. When a Samaritans volunteer does break confidentiality, even in the case of a murder confession, they can no longer stay with the organisation. That’s how crucial, how sacrosanct, confidentiality needs to be.

Christine Pratt’s decision to talk will send ripples throughout the support services world. It can take numerous dead calls before someone dares speak to the voice at other end of a helpline. It can take months of learning the number off by heart before daring to say something out loud, to someone, confidentially.

It doesn’t take a lot to choose not to call for another day. I dare say a public breach of confidentiality could well stop someone ever calling.

So that’s a bullied person, feeling vulnerable and unsupported.  That’s a victimised neighbour not calling for support after years of attacks and vandalism. That’s an abused child not picking up and calling Childline. And all to score political points and drum up PR for one charity, while shooting every other supportive charity in the foot. I fail to see the charitable act in any of this.
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* Conservative Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe MP is one of the patrons of The National Bullying Helpline. In fact, the organisation has quite a lot of blue blood sloshing around. Conservative Councillor, Mary O’ Connor, Boris Johnson’s chair of London Health Commission is also a patron. And there’s a lovely personal endorsement on the organisation’s homepage from one David Cameron.

There are lots of other question marks that I’m not political enough to scratch about in, the politics of this isn’t what interests me, frankly. I’m sure there are lots of similar issues in left-learning organisations, of course, but if you’re interested, this guy has been digging.

Orginally published March 2010

Gordon Brown has threatened “serious action” to make sure companies appoint more female directors, “unless there [is] a sharp increase in the number of women on company boards.”

It’s the usual hackneyed, offensive, open-palmed swipe that you get in the run up to an election and it pisses me right off.

This bonkers ‘boobies quota’ is on a level with a casting couch. I don’t want to get a position on a City board because the company will be in trouble if I don’t. I don’t want to get a top City job because I have a pair of breasts. I don’t want a position on a City board at all, thank you very much.

There’s the rub. This kind of heavy-handed approach assumes a great many things:

1. That there are a far smaller number of top Director-level jobs filled by women because the City is inherently sexist.
2. That all women aspire to these jobs but are banging their beehives on the glass ceiling.
3. That the top jobs that count are the big commercial ones (what about female head teachers? Or not-for-profit managers? Or doctors?)
4. That the right men are already getting access to the top jobs and need no help.

There are very few top level jobs. Focussing on this number is focussing attention on a tiny percentage of working women. What about the thousands of bright women with bags of innovation to offer, that don’twant to make the kind of sacrifices needed to sit astride the FTSE100?

Only a tiny fraction of women in this country hold board-level positions. But only a small number of men do too. A larger number, granted, but a drop in the workforce ocean.

This latest move is a political red herring, an empty-worded faux attempt to use a sledgehammer to bash the bumps out of the playing field. This puffing and posturing is of no practical benefit to the huge percentage of working parents, trapped in a vortex of guilt, childcare, stress and rushing around. And they’re your voters…

What about people like me? I’m a company director but I freelance because while my career is of supreme importance to me, so is being able to pick my children up from school every day. Should I want something different?

And what about people like my husband and other family-focussed men? He is fantastically bright, innovative and hard-working. He’d be an asset in any role. But he doesn’t want to make the sacrifices currently needed to sit on a high-level board any more than I do. There are thousands more like him.

The brightest men and women should be encouraged into leadership roles through family-friendly, people-friendly, innovation-friendly cultures and ethos. Not because the PM will nobble the paymasters if they don’t crowbar a few more tits in.

Originally published October 2010

I’ve watched 2010 unfold with the taste of sick in my mouth. I’ve watched a bunch of fun tools, useful marketing channels and ways to commoditise friendship elevated to the status of kings.

Social media, especially Twitter, but Facebook a little too, seems to have a Siren-style effect on people. Drawing even great minds on to the rocks of idiocy and jargon-babblery.

Where is the proof? What has it really achieved? How is it better and more valuable than television, newspapers, radio or pen and paper? Different, yes, but how is it more valuable?

I hear, ‘reframe the question…’
They mean ‘if we don’t like the answer we’ll change the question until we get an answer we do like…’

Is putting a teabag in your ear a cure for HIV? No. Well change the question then. ‘Is not putting a teabag in your ear the cause of HIV?’ No. Oh great, now it is a cure. Next.

I hear, ‘you just don’t get it…’
They mean, ‘stop saying stuff we don’t like…’

I have enjoyed using social media. I have learned things through social media. I have made money from social media, a lot of us have. I’m one of those that has used the digital world as a platform upon which to build an extra element of my career. It has, in that respect, been a positive thing for me. Does that make it revolutionary? No. It makes it one of many useful platforms.

When ITV was created, my Dad had a job fitting convertors to television sets so that they could receive the new channel. Does that make commercial TV revolutionary? No. It made it a positive thing for him though. And a useful platform for advertisers.

I train and consult clients on social media (though more often online community) and when I do, I say to them what I’m saying here now, it’s no magic bullet. Curb your enthusiasm.

Social platforms are just tools. Grow. Up. They’re fun, they’re useful, you can learn things both personal and intellectual, you can find out what Richard Bacon’s up to right now, but you can also plug into a world of scientists, or human rights campaigners.

You can learn about things. You can make a tiny connection to someone living inside a devastating state machine. But to change something you need to do something, you need to get your hands dirty.

It would be fantastic if changing your location to Tehran and retweeting some smug message overturned a dictatorship, it would be so easy. People like me could just ‘Like’ a regime change while I wait for the kettle to boil. But believing it to be possible makes you a fruitcake.

These are tools. These are platforms. It’s dangerous to elevate them higher.

Being a big deal on Twitter might introduce you to some new friends, possibly get you a new job or maybe a new relationship, but all those things only expand in value when they hit the oxygen of the real world.

It’s just a bunch of tools and toys. For most people, being a big deal online means balls-all in the real world. Taking your Farmville cows to the slaughterhouse won’t serve up a juicy steak.

Someone said to me recently that I must (as an early adopter of such playthings) be really proud of how social media has come into its own over the last few years. Well, I’m not proud. I’m appalled.

The ‘Twitterverse’ at its worse is a pantomime dame shrieking about her own significance while the plot continues behind her. Bad stuff happens, real life happens, the dame is light relief, a tool to move the story on, she’s not the story.

And the biggest dames of them all divert attention from their over-blown claims by shrieking about online newspapers: “you’ve had fifteen years to make this work!” they lament. Well so have you!

There is lots of great stuff to say about social media. Individual successes  – let’s celebrate those rather than assume that success is scaled up to a war-winning size. Let’s not get carried away.

Bloggers are bloggers and online newspapers are online newspapers and they both have value. Paywall debate? No debate. I worked for an online newspaper and I had kids to feed. Damn right the words I wrote for nine hours a day were worth something. The frippery and primal screaming of my blog posts (which frequently link out to news that cost something to produce) less so. Far less so. If it’s really worth something, I’ll jam some Google Ads on here and watch the value totted up in pence a day before my very eyes.

To my mind, if I hear anyone else saying things like “we need a new paradigm” or “change the conversation” I shall cry bullshit as loudly as I can IN REAL LIFE.

Women didn’t get the vote because Emaline Pankhurst put a frowny face on her status. I’m being facetious, those tools didn’t exist then. But the Suffragettes didn’t get stuff done by sticking posters up or some other banal, easy exercise alone.

Changing your twibbon is the equivalent of showing your support for anti-apartheid by changing your t-shirt. You didn’t end apartheid decades ago. You didn’t fix Iran now.

I’m not talking about online communities, by the way, especially support communities.

They know what they are, they generally know their own value. A value to the individuals within the community and the organisation providing it.

I have been involved with one particular support community for seven years. It has no sharing functions, it has no avatars, it still sits on a creaking out-of-date Ideal BB message board because the content’s too precious to risk migrating.

It’s genuinely saved families, it’s genuinely saved lives.

That’s a quiet revolution of which I can be proud.

Aged 28, with my third baby in a pushchair, I finally gave up a habit that saw me leaping into roads several times a week.

If you’re aware of ‘triple drains’, you’ll understand. If you’re not, you’ll think I’m a total lunatic.

The triple drain phenomenon has fascinated me for over 14 years, since a college friend in Exeter told me that it was bad luck to walk on a triple drain, good luck to walk on a double drain, that it was cumulative and important and true. It was ridiculous, absurb, and addictive.

My husband still walks in the road rather than steps on a triple drain. He grew up in Staffordshire.

An ex weaved in and out of the addiction. He grew up in Hampshire.

My friend’s sister had embarrassed herself socially on many occasions stamping on double drains and skirmishing around the pavement to avoid a triple. She grew up in Essex.

My friend from Northampton was the same.

So far in the last 20 minutes Twitter has added Staines, Guildford, Crewe, Essex, Oxford and Kent.

I would like to say that growing up and having a baby stopped me. It didn’t. Nor did having a second baby.

I only paused it – you never really give it up, you just take it each day at a time – when my third child was a baby and I had to push him in a pushchair along a narrow village pavement to drop my eldest children at school. The pavement had a whopper of a triple drain, the full width of the pavement, and it was literally a case of life or death. I was not about to plunge a tiny infant into the road to avoid an arbitrary piece of street plumbing.

I’d like to say that was an instant decision, but I actually wheeled him along the pavement, with me stepping into the road and pushing side saddle, for several weeks in front of bemused/horrified yummy mummies.

It was hard to stop, but I did. And the world didn’t end. But I’d still rather clock up a double than tread on a triple. Always.

I’m fascinated by the viral nature of it. I love that kids and now adults of all backgrounds the length and breadth of the country go to outrageous lengths to avoid treading on three drains in a row. I’m fascinated  by the idea that everyone that is in the grip of this, knows it’s ridiculous. I’m fascinated that this countrywide unwritten code is still bubbling along, rarely spoken about, in 2010.

So help me in my quest to plot just how far the phenomenon reached and just how far you’ve gone to avoid death by triple.

Help me!

Plot on my Google map where you grew up or tell me and I’ll add it.

I’d love to hear in the comments below how weirdly, socially suicidally or dangerously you kept out of the way of a triple… or cashed in a sweet double.

My consultancy clients have included large B2C publishers, leading UK charities and newspapers.

I have also undertaken work for start-ups, small publishers and family businesses.

With my experience within large publishing networks and smaller enterprises, I can advise on content and community strategy, using social media tools effectively and getting your processes in place. Not all of it is very sexy, but it’s critical.

I am not an expert on SEO, pay per click advertising or building websites. But I have some brilliant professional friends who are all that and more, and I’m always happy to help with recommendations.

If you’d like to have a chat about how I can help, please email me.

I live and breathe community and have done since my teens. From instant messenger to email groups, I was there, yack-yacking away.

With the advent of forums, an enduring love affair began and over the last seven years I have been lucky enough to launch a community-based diet platform at The Sun, manage the UK’s largest women’s community, launch the UK charity website of the year 2004 and head up a fantastic community management team for FreshNetworks.

Up until May 2012, I worked for NBC Universal-owned iVillage.co.uk, developing user acquisition strategies then working as head of community for the vibrant women’s community.

For the last 12 years, I have written content for a wide range of audiences, covering everything from travel to catering to colonic irrigation. I write to deadline and word count, and love a last-minute challenge.

In recent years I have specialised, focussing on money, food, travel and family. I mainly write for online newspapers and portals. I was Diet Editor at The Sun and a regular contributor to MSN Money.

I also write a monthly column for award-winning Vine magazine.

I don’t write about music anymore, because I’m too out of touch. Trust me, it’s better that way.

If you’d like me to write content for you, please get in touch.