... I'd consult grammar-school kids

At sometime towards the end of the Lower Sixth, in that small, cruddy couple of weeks between the last AS-Level exams and the end of the school year, the venerable boys' grammar school I was schooled at thought that it was time to introduce us to the 'workplace' and the 'real world'. This meant:

1. Less purely-academic, theoretical and exam-focused book-work;

2. No school uniform, but suits instead;

3. Girls.

This was achieved by a two-day conference where we would be split randomly into groups and given 'tasks from the world of business', or something; we would then 'present our ideas to the group' at the end. The words 'best practice' weren't involved as such, but it was clearly meant to be the kind of 'business event' where they would crop up eventually, as a result of some 'out of the box thinking', no doubt, and of a few other workplace clichés that have since become the clichés of people railing against workplace clichés (although this characteristic of being doubly-hackneyed makes it doubly confounding when you come across someone who still uses such phrases unironically...).

It was, indeed, as toe-curling as it sounds. Imagine 120 sweaty, spotty late-adolescent lads thinking they're cool because, for once, they're not wearing school uniforms; no, they're wearing cheap suits and ill-fitting shirts courtesy of their much fatter dads. Now imagine those lads trying to not be seen to muster up enthusiasm for the task at hand, shuffling about and mumbling, trying to avoid being picked on to answer anything. Now imagine that the whole scene is being surveyed by snooty seventeen-year old girls. So toe-curling that I broke a pair of shoes (well, okay, so they were falling apart anyway... but you get the point).

It got even worse when it turned out that the 'tasks from the world of business' were not actually even from a genuine business, but from a cash-strapped council in one of Britain's poorest and most isolated areas. That's right: we were being asked to propose theoretical regeneration schemes for Folkestone (no, I had no idea it was that poor either, until I read the statistics). I nearly pissed myself laughing at the very idea of getting schoolkids - some of whom I knew could barely string a cogent sentence together - to waste their time designing regeneration plans for a no-name town when it was sunny outside and when, clearly, all half the room was interested in at that particular moment in time was football; and the girls. The sheer absurdity of it was mind-numbing. I mean, if we'd been doing it for a genuine purpose like an exam... well, OK, absurdity is everywhere if you look hard enough; but here, it was jumping out of the very fabric of existence at me.

Things took a turn for the worse when I realised I had misunderstood. We weren't wasting our time doing theoretical designs for a regenerated Folkstone; no, we were being asked to do it for real. A rather desperate-looking council official had traveled up from Kent that morning to come and talk to us about the project and to evaluate our ideas; he wanted to inject some 'youthful dynamism' into the way they thought about things down at Shepway Borough Council, and we were the 'great minds of the future'.

We didn't look very dynamic: the lads were trying to outdo each other in the various categories of looking Most Bored, Most Tired, and Most Suffering from Mild Heat Exhaustion; some were even going for podium-positions in all three. There were flies buzzing around and, from memory, a few tumbleweeds blowing in by the time he'd finished his half-motivational, half-suicidallly desperate outline of our task.

I felt sorry for him. And sorry for Folkestone. My gran lived in Hythe, an outlying town forgotten to the world since the early 1800's, and it was a charming bit of the country with which I felt a residual connection after many a childhood holiday. If Folkestone, and a seemingly intelligent representative of its populace, were so desperate that they were seriously turning to bored schoolboys for ideas, they must be in real trouble.

So I tried - within the bounds of trying not to appear as if I were trying too hard, of course - to come up with at least a couple of half-sensible ideas for this fellah to take back in his briefcase at the end of proceedings. Since, according to him, property prices were at rock bottom and no-one was buying or renting, especially in the centre, I suggested designating a particularly run-down area of the town centre as an 'artistic quarter', subsidising rents even further - after all, if the rents are low and no-one is there anyway, what have you got to lose? - and trying thus to turn central Folkestone into a slightly off-beat shopping destination filled with weird little artists' workshops and kooky jewellry boutiques à la Brighton Laines.

It wouldn't be so hard: they could cash in the ironic cool of being a seaside resort to get in young people with new ideas, but not much money, and then hope for the best; within day-tripping distance from London, reachable from all of Kent, and not far from the Channel Tunnel, surely they'd eventually get some curious, rich-yuuppy visitors who'd realise how nice the place was, call it the next undiscovered hot-spot and move down there for a spot of down-sizing or three-day-a-weeking from London. Before you knew it, you'd have a redevelop sea-front like in Brighton or Poole and a bustling set of middle-class consumers after this elusive thing called 'lifestyle'. Trendy bars, nice restaurants, and tax pounds would follow.

So I wrote our presentation, got the team to deliver it until they stumbled so badly that I had, shock-horror, reveal myself as the senior craftsman for the whole scheme, and then essentially put my pitch to the poor benighted council official. He seemed mildly taken with the idea, thanked me quite profusely at the end, and disappeared, a smile on his face and keen swing in the briefcase. How nice of him to hunour me, I thought, but he surely can't take this seriously. I mean, Folkestone the next Brighton? Never. If I were him, I'd take a safer bet for tax pounds, like, oh, I don't know, allowing a nuclear reactor to be built on the beach, or selling off the local schools to a consortium of Scientologist used-car salesmen.

*

It's been years since I went back to Hythe; I haven't been since just before I started at Oxford in 2003, in fact, and it's time to go back: it's soon to be the anniversary of my father's death; his grave, and that of my grandmother, are just outside the town. Also, I fancy a day to myself, wondering half-remembered places and having sudden flashes of memory, feeling as if I actually had a childhood and a dad and all that stuff; I need a change of scene, too, a train journey to a place I haven't been to recently.

So I had a quick look at Hythe on Wikipedia today, just to whet my wanderlust, and within minutes, as often happens on the thing, I was clicking on Folkestone. Imagine my surprise when I read about plans for the "Folkestone Creative Quarter", amongst other things. Now, I wouldn't want to suggest that that council official 'nicked' my plans, rudimentary as they were, nor that, since the idea was so good, that I was the only person who looked at Folkestone's problems and suggested the same remedy; but, then again, he seemed to have a lot of (unwarranted) respect for us as 'great minds of the future', and it's not like the town could have afforded a proper consultation process, if my understanding of their budget was accurate; perhaps, just perhaps, I've saved a small town on the South Coast, or played a contributing rôle in its salvation. For, as Tolkein puts it: "Even the smallest creature can change the course of history". Not that I'm suffering from delusions of granduer and comparing myself to Frodo or to Christ or anything.