I fear we need to invoke an ideological cone of silence over this
column. I have to tell you a secret. My executive
assistant, Semi, is an extremely beautiful young man. I
know, I know. If I were a bloke, and said the same thing about my
female assistant, I'd be in all sorts of trouble. So you have to
promise not to tell anyone, OK?
To make matters worse, he has an irrepressible, chirpy
disposition. He's always in a good mood, and his Samoan heritage
manifests itself in a huge musical talent that expresses itself in much
singing and guitar playing around the office.
Music is a passion we share, although that is like saying that Madonna and Renee Fleming are both singers.
Semi's head is very much in the contemporary space. Me - I think
that there hasn't been any good music written since 1925 (except jazz,
of course).
This all came to light because Saatchi & Saatchi gave us all an
iPod for Christmas. I'm very excited about this, because I spend
so much time on the train, an iPod will be a very useful
diversion. My relationship with technology is a complicated
one. My mother's insistence that I learn shorthand and typing "so
that I would have something to fell back on" has turned out to be very
useful in the age of computers. I can operate my computer at warp
speed - I just don't understand how it works.
Semi being young of course knows exactly how it works, and we spent
most of my first day back in the office engaged in a series of parallel
conversations as we battle to get my iPod up and running.
Semi is chatting away in techno-babble, while I sit there nodding
wisely and hoping he doesn't realise that I don't understand a word
he's saying. I see from my computer screen that various things
are being loaded into it, but how or why is beyond me.
Semi, on the other hand, is deeply mystified by the music I want to
store on my iPod. Who's this joker then? He asks. It's
Mendelssohn, Semi. German dude, huh? That's right
Semi. Liszt's Totentanz attracts his attention as it starts to
play while the computer is eating it. I explain that it's a set
of variations on the Dies Irae, the Latin Mass for the dead. We
realize that composers past and present have in common a fascination
with death and dying, and Semi thinks that he might borrow this one for
his own collection. I imagine Liszt could sit quite comfortably
in the death metal section of Semi's iPod.
By day's end I have 119 what the iPod describes as "songs" stored, and
I think I've got the hang of it. I'll need to be able to do it
myself. Semi's musical talents have been discovered by other
offices in the Saatchi network, and he's off to China next week to play
and sing at an event for our Hong Kong office.
Ah fame!
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Change of Life 
