Sex. Ha Ha Ha

Solly's tips for being creative in a brainstorm: No. 17
When the facilitator - for that is what they are called - writes a word on a flip chart and asks everyone in the room to say the first thing that comes into their head, no matter how daft it may seem, just say 'sex.'
Everyone tries too hard to come with something fancy or pretentious but it's the simple things that work.
For a start, you can always find a way to link it to the word - be it 'refreshing' or 'Primark' or 'savings' or anything. Second, it always gets a laugh and allows someone else to try and think of something poncey.
For those of you in jobs where you never go within a mile of a brainstorm...lucky you.
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I went to Manchester for a brainstorm today. Or is it a thought shower these days, I forget. Contrary to many of my geographical location who think Hatfield represents 'the north', I love Manchester. I go quite often for work. Today it was warm and sunny, which is a record. It took my taxi driver 30 seconds to mention Oasis, which was also a new record. Two girls getting off the train in front of me and one said to the other 'it's sunny, but she said it was going to be cold and grey and wet' to which some bloke walking past said 'it's Manchester, love. Don't worry, it will be.' But it wasn't and the city looked great. And the job went well too. When my ideas form the basis of a multi-million pound ad and marketing campaign, I'll let you know what it was all about. Anyway, it's Preston on Monday. I'll wrap up.
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It bemuses rather than angers me and millions must get the same feeling but why, when you buy a simple return train ticket, do you end up with five different bits of printed card?
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On the bus to school the other day my daughter walked past a group of boys from another school (an RC one as it goes) and one of them sneered 'Jew'.
Now the thing is, apart from being quite offensive, my daughter isn't even Jewish. All my kids are atheists, as are their parents, but unlike us, they haven't grown up in a religious environment. My wife was brought up a Catholic and I, it will probably surprise you all to know, as a Jew. As the joke goes, I was practising but when I realised I wasn't any good I stopped practising.
However, I was a bit shocked about the 'Jew' thing on the bus. My daughter was angry that it was racist, confused because she doesn't consider herself Jewish and now resigned to the fact that she has inherited more of my genes that she had previously realised.
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However, what is has done is fuel a bit of interest in her heritage and in a nice way. Tonight she asked me and her mum to come down to the school with her to listen to this brilliant and spirited woman called Anna who is a survivor of children's ghetto set up by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. In their house there were 50 Jewish children from all over Europe, many were sent off to Auschwitz and didn't return while others died of illness.
Yet during the war, older children and adults went to the house, which acted as a kind of children's prison, to teach them lessons and music. Many of the teachers were great academics before the war and few survived. Out of the kids 15 survived and 12 are still alive and regularly meet even though they live all over the world. Anna became a concert pianist and a professor teaching music at a major Czech conservatoire.
It is a lovely story and, in front of a packed hall full of enthralled kids and adults alike, she answered questions with grace and patience. Most remarkably I thought, she kept repeating the fact that she had no bitterness, rancour or anger but was thankful for surviving and wanted to encourage love and hope.
I do have a tenuous connection to the whole concentration camp thing. My auntie Edda, who was Polish, was in Belsen. She wasn't my auntie then, of course. But my uncle Sammy - the son of Austrian immigrants - was a British soldier with the United Nations peacekeeping force at the end of the war and liberated Belsen where he met Edda. They married and went off to run the poshest hotel in Jamaica before coming back to settle in Suffolk. Bizarrely, she became a Jehovah's Witness.
Footnote: Sammy's family name, that of my grandmother, was Baumwald which sounded far too German back in the East End in the 1930s. It means, literally, Tree Forest (but can mean Forester too). Most of the family changed it to Beaumont to make it sound more British. One changed it to Bell. Sammy changed it to Treforrest! That's enough of my family history.
Peace my friends....Solly