If you have the nerve to think back and consider the way we all felt before our worlds turned upside down, I suspect that like me you will find it incredible just how the mood and culture of our society can change from one period in time to another.

I have been trying to work out what makes one period in history have a different heartbeat or style to another. My guess is social economics, which might come as a disappointment to the activist. However I am convinced the Swinging Sixties came more as a result of prosperity than drug-infused free thinking. A new-found sense of liberation and opportunity emerged as we shrugged from off our shoulders the heavy weight of post war indebtedness while London and then Britain as a whole began to loosen up and develop a brash new confidence that empowered a generation.

So it would seem the downturn in economic fortunes has hit and undermined our confidence, leaving us feeling insecure and scared in a way that many, especially those of a younger generation, have never been before. In our new service-driven economy the pain of recession is not exclusively the burden of industrial workers, with the virus of unemployment crossing any remaining class divides and making this a truly national epidemic.

This sense of terror has undermined not just the businesses where we work but also sought to reshape the way we, as individuals, live our lives.
What happened to the ‘work/life balance’ and all those brisk young city boys who threw away their tie with a finger held up to convention?
Has everyone lost interest in these lifestyle considerations?
For me a business lunch was never the same after Black Wednesday and I suspect all the concerns over paternity, maternity, working hours and staff share options are now put aside for a Brave New World in which no one is actually feeling that brave.

Whilst I will leave you to wonder if we are in danger of throwing out some very sensible ideas surrounding productivity (and the premise that success is usually born from a confident and assured standpoint), when it comes to the company car we have seen, over the past decade, a radical re-think. I am fairly sure that the big issues that so preoccupied our minds as fleet operators, when we had the time to think, still remain as important as ever. So for the purposes of this, our Spring Newsletter, and with a view to rebirth I turn my attention to the not inconsequential matter of the environment.

For me the ‘greening’ and running of a cost-efficient and safe fleet is much of the same thing. I don’t doubt that the government will penalise drivers of clean cars once every driver drives a clean car, but for now they have shaped their benefit taxation on the back of A Good Cause and anyone who is in favour of lower emissions will find that a hard one to argue about. I find myself thinking about the big tax-take that really matters to those who depend so much upon the motorist to finance plans for a fair and decent society and this is in turn dependent on OIL, and what will happen when it runs out.

A very famous American chat show host who boasts a stable or two of vintage dream cars pointed out that in the past everyone used horses to get around but that these days the horse is most often used for pleasure, and destiny waits on a similar footing for the combustion engine when the oil runs out.  A new workhorse will be required for the purposes of transportation. I imagine the car of tomorrow to be programmed and self-controlled, enabling the passenger to sit back and enjoy the view as the navigation system transports them in an orderly queue to their preferred destination!

A tiger in the tank which might turn around and bite you
European Union legislation would mean more bio fuel being added to petrol and diesel and this could result in some strange side effects.
You would have to fill up more often, and the cost incurred by the oil companies in adapting their plants to deliver on the product development will be passed on to the motorist making fuel even more expensive. I always think the terminology here gets very weird, but basically the vegetables that get grown to make the bio create greenhouse gas and trees that we need to reduce carbon get chopped to grow the vegetables.

For now the politicians seem focussed on the Electric Car. The government is keen and wants to subsidise your purchase, it has to cut CO2 emissions before 2050. Boris wants to turn London into Scalextric with new battery chargers radically outnumbering petrol stations.  But as with electric there appears to really be positives and negatives which no doubt will eventually work their way into fleet management considerations. Any one looking at their recent EDF bill will have noticed that electricity is getting expensive and electric cars unlike ‘white goods’ aren’t cheap.

One keen DIY enthusiast I know summed up the electric downside when she commented to me the other day, “I am always frustrated when my batteries run flat”. The other down side with electric is that you’re kinda passing the buck; after all you have to grow the electricity which is likely to mean more carbon. I’m inclined to think that when we emerge from these dark times the light at the end of the tunnel will be generated by something other than electricity, i.e.  ‘this is the dawning of the age of Hydrogen’.

Any true movie-lover will recognise the following words as those of The Stranger in that marvellously expletive-ridden film The Big Lebowski: "Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough."

It was with similarly vague thoughts and intentions that I found myself considering the task of adding a light-hearted music-themed piece to the next Marshall Leasing Newsletter. It was suggested that the views of a chap (and one frankly old enough to know better) on contemporary music might be a welcome distraction from cars, leases, contracts etc. The reader must judge of course, but before I lose my train of thought here we go......

There is a school of thought that seems to suggest that as we reach a certain age (and particularly as far as our music tastes are concerned) we should suddenly drop any affection we might have for the work of The Raconteurs or The Ting Tings and instead start re-stocking our CD collection with Hits of the Sixties compilations. Conversely when it comes to fashion our children in particular don't want us to head into Tesco on a Saturday morning in flares and a tie-die but rather expect us to give more than just a nod to trying to look vaguely sensible. Perhaps it's the following notion that creates this dichotomy, i.e. that whilst parents can generally keep their musical tastes hidden behind closed doors (or at best only occasionally and shockingly  displayed publicly in the odd village hall disco/wedding reception) at some point they must head out into The Real World and be seen in the company of their offspring .

Whilst I personally have always happily flaunted my somewhat brazen 'go anywhere, watch anything' attitude to music, grounded as it was by my hedonistic progress through the wild days of Punk, even the best of us can get caught out in even the most well-laid of plans. Recently (and fuelled by glowing media reviews) I decided to take in a performance by Florence & the Machine which conveniently took place on the campus of Essex University. This was a place I knew well as in the late 1970's (gulp...) I was a regular 'guest list' attendee, working as I did in a local record shop where we sold tickets.

How easily one forgets however, and on this occasion what I crucially forgot was that this was a Uni'-based gig and by mid-evening, and as the place filled up, I became not only convinced that I was the only person over 50 in the entire auditorium but was also convinced that all the sub twenty year old females (and a fair proportion of the males) present had by this point decided I was the University's Pervert in Residence. I reluctantly skulked off to a side-stage area and took in the performance from there.

Sometimes it can go delightfully in the other direction of course. Whilst waiting recently for the ethereal Bat for Lashes to take to the stage I found myself standing in a packed throng beside two girls in their late teens. One of them was clearly shocked by the fact that a) some old bloke was there to see this band at all and that b) even more shockingly this guy (who was clearly old enough to be her dad) actually knew who the support band were! We chatted for a while and then in a surreal moment and in what by this time I had convinced myself was a truly angelic voice (yes, I admit it, I was getting carried away) I heard her ask "Have you seen any other bands recently you could recommend?"!

It struck me afterwards that this was rather like Damien Hirst asking Rolf Harris if 'he'd come up with any good ideas lately?' but I tell you what, had someone had offered me a tape of that brief conversation post-gig I would have paid a handsome price for it!

On a serious level the underpinning to a lot of this non-generational attitude is the dramatic shift in the availability and dissemination of information and art over the last 25 years or so. Up to the mid-Sixties there hadn’t been something we would recognize as ‘youth music culture’ and typically once teenagers grew up, married and started a family any early and formative musical interests they once had died and faded along with their youth and an accompanying reduction in leisure time that the responsibilities of parenthood brought.

In today’s modern world this is no longer the case. All forms of popular music are accessible to all generations and come to us via advertising, cinema (more than ever), radio, TV, and of course most notably the Internet. Even as little as 20 years ago a, what shall we say, vintage kinda guy like me would have looked hugely out of place at an Erasure or Duran Duran concert but happily this seems no longer to be the case. I guess there are just as many people out there who are still stuck in the 1960's, 70's 80's etc. but it does seem increasingly harder and unnecessary to be like that. As I delight in telling my children whenever teenage eyebrows are raised at Dad's musical proclivities, "It's all just music!"

Lastly, and hopefully by way of proving a point I leave you with JC's Hot Spring Tip:

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