‘We’ve got more ways to communicate with one another than at any time in human history, and yet we’ve completely forgotten how to communicate with one another, or at least how to communicate in a meaningful way.’
Charlie Corbett is starting a revolution. He wants to end corporate-speak and the lazy thinking behind it. Instead, he calls us to think hard and speak plainly as communicators, and challenge meaningless jargon and obfuscation as listeners.
The same goes for writing a book, and he has great advice on how to get over yourself and get started. Brilliant, bracing listening.
LINKS:
The Art of Plain Speaking on Amazon UK
Bullfinch Media: http://bullfinchmedia.com/
Charlie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BullfinchMedia
Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bookstothesky
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
This Book Means Business – the mentorship programme: https://alisonjones.lpages.co/this-book-means-business-mentorship/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club Summer Reading List 2019: https://alisonjones.com/the-extraordinary-business-book-club-summer-reading-list-2019/
Alison Jones: Hello, and welcome to the Extraordinary Business Book Club. I’m here with Charlie Corbett, who’s a former editor and Wall Street Journal and FT journalist, who was horrified to realise when he joined the corporate world in 2012 that it was awash with “jargon, obfuscation and soulless anti-communication”. As founder of Bullfinch Media, he’s doing his best to put that right. He’s a winner of the Plain English Campaign’s Communicator of the Year Award and the author of The Art of Plain Speaking, which won the Short Book category at this year’s Business Books Awards. Welcome to the show, Charlie.
Charlie Corbett: Thanks Alison, really great to be here.
Alison Jones: Very good to have you. Congratulations on the award of course.
Charlie Corbett: Thank you very much, thank you very much indeed.
Alison Jones: You still celebrating?
Charlie Corbett: Yes, sitting back and enjoying the reflected glory of it, not celebrating too large still after the party on the awards night.
Alison Jones: It was quite the party, wasn’t it?
Charlie Corbett: It was indeed, exactly, it was. I can’t remember what hour it was I returned home but it was a happy feeling.
Alison Jones: And that moment when they announced your name, just give us a little insight, what was going on in your head?
Charlie Corbett: Well, at first I really genuinely didn’t think I was going to win an award, and I thought “Well it would be nice to go along, and it’s wonderful just to be nominated.” Just before the award was announced, one of the judges, the lead judge in my category said something along the lines of “Well, I like books that are well-structured and clear”, and I turned to my friend who’d come with me and I said “Ah, I think I’ve got a good chance now.”
Alison Jones: “I’m in with a shout here.”
Charlie Corbett: “I’m in with a shout.” But it was a great surprise, I hadn’t prepared anything to say. I’ve never really won a prize like that before, so it was great fun and a great privilege.
Alison Jones: Do you know what’s funny, is that I’ve interviewed quite a lot of the winners now, and if you’re to believe all of them, nobody had a speech prepared, everybody thought it was a huge surprise.
Charlie Corbett: Everyone says that, don’t they? They do, that’s true. But I promise it’s true on this occasion!
Alison Jones: So funny. Well, tell us a little about the book, which is terrific. Why did you write it?
Charlie Corbett: Why did I write it? I wrote it for lots of different reasons. One of them, it was just a bit of a rant. I became really frustrated, I’d been a journalist for well over a decade, gone into the corporate world and I saw myself as this person who could go in and help turn copy into something that’s easily understandable. So I went in and I would meet with companies and I would translate their articles into things that your granny would understand, and then it would be sent back to the business, who would then share it to the rest of the business. They would make 101 changes and the compliance team would maul it, and it would come back as incomprehensible gobbledygook, and I felt “Well, I’m not really adding any value here, I can’t really see the point of this. Maybe if I wrote a book and they went home and read it they might get a better idea, because they’re not really listening to me when I speak to them.”
So, it started as a rant and then I suppose the title, The Art of Plain Speaking popped into my head, no one else it seemed had used a title like that. And the next thing was, I thought, “Well, it’s got to be useful. No one’s going to want to read something that’s not useful”, which is why I then did a chapter structure based on how to come up with good ideas, how to write well, how to speak well publicly, because I did want it to be a concise guide book for people that they would find useful. All the feedback I’ve had so far is that people seem to have found it useful.
Alison Jones: Yes, I liked the way that you put use cases in there, because there are quite a lot of books on the value of good English, they tend to focus on English as it should be spoken, and the language and the value of communication. You do all that, but you also have “How to survive a Twitter storm”. It’s just really, really practical stuff in there.
Charlie Corbett: I was trying to be practical. I didn’t want it to be one of these Eats Shoots and Leaves-style books, because I fear the grammar police as much as the next man, and I’m not there saying “This is how you should speak”, I think my point is that we all fall into the trap of using the jargon that we hear around us every day, and you get too close to it. And I suppose my point is that you can speak like this if you want to, that’s fine if you feel more confident doing it that way, that’s fine, but if you want to stand out as a business or as a job applicant, then actually just speak plainly. Just use short words and short sentences, because that’s the best way to get meaning across and avoid the overused, hackneyed expressions that you hear every day. And as I say, I’m not perfect, I speak almost completely in clichés some days, but the point is I aspire not to, and I’m able to stop myself when I start speaking in jargon or hackneyed expressions.
Alison Jones: There’s a handy anti-glossary in the back of the book, isn’t there? “If you find yourself using these words, please don’t.”
Charlie Corbett: Yes, exactly right. Words to avoid, my banned list. In a way that was sort of the genesis of the book. I was writing a blog, I think on LinkedIn, of banned words that pique frustration when I was working for these businesses. A friend of mine said “Well, you should turn this into a book, it’s quite amusing”, and I was getting a lot of feedback from people, and it resonated with a lot of people. So that gave me the confidence to go on and say “Well, okay, there’s something in this, but I’ll try and make it a useful bible to have on your desk”, or at least I hope so.
Alison Jones: Yes. It’s always really fascinating to hear how books start, there’s always a kernel of something like that. Just going back to that point, and I love that phrase that you took right now, “soulless anti-communication”. I mean, nobody gets up in the morning and says “What I must do today is obfuscate and fail to communicate”, I mean, nobody does that. Why does it happen?
Charlie Corbett: I think it’s lots of different reasons. One of those reasons, the first thing is that people use that kind of language when they don’t really understand the business they’re in, or they hide behind it because “I don’t really understand what’s going on around me. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll just disguise myself behind all these words, and then no one will notice.” So that’s one reason, it’s fear really I think. Another reason obviously is deliberate, I always say when companies talk about… no one’s fired anymore, they’re “restructured out of their job by a Human Resources department”, and when you start talking about people as resources, that puts them on the same level as coal. It’s far easier to restructure a human resource out of its job than to fire Bob who has worked there for 25 years. So that kind of language can be used in a very negative way like that, but also people use it to hide behind as well.
I think lazy thinking has a lot to do with it. It’s much easier to describe yourself as an “innovative, sustainable company that’s committed to enhancing client experience.” Well, name a company that isn’t, you know? You’re not going to stand out. You need to think hard about what the purpose of your company is and then express that in a way that is very simple, and if you do, you will stand out I think.
Alison Jones: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I wonder if we share some responsibility as consumers of this stuff, that we are too easily impressed by the long words and the highfalutin terms and so on, and actually we need maybe as consumers as language to get more emphatic about “Well, tell me what that actually means.”
Charlie Corbett: Start a revolution.
Alison Jones: Well, it’s the Plain English Campaign I suppose, that’s exactly what it’s doing, isn’t it?
Charlie Corbett: I think we’re impressed by it. We don’t really understand it, and then we’re a bit frightened to ask people what they mean, and that’s good because they don’t really know what they mean at heart.
Alison Jones: It’s good in a way obviously, it gets them off the hook, but that’s what I mean about sort of colluding in it.
Charlie Corbett: Yes, I think you’re absolutely right. I think we should challenge people more, particularly journalists. With the financial crisis, where the entire global economy was brought down because people didn’t understand what CDOs were and how they worked. And that wasn’t just you and me on the street, that was the CEO of Lehmanns. Nobody asked the right questions, nobody stopped in meetings and said “Actually, what does this mean? How is this complex financial instrument put together?” And if they had, then probably most people in that room would not have been able to explain that, and then alarm bells might have perhaps gone off a bit earlier.
Alison Jones: But they slept-walked into it, it’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes, isn’t it?
Charlie Corbett: It’s exactly like The Emperor’s New Clothes. My pitch, I’m starting a business called the Plain Speaking Institute, I think that’s my working title. My pitch, really, is that the communications industry is broken. We’ve got more ways to communicate with one another than in any time in human history, and yet we’ve completely forgotten how to communicate with one another, or at least how to communicate in a meaningful way.
Alison Jones: And there’s another dimension. When we allow this to happen, it leaves a vacuum for other stories to come in. I guess that’s the roots of populism maybe, where there’s simple black-and-white narratives, people go “Oh, I get this, he’s talking my language.”
Charlie Corbett: Well I think you’re absolutely right. We’re getting very political now, but this is what Farage does, this is what Trump does. You can fault them on every other level, but they speak to people in a way that is direct and clear, and in a way that people really understand. It resonates with people, and it’s dangerous. You look at the European Union versus Farage, European Union counsellors, they talk in riddles that no one really understands, and Farage speaks in plain English. I’m not supporting his policies, he’s a very clever man, he’s crafted a very clear image, and I think that at the heart of all of that lies an ability to speak plainly to people in a way that they understand and that conveys real meaning.
Alison Jones: Yes. I think it’s important to every level, politically, in business, in life and relationships.
Charlie Corbett: I’ve always said that my book’s not really a business book. I’ve often described it as the antidote to business books, in that I’m trying to break through this kind of pseudo-science, the long words and the jargon and all that kind of thing. All the feedback I’ve got, people who are reading it, a friend who’s a stay-at-home mum in Aberdeen, she takes it to council meetings. It’s something that hopefully everyone can enjoy, because it’s written in a style that’s slightly irreverent and not hugely serious, but with a very serious message.
Alison Jones: And you can tell that it started life as a rant actually, which did make me laugh. Just occasionally it comes through.
Charlie Corbett: I see myself as part grumpy sub-editor and part plain-speaking evangelist. I’m probably fighting a losing battle, but it’s fun to fight it anyway.
Alison Jones: I’m on your side, I’m right behind you. One thing that particularly amused me as well, because obviously you’ve got that background as a journalist, one of the things you’re talking about is how much time and energy businesses particularly put into communication, “comms”, press releases in particular. And please do tell this story, you’ll tell it much better than I do, but what happened to press releases when you were a journalist?
Charlie Corbett: Oh, well yes, of course. When I first started, in the days of clunking fax machines, this fax machine in our office would just clunk out releases all through the day and we just put a dustbin underneath to catch them.
Alison Jones: Straight to the filing cabinet.
Charlie Corbett: Well, you know, absolutely right, and where they deserved to be. Because if you are a good PR agency or have a good marketing department in your company, you’ve already built the relationship with the journalist well enough that you can give them a call or you can go for a cup of coffee to explain to them your news, or to explain to them why this bad news story that’s appeared about them isn’t necessarily correct. It’s all about human relationships, and the curse of email is that it is far easier just to carpet-bomb a thousand journalists, who have nothing to do with your business, with a press release, and then get some poor graduate to phone them up and say “Did you get my press release”, probably when the journalist is on deadline and quite stressed. So, actually, you’re hurting the brand of the company involved and not helping in any way. You’re not going to get your news into any kind of magazine or newspaper that way.
Alison Jones: Yes. You say there is a role for a press release but it’s very much as part of an ecosystem rather than this scattergun approach.
Charlie Corbett: It’s the end of the process of building a relationship with the appropriate people who write about your business. I mean, the world has changed, so it’s not just print journalists. It’s digital. It’s knowing who the influencers are within your business who have a wide distribution, building a relationship with them, which can be… you can become friends but it is ultimately transactional, and as long as everyone understands that. Once you’ve built that relationship then all the press release is, is a short one-pager with no more than 250 words, let’s say, that just gives the basic information and how to get hold of the company or the best person in the company if you’re announcing a hire or you’re refuting a claim or whatever it might be. But it should always be seen as the last part of the process, not the first part, which is what many people do see it as.
Alison Jones: And should never contain any sentence that begins with the words “We are delighted to announce…”, right?
Charlie Corbett: Certainly not. Go on to LinkedIn now, scroll down, you’ll see about five “We are delighted to announce”, I mean, you’re announcing you’re about to announce, and then announcing it!
Alison Jones: Coming back to those principles of why people don’t write plainly, speak plainly, the fear, that deliberate obfuscation, the sense of distancing themselves or disowning something, and also the lack of clarity about the thinking. All of those apply to people writing books as well, particularly business books. It seems to me that one of the key mistakes that first-time authors make is to think that “Oh, I’m now writing”, and they sort of mentally don a kind of professorial cap and step behind a lectern, and the thing just falls dead.
Charlie Corbett: It’s so true. People think “Well I’m writing now, I must write like a writer”, but what does that mean? And you get this kind of academic approach to it. And it’s understandable because if you’ve never written before, the first thing you have to do is think about your audience very, very hard, and then remember that your audience are human beings. So how do you speak to human beings? Well, you speak to human beings like you always speak to human beings, so write as you speak. And if you keep that in your head, and the audience, imagine who I would say you’re writing for, an individual person. Picture that person in your head and imagine you’re speaking to them and then it becomes much easier to write. I think that’s why a lot of people struggle with writing, because as you say, they overlay this idea that they’ve got to write in this professorial, academic way. “We studied the aforementioned”, you know, et cetera. “And therefore, with that in mind, we concluded that in summary”, you know? And so it gets longer and longer and no one’s going to read a single word of it because you don’t get to the point ever.
So, write as you speak. The greatest writers who write as they speak, George Orwell is a great example of that. It is like you’re in the room with him when you read what he writes, and that’s the joy of it.
Alison Jones: And actually, his essay on language is fabulous. I can’t remember what it’s called now, you’ll know, what’s George Orwell’s essay on language called?
Charlie Corbett: Well, I was going to add that as one of my books at the end. Which I will. It’s called Politics and the English Language, which I would recommend anyone should read, it’s not long.
Alison Jones: It’s a very unprepossessing title for a brilliant, brilliant essay.
Charlie Corbett: Oh, it’s brilliant. But he can write, I mean he wrote about a day in the life of a toad and it’s just the most riveting read. He’s just so interested and interesting and it really shines through in everything that he writes, but that’s brilliant. I quote from that in the book as well, especially, he says “It is much easier once you have the habit to say ‘It is not an unjustifiable assumption that’, than to say ‘I think’.” And I think that gets to the heart of everything we’ve just been talking about.
Alison Jones: So that tip about having the human person to whom you are writing in front of you is brilliant. Coming under that as well, those things we talked about, about the fear and the lack of clarity, those are the bigger issues, aren’t they?
Charlie Corbett: They’re bigger issues, and they’re tough, and we’ve all been through it. You’re not alone, because I think every writer in the history of humankind has had these similar fears, and I did at the beginning of this book. One of them was exactly this. People were saying to me “I love the way you write, it’s all great, but people in business, they like speaking like that. That’s what they do, it’s part of the shtick, people like going to meetings and speaking like that.” There was a little bit of me that thought “Well, maybe I should tone this down a bit, and maybe I should write a little bit like what they want to hear”, and I was wrong. I woke up one morning and I said “No, I’m not going to do this. I’m going to back myself.”
There’s a little foreword I wrote at the beginning of the book which starts “When all is said and done, this is a book about common sense.” Because I was so enraged that I would even be tempted to write in another person’s voice. And that’s what it is, it’s about finding your voice, and you can only do that by writing lots. Just sitting down and doing lots of writing and eventually you will find your voice. It may happen on the first day, it may take weeks, but once you’ve got your voice it’s a big help, and you can only do that by writing.
Alison Jones: Absolutely. And the writing, of course, itself brings the clarity. Often you don’t quite know what you do think about something until you write it out.
Charlie Corbett: 100%, it’s good for the soul as well. Just write and write and write, and then go back over it and make it make sense, but when you first start it’s just getting it on the page, that’s age-old advice isn’t it? But it’s good advice. It’s the best advice.
Alison Jones: And is that how you write, Charlie? When you come to start writing a book, do you start with the plan? Do you start by just talking it out? Obviously you have been a professional writer, you’ve been a journalist, and it’s what you do so much of your time. What does your routine look like?
Charlie Corbett: I mean, everyone is different. My routine is I like to get up early in the morning when I write. My body doesn’t work in the morning, I bump into things, stub my toe, shout, but my brain seems to work, it’s the only bit that seems to work. And it’s a silent time of day, although not with my young children at the moment, but it tends to be a quiet time of day. I love writing, some people find writing hard, some writers enjoy the process. I enjoy the process because it’s therapy for me, and so, what I will tend to do, the hardest thing is getting the words, it’s starting. To start writing. And it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to have everything formulated in your head exactly what you want to write, but I just start writing and I always have done. Obviously you need a wider structure, but we can talk about that later. But that’s what I would say, just start writing.
Alison Jones: Tell me about the structure bit. Do you write to find the structure or do you have a sense of the structure and then start writing within it?
Charlie Corbett: With this book, and I have started about 10 other books about all sorts of different things, with this book I just came up with the idea and I started writing. And then, about probably several thousand words in, a structure started coming into my head. What I started writing was the banned words list, and I thought “Obviously I’ve got to have a structure with this book”. And then the best thing I did, and the biggest thing I learned about writing a book, is that actually, yes, start writing, write any old thing, get a few thousand words on the page. But you must have a broad structure. I thought “I’m going to have 10 chapters”, as a basis. And I came up with the ideas for the chapters, and that’s where I started. It wasn’t the structure I finished with, but it was a structure, and it gave me discipline.
Once I had the discipline, I knew that each chapter would be anything between 5,000 and maybe 10,000 words, or 2,000 and and 5,000 words, and sometimes you’d have a chapter, “Oh, actually that’s better as two chapters.” But it’s the same as writing a feature, once you have that initial structure in place in your own mind, and this applies to business books as well as fiction books, it’s a kind of narrative thread that runs through it, with a beginning, middle and an end, that you’re taking the reader on a sort of journey which is why I start with “How to come up with original ideas”, because ain’t no point writing anything if you haven’t got anything interesting to write about.
Alison Jones: Yes, I thought that was great, going upstream like that. Most writing books don’t do that, that was really cool.
Charlie Corbett: Thank you, Alison. Saying lots of nice things, I should get a big head.
I think the structure’s really important, and it will give you discipline.
Alison Jones: I always ask people what their best tip for a first-time writer is, and I might have rather set you off on it early there. Is that what you’d say?
Charlie Corbett: I’d say the best tip actually, which I was given by a writer when I was struggling at the start and trying to find the time, because I was working full-time, and two little children. “When am I going to do this?” I kept imagining there would be a three-week period, like Evelyn Waugh used to go to a hotel for six weeks. I was imagining going to a pub in the West Country, and that’s never going to happen. So the advice I was given which I would give to anyone is do something everyday. Just a little bit. Not even writing, just something on the structure, a little thought, just something towards the book every single day. And then it never leaves your mind, and suddenly you look around and somehow, by osmosis, it’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
I used to, on the Tube, I’ve got about a million emails that just say “for the book”, and that’s the joy of the smartphone. I’d be on my smartphone writing. A lot of this book was written on a smartphone, forwarded to my email account, and then tidied up in a lunch break or early in the morning if everyone was still asleep.
Alison Jones: That’s brilliant.
Charlie Corbett: And so that was the best advice I got.
Alison Jones: And of course, that ties right back to the structure thing as well, doesn’t it? Because once you’ve got your structure, you know what you need to write and you can just use those interstitial moments. Is that word allowed? Is that too long?
Charlie Corbett: It is allowed.
Alison Jones: I didn’t see it on the banned list.
Charlie Corbett: It’s not on the banned list. If you keep using it, I may have to bring you up on it. But it’s true, it’s like all these things, back to the old cliché “From small acorns do great oaks grow.” And it is a journey that you make and suddenly you look back and “Oh, hang on a minute, I’m half-way up the hill, I never thought that was possible”, and it gives you added impetus. The other thing about a structure, of course, is that you’ll be able to work out once you’ve got your chapter structure in place, actually you don’t need that chapter, or it doesn’t fit, or it should be further up. You just get a much better idea of the whole. You can see that next horizon, and that’s really important.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. That’s a fantastic tip, thank you.
I also ask guests to recommend a book. I say business book, doesn’t have to be a business book, but what book do you recommend, I’m sorry I spoiled the surprise here, that everybody listening should read?
Charlie Corbett: No, well there were two, because I can’t make up my mind. So one of course was, from my perspective, Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. It is a fantastic read anyway. It’s not long, it will take you an afternoon, even a couple of hours. The business book I would recommend is Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.
Alison Jones: Yes, I’ve heard of this. I’ve never read it.
Charlie Corbett: It inspired me, and it’s one of the reasons I did the “How to, how to, how to” structure, because he had 25 years in advertising, he grew frustrated. For people who don’t know, David Ogilvy was the one who probably invented modern-day advertising from the 1950s onwards, and is responsible for some of the most famous campaigns that there ever were. He founded in an agency in New York, he was an Englishman, went to New York, founded the most successful agency in New York which is now called Ogilvy, and may still be in existence I think. He then wrote this book.
It’s beautifully written. It is written as he speaks, it’s written as though he’s talking to a room full of ad men. And I say ad men, because in the 50s they were, if you watch Mad Men. And he was the Mad Men era, that programme was about him. But it’s beautifully written, it’s hilarious, but stuffed full of good advice. And people might say “Well I’m not in advertising.” Well, actually, these days in companies, everybody’s in advertising because everybody’s trying to get their message across on social media just like everyone else, and what this book does is tell you how to do that with absolute clarity and in a way that will make you stand out from the rest. And most importantly, it’s just a bloody good read, and you’ll whiz through it.
Alison Jones: I’m doing this 100 business books in 2019, so any book that I can whiz through, I’d fall on it with great force.
Charlie Corbett: Hang on, 100 books? Goodness me, well done you. Have you got a charity sponsorship page?
Alison Jones: No, I flipping should have, honestly.
Charlie Corbett: Goodness me, well done you. Although, being a judge on the Business Book Awards, you must be a fair way through it now.
Alison Jones: Well, clearly that did help, yes. But the funny thing was I couldn’t put them up, because I read, yours included, all the winners of all the categories to choose the overall Business Book of the Year, but I couldn’t tell anybody what I was reading so it was frustrating for a little while.
Charlie Corbett: That would be very tricky. I have to say, thank you so much for doing that, it’s an amazing job that you do, and not easy.
Alison Jones: It’s a huge privilege, just to get to read that quality of book, and fresh off the press as well. What I’m trying to do is fill in the holes, books that I almost think I have read. The classics, like you think you must have read Little Dorrit, I’ve never actually read Little Dorrit. And then also try and keep up with the new stuff that’s coming out as well, so try and kind of balance the two. It was a great exercise in reading the kind of bleeding edge books that were just fresh off the press, that was terrific.
Charlie Corbett: You’ll have an extreme form of what I have, which is book guilt. I’ve got this pile of books that just stare at me in a threatening manner every day. “Yes, I will read you.”
Alison Jones: It’s sort of reproachful.
Charlie Corbett: It’s reproachful, isn’t it? Just, “Read me”, “Okay I will.”
Alison Jones: “I can’t believe you’ve not read me yet.”
Charlie Corbett: Yeah, I know.
Alison Jones: “Do you know how much work went into me?”
Charlie Corbett: I know. Exactly. And then another book will flash its ankle at you in the bookshop, and you’ll go “Oh, I’ll read that one first.”
Alison Jones: It’s like that little meme isn’t it, with the guy walking along the street and the other woman walks by.
Charlie Corbett: That’s the one! That is the one.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. Now Charlie, if people want to find out more about you or about the art of plain speaking, about what you do, where should they go?
Charlie Corbett: I think probably the best place at the moment is Amazon, to put me into Amazon. Or LinkedIn, I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn these days, so I can be found there. I do have a website, www.bullfinchmedia.com, which is very out of date and I’d like to update because I’m slightly changing my tack towards The Plain Speaking Institute, which will be launched at some indeterminate point in the next few months, which is essentially a communications advisory for businesses, but we shall see what happens with that.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. But if they go to Bullfinch, in fact if they hook with your LinkedIn, there will be links to that when it launches. It’s just fascinating. Thank you so much, it’s absolutely brilliant talking to you today Charlie, really enjoyed it.
Charlie Corbett: Well, thank you Alison. I’ve had a lovely time, and thank you so much for interviewing me. It’s been a great honour and a privilege to speak to you.
Alison Jones: You’re very welcome.