Joining the dots on a page
Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 9:03PM 
Whatever you think of him, Alastair Campbell knows a thing or two about the art of communication.
I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the spin last week and was intrigued by what he had to say.
Communication, he suggests, always begins with a white canvas. And the job of people in communications is to spend their time throwing dots onto the canvas – day after day, week after week, month after month – until, over time, the dots begin to join up on the page and a recognizable, meaningful picture begins to emerge.
Referring to his time in Blair’s Labour Government, Campbell said that his mission was clear: to throw dots onto the page in such a way that whenever people saw Blair appear on the television or newspaper headlines, the British public would immediately recall the canvas that together he and Blair had spent years painting and see a coherent image of New Labour, New Britain.
As someone involved in communications, Campbell’s metaphor of the communicator’s role is intriguing.
As someone involved in the business of being a parent, though, it challenged me to the core.
Travelling home that night, I therefore found myself still asking the same questions, over and over again in my mind:
What are the dots that I am throwing onto the page for my children? What kind of picture am I painting for them? What kind of sense are they making out of the hundreds and hundreds of tiny impressions I am making upon them, day after day, week after week, month after month?
And then it dawned on me. The answer to my soul-searching was actually hidden in the question: ‘the hundreds and hundreds of tiny impressions I am making upon them’.
The answer had been staring me in the face (literally) all along, if I had only been smart enough to recognize it.
If I want to know what kind of picture I am painting, I have first to recognize that my children are themselves a living canvas; and that each one of these tiny ‘impressions’ that I make moulds them, shapes them, and sets them upon a path – for good and for bad.
Every decision. Every word. Every glance. Every hug.
Think about it for too long, though, and it can drive you mad.
At least, faced with the day-to-day reality of modern family life, the weight of my ‘impressionist’ view on parental responsibility could easily feel too much to bear – particularly in moments when I know that I have ended up making the wrong impression and perhaps even thrown the odd blot of inappropriateness onto the landscape of their childhood.
If you look closely, though, most paintings are like that. Art is made by humans and not machines. Beauty is captured by irregularity as well as form and perspective. There is even the occasional splatter of paint that, in retrospect, artists will recognize as a plain, old mistake.
But it’s still art. The painting still makes sense. It is still beautiful.
Just as our children are the greatest things that any of us will ever produce.
