The customer is King (Queen)…but only if it suits us.
Corporations, small, large and micro are after one thing, your money!
Whether you are selling to consumers, involved in business to business dealings, selling on market stalls or an ecommerce hustler, you exist primarily to sell something in return for money.
That money pays for your expenses in trying to sell your stuff and then pays you and your employees’ wages so they can live in happiness.
Wrong!
Money doesn’t make anyone happy, it has been researched many times over, sure money helps, but it doesn’t make anyone happy as such.
Even Kings and Queens through the ages who’ve had it all, fame, power and money, but the one thing they didn’t have, guaranteed happiness.
Even making your customer King won’t make them happy either.
We often believe that in order to keep loyal customers we need to make sure they are happy and go out of our way to make sure they stay with us. Corporations go through huge expense in making sure that clients stay with them. They wine and dine them, organise events for them to attend, free tickets to sports matches and all in the hope and desire that they will stay with them for a lifetime. After all a loyal customer is a sure bet for profits.
And all those activities just make your products and services more expensive and inevitably increases the sales price to them, at which point they start looking elsewhere.
If we truly believe that the customer is King (Queen), we need to provide a fair price that sits well with the client, is competitive, honest and transparent. No frills, no extras, no entertainment, presents, gift cards, corporate hand outs, just honest and authentic business.
Practice this with outstanding customer service at every step of their journey and they will be a loyal customer for a very long time. And if the price hurts at any stage, tell them to speak with you and you will do what you can to assist them even on a temporary basis and they will do the same for you too. True partnership.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un — Gift Giving — Michael & Josh #weeklycartoon
When Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un met, they appreciated each other so much, it didn’t seem that real. There is a theory of course in NLP that in order to build rapport with someone you have to match their behaviour, tone of voice, mannerism etc. And as we know that’s exactly what Trump did with his ‘fire and fury’ and ‘rocket man’ statements.
They probably took a liking to each other because they are in fact so similar. Here they are sharing cuddly toys.
Boris Johnson — ‘Dad’s Army — Michael & Josh #weeklycartoon
“You’ve got to face the fact there may now be a meltdown. OK? I don’t want anybody to panic during the meltdown. No panic. Pro bono publico, no bloody panic. It’s going to be all right in the end.”
This was the secretly recorded statement Boris made during a debate on Brexit. It reminded us of Dad’s Army’s famous statement by Lance Corporal Jones, ‘Don’t Panic, Don’t Panic!’.
This is the spell that Harry Potter uses when he’s in a duel.
This how I feel sometimes when I’m duelling against the manipulation of the internet, email marketing and advertising.
No matter what I do I’m bombarded with these messages every day. They suggest that we are exposed daily to 5000 marketing messages. We don’t even know it’s happening to us.
A connection of mine Nolan Clemmons posted this fabulous graphic (see below) illustrating the routes that corporations use to manipulate us using email and the internet. Once they have us in their sales funnel they will bombard us with adverts wherever we browse, in our email inboxes and then eventually by phone.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe the Internet is a great invention, I’m an advocate a believer and yet I also believe that tech companies have carefully examined us humans as targets and data sets to be manipulated and controlled.
Governments actually love Facebook, they may suggest all sorts of action for data leaks, privacy hacks etc., but they themselves are the biggest users of searching for individuals using these technologies. I’ve sat in front of cyber security experts that have shown me a whole host of hacks they use to get the intel that governments, security firms, the police, MI5, the FBI, NSA, GCHQ and the CIA need in order to locate criminals. Well they can adopt these techniques for all of us too, for any of us. On the day of publishing this, I received this email.
By: Sarah Miller — Citizens Against Monopoly
Facebook Inc. is inviting Capitol Hill staffers to Washington DC’s “newest, most exclusive event venue” for free food and drinks. Events like this enable Facebook to peddle influence in the halls of power, and keep lawmakers from cracking down on its abuse of our democracy. In the first quarter of 2018, Facebook spent $3.3 million lobbying the U.S. government, more than ever before. That’s a key part of how it builds power and evades accountability, and events like this one are part of the process. At “A Place to Connect,” Facebook’s executive and top lobbyists will be schmoozing the people who are supposed to represent us, and trying to bamboozle Congress into believing that the company’s reforms are for real. For instance, a former corporate lawyer who is now Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer will try to argue that Facebook is stepping it up on privacy — all actual evidence to the contrary.
Sign the Freedom From Facebook petition. Tell the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook’s monopoly: https://freedomfromfb.com
You know when you get that sinking feeling, that what you’ve been doing on the Internet for over a decade in order to be noticed, get found and help your own small business is now catching up with you and the realisation that corporations are using all your data to make millions, no sorry, billions.
Today I sat through a presentation by the UK CEO of Cisco and he told us that in 2018, that’s right now, there are 18 billion devices connected to the internet, by 2020 it will be 50 billion and by 2030 it will be 500 billion, that’s ½ trillion devices connected to the internet. And that’s not just mobile phones by the way, of course it couldn’t be.
He also said there are more mobile phones in the world compared to toothbrushes. What a ridiculous statistic that is, but it’s true!!
Privacy is dead, it’s official. Even when you delete all your data everywhere you know it’s being held, your data will be there until way after your death. It’s like plastic. Tiny little microscopic particles of your data will live on forever.
Well at least until we blow up the earth or it self-destructs into a fireball of internet mayhem.
After watching a 2013 documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply” on Netflix, realising it was released 5 years ago and probably made a few years earlier then that, I now know without a shadow of doubt that my data, which I so willingly shared with so many websites and organisations, is being used and abused the world over.
The worst thing is I don’t even know how it’s being used and what profits are being made as a result.
I was the Social Media and Internet advocate, I was so excited and delighted when I first discovered it all, so happy that now we could talk to people all over the world and make relationships with strangers we’d never met previously at the drop of a hat. or maybe I should call it the ‘data hat’ or is it ‘data hack’?
Actually who cares, billions of people now adore the internet and in order to use it successfully, we have to give away every tiny bit of data about ourselves.
When I first saw adverts on TV, when I was a young boy in Amsterdam, I thought they were magical. Those short stories advertising usually food and stuff you’d like to own were mesmerising and actually very memorable. Well they repeated them over and over, day after day, many times during an evening and therefore they just stuck in your mind, potentially, forever.
I still remember that in between each advert they presented a lion character and he did strange things in between each advert. I was also very interested in seeing what he would do in between the adverts as well as the adverts themselves. Here is an example of a Dutch advert, advertising Dutch Peanut Butter. Notice the Lion’s antics before and after. I now realise that the Lion, played a massive part in getting you to stay watching and locking in a massive hook into your brain.
[embed]https://youtu.be/iy6AhWkSKo8[/embed]
After all, adverts are short interventions in your brain, they get lodged into your memory banks for recall at a later date. Have you ever found yourself walking around a shop and noticing a product that you actually didn’t need, but you still bought it? You may not have been able to make the association in that moment, you may not make any association to the advert ever, but the signal was still there without you even noticing, the signal to buy something you actually didn’t need.
You are already the most powerful storyteller walking on the planet, the only problem is you don’t realise it yet. As you are reading this text, your mind is more than likely starting to wander in different directions, you may be reading these words for sure, but what happens to those words when they integrate with your brain is something totally unique.
The words you are reading will only make sense when they match up with the stories you have created inside the depths of your neurons, which of course reside in your brain.
All of us have the ability to make sense of things that are happening around us and we do this through capturing short stories about the times, places, people and things that we observe, including the words that you are reading right now.
You have to create visual cues in your brain for many things and when you add some emotion and feeling to those visuals it will have a better chance of hard-wiring there. When our neurons hard-wire they stay inside our long-term memory for longer.
Stories when told well, will engender some emotion and feeling inside of you and when it does, that’s THE most powerful way for it to lay down new memory neurons. Therefore when you share stories make them relatable, memorable, different, unusual and stand out.
I love the following quote, it’s the one I always recall when creating stories.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou
I would like to express my gratitude to you as a follower in my network here on Medium.
I have no idea if you’ve actually managed to read my Typewriting publication, but if you have and you’ve engaged with any of the short articles, I truly appreciate you.
If ever you’d like me to write about something you are curious about, do reach out and ask me. I would love to practice my writing, research and analysis on topics my followers would like to hear more about. Topics, I am happy to write about are, storytelling, marketing, engagement, whiteboard animation, mindfulness and minimalism. But I’m happy to contribute on other topics too. I am never short on opinions or advice.
Thank you so much and I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards, Michael
ps. I just discovered that I can send these letters to any followers of my publication on Medium. I assure you that I will not make it a regular habit to email and you can manage your email settings as well.
And fame, that’s what we’re supposed to be striving for correct? I was reminded about how it could turn out when I watched an interview on Recode’s YouTube channel, during their 2018 Code Conference, with Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and colleague Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s CTO. You will know what they talked about, it’s been the most talked about technology internet event of 2018, followed closely by GDPR in the EU.
They likely have $$millions in the bank and maybe $$billions in stock options on top of that.
And they didn’t look happy, not in the slightest. They were being interviewed by the very tough interviewer Kara Swisher and being asked some very very tough questions, which actually they avoided mostly to answer completely.
If you wish to fill up 45 minutes of your time, you can watch it below.
[embed]https://youtu.be/i3QBy5T0qxw[/embed]
I have compassion for them, I truly have. Here you are working for the biggest Social Media company on the planet with billions of users and your greed and the greed of your shareholders has gotten the better of everyone involved with creating this monster of a company.
Can you truly be happy when your Uber drives you home after a long day of grilling by the media, accusing you of making too many mistakes, having to constantly apologise and promising that you’re going to do better? That must takes its toll on your human nature. Even when you might believe that it’s not you who is singularly responsible, you’re going to feel like you are, even when you are part of a team. After all you can’t let the side down and point the finger and say, it was his fault, why should I be taking the blame and all the media hassle?
Well, because you decided in a moment of madness that you wanted to work for the most famous social network in the world and you did actually sign up to take the good with the bad. The good has happened, your bank account is overflowing with more money then you know what to do with and now the bad is showing it’s ugly head.
There were a couple of times that both Sheryl and Mike solicited some sympathy from the interviewers and the audience. Mike suggested ‘I’m not trying to be one of the people that’s fired over all of this tonight’, brave thing to say actually with your boss sitting next to you. Sheryl asked if Kara had read her book. Her book is about the death of her husband and how she had to deal with that, it’s called Option B. They were looking for compassion but they didn’t get any. Maybe because we judge them for what they have and not for who they are as human beings?
Fortune is never what it lives up to be, fame is probably even worse. If you want adoration and feeling of wealth, love and respect for who you are and be satisfied with what you have right in this moment then look no further then yourself. If you can realise and see that you’re already happy when suffering is absent then you actually have it all. No fortune or fame will ever achieve that.
This was my response to a question posed inside a LinkedIn group asking: ‘What’s standing in the way between you and the person you most want to be?’
I’ve realised over my young years that unhelpful thoughts get me into all sorts of trouble with myself. Usually there’s nobody else involved it’s all my own doing. It stops me from moving forward, it stops me from staying in the moment, I overthink stuff and arrive at conclusions that are never reality.
Where does this come from? How does this manifest? How can I change it?
It’s as a consequence of years of self-programming that we do to ourselves, repeated thoughts that are not true become truths in your own reality. The more you think of something the more it gets hard-wired in our neural pathways. Tony Robbins has an acronym for it, NAC, Neuro-associative conditioning.
There is also another famous saying, which sums up what happens in your brain when you continuously think the same untruths.
Imagine each thought is a neuron, maybe a new one or likely an old one, because you’ve been thinking this stuff for a while. So when you think that thought a neuron fires with another neuron that then concludes it is the truth. Very likely it’s not, but you’ve just created that connection. Repeat the same thought over and over and those neurons fire over and over too.
‘Neurons that fire together wire together’.
Once wired together it’s very hard to get them apart. The same process that wired them together needs to commence to unwire them. So repeated thoughts of the opposite of the untruth are needed in order to lose the wired connection and create a new neural pathway instead. For example, the untruth of ‘I won’t amount to anything’ could be replaced with ‘I am perfect as I am in this very moment’. Repeat that thought over and over and eventually the other one will one day stop appearing in your thoughts. It sounds great in theory doesn’t it? Doing it is a much harder thing.
I am reading or rather listening to an audible book titled ‘The Art of Happiness’ by The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. Howard brings a Western perspective to Happiness and the two have a lively conversation about many issues related to happiness and the mind.
I have only listened to 1½ hours of a 10 hour book and it’s already having a profound effect on me.
‘Happiness is the absence of suffering’, a quote that will live with me forever.
How about looking at your day and reviewing it in terms of percentage of suffering vs percentage of happiness. This could be a fabulous measurement in terms of reflecting on how your mind behaves. More suffering each day will inevitably lead to depression, disease and discomfort at some stage. More happiness each day will lead, well, to more happiness longer term. Inevitably a longer life without disease or discomfort.
So what amounts to suffering?
This is just a starter for a list and feel free to add to it if you wish, I am sure you can think of more, but actually is there anything else?
I received this email from Citizens Against Monopoly. A new story from the New York Times exposes yet another way Mark Zuckerberg has abused user trust to build Facebook into a social-network juggernaut. Facebook secretly “struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.”
Facebook gave the over 60 companies — including Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft — “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders.”
The full list of companies isn’t known.
These secret agreements look like clear violations of the 2011 consent decree Facebook signed with the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook Inc. enjoys social networking market dominance, with strong majorities of Americans using one or a combination of its desktop and mobile products, which now include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Relatedly, Facebook holds a dominant market position in online advertising due in part to the unregulated collection of user activities through its social-media and tracking products and through data-sharing agreements with other data aggregators.
Story after story is now revealing that Facebook built that its dominance through repeated violations of user privacy and deliberate negligence — or, as Mark Zuckerberg himself liked to call it, by “moving fast and breaking things.”
As Rep. David Cicilline said, “Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook.”
The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, has the authority and power to make Facebook safe for our democracy. Armed with the 2011 consent decree, the FTC has the immediate power to impose remedies that will break up Facebook’s monopoly power, give us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protect our privacy.
CAM is a growing movement to protect America’s (and maybe the world’s) economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and freedom of expression.
ps.
Facebook has a fantastic hack for businesses who wish to advertise directly to you (said sarcastically). All they need is either your email address or phone number and upload that list to Facebook. So now you’ve become a laser targeted object of adverts from people or companies you know. By the way this is not a suggestion to go and do this, but I understand this might happen too. It’s to highlight that once you’re on a list, they can do with it what they wish. Now, you can remove yourself from those lists, although it may already be too late, watch the video on how they do this. You need to go to settings in Facebook, select ‘Ads’, 4th items from the bottom to undo all those companies who have you in their list. Enjoy!
Zuckerberg in front of the EU Parliament — Michael & Josh #weeklycartoon
Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by the EU Parliament. They bizarrely insisted to ask all questions upfront. They basically made fools of themselves, because they wanted to be sure all their voices were heard, this is not untypical of the EU. It inspired this short story and a cartoon to accompany it.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a young and ruthless officer in the Facebook, General Zuckerberg has complete confidence in his troops, training methods and weapons. Zuckerberg eagerly awaits the day when Facebook’s technological innovations will help bring down the hated New Republic and the European Resistance, and considers it his destiny to rule the galaxy.
After the destruction of Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg led Facebook forces that drove the Resistance from Europe — and assured Supreme Leader Sandberg that one of his latest technological innovations would soon deliver victory for their regime. After the demise of Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg accompanied Sandberg to Europe, helping oversee Facebook’s assault on the remnants of the European Resistance.
God regrets sending GDPR emails — Michael & Josh — #weeklycartoon
To date I have received exactly 99 emails on #GDPR and #privacy policies and they are still arriving every day. The biggest mistake is people asking me to opt back in. Of course I’m not going to do that, silly question. It inspired our latest cartoon simply titled ‘God Does PR’, get it? 😂
I have been searching for a cloud CRM for years, one that I would be happy with and I am over the moon to say that I have finally found what I’ve been looking for. I know, I know it sounds corny and I will have no vested interest in promoting Hubspot apart from the fact that I would love for small business owners to have an amazing experience with their CRM too.
I do not pay for Hubspot by the way, they provide a CRM for free, completely for free, let me say that another way, no money leaves my bank account every single month for using Hubspot. Yeah I know, it sounds too good to be true, well it is totally true.
Of course they do have a paid service for sure and that’s not even that expensive either. Let me describe some of the benefits I am getting for using their cloud based CRM system.
Oh I must just say that I do not engage in any email marketing, drip feed campaigning, squeeze page downloads or other spam practices whatsoever. And that’s just as well, because that means I can use the free Hubspot product.
I can add contacts, manually, upload, via email bcc and tag them.
They allow me to IMAP my email, that means when I send email to my contacts, it is synched with my normal email provider, which is Google G-Suite, via Apple Mail. Everything syncs beautifully. This means my conversations with contacts are beautifully kept together on my contact record inside Hubspot. I need this because it means I can develop a closer one to one relationship with my contact. No bulk emails from me, but of course they do it if you pay for it. I highly recommend that you do not use bulk email practices by the way.
Anyway, more benefits, the contact’s domain, if it is a company one, will automatically bring in the company details including the company LinkedIn page. Incredible!
If I send an email to my contact, it allows me to add a follow-up task inside Hubspot really really easily, which means I have no need to add this anywhere else. Really super easy indeed.
Of course then I have a task list, a deals section, lead/contact capture forms, tracking code for my website, even a cookie pop-up for my website.
It just works beautifully and fully integrated, I am really super happy with their solution, can you tell?
They are also completely GDPR compliant and the only company I have come across who actually laid out their stall in connection with GDPR, clearly and showed a roadmap of product updates and releases in order to allow us as users to be fully compliant and they did it all on time as well.
The promise is that it will be free forever, so let’s wait and see if that’s true. I guess they want raving fans, testing out the product and be so impressed with it that one day they will sign up to purchase some of the paid options too.
I’ve tried many CRM systems during my digital career and am now kicking myself for having tried out so many before finding what I am truly happy with. I love it’s simplicity, I see so many that have made it so complicated.
I spent around 30 minutes sitting on a bench in the sunshine in the middle of a Birmingham City park. It was the middle of the day and many people were walking around and going about their daily routine. Maybe they were doing some shopping or maybe they were getting some lunch.
I couldn’t help but notice that most people were taking no notice of their surroundings, because they were all looking at their smartphones. Every now and again they had to look up because if they didn’t they might walk into a lamp post or even another zombie.
It’s a very sad result of us wishing to embrace technology. Furthermore what example are we setting for young people. They witness us behaving like zombies and they will copy our behaviour and actions too. Especially as they will be begging to get their own devices by the age of well maybe 7 or 8?
I also spent some time sitting in a coffee shop inside a shopping centre, doing some writing. I decided to pause my writing and look around at the people and I witnessed many groups of friends or maybe families walking together and every single person was walking with their smartphones in their hand. There was no conversation going on between them.
Do we all think this is normal or are have all become so addicted to our devices that we feel it’s more important to look at non-sense instead of spending time being fully present in the moment with our loved ones.
Putin and Abramovich — Michael & Josh #weeklycartoon
Roman Abramovich the oligarch, who owns Chelsea Football Club was unable to attend the FA cup in the UK on Saturday 19th May 2018. He is being forced to apply for a new investment visa after letting his previous one expire. Chris Hutchins, a biographer of Putin, describes the relationship between the Russian president and Abramovich as like that between a father and a favourite son. Within the Kremlin, Abramovich is referred to as “Mr A”.
Abramovich was the first person to originally recommend to Yeltsin that Vladimir Putin be his successor as the Russian president. When Putin formed his first cabinet as Prime Minister in 1999, Abramovich interviewed each of the candidates for cabinet positions before they were approved. Subsequently, Abramovich would remain one of Putin’s closest confidants. In 2007, Putin consulted in meetings with Abramovich on the question of who should be his successor as president; Medvedev was personally recommended by Abramovich.
Theresa May and the Windrush Scandal — Michael & Josh #weeklycartoon
The Windrush generation have been threatened with deportation, refused access to public services such as healthcare or lost their jobs as a result of “hostile environment” immigration policies in the UK. The prime minister promised MPs there would be a “full review of lessons learned” following the scandal, which has engulfed the government in recent weeks and forced the resignation of the home secretary, Amber Rudd.
Jack and Marion de Groot (Carter) wedding day in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
News article clipping, date unknown, but assumed to be in 1947 the year of India’s Independence from the UK. By Marion Carter (my mother) who was 17 in that year. I discovered it in a small book of authographs owned by my mother.
On the dawn of India’s Independence, the Anglo-Indian communities all over the country were busy with trunks and packing cases, and the air was filled with the news, ‘We are going Home’.
‘Home’! Where is our ‘Home’?
Some apparently think it is in England, I wonder what the English think of that. True, we may enter England at will, the same way as any other native of this land and on arrival we shall be received with the same peculiar welcome…the thinly disguised colour bar. (definition: a social system in which black people are denied access to the same rights, opportunities, and facilities as white people.)
Can England be the home of any self-respecting Indian? And what are we, if not Indians? We were born here, our ancestors were born here and neither we nor they have ever seen the shores of England. Yet we are going ‘Home’?
Some of us, of course, well, deserve a bit of our own medicine which will be liberally administered to us at ‘Home’. For generations we considered ourselves superior to other communities, because we could claim to some English blood. Even assuming that all the foreign blood is English, pure certified English. The Lord only knows why this should be assumed and how the Dutch, Portuguese, American and other blood managed to evaporate from our veins, why should that makes us superior and can that make England our ‘Home’?
If by the same token the inhabitants of England with mixed blood decided to go ‘Home’, what a glorious exodus that would be! The Royal Family would scatter to Germany, Denmark, France, Greece, Portugal, Holland and Spain. The astonished countries of Denmark, France and Italy would be over-run by returning exiles. Typical Englishmen and English-women returning ‘Home’ would become a menace to all Europe and every continent would get is share until only a few poor Celts would remain in the highlands of Scotland and in the hills of Wales. But the natives of England consider themselves English and will not desert in a hysterical flight to strange and foreign shores but will remain English and stay in England where they belong.
Why should we Anglo-Indians consider ourselves closer to a strange country than to the land which nourished almost all our forefathers. Good reasons there are none, but there is an obvious explanation. India is a land of snobbery. Everyone is trying to be ‘superior’ to his neighbours and tries to convince himself that there is something that makes him so. With us it is our mixed blood. It sounds idiotic.
Family de Groot in Amsterdam — Marconistraat
Colour Shame
Could there be anything more ridiculous than that a whole race should be ashamed of its own colour? And those who are a shade lighter should look with contempt on the others as their inferiors? What incentive will there be in Indian society for intellectual advance for the betterment of the mind, when what really counts is the colour of the skin? From Europeans we could expect no better, but that a colour bar should develop in India among Indians, is a disgrace to our ancient civilisation.
Those who have no light complexion to boast of, find other ways of establishing their superiority. There are those who are proud of never having done a stroke of work in all their lives. What an asset they are to their country! Some simply can not get over having been born into a high caste and consider it great condescension to be occasionally courteous to anyone a step lower. Some who made or inherited great wealth look down sneeringly on those who are poor and so it goes on.
Indians are busy snubbing while being snubbed. What nonsense it all is, these multitudinous Aristocracies!
The Caste or Parentage Aristocracy, The Much Money Aristocracy, The Idleness and Uselessness Aristocracy, The Mixed Blood Aristocracy, The Government Official Aristocracy, The Light Pigment Aristocracy, etc.
There is a superior and high caste, but not of birth or money or any of these things, but of mental quality. One who is more honest, more tolerant, more kind, more cultured, in the true meaning of the word, is the superior Aristocracy on earth. These Aristocrats can save our country, the other can only lead it to destruction.
Written in 1947 by Marion Carter (de Groot) mother of Michael de Groot. Posted on Medium by Michael in 2018, 71 years later!
Marion was born 23rd August 1930 and deceased 24th February 1996 aged 65. Marion was a heart-disease sufferer for many years. I never heard her speak much of her Anglo-Indian heritage, she was very much the European and embraced everything Dutch and English. And of course after many years in the Netherlands we did and she did eventually come to live in England, something she allegedly resisted against when you read her article. Rest in peace Mama.
