Use your loaf

"If you don't give a Frenchman his bread 'e is not very 'appy" so concluded Raymond Blanc during one episode of the recent series of BBC2's The Restaurant.  In this particular episode one of the hapless couples had decided (or more likely forgotten) not to have bread available for their customers and this was on the very same day that Monsieur Blanc visited.  When he searched his table in vain for his pain he was not impressed with the would-be restaurateurs having committed one of the gravest of hospitality errors.  Nil point!

In France bread is so, so important that even in the smallest of villages there's usually at least one boulangerie selling a delicious array of breads and cakes.  Back across the Channel and all but a handful of independent bread shops, selling their own produce, have disappeared as we as a nation turned away from local shopping, preferring to spend half our leisure time in the all-consuming hypermarkets.  

And in these shopping monoliths whilst 'real' bread has made a come-back, by far the most popular variety is plasticised, sliced carbohydrate masquerading as bread; it may contain flour, yeast and salt (along with a multitude of preservatives and raising agents) but bread it ain't. In fact it's so bad we ought to come up with a new noun so that we don't confuse the pre-packaged pap with the genuine article.

So, imagine the delight when I recently walked into The Loaf, a recently opened bakery, deli and cafe in Crich, in rural Derbyshire (made famous as the fictional village of Cardale in the TV series Peak Practice).  Before I had tasted the coffee or sampled their pains aux chocolates I had been by seduced by the bright, fresh red and cream interior, resplendent with beech furniture, complemented with dark brown leather banquette seating -- a welcome departure from frilly tablecloths, doilies and Victoriana, which works in only a minority of coffee shops.

I ordered black coffee and a pain au chocolate, and then went to a table and sat down.  If this cafe had only one selling point that aced the high street coffee chains, it was that I didn't have to wait like Oliver in the queue for his gruel.  

My personal bug-bear of the Caffe Costabucks is that you must stand in line and wait for your drink, having been cross-examined about your need for "any pastries with that?" (No!, I would ask if I wanted anything else) and then you have to carry your order over to a table (if you can find one available) having fought over 6 square inches of work surface in order to dispense sugar and milk.  A relaxing experience it isn't.

Back in The Loaf I sat and took in my surroundings; the multitude of fresh loaves that were on display behind the counter -- all having been baked on the premises in the early hours.  On another wall was shelving filled with a wide range of pre-packed teas and coffees, and finally the mouthwatering deli counter.

My coffee was a delicious aromatic blend, enjoyed black and unadulterated and my pastry was divine; fresh and flakey as you would expect.  The experience was over all too quickly.

As I paid for my breakfast I bought a baguette and a small round loaf, both were wrapped in paper; as I walked back into the cold nothing could wipe that smile off my face.

My only regret is that I don't live in Crich.

C'est la vie!

   

 

You can't shoot builders

Along with any form of homicide it is not advisable to shoot builders, although the builder that we have been working with recently I could have quite happily throttled the S.O.B. ( as our American cousins often to refer to such low-lifes).

The reason for this out-of-character reaction was receiving the invoice for work done, such a fantastic work of fiction I don't know why he doesn't go in for the Booker Prize.  Smart-arse comments aside, the invoice was about £2-3,000 more than we had been led to believe, although let us remember that Chamberlain had been "led to believe" that Herr Hitler was a man of peace, so perhaps being "led to believe" things always ends in tears.

If, er, if (heh, heh, heh), if I'm being absolutely honest... (dropping into my mock-Ronnie Corbett mode, and yes written impressions based on famous funny men don't really work... but stay with me); if I'm being absolutely honest (heh, heh, heh) then we (well I say "we"), I am partly to blame for our, or rather my, current travails.

Getting any sort of quote from Bob (obviously not he real name and "yes we can" isn't his catch-phrase... no, I think my builder's catch-phrase is more along the lines of: "because I'm worth it").  Back to my little escapade... I didn't pin him down to an exact price for any given job, although a figure of £2,000 (ex-VAT as we now also find out) for "misc" building work, to which we had attributed a number of jobs.

For a conservatory base and dwarf wall we had been quoted £3,800 (including VAT).  When we asked if "Bob" could do the job the exact response was: "well, there'll be something wrong if we can't do it for that..." and yes, of course there is something wrong.  Because on top of the £3,800 we had to find an extra £1,000 or so to hire a man and a digger, who also needed a 5-tonne industrial size dump truck to take away the spoil from the excavations needed for aforementioned conservatory base and dwarf wall (which I am not so sure isn't a phrase that dwarves might find dwarfist in these politically correct times).

To my way of thinking, the £3,800 should really be minus the extra £1,000 that we had to find, because otherwise we would have appointed the conservatory company with their all-in-one, guaranteed price.  But we didn't.  We stayed local (this man lives about 5o paces from our front door) and put our trust in him.

We should have perhaps been warned about "Bob" because in his opinion, when we first discussed with him what needed to be done to refurbish the property (our tentative first steps into development), he advised that it would be quicker to remove all the plaster from the walls and ceilings in order to put in a damp-proof course that (as a builder of 30 years) had failed to observe (until all the plaster has been removed), than it would be to chop out the standard 1-metre of plaster removal normally required for damp-proof courses.

I know that damp can rise, but I've never heard of damp ceilings, unless someone runs a bath and forgets about it.

Having bare walls and no ceiling made it easier for the electrician and the plumber but at what price?  200 bags of rubble and two skips later... no "Bob", that was poor advice.

So, back to the matter of the invoice.  Rather than itemising each job and putting in a price, we get just four lines of data: number of hours for labour, materials, VAT and total.

We asked for a break-down of the figures, which we expected to discuss in a professional and adult manner and all we get is that he has never, in all his years ever been asked to provide a break-down, and then he simply walked away from the conversation.

So, we end this entry with a Shakespearian dilemma: to pay or not to pay, that is the question.

French Farce

Having just returned from celebrating New Year in France it was interesting to see the attitudes of Brits living over there. We were in the Haute-Vienne department of Limousin in south-west France in a small village. Little English is spoken by the locals and the area has had an influx of English people since we last visited in 2005.

We spent New Year's day in a restaurant that was taken over by a couple from Kent at the end of 2005. The food wasn't bad, but neither was it genuine French cuisine; apart from a group of three French locals dning it was just our group of 8 and that was it. In the bar you could hear English conversation and it was obvious that the place was becoming popular with the local English community.

The attitude of the owners was that the French are suspicious of non-French restaurateurs and that they have found it slow to attract the locals. With a fantastic restaurant established in the village, which offers plats du jours for around 8 euros (2 courses for around 12 euros) there is no reason for the French to visit a non-French venue, especially when the prices are significantly higher and the food quality significantly lower.

If the owners are trying to attract local French custom then they must stop using A-boards written in English. One day the sign read: "Roast Pork", which I am sure sent out completely the wrong signals to the locals. Imagine how many customers there would be if a Thai restaurant in the UK was written in Thai? Exactly, very few.

The other option to attract local custom would be to ensure that they are offering what the locals enjoy; in so many of Gordon Ramsay's solutions in his "Nightmare" shows is to simplify, simplify, simplify. The fact that this restaurant does fish and chips once a month is hardly going to endear the locals to English gastronomy. Instead they could be clever and offer fantastic fish dishes with frites, which the locals would enjoy without the dish having to be labelled "fish & chips".

The owners were somewhat dismissive of the locals not visiting their restaurant, but with the view that it is the French people's unwillingness to try something new misses the point and if they continue to service the English-speaking locals and UK tourists then I can't see them surviving for too long. That would be a shame, because the restaurant has potential and there is definitely a need for more good eateries, especially as tourism in this region is growing.

Getting a French chef, or at least advice from a French chef, would start to stop the rot and in my opinion they must really engage with and become part of the local community, otherwise they will be seen in the same light as those immigrants in the UK that are seen as not integrating. They must never forget that they are foreigners with its own unique set of values and customs, and that they must accommodate them or they may as well be back in Kent.

The French can and do welcome the English if you are prepared to get involved and this was brought into sharp relief during our stay in the village for 9 days. In that time we had our French neighbours round for drinks and then we were invited back to their home 2 days later. The family that we 1st met 2 years ago speak no English and with my improving French we were able to hold court for an hour or so each time. Interestingly, the English family living in the gite adjacent to our accommodation had not really mixed and Catherine, the French neighbour, was very dismissive of their lack of integration and especially the wife's lack of French (after living in the country for 3 years).

The French don't have a problem with anyone that tries and after several years of holidays in the country and having a go at speaking French has always been appreciated.

The French, rightly, have a problem with Captain Mainwarings who think that shouting in English is the way to communicate and with those that live in English enclaves, cut off from French life. If you've bothered to move to such a delightful country and want to enjoy that all that life there has to offer then you need to be prepared to give a little back, and I would say that the more you give you the more you will receive.

Aitch for Hotel

Although we have Lynne Truss's fantastic homage to the humble apostrophe, someone should perhaps write at a simple introduction to the pronunciation of the English alphabet.

But surely, we all know that "a" on its own is pronounced "ay". But what about the letter "h"? As far a junior school teacher in rural Derbyshire in concerned, the pronunciation is "haytch". Au contraire Ms Illiterate! The correct pronunciation, as verified by the Oxford English Dictionary, is actually: "aitch".

But does this matter (and should I be starting a sentence with "but")? Yes, it does matter because this is part of the foundation for our rich, expressive and diverse language. Get the sound of our letters wrong and its all down hill.

Many would disagree that such pendantic issues, including issues of grammer, should be ignored and go as far as to suggest that we should opt for a more intuitive approach to language. Some would prefer to use a phonetic approach where all our historic customs and grammar rules go out of the window with basic spelling.

The sad reality about this true story is that if our teachers are getting it wrong, what hope for those now at school? Dumbing-down may not be an actual policy for our leading and learned educationalists (the experts) but it is certainly one of the outcomes.

Scotland the Brave

The recent outbreak of Scottish nationalism, where First Minister Jack McConnell refused to support England in the World Cup, has been followed by rising tennis star Andy Murray.

Whilst McConnell was unrepentent in his decision to deliberately not support England after his ridiculous statement, Murray's nationalistic streak seemed a bit more sublte: when he appeared on court at Wimbledon he was sporting a white outfit edged with blue and a Cross of St Andrew wristband. Although he hasn't uttered a word, the message is clear: "hands off England I'm not yours, I'm Scotland's!"

With many other sporting events there are often teams from across the kingdom, but for Wimbledon Murray is put under the Great Britain heading. This is something he obviously dislikes, otherwise why wear such a display of nationalism. I don't know of any other tennis player that has done so.

Can anyone imagine if Henman had worn a Cross of St George wristband? No, because he would have been condemned as a Little Englander.

As Murray is now GB's only hope for tennis stardom I'm sure that most English, Welsh and Northern Irish people would fully support him as "one of us". If Scotland was playing in the World Cup, then I would be hoping for them to go as far as they could.

As with all things when it comes to national pride, the English in particular, are left wondering how things will be perceived. Every other country does its own thing and doesn't care who thet upset. Well, from now on I'm not so sure that Murray deserves (or even wants) the support of his erstwhile southern cousins.

Come back Hadrian -- all is forgiven!

What a lot of hot air

There seems little doubt that we humans, especially in the northern hemisphere, are pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that this is likely to have an impact on our weather systems. The also seems little doubt that changes need to be made to our collective behaviour if we are to prevent the doomsayers' predictions.

The UK alone contributes but a small percentage to overall global CO2 emissions, so on a micro (UK-only) level the political debate on global warming seems quite removed from our everyday lives of getting to and from work or visiting our local supermarket.

On one level the government's message should be taken seriously and that we should all be doing what we can: cycling everywhere, installing solar heating and erecting wind turbines. If you were to spend the £20,000 or so that it would cost for both solar heating and a wind turbine you would struggle to ever see a financial return; that is, if the local planners allowed you to go ahead.

The mixed messages start to emerge when you understand how government finances work and how every government is actually addicted to motor transport, to the point that new railway lines will not be built (or re-opened) if there is a threat to revenues generated by car journeys. Governments aren't actually addicted to cars, it is just the billions raised from the tax on fuel, road tax and from the anticipated road charging schemes.

On the one hand cars are bad and on the other they're rather very good. How does, or how should, the government handle this dilemma?

From a communications perspective it is tricky. You can't go back to a time when we were less dependent on the car, but governments must re-evaluate their financial need for car-generated revenues. As the M1 grinds to a halt at Luton every morning around 7am, there surely has to be more the transport equation than what it would cost the government if none of us were in our cars. The costs of having hundreds of thousands of people sat going nowhere all around the UK costs businesses millions and these are the costs that we should be looking to reduce.

Governments need to put money into real transport alternatives, to re-open the rural branch lines, to promote bus services and to re-engineer the urban landscape so that we can actually use our cars less.

Do I look fat in this?

On returning from a recent 2-day pampering session at a local health spa, my wife dropped a clutch of glossy magazines on the coffee table. Heat, OK! and Hello to name but a few. On the cover of one there was a headline-grabbing: “Celebrities’ flabby bellies”.

Of course, such headlines are designed to convert the browser into a purchaser; in my case not actually buying, but it did attract my attention and soon I was flicking through the magazine in that nonchalant not-really-reading-but-of-course-really-reading manner.

A few pages in and there was a feature on the girl band Girls Aloud. On the double-page spread there were ‘now’ and ‘then’ photographs of each band member.

Accompanying each photograph was each singer’s vital statistics. In this case the ‘vital’ element of the figures was that they had all dropped down several clothes sizes. The naturally curvy had become almost skeletal; the healthy facial glow now gaunt.

Whilst it’s easy to dismiss such articles as trivial and irrelevant there is a worrying message being sent out. If this article was a one-off, isolated feature then there would be no problem. But taken together with virtually every other women’s and girl’s title promoting, selling and reinforcing the message that thin is good then we’re going to see a continual increase in eating disorders.

In the same title, ironically, there was an article on how thin and ill Anna Kournikova was looking since she’d left tennis to take up modelling.

Little wonder she’s lost weight: it’s the advertising and fashion industry that eschews any figure that’s larger than an 8 and demands a constant flow of young thin girls to glamorise their products. I wonder how many Flakes Cadbury’s would have sold if they used even an average-sized British women let alone anyone that was slightly overweight.

Companies promoting their products and services must start to look at how their advertising is likely to impact on their target consumers. We must see the use of more everyday-sized models so that young impressionable girls and boys don't get the wrong message that skeletal is good.

Such aspects of companies' activities must also be a fundamental part of their corporate responsibility policies. It is all very well making a commitment to the environment, but if they're promoting thin=good/fat=bad messages then they're simply fuelling eating disorders and their responsibility statements are then no more than spin.

How to avoid screen rage

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly new technology becomes a part of everyday working life and the speed that we take technological developments for granted. Recently I was having problems connecting to the internet via our ISDN connection (unfortunately, there are still areas in the UK without broadband) and I was immediately faced with the problem of not being able to send out clients’ urgent press releases.

As I pondered my offline predicament I was transported back to being an 18-year-old junior in a sales office where I used an electric typewriter to produce the letters of the day. It was a slow and laborious process, especially if you made a mistake and had to start again. This sense of tedium enveloped me as I knew that I would have to resort to not an electric typewriter but mail merging letters and printing out the press releases, then stuffing the information into envelopes. It wasn’t that long ago that being able to mass produce letters in the time it would have taken a small army of typists seemed a highly efficient way to work – how quickly times change.

The problem with the ISDN connection was soon resolved and was back online. As I hit the ‘send/receive’ button, I reflected how easy it is to e-mail; I also reflected that a noun has now become a verb. E-mailing is almost as easy as talking and a lot quicker than texting; it is silent, immediate, fast and yet can still come across as being a slightly impersonal medium – probably because everyone thinks that e-mails should be far less formal than letters.

Despite the many benefits that e-mail brings to our lives, it can also be a dangerous tool and one that should be handled with caution. It is too easy to use the ‘reply’ or ‘forward’ options in our e-mail software than it is to send a fresh one. Familiarity does breed contempt and before we know it we’re forwarding a long e-mail chain for all subsequent recipients to read.

If we receive an unpleasant (or even a rather intimate) e-mail we should be very careful how we respond. As Bill Howard, in his article Save Yourself from E-mail Faux Pas, explains: “No matter how annoyed you are at some jerk’s e-mail, save your ‘that’ll put the S.O.B. in his place’ response and look at it again an hour later or first thing the next day. Chances are you’ll want to tone it down.”

Not only may you want to tone the response down, you may not want to end up in court. Unlike telephone calls or sending text messages, with e-mail you are actually publishing material and can be used in a court of law if you are making false accusations are producing inflammatory material. An innocent e-mail to a loved one or a rant about a loathed boss can soon end up half way around the world, leaving the originator of the e-mail embarrassed at best and worst without a job. The same goes for CCs: be careful who you might be unwittingly including in your circulation list.

Getting the message to the right recipient in the first place may not be as easy as you might expect, as Bill Howard suggests: “Use addressee auto-fill cautiously. If you type C-l-a-u, Claudia Andrews appears in the addressee window before Claudia Mezza. Hit enter too soon and you’ll send the message to the wrong Claudia.” However. if you’re generating an e-mail from a database that interfaces with Outlook or Outlook Express then you’re less likely to get the wrong person because you’re creating an e-mail from a unique record and you’d know immediately if you’d opened the wrong record.

With previous technologies there wasn’t the need to be so careful, but with e-mail my advice is that we should observe a few simple rules. Business e-mail should remain for business. Use a Hotmail, or similar server-based e-mail systems, for personal contacts. Where you do receive personal e-mails at work, check the policy of the employer; you might be breaking the terms of your employment (sending personal e-mails is no different from making personal telephone calls) and with spyware able to monitor every keystroke, you don’t know who might be watching.

A few years ago when I working for one particular employer I only found out after sending many e-mails to recruitment agencies that all e-mails (sent and received) were retained on their system, even after deleting them from my own computer.

Whether or not it is company policy I also suggest sending out fresh e-mails every time. This way you can’t accidentally send sensitive information to third party recipients. It may be more time consuming to start with a new e-mail, but this way you’ll avoid falling into the bear traps triggered by lazy habit of hitting the ‘reply’ and ‘forward’ buttons.

Don’t respond immediately to what appears to be an unfriendly or rude e-mail the moment you have read it. If and when you do receive such e-mails, the safety of the anonymity of the screen can lull you into a false sense of security and anger can soon burst forth. Perhaps this should be called screen rage, but whatever it might be called, my advice is walk away and take a breather. Even if the e-mail is unpleasant it is much more positive to deal with it when you are calmer and more focused.

To ensure that you don’t send e-mails that are likely to cause offence avoid sarcasm – it can come across too heavy in e-mail – and irony is often too subtle. The best option is to play it straight.

To get the most out of e-mail we need to apply a few commonsense rules. After all, we know how to behave on the telephone and writing letters so why get careless with e-mail? With e-mail now so much a part of our working life we use it without thought, but as professional communicators we need to be setting the agenda for best practice in all areas of communication and remember that our clients may not be giving the attention they should to such a powerful communications tool.

Mean-spirited local authorities

Driving our cars today seems to offer fewer and fewer pleasure: we have speed cameras at every turn, we have expensive fuel and we have increasingly congested roads. Even when it comes to parking there always seems to be problems finding a space.

The only consolation, in recent times, was when a fellow motorist offered you their pay-and-display ticket with enough time remaining to enable you to park for free. This simple neighbourly gesture was always enough to put a smile on my face and restored my faith in humanity.

But if you've been to a car park recently you'll find that your attempts at being neighbourly have been thwarted. Increasingly, you now have to enter either all or part of your registration number so that you can't give the ticket to anyone else. Of course I can see the finance directors' rationale: more money for the coffers, but for the actual amount of additional revenue raised set against the additional cost of the more complex machines, it is a mean-spirited act.

Whether or not you visit car parks that have the 'mean machines', as I'll brand them, there is the other issue: the actual cost of parking. I'm not really bothered whether I pay £1 or £2 per hour, what I really object to is the cynical pricing policy. How often have you found a ticket machine where the pricing is something like: 70p for 1 hour; £1.30 for 2-3 hours and £1.80 for 3-4 hours and so on? That's right, every time you visit such a machine you can guarantee that you have 60p in change or pound coins only. Why don't councils opt for round figures? £1 for an hour; £2 for 2 hours and so on.

The reason is obvious and it is another devious ploy to extract maximum revenues from the motorist that is trying to visit the village/town/city centre and spend money in the shops (keeping shops in business and enabling them to pay their local rates back to the mean-spirited councils).

To encourage shoppers back into town and city centres we need parking policies that actually encourage visits and help dissuade us from shopping at the out-of-town centres where parking is free.

What we pay when we park our cars is not going to change the course of history, but councils should wake up to the fact that they should be encouraging visits to town centres, that they shouldn't be preventing neighbourly gestures and they should realise that we're not as stupid as they think.

Free advertising?

The great news for the PR industry is that there are still many people that are either unaware of PR or unaware of its potential.

I volunteered to help a friend to publicise a new service that he was launching as part of his busness and having submitted a draft release he wanted to know how much the target publication would charge. I explained that they don't charge, but equally we cannot guarantee coverage. But by making the story as relevant as possible to the publication's readership and ensuring that it is genuinely newsworthy then there is a good possibility of coverage.

Many people still see PR as something that is 'free', or related to advertising; both of which are incorrect. If clients are paying for a PR company to help communicate their news then the publicity generated isn't free, by definition, and shouldn't be seen as being something of little value.

The challenge is to continue to demonstrate the value of PR and to show that we're much more than press release machines; our remit should encompass every aspect of how a company or organisation relates to its all of its publics (including staff, customers, suppliers, shareholders, local community, government agencies).

There are a number of mainly trade titles that make charges for "colour separation" (charging for content) and they are the ones that I steer clear of. Not only are they doing a disservice to their readers because editorial and advertising has effectively been merged, but they are missing the point of journalism and PR.

Have a great day.

Today, the UK government announced yet more plans to dramatically re-shape our education system. Yes, there going to privatise education and they're moving back towards schools taking pupils based on ability: in other words we're back to selection.

In the 60s it was 'out' with selection and 'in' with comprehensives; no more evil 11-plus exams to determine how bright you were. And since then we have been on the slippery slope to where we find ourselves today: more and more going to university and more and more who can't actually read or write.

But that's OK, because today there is no such thing a failure; nothing so black and white as that. No, there are just shades of grey, or rather the whole alphabet to allocate for grades. You can still 'pass' a GCSE with a G. When I did my "O" levels you needed an A, B or a C. Ds and Es? Sorry, but you'd failed.

What's so wrong with failing? Through failure you can actually learn how to succeed; you get knocked down, but you get up again... Character-building is a better word, but that sounds too... well, too elitist probably.

Certainly no room for elitism with Nouvelle Labour. Except that Tony B went to Fettes: the Scottish Eton no less.

It's all a case of plus ca change... and for those who didn't study French I'm really saying that nothing much changes. If we'd left the education system alone and maintained "O" levels and apprenticeships we'd have plenty of tradesman, and we'd have school children that knew what to do with an apostrophe.

Here endeth today's words of wisdom.

That Friday Feeling

It's suddenly Friday again and time to plan and plot for two days 'off'. Well, with 2 young boys and garden that resembles the Somme, I doubt I'm going to have much time off; but Friday it is and tonight time for a few beers.

On the subject of beers, did you know that 3 pints in one night and you are technically a binge drinker? No, neither did I. Five or 6 pints maybe, but three? But thanks to Nanny State, three pints and you're heading for an early grave. These days it seems that we're all doing everything that's wrong: driving too much, too little exercise, too many cigarettes, too many poor meals, too few family meals together... the list goes on (and on).

But back to Friday. If you've spent the last 4 days looking forward to knocking off today then you're likely to experience is the Monday Morning Blues. Nothing worse than the sense of dread if you have a job that you don't really enjoy. Then, of course, there is the Sunday Syndrome: the slightly worried feeling in the pit of your stomach, which means that what should be a relaxing two days off, is actually only about a day and a half before you're back to thinking about work.

Mondays come round as surely as night follows day, and before you know you are back at work. If you enjoy your work as much as that, then how productive are you being and should you not look at moving on? Your boss isn't getting particularly good value from you because it's probably Wednesday before you've settled into the week and by Thursday it's the emotional wind-down for the weekend.

If you enjoy your work and perhaps spend a lot of your time in the office, or whatever constitutes your 'office', then there are the issues of work-life balance nagging in the background. If you spend what is perceived to be too long at work then there are those that suggest that you're either inefficient or you're part of the presenteeism culture: staying at your desk just to look good for the boss.

Of course , there has to be a balance between being dragged to the office and being dragged from the office, but surely it is better to be motivated and focused, rather than resenting every minute that you're at work. For one, time evaporates and the weekend comes round faster (and you enjoy more of the weekend), and for two, life's surely too short to spend a third of your life with a cloud over your head.

And talking of clouds over your head, the next time it's raining go out for a walk. The relevance here? Absolutely zero, but it's a great feeling to be out in the wet especially when we're always trying to avoid getting wet we forget the simple pleasures of being connected to nature, which can be enjoyed whether you love or loathe your job.

Ciao.

Today's Image

As an amateur photographer I will also be posting various images to my blog site.

This is the waterfront at Kinsale in Eire. Kinsale is a fantastic place to visit, especially if you're a bit of a foodie. A warm welcome is waiting in every pub, bar and restaurant, and the food is wonderful.

Thursday 20 October

Welcome to Opera Public Relations' blog, which we hope you find of interest and will navigate back to.

On our blog there will be news of our campaigns, clients, our recently-launched networking group for Derbyshire-based PROs (Springboard) and sometimes a bit of a rant.

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