So here we are suddenly in August and, like you, I’m wondering where the year is going… August is traditionally a time when people take time off from work, this year largely for domestic UK holidays. Although I note from my social media feeds the lucky few who have managed to get to another country and away from the UK’s stop, start summer weather.
Am I managing to take any time off? Not really; instead I’m planning some time at the end of September when the festival I’m working on has finished and when my younger daughter will be back at school (in the sixth form, yikes!) and my older daughter should be settling into uni – they both got fantastic grades, despite a couple of very challenging years with lockdowns and remote learning. Please let’s not talk about grade inflation for this cohort of students – they’ve been through a lot and spending part of their lives locked in their homes with their mother was a big price to pay.
Meanwhile Covid and the constantly changing government guidelines on international travel, combined with the fall-out from Brexit, continue to play havoc with my plans, and possibly with yours. The festival I’m working on has had to make some last-minute changes as the French artists programmed to perform as part of the Inside Out Dorset Festival have found it impossible to travel. So that meant scrapping some print and hastily rearranging and reprinting replacement flyers. Not to mention missing all sorts of deadlines in the process.
Like all good festivals, it will all be fine. People will turn up, performers will be there and something amazing will happen. 17-26 September in Dorset – put the weekends in your diaries now.
The other thing I wanted to note this month is that working from home / working from anywhere and specifically working from outside of London has totally come of age. Others have said this, and I’ll say it again, we’ve accelerated the trend to working from home by about five years in just a few months.
One TV distributor I talked to recently said Soho is now “empty” and you can’t fit additional meetings around your one London meeting any more, because no one wants to have face to face meetings in London. My impressions of Soho when I went up there for lunch one Friday in early August were that it’s quieter than I’d expect for a Friday lunchtime (there were a few people sitting outside the bars I passed) but it was far from empty. I avoided the tube. So, not deserted, but certainly quieter than I remember. Then again, it is August.
In media news
As you’d expect, it’s a relatively quiet time for business-to-business news.
I could hardly have been less interested in the Olympic Games, and that’s not just because of the Covid craziness and the fact it was in another time zone in Japan. (Ok, I did watch some of the BBC2 9pm ‘highlights’ in the first week of the Games when I was completely bored… and the equestrian dressage was hilarious!)
But I did spot this story from The Guardian about the BBC juggling live streams and it reminded me of a friend’s post on Instagram of her on US TV saying it was confusing over there, knowing what to watch where, as there are just so many media outlets airing Olympics coverage.
This was interesting from Alastair Campbell about the impact that television still has, and I highly recommend Tortoise Media for ‘slow’ news. I try to make time to read their Sensemaker newsletter every day which has a few handy ‘Long Stories Short’ bullet points about the top stories in the news and a longer disquisition on one of the topics of the day. The newsletter is free and I pay £10 a month to subscribe to their service which includes ‘Think Ins’ (not that I’ve been to any) and, importantly, helps fund quality journalism.
I’m keeping it brief again this month. Enjoy the rest of summer and I’ll post again in, can you believe it, September.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 