It feels like the school holidays have been going on forever. I picked my older girl up from university on 18 June and she’s been lolling around the house ever since, give or take a few days away and several nights out. She’s a good kid though, just being young after two years of horrible restrictions.
My younger girl went to a music festival in Madrid in July, missing a week of school, then tested positive for Covid so missed another week of school. Then it was the heatwave of 18-19 July so she was again on Teams for school work. Then term ended on 20 July.
So I’ve embarked on a summer of working from the dining room table (and once a week from London), while I think about slinking off to the river for a lunchtime swim.
Meanwhile we managed a week in West Wales with friends and have a few other camping jaunts lined up to take us through to the new term in September.
As ever, I’m interested in talking to anyone who wants some support with comms and PR, particularly from October/November time onwards.
In other news
Lots has caught my eye this month.
My daily digest of business news from The Guardian has many important stories, about the state of the economy (it grew 0.5% in May, despite the cost of living crisis; but then retail sales were down by 0.7% in May, inflation was at 9.4% in June) and so on. But I do love stories like this one about men’s footwear, which ran in the teeth of the heatwave we had in mid-July.
Best quotes: “The sockless loafer for men is just all too Philip Green in Monaco,” and “Your rule of thumb for your heatwave office outfit is that anything you would wear to the beach is most likely going to be inappropriate for the workplace.” As if we needed telling that last point.
I once wrote a whole piece about men’s footwear in summer, back in about 1993. It’s such a nightmare for some men.
There was also this story about how workers in the City were dressing in the heatwave. Genuinely, as well as the heavy lifting reporting, this is one of the reasons why I love The Guardian.
This is shocking and bad PR, about Skittles in the US containing titanium dioxide and manufacturer Mars knowing about the problem but listing ingredients as maybe or maybe not including the toxin.
I finally understand SLAPPs, from this story in Press Gazette but why am I writing about them in a PR business blog? Because they muzzle journalism and some of my PR now is about getting good news lines into the press to show what excellent work journalists do in holding people to account.
“Netflix is having a terrible year,” says CNN Business in this piece. Falling subscriber numbers, falling stock, letting staff go. It’s all going horribly wrong and should give Boris Johnson and Nadine Norries pause for thought when they wrongly claim Channel 4 needs to look to the likes of Netflix as it plans its future.
Clearly, streamers are competition to public service broadcasters and they won’t go away entirely. But Channel 4 does stream its content and do a tonne of other things like support independent producers, broadcast linear TV, work in the nations and regions and crucially provides daily top quality, impartial news.
This Samsung ad sparked an interesting debate, about a woman shown running in a city at 2am. Clearly, a risky undertaking given rates of violence against and murder of women who are out alone in the streets, either walking or running. But I take the point that lots of ads show risky behaviour such as first dates or buying a drink at a bar. Dunno. I’m glad the ad was pulled but it was deemed not to have broken marketing codes.
That’s all for this month. Have a great rest of summer.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 