Working life has settled down to normal after, I will admit, a certain testiness in the air in mid June. Maybe it’s global and domestic politics, which hasn’t been good; maybe it’s our stage of life. I was feeling very testy in the middle of last month and I felt this from some colleagues too.
Then the air cleared for me. One day last month I had a lunchtime walk with my older daughter which was a nice break in the day, to get my sunglasses fixed and to renew a library book. I bought her an ice cream and we wandered through the Tuesday charter market in Salisbury, appreciating the city where we live. I don’t know why I don’t go into town more regularly for a mooch and a treat. I’m just so fixed on my small routines of working from home and daily lunchtime walks around the meadow, plus of course running and regularly dipping in the river.
On our walk my daughter talked about being hopeful that her generation can do things – politics, relationships, care for our planet – better than my generation. She had just watched the first couple of episodes of Shifty which I’ve now watched. It points up all the many mistakes made from Thatcherism onwards to the end of the 20th century and Adam Curtis does it in the best way possible, using footage from the time juxtaposed with other footage that highlights the sexism, racism, transphobia, misguided economic policies etc with very simple captions. I was also quite disappointed with my generation when I’d finished watching it.
It did, to my mind, only and of course deliberately focus on the negative. You could make a different documentary about the positive things that have happened in the past 40 years.
At Good Faith Partnership, we’re already planning for our second Warm Welcome Week in January 2026 when we’ll again chase away the winter blues with a surge of colour. And we have other plans for Warm Welcome to be unveiled as the campaign becomes even more established.
We’re publishing our 2024-25 Warm Welcome Impact Report, which shows there were 2.6 million visitors to Warm Welcome Spaces last winter and that 68% of people now live within 30 minutes of a warm space, up from 62% last year, reflecting the growing number of warm spaces across the UK.
I enjoyed Glastonbury on the BBC including Bob Vylan’s performance. It’s not anti-semitic to say Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza is obscene and horrific.
In other news
Sky, ITV and Channel 4 are joining forces to sell ads on their streaming services in a fightback against big tech including Facebook and Google who have taken two thirds of the £45bn ad market in the UK. Good for them, I say, and here’s to them clawing back some of the spend.
I’m not going to comment on Gary Linkeker saying the BBC should ‘hold its head in shame’ for dropping a film about Gaza because I don’t want to get into online debates with anyone, but it’s a great story from my former colleague Tara Conlan.
That’s it for this month. I may or may not post in August, when I hope we’ll all be taking things a little slower and trying to stay cool as our planet heats up alarmingly.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 