Last month we had ‘Jane Austen day’ at Winchester Cathedral – a special service and the unveiling of a statue in the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. It went extremely well with me chaperoning 11 journalists and photographers (a bit like herding cats), and subsequent coverage on the BBC and ITV regional news, plus images in The Times and Evening Standard and radio interviews on Global Radio.
Also last month, I helped organise the Warm Welcome Campaign launch for winter when, we know, demand for warm and welcoming community spaces will rise. We’ve had more than 450 views of the hour-long online event and we’re supporting more than 5,700 Warm Welcome Spaces up and down the country to continue their vital work providing warmth and connection for thousands of people every week.
Finally, in my news, it’s five years since I launched Lucecannon PR and I’ve been writing this monthly blog for five years now; this is blog post number 61, some kind of milestone I thought worth marking.
In other news
The BBC is in all sorts of trouble after the resignation this week of director general Tim Davie and director of news Deborah Turness and a threatened lawsuit from the US president. The BBC made a terrible error in a Panorama edit of a speech by Trump, and now it’s emerged that a second clip from Newsnight might also have been badly edited. As others have said, this is a huge open goal for all the many detractors of the BBC and is deeply saddening for those of us who care about preserving the corporation and all the cultural and social good that it brings to Britain.
I wonder if the intellectual might of Britain can unite around the BBC and protect it from right wingers and Trump. It’s still a fantastic institution of thousands of people including journalists doing great things, despite several crises and a very few despicable individuals and their appalling behaviour. Tim Davie, whatever his lack of experience as a journalist, and Deborah Turness, a very experienced journalist, have not behaved appallingly. The Church, by comparison, sails on despite some really serious crises that include abuse.
This is interesting by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian about men who want to be present fathers and who find that conflicts with their commitments to paid work. The piece points out that women have had to mastermind this juggle for years. Hinsliff wrote this book, Half a Wife, which I read when my girls were young and it really resonated.
I tried to solve the parenting/working life juggle by going freelance when I had my older daughter, but even then I often had a clash with childfree colleagues who would invariably call me with a query at 3.15pm just as I was collecting children from school. Now my kids are grown and need (slightly) less attention in the working day, I can pick up the slack from colleagues who still have the school pick-ups and time off that coincides with school holidays.
Like millions of people, I was affected by AWS outage that occurred on 20 October, having to use Teams instead of Zoom for an online meeting and not being able to get into Canva. I didn’t really mind and I don’t have or use Alexa to turn my lights on and off. I did like this take on the outage from the Guardian which cited people having “a really good day” because they couldn’t use tech to do their jobs.
The next time I post it will be Advent with Christmas just around the corner. I can’t wait! And not just for mince pies (which I’ve already started), but for the ‘holiday at home’ time off. See you then.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 