Lots of people reported a really busy start to the year: at the Warm Welcome Campaign we had Warm Welcome Week, starting on Blue Monday (the most depressing day of the year, according to travel companies aiming to sell holidays). January is a difficult time. The merriment of Christmas is over; bills, the weather, illness, global and domestic politics all conspire to create a pretty grim atmosphere for many of us.
But with the Warm Welcome Campaign, as we said in a BBC Radio 4 Appeal for the Campaign, something quietly remarkable is happening.
Community spaces up and down the country are registering with the Warm Welcome Campaign and opening either for the first time or for the most recent time in many years to give people a warm and friendly place to go – especially if they are lonely and/or struggling with the cost of living.
It’s such a joy to be involved in the communications around Warm Welcome. In Warm Welcome Week, we staged events up and down the country, the team visited many Warm Welcome Spaces, we got PR and social content for some VIP visits including a visit by former prime minister Gordon Brown to his local Warm Welcome Space in Kirkcaldy. We held a Parliamentary reception to tell MPs about the Warm Welcome Campaign.
And we had huge amounts of engagement on social media, as people running Warm Welcome Spaces up and down the country – most of them volunteers – dressed in bright colours, engaged in craft activities, cooked and baked and gave everyone who visited their space a very warm welcome and a place of connection.
Life continues to be busy for all of us starting the year with plans for conferences, projects coming to a head after years of work and, of course, the annual traditions to prepare for such as Pancake Day. There are holidays to look forward to including the Easter break, which means one thing to the Church and quite another to those of us who look forward to two bank holidays and a time to celebrate spring.
In the midst of this, I’m working with the Good Faith Partnership and A Million Acts of Hope which is a campaign to celebrate community and acts of hope all over the country. It will culminate in a week of action in May. You can find out more here: https://millionactsofhope.org/#plan
I do believe paid work, at this stage in my working life, should be enjoyable and – ideally – make a positive difference to the world. That means people working well together and communicating well, some things that seemed in short supply at times in January.
It sounds hokey, but I have been more than usually affected by the phases of the moon this month: the new moon on 18 January and the full moon on 1 February. The world and my little world seemed to go a bit crazy. Forgive me, but every day is crazy in politics at the moment so I can’t remember the political specifics of Monday 19 January, Blue Monday.
I do, though, remember my particular domestics on the morning of Blue Monday. Cat pee on a laptop, encouraging reluctant daughter to her part-time job, appalling weather, road works, traffic jam, 8.10am work texts, 9am meeting to set the agenda for the week. By 10am I needed a lie down.
Then on Tuesday 20 January, certain things had to be done with alarming alacrity with the very few people who’d managed to make it out from under their duvets. Is it any wonder I didn’t do Dry January? I’m just proud I waited til 6pm for a glass of wine most days.
Throughout it all, I’m clinging on to self-care: river dipping when it’s safe, running, trying to get enough sleep and eat well. I also have fantastic friends, including present and former colleagues, who make me roar with laughter on a regular basis. Just while writing this, I’ve been reminded of one comment when my ex and I were working for a magazine for the public sector. One civil servant, when asked if some government directories were a bit hard to read, said: “No, directories are meant to be hard to understand.”
In other news
My aim when starting this blog was to comment on the biggest media stories of the month. But more and more I’m drawn, like so many of us, into thinking about global and domestic politics. Iran, Ukraine, Greenland, Gaza, Mandelson, Epstein; it’s the stuff of nightmares. There’s nothing for it but to gently keep on top of the headlines and cocoon oneself in culture, whether it’s music or literature or whatever your bent.
This is just by the by, but I got a little bit more respect for Starmer after he said the UK would not yield to US pressure over Greenland and trade tariffs and then openly criticising Trump’s comments about Nato troops in Agfhanistan. More of this, please, although as I write the Politico London Playbook is calling this “his worst week as prime minister (so far)”.
As for the final of The Traitors last month, what a load of rubbish. I was hooked I’ll admit (there’s little else to watch in the first three weeks of January) but for the successful traitors to say their families would be so proud of them for lying and manipulating their way to win – really? I’m probably not going to watch another series, unless it has a great cast of celebrities.
TTFN.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 