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Went to Birmingham last night to talk to the Midland's Creative Circle. Lovely bunch of people. Really good fun. Haven't been to Brum since the days we went to the Rum Runner and pretended to meet Duran Duran. I do like the new Bull Ring and this great place we did the talk at called The Custard Factory. Had a little debate with The Economist bloke about their ads. See next post.
Good displays in the Lego shop in the Bull Ring.
Good pub sign
Great thing in the window of urban village.
We were driving up the M1 the other day. Arthur very bored. So I gave him the digital camera for a bit and he took all these shots. Obviously they're rubbish and blurry and random. But they're also slightly beautiful and a bitter-sweet portrait of the unutterable tedium of some car journeys when you're a kid. Including the gormless grinning dad.
Sad day. Brian Clough died. Coming from Derby I have to mention this. I was in the same class as Nigel at junior school and we hung out a bit when we were very young. (Too young for it to be clear that I was no good at football.) We got taken to a Forest game once for Nigel's birthday treat, so I became a Forest fan. Brian was a lovely and scary man. Excellent to be around as a kid. He did stuff other Dads didn't do. Like drive a big flash car and be at home all day. I never knew him after I was about 10 or something but I always thought he was an excellent man. It's a very sad day.
I always wanted to get him into the agency to talk about management and stuff but never did - he would have been excellent, he had a intuitive genius for leadership. I guess I was slightly embarrased to be in advertising and not doing something he would have admired like being a Doctor. Saw Nigel in a park a few months back and said hello. It was all very awkward, I imagine he had no memory of me at all, but he was, of course, unfailingly polite. His Dad would have been proud.
We've been working with We Are What We Do for a couple of years now and it's finally starting to happen. (All due to them, all we did was go to a few meetings, spout some opinions and do some ads.) The book's on Richard and Judy today. David and Eugenie who started it and got it going are extra-ordinary people. We've got some ads running in the Standard next week on their behalf which I'll post when I get some jpgs from traffic. In the meantime, go to the site, buy the book, do an action.
Had a weekend in the peak district with some friends. Top fun. I don't want to be some dumb Grand Designs Escape To The Country pultroon, but it's a shame that more kids don't get to climb on hay...
...launch rockets...
...and just play around in fields. Alfie's four and his dad reckoned he'd never been in a field before.
And you can't beat a bike light for play value.
Here's a brand that's not getting as much love as it should. Angel Delight. You can make it together. You can lick the bowl. And the whisk. No heat. No cooking. A bit of waiting and a delicious butterscotch goo.
This is a sign attached to a climbing frame thing in Regents Park. Are they saying no helmets? I presume they are. Why? are helmets dangerous? Do kids in helmets frequently bash into other kids, causing injury and destruction? And have you ever seen a kid in a helmet on a climbing frame? Maybe unrestricted helmet wearing is more of a hazard in Norway or wherever this frame was designed.
Though, the whole issue of kids and helmets is interesting. I'm very reluctant to make Arthur wear his when he's on his bike. Becuase he doesn't like it, and it means he gets less joy out of his bike, and if he doesn't learn to love mucking about on his bike then I've failed as a parent. It seems an acceptable risk. Of course it's easy to say that now. He's not had a horrible accident.
Went to see the Pet Shop Boys playing along to the Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square last night. Very good. They've always liked big romantic sweeps and Soviet key changes and that perfectly suits the film; no point being subtle with this stuff, especially when it's played outside to a group of drunken tourists. The crowd were, of course, the most annoying bit, especially the woman who came and danced and whooed along to the pram rolling down the Odessa staircase.
And there was also some horribly 80s student socialism agitprop intro which didn't help. (Though it did illustrate just how good Eisenstein was, by contrast.) The ICA is disappointing sometimes; so much of the stuff they do could also have been done at Cambridge Poly in 1983. Had to leave a bit early because the dancing whooing woman was so irritating.
My favourite bit was just how the square looked before the whole thing started. The arc lights shining through the fountains.
Blimey, shows how old I'm getting, been doing this blog for ages and this is my first review of anything vaguely like a gig.