It’s Christmas… time for homecoming stories. Lanky boys return from university with bags of washing and stories of all night drinking sessions, or the miracle of passed exams. Savvy girls back from the big smoke with too much eyeliner recount stories of sociopathic bosses or avaricious landlords. The identities in the stories differ, but the […]
Have you noticed how boring politics has become? Journalists search for the reasons we’ve lost interest, but they don’t need to look very far. Journalists are writers, and every writer knows that the key to a compelling story is empathy. Not fancy language, correct information or sentence structure. It’s the ability to evoke a […]
“For fucks sake…” I’m at the help desk at JFK. A sweating, overweight man in front of me isn’t all that pleased about the help on offer. “Seriously?” (This word seems to be the current U.S. abbreviation for “Is it just me, or do you detect a touch of irony in this exchange?”) The […]
It was business guru, Seth Godin, who popularised the term “Permission Marketing”. Like all new phrases, Permission Marketing emerged from the culture that surrounded it. We had grown tired of its opposite force – “Interruption Marketing” – the barrage of information coming at us from all forms of media. “Buy me! Notice me! Like me!” […]
I knew there was a problem when the head of site services stormed into the Production office demanding payment for 30 toilet doors. Before that I was too stressed to wonder what the small bonfires in the distance were made of. It was cold. So, in a gesture of creative anarchy, the heavy metal […]