Jetlag and why it sucks

We’ve been in Sydney for a week now and I think my body clock is just about acclimatised to being in the Southern Hemisphere. The first few days after a long flight always seem to be the worst – that my-head-is-full-of-cotton-wool feeling that’s halfway between hangover and sleep deprivation. But it begins to pass once […]

Air travel: both miracle and nightmare

My first ever post from the Southern Hemisphere – exciting stuff! A pink-tinged dawn greeted our arrival at Sydney airport at 5am yesterday after a plane journey that seemed to last for several lifetimes. I’ve never been a great lover of air travel. So the thought of 7 hours on a plane to Dubai, almost […]

Pork. The Other White Meat – the allure of Australian advertising

I’m heading off on a well-earned late summer break to Sydney this week. Aside from the obvious allure of summer, sunshine and the potential for some quality Aussie hospitality, I’m very much looking forward to seeing some new examples of the magnificent bluntness of Australian advertising. I should say at this point, that my partner […]

There are lies, damn lies and advertising copy

There’s an advert that’s currently running on UK television for Knorr stock pots that’s been driving me slightly batty. In this ad, the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White extolls the virtues of Knorr’s new range of stock pots which are ‘made with real ingredients for a real meaty taste’. Now I am no culinary authority, […]

Why we need punctuation – the battle for the apostrophe

I’ve just started re-reading the excellent Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss – a really great book with a ‘zero tolerance approach to punctuation’. If you see yourself as a bit of a punctuation stickler, or your family and friends habitually accuse you of being a pedant, this is definitely a book worth reading. […]

To press, or not to press: placebo buttons and pedestrian crossings

I was talking to a friend last week about pedestrian crossings – yes, I’m that fascinating. I’d noticed recently that an increasing number of people will stand at a pedestrian crossing waiting to cross the road, but won’t actually press the button to make the lights go red and stop the traffic. Odd, I thought. […]

Losing your smartphone: the cardinal sin of 21st century life

I was in a meeting today where one of the guys leading the session was feeling slightly out of sorts. He’d lost his smartphone… or to be more precise, he hadn’t lost it, his wife had washed his clothes with the phone still in them. But the upshot was the same either way: he had […]

Living in a digital world – Star Trek or second nature?

We live in an increasingly digital world: we buy our clothes online, we buy our books through our Kindle e-readers, we share our family photos on Facebook and we plan our restaurant trips around the online vouchers that get us one pizza free…or that may just be me. Who can resist cheap pizza, eh! But […]

Cold calling: is this the best way to communicate with your customers?

Cold-calling: It’s pretty much universally loathed by the general public and yet companies carry on phoning us to talk about PPI claims, accident insurance, double glazing, changing our energy provider etc. Is it the best way to communicate with potential customers? Doubtful, I think you’ll agree. As the person receiving the call, it can be […]

The beauty of slang – knowing your twerk from your selfie

Good to see that the Oxford English Dictionary – not usually an institution you’d imagine as being ‘down with the kids’ – has included both ‘twerking’ and ‘selfie’ in its new edition. People can get rather sniffy about slang, but it’s the colloquial and social changes to our language that give it that essential colour. […]