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We’ve had a bit of an office reshuffle recently which resulted in me having to clear out an old filing cabinet. It was like several geological layers being exposed in a cliff face. Here are some of the “fossils” that I dug out.

This is a “classic” Tennent’s Lager ice block font, circa God knows how long ago. Nice!

And from roughly the same period a set of four Tennent’s Lager cans featuring the Lager Lovelies. Someone told me that these can fetch up to £800 each on ebay, but they’re technically the property of the agency.

From 1993, the year that I left the agency, BBH’s first International Advertising handbook. Those were the days when global advertising was a brave new world for BBH. There is some great 1993 stuff about how computers and ISDN lines might revolutionise the way these accounts are run - for instance one page opens with the rhetorical question “But we’ve got telephones and faxes, so why on earth do we need to complicate things by using computers?”

The 12 inch EP version of Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Don’t ask.

A pair of rose-tinted spectacles.

The box set of CDP’s greatest hits, print and TV. A fantastic pick-me-up whenever you question the wisdom of working in an industry like ours.

And finally a cardboard cut-out of Simon Cowell stuck to a pencil. We occasionally use these in workshops and brainstorm sessions. You hide behind the Cowell persona if you’ve got something brutally honest to say. It works! You hear things that need to be heard but which might have otherwise been left unsaid.

We had what was probably our last meeting at IRN-BRU’s Parkhead head office the other day. They’re moving to their state of the art bottling plant in Cumbernauld.

We recorded the event for posterity.

We couldn’t get into the usual meeting room because of preparations for the move, so we found ourselves in this subterranean room off the loading bay. It was the A G Barr version of Churchill’s War Rooms with various sales area maps all over the walls.

It was also clearly the secret Overhead Projector Graveyard (you can see one of them in the background). This was where all the OHP’s came to die. No-one saw them go but they made their way somehow, like elephants, to this ancestoral burial ground.

Seeing all these OHP’s reminded me of an idea I had a while back for a piece of software to plug into Powerpoint. This software would recreate on Powerpoint slides all the endearing quirks of working with OHP acetates.

So, as you make your presentation, random hairs and fingerprint smudges appear on your slides.

As you click between charts they sometimes appear to float and slide, coming to rest at an odd angle, the way that acetates used to once the OHP bulb got hot.

Every now again (on the Russian Roulette setting) a slide will start to turn brown and appear to melt. The content of your chart is irrevocably lost as various melt holes get bigger and join up.

The software also gives you an additional option for building bullet point charts. Instead of just appearing they are revealed one by one by a feature that mimics the effect of a piece of paper being pulled away. This feature comes with a further “nervous shaking hand effect” option. This recreates the way that OHP’s would magnify the slightest nervous shake to an extent that was impossible not to notice. A nervous reveal also ran the risk of dragging the acetate out of position as the paper was moved downwards - and this can also happen to your Powerpoint slide on this setting.

This software would be great for presentations to people over the age of 35. Whereas I realise that there are people in the agency who won’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about.

Rich The Tat, Leith’s celebrated tattoo artist is scrolling the word ‘diarrhoea’ onto someone’s hand. Next to him another man is having his arm shaved. A third bloke with strange writing on the palms of his hands is being fed a banana by a girl with feathers in her hair.

We’re on a Scottish Executive film shoot making an ad to promote ‘Hand Hygiene’. They reckon something like 80% of all infections from ‘flu to MRSA are spread by hand. The very thought of this has acted subliminally on the entire creative team and ever since we got briefed we’ve found ourselves feverishly washing our hands at every opportunity, like mad Lady McBeth.

I’ve just been speculating to our client Trish Quinn that the finished ad when broadcast will trigger a national outbreak of obsessive compulsive disorder. She tells me there have been serious discussions about this already.

Meanwhile our Head of TV Les Watt, having guzzled down his microwaved porridge like Daddy Bear, is contemplating a snooze on the sofa in front of the sofa. We’re worried he won’t wake up till spring. The eskimoes have something like 47 different words for ‘snow’. Les has almost as many euphemisms for a sneaky snooze. Last time he called it “a long blink”. Today, he says “ I’m just recce-ing the insides of my eyelids.” There is a framed picture on Les’s wall containing a montage of, oh, sixty photos of Les slumbering at shoots all over the world.

Finally, the camera turns over. The amount of kit they need to film a bloke washing his hands is staggering. We’ve got four hand models – chaps with well-manicured cuticles and names like ‘Geraldo’. We also have three wash-hand basins. The camera needs to get in really tight as if it’s actually in the sink. So we have one basin bisected across its length and another bisected across width – on yeah and one intact basin. The art director briefed a stonemason to do the needful with his big angle-grinder. When she came back, the guy had cut one basin into four quarters. Words were exchanged. Mainly sweary-words. The poor guy had to start all over again.

The lighting cameraman, D.O.P., call him what you will, is using a Fraser lens for these basin interiors. It costs a bomb to rent and there are only two of them in the UK. They’re specially designed to squeeze into tight close-ups and keep all the detail. Which probably means most of the world’s supply of Fraser lenses are beavering away on porn shoots in the seamier quarters of downtown Los Angeles.

Here in downtown Leith we’re working ourselves into a lather with plain soap and water.

Later in post, we’ll be correcting the colour of the ink, animating the ink in the sink to give it a slightly evil quality and adding a soundtrack of effects and explanatory voiceover.

Here’s the finished film, finally.

Let us know what you think and after you’ve watched it, please wash your hands.

The guy who cut my hair last week represented Great Britain in gymnastics at the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games.

In his spare time he’s now a semi-professional break-dancer (or B-Boy).

He also survived a house fire last year.

It beat the hell out of the usual, banal haircut conversation.

Picture the scene.

It’s early November. You’re in a meeting for something completely unrelated to Christmas, and out of nowhere your brain suddenly decides to come up with an idea for a slightly different kind of Christmas card.

After all, as everyone’s been saying since the birth of little baby Internet, the good old paper Christmas card is dead.

So why not build a website, fill it with festive films made specially by Leith Agency staff, and then send it to our clients, contractors and friends?

And why not call it YuleTube?

And why not do the whole thing in three weeks?

Yes, why not indeed? This is The Leith Agency, where’s no such thing as a problem, only a challenge, as Grant always says.

Well, never ones to shirk a challenge, we sent a brief out to the whole agency, asking everyone to send in their ideas. Five days later, a bumper sack worthy of Mister Claus himself was opened on the boardroom table and a mighty feast of judging took place in order to pick the films that would be made.

There were rude ones, cute ones, funny ones, impossible-to-make ones… ones from the studio team, ones from production, ones from finance, ones from IT, ones from the TV department, ones from planning, ones from creative. Hell, there were even ones from account management.

But there was only one week to get everything filmed and only agency staff to do it, so victors there had to be, and a select band of ideas was picked.

Cameras were purloined. Golf flags were borrowed. Sprouts were smacked. Nuts were cracked. Guitars were thrashed. Legal advice was taken. A logo was created. And films were made.

To cap it all off, our friends at Blonde Digital built a site more than worthy of the effort everyone had put in to making everything happen.

Thank you to everyone involved, as well as to the five thousand people who visited.

And an especially big festive hug to Mister U. Tube of Googleland for not suing us.

Mwah.

We haven’t posted yet in 2007, which is shameful.

So I took a camera with me to Manchester yesterday on a trip with David Amers (Planning Director) and Paul Stallard (Head of Leithal Thinking). It’s complete trivia but at least we’re off and running for this year.

This as David and Paul cutting a dash in matching spectacles and faux-collegiate stripy scarves. Obviously the de rigeur planning look for 2007.

Here’s Dave in full(ish) flow, presenting a debrief. I say “ish” because he’s sitting not standing and he hasn’t got his sleeves rolled up. The rolled-up sleeves are a signature piece of presentation body language for Mr Amers, as are his Blairesque, emphatic hand gestures. I tried to capture one of these for posterity but, alas, pressed the shutter a fraction of a second too late. So what you see here are the hands in repose, post-emphatic-gesture. Or pre-next-emphatic-gesture.

At the airport, Dave leaves our table at Costa Coffee to make a call that he obviously doesn’t want Paul or I to overhear. It’s a rubbish picture because the flash didn’t reach the inordinate distance that David had put between himself and us. That’s him furtively lurking in the background.