Leith is who we are.
Leith is where we are.
The Leith Agency's weblog.

Have yourselves a little look at this. Britain Thinks. Peculiarly mysterious as to who’s behind it. My vote goes to a political party…

I’m just looking through some online qual research that the fine guys and girls at face have engineered and moderated for us.

The qual was conducted with the Young. And I’m looking through various blog posts and wondering why now and again, they feature a capital D for no particular reason at the end of a sentence.

And then I look again at one particular cap D and I realise to my ageing horror that it’s a : D

Specifically:

Reminds me of when i was a kid

How to make yourself feel old.

Now this is pretty careless. I should not leap to judge as I haven’t seen the magazine for myself. But really…

Worse still, I spied at the weekend that they are now using some kind of slippy shiny plastic for their labels. No more faithful artisanal paper for them.

Oh innocent…..

On the train from Aberdeen to Edinburgh yesterday and this particular train conductor seemed to have a bit of a luggage fixation. Not in the sense of stroking a nice looking suitcase or drooling over a Louis Vuitton. No, this lady had a terror that the train would be drowned in over-sized luggage.

She made two announcements, one before the train set off and one after, explaining where varying sizes of luggage should be left. And to avoid catastrophe, two seats had been “uplifted” in the middle carriage to cater for “very large items”.

I could ill resist the temptation to ask her, when she came for my ticket, whether any very large items were expected. I shouldn’t have. She spoke for quite a while about how these trains lacked storage space and you got buggies and now that the summer was approaching, golf clubs and there just wasn’t the space to store them. And you didn’t want to block the doorways as this would be a safety hazard. All very admirable.

I was slightly disappointed that we weren’t expecting a small travelling circus to join the train at Arbroath. Maybe next time.

A trip down to Middlebrook on Monday to see our friends at A G Barr

The train back as the tail end of the solstice sun set over the (can I pretentiously say arcadian?) Lake District and I am again fascinated by Ed’s comment, Lake District bound for a workshop, that the whole area should be razed to the ground. How to answer that?

Comments on the back of a postcard please.

How can this possibly be….???

Free handgun promotion sees car sales quadruple
Brand Republic 23-May-08

NEW YORK - A Missouri car dealer has said that sales have quadrupled since it launched a promotional deal giving away a free handgun with every vehicle sold.

The alternative to a handgun is $250 worth of credit to spend on petrol — but the owner of Max Motors, Mark Muller, told the BBC that most people “except one guy from Canada and one old guy” had gone for the handgun.

Louis Vuitton are throwing money at cinema advertising now, to no great effect as far as I can tell. They have a very long, very luxuriant ad running in cinemas at the moment, describing in self-indulgent long shots and artful abstract close ups, the journey that is life (when you’re a Louis Vuitton bag carrier at any rate).

The ad asks the viewer a series of empty questions, concluding I think that travelling the world (accompanied by your leathery companion) is the best way to broaden your mind. Although it’s hard to tell if this is really what they are saying as the end product is more or less as empty headed as a bad perfume ad.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. I did rather over-indulge in cinema-going at the weekend (go see The Orphanage - scary but beautiful so you can almost forgive the scariness) so seeing this poor advert four times in almost as many days probably didn’t help it stand up to scrutiny. And maybe I’m just full of subliminal bitterness as I will never own a leathery Vuitton case. But really. What an extravagent waste of money.

A poster has gone up at my gym. It outlines the type of music that will be played in the gym in each segment of the day. So:

Morning: easy listening
Afternoon: classical music
Evening: dance music

It finishes with a brilliant little sign-off:

“This music will be enjoyed by the majority of gym goers.”

Advertising or propaganda..?