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

Now I’m hardly a prolific blogger at the best of times but if you’re a regular attentive and loyal reader, you’ll have noticed that recent posts have been skimpy to say the least. Your digital team has been rather hampered by x2 things:

1. Jim Wolffman has selfishly been en vacances in Montreal
2. Me, I, Claire Wood, is about to launch a Fringe show upon the unsuspecting public, the like of which you have never before seen. So that’s been eating up a good portion of my free time.

We are doing, courtesy of a very smart idea from Mr Brooke, a show on our fair barge, the Mary of Guise. This show is The Tempest, by a little known fellow called William Shakespeare. It’s not quite Shakespeare as you (might) know it. I’ve cut the script to bits (such arrogance!), we have live music peppering the fine Shakespearean tongue and, well, I never saw Jonny Depp in a Shakespeare play. (Not that I have exactly Jonny Depp in my cast but you’ll struggle to tell the difference…)

The spectacle starts on Monday. Runs from 9 to 21 August at 7:30pm each night except Sunday with a matinee both Saturdays at 2:30pm. Tickets are available here and I know everyone always says they’re selling fast but they genuinely are. So do pop along if you’re in that neck of the woods and fancy a little sliver of something approximating to culture. (Although don’t pop along spontaneously as we might be sold out - get a ticket Now and Then you can pop along. I’d hate you to be disappointed!)

Although I’m trying hard to hate google (unreasonably singling them out from all other search engines) at the moment for the amount of energy they force us unwittingly to consume - particularly in my job which often feels as if it’s entirely fuelled by google - I then reluctantly lope onto the internet to check something unavoidable. And am presented with this.

The Little Prince.

Adorable. Love them. Yet hate them. Love them yet… What’s a planner to do..?

An amazing lady called Lori Idlout popped in to visit us a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of clever Suzie at ’see me’.

Lori works for the Embrace Life Council in Nunavet, the most northern and most recently established province in Canada. The community living in (huuuuge) Nunavut numbers some 32,000 people. The median age of this community is 22. They speak 4 languages, one of which is English. Historically, a nomadic community, they were settled at last some decade in this incredibly inhospitable landscape (dark for three solid months of the year, beating sunlight for three months of the year and something in between the rest of the time) and urged to apply themselves to adhering to the same governing principles as the rest of that fair country. As you might imagine, it was all a bit of a shock to the system.

The suicide rate in Nunavut is incredibly high. Whether due to the clash of cultures, the remote land, the uncompromising weather or, as Lori suggested, the sudden exposure to slivers of a Western culture that offered aspirations that could never be realised for many of the community members. The Embrace Life Council was set up to explore how this had come about - and how this attempted suicide rate could be slowed if not ceased.

So Lori has been working away on improving the mental health of the young people up there. Similar to what we’re doing with ’see me’ down here - kind of. She outlined their approach to tackling the situation, the work they’ve been doing with young people locally and showed us some of the materials they’ve produced as part of all of this.

We see a lot of people talking in this here job. I’ve still to write about Malcolm Gladwell (thanks to Hamish’s nagging) and John Grant. Both of which were fascinating. And it’s hard to describe why Lori was so remarkably unusual without sounding trite. But she was humble, hopeful and imaginative in her approach to a situation which would overwhelm many more people with the scale of the challenge.

She offered three pieces of advice in essence to her young people:

Learn about what you feel about your identity

And respect your relationships

Wisdom that would not be out of place for people that aren’t 22 and living in Nunavut.

She finished with a lovely thought:

“When you’re going through such a hard hard time, you forget to see the things that are beautiful.”

Let’s not preach. But you could do worse.

At dinner that night, she was so kind as to present me (me!) with an Inuksuk, a stone figure that played a practical and spiritual role for the Inuit people. Jim took a rough looking photo of our lovely thing.

It occupies pride of place in the planning department. I’ll be happy to show and tell when next you’re passing.

Today goes horticultural. Lovely stuff.

Getting some v nice coverage for our latest BRU campaign.

The Scotsman have a big plump piece today - it can be viewed here.

The Sun have gloriously gone to town with the story.

There’s even some real live coverage of the press conference on the Mirror’s website (assuming you don’t mind sitting through the Kleenex ad first).

But find it all in its purest form on the IRN-BRU website here. Have fun.

Marketing Society Star Awards on Friday night. We did really rather well (oh how arrogant) with a couple of golds, seven silver awards and five bronzes between us and our tangible cousins.

Our esteemed Scottish Government client - for whom most of the above awards were collected - won Marketing Team of the Year which was very well-deserved.

IRN-BRU’s storming Can Clan event last autumn carried away one of the above silvers which was equally well-deserved.

But far and away highlight of the night was our very own Planning Director and my personal master, Mr Amers, winning Agency Star of the Year. Here he is looking modest. Though he hardly needs to.

In the past few days, some proactive soul has taken to chalking alerts onto the pavements of my local streets:

WATCH OUT (arrow pointing in appropriate direction) DOG POO

These chalk alerts sprung up (?) overnight it seemed. The considerate artist circles the offending item and follows it up with the above warning a couple of yards away with a suitably directed arrow.

Incredibly considerate. And I can’t help but marvel at a concern for fellow man that appears to overwhelm a surely natural distaste aroused by such a chalky circling act.

I would like to hereby welcome a new trend. I shall call it guerrilla citizenship. Remember, you heard it here first.

Now I think I can comfortably say that I’m not easily outraged. But this morning’s Metro took things a giant step too far I think. A little bit biased as we do a lot of work with the Government to tackle knife crime. But surely a national newspaper that is widely read by kids on the bus on the way to school isn’t quite the right place to feature a pretty girl eulogising about her knife collection…??

Now is it only me that thinks that this:

is grasping and manipulative whereas this:

is a delicate tactful and subtle response to adverse circumstance..?

Mind you, HSBC got their ad out on at least Wednesday whereas I saw Thomsons’ for the first time today. So perhaps it just demonstrates the virtue of taking a little time over your copywriting…

Yesterday’s Observer Magazine could have been specially assembled with only me in mind.

It featured a rather fine collection of pics of a graffiti project in Philadelphia which made me ooze with envy (sorry, not a very pleasant image though nicely almost alliterative).

And then a poignant article about Camilla Nicholls’ battle with depression.

Dear Observer. It deserves to win its fight against its drooping circulation, I think.