Seems tickets for our Fringe show on our barge are selling faster than plump firm-fleshed fish on a prize fish barbeque-ing day. A very measley 70 remain for the entire fortnight. Make sure yours in one of them by purchasing quickly here.
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!)
I’m image hunting for a man with a beard (bizarrely) in an office. And Getty Images threw up this:
Emperor Nicolas II in his palace in St Petersburg in 1914. All of 4 years before he was shot to death with wife and kids in the woods outside - if my memory serves me rightly - Ekaterinburg. How cultured Getty has become.
Planet Leith, your one stop shop for snobby cards!
Only in Leith!
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
Be willing to be prepared for whatever hardships may come
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.
This, the title of a facebook group, on the (almost) eve of Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden’s impending wedding. Causing a terrible fuss as it’s expected to be terribly expensive and the taxpayer are reportedly footing (some of) the bill.
The point is that Michael has just returned from Stockholm, in which fair city he was busy conducting some research. And he’s brought us commemorative mjolkchoklad med hackade mandlar and it’s delicious. I can’t take a picture of it as David Watson won’t buy us iPhones. But I can direct you here to see some matching crockery.
Royal chocolate in the planning department. Who’dda thought we’d see the day? And I haven’t even started telling you about our planning Inuksuk. For a future post, I think
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.
In another of these bizarre moments which punctuates my professional life, I am sat in a Holiday Inn hotel room up in Aberdeen with a sheepskin rug and Freddy the shipwrecked cat lying on my bed waiting to be taken to tonight’s groups.
Freddy is one of these sinister stuffed to look like a real curled up cat beasts, complete with cattily closed eyes, pink nose and whiskers. The sheepskin rug looks much like any other.
And in another (and remarkable to me) first, I have a peculiar little bathroom that has a door which closes to detach the bathroom from the bedroom. But it is cleverly hinged so that it also swings 90 degrees into the bathroom and can shut again, in a door frame which separates off the toilet portion from the sink. With only Freddy the shut eyed cat for company, I can’t imagine that much of my modesty is at stake. But how handy it could be if you were two a bed in the real bed and another two little ones in the sofa bed. So teeth could be brushed with all of this aforementioned modesty still intact. Ingenious.
I learn something new every day.
Are completely and utterly in order for a bevvy of Leith beauties who have just beautifully passed their IPA Foundation Certificates. Although talk about foundations does them scant service as they’re all far superior to that. So big hats off to Brieanna, Christine and Toni. You can rest assured that they are well and truly foundationed when dealing with them in the weeks and months to come.