Week 397: umbrella
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To leafy London, courtesy of an advertising company. They’d flown several of their people over from New York – there seemed to be a correlation between having “growth” in your job title and being especially tall – and put us (various independent website publishers) up in a posh hotel that was, in some ways, even better than a Premier Inn. (Namely, being Irish-owned it served Barry’s Tea.)
Now I have no plans to leave bustimes.org’s current advertising partner, despite this other company’s blandishments. But it was nice to meet other people with similar but different jobs, and see that the open web is still flourishing, and I was relieved that it wasn’t a plot to murder us all or something. There was someone from a particular website that I’ve been a bit obsessed with and influenced by in the past, but I struggled to communicate that in a loud echoey room.
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I don’t like umbrellas. Getting poked in the eye by one is the biggest peril of London, way more than the muggings and stabbings that some headbangers say there are. But I know, on the whole, people are careful to move their umbrellas out of the way of passersby’s eyes, and maybe I’m really jealous cos I’ve never had a brolly that didn’t get blown inside out almost immediately. It seems like the best umbrellas have the logos of investment banks and golf tournaments on them, and aren’t available for just anyone to buy.
Anyway, the advertising company’s goody bag included a good umbrella, and I feel like I’ve been admitted to the umbrelluminati.
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Made a small supercut of all the times in the second series of The Night Manager someone says “Alex Goodwin” or “born in Norfolk to a second-rate merchant banker and an alcoholic mother who slept with half of Fakenham”, which is only really entertaining if you both know someone by that name and have a connection to that market town. I am grateful to the great get_iplayer, and more grateful still to the subtitles which meant I didn’t need to actually watch the series noting down timestamps – yet another way in which accessibility features benefit everyone.