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PRESS REVIEW – Tuesday, May 20: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's new book "Original Sin" shows that Joe Biden's cognitive decline was far more severe than portrayed. It comes as the Democrats are accused of covering for him during his presidency. Also, reactions after Britain and the EU sign agreements that effectively turn the page on Brexit. And, a sculpted bust of Jim Morrison, stolen from his Père Lachaise gravesite thirty-seven years ago turns up in a French police investigation! The reactions are coming in thick and fast from the press this Tuesday after the publication of journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, "Original Sin". The book explores Joe Biden's mental and physical decline during his time as US president. It comes just days after the Bidens' revealed that he has metastatic prostate cancer.As Rolling Stone notes, the book claims that Biden's cognitive decline was more severe behind the scenes than what was publicly visible. Furthermore, his inner circle actively engaged to cover up his diminishing memory. It's prompting much soul searching within the Democrat Party, Rolling Stone says. The authors have also faced backlash for not focusing on Biden's presidency while conservatives accuse the Democrats of a major cover up. For the conservative Wall Street Journal, the book reveals a "conspiracy in plain view". Democrat elites and the media couldn't or wouldn't see what everyone else saw: "a doddering, senescent president who was frequently incoherent and rambling". The paper adds that "an existential meltdown over Trump made Democrats cling to Biden as a talisman. This talisman that in the end was an almighty curse." The Washington Post has published readers' letters to the editors which paint a similar picture of outrage. One reader says it's time for Democrats to move on, find new candidates and relegate baby boomers to history. Another says Joe and Jill Biden and the Democrats owe the public an apology. The Economist offers a more tempered viewpoint, saying that Biden did not decline alone but that his party and the press lost altitude along with him.There are mixed reactions from the British papers this Tuesday after the EU and Britain shook hands on a deal concerning defence, fisheries and energy. The Independent is triumphant: Britain and the EU have turned a page with this Brexit reset deal, the paper declares on its front page. The Financial Times calls it a showpiece summit, hailing this first step towards the reconstruction of trade links between the two parties. It comes nine years after that fateful Brexit referendum vote. The Guardian says in this analysis piece that there are clear benefits but political risks for Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He recognised for the first time yesterday something his predecessors denied for years: that Brexit has damaged Britain. This exposes him to the risk of being accused of betrayal by his rivals and possibly voters.Not everyone feels this is a victory, however. The pro-Brexit papers are furious. "Kiss goodbye to Brexit, the Daily Telegraph says sarcastically on its front page today, with a picture of Starmer and EU Commission President embracing each other. The Daily Express says that Starmer's ABJECT SURRENDER is a betrayal to Brexit. The paper is particularly angry over the fisheries deal. It says that in 2016, Britons votes to take back control of its fishing industry ... yesterday's deal will undo all of that. The Sun chooses to go with a fishing pun: Britain is done up like a kipper, it says on its front page.Here in France, the government is facing scrutiny over its plan to build a mega prison in French Guiana. This story garnered a lot of attention in France on the weekend and now in the international press. It was first reported on the weekend when French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin announced plans to build a max security wing during a visit to the overseas department and region. Weekend paper Journal du Dimanche reported that the prison wing would be reserved for Islamic terrorists and drug traffickers. The prison would be near the notorious Devil's Island, to where prisoners were sent by Napoleon Third in the 1800s. The announcement sparked outcry by Guyanese MPs, who called the decision insulting and disrespectful, The Guardian reports.The Doors frontman Jim Morrison knew a thing a thing or two about prison, having been sent to prison in 1967 for disrupting public order. He died four years later in Paris where he was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery. For Morrison's 10th death anniversary, Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin sculpted a bust in his honour at his gravesite. For seven years, it became a symbolic tribute – fans graffitied the bust, chipped off parts of it to keep as a souvenir. Then it was stolen in 1988. Now 37 years later, French police came across the marble bust while carrying out a totally unrelated fraud investigation. No word yet on who did it, where it's been hiding for nearly forty years and whether it'll be returned to Jim's gravesite, Rolling Stone reports.Finally, The Times reports that you can now register for wedding gifts at Tescos, Britain's biggest supermarket chain. Among the choices are the really useful but totally unromantic bundle of luxury toilet paper, kitchen rolls, bin bags, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner and shower gel. According to Tesco, newlyweds would rather practical products than fancy ones these days. You can blame the high cost of living for that!You can catch our press review every morning on France 24 at 7:20am and 9:20am (Paris time), from Monday to Friday.
Jimbo welcomes Duncan Alexander, Charlie Eccleshare and Jay Harris into the studio with the Premier League back in full swing.Liverpool maintain their 12 point lead with a Merseyside derby victory, despite the failure of the officials to send off Everton's James Tarkowski. Do tough guys get an easier time from referees?Bukayo Saka scores on his return for Arsenal but they lose Gabriel and potentially more defenders to injury. How will they cope when Real Madrid visit the Emirates next week?One of the Premier League's fastest players Anthony Elanga scores the winner for Forest against Man United and it looks like a very exciting end of the season for Villa.This weekend brings us the Manchester derby, a chance for Leicester to break more records and a chance for Thomas Frank to show Chelsea what they could have won.Plus Merino, Tescos and the Thursday-Sunday routine for gladiators.We're asking you to fill out a quick survey about you and your podcast habits by going to theathletic.com/athletic/survey25. Three lucky entries will win £100 worth of Amazon vouchers too.Produced by Charlie Jones.RUNNING ORDER: • PART 1a: Liverpool 1-0 Everton (03.00)• PART 1b: Arsenal 2-1 Fulham (10.00) • PART 2a: Forest 1-0 Man United (19.00)• PART 2b: Midweek cup drama across Europe (26.00)• PART 2c: The rest of the Premier League midweek (28.00)• PART 3: The Premier League weekend (40.00) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jimbo welcomes Duncan Alexander, Charlie Eccleshare and Jay Harris into the studio with the Premier League back in full swing. Liverpool maintain their 12 point lead with a Merseyside derby victory, despite the failure of the officials to send off Everton's James Tarkowski. Do tough guys get an easier time from referees? Bukayo Saka scores on his return for Arsenal but they lose Gabriel and potentially more defenders to injury. How will they cope when Real Madrid visit the Emirates next week? One of the Premier League's fastest players Anthony Elanga scores the winner for Forest against Man United and it looks like a very exciting end of the season for Villa. This weekend brings us the Manchester derby, a chance for Leicester to break more records and a chance for Thomas Frank to show Chelsea what they could have won. Plus Merino, Tescos and the Thursday-Sunday routine for gladiators. We're asking you to fill out a quick survey about you and your podcast habits by going to theathletic.com/athletic/survey25. Three lucky entries will win £100 worth of Amazon vouchers too. Produced by Charlie Jones. RUNNING ORDER: • PART 1a: Liverpool 1-0 Everton (03.00) • PART 1b: Arsenal 2-1 Fulham (10.00) • PART 2a: Forest 1-0 Man United (19.00) • PART 2b: Midweek cup drama across Europe (26.00) • PART 2c: The rest of the Premier League midweek (28.00) • PART 3: The Premier League weekend (40.00) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode 58 (13/03/25) On this episode - Barry and Greg kick off talking about having that nasty cold that's going about, a new segment from Barry called ‘The Masters of Comedy' where he discusses the lives and works of famous comedians from the past (this week Barry is looking at 70's household name, Dick Emery), the shopping trolley scale trial at Tescos, Barry makes up some showbiz news, a new super hero called ‘Eggy Bubble Man', another made up showbiz story, an impression of Alison Hammond in a David Lynch movie, the possibility of the new James Bond being American, imagining Natalie Cassidy playing The Witcher, the CGI monkey dogs in Gladiator 2, an impression of Neil Gaiman paying his babysitter, some more impressions (including a victorian man seeing donuts for the first time), watching films when you've forgotten you've already watched them, an improv of Barry being a Personal Trainer to Greg, our agony aunt section ‘You Be The Judge', our weekly improvised soap opera ‘Aylesbury Market', a ‘Dead Celebrity Seance', recommendations, Future Greg and a whole lot more!
Ewen Cameron and Steven Mill are here with their own unique take on Scottish Football including the Edinburgh derby win for Hibs and rumours of the next Rangers manager.Shell suit Bob is on hand to help Ewen on the quiz, more chat about going for the toilet in gardens and would you open a Tescos?Plus another question for the masked footballer, the best modern managers on the Winner Takes It All and Ewen's terrible joke.It's The Big Scottish Football Podcast!SOCIALS:✖ TWITTER | @bigfootballscot
Oi, bellend, if you liked the pod give us a rating, a review, send us some love. Ho-Ho-Ho! And that is just John's last three Dorises. Welcome to this, our festive offering. Now you may be saying, but D-Dog it is still only mid November. Well, there have been mince pies and tins of celebrations on the shelves of Tescos for 2 months already, and the BBC have announced their tortuous line up including surprise-surprise, more Mrs Browns racist Boys, and Miranda is back to somehow have her skirt caught in a taxi door and then ripped off on the way to… I don't know… keep it festive… a children's nativity play…how droll so we are roasting the Chestnut Massives on an open fire, and who can stop us.We have a box (hill) full of crackers this week including, but no limited to: A Barry bib banditMr MotivatorPaul Chuckle Mr Methane the worlds only performing flatulist And Ste Southern is back to shout “snake oil” at insta ads So cum on ye faithful, and welcome to the 10th episode of the Fourth Worst podcast on running.Always remember to wipe thoroughly.
This is the first of two episodes on another seminal club in the history of dance culture: The Warehouse. Jeremy and Tim begin by spending some time discussing the city of Chicago, a place that despite its massive musical output hasn't really featured in out story so far. A crucible of industrial modernity, they consider its unique historical position, the move from Delta to Chicago Blues, and how it linked to NYC in the mid-70s. We hear about the several early locations of the club that would become The Warehouse, revisit Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, and give a shout out to another satellite of the US disco scene, Le Jock. Plus: singing bumblebees, Chaka Khan, and David Mancuso's enduring love of Tescos. Produced by Matt Huxley. Tracklist: Muddy Waters - Trouble No More Rufus and Chaka Khan - Once You Get Started Titanic - Rain 2000 Bumblebee Unlimited - Love Bug
The idea of ectoplasm was an innovation in the spiritual movement in the western world - but what was it, how did it work and who did it convince? In this episode we look at a potted history of the phenomenon, with some surprisingly perplexing moments. Get your cheese-cloth ready! Get involved for less than a small pack of Cheddar cheese at Tescos www.patreon.com/TQMpod
In the final instalment of the Gemma Collins anthology we hear all about the past 4 years in her life. We start just as the pandemic hits and Gemma is enjoying a hiatus from the spotlight and is discovering the delights of shopping at big Tescos! She talks about how during this time she finds love (again) with her old flame Rami and tells us about their plans for the future and their hopes of having a baby one day. About the series: Told over multiple episodes, each season sees our celebrity guest leave egos at the door and unpack their own life in their own words - taking you behind the scenes and under their skin. Our guest for series 2 is the one and only Gemma Collins who sat down with us in March 2024 to candidly talk us through her life story so far, as only she knows how. With no agenda and with unparalleled access, Everything I Know About Me is as good as having them on group chat. Guest: Gemma Collins Narrator: Lisa Snell Producer: Osk Petursdottir Editor: Chelsey Moore Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive Producer: Jamie East A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Picture this: a missed phone call in a Tescos car park, a surprise email lands from the creators of a Major TV who want to send their contestants into a frenzy with a little help from our e-stim devices. That's just a taste of the electrifying journey we embarked on back in 2008.This episode serves up a startling blend of history, high voltage hijinks, and the art of striking deals with entertainment giants. Get ready to chuckle over the antics of TV personalities under the (mild) influence of our tech, and learn how we navigated the live-wire negotiations that turned a shot at exposure into a win.Fast-forward to today, and it's not all about the shock value—there's a serious side to the stim, I promise. As we wrap up this week's episode, remember that our kits are more than just a novelty for reality TV. They're a portal to discovery, and I'm not just talking about the contestants' journey on-screen. Tune in for insights into how these experiences shape perspectives and invite exploration. Don't forget to drop us your thoughts - your reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts really supercharge our day. Signing off with a spark of excitement, I hope you find this episode as thrilling as it was enlightening. Keep the feedback coming, and remember, safety first, but always stay stimulated!"I make sex toys" is a the personal podcast of Wayne Allen, the Director of E-Stim Systems. The content of these podcasts are not designed to be Explicit or Erotic but we may discuss adult topics and therefore these podcasts are not suitable for children or those of a nervous disposition. You have been warned.If you are interested in E-Stim Systems the company, or any of our products, have a look at https://www.e-stim.me/buy
On today's show, Melissa joins Sonia to give her thoughts on the system error Sainsburys and Tescos customers experienced this weekend which resulted in them being encouraged to pay in cash. Later, Lucinda Lidstone discusses actress Liz Hurley's bikini and provocative shots for social media have largely been taken by her son, Damian. Now he's made his directorial debut filming her in a steamy movie. Should we really be involving our children in things like this? GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Melissa Ciummei is a financial investor who has decided to speak out against globalist/corporatist policies that aim to surveil and control every aspect of our lives. GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: Lucinda began her early career working with adults in NHS Primary care with brief cognitive intervention and later moved to a more clinical setting in Private Mental Health on inpatient wards and in an outpatient day hospital. Here she supported both Adults and Adolescents in Crisis with severe presentations such as Eating Disorders and Hearing Voices, providing both individual and group therapy. Lucinda has also been in private practice for a number of years; concerned about a lack of provision for adolescents she founded ASC to support young people and their families in the South Essex area. Lucinda values research and new ideas and encourages talking and thinking about mental health & emotional wellbeing through the ASC monthly Podcast ‘ASCit'. She has developed a further service for adults who wish to explore their spirituality and expand personal awareness and consciousness.
SEEING AS YOU LOVED THE ARGUMENTS BETWEEN REG, MULE AND WILL SO MUCH, WE THOUGHT WE'D DO IT AGAIN WITH STRONGER ALCOHOL
This week your hosts Ben, Charlie and Johnny serve you another hilarious confessions and funny stories sent in by listeners - so we can all learn from their mistakes! Today we've got a cautionary tale for dog walkers and an accidental win for a bush bandit, a lad overhears something harrowing in Tescos, Gaz teaches a young labourer some life lessons, and we've got a list of the most shameful nuts you'd admit to over the internet!The Thread of Gentlemen is a comedy podcast hosted on the Acast Network. Each week we do a kamikaze dive into the funniest confessions and stories sent in by listeners, and scrape the barrel of the internet for hilarious tales and half-truths.Have you got a story fit for The Gentlemen? Get involved and send it over to stories@thethreadofgentlemen.com and we'll do our best to read it on the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Fluent Fiction - Hungarian: Misunderstandings & Rabbit Stew: A Tale of Communication and Connection Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.org/misunderstandings-rabbit-stew-a-tale-of-communication-and-connection Story Transcript:Hu: Budapest, hűvös őszi este. Ádám, Zsófia és Gábor a vitrin mögül figyelik a gyalogosokat, akik végigmennek a váci utcán. Majd vacsoráznak a butik kávézóban, melyről fantasztikus kilátás nyílik a műemlék épületekre.En: Budapest, a cool autumn evening. Ádám, Zsófia, and Gábor watch the pedestrians passing by on Vaci Street from behind the display window. Then they have dinner at the boutique café, which offers a fantastic view of the historic buildings.Hu: Ádám úgy tűnt, ma délután fáradtabb, mint máskor. Zsófia lenyűgözte az őszinte érdeklődést, amit a világ dolgai iránt tanúsított, míg Gábor, a jó barát és konyhaművész, oda volt az ízletes hagyományos ételekért.En: Ádám seemed more tired than usual this afternoon. Zsófia was impressed by his sincere interest in the world, while Gábor, the good friend and chef, was crazy about delicious traditional dishes.Hu: Gábor fertőtlenítette a kezeit, majd kilépett a konyhából. Zsebkendővel törölte meg a kezét, amit majd a nadrágjának hátuljában hagyott. Az asztalra helyezett egy tányért, rajta egy gondosan elkészített nyúlpörkölt.En: Gábor sanitized his hands and stepped out of the kitchen. He wiped his hands with a tissue, which he left in the back of his pants. He placed a plate on the table, with a carefully prepared rabbit stew on it.Hu: Ádám azt hitte, egy finoman elkészített vacsorát láthat. Hirtelen elállt a lélegzete, amikor rájött, Zsófia házinyuláról van szó. Úgy tűnt, ez az est a váratlan fordulatok estje lesz. Ádám elpirult, a gondolattól pedig borzongani kezdett.En: Ádám thought he would see a delicately prepared dinner. His breath suddenly stopped when he realized it was Zsófia's pet rabbit. It seemed that this evening would be full of unexpected turns. Ádám blushed and began to shiver at the thought.Hu: Zsófia viszont alig várta, hogy megkóstolja Gábor pörköltjét. Hátra dőlt a székében, érzékelve az étel kellemes illatát. Mikor rájött, hogy Ádám miszerint ez az ő házinyula, a szívverése hirtelen felgyorsult.En: Zsófia, on the other hand, couldn't wait to taste Gábor's stew. She leaned back in her chair, savoring the pleasant smell of the food. When she realized Ádám's misunderstanding, her heartbeat suddenly accelerated.Hu: Gábor közben mosolygott, és folytatta az elkészítését. Végül befejezte. A pörkölt illata betöltötte a szobát, csalogatóan hatott mindhájukra.En: Meanwhile, Gábor smiled and continued his preparation. Finally, he finished. The aroma of the stew filled the room, enticing all of them.Hu: A hirtelen felindulásból fakadó ijedtség kezdett alábbhagyni, Ők hárman nevettek ezen a nagy félreértésen. Zsófia könnyezett, Gábor pedig bemutatta a Tescos dobozt, ahol a nyúlhús származását jelöli. A vacsora megszakítás nélkül folytatódhatott.En: The frightened excitement that arose from the sudden impulse began to fade. The three of them laughed at this great misunderstanding. Zsófia shed tears, and Gábor showed the Tesco box, which indicated the origin of the rabbit meat. Dinner could continue without interruption.Hu: Nap mint nap kapcsolatba kerülünk problémákkal, félreértésekkel. De ahogy Gábor, Ádám és Zsófia története is mutatja, a legfontosabb a jó kommunikáció. Ha megnyílunk, ha kimondjuk, amit gondolunk, ha összefogunk, még a legösszetettebb kiadókat is le tudjuk küzdeni.En: Every day, we encounter problems and misunderstandings. But as Gábor, Ádám, and Zsófia's story shows, good communication is the most important. If we open up, speak our minds, and come together, we can overcome even the most complex challenges. Vocabulary Words:Budapest: Budapestcool: hűvösautumn: őszievening: esteAdam: ÁdámZsofia: ZsófiaGabor: Gáborwatch: figyelpedestrians: gyalogosokpassing by: végigmennekdisplay window: vitrindinner: vacsoraboutique café: butik kávézófantastic view: fantasztikus kilátáshistoric buildings: műemlék épületektired: fáradtimpressed: lenyűgözöttsincere: őszinteinterest: érdeklődésworld: világfriend: barátchef: konyhaművészdelicious: ízletestraditional: hagyományosdishes: ételeksanitized: fertőtlenítetthands: kezekkitchen: konyhatissue: zsebkendőplate: tányér
70. "You can go to Tescos and look at a woman's face!" We're back listener! With a brand new spooky ass theme tune, just in time for the Halloween season! This week the dungeon bozos discuss; the recent Zelda game; Tears of the Kingdom, a correction regarding Eli Roth's Thanksgiving trailer, Jamie looks forward to the new Saw movie, and for the main feature; the duo take a trip to the neon lit, wrong side of town for 80s, stripper vampire movie; Vamp. This one features an iconic Grace Jones performance, a seedy night club, protocol regarding audience numbers when booking a stripper, going for a number two in a club toilet and when does casually looking become full blown peeping? Also this episode; Mark takes us into his grungey book nook to discuss Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Rant and Haunted, and a longtime favourite of the dungeon duo. Warning!! Contains drunken opinions, swearing and creepy music that could offend or scare small children. Hope you gain some enjoyment from all this, if you do, how about following us? Or giving us a 5 star rating? Thanks kind listener. #zelda #Thanksgivingtrailer #vamp #chuckpalahniuk #gracejones
When people say that men don't talk about their mental health I strongly disagree - they do - they just want solutions, not to go over the problems. I see a lot of male clients for this reason as solution focused work really appeals to that sort of mindset, so hear from Stuart in this episode. How he changed his life and started changing the world around him by seeing the positives everywhere he went - even when he was going to Tescos! Find out more about my solution-focused work with individuals and organisations, my book, and online course on my website: www.ginlalli.com You can also join my Facebook group --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ginlalli/message
Since the last episode we've been up to all sorts. We had the Leaver's Disco, a dog licked Robin's bottom and we went to Tescos all by ourselves. Plus there's Juno's Book Review, Joke of the Week, Poo Facts and we sing you a song. We love you all! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/notcomplaining/message
Jenny Phillips Jenny Phillips is a quaified nutritionist and yoga teacher, and part of the team writing five diabetes and weightloss cookbooks with Katie Caldesi and Dr David Unwin. These books really help to change lives as they provide the 'why" - the science- plus delicious recipes. She has worked with food since her own recovery from breast cancer in 2003 (20 years ago!) where the appliance of science helped her to optimise her own health through food and lifestyle. So far she is on the right side of a predicted 50% chance of a recurrence (scary!) and has reverse aged in the process! In addition to nutrition coaching and yoga classes, she offers fabulous low carb retreats in the West country - a chill zone for healthy living. Jenny's Top Tips Make your kitchen somewhere, where you want to be. Recycle your meals. Think about tomorrow - today. Jenny's Books Eat to Outsmart Cancer: How to create optimal health for prevention & recovery – Jenny Phillips The Diabetes Weight-loss Cookbook (Kyle Books, 2019) Reverse Your Diabetes Cookbook (Kyle Books, 2020) The 30-Minute Diabetes Cookbook (Kyle Books, 2021) The Low-Carb Weight-Loss Cookbook (Kyle Books, March 2022) The Low-Carb Italian Kitchen (working title) (Kyle Books, March 23) Resources Mentioned Katie Caldesi 117: Katie Caldesi - Low Carb the Caldesi Way Dr David Unwin 066: Dr David Unwin - The Low Carb GP Dr Jen Unwin 037: Dr Jen Unwin - Fork In The Road Protein Calculator Food Tracking - Cronometer Caldesi Restaurants Quotes by Jenny Phillips “You then get the risk of recurrence, because my cancer was really big and it was grade 4, so it was really active. It tends to be in younger women and it tends to be really nasty. My risk of recurrence was 50%.” “As a nation we are overfed and undernourished.” “I love this idea of reverse aging.” “The nice thing about low carb is that it can be really simple.” “That gives people a lot more satiety, so they are not ravenous all the time and it is quite a revelation very often for people.” “We didn't used to have Tescos on every corner when we were cavemen.” “One thing I see quite a lot of particularly in healthier women or women that perceive they have a healthy diet is low protein.” “I do think it is challenging if someone is excluding all animal products.” “You don't want to spend all your time as a slave to the oven.” “People are also quite shocked, they seem to eat so much really good food and they don't put on weight. So that's a bit of a revelation to people.” “Think about tomorrow today.” Connect with Jenny Phillips on social media Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/226427345065904 Instagram: https://instagram.com/jennynutrition Website Details: https://www.inspirednutrition.co.uk The Fabulously Keto Diet & Lifestyle Journal: A 12-week journal to support new habits – Jackie Fletcher If you have enjoyed listening to this episode - Leave us a review By leaving us a review on your favourite podcast platform, you help us to be found by others. Support Jackie Help Jackie make more episodes by supporting her If you wish to support her by just pledging £1 or £2 a month go to: https://fabulouslyketo.thrivecart.com/support-the-podcast/ Or You can get some extra benefits by supporting her on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FabulouslyKeto Connect with us on social media https://www.facebook.com/FabulouslyKeto https://www.instagram.com/FabulouslyKeto1 https://twitter.com/FabulouslyKeto Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/FabulouslyKeto Music by Bob Collum Recommend a guest We would love to know if you have a favourite guest you would like us to interview. Let us know who you would like to hear of if you have a particular topic you would like us to cover. https://fabulouslyketo.com/recommend-a-guest We sometimes get a small commission on some of the links, this goes towards the costs of producing the podcast.
In part two of this chapter on the WCC we discuss the relatively competitive round one results, Super League pinning their hopes on Wigan, Tallis vs O'Connor, the state of the UK Super League, Wigan vs Tescos, Bradford Bullmania, rating UK Super League stars, Perth's problems, John Ribot and Super League in damage control, an impromptu Brian Smith fan club meeting, jet lag scientists, blaming the media, blaming referees, and much, much more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of Statistically Speaking we shine the spotlight on local data and look at how good statistics for small areas make for better targeted policy interventions, and more effective use of valuable public resources. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode we're talking about local data for local people - How good statistics for small areas make for better targeted policy interventions, and more effective use of valuable public resources. We're going to explore, for example, how new data sources are helping to precisely calibrate economic circumstances and local communities. How we may even be able to calculate the GDP of your street or village. Now many economic forces are of course global. Some of the solutions to issues like competitiveness, productivity and inequality might begin on our doorsteps. As ever, we have the cream of ONS expertise here on hand, this time in the shape of Emma Hickman, Deputy Director of the ONS sub national stats division, and Libby Richards, Deputy Director for UK wide coherence and head of an important new initiative called ONS Local, which we'll be hearing about in full. Also joining us is Stephen Jones, Director of Core Cities UK. Its aim is to promote the role of our great cities in creating a stronger fairer economy and society. So Emma, to set the scene for us first then please explain precisely if you would, the value of really good local stats. EMMA HICKMAN So the needs are multiple, really. I think the most important thing is that we are seeing a huge increase in locally targeted policymaking and that's at a range of different levels across government. So in central government, we see near the department for levelling up Housing and Communities kind of really wanting to think about how do they target policies that are going to help to level up the country but equally what we're also seeing is an increase in devolution which is giving more power to local areas and local policymakers. And so it's really also important that they have the statistics and the data that they need and the evidence that they need to make really, really good decisions for their local areas. And they can do that in a really powerful way because they also have knowledge of their local areas. And then finally, you know, actually for citizen kind of uses of our data and statistics really one of the inclusive data principles that people are able to see themselves in the data and that they feel that the data and the statistics that we're producing as an office represent them. And so having statistics and data available at really geographies that are very meaningful to people is hugely helpful in making sure that as a country, right across the UK that we are kind of reflective of the experiences of really kind of a wide range of people and you know, local economies and end users and understand kind of how they're experiencing that as well. MF I guess one of the fundamental principles here is that it's it's local knowledge. It's all very well and everybody thinks they know that local area, but to understand all local areas, we need comparable statistics and data produced to consistent standards. EH Yes, absolutely. And that's, I mean, that's one of the key challenges. I think we'll probably kind of come to talk about a little bit later, but you know, absolutely. And that's really about understanding you know, where are the where are the inequalities within regions, as well as between regions? I think we have a lot of information available about, you know, kind of regions, but actually, we also know that some of the inequalities that people really feel are much greater actually within regions and between them and kind of being able to draw that out of data and statistics in a comparable way I think is really important for helping sort of policymakers and decision makers to understand where best to target resources. MF Stephen, from a policy perspective, describe the demand for local data at the moment, what sorts of policy solutions are policy makers coming up with and how are those best informed by really good data? STEPHEN JONES I think it covers all branches really of policymaking. I think as Emma was saying, the kind of need for really understanding and having a kind of quantitative basis for what's happening in a place is, is actually absolutely crucial for designing policy, whether that's policy about trying to make the economy grow, whether that's policies aimed at trying to reduce disadvantage and challenge facing individuals, whether that's policy about delivering the most effective and efficient public services in the right places at the right times, all of those things, whether that's done in public or private sector need to be built on a good evidence base, good understanding. I think the other thing I would add to the richness of local data can do you can kind of contextualise and understand, you know, a number on its own doesn't mean a huge amount, but if you know that you are 10% higher or 20% lower than your neighbouring place. Or the city of the same size. It's those kinds of contextual dimensions that really help nuance and finesse your policymaking. MF And it does come back to that question of trust in data than to make those comparisons in a really reliable and meaningful way. Which I guess is where the ONS, the Office for National Statistics, where we come in. Now Libby tell us about ONS Local. This is an initiative which is all about making sure that that really high quality data is available for the policy makers LIBBY RICHARDS ONS Local is our advisory service that is staffed by ONS analysts who are based in every nation of the UK and every region of England. And the idea is that we are here to help local policy makers, regional observatories, and lots and lots of different users of sub national data to really understand the enormous offer from ONS in terms of local data. Having said that, it's also very much about those working relationships as well. Stephen's talked a lot about context and understanding the nuances and so understanding the situations and challenges that are happening locally is absolutely key to ONS Local helping local areas understand that context better. MF The big ONS surveys of course have long carried, many of them are typically think about the Labour Force Survey over a very long period of time, carried a great wealth and local data that obviously gets lost in the national headlines that these data releases generate. But is it a question of getting better value out of what the ONS is already creating or actually about sourcing new data from different sources? LR It's a bit of both, very much, in being able to take people through what we already have when understanding their questions, particularly when multiple local areas are asking the same question that's really maximising what ONS already do. However, Emma's side of the house in particular, less so in the regionally and nationally distributed ONS Local is really about developing those new statistics getting into how do we get down to hyper localised sort of 400 to 1200 household building block data that then allow people to build those areas that means something to them. Emma, I don't know if you want to chip in? EH Yeah, very happy to. There's two strands I think to that Miles. I think there's one which is about, you know, how do we make the most of survey data and kind of new administrative data sources together to enable that level of granularity? And then the second part is actually when we talk about administrative data probably, that might not really mean things to lots of people. That's data that is collected for a different purpose, but collected on a on a very, very routine basis. And there are actually a fair number of new sources of that kind of data that we're able to get into the ONS. MF That's interesting. Can you give us an example of that? EH So, I say relatively new. I mean, I think ONS have had this data for quite some time now. But in order to get the level of granularity that we need on Gross Value Added statistics, for example, which is a measure of productivity, we use HMRC's VAT data for businesses and then we can link that to kind of our survey data and think about how can we then apportion estimates down to the level of geography that we need, knowing that the survey is the place where we've been able to ask the question that we really want to know the answer to and then we can use the other data to model sort of some of the other granularity that we need. The other thing is we've been really successful and using card payments data throughout the pandemic to inform the government's response. And we've recently successfully acquired a really exciting new data source from Visa, it's aggregated, so there's absolutely no way of identifying people in the data, but they've aggregated it at a really granular level of geography for us. So again, it would be in the region of probably hundreds of households, but actually that's granular enough for us to get some really, really good insights into kind of how you know, consumer spending is kind of playing out in the local economy. And there are all sorts of applications for that, that we're really excited to be to be able to start taking forwards now that we've got that data in the office. MF So just with those three very important data sources, suddenly we're creating right down to that very micro level, as you say, 400 to 1200 households really quite a full picture of local economic activity. EH And the really exciting thing about that is that people can then build their own geographies as well from that. So you know, traditionally in statistics, we tend to produce data at the level of an authoritative boundary like a local authority, but actually you might really want to know about, I don't know, West Midlands Metro, for example, they extended the line a few years ago, you might really want to know about local economic activity around that and actually, that's not going to be captured in the sort of administrative boundaries and so having the data at that level of granularity really allows people to build a geography that sort of area of interest or importance to them in some way. MF Creating a GDP of your street or village. EH Indeed. MF Okay, that's the project for now, but it comes across with some pretty significant challenges. It comes back to this problem of comparability doesn't it, and particularly if you're looking across the UK contexts there. We've got different government structures, we've got some devolved areas, we've got areas and we've got big metropolitan authorities as well. How difficult is it to be able to standardise and to make uniform the data right across that rather complex government picture? EH Incredibly so. To the point where we don't necessarily aim for uniformity. It's very much about how do we make sure that we're able to tell stories that are coherent and consider that UK wide angle when thinking about the nations but also thinking about how do you enable that comparability that's very tricky. And the more and more devolution happens, the more and more difficult that actually can become, particularly when you're looking, for example, at health data where it is a devolved policy area across the four nations. But actually, if you live on the border, let's say between Wales and England, actually, you may well be getting your health care on the opposite side of the border from which you live and therefore you've got to be able to have an opportunity to consider that. MF There's the issue then of course of samples as well. And the more local you go, of course the less representative your sample is going to be. EH Absolutely. And that gets particularly tricky. Even at a nation level where we're thinking about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, for example, the opinions and lifestyle survey, actually, it's quite difficult to find out what that looks like for Northern Ireland. And ideally, we'd want to be able to get more granular than the nation level, but sample sizes make that really tricky to still be representative. And so either we'd need to expand the survey to get that level of granularity or we have to actually say the best we can do is this. MF Yes, because there is only one holy universal survey of course and that is the census and that only happens once every 10 years. I recall when we were running the big COVID infection survey at the height of the pandemic, even a massive data gathering operation like that. We could still only end up getting it down to sub regional level which is what units are for half a million people. So it does show doesn't it how important it is to make the most of that admin data which can be extremely comprehensive sometimes EH I, you know, completely agree with you there Miles on administrative data and how important it is to be able to kind of think about innovative ways to combine that data with our survey data to get a more granular level of information. I talked a bit earlier about kind of estimates of gross value added and I can say that's just that's a measure of productivity and it feeds into the largest component of GDP and in local areas. What we were able to do there as I mentioned kind of earlier, we took HMRC's VAT tax data which is collected for all businesses that pay VAT, we were able to link that to a data set that ONS hold called the interdepartmental business register and the information that's held on that is all of the information about business structure, so has a VAT reference in there so we can link it to HMRC data. But the most important information on there for us was actually that where the local units are, so for example, Tescos will have a headquarters somewhere but you probably have a Tesco Express quite close to where you live. And that's one of the local units so tells us where the local units are and their postcodes and it also tells us how many employees work in those local units. And so we can make an assumption like productivity for all employees in the organisation is the same, and then we can look at actually what the productivity for that firm is top level and then divide that by the number of employees to kind of say, well, actually, if all employees are equally productive, this local unit has a productivity sort of measure of this much, and then we can aggregate that back up again to the sort of area so you know, really kind of key to be able to understand those methods, but there are some other challenges as well, but I can probably come back to those. MF That's fascinating stuff. I mean, you could point to a certain, perhaps a certain enterprise, a certain employer, that is considered to be, you know, fundamental to a local economy. But this way, you can actually really press precisely quantify what that importance is. EH And I think that's one of the challenges because actually as a as an office, we don't want to be disclosing the productivity of any single firm or any single business because that is personal information. So one of the things that we've had to do in very local areas where there are what we call dominant businesses or dominant organisations who have like most of the productivity for that area, is we've actually, you know, I'm gonna be honest, we've we've sort of masked it a bit. And so we've kind of averaged a few local areas together so that you still have a building block level of data, you still have a building block so you can build a bigger area, but you don't actually have any businesses that are considered dominant within the statistics that we produce. That's taken quite a complex algorithm to be able to achieve that. I won't go into too many details just to say that it is a consideration and the challenge that we've had to really innovate to be able to be able to publish that information. MF It's important to stress Isn't it that all the usual principles of non-identification and confidentiality apply in this work as much as they do anywhere else across the ONS. EH Yeah, absolutely. MF Give me a couple of examples of some specific bits of work that you've been doing then. There's been an analysis of towns and out of town locations particularly and how local employment growth is happening outside of town and city centres. EH My team kind of over the last sort of couple of years have been doing a whole series of analysis of towns in particular, like I say, that's a geography that people can really relate to, you know, lots of people kind of live in a town or a city. And that's something that's a bit more understandable than maybe a local authority and is a bit closer to them than the region for example. Our recent analysis on towns and out of town locations when we looked at employment growth, I think has some quite important findings actually for transport planning. For example, what we found is that actually employment growth is not happening the most in town centres, it's happening more and faster within two kilometres of the edges of a town of the town boundaries. And so what we think it might be happening is that kind of employment growth is actually happening in industrial parks are situated on that cusp between town and kind of rural areas. And when you're thinking about, you know, how people might travel to work, for example, I think it's really, really important to have those insights so that we're not just planning transport routes, for example, that go into town centres MF And what other insights have we been generating? EH So another recent piece was a new piece of analysis on the nighttime economy. So I think lots of people will think about the nighttime economy as being predominantly about bars and restaurants and obviously, you know, they will have a really, really big impact on those sort of industries during the pandemic. But in fact, what we find is that actually the nighttime economy in rural areas are surprisingly busy and that's because we also have a nighttime economy that is around health and health care. Nurses, for example, kind of working night shifts and that sort of thing. And then the other kind of aspect to it is sort of warehousing and transport as well. There's often kind of an overnight element to that, too. And again, having that understanding of like how that kind of plays out in different parts of the country is kind of a really, really useful. We originally did it just for London, interestingly, and then we've done this kind of new analysis looking at the whole country, which was really interesting. Other things produced quite recently as well are an expansion of job quality indicators of work across the UK, which is important because if you just look at kind of employment numbers, you're not really getting a sense of, you know, you get a sense of who's employed and who's unemployed in terms of characteristics of people, but what you don't get is like how good is the job quality for those people and actually, job quality is probably quite important for a lot of individuals and in terms of how good they feel about kind of going into work and how productive they are? And all of those those kinds of things, MF That also forms the understanding doesn't it of why some people have opted out of employment in recent years. EH Absolutely. And it also can tell us about things like how many people are working part time who want to be working full time for example. Or vice versa, you know, so there's kind of like a measure of underemployment in there. It tells us a little bit about what percentage of people are working on zero hours contracts versus permanent contracts, all those kinds of things, I think are quite, you know, sort of quite important. MF Some other developments well worth pulling out as well. I think we've been able to produce very interesting picture of comparative housing affordability down to quite local level. EH Yes, I think our main housing affordability release goes down to local authority level, but we have produced actually a range of housing affordability statistics, the local authority, one that we published recently probably been the most comprehensive, we're also doing a lot of work on the housing data that's collected through the census as well to understand dwellings and their characteristics as well. You know, how many dwellings are occupied and versus non occupied and how that varies by different parts of the country as well. Housing affordability in particular tells us about how people's earnings relate to what they spend on housing, and obviously that has huge impact on again, kind of, you know, people's disposable income at the end of the day. So I think it's certainly an important one. MF So lots of fresh insights that are coming from the ONS and local statistics, but it's important to point out that a lot of this you could be doing for yourself if you're so inclined, and we've brought forward a tool called and it's much more exciting than the name implies, actually. It's called the Sub National Indicator Explorer tool. Libby, can you explain how that operates? And some of the really interesting insights that you can generate with it. LR So the Sub National Indicators Explorer is something that we know and have known for a while that users desperately want. So often, if you are trying to understand a particular place, you have to go to lots of different sources to actually find information about one area. So for example, if you want health you have to go to one place. If you want to find out about education, you have to go to another and find your area and then collate that yourself. What the sub national indicators Explorer allows you to do is bring together all of those relevant indicators into one place so you can find your local authority and compare it with say up to three others across more than 40 different metrics ranging from gross median pay, right the way through to healthy life expectancy, and so you have this incredibly useful tool where you go, I want to know everything about place x and you get it all in one place. Our intention is to develop that a little bit further and eventually head into some of the developments that have come out recently around the census where you can build your own maps, build your own areas and flexibly bring different data things together. Alongside that we've also been thinking about how else we might be able to compare other areas and the team have recently done an analysis that clusters local areas together under metrics similar to and including some of the same from the sub national indicators tool and so that explores places that are statistically similar using things like regional growth metrics, and we can see what different parts of the country could potentially learn more from each other. They might be facing similar challenges and therefore getting beyond their local area to kind of join up with other areas across the country and this also gives some really weird potentially interesting insights. MF Yes, which shows that despite the north south divide, about which we continue to hear a great deal some places in North and South have a great deal in common with each other. LR Indeed, and actually places for example, in the south may be very different. So Portsmouth down on the south coast can look a lot more like places in the Northeast than possibly other areas on the south coast. Portsmouth is in a cluster of higher connectivity but lower health and well being whereas neighbouring Havant is in a much higher health and wellbeing and moderate educational performance cluster and you can see this all over the place. So for example, Newcastle upon Tyne is actually very similar to the New Forest and Havant and in fact, so is York and Great Yarmouth. And so they're actually disperate across the country, but mostly situated in particular areas. However, if Havant or the New Forest is facing a particular problem, maybe going and having a chat with York might actually be quite helpful depending on the problem. MF That seems an excellent moment to bring in Stephen Jones as director of Core Cities. Stephen, the local picture, of course, is much more complex than that old cliche about the north south divide. But what work are you doing with the ONS and with others, to produce a really informed picture which policymakers can then act on to deal with these issues of localised deprivation, economic disadvantage and so forth. SJ Firstly, we're doing a piece of work as Core Cities with the Royal Society of Arts called Urban Futures Commission, looking at the kind of like what's the long term potential and trajectory of our biggest cities in the UK and within that, you know, this is the sort of position of why do UK cities relatively underperform compared to the international peers in the developed world is quite a well established problem that's decades old. What some of the new data available is allowing us to kind of really get a better handle on is, why is that the case what is happening to for example, a fairly recent new release of fixed capital formation, so investment data, at a local authority level split by the different asset classes that the ONS have produced is really helpful to bring an understanding and a kind of richness to basically what both public and private investment we can see that our big cities outside of London have a relatively lower levels of public and private investment, particularly then if you strip out real estate investment. So investment in capital and business intangibles, those things are particularly low. So not all of our core cities, the total investment in Greater Manchester most recently was about 9000 pounds per head, central London, it's 55,000 pounds per head. If you go down to Newcastle I think it's down to 3000 pounds per head. You know, that's a dramatic difference in levels of public and private investment. MF Does having much more reliable local data, perhaps hold with it the promise that the policy interventions that result from it can be therefore much more effective? SJ So completely. You know, one of the things that I'm quite excited about in terms of using the local GVA data that Emma was talking about as a new release is there's been a whole host of different policy interventions over the last 10, 20, 30 years trying to kind of create economic activity within zones areas and whatever was saying about the ability to build your own geographies, I think is really has real potential in it. So whether it's the enterprise zones of the Heseltine era or the enterprise zones of the George Osborne era, whether it's free ports policy more recently, whether it's transport led regeneration schemes around new road junctions or new rail stations, whether it's the role of universities, science parks, investment in innovation zones, the government recently announced in the budget just a few weeks ago, the question of investment zones, all of these policies, they are some of the national ones – there's many more when you think locally are attempting to try and create concentrated economic activity within certain locations. One of the main criticisms in a policy sense is that that activity will just get displaced from elsewhere. If the business that is currently located three miles up the road will move to within the zonal boundary to gain sort of benefits and advantages that are being offered there. Well, we'll kind of be able to tell whether that's true or not, by actually looking to see whether the areas nearby have sort of reducing GVA compared to the areas that are growing and I think being able to properly evaluate policy interventions over the last 30 years to really then decide, well, is it worth pursuing policies like the investment zone announcement of recent weeks or actually should we be trying other approaches? I think that that kind of insight is going to be incredibly valuable. MF Indeed, and perhaps also with data at a much lower level and much more micro local level as well, perhaps much smaller, more precisely targeted interventions might be what's called for. SJ Exactly and I think that again, picking up some of what Emma was saying earlier, some of this data is a tool for local authorities. This has huge potential sort of exactly where are the jobs located? Are they in the town centre? Are they in the business park on the edge of town? What time of day is that activity happening? Is it shift patterns versus is it concentrated in the sort of 945 when we know these things, whether you're sitting there working out your local plan and working out where you're going to zone, your new employment land where you're working out whether you're going to offer any business rate incentives in a business improvement district when you're sitting there working out and what time of day do you need to have your trading standards officers available, these kinds of planning decisions day to day when you're trying to think about what your refuse collection plans and patterns are those things that local authorities are doing on just managing public services bringing together those different aspects having that sort of insight to know what's happening, when and what's most effective, we'll just make our policies more efficient. And in a world where public finances are constrained, particularly so for local authorities and have been for a while or be able to use the funding that is available more efficiently and the delivery of those services I think is hugely beneficial. The other thing that I'm interested in I think, is an area where we as Core Cities can can work with the ONS and others going forward is how do we make more advantage and take more advantage of the data, administrative data that is held locally? So if you think of an average local authority, they have huge amounts of data about that area. Whether that's through kind of council tax dates on collections, arrears, council tax discounts, whether that's through business rate data, whether that's through library card membership, planning applications, the list goes on. Obviously, for the same reasons, as we've talked about the need for protecting individuals and protecting data confidentiality, some of that data, you know, we'll need to be careful about how do we use but at the moment, it's largely sitting there on databases being under explored. If we can get to a world where we can start matching some of that data with some of the data sources that the ONS are making available, and then matching it with data sources such as Emma was talking about that the private sector can bring to the table like Visa and others. I think it's in bringing those sort of insights together. You can actually really, really develop the rich pictures. I can see Libby you would like to come in, so I might just pause there. LR Yeah. I was just gonna say Stephen there mentioned about utilising locally held local data alongside national level local data, sort of your ONS data, your government department data, and actually that is one of the things that we're really hoping that ONS Local can help with by having people locally with very good relationships with those individuals in local government, local authorities, regional observatories, actually, if we can pull together their administrative data with what we have at the national level and help with some of that analytical insight because also aware, as Stephen said, local governments are constrained and resources actually, if ONS can help in that analytical insight, then even better that we can help along the way. MF So Emma, an exciting vision of the future there and the possibility to be really improving local and regional policy interventions. What's coming next? EH The really big exciting development that I just wanted to mention is the kind of opportunity for collaboration and I think ONS as an organisation are on the cusp of opening up the Integrated Data Service more widely, and actually, we've been working really, really closely with that team over the last couple of years or so to understand what a good data asset would look like for subnational. And to kind of start to make sure that we can do some of the data engineering to make that micro data. So when I talk about micro data, I'm talking like response level information from surveys kind of available in a secure and safe way and also in a way that's easily linkable, so that you can easily pick up something about health and something about quality jobs and link them together in that service and do the analysis that you were talking about. That's one of the most exciting developments. I think that's on the horizon in terms of how we'll be able to collaborate and kind of use and share data more widely, keeping in mind that privacy aspect. So you know, the idea is that all of that data is anonymized before it goes into the service and then things will be in kind of really strictly controlled through it. But there is that opportunity for those wider collaborations. I don't know Libby, whether you wanted to come in a little bit on some of the other kind of future developments as well. LR Yes, so over the last 9 to 10 months we have co-designed the ONS Local service going out across the country, doing round tables, getting people together in the room, putting forward our vision of what ONS Local might look like but very much saying “tell us why we're wrong, what doesn't work for you, tell us what we're missing”. So really building that service with our users, and now we're really beginning to fly now that we have people across the country. Other bits of new work also on the horizon include new data looking at the effect of place on geographic mobility across towns and cities, so we can follow those trends as people move around the country and can help us build pictures of places, track educational outcomes and workforce trends by area, at a level that we've not been able to do in the past. We've also talked a lot today about the Gross Value Added (GVA) data, and that obviously focuses on businesses. The next innovation for those sorts of granular statistics is more looking at the households aspect, and therefore allowing more targeted policymaking for those bespoke areas, and understand those hyper-local affects that are so important at the moment, particularly when considering all those devolution aspects. MF Some insight there on the work underway here to ensure people across the UK see themselves in our data. Many thanks to our guests today Emma Hickman, Deputy Director of ons sub national stats division, Libby Richards, Deputy Director for ONS Local and UK wide coherence, and Stephen Jones, Director of Core Cities UK. I'm Miles Fletcher and thank you to you for listening. If you've got a question or comment about these ONS podcasts, you can find us on Twitter @ONSfocus. You can also subscribe to new episodes of the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all other major platforms. Many thanks to our producer for this episode at the ONS Alisha Arthur. Until next time, goodbye. ENDS
Ooohhh. That's gotta hurt. All the dirty tactics and no success. Howler Head is now available in the UK! Head to https://howlerhead.com to get your hands on some today. Also available in larger Tescos, Amazon and https://www.masterofmalt.com/liqueurs/howler-head/howler-head-liqueur/ The UK Chief Medical Officers recommend adults do not regularly drink more than 14 units per week. Please drink responsibly -https://www.Drinkaware.co.uk Legal consumption for persons 18+ in the United Kingdom and 21+ in the United States of America. The sale of Howler Head will be subject to the countries' age restrictions and legislation.
Scott Jimmieson has realised his dream of becoming a farmer, and he's keeping it local with his new online shop business, Local Food NZ, connecting farms with consumers.The online farm shop and home delivery service in the Manawatu and Wellington regions offers free-range eggs from Scott's farm and honey and coffee from other local producers. The Local Food NZ business started in 2019 and their direct-to-consumer model was amplified by the Covid lockdowns. They also wholesale a number of eggs to cafes and restaurants.Scott always knew he wanted to be a farmer, going to work in the dairy industry straight out of high school before travelling overseas and coming back to New Zealand to start his egg farm.Living the dream in London and walking into the Tescos stores, he noticed all the free-range eggs. Doing some research, he discovered about 45% of the market was free-range while in New Zealand, it was only about 14%. He thought it could only go one way here.Website: www.localfood.nzFacebook: Local Food NZ Instagram: Local Food New Zealand (@localfoodnz)
20th September - As the cost of living bites, Tescos bail me out with some flowers. Much love and gratitude, Belle x
It's a scorching hot day so Paul and Eli decide to skip recording the podcast and take themselves out into the wild to get up to some mischief. In the great tradition of mucking about in the woods, the cheap chaps are trying to recapture those naughty adventures from their youth. They plan to smoke ciggies, drink cheap booze, look for a place to call their “den” and, of course, search for a pile of disregarded porn mags. As with most walkabout episodes, things don't go according to plan. Along the way they get lost in a cemetery, take abuse from little old ladies, reminisce halcyon days, make toxic cocktails, have a meltdown in Tescos, dangle from trees and make an utter show of themselves. It's a shameful day out for everyone. Come and join Paul and Eli as they soak up the sun in this Summer Special ramble. See pics/videos for this episode on our website: https://www.thecheapshow.co.uk/ep-290-the-boys-of-summer Tickets for LIVE SHOW on August 13th: Episode 300 Live www.harrowarts.com/whats-on/event/cheapshow-300-live For Information on travel and accommodation for CS300 www.thecheapshow.co.uk/cheapshow-300-show-info And if you like us, why not support us: www.patreon.com/cheapshow If you want to get involved, email us at thecheapshow@gmail.com And if you want to, follow us on Twitter @thecheapshowpod or @paulgannonshow & @elisnoid Like, Review, Share, Comment... LOVE US! Oh, and you can NOW listen to Urinevision 2021 on Bandcamp... For Free! Enjoy! www.cheapshowpodcast.bandcamp.com/album/urin…-the-album MERCH Official CheapShow Merch Shop: www.redbubble.com/people/cheapshow/shop www.cheapmag.shop Thanks also to @vorratony for the wonderful, exclusive art: www.tinyurl.com/rbcheapshow Send Us Stuff: CheapShow PO BOX 1309 Harrow HA1 9QJ NEW ART: Get hold of Spunk.Rock's exclusive new CheapShow Art Work: www.instagram.com/spunk__rock www.redbubble.com/people/spunkrock/shop www.etsy.com/uk/shop/spunkrock
In this episode, we're excited to have filmmaker, actor, producer, director & the South London Film Festival founder, Kyriakos (Kyri) Georgiou as a guest!Filmmakers: Scroll down for an exclusive discount code when submitting your film to the festival.We're talking:Elvis starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks (and how it gave us both the best and worst performances of 2022 so far)Method acting: Is it worth it?Kyri's incredible life story: how he became a filmmaker, shot his short film during the pandemic, founded the South London Film Festival and what's next in store for the festivalThe astonishing final scene of Oscar-winning short film “The Long Goodbye” starring Riz Ahmed and directed by Aneil KariaPost-Brexit England, underrepresentation, and the urgent need for more diverse storiesGet connected with Kyri and the festival:South London Film Festival Website - https://www.southlondonfilmfest.co.uk/Social - https://www.instagram.com/SouthLondonFilmFestival/ Submit Films Here - https://filmfreeway.com/TheSouthLondonFilmFestival Email - info@southlondonfilmfest.co.ukUse Code - TFSCENE22 for a 20% discount to submit your film! Applied at checkout on FilmFreeway: https://filmfreeway.com/TheSouthLondonFilmFestivalKyriakos GeorgiouWebsite - https://www.georgioufilms.com/Social - https://www.instagram.com/thekyriakosgeorgiou/ “When Life Gives You Lemons, Take Them Because There is None Left in Tescos” short film - https://vimeo.com/411340432 Films overheard in this episode: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Star Wars: Rogue One, Elvis, Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby, Titanic, SurgeShoot your thoughts or suggestions over a voice note:Head to https://thatfinalscene.com/voicemessage & record your voice noteOr text us your voice note to (+44)7514969453 on WhatsAppFollow THAT FINAL SCENE on social:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalsceneTikTok: https://tiktok.com/@thatfinalsceneYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxZeo-b950d9sxXF_0x5-Wg/featured See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
If you're in the UK and you like your peanut butter, you've probably come across Pip & Nut, the brand named after its Founder and today's guest, Pip Murray. Pip started the business when she was 24, at her kitchen table, with a blender and some nuts. But plenty of people start businesses like that so what makes her special? How has she managed it? Oh, and we've also got the return of the king, Rich Martell, Co-Founder of Secret Leaders, who went to university with Pip and was one of her early investors. He couldn't resist the chance to join Dan in the interview chair - and so he could ask Pip the difficult questions. Like how do you actually get your product listed at Tescos? Sponsor links: smithandwilliamson.com/secretleaders klaviyo.com/secretleaders personio.com vanta.com/secretleaders
The recent news headlines feature Novak Djokovic ... will he or wont he be allowed to defend his title in the Australian open?....the coverage includes his fans protesting in the streets as to the announcement by the authorities that he has not complied with the covid regulations.....and this is HEADLINE news....I am a tennis fan and an admirer of Novak's talent but IT'S A GAME OF TENNIS....that's all....it belongs in the sport section at the end of the news....not in the headlines....there's far more important stuff going on in the world. Then we are told that energy prices are going to increase by 50% and this will seriously affect the lower paid....with scaremongering headlines like "Heating or Eating?"...which really helps the situation....what we don't seem to have been told is WHY....or have I missed something.....it's a good job you can't buy boxes of energy from Tescos otherwise you would see our nation of sheep with their supermarket trollies piled high with these boxes of energy.....I don't suppose it's anything to do with money?...not much. Another piece of "news" was regarding the gay Irish bloke who wanted a wedding cake made for him and his future "husband"...he wanted a cake with the two of them set in the icing on the top.....the cake shop refused to make it because of their religious beliefs....so the Irish guy considered he was being discriminated against.....it gets better....he took the cake shop to court and lost the case ....so he took it to a tribunal and lost the case again....he is considering taking it to the human rights lot and hopefully he will lose that case......you couldn't make this up....where the shop went wrong was mentioning "religious beliefs" they should have just refused to do it full stop....what people don't understand is a sale is a contract where there has to be an offer and an acceptance......the offer is made by the buyer not the seller.....if the latter refuses, which he is entitled to do, there is no contract......putting items on display is not an offer it is known as an "invitation to treat" which invites the buyer to make an offer which the seller can either accept or refuse....case closed. On the entertainment front I decided to watch the new series of The Apprentice with Lord Sugar making his many over the top entrances into the boardroom to a shower of young hopefuls ... each one convinced they are the ones to make a fortune.....I must admit it is quite entertaining....and it's always good to see some over confident whiz kid get shot down in flames.......his Lordship sets them some nasty tasks and must be laughing his socks off when he watches it back.....nice to find something that is worth watching on the television. I was listening to the radio in my car and a song came on by Leona Lewis....what a fantastic voice...for me she is the most under rated singer around....she is up there with the best....which brings me to the other end of the scale............. This weeks "one of the worst records ever made " spot features, once again,Yoko Ono......it is called War Zone.....there's not a lot you can say about it really.....it is beyond me.....maybe it's me....maybe it's a masterpiece?.....maybe not.
The recent news headlines feature Novak Djokovic ... will he or wont he be allowed to defend his title in the Australian open?....the coverage includes his fans protesting in the streets as to the announcement by the authorities that he has not complied with the covid regulations.....and this is HEADLINE news....I am a tennis fan and an admirer of Novak's talent but IT'S A GAME OF TENNIS....that's all....it belongs in the sport section at the end of the news....not in the headlines....there's far more important stuff going on in the world. Then we are told that energy prices are going to increase by 50% and this will seriously affect the lower paid....with scaremongering headlines like "Heating or Eating?"...which really helps the situation....what we don't seem to have been told is WHY....or have I missed something.....it's a good job you can't buy boxes of energy from Tescos otherwise you would see our nation of sheep with their supermarket trollies piled high with these boxes of energy.....I don't suppose it's anything to do with money?...not much. Another piece of "news" was regarding the gay Irish bloke who wanted a wedding cake made for him and his future "husband"...he wanted a cake with the two of them set in the icing on the top.....the cake shop refused to make it because of their religious beliefs....so the Irish guy considered he was being discriminated against.....it gets better....he took the cake shop to court and lost the case ....so he took it to a tribunal and lost the case again....he is considering taking it to the human rights lot and hopefully he will lose that case......you couldn't make this up....where the shop went wrong was mentioning "religious beliefs" they should have just refused to do it full stop....what people don't understand is a sale is a contract where there has to be an offer and an acceptance......the offer is made by the buyer not the seller.....if the latter refuses, which he is entitled to do, there is no contract......putting items on display is not an offer it is known as an "invitation to treat" which invites the buyer to make an offer which the seller can either accept or refuse....case closed. On the entertainment front I decided to watch the new series of The Apprentice with Lord Sugar making his many over the top entrances into the boardroom to a shower of young hopefuls ... each one convinced they are the ones to make a fortune.....I must admit it is quite entertaining....and it's always good to see some over confident whiz kid get shot down in flames.......his Lordship sets them some nasty tasks and must be laughing his socks off when he watches it back.....nice to find something that is worth watching on the television. I was listening to the radio in my car and a song came on by Leona Lewis....what a fantastic voice...for me she is the most under rated singer around....she is up there with the best....which brings me to the other end of the scale............. This weeks "one of the worst records ever made " spot features, once again,Yoko Ono......it is called War Zone.....there's not a lot you can say about it really.....it is beyond me.....maybe it's me....maybe it's a masterpiece?.....maybe not.
About JakeTechnical Lead by day at the Met Office in the UK, leading a team of software developers delivering services for the UK. By night, gamer and fitness instructor, attempting to get a home cinema and gaming setup whilst coralling 3 cats, 2 rabbits, 2 fish tanks, and my wonderful girlfriend.Links: Met Office: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk Twitter: https://twitter.com/jakehendy TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com. Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's often said that the sun never sets on the British Empire, but it's often very cloudy and hard to see the sun because many parts of it are dreary and overcast. Here to talk today about how we can predict those things in advance—in theory—is Jake Hendy, Tech Lead at the Met Office. Jake, thanks for joining me.Jake: Hey, Corey, it's lovely to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.Corey: There's a common misconception that its startups in San Francisco or the culture thereof, if you can even elevate it to being a culture above something you'd find in a petri dish, that is where cloud stuff happens, where the computer stuff is done. And I've always liked cutting against that. There are governments that are doing interesting things with Cloud; there are large companies and ‘move fast and break things' is the exact opposite of what you generally want from institutions that date back centuries. What's it like working on Cloud, something that for all intents and purposes didn't exist 20 years ago, in the context of a government office?Jake: As you can imagine, it was a bit of a foray into cloud for us when it first came around. We weren't one of the first people to jump. The Met Office, we've got our own data centers, which we've proudly sit on that contains supercomputers and mainframes as well as a plethora of x86 hardware. So, we didn't move fast at the start, but nowadays, we don't move at breakneck speeds, but we like to take advantage of those managed services. It gets out of the way of managing things for us.Corey: Let's back up a second because I tend to be stereotypically American in many ways. What is the Met Office?Jake: What is the Met Office? The Met Office is the UK's National Meteorological Service. And what does that mean? We do a lot of things though with meteorology, from weather forecasting and climate research from our Hadley Centre—which is world-renowned—down to observations, collections, and partnerships around the world. So, if you've been on a plane over Europe, the Middle East, Africa, over parts of Asia, that plane took off because the Met Office provided a forecast for that plane. There's a whole range of things we can talk about there, if you want Corey, of what the Met Office actually does.Corey: Well, let's ask some of the baseline questions. You think of a weather office in a particular country as, oh okay, it tracks the weather in the area of operations for that particular country. Are you looking at weather on a global basis, on a somewhat local basis, or—as mentioned—since due to a long many-century history it turns out that there are UK Commonwealth territories scattered around the globe, where do you start? Where do you stop?Jake: We don't start and we don't stop. The Met Office is very much a 24/7 operation. So, we've got a 24/7 operation center with staff constantly manning it, doing all sorts of things. So, we've got a defense, we work heavily with our defense colleagues from UK armed forces to NATO partners; we've got aviation, as mentioned; we've got marine shipping from—most of the listeners in the UK will have heard of the shipping forecast at one point or another. And we've got private sector as well, from transport, to energy, supermarkets, and more. We have a very heavy UK focus, for obvious reasons, but our remit goes wide. You can actually go and see some of our model data is actually on Amazon Open Data. We've got MOGREPS, which is our ensemble forecast, as well as global models and UK models, with a 24-hour time lag, but feel free to go and have a play. And you can see the wide variety of data that we produce in just those few models.Corey: Yeah, just pulling up your website now; looking at where I am here in San Francisco, it gives me a detailed hour-by-hour forecast. There are only two problems I see with it. The first is that it's using Celsius units, which I—Jake: [laugh].Corey: —as a matter of policy, don't believe in because in this country, we don't really use things that make sense in measuring context. And also, I don't believe it's a real weather site because it's not absolutely festooned with advertisements for nonsense, which is apparently—I wasn't aware—a thing that you could have on the internet. I thought that showing weather data automatically meant that you had to attempt to cater to the lowest common denominator at all times.Jake: That's an interesting point there. So, the Met Office is owned and operated by Her Majesty's Government. We are a Trading Fund with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. But what does that mean it's a Trading Fund?k it means that we're funded by public money. So, that's called the Public Weather Service.But we also offer a more commercial venture. So, depending on what extensions you've got going on in your browser, there are actually adverts that do run on our website, and we do this to help recover some of the cost. So, the Public Weather Service has to recover some of that. And then lots of things are funded by the Public Weather Service, from observations, to public forecasting. But then there are more those commercial ventures such as the energy markets that have more paid products, and things like that as well. So, maybe not that many adverts, but definitely more usable.Corey: Yeah, I disabled the ad blocker, and I'm reloading it and I'm not seeing any here. Maybe I'm just considered to be such a poor ad targeting prospect at this point that people have just given up in despair. Honestly, people giving up on me in despair is kind of my entire shtick.Jake: We focus heavily on user-centered design, so I was fortunate in their previous team to work in our digital area, consumer digital, which looked after our web and mobile channels. And I can heartily say that there are a lot of changes, had a lot of heavy research into them. Not just internal, getting [unintelligible 00:06:09] and having a look at it, but what does this is actually mean for members of the? Public sending people out doing guerrilla public testing, standing outside Tescos—which is one of our large superstores here—and saying, “Hey, what do you think of this?” And then you'd get a variety of opinions, and then features would be adjusted, tweaked, and so on.Corey: So, you folks have been a relatively early adopter, especially in an institutional context. And by institution, I mean, one of those things that feels like it is as permanent as the stones in a castle, on some level, something that's lasted more than 20 years here in California, what a concept. And part of me wonders, were you one of the first UK government offices to use the cloud, and is that because you do weather and someone was very confused by what Cloud meant?Jake: [laugh]. I think we were possibly one of the first; I couldn't say if we were the first. Over in the UK, we've got a very capable network of government agencies doing some wonderful, and very cloud things. And the Government Digital Service was an initiative set up—uh, I can't remember, and I—unfortunately I can't remember the name of the report that caused its creation, but they had a big hand in doing design and cloud-first deployments. In the Met Office, we didn't take a, “Ah, screw it. Let's jump in,” we took a measured step into the cloud waters.Like I said, we've been running supercomputers since the '50s, and mainframes as well, and x86. I mean, we've been around for 100 years, so we constantly adapt, and engage, and iterate, and improve. But we don't just jump in and take a risk because like you said, we are an institution; we have to provide services for the public. It's not something that you can just ignore. These are services that protect life and property, both at home and abroad.Corey: You have provided a case study historically to AWS, about your use cases of what you use, back in 2014. It was, oh, you're a heavy user of EC2, and looking at the clock, and oh, it's 2014. Surprise. But you've also focused on other services as well. I believe you personally provided a bit of a case study slash story of round your use of Pinpoint of all things, which is a wrapper around SES, their email service, in the hopes of making it a little bit more, I guess, understandable slash fully-featured for contacting people, but in my experience is a great sales device to drive business to its competitors.What's it been like working, I guess, both simultaneously with the tried and true, tested yadda, yadda, yadda, EC2 RDS style stuff, but then looking at what else you're deep into Lambda, and DynamoDB, and SQS sort of stands between both worlds give it was the first service in beta, but it also is a very modern way of thinking about services. How do you contextualize all of that? Because AWS has product strategies, clearly, “Yes.” And they build anything for anyone is more or less what it seems. How do you think about the ecosystem of services that are available and apply it to problems that you're working on?Jake: So, in my personal opinion, I think the Met Office is one of a very small handfuls of companies around the world that could use every Amazon service that's offered, even things like Ground Station. But on my first day in the office, I went and sat at my desk and was talking to my new colleagues, and I looked to the left and he said, “Oh, yeah, that's a satellite dish collecting data from a satellite passing overhead.” So, we very much pick the best tool for the job. So, we have systems which do heavy number crunching, and very intense things, we'll go for EC2.We have systems that store data that needs relationships and all sorts of things. Fine, we'll go RDS. In my space, we have over a billion observations a year coming through the system I lead on SurfaceNet. So, do we need RDS? No. What about if we use something like S3 and Glue and Athena to run queries against this?We're very fortunate that we can pick the best tool for the job, and we pride ourselves on getting the most out of our tools and getting the most value for money. Because like I said, we're funded by the taxpayer; the taxpayer wants value for money, and we are taxpayers ourselves. We don't want to see our money being wasted when we got a hundred size auto-scaling group, when we could do it with Lambda instead.Corey: It's fascinating talking about some of the forward-looking stuff, and oh, serverless and throw everything at Cloud and be all in on cloud. Cloud, cloud, cloud. Cloud is the future. But earlier this year, there was a press release where the Met Office and Microsoft are going to be joining forces to build the world's, and I quote, “Most powerful weather and climate forecasting supercomputer.” The government—your government, to be clear—is investing over a billion pounds in the project.It is slated to be online and running by the middle of next year, 2022, which for a government project as I contextualize them feels like it's underwear-on-outside-the-pants superhero speed. But that, I guess, is what happens when you start looking at these public-private partnerships in some respects. How do you contextualize that? What is the story behind, oh, we're—you're clearly investing heavily in cloud, but you're also building your own custom enormous supercomputer rather than just waiting for AWS to drop one at re:Invent. What is the decision-making process look like? What is the strategy behind it?Jake: Oh. [laugh]. So—I'll have to be careful here—supercomputing is something that we've been doing for a long time, since the '50s, and we've grown with that. When the Met Office moved offices from Bracknell in 2002, 2003, we run two supercomputers for operational resilience, at that point [unintelligible 00:12:06] building in the new building; it was ready, and they were like, “Okay, let's move a supercomputer.” So, it came hurtling down the motorway, plugged in, and congrats, we've now got two supercomputers running again. We're very fortunate—Corey: We had one. It got lonely. We wanted to make it a friend. Yeah, I get it.Jake: Yeah. It's long distance; it works. And the Met Office is actually very good at running projects. We've done many supercomputers over the years, and supercomputing our models, we run some very intense models, and we have more demands. We know we can do better.We know there's the observations in my group we collect, there's the science that's continually improving and iterating and getting better, and our limit isn't poor optimizations or poorly written code. They're scientists running some fantastic code; we have a team who go and optimize these models, and you know, in one release, they may knock down a model runtime by four minutes. And you think, okay, that's four minutes, but for example, if that's four minutes across 400 nodes, all of a sudden you've now got 400 nodes that have then got four minutes more of compute. That could be more research, that could be a different model run. You know, we're very good at running these things, and we're very fortunate with very technically capable to understand the difference between a workload that belongs on AWS, a workload that belongs on a supercomputer.And you know, a supercomputer has many benefits, which the cloud providers… are getting into, you know, we have a high performance clusters on Amazon and Azure, or with, you know, InfiniBand networking. But sometimes you really can't beat a hunking great big ton of metal and super water-cooling, sat in a data center somewhere, backed by—we're very fortunate to have one hundred percent renewable energy for the supercomputer, which is—if you look at any of the power requirements for a supercomputer is phenomenal, so we're throwing that credentials behind it for climate change as well. You can't beat a supercomputer sometimes.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense. Corey: I'm somewhat fortunate in the despite living in a world of web apps, these days, my business partner used to work at the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Lab, helping with the care and feeding of the supercomputer clusters that they had out there. And you're absolutely right; that matches my understanding with the idea that there are certain workloads you're not going to be able to beat just having this enormous purpose-built cluster sitting there ready to go. Or even if you can, certainly not economically. I have friends who are in the batch side of the world, the HPC side of the world over in the AWS organizations, and they keep—“Hey, look at this. This thing's amazing.”But so much of what they're talking about seems to distill down to, “I have this one-off giant compute task that needs to get done.” Yes, you're right. If I need to calculate the weather one time, then okay, I can make an argument for going with cloud but you're doing this on what appears to be a pretty consistent basis. You're not just assuming—as best I can tell that, “And starting next Wednesday, it will be sunny forever. The end.”Jake: I'm sure many people would love it if we could do weather on-demand.Corey: Oh, yes. [unintelligible 00:15:09] going to reserved instance weather. That would be great. Like, “All right. I'd like to schedule some rain, please.” It really seems like it's one of those areas that is one of the most commonly accepted in science fiction without any real understanding of just what it would take to do something like that. Even understanding and predicting the weather is something that is beyond an awful lot of our current capabilities.Jake: This is exactly it. So, the Met Office is world-renowned for its research capabilities and those really in-depth, very powerful models that we run. So, I mentioned earlier, something called MOGREPS, which is the Met Office's ensemble-based models. And what do we mean by ensembles? You may see in the documentation it's got 18 members.What does that mean? It means that we actually run a simulation 18 times, and we tweak the starting parameters based on these real world inputs. And then you have a number of members that iterate through and supercomputer runs all of them. And we have deterministic models, which have one set of inputs. And you know, it's not just, as you say, one time; these models must run.There are a number of models we do, models on sea state as well, and they've all got to run, so we generally tend to run our supercomputers at top capacity. It's not often you get to go on a supercomputer and there'll be some space for your job to execute right this minute. And there's all the setup as well, so it's not just okay, the supercomputer is ready to go, but there's all the things that go into it, like, those observations, whether it's from the surface, whether it's from satellite data passing overhead, we have our own lightning network, as well. We have many things, like a radar network that we own, and operate. We collaborate with the environment agency for rainfall. And all these things they feed into these models.Okay, now we produce a model, and now it's got to go out. So, it's got to come off the supercomputer, it's got to be processed, maybe the grid that we run the models on needs to be reprojected because different people feed maps in different ways. Then there's got to be cut up because not every customer wants to know what the weather is everywhere. They've got a bit they care about. And of course, these models aren't small; you know, they can be terabytes, so there's also a case of customers might not want to download terabytes; that might cost them a lot. They might only be able to process gigabytes an hour.But then there's other products that we do processing on, so weather models, it might take 40 minutes to over an hour for a model to run. Okay, that's great. You might have missed the first step. Okay, well, we can enrich it with other data that's come in, things like nowcasting, where we do very short runs for the next six-hour forecast. There's a whole number of things that run in the office. And we don't have a choice; they run operationally 24/7, around the clock.I mentioned to you before we started recording, we had an incident of ‘Beast from the East' a number of years back. Some of your listeners may remember this; in the UK, we had a front come in from the east and the UK was blanketed with snow. It was a real severe event. We pretty much kept most of our services running. We worked really hard to make sure that they continued working.And personally I say, perhaps when you go shopping for Black Friday, you might go to a retailer and it's got a queue system up because, you know, it mimics that queue thing when you're outside a store, like in Times Square, and it's raining, be like oh, I might get a deal a minute. I think possibly in the Met Office, we have almost the inverse problem. If the weather's benign, we're still there. People rely on us to go, “Yeah, okay. I can go out and have fun.” When the weather's bad, we don't have a choice. We have to be there because everybody wants us to be there, but we need to be there. It's not a case of this is an optional service.Corey: People often forget that yeah, we are living in a world in which, especially with climate change doing what it's doing, if you get this wrong, people can very easily die. That is not something to take lightly. It's not just about can I go outside and play a pickup game of basketball today?Jake: Exactly. So, you know, operationally, we have something called the National Severe Weather Warning Service, where we issue guidance and alerts across the UK, based on severe weather. And there's a number of different weather types that we issued guidance for. And the severity of that goes from yellow to amber to red. And these are manually generated products, so there's the chief meteorologist who's on shift, and he approves these.And these warnings don't just go out to the members of the public. They go out to Cabinet Office, they go out to first responders, they go out to a number of people who are interested in the weather and have a responsibility. But the other side is that we don't issue a weather warning willy-nilly. It's a measured, calculated decision by our very capable operations team. And once that weather system has passed, the weather story has changed, we'll review it. We go back and we say what could we have done differently?Could the models have predicted this earlier? Could we have new data which would have picked up on this? Some of our next generation products that are in beta, would they have spotted this earlier? There's a lot of service review that continually goes on because like I said, we are the best, and we need to stay the best. People rely on us.Corey: So, here's a question that probably betrays my own ignorance, and that's okay, that's what I'm here to do. When I was a kid, I distinctly remember—first, this is not the era wish the world was black and white; I'm a child of the '80s, let's be clear here, so this is not old-timey nonsense quite as much, but distinctly remember that it was a running gag how unreliable the weather report always was, and it was a bit hit or miss, like, “Well, the paper says it's going to be sunny today, but we're going to pack an umbrella because we know how this works.” It feels, and I could be way off base on this, but it really feels like weather forecasting has gotten significantly more accurate since I was a kid. Is that just nostalgia, and I remember my parents complaining about it, or has there been a qualitative improvement in the accuracy of weather forecasting?Jake: I wish I could tell you all the scientific improvements that we've made, but there's many groups of scientists in the office who I would more than happily shift that responsibility over to, but quite simply, yes. We have a lot of partners we work with around the world—the National Weather Service, DWD in Germany, Meteo France, just to name but a few; there are many—and we all collaborate with data. We all iterate. You know, the American Meteorological Society holds a conference every year, which we attend. And there have been absolutely leaping changes in forecast quality and accuracy over the years.And that's why we continually upgrade our supercomputers. Like I said, yeah, there's research and stuff, but we're pulling in all this science and Meteorology is generally very chaotic systems. We're still discovering many things around how the climate works and how the weather systems work. And we're going to use them to help improve quality of life, early warnings, actually, we can say, oh, in three days time, it's going to be sunny at the beach. Be great if you could know that seven days in advance. It would be great if you knew that 14 days in advance.I mean, we might not do that because at the moment, we might have an idea, but there's also the case of understanding, you know, it's a probability-based decision. And people say, “Oh, it's not going to rain.” But actually, it's a case of, well, we said there's a 20% probability is going to rain. That doesn't mean it's not going to, but it's saying, “Two times out of ten, at this time it's going to rain.” But of course, if you go out 14 days, that's a long lead time, and you know, you talk about chaos theory, and the butterfly moves and flaps its wings, and all of a sudden a [cake 00:22:50] changes color from green to pink or something like that, some other location in the world.These are real systems that have real impacts, so we have to balance out the science of pure numbers, but what do people do with it? And what can people do with it, as well? So, that's why we talk about having timely data as well. People say, “Well, you could run these simulations and all your products take longer to process them and generate them,” but for example, in SurfaceNet, we have five minutes to process an observation once it comes in. We could spend hours fine-tuning that observation to make it perfect, but it needs to be useful.Corey: As you take a look throughout all of the things that AWS is doing—and sure, not all of these are going to necessarily apply directly to empowering the accuracy of weather forecasts, let's be clear here—but you have expressed personal interest in for example, IoT, a bunch of the serverless nonsense we're seeing out there. What excites you the most? What has you the most enthusiastic about what the future the cloud might hold? Because unlike almost everyone else I talk to in this space, you are not selling anything. You don't have a position—that I'm aware of—that oh, yeah, I super want to see this particular thing win the industry because that means you get to buy a boat.You work for the Met Office; you know that in some cases, oh, that boat is not going to have a great time in that part of the world anyway. I don't need one. So, you're a little bit more objective than most people. I have pushing a corporate story. What excites you? Where do you see the future of this industry going in ways that are neat?Jake: Different parts of the office will tell you different things, you know. We worked with Google DeepMind on AI and machine learning. We work with many partners on AI and machine learning, we use it internally, as well. On a personal level, I like quality of life improvements and things that just make my life as both the developer fun and interesting. So, CDK was a big thing.I was a CloudFormation wizard—still hate writing YAML—but the CDK came along and it was [unintelligible 00:24:52] people wouldn't say, but that wasn't, like, know when Lambda launched back in, what, 2013? 2014? No, but it made our lives easier. It meant that actually, we didn't have to worry about, okay, how do we do templating with YAML? Do we have to run some pre-processes or something?It meant that we could invest a little bit of time upfront on CDK and migrating everything over, and then that freed us up to actually doing things that we need for what we call the business or the organization, delivering value, you know? It's great playing with tech but, you know, I need to deliver value. And I think, what was it, in the Google SRE book, they limit the things they do, toiling of manual tasks that don't really contribute anything, they're more like keeping the lights on. Let's get rid of that. Let's focus on delivering value.It's why Lambda is so great. I could patch an EC2, I can automate it, you know, you got AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, or… whatever its name is, they can go and manage all those patches for you. Why when I can do it in a Lambda and I don't need to worry about it?Corey: So, one last question that I have for you is that you're a tech lead. It's easy for folks to fall into the trap of assuming, “Oh, you're a government. It's like an enterprise only bigger, slower, and way, way, way busier.” How many hundreds of thousands of engineers are working at the Met Office along with you?Jake: So, you can have a look at our public report and you can see the number of staff we have. I think there's about 1800 staff that work at the Met Office. And that includes our account manage, that includes our scientists, that includes HR and legal. And I'd say there's probably less than 300 people who work in technology, as we call it, which is managing our IT estate, managing our Linux estate, managing our storage area networks because, funnily enough, managing petabytes of data is not an easy thing. You know, managing a supercomputer, a mainframe.There really aren't that many people here at the office, but we do so much great stuff. So, as a technical lead, I'm not just a leader of services, but I lead a team of people. I'm responsible for them, for empowering them, and helping them to develop their own careers and their own training. So, it's me and a team of four that look after SurfaceNet. And it's not just SurfaceNet; we've got other systems we look after that SurfaceNet produces data for. Sending messages around the world on the World Meteorological Organization's global telecommunications system. What a mouthful. But you know, these messages go all around the world. And some people might say, “Well, I got a huge team for that.” Well, [unintelligible 00:27:27]. We have other teams that help us—I say, help us—in their own right, they transmit that data. But we're really—I personally wouldn't say we were huge, but boy, do we pack a punch.Corey: Can I just say on a personal note, it's so great to talk to someone who's focusing on building out these environments and solving these problems for a higher purpose slash calling than—and I will get letters for this—than showing ads to people on the internet. I really want to thank you for taking time out of your day to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you do it, potentially consider maybe joining you if they are eligible to work at the Met Office, where can they find you?Jake: Yeah, so you do have to be a resident in the UK, but www.metoffice.gov.uk is our home on the internet. You can find me on Twitter at @jakehendy, and I could absolutely chew Corey's ear off for many more hours about many of the wonderful services that the Met Office provides. But I can tell he's got something more interesting to do. So, uh [crosstalk 00:28:29]—Corey: Oh, you'd be surprised. It's loads of fun to—no, it's always fun to talk to people who are just in different areas that I don't get to work with very often. It turns out that most of my customers are not focused on telling you what the weather is going to do. And that's fine; it takes all kinds. It's just neat to have this conversation with a different area of the industry. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Jake: Thank you very much for inviting me on. I guess if we get some good feedback, I'll have to come on and I will have to chew your ear off after all.Corey: Don't offer if you're not serious.Jake: Oh, I am.Corey: Jake Hendy, Tech Lead at the Met Office. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment yelling at one or both of us for having the temerity to rain on your parade.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Hello and welcome to Secure The Insecure hosted by Johnny Seifert.On Episode 102 broadcaster Kate Thornton talks about her brilliant podcast White Wine Question Time, her upcoming live shows and her work with Tescos on our shopping habits.If you enjoyed the episode please give it a five star rating and leave a review.If you would like to contact me I am on Instagram @johnnyseifert and @securetheinsecurepodcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends August 27th 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:https://www.rubbercheese.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellymolsonhttps://twitter.com/TheChiefCheesehttps://www.skipthequeue.fm/https://twitter.com/Skip_the_Queuehttps://www.painshill.co.uk/https://twitter.com/PGriffiths_PHP Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in, or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip The Queue.In today's episode, everything has been turned on its head. Paul Griffiths, Director of Painshill Park, is interviewing me about what it really takes to launch a podcast, and why we started Skip The Queue in the first place. I think I should probably be worried about the ice breaker questions.Paul Griffiths: Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of Skip The Queue. And I'm your guest presenter today, Paul Griffiths, and I'm delighted to have a very special guest for you today, Chief Cheese herself, Kelly Molson. Kelly, welcome to Skip The Queue.Kelly Molson: Thank you for welcoming me to my podcast. Paul Griffiths: All right, it's an honour. I know we've been trying to get you on the show for a long time, so it's great to finally get there. Now, we're here today to talk about how you made a podcast, and how you turned Skip The Queue into the ultimate podcast for visitor attractions. But, before we do that, of course, regular listeners will know, we have to start with our ice breaker questions. Kelly, are you ready for some ice breaker questions?Kelly Molson: No, I don't think I am, if I'm completely honest. I'm starting to feel like this is a big mistake.Paul Griffiths: No, no. Well just think, all the people you've had on, and all the questions you've asked them...Kelly Molson: I am.Paul Griffiths: I think we're going very easy on you like you do for your guests. You hope you'll not get difficult questions. Now Kelly, through the series of podcasts, I think we've all learned little bits about you from various things you've said, or say. So, I've tried to theme these questions slightly on your interests. So, I know you're a big fan of all things '80s, so particularly music. So, I want to know, and our guests want to know, what is your favourite '80s dance floor filler of all time?Kelly Molson: Oh, okay. Do you know what, so this is really weird because we were just talking about '80s music on our morning catch up with the team. Because one of my team members... So, we've got a password system that we built ourselves, and it's called Kenny Loggins.Paul Griffiths: Nice.Kelly Molson: And one of... Yeah, I know, great, right? But one of our team was like, "Who's Kenny Loggins?" I lost my mind. Okay, so I think a great '80s dance floor filler, it's got to be Wham, hasn't it? I feel like something like Club Tropicana.Paul Griffiths: Nice.Kelly Molson: Would be a good choice. But I do, on the theme of Kenny Loggins, I do love a bit of Footloose, and I also am a massive Top Gun fan. So, Highway To The Danger Zone. I mean, is there anything more '80s than that?Paul Griffiths: It's the perfect song, isn't it? The Aviator sunglasses. Funny enough you should mention Club Tropicana, my son Barney, who I think I got mentioned before on Skip The Queue, his class got the '80s as an era for world music decade. Each class got a decade. And they had to vote on what song they wanted to sing and dance to. But Club Tropicana didn't make it. Kelly Molson: Oh.Paul Griffiths: They had Club Tropicana, Madonna's Holiday, or Madness' Our House. And they went for Our House as a class vote.Kelly Molson: Oh right. I'm disappointed. It's the spirit of the '80s for me.Paul Griffiths: Absolutely. Okay, now we all know that you are a big Spurs fan, so we're going to give you an option here, you've got to pick one of these two strikers, who is going to play for Spurs forever. But the one you reject is off to play for the Arsenal forever. Kelly Molson: Oh.Paul Griffiths: So, will you take Harry Kane upfront for Spurs forever, or will you an in his prime Gary Lineker to play for Spurs forever? The other's off to The Emirates Stadium. Kelly Molson: Oh, God.Paul Griffiths: Now, I'll give you some help here, maybe. Lineker scored 80 goals in 138 games for the Spurs. Kane's, at the time of recording, 166 goals in 242 games. Obviously, a lot more games played now with European football. But, who are you going to take, and who's off to The Emirates?Kelly Molson: Oh my God. This is awful. This is a dreadful question if you're a Tottenham fan, because Gary Lineker, Gary Lineker was just, I mean, he was just an absolute hero. Oh, and I can't imagine him. No, God, this is dreadful. I'm going to have to go Lineker. Yeah, no, I'd have to, because I just feel like I couldn't live with watching him on the telly, and him having played for Arsenal. No. I'd have to go for Lineker. I know that doesn't work out in terms of how many goals, and stuff, but...Paul Griffiths: No, but that ratio [crosstalk 00:04:58].Kelly Molson: It's from my childhood. Yeah, I couldn't bear that.Paul Griffiths: Oh, you Gazza as well as a package. He comes with Gazza [inaudible 00:05:07].Kelly Molson: I wanted to marry Gazza, genuinely, when I was a kid. Gazza was like my... Yeah, I thought I was going to marry Paul Gascoigne. Maybe I had a bit of a lucky escape there, though. Paul Griffiths: I was just going say, probably better you didn't [inaudible 00:05:15]. Right, and the other thing we know you love is visitor attractions, especially as you've spent so much time on podcast talking. So, there's some either ors for you here, would you go to, Disney Park, or Merlin Park?Kelly Molson: Disney.Paul Griffiths: Museum or stately home? Kelly Molson: Stately home because I really like the grounds as well that become part of a... Like that kind of outside space too. So, stately home I think.Paul Griffiths: Good answer. National Park, or landscape garden.Kelly Molson: Oh, that would be National Park.Paul Griffiths: Fair enough.Kelly Molson: I'm going to feel like I've upset... I'm going to upset someone along the line, aren't I? But how can I not say National Parks?Paul Griffiths: And that's what ice breakers are all about, but moving on to upsetting people, of course, we have to ask you, what is your unpopular opinion?Kelly Molson: Right, well I thought about this, and I've got many. I've got one about Lorraine Kelly, but I don't know if I'm prepared to take the backlash for that one yet, so, I might save that for another day. So, I'm going to go... Oh, I've got so many, I'm going to go with afternoon tea is rubbish, absolute rubbish. I don't understand why, when you get to a certain age as a woman, every... I don't know, all of your mates are like, "Hey, let's go out for afternoon tea." Like, "Really?" I'd rather go to the pub. Kelly Molson: And, I don't understand what meal afternoon tea actually is, because you always have it at about 3.00 o'clock. So, do you have lunch before you go, because I'd be hungry by 3.00. So do you have lunch, and then you have tea? And then dinner? So you're having an extra meal. And then you never get enough sandwiches. Too much sweet stuff, not enough sandwiches. And you have it with tea. I just don't get it. It's just not for me.Paul Griffiths: That's a really well thought out answer, Kelly, there. And I have to say, I'm with you on a lot of those points, although, as someone who's selling afternoon teas from this afternoon on, I'm a great fan of course. But ours do come with Prosecco, so maybe that's an added bonus.Kelly Molson: Yeah, I mean... Yeah, if it is a Prosecco based one, it elevates it slightly for me, but I still just... I don't understand the big hoo-ha about an afternoon tea. And I just... The idea of it is actually better than the reality I think. Paul Griffiths: I think that's going to be an unpopular opinion that splits a few of our listeners, but I think it's a good answer, and well thought out.Kelly Molson: Thank you.Paul Griffiths: It's okay. Thanks for coming to the show.Kelly Molson: You're very welcome.Paul Griffiths: No, it's great to have you. You know that we're all great fans of Skip The Queue, and I think we'll talk about it later, you've got an amazing, almost family, of listeners who almost become a little group that talk regularly together, et cetera. And it has been a lifeline for many over the last year, with resource, and with so much great content that's helped so many of us through lockdown, re-opening, sharing... I mean, the amount of times I've been in the car chortling at peoples' experiences because of the laughter of recognition because I've been there myself. Paul Griffiths: Now I think we want to know a little about how you set up the podcast, and I thought it would be really useful to start with because, over the podcast, we've learned a lot about you as well. But I thought it would great if you told us a bit about how you became chief cheese, and how you set up Rubber Cheese, why you got the name. I know you did tell us on another podcast, but people might not have listened to our American friends. So, just chat a bit about the background before we go into podcasting.Kelly Molson: Gosh. So, Rubber Cheese has been around for 18 years now, which is... It is the longest job that I've ever had in my entire life. I met my co-founder, Paul, when we were working at an internet company. So it was like... It was the first foray into people being able to build their own e-commerce stores. You know you've got Shopify now, where you can go on and load your own store. So, about 20 years ago, there was a version of that called iShop which is still around now. And Paul and I met working there. And I think there was just something. We just always wanted to do something for ourselves. So I think I worked there for a couple of years, got a bit of a taste for web stuff. I was a graphic designer previously to that. I used to design branding, and brochures, and marketing materials, all kinds of stuff, and packaging as well.Kelly Molson: And so, yeah, we were 24, and 25, and we just thought, "Hey, let's leave our jobs, and go and set up an agency, right? What could be difficult about that?" Paul Griffiths: What could go wrong?Kelly Molson: What could go wrong? And lots went wrong. But no, actually, it was great. It was... Look we didn't really have a huge amount of ties at that point, so it was like, "Let's just give this a go, and see what happens after a year." And about two months in, we won a really big contract with Tescos, via a friend of mine who I had recently reconnected with on Friends Reunited, which is really ageing me. Paul Griffiths: Yeah, we are ageing ourselves there, for both doing that one, yeah.Kelly Molson: Massively. And just... It started there really, so we won this big contract with Tescos, it was a two-year contract, it put us in a really great position of then being able to go, "Okay, well great, our rent's paid." And we could then start to look at clients that we were working with, and just grew quite organically. It was just the two of us for five years. And then we took on our first full-time employee, who... She came in as a designer. So she took my design role, and then that was at the point where I became Chief Cheese. So I then had to stop learning about design, so to speak, and start learning a lot about spreadsheets, and pipelines, and sales forecasts, and all the stuff that was really hugely complicated to my creative brain. Kelly Molson: And it's just gone from strength to strength really. So we've been really, incredibly lucky. I mean, there's seven of us. We're not a huge, huge agency, but we work with global brands, and I just think we've been so incredibly fortunate over the years to work with some amazing clients. Kelly Molson: And the last six, seven years, a lot of them have been within the tourism attractions sector, which is where we end up today.Paul Griffiths: What about the name, how did you come up with Rubber Cheese, because it is fabulous?Kelly Molson: Thank you. I really want to tell you that there's an amazing story behind it, but it's so dull. So Paul and I were, again, this is nearly 20 years ago, we were teaching ourselves to use Flash animation, which was all the rage back then. And we needed a website where we could upload stuff, and test it out, and see if it was working. And Paul was like, "Oh, we'll buy a domain. Rubber Cheese, that'll do." So we just bought this domain, and then when we left the company, we said, "Well, we'll take that domain with us, we'll buy it, and take it with us." Kelly Molson: And that was it. There was no... It was just, "Okay, well great, we've got this ridiculous name, that will draw some attention, won't it?" So, I'd love to say from a branding perspective, you should really think about your name, and what that means. But we didn't do any of that whatsoever. It just became this odd name. But it was quite... It was quite funny because when we'd start to go networking events, or even just a bank to pay in a cheque, how retro is that? You'd get asked, "What is Rubber Cheese?" And you'd end up having these great conversations with people about what it was. Sometimes I'd go to a networking event and people would go, "We've been waiting for you to turn up, because we really wanted to know what Rubber Cheese is." And it was like, "Oh, this works in a way." Because people want to talk to you and find out a little bit more. I think we did... We might have thought about changing the name at one point, but it's there to stay.Paul Griffiths: Perfect. And then now, she's been chief cheese, what more could you want?Kelly Molson: Exactly.Paul Griffiths: So, from Rubber Cheese, and obviously you've said, in the last six, seven years you've been focusing... Well, not focusing, but doing a lot of visitor attractions, talk a little bit about how you set up Skip The Queue, and what made you do that and why, if you're working in a number of sectors, you thought actually tourism, we'll focus on visitor attractions.Kelly Molson: So we have worked in lots of different sectors over the years. We've been really lucky. But what happened is, we started working so... I mentioned a global client earlier, we've been working with Pernod Ricard for, probably about 10 years, in various forms. And probably, it must have been about five or six years ago, that we started talking to them about the Plymouth Gin Distillery Visitors' Center, a fabulous place. And we were contracted to build a platform for them, which was a ticket booking platform. And what was really great about that project is, it was our first foray into understanding the visitor experience, and the experience economy, and a tourist attraction, and a visitor attraction, and what challenges they had. And it was the best project. Everybody loved working on this project. And it was such a good learning experience for us, and so that worked really well for them. Kelly Molson: They then rolled it out to the Beefeater Distillery, and then we've been working it again with four of the Whiskey Distilleries up in Scotland as well. And so, over those three years, four years that we've worked with them, we've just built up this huge amount of knowledge about what they were doing, and their challenges, and how we could make things work better for them, which then led to winning other projects in that sector. So, it was fabulous that we worked with Eureka, The National Children's Museum, who are just wonderful. If you haven't been there, please go. Find a child to take so that you can go. It's definitely, it's worth it, you know.Paul Griffiths: Brilliant. One of your podcasts with you a few episodes ago and listen to a chat about the new Eureka, that's really inspiring. I think everyone then was like, "I want to go, I want to go." Kelly Molson: Oh definitely. Yeah. And the new centre is going to be incredible, I cannot wait for next year when that opens.Paul Griffiths: We'll go with our Crocs and socks on. Kelly Molson: Oh, Michelle. Michelle. No Crocs and socks. Please don't do that. So yeah. It came from there really, and I think what was interesting is that all of the team are very much... We're all people that spend our money on doing things, rather than buying stuff if that makes sense. Paul Griffiths: Yeah, it does.Kelly Molson: We want to spend our money on things that make memories, so we love to travel, Lee and I, we travel a lot. We like to go to different places, we like to... Even like Christmas presents, we don't really buy each other stuff, we'll go, "Okay, well, why don't we go to the theatre, or why don't we go and..." That's what we would rather do with the money that we have. And we just spoke to the team, and said, "Look, we've never done this before, but we'd really like to focus all of our attention on one sector, what do you think?" And everyone was up for it. Everyone was behind it. And that's really where the idea came from because although we'd been working in that sector, we didn't know enough, it wasn't broad enough for us. So the podcast was a way for us to learn more from people. Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: And so that's how we came up with the idea of starting it.Paul Griffiths: I should have said earlier actually, I must say thank you to a number of regular listeners who have emailed in or LinkedIn or Twitter with questions. And lots of these, I hope I'm covering in the next bit of the show. And a number of questions that people have sent in. And a lot of people are interested, Kelly, to know how you initially set this up from a brainwave of, "Let's do a podcast." To recording and turning Skip The Queue into what it is. But how did you start up in that sense?Kelly Molson: So, I guess there are quite a few facets to it really because you have to think about why you're doing it in the first place. So that for me is the first starting point. It's like, "Why are you doing it?" So, what are your objectives with the podcast, and ours was really... It was initially about education. We wanted to understand about the sector, understand about people's individual challenges, what the sector was going through. Good things, bad things. Kelly Molson: We wanted to meet people in the sector, so again, we wanted to expand our network. We really wanted to create a platform where we celebrated the people that worked in attractions as well, because we thought that was really important. There's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes in attractions that you don't realise when you visit them. And even the people that you're talking to front of house, you don't realise the kind of pressures that they're under, or you're sometimes not aware of the service that they're delivering you. So it was like, "Well, why don't we celebrate that?" And then, ultimately, it was a way of raising our profile in the sector as well. Kelly Molson: So from a marketing perspective, a podcast is a really great thing to have, because it can position you right in the centre of that industry that you want to be part of. So that was a big part of it. And then, we had to look at how we were going to do this. And what skills did we have internally to be able to set up a podcast? And so, I think Paul and I were like, "Okay, well we can host." I do a lot of public speaking for the agency anyway, so I was quite comfortable talking, although a podcast is very different from standing up in front of hundreds of people at an event. It's... In some ways, it's more uncomfortable, but I'll tell you why it started off being a bit more uncomfortable. And then you have to think about what format your podcast is going to be. Kelly Molson: So, is it going to be you just delivering your knowledge, or are you going to try and get guests in? What are those topics going to be? What are you going to talk about? How are you going to find the guests that you want to come on? Are they going to say, "Yes?" Is anyone going to say, "Yes," they want to come on this podcast, I don't know. What kind of content is there going to be? And then you have to really think about where your audience is because anyone can set up a podcast but not everyone is going to find it, and listen to it. So you have to think about, "Is there an element of community building that you need to do around this podcast as well?" Where you promote it, and how you get that out to the right people. And then, once you've done all of that, you have to think about, "Okay, well, who's going to edit this podcast? How are we going to actually make it a thing?" I can sit and record something. Kelly Molson: None of us internally had any podcast editing skills, and we made the decision really early, that nobody was going to learn that. It was going to be too much of a time drain for us. So we were going to outsource that element, so we work with Steve Folland, who is super. We knew Steve, he works and is based locally to where our office is. But he works on some really awesome podcasts. And he actually has his own podcast, Doing It For The Kids. He's got a really great podcast for the freelance community as well. And then it's down to, where are you going to host the podcast, you need some kind of platform to host it on? What are you going to record it on? And how are you going to promote it? So, we talked about building a community. If you're going to promote a podcast, you need things like graphics created. Are you going to have our podcast transcribed? That was really important to us. Kelly Molson: We wanted to make the podcast as accessible as possible to everyone, so not everyone can listen to a podcast. So we make sure that it's transcribed, so you need to have that done so that people can read the podcast if they want to. So there is a huge amount of things to decide on before you go, "Right, let's do it."Paul Griffiths: It's interesting. Lots of the points you've touched on, I'd like to delve into a bit more in detail, if we can, over the next few questions. A lot of people... One of the things that came up a lot when we put a plea out for questions, and what people want to know was costs. Because you just described things that people aren't doing free of charge. And I wondered if you could give an idea of what it costs to do an episode, or what it costs to set up, or whatever figures you're happy to give. It's just, I think a lot of people would be interested to know what sort of budgets they would need if they're looking to set up a podcast.Kelly Molson: Yeah, totally. So, I've thought about this in quite great detail. So because we knew initially we were not going to edit, we didn't have to buy any editing equipment. So I'm really sorry I can't answer any questions about that because genuinely, the best thing that we ever did was hire Steve to do the editing. He's a specialist. He makes everything sound brilliant. He even makes me sound funny sometimes. But what we did purchase were things like a really good microphone. So this is my microphone. A blue yeti microphone. Which was about £120, £150, somewhere around that. But that's a really great investment. It was a bit of trial and error actually, we bought other microphones that weren't that great, and ended up going back, but this has been the best one that we've bought. You need good headphones. These are average headphones. My good headphones I actually left at the office, and I haven't been back there for a while. So a good pair of headphones, noise cancelling ones are normally quite good. I don't know, 30, 40 quid for a pair like that. You could go higher if you want, but something around that price bracket would be fine. Editing an episode is an interesting one. You can hear my little dog barking in the background. Steve will edit her out.Paul Griffiths: Oh really?Kelly Molson: He'll work his magic somehow. You probably won't be able to hear her. But that for us is worth the weight in gold. So...Paul Griffiths: Desperate to be on the show, isn't she?Kelly Molson: She's such a drama queen. She's just... She craves attention. I mean, I wonder where she gets that from?Paul Griffiths: Ooh.Kelly Molson: But then you need to think about your site hosting. So we host our podcast on a platform called Simple Cast. That's about £15 per month. We record through Zoom. And Steve curses me for recording through Zoom because the sound quality is not great. We used to record through a platform called Zencaster, which again, is a cloud-based platform. It's about £15 a month. Now, the reason we stopped recording through Zencaster is, it became a bit complex for the guests, and sometimes some of the guests didn't really understand what they need to do, even if I'd sent instructions. People are really busy. They don't always read the things that they need to before they come on, which is understandable. Zoom, everyone was really comfortable using, because they were using it every day for all of their meetings. So it just became easier for us to do Zoom. So we've got a pro Zoom account. But obviously, we use that for other things as well, so I don't really tie that into podcast costs. But then you need to think about who's going to create your promotion graphics for this. We're lucky, we've got in-house designers. Kelly Molson: We've got an amazing VA who supports me hugely with our podcasts. So we've got templates set up, she will then create all of the podcast graphics from the templates that we've already got in place, but that is potentially a cost that someone needs to think about.Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: Then I said we get it transcribed, each episode. It's roughly about $40 to get it transcribed. So there are lots of little things that you don't think about, that you need to think about in advance. We also run a competition. So there is a cost to that in the fact that you have to purchase the books that people recommend, sometimes they recommend two or three when I ask for one. And then that puts my budget up. And then the postage for that, and things like that. So I think we worked it out that the podcast probably costs about five, to six grand a year.Paul Griffiths: Oh. Kelly Molson: Which isn't a huge amount if you've got... It depends on what your marketing budget is, but it also then depends on what the returns, or what your expected returns are for that podcast, and for that amount.Paul Griffiths: Yeah. Kelly Molson: So you have to work out... And that takes you back to why are you doing this in the first place? And is this a worthwhile investment for you?Paul Griffiths: I think that that would be one of my later questions actually. Thank you for that Kelly, that's really honest, and I think that's really useful for people. Because I think that's one of the things that a lot of people, me included, probably felt that you go on Zoom, you record speaking to someone, bang, it's up live. But actually, there's so much more work behind it which is just quite frightening.Paul Griffiths: You obviously manage to attract brilliant guests, and I think they get better and better all the time, but how did you go about... Well, firstly can you tell us about how you got the initial guest, because you had no podcast, you were starting up. You had to invite 10 people on, and you had some fabulous people in those early days, real industry leaders coming on the show. And then, how do you now go about getting guests and picking topics, and thinking about what people might want to hear about?Kelly Molson: Yeah, so it was really difficult to get guests when we first started because you haven't got anything to show them. You've no proof of concept, you're just getting in touch with people and saying, "Hey, we've started this podcast, it's about this subject, we'd really love you to come on and talk to us, how do you feel about it?" And we would get emails back from people, and they'd be like, "Well, can you send us an episode? What is it? How many listeners have you got? How long..." We were like, "Well, zero listeners at this moment in time. Hey, we're listening." So, it was quite tricky. We lucked out a little bit, I'm not going to lie. So we had the CEO of Paradise Wildlife Park come on. Which, for us, was quite a big coup, because they're quite local to where we are, but the luck that we had is, one of our team members was actually related to her. So we had a little bit of an ins there already.Kelly Molson: And then I think some of the others we, again, it was just... We maybe just got them at the right time. They had something that they wanted to talk about, that they were quite keen to get out in the world. And then, actually, it was a case of, I stalked people a little bit. So, I went to the visitor attractions conference at the end of 2018, or no, it was in 2019. So, I'd been stalking people that had spoken at the attractions conference previously, and saying, "Oh, I really loved your talk, it was really interesting, I wondered if you could come on and talk about the same thing on our podcast?" And that's how I got a few of the early, of the second series people, come on. Kelly Molson: So Jules Ozbek, who I think is fantastic, I heard her speak at the Visitor Attractions Conference at the end of 2019, and then I... I basically just stalked her a little bit on LinkedIn and asked her really kindly if she would come on the podcast, which she agreed to. And also Abigail Olive, as well, who was awesome, from Castle Howard. Her story about... She shared the love story.Paul Griffiths: Yes.Kelly Molson: You must go back and listen to this episode because it's a brilliant story. But it was about how they... There's a wonderful love story that had happened that then brought them all of these incredible Chinese tourists to the place. And she was fabulous. And I think once people hear the calibre of guests that you can get, it sort of spirals a little bit from then.Kelly Molson: But those first ones were... It was really, really tough. And I just think you've just got to keep ploughing on, and asking people. People will say no, but don't be offended by that. Some of the people that have said no, would probably say yes now if I went back because I can showcase what we've done, and who's been on.Paul Griffiths: And so, how about now Kelly, do you have a long waiting list of guests lined up, you plan your series, don't you? So, are you finding it easier to get guests now, how do you go about it now, now you're that you're already onto this podcast?Kelly Molson: So, I still stalk people, if I'm honest. So, what I think, what's great is that the guests we've had on... There is something really lovely about the attractions sector, in that, there is a community there already.Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.Kelly Molson: And what is wonderful is that we've had guests on, that I've then been able to say, "Who do you think that we should have on? Who do you think has got a really interesting story?" And I can remember doing this with Carly Straughan, and Johnny Lyle as well, both of them. I had really good chats with them after their episodes. And said, "Could you recommend some people that you think that would be really great for us?" And they're so well connected, and they know everybody in the industry, and they were like, "Yeah." And they sent me lists of people. They were like, "You need to speak to this person, this person would be great." And so, that's how it spiralled. But because they knew them, obviously those guests come on, and then they knew more people and more people. So, that's one of the best ways, is like saying to your guests, "Who do you think should come on and talk about this? Because you know the industry better than we do right now." Kelly Molson: And then I do stalk people. I go on to Twitter, and like I said, there is quite an active attractions community on Twitter.Kelly Molson: And I see who people are talking to, or I see Blooloop is a fantastic resource, Attractions Magazine is another great resource. I see stories that come up in there, and I think, "Wow, that would make a great podcast episode, let's talk to them." So I've got my eye on the Black County Living Museum at the moment. So, I'm doing a little bit of stalking at the moment, because I'd love them to come on and talk about their Tik Tok fame.Kelly Molson: And so, stuff like that happens where you see what's going on, and you think, "Great, they would be awesome. And then you just reach out to them." But you do... I do get people to email us. Not very often actually, but occasionally people email us and say, "I think this person would make a great guest on the podcast, or we've got this thing that we'd love to talk about." I have to be really conscious that there are sometimes will contact that... I don't want the podcast ever to be salesy.Paul Griffiths: Right yeah.Kelly Molson: For me, it is an education piece, and it's really important that it stays an education piece, so I'll try to get that balance right between the kind of people that do come on, and what they're talking about and those topics. So, sometimes people will say, "I've got this thing that I've launched, and I want to come and talk about." And I don't know that that's a good fit for the audience at that point. So...Paul Griffiths: Fab. And what about the promotion of a podcast, from the early days of getting it known, I guess was word of mouth. And now, how do you promote it? How do you keep gaining more listeners, and how have you got your success?Kelly Molson: Well, it's lovely that you think it's successful. It is interesting because I think that success is really subjective. So, again, it goes back to your objectives, and what you are trying to achieve from it. Because our top one was always about education, we weren't that focused on what the numbers were. So, people are, "Oh, how many downloads do you get?" It's not really that relevant to us because that's not what we were... We weren't aiming to be number one in the podcast charts. So, the way that we've promoted it is by understanding where the community is. So, where do the people that would be our listeners hang out, and it's mostly Twitter. Kelly Molson: It's a very active community on Twitter, so that's really where we do most of our promotion. So we've got a Twitter account, specifically for Skip The Queue. We will post out on there when the new episodes are coming, and we'll make graphics and snippets, and we'll do as much as we can to promote the guest.Kelly Molson: It's actually probably more about promoting the guest than it is about promoting the podcast if that makes sense? So we really try to highlight those people and raise them up. And what's great is that so many people then help us spread the word. So, the best people to share, and promote the podcasts, are the guests that come on. And we've been really lucky that we've had great guests that have wanted to do that. We've had other great guests that have come on, and that's it. They've come on, they've done the podcast, they've shared their knowledge, we don't hear from them again. They're not, they haven't shared any of the Tweets, or any of the posts. And that's fine. If that's not their bag. But then, you do get a huge proportion of people that really want to. They're really proud of the fact that they've been on. They want to share what they've done with other people. And that's really where you see the numbers start to grow, and the interaction happen. We've got some really incredible loyal fan base.Kelly Molson: You are one of them Paul. You're always super generous with sharing what you think about the podcast, or what you've learned from it. And Mark Ellis does as well, from the National Arboretum. And that's how you spread the word. There are other things that you can do, which we haven't done as actively as we could. But things like going on other people's podcasts is a really good way of promoting your own podcast.Paul Griffiths: Right.Kelly Molson: And I was very kindly invited on the Attraction Pros podcast, which is our... It's the US equivalent. Josh and Matt who run that are fabulous. And honestly, all of our listeners should subscribe to that if you're not already because they get some really interesting guests on there, and they ask great questions as well. So that was a really lovely opportunity for us to cross-promote. And Matt and Josh have both been back on our podcast as well. So hopefully, that's helped and crossed the big pond. Kelly Molson: Sometimes it is also about getting a big name to come on the podcast too. And that drives up your listeners because they... So I reached out, oh God, I was so nervous about doing this. So I asked the ex VP of Disney if he would come on the podcast. And I was terrified. I sent this email on LinkedIn thinking, "He's never going to reply to me." And honestly, five minutes later he emailed back, and was like, "Yeah, I'll come on." "Oh God, now I've got to actually interview him." I was so nervous. But that was incredible, the value that that gave to the podcast, and how it was able to position it. After that, no one said no to coming on the podcast since that point so...Paul Griffiths: Lee Cockerell and you really are hard-hitting, aren't you? And of course, I think from his perspective, I guess because he's got a brilliant weekly podcast. Dan's got a brilliant weekly podcast. So they are, as you said, going on other people's podcast as a guest is a great way. And you said, was a brilliant episode of you on Attractions Pro, as was then, Matt and Josh came on yours. You talk about not worrying about the stats. Is there a little bit of you Kelly, that thinks it's like Top of The Pops, back in the old days, and you're wanting to see where you are on that list, and seeing how many people are listening, I know I would?Kelly Molson: I don't check it very frequently. I'll be completely honest.Paul Griffiths: Really.Kelly Molson: No, I don't check it very frequently. I started to do a top three on Twitter. Like the top three downloaded episodes, because I thought that would be interesting for listeners to know. But I did check it before we recorded this because I knew you were going to ask, so the most downloaded episode at the moment is The Making Of Harry Potter.Paul Griffiths: Oh yeah. It was a-Kelly Molson: With Geoff Spooner So, that was a great episode. And that, at the moment is on about 270 downloads. So, that's like 270 individual brand new downloads. And at the minute I think we're just about to hit 6,000 downloads in total. I don't really even know what that means though. So, again, I'm just not that bothered about it. It is a niche podcast. It's not for everybody.Paul Griffiths: No.Kelly Molson: And it was never made to be for everybody as well. So, I just think, for me, the numbers don't really matter that much.Paul Griffiths: Good answer. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? And I suppose for you it's a quality, not quantity because you're getting some people who are in that business, and going back to your original objectives, might well want to work with a digital agency, and you guys are therefore on the tips of everyone's tongues I guess, which is achieving your objective.Kelly Molson: Hopefully, yes. If it's achieving one of the objectives, that would be wonderful.Paul Griffiths: Yeah. Absolutely. The next question was all about the tech side, and I think you've already talked about a lot of things like the equipment you need, but also... So, when you're planning your episodes, so your guest has agreed to come on. You've contacted them, and stalked them through various social medias, they know they're being followed, and it's like, "Better say yes, otherwise Kelly is never going to leave me alone." Tell me a bit about what you do after that to prepare your guests, or to plan the episode. Kelly Molson: So, a lot of the time I will have invited that guest on for a specific reason. So, there will have been something that I've seen, that they've been talking about, that I'll think, "That would be really great to understand a bit more about that, and I think our listeners would like that as well." So, that's normally how it starts. Sometimes we have a pre podcast chat, so it might just be a five or 10-minute chat about what we're going to talk about. Sometimes it might just be, I'll email over and say, "Look, I heard you speak about this topic, I think it would be great to come on to the podcast, how do you fancy it?" If they say yes, then I work out a few pre questions. So, I don't like it to be super structured, I mean, obviously, there is a structure to the podcast. Kelly Molson: You all know that there's ice breaker questions coming. You know that I'm going to ask for an unpopular opinion. But the rest of the podcast is... I try to structure it in a way where there's three or four key questions that I really want to understand, but the rest of it is quite conversational, so it can go off on a bit of a tangent, and sometimes that's a bit more relaxed for the guest. But also, some guests, they like to know what we're going to be talking about, and what they're going to be asked. So, by giving them three or four questions that structure the topic of that conversation, it makes them feel a bit more at ease because they know what to expect. So that's what I do. I just... And then there'll be other times where I just think, "This person's really great, and they would make a really great guest. I think they'd be a great guest." But I might not have seen anything that I think they've been showcasing, or they've been talking about. Kelly Molson: So then we'll have a chat and say, "What could you share with the listeners?" What would you think would be relevant for them right now? Have you been through anything recently that's been a learning curve for you? Have you had any challenges that you're happy to come on and talk about?" Or, "Is something really exciting just about to happen that you think our listeners would be really interested in understanding more about why that's happened?" So it's a bit of a mixture.Paul Griffiths: Brilliant. So, I'm sure some of our listeners today have been listening in because they are thinking about starting a podcast, or they've... And I think it's been really great, Kelly, you've been so honest. Because I think it isn't an easy process it seems. There's a lot of work involved in it. I think it's great that people know that. But if people were thinking of starting a podcast, what are your key tips, or advice you'd give them?Kelly Molson: So I think that it's going back to what we talked about initially, so it's, "Why are you doing this in the first place? What are your objectives for starting a podcast?" And they're going to be very different, depending on what you do as an organisation, whether you're a supplier to the industry, whether you are the National Football Museum, for example, came on. And they talked a lot about why they started their podcast. Paul Griffiths: Yes of course.Kelly Molson: And a lot of that was to facilitate the fact that they weren't open, they'd got all of these fantastic artefacts, shirts, all of those things that they could talk about, and have conversations about. And they've got a lot of content already that they knew that they could do something with. So the podcast seemed like a natural way of getting that out to the public when they couldn't visit the centre. So, go right back, and think about what it is that you want to achieve by setting up this podcast. Kelly Molson: And that might education, it might be getting something out to the world that you've got to share. It might be... It genuinely might just be, you're an agency and you want to position yourselves in a certain sector. There's other agencies that we know have podcasts who work in the tech sector, for instance. So they focus on having tech guests, and those kinds of conversations. And then you really need to think about where your audience is, because I don't think it's enough to just have a podcast. You really want to be building some kind of community around that podcast. Or it's just output all the time. There's no engagement. There's no... It doesn't go to a deeper level. We've had so many incredible guests on there now. And a lot of those guests have turned into people that I can just call on about stuff. Or I can email and say, "How about this?" Or, "Oh, I saw this thing that I think that you'd really love. Here you go"Kelly Molson: And I like that. I think that there's a real positive energy to that. So, really think about what your objectives are? Who your audience is? Where they are? What do they want? What does your audience want to listen to? What is going to be relevant to them right now? We launched Skip The Queue in the middle of 2019, which was very different to the middle of 2020. And so, when we brought it back in 2020, for us, it was all about, "Okay, maybe COVID situation has given us a little bit of an opportunity here, because our audience is going to be, probably, far more engaged this year than they would last year. They've got a lot of time on their hands, sadly, with venues being closed and people on furlough. What would help them right now? What would be useful to them right now?"Kelly Molson: And so, we pitched it as, "Let's get people on that can share their experiences of how this has impacted them, what they're doing to plan for re-opening. What things are they thinking about past COVID? How has this changed what their marketing plans might look like? How has this changed their digital strategy, and what that might look like?" Kelly Molson: So, really, really think about what's relevant to the audience that you're trying to get in front of, at that time. Yeah, I think they're my top tips.Paul Griffiths: You've mentioned objectives quite a bit, Kelly, which is fascinating during this. And do you feel, when you sit back or look back at why you started it out, you've ticked those objectives? I mean, it sounds like you have, but do you feel that you have?Kelly Molson: Yeah, I do. And I feel really proud of what we've achieved actually. I think that I've always been quite honest and said that I think that actually, the podcast was the thing that got me through last year, because although we work in the sector, we were very fortunate to be relatively busy last year as a digital agency, because of the situation, and people having to pivot, and make those changes. But it was still really, really tough, and for me, being able to speak to someone new and really interesting every week, or every couple of weeks, that could come on the podcast, was just a bit of lifesaver really. It really helped me. But yeah. In terms of the objectives, has it ticked all the boxes? I mean, absolutely. I mean, what we know now about the sector, and what we know about the people in it, and the network that we have in it, is phenomenal. I couldn't have asked for more from it. Kelly Molson: And it has really brought some really interesting things. So, for example, I talked about going on the Attractions Pro's podcast. Because of our podcast, we've been asked to go on to other people's podcast. And that's helped promote our services. And our services, and what we do isn't really what we talk about on the podcast that much. So, that's been really nice. We've been asked to speak at webinars. We were always going to exhibit at the Visitor Attractions conference last year, which we did. But I think the fact that we had the podcast helped me then get a speaker slot at that as well, because they could hear that I was, maybe not a bumbling idiot. Kelly Molson: I don't know? So, maybe that bolstered my chance of getting a speaker slot. And we've been asked to contribute to publications, we, like I said, we've got an amazing network, we've built up all of these fantastic connections and community. But actually, it has brought leads as well. It has brought us leads and things into the business, where people have said, "Well, I was looking for an agency and found you, but then I heard the podcast as well." And so it reinforces your understanding of the sector, which I think makes people feel more trustworthy towards you. And more confident that you know... You'll understand what's important to them in their challenges.Paul Griffiths: Yeah. No, I think it's really done that. And moving forward, obviously, the last year has been successful, as we've said earlier, some amazing guests. What do you see... How do you take it forward? How do you take Skip The Queue forward, is it more of the same, or do you branch off into different things? Or what do you do next?Kelly Molson: That's a really good question. So, there's lots of things that I've been thinking about doing. We are going to have a little bit of a Summer break.Paul Griffiths: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And we're going to come back in October. So, just because we've been doing this continuously for a whole year now. And it wasn't what I expected. I always thought we'd do... I thought we'd make it very seasonal. So we'd do eight or 10 episodes, and then have a break, and then do more. But I loved it so much last year, and genuinely it was keeping my spirits up, I said to Paul, "I'm just going to carry on. I'm just going to keep going through." But it is definitely time for a little bit of a rest while all you guys open up this Summer, and go crazy with all the visitors that are going to come. I might just put my feet up for a little while.Kelly Molson: I definitely want to do some panel events. There's some things that Hannah and I, Hannah Monteverde from BeWILDerwood, spoke about. About women in the sector, which I think would be really interesting. Paul Griffiths: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And I'd like to get more... I'd like to do more panel events in terms of hot topics in the sector as well. And so, have three or four panellists that come on and talk about things. I really would like to do an event. I would love to do some kind of Skip The Queue event. I don't know what that would be, whether it would be like a little mini-conference or a live podcast event. I think live podcast... Steve would probably go insane listening to this, and go, "No, don't do it." But I think I would really like to do something where we get everybody together because it has really felt like a bit of a community effort where people have got behind us.Paul Griffiths: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And it would be really nice to put something on when we've got everyone together when we're able to do. So, I've got something like that ticking around in my head. Definitely more of the same as well. If that's what everyone wants to hear. But I take this opportunity to ask, what would our listeners want? If you're happy with the way it's going, great. We'll do more of that. If there are extra things that you'd love us to do, or you think would be really interesting, then email me at kelly@rubbercheese.com. Don't be shy.Paul Griffiths: Brilliant. Kelly, thank you so much for sharing everything with us today, but more importantly, thank you for everything you've done in the last year. These podcasts have been a lifeline for so many of us. We've all loved listening, and you've built up this family of regular listeners who comment all the time. And I know people look forward to it, and can't wait to download and listen. And you see that now, how quickly are responding to your episodes, and we've commented on it. But I know, from what you've told us today, you've really got into just how much work it is. So, on behalf of everyone, all the listeners, thank you so much.Paul Griffiths: But we can't finish, of course, without a book recommendation, and I hope you've got several. So you have to drive your marketing budget through the roof, so, Kelly, I want to know a book that you would recommend, and our listeners can get by re-Tweeting this episode, and saying, "I want Kelly's book." On Twitter. So, what is your book recommendation? Kelly Molson: So, this is the book that I have probably recommended the most throughout my career. And I read it about a year into having set up Rubber Cheese, well maybe about six to eight months into setting up Rubber Cheese, because somebody said to me, "Oh you need to get out, and you need to start networking." And I was like, "What the hell is that then? I don't know. What is networking? What do you do?" And they said, "Oh you go to meetings, and you meet loads of interesting people, and you just talk to them." And I was like, "All right." I was 25. I was like, "Okay, that sounds weird, but I'll do it." But somebody recommended Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends And Influence People.Paul Griffiths: Really?Kelly Molson: And it is a really old book, but it is genuinely the book that I credit with changing my whole perspective about how to listen to people. About how to have really good conversations. And ultimately, it is the book that I've given out the most to people. So, I think a really lovely girl that I know, I was mentoring her for a little while a couple of years ago, and that was the first book that I sent her. And said, "Have a read of this, I think you'll really enjoy it." And it's just the one book that I've sent out religiously to people. I've made Lee read when he started his photography business. Because I just think there's something about it that just makes you really understand that it is about the other person, more than it is about you.Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: And I think when you're younger, you maybe... Well, me personally, when I was younger, maybe didn't really understand that fully, about how to listen to people, and understand what was important to them, and letting them speak. So, that would be my recommendation.Paul Griffiths: Well, thank you. And as I said, if you want that book, re-Tweet this episode link, and put, "I want Kelly's book." And Kelly will send you a copy if you're the winner. Kelly Molson: I will.Paul Griffiths: If you're the one lucky winner, I should say. She won't send them out to everyone, because Kelly's budget doesn't stretch that far. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for coming on Skip The Queue, it's been so insightful, so brilliant. And thank you for coming on.Kelly Molson: Oh, you're welcome. I really enjoyed this Paul. So thank you for being a fabulous interviewer today.Paul Griffiths: You're very kind. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions, that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes, and transcriptions from this episode, and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.
We would like to welcome Michael Cooper, who has just landed himself a new role, working with the Church Army as they support many people in the area of deprivation, across so many communities housing estates in the South East and across the nation. The ministry has been birthed from the Church of England, and has been running for many years. Many people in these communities are struggling with high level of anxiety and depression. He works with a team that goes into areas that reach deprived children, young people and parents - working through youth clubs, home visits, monitoring family, work, holiday clubs and trips and expresses the joy of the Lord that's on his heart as he embarks in this new role. This frontline work that they are doing and seeing the unconditional favour of God working through the church army.org.
Join hosts Gabe Cook, Grant Hutchison and Martyn Goodwin-Sharman as they take their hands out of the puppets, and open the Neutral Cider Hotel!But first, Grant returns with his shop Aeble now open, confused with how many alternative cider fans have been hiding in Scotland, Gabe’s book Ciderology nearly arrives on time, and Martyn has no discernible news, bar an apology. Then, the charitable Gabe utilises his vocabulary to help a charity!In the news, it's Craftcon 2021, the wonderful Simon Day hosted a fantastic event stacked with in depth talks, and one about kegged cider that a certain Cidershit was a part of! Gabe was interviewed for his upcoming book, with a certain set decoration that needs discussing. Finally Pulpt now have their cider 'Flare' available in Tescos. The interview this week is with founder and president Gidon Coll of Original Sin cider. One of the true pioneers of modern cider, establishing his brand in New York 1996, with a desire to reconnect America to its roots through an authentic drink. The guys discuss everything; the mundane reality of association meetings, Banjo Pete, pounding the pavements of New York, Royal Bath and West Show, the history of the Newtown Pippin and everything in between! The guys try a range of Original Sin ciders, with the clean, crisp Hard Cider, the controversial Pineapple Haze, and three different single variety ciders; Newtown Pippin, McIntosh and Northern Spy. There’s a lot of love, a lot of questions, and some absolutely bold claims made in this section!Finally, it’s game time and Gabe brings a slice of The Big Apple to the cider heads of the hotel, but who gets to take home the crown?!Thanks for listening. Please leave us a message at our Speakpipe and join us on our socials below. The Team:Gabe is a cider expert: The CiderologistGrant has two cider businesses: Re:Stalk and Aeble Cider ShopMartyn loves to write about cider: CiderShitThe Rest of The Team:Executive Producer/Editor: Scott RiggsMusic: Billy KennedyConnect:Instagram: NeutralCiderHotelFacebook: NeutralCiderHotelTwitter: NeutralCiderPodListen and share episodes on our website: https://www.neutralciderhotel.com/ Leave us a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/neutralciderhotel
It's the start of an expose into the wonderfully weird town of Breag. Laurie and Henry do an overview of what this town really is. There are hedgehogs, no Tescos, and always watch out for the goats. Cover art is by @nickick._ on Instagram.
Martin is joined by Andy Miles, a leading retail e-commerce expert whose career has included working for some of the biggest brands in the UK such as Tescos, Boots and more recently the Arcadia Group. Andy shares his insights on the technological trends that are empowering consumers with their e-commerce experience. With the customer being king, Andy identifies ways that retailers can build a true omnichannel journey and how to ensure that brands get the basics right when it comes to digital.
016 Laughter & Positivity with Pete Cann The Laughter ManWhat is the key to a happy and positive life? Well, it's all about having a ruddy good laugh! Joining me in this episode is the amazing Pete Cann, The Laughter Man. Laughter Yoga leader, Pete is on a mission to bring laughter to a million people. So we sat down and chuckled and discussed why laughing yoga is the happiest wellness program in the world and how it can make us live a happy life. This has to be one of the funniest episodes I have recorded and you will have a great time listening to this. In this episode, we unlocked... Why laughing is an effective stress relief and how it can have massive benefits to your mental health and physical health. Why we all need a little laugh from time to time And why I wear Pyjamas whilst walking around Tescos, yes that is right! PODCAST MERCHANDISE!!! It's officially here! Woohoo! You can now buy your own UNLOCKED podcast notebook. The perfect addition to share your thoughts, ideas and inspiration from the podcast. Available here -https://www.amazon.co.uk/UNLOCKED-Ricky-Locke-Podcast-Notebook/dp/B08TK4MQX1/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ricky+locke&qid=1612290641&sr=8-1 ( click here to order) How to find out more about Pete Website https://www.petecann.com/ (click here) Follow #Thelaughterman on https://www.instagram.com/petecannthelaughterman/ (Instagram) Tune in for Pete's daily laughter lives on https://www.linkedin.com/in/thelaughterman/ (LinkedIn) Patreon thanks! Shout out to the amazing Patron supporters for keeping this podcast going; thank you Ant Howe, Cheri Brenton, Chris Lovett ,Steve McDermott & Rory Barnes! You are all amazing! Come Join the UNLOCKED community where you can receive... Early access to episodes Patron shout outs and recognition at the end of every episode Exclusive backstage content and bonus episodes Ask me anything - have your questions answered online Shape the future of the podcast with your requests. Live hangouts every month supporting each other to UNLOCK success (Optional - become a sponsor of the show!) Exclusive giveaways and HUGE Discounts off my online courses and so much more... To be a Patron and support the podcast just head to this https://www.patreon.com/theunlockedpodcast (link) or head to https://www.patreon.com/theunlockedpodcast I can't wait for you to be a part of this journey! Free Resources https://mailchi.mp/0d35be4cdc01/8hyymfp0m6 (FREE Ebook 10 SIMPLE STEPS TO SELL WITH CONFIDENCE ) https://mailchi.mp/fecf67ff6878/10-tips-to-improve-your-productivity (FREE Ebook 10 tips to improve your productivity) Free Workbook : https://drive.google.com/file/d/18hahQ2osX2InxaPGkhJ9gd0MgjeQEMIr/view?usp=sharing (Understanding Your Values) FREE EBOOK : Ihttps://www.rickylocke.co.uk/ebook (mprove your confidence and create awesome videos with a smartphone) Follow me on https://www.instagram.com/rickylockemagic/?hl=en (Instagram) & https://www.facebook.com/RickyLockeMagic (Facebook) at: https://www.instagram.com/rickylockemagic/?hl=en (@rickylockemagic) For more about me and what I do, https://www.rickylocke.co.uk/ (check out my website) PODCAST MERCHANDISE!!! It's officially here! Woohoo! You can now buy your own UNLOCKED podcast notebook. The perfect addition to share your thoughts, ideas, and inspiration from the podcast. https://www.amazon.co.uk/UNLOCKED-Ricky-Locke-Podcast-Notebook/dp/B08TK4MQX1/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ricky+locke&qid=1612290641&sr=8-1 (Available here!) A new episode is out every Wednesday. So make sure you hit SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss out on any episodes coming soon. And, if this episode brought some value to you, or even a smile, then please leave a review or a rating. That would be amazing! Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoy this episode and I'll join you next week for another episode of UNLOCKED!
Laughing is probably the greatest gift we have as humans. Free will and adaptability are handy. Sure an orgasm is nice but you can't you do it in Tescos. Laughter can happen in an instant and no matter how you are feeling at the time it is programmed to bring you joy. It literally creates happy chemicals in your body.It is why Fun is one of the core values of Team Super Dad and why I am chatting with Pete Cann the Laughter Man today.You Can Laugh At Any TimeYou can turn on laughter at any time. You can also do it on your own or with others, It is infectious and brings joy to others. My dad loves to remind me that no matter how tough things get the most important thing to do is to keep having fun. In this episode of the Team Super Dad Pete I chatted with Pete about creating laughter and what it does for you.Few people stop to consider that laughter can be turned on at any time. Our wonderful imagination can remind us of something funny or you can simply generate it. Pete and I do a couple of his laughter exercises in the pod which you can join along with.Laughing Is Actually ExerciseIn a world where depression and mental health is thankfully now openly talked about, laughter is a positive action that anyone can take. Not only does it produce positive endorphines and other feel good chemicals in your brain but it is actually also a form of exercise. It raises your heart rate and has you breath in more air. It is crazy therefore that we do not all take a moment or two each day to have a good chuckle to ourselves. Ideally out loud.Laugh With The People You LoveFamily life can be taxing - we all know that. Laughter can break through those day to day stresses and build (or rebuild) closer connections to the ones we love. It is impossible to argue and laugh at the same time. It is impossible to stay angry at someone and laugh with them at the same time.In all these ways do the best for your family and loved ones by laughing together regularly. Laughter really is the free gift we should never forget to use.You can watch these episodes Live or the video replays on YouTube or in the Facebook Group.Of course if you have not already then subscribe to the Team Super Dad podcast now.Enjoy the podcast and be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.Team Super DadTeam Super Dad gives Dads the tools and confidence to live their life they desire, not the life they feel stuck with. We transform Dads health, wealth and happiness so that they can feel great about themselves, create more time with their family and enjoy life to the full.Find Out More About Team Super DadTeam Super Dad website Get Dad Coaching 1-on-1 and GroupsFind out more about the Hero AcademyJoin the Team Super Dad community on FacebookSubscribe to the Team Super Dad podcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
We made it to Episode 20 in the same way an 80 year old wakes up in the morning glad for another day of gardening. This is the rebrand. Who thought we’d run out of steam talking a lot of cobblers but we did! We are now Just the Tip Mind and Body Health and this Episode 20/New Episode 1Point2Point-0 is where Kit will show us his mindset when it comes to exercising. This all sounds like a professional approach in the vain of SuperProJoeWickes but as you indulge your ears it doesn’t go as planned. So listen in on this show and feel like you are on the Titanic about to hit an iceberg. Shownotes: We mention Joe Wickes and unless you have been living in a bank vault here is a breakdown of the great man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Wicks_(coach) As Kit used Tescos Peas to fix his battered leg here is a review of a Tesco Cafe involving mushy peas https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186443-d4167516-r256273611-Tesco_Cafe_Holyhead-Holyhead_Anglesey_North_Wales_Wales.html Let’s say you are a Tescos snob and it is the ONLY place you want to go to…. Well here is the store locator so you can never be too far away from a Tescos Value Range https://www.tesco.com/store-locator/uk/ Moose socks? where to buy? Lost in the noise of online shopping? The Cats Spazz of comfortable footwear is here—>>> https://road.cc/content/review/71033-moose-nordkapp-socks We went retro television and referenced Allo Allo and Mimi’s and Rene’s age during the series run… well read Mimi’s stats below and honestly do your own calculation of their ages using the internet…. Use some grey matter https://alloallo.fandom.com/wiki/Mimi_Labonq
How do you cope when you've got a business that's skyrocketing under Covid, plus three kids at home? That's what we wanted to find out from Steph Douglas, whose gift-box business Don't Buy Her Flowers found that sales went through the roof when the shops closed.We chatted to the brilliant Steph about how she found herself working full-on under highly adrenalized conditions, how she coped with the guilt about doing well when other industries suffered, and the intense pressure and responsibility she felt. It wasn't until she had a break from work that Steph found herself struggling with her mental health – she shares how she managed this and what her plans are to cope with Pandemic: The Return. Plus – the universal experiences of crying in Tescos and dishwasher rows with your partner…How to Cope is hosted by writer Becky Howard and psychotherapist Lucy Clyde. You can follow us on Twitter @_beckyhoward @lucysclyde @cope_podcastDon't Buy Her Flowers: https://www.dontbuyherflowers.com/ Thanks for listening - please like, subscribe and share
How to smash the music business not once but twice. How to do it even better the second time around. How to remember you’re not in Tescos but on stage in front of thousands of people. How to get Peter Kay to sit on your knee. How to get the Foo Fighters to Never Give You Up and Never Let You Down.Instagram: @rickastleyTwitter: @rickastley Website: https://rickastley.co.uk/ OUR SPONSORS: M&S Plant Kitchen PRODUCTS MENTIONED: Plant Kitchen Cauliflower PopcornPlant Kitchen No chic’n nuggetsPlant Kitchen No Chicken KievListen, Subscribe & Review Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Welcome to HOOVERING, the podcast about eating. Host, Jessica Fostekew (Guilty Feminist, Motherland) has a frank conversation with an interesting person about gobbling; guzzling; nibbling; scoffing; devouring and wolfing all up… or if you will, hoovering.This week I’m talking to Rose Stokes, journalist and soon to be author whose currently on a mission to pull apart the myth that you can tell how healthy someone is from how they look. Aspiring to thinness isn’t aspiring to health - for me or her, anyway. We’re at mine, tanking white wine, pringles, some little round Italian tiny mini baby pretzel types things and spicy olives. Wallop. Everything written below in CAPITALS is a link to the relevant webpage. Honourable Mentions/ LinksFor updates on what she’s up to, what she’s discovered and to her funny mind follow ROSE STOKES on the old Twitter there. And THIS IS THE ARTICLE that made me contact Rose, to beg her to do a hoovering. I’m on this great site called PATREON where I swap your money for ace podcast related stuff like totally exclusive content and guest recipes. It’ll help me keep the podcast not just alive, but also thriving. Thanks so so so much if you’ve become a patron recently and/ or stuck with me since the beginning of this. Also - if you’d wanted to donate something as a one-off you can DO THAT HERE on the Acast Supporter page thing. We ate PRINGLES, dear me I’m so sorry if you hadn’t heard of them already.The singers we laud up are SAINT SAVIOUR and LIZZOShe used to write for the ECONOMISTAnd we get deep into supermarket chat mentioning no less than TESCOS, SAINSBURYS, LIDL and MORRISONS. Haha. There’s only a few days to go but you want a tenner off a first Oddbox then CLICK THIS LINK Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/hoovering. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week: Is cereal soup? Barclay went out clubbing in covid land, playing drums again, getting told off for dancing, Harry styles DJing in the local club, barking bouncers, drinking petrol, Dale lost his mum in big Tescos, analysing dreams part 2, Dale was attacked by shooters with AK47s, crack Hens, Dale does ketamine with his aunty, almost witnessing death on Tiktok live, some of the worst names ever, cooking with poo, a test for the listeners. About us: Dale Pendlebury & Barclay Wood are 2 DJ/Producers that love house music.
On this episode Tony sits down with comics creators James McCulloch and Johnny Cannon and they discuss the highly regarded Judge Dredd story from the first issue of the Megazine - 'America'. A story written by John Wagner with art by Colin MacNeil and letters by Annie Parkhouse. Will it still stand up? What about that twist ending? How often does Tony hang about in Tescos? You can find more of Johnny Cannon's work here and follow him on Twitter here. You can follow James McCulloch's work here and follow him on Twitter here. Many thanks for listening.
Do you feel like you are busy fool in your pet business? Are you passionate but penniless and time poor? That's how this weeks guest Sally Cousins felt about her dog walking business too! Sally worked in Tescos for 21 years before she finally followed her passion and started Woofer Walkies. Sally shares how she went from being an average 'low priced' dog walker, to being a 'premium' pet business by mastering email marketing, direct mail and she even wrote a book in lockdown. Go to www.growyourpetbusinessfast.com/challenge
This is the eighth episode of the Tiger Heart Chats podcast featuring Tiger Heart CEO Sanj Surati and The Little Wild Ones CEO, Kevin Francis recorded on Monday 15th June 2020. The Little Wild Ones is a design driven animation and motion design studio based near London with a passion for character driven brand storytelling. The Little Wild Ones have been a motion partner on a few of the Tiger Heart projects over the years. In this podcast, Kevin and Sanj discuss a few projects they have worked together on including; The Ocular Intelligence projection mapping for ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt and also a virtual reality project they delivered for Crisis. Some of the topics raised include: The Little Wild Ones – http://www.thelittlewildones.comAnimationBroadcastSurrey Institute in Farnham - https://www.uca.ac.uk/life-at-uca/locations/farnham/Ascent Media - https://ascent.mediaTape - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideotapeDesign Britain's Got Talent - https://www.itv.com/britainsgottalentMusicMoviesKids Channels Industrial Design Dreamweaver - https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/dreamweaver.htmlDisney - https://disney.co.ukFreelancing The Trouble with BeesBeesVeterinarian - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterinarian90sIndustrial Farming Covid 19 Tescos - https://www.tesco.comFlowersHorticultural Emmy Awards - https://www.emmys.com/awards/nominees-winnersJellyfish Pictures - https://jellyfishpictures.co.ukTom Brass - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4673700/Spill Over- https://bit.ly/3e68uk9Stephen Hawkins - http://www.hawking.org.ukOcular Intelligence - https://youtu.be/4oMdQwm0lMgEric Schmidt - https://twitter.com/ericschmidtGoogle - https://www.google.co.ukCentre for Entrepreneurs - https://centreforentrepreneurs.orgData Visualisation RFID - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identificationThe Royal Institution - https://www.rigb.orgEntrepreneurshipArtificial IntelligenceAIAutomationCrisis - https://www.crisis.org.ukHomelessnessVirtual RealityVR360 FilmTechnology Imagination Creative IdeaRichard Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-lee-b5106017/Beauty and the Beast - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101414/Beauty and the Beast (Live Action) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2771200/James Baxter – https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0062744/Emma Watson - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0914612/Dan Stevens - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1405398/Akira - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/Ghost in the Shell - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/Lego2D3DAnnecy Animation Festival - https://www.annecy.org/iPad - https://www.apple.com/uk/ipad/Procreate - https://procreate.artArtistryStorytellingVirgin Megastores - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_MegastoresFlash - https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer.htmlAdobe Animate - https://adobe.ly/3htx80dToon Boom - https://www.toonboom.comMatches Fashion - http://matchesfashion.com/Places:FarnhamLondonSoho Haverford WestPembrokeshire New York AnnecySouth of FranceCamdenAdvice:Just get on and make somethingHave funDon't be a perfectionistGet your work out thereMake time for your personal projects if you are already workingYou have to be committed Kevin Francis Links:https://www.instagram.com/thelittlewildones/http://www.thelittlewildones.comSanj Surati & Tiger Heart: https://www.instagram.com/sanjsurati/ https://www.instagram.com/tigerhearttech/ https://www.twitter.com/sanjsurati/ https://www.twitter.com/tigerhearttech/You can listen to the Podcast on the following links: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiger-heart-chats/id1507957892?uo=4 Google: https://bit.ly/2znRXIKDeezer: https://www.deezer.com/show/1048492Don't forget to share: #tigerheartchats https://www.tigerheartlondon.comTiger Heart is an innovation agency that specialises in emerging technologies set up by Digital Atelier Sanj Surati. Sanj is an award winning multi-disciplined Digital Atelier with over twenty years of experience within the music, fashion and luxury industries. London-based Sanj has been working within digital and technology since 1998. He has seen the cultural shift in human habit and behaviour as we all evolve into digital consumers. Some of his successes have been burgeoning, ground breaking and, more importantly, culturally relevant.
HSG UK (Hygienex) offers water conservation and washroom services. Lead by Simon Rice and Tom Rice, they are a father and son duo that created Ureco a water saving device for urinals and their clients and partners include Tescos, Pizzahut, Rolls Royce, NEC Birmingham, Boots and BT. If you would like to be a guest on The Green Element podcast or have any questions please drop us an email at info@greenelement.co.uk For more information go to Green Element Podcast This episode is hosted by Will Richardson - connect with Will on https://uk.linkedin.com/in/greenelement (Linkedin) or Twitter This episode is produced by Woon Tan of Podcast Publishing
The first in the series where I talk to a non film person but whose job and expertise will improve us as people and as an industry. When the industry is back up and running and we are all on set, Tim gives us some amazing tools to work more efficiently and holistically. Plus also ways to be able to keep our personal relationships at home strong and get back into the swing of going to Tescos after filming in a desert for 3 weeks on a hundred million film with loads of Hollywood celebs. Check out his website. http://www.breathe-labs.com/ I hope this will be an episode that you listen to every week. If you love what we talked about, Tim is happy to do a Q&A later in the year with your questions so drop a question in the comments. Please subscribe, share and review. Big love Film Family. Isusko (www.thetimescheduler.com)
About Anup Ladva Talent is overrated. So says today’s guest, Dr Anup Ladva. In this week’s episode, Anup talks us through turning around his bad-boy beginnings in Palmers Green to become owner of several successful clinics. He also tells us about his love of tech, which he satisfies by helping clinics get started in digital dentistry - and by steering some exciting dental-tech startups. Along the way, you’ll hear plenty of words of wisdom on management, motivation, running a practice and much more. Enjoy! In This Episode 0.58 - Mischief in Palmers Green 03:12 - Getting into dentistry 09.38 - Into practice 13.07 - Anud’s biggest influences 17:18 - Efficiency hacks 15:41 - Selecting practices and partners 33.10 - Getting kicked out of Tescos 37.57 - What’s important to Anup Ladva? 42.37 - Boards, bosses, buddies & bonuses 50.11 - Anup’s biggest mistake 58.37 - Digital dentistry 1.08.58 - Egg distribution 1.10.19 - Anup’s words of wisdom About Dr Anup Ladva Since graduating from Kings College London in 2002, Anup has focused mainly on primary care dentistry. He has developed special interests in occlusal rehabilitation and cosmetic dentistry and has trained in the US with MJDF and the Royal College of Surgeons. He is an examiner and clinical teacher at Kings College and a trainer for the eastern deanery. Anup is a digital dentistry consultant who supports clinics to integrate new digital workflows. He is also an entrepreneur with involvement in new dental tech startups.
You're joining us live from the travelator in Tesco, where a follower of Christ and her alien intern brother are reading terrible reviews. These two right little chatterboxes have a doozy of an episode for you, so please enjoy this while our meager existences fight against the inevitability that is entropy. Support us on Patreon at patreon.com/beachtoosandy for a monthly livestream Q&A! Go subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch our first ever live show in New York! www.youtube.com/c/beachtoosandywatertoowet Buy our merch! https://store.dftba.com/collections/beach-too-sandy-water-too-wet Logo by Courtney Aventura. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
This is the critical review of Marc Bolan and T. rex from the heady days of Ride a White Swan to major success in the United States with Get It On. Drawing on extensive rare archive footage of T. Rex we discover the power of the band on stage from surviving footage of amazing concert performances. The latest edition of Music Legends Magazine is available in WHSmiths and Tescos stores or free to view online at: mlmag.uk/issuesAt Music Legends we break the mould of traditional music magazines by offering interactive video footage. This content is designed to complement and expand upon the key articles in the magazine using exclusive footage and interviews that we hope you will love. Please feel free to browse the available video content here on our YouTube channel and subscribe today to make sure you never miss an episode. Thanks for watching! – The Music Legends Team.
What does it mean for a 6 year old young girl not to have her own bedroom? This little girl had never experienced such a thing until one afternoon, when she walked into a room of her landlord's little daughter of about the same age. She was mesmerised by the beautiful colours of butterflies and a huge bed that dominated the room. Then the landlord's little daughter told her off for touching something. She was furious, and couldn't wait for her Mum to get home so she could would go and have words with this rude little person… But her Mum said they were renting a room from these people, and they just needed to take it on the chin and get on with their lives. It was a devastating answer for this little girl. But it was also the start of her learning to become resilient – and quickly. She never complained after that incident and accepted all that was thrown at her. As soon as she was old enough, she got a job at Tescos on the tills and from that moment onwards her life changed forever. This little girl grew up to become smart, capable business woman with a clear vision and a clear head. My guest this week is called Su Patel So, who is Su Patel? Given her deprived background, and a childhood characterised by bullying, isolation, poor self-esteem and divorced parents (at a time when divorce was taboo in the Indian community), the question is, how did she get from the tills to creating an HR department? She financed her own way through HR training and with her strong dedication and intelligent skills she enabled Tesco to develop engaged staff and a thriving business. Businesses grow when people grow! Su coaches and train ambitious HR professionals who may be struggling to move up the ladder, and she helps businesses be proactive in how they lead people ensuring that employees are valued in the workplace. Today Su is a senior consultant at HR Training and Consulting Ltd, partnering with businesses and working as part of their HR team. If you'd like to get in contact with Su on facebook and linkedIn.
I sat down with Phile Neale, pop-star turned entrepreneur. We discussed his journey from working in Tescos to being on the Dragons Den. Phil is a true entrepreneur and he is the man behind the ‘social alarm clock’ app Snoozle. Founder Phil Neale previously appeared on 2015’s Britain’s Got Talent with his two brothers and their dad as ‘The Neales’. The act eventually featured in the top 25 of the Official UK Music Charts with their debut single. https://www.snoozleapp.com/
The Ramones broke all the rules when they released their classic debut album. Here we examine the making of Ramones, and the impact the record has made on the modern rock scene.The latest edition of Music Legends Magazine is available in WHSmiths and Tescos stores or free to view online at: mlmag.uk/issuetwoAt Music Legends we break the mould of traditional music magazines by offering interactive video footage. This content is designed to complement and expand upon the key articles in the magazine using exclusive footage and interviews that we hope you will love. Thanks for watching! – The Music Legends Team.
This is the true story of the Ramones fetauring founder member Tommy Ramone, long suffering tour manager Monte A. Melnick, art director Arturo Vega and Hilly Kristal, founder and owner of CBGBs. Also included are rare broadcast interviews with Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone previously unreleased on DVD.The latest issue of Music Legends Magazine is available now in WHSmiths and Tescos stores, or is free to view online at mlmag.uk/issuetwo
Tescos, Carly and UAOs
In any news article about influencers, the journalists always love to have a pop at how much we earn. It’s obvious that the general public and traditional media have an unsavoury view of influencers. Mainly due to reality TV celebs charging 5 figures for a facetuned selfie, holding up an indescript supplement and adding a ton of grain to their posts. There’s also a huge problem with secrecy within the industry. Many creators have had their fingers burned by revealing their rates, only to be undercut by a ‘competing’ influencers. We had a twitter chat over on #growglowchat where we discussed transparency and lots of good points were brought up. Such as, ‘why should we discuss rates? No other industry feels the need to.’ And they’re right - but if you were to Google, ‘how much does a plumber charge by the hour?’ You’re very likely to be met with millions of results that fall within a small range. Plumbing is an industry that’s been around for hundreds of years, is regulated, has standards and not one single plumber has a monopoly over the whole market. In the influencer industry, it’s only really been something that’s been making serious money for last 5-6 years. It’s unregulated and there are no standards that have been set. Further more, when you Google, ‘how much does an influencer charge?’, you’re met with 6836837 different results with often no rhyme or reason whatsoever. In this episode, we’ll go over all of the contexts that need to be considered when setting your rates. We’ll go through a couple of strategies influencers use to work out their rates, I’ll share the feedback I’ve had from many influencers plus I’ll offer my experience on a way to work out rates that has worked for me these past few years! As we begin this I just want to say how frigging overwhelming this is. I’m not an expert. I don’t work in influencer marketing. But I have been in this industry longer than the job of ‘influencer outreach’ has been around. And I will also say that generally, everyone is making it up as they go along. PRs, Brands and Influencer outreach managers are throwing the term ‘ROI’ out like it’s going out of fashion, without REALLY understanding what it means. Because ROI in influencer marketing ISN’T about, ‘I paid them £200 and I made £100 profit on that investment.’ Because it just isn’t that simple. Furthermore, good influencer marketers understand that influencers aren’t sales people. They aren’t targeted on sales KPIs. Using an influencer for your marketing could be for a range of reasons - gaining social followers, improved brand chatter, increasing footfall to stores, improving affinity with audiences and the brands - these are difficult things to track and attribute to a single Instagram post or Story shout out. So then how does an influencer set a rate? If they can’t say, ‘well my photo gets 300 likes, which translates to 10 follows for the brand, which translates to 1 sale and the sale = £20’ - like that makes no frigging sense. Are they charging based on follows? Sales? Exposure to their audience? It’s a MESS. So influencers then get told by some ‘experts’ to base their rates on an hourly rate and pro rata it out depending on the work they’re doing. So let’s say you decide your hourly rate is £10 and it takes you 20 minutes to take a photo, 5 minutes to edit it, 10 minutes to write a caption, 42 seconds to post it, based on your wifi - can you see where we’re going here? A MESS. And then what do you base your hourly wage on? Is it inline with what you can earn at Tescos or what a consultant doctor would charge? I’m being hugely reductive here but I hope you can read between the lines and understand what I am saying. It’s complex and totally context driven. So then does an influencer listen to those people who say to charge 1% of your following? Because I know creators with 5,000 followers who’d have to charge £50 whose production values are so much higher than a reality TV star holding the gummies up in a selfie. That micro influencer would hire a photographer, at personal expense, buy props, spend time mood boarding ideas and then time editing. Plus putting in effort to craft the perfect caption. Why should they get so much less? Or two influencers with 5000 followers charging £50 and one influencer’s content is a steaming pile of wank and the other’s looks like it stepped out of a Vogue concept shoot. Is that fair? So can we agree to put this 1% notion in the fucking bin? Because no context is taken in here. Context like: The number of followers and fans the influencer has The amount of engagement their posts generally garner The fit of the advertisement with their brand and following The number of posts you want The type of post (image, video, audio, etc.) The amount of effort needed from the influencer (do you provide the image/video or do they?) Where the ad will be promoted (will it just be on the influencer’s account? Are you cross-posting it? Are you using it in other efforts?) In my research, I found some figures online that say… Instagram: 1,000 per 100,000 followers (so £10 per 1000 followers roughly) Snapchat: Starts at 500 per campaign in 24 hours YouTube: Roughly 2,000 per 100,000 followers Podcast: £100 per 10,000 downloads - but I’ve also seen the same fee for 1,000 downloads I then stumbled across Influencer Marketing Hub - Micro influencers vs Celebrities. I put my details up against Kim Kardashian’s (the default option) but beautifully you can compare yourself to ANY influencer - how lovely for our self esteem. With these online calculators, I find them somewhere between low-balling and insulting. I’ve often gotten £50-£100 more than the top range that these calculators suggest. So just how do you get parity? When brands want to say, ‘well so and so with more followers/engagement charges less than you’, we get pitted against each other by online calculators and the whole business about keeping us quiet from taking about money serves one purpose and one purpose only - to get as much as out of us for as little as possible. I truly believe parity in the industry will be a two pronged approach - brands becoming more educated so that they only work with influencers who are right for their campaigns - not just the ones who are cheapest or who they can milk for as much as possible. And it’ll come from us as creators seeing each other as a community rather than competitors. Because when we undervalue ourselves we give less value to our peers. If we are open about our rates so that we can put ourselves in line with each other, then brands will not be able to take advantage - intended advantage or not. This is where Grow & Glow, my new hub for creators will hopefully help. Upon entering the hub, creators will be encouraged to share their rates and media kits so other members can access them and create or adjust their own rates in line with what their peers are charging - with all of the context. Like let’s be real - I know who my peers are who have similar engagement, similar level of content and a similar audience - so I charge in line with them. This is info you’ll be able to access when we go live. Furthermore, Grow & Glow will be open to brands to. To be able to approach the members for opportunities knowing full well that those members will be in communication - not competition. I think it’ll be a really good thing for the industry. But enough of me plugging that, let’s go back to discussing all of the factors that need to be kept in mind when we build our rates out. Let’s go back to the context we discussed before like: The number of followers and fans the influencer has - if an influencer has a highly engaged and big following - they can charge more of a premium. The amount of engagement their posts generally garner - then if their posts get good, deep, quality engagement rather than bot comments, pod love or empty compliments - they can add a premium The fit of the advertisement with their brand and following - if the partnership is going to absolutely bang with their followers, because both the creator and their audience are genuine fans of the brand - they can add a premium. PS why are you doing a collaboration that you or your audience don’t love in the first place? But that’s a whole other show. The number of posts you want - calculate the amount of content - is it one grid post? Or is it a blog, grid and set of stories? Work out a package. The type of post (image, video, audio, etc.) - each type of content requires different skills and amounts of time put into it. The amount of effort needed from the influencer (do you provide the image/video or do they?) Where the ad will be promoted (will it just be on the influencer’s account? Are you cross-posting it? Are you using it in other efforts?) - does the brand want usage rights? Because fees for this need to be added on too. Furthermore, agreeing on rates is a dance between the creator and the brand. On Sophie Milner and Millie Cotton’s amazing Keeping It Candid podcast, Chloe Plumstead said something I really respect. She said, ‘I have my rates and if the brand can’t afford it, then move along’ - I mean I’m paraphrasing but what I took from that was, it wasn’t her job to bend her fees to a brands budget. So she rarely lowers her rates in line with them. I believe this is smart. It’s the age old saying - ‘those that pay the least, want the most.’ Setting your rates comes down to a simple calculation - what are you happy to complete the work for + the premiums you can add for context (mixed in with a little of self-awareness, I’ll come on to this) = your rates. This is what I do! When I receive a brief, I think to myself - ok what have I charged and had accepted for a similar scope of work before - and I go from there. So say if I’ve done a collaboration for a blog post, Instagram post and set of Insta Stories for £1200, I’ll say my fee for the same package is £1200 and go from there. But if it’s a new scope of work or a different package structure, I’ll think of it like this… So say if you’re happy with £20-£30 an hour for your time (similar to other creative and media industries) and the time it’ll take is 4 hours (£80) and then you want to add premiums on for your great engagement, high level of content quality, usage rights or whatever other contexts we discussed and determine the rate your happy with is £200 - stick with that and stand by it. If at any point, you think it’s not enough - go higher. If you think it’s too much, after self reflection - not after low confidence, that’s different. Adjust accordingly. I’d LOVE to give you definite figures. Or a calculation. But it’s impossible. I can only tell you what my thought process is! And you know, sometimes I’ve had set fees in my head for the different content I create and then I chat with a friend who has similar contexts to me and I see they charge more - I up my rates! And if we have the same convo and I think they’re undercharging - I’ll tell them. So many times I’ve had friends and other bloggers thank me for these conversations because it’s helped us gain that level playing field. Community yo. So do this dance with the brand… They ask for your rates, you say what you’re happy with but you want to know their budget. Usually their budget will align with your rates - funny that. But if they don’t probe further. If you really believe you’ve over charged - negotiate, but if you believe you’ve asked for what you’re worth - don’t falter. If that brand doesn’t want to work with you - it’s because they can’t afford you. Someone else can. Now ideally, I prefer the dance of asking what their budget is before revealing my rates. And this can be annoying sometimes. Because a brand has a set figure they can use for influencer marketing and are often trying to get as many pieces as content for that budget as possible - but try and get them to value it first, so you can see if you can negotiate it, or if it’s worth it. I can’t ever see there being a set rate across the industry - due to all of the contexts that come into play - the only way forward for clarity and parity is, I believe, in transparency and communication. And you know what, if you share your rates and get undercut - then karma will get that influencer and the brand will have lost out on working with you even though you’re awesome! That’s the downside, but the upside is that we come together as a community to fight against the negative aspersions against us and work together for a fairer value on what we do. If you ever have any questions, feel free to message me or email me! I love chatting about this kind of thing. In the mean time, make sure you subscribe and leave a rating and review. I bloody love it! Chat to you v v soon. BYEEEE.
Startup Secrets Podcast | Business | Entrepreneur | Interviews
*** GIVEAWAY*** Want a snack? ;) Sara and the team at Well and Truly have very kindly given us some of their goodies to pass away to our listeners! Simply share this episode on social (FB, IG, Twitter) and tag the Startup Secrets page (links on website) and we’ll pick some lucky winners :D In this episode we speak with the brilliant Sara Trechman - not only because of the unbelievable business she’s built, but also because she’d had her newborn baby just 6 days before this recording and still joined us!! Sara and her co-founder have managed to build a widely recognised product and business with Well and Truly: they’ve raised chunks of money, have exported overseas, are stocked in Tescos and Sainsburys, and rocked an electric tuk tuk around the streets of London (why not)! If you’re in the product and/or FMCG sector then give this a listen! In this episode we discuss: Focus groups and testing Manufacturing Marketing Selling to the big boys Internationalisation and exporting And as always, plenty more...
This week on the Headliner: Fyre Festival hits melting point, Tesco cuts down its ‘traditional' grocer approach and Facebook's latest ploy to integrate WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram
JOB CUTS AND CRISIS SITUATIONS TESCOS AND SANTANDER BANK. CORRECTION ON 29.01.2019 9,000 JOB LOSSES AT TESCOS. ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD.
In this week’s episode the Odours team wade through the convoluted mess that is 1995’s Congo!Undeterred by the films lead talking Gorilla declining an interview, the Odours team talk gender-fluidity amongst simians, the uncomfortable apex of diamond heists and colonialism, the unprecedented violence of Hungry Hippos, the mob-lynching of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, and doing the weekly-shop with Delroy Lindo at Tescos. Get some!
Episode 92 We are joined by Ice who talks The Wheel of Time, Spider-Man into the Spiderverse and we discuss when to use the word “init” (yes it's one word). In our “F it” segment we talk about a certain website shutting down, “girls toys” controversy in Tescos, and Fortnight gets sued by everyone. We cover the latest news including an Inbetweeners reunion, Hott Fuzz 2? Aladdin's EW cover, John Wick 3 photos and Keanu Reeves as Wolverine? Spider-Man PS4 Rami suit dlc, and Runaways season 2. We watch trailers for Hellboy and Men In Black International. And our main event is a review of, our final movie of 2018, Mary Poppins Returns.
ONversations are back! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carl-munson/message
Oh man. I have a tummy ache. I may have baked cookies. Shortbread, to be more accurate. And I may have eaten more than my fair share. I'm really not a chef, a baker or a candlestick maker - which if you've been paying attention to my Year of Fun adventures, you'll know. But I've had this bizarre and persistent craving for shortbread recently - buttery, crumbly, preferably warm, shortbread. And each time I attempt to satisfy that craving, I get left a bit disappointed. Without giving you my full food critic reviews on the shortbread I've tried, I'll just summarise that store-bought shortbread, the kind that comes in a packet and is filled with preservatives and all sorts of shite, is... below average. I even tried some festive flavoured ones from Tescos, and they were barely tolerable. I choked them down. I will say that the shortbread in Pret a Manger is one of the finest you can get that isn't homemade, so props to Pret. But I wasn't prepared to make a bulk purchase from the coffee shop chain, in order to get my fix on the daily. So... that leaves me with baking my own. And this was actually in my original list of things to do on my Year of Fun, I've just delayed it because I'm such a baking fail. I just can't seem to follow instructions. And this was no different. I found a recipe online that involved just 3 (technically 4, but of course I left out the vanilla essence because... does anyone ever really notice the vanilla?) and they also fit my low-sugar, low-gluten diet. This may be the first - and the last - time I ever stick a recipe on the blog, but here I go. 250g almond flour 85g butter (salted - use Kerry Gold!) 100g erythritol Makes 6 big-ass shortbread cookies. I was meant to 'cream' the butter and sugar substitute together before adding the almond flour, but that takes either a power mixer or elbow grease, neither of which I have. So I used my fingers. What? It totally worked AND was super therapeutic. I think that's the part of baking that appeals to me most: the hands on bit. The getting slightly messy bit. The lick your fingers, lick the bowl bit. The don't-think-about-the-washing-up bit. And that was it. Pre-heat oven to 175 degrees C. Bake for 15 mins, depending on how thick you made 'em. Get your kettle ready for a nice pot of tea for when they're ready. My patience was really tested here as they come out of the oven too soft (and scalding) to handle, so I had another good 15 minutes wait to tuck in. But OH how good they are. Fun rating: 7.5/10 I'd give it a higher score, but my mild tummy ache is telling me to be honest. Next time I do this I'll pace myself. POWERED BY PATREON This podcast is made possible only by means of my generous supporters on Patreon. Thank you! Supporting this project gets you lots of goodies, including a copy of my soon-to-be-released BOOK, The Creative Introvert: How to Live a Life You Love on Your Terms, monthly Masterclasses and much more. Hitting milestones also funds future projects, and ideas guided by you, my supporters. Become a supporter
This week, we discuss what it would be like to start a cult in the field behind a Tescos, we ask who would win in a battle of wits between Pete Wentz and Abraham Lincoln, and we finally answer the age old question: "What is the most outrageous power move in American political history?"
Jim Cregan joins me to talk about how he went from British building site to Australia and back again. In the process he launched his own brand of Iced Coffee having not been able to find it in the UK on his return from OZ. You can now get Jimmysicedcoffee in Tescos, Sainsbuys, Waitrose, Selfridges and even in Animal's clothing shops. We talk brand building through University tastings, his Ride Club, Cinema Club and festivals. Let's StartUp!
A conversation with singer Jamie Miller, Jamie is 20 years old and was a contestant on "The X Factor" and "The Voice". Listen to his story how he went from working in Tescos to moving to LA. A podcast bringing you inside the minds of the industry professionals and showing you the ins and outs of entertainment. Hosted by Kane Silver Check out Level Up Dance Academy bringing you premium dance training and education helping dancers reach their full potential and to Level Up! Instagram @theinsandouts_ @mrballchange @jamiemillmusic @levelupdanceacademy
A conversation with singer Jamie Miller, Jamie is 20 years old and was a contestant on "The X Factor" and "The Voice". Listen to his story how he went from working in Tescos to moving to LA. A podcast bringing you inside the minds of the industry professionals and showing you the ins and outs of entertainment. Hosted by Kane Silver Check out Level Up Dance Academy bringing you premium dance training and education helping dancers reach their full potential and to Level Up! Instagram @theinsandouts_ @mrballchange @jamiemillmusic @levelupdanceacademy
You are an amazing pet pro who offers and amazing service so why don't you have more clients? Well Dom has the answer which he will share with your while he is serving 'Suki' tea and cake to Alex the video guy. He also tells the story of the excellent customer service he experienced on a recent trip to the lakes and why a heartbreaking trip to Tescos caused him to start razor blade subscription, AND how this can help you get more awesome clients in your pet business.. For more pet business marketing tip and advice check out Dom's Pet Business Bible 'Walk Yourself Wealthy: The quick, easy and no BS guide to transform your passion for pooches into an insanely profitable and fun dog walking empire.'
In this Panti monologue Panti shares her coming of age story around 'The Pope's Visit' and touches on the theme of what we believe in and what faith means to us. In this episode, her guests in her chamber are novelist John Boyne, (author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), Amanullah De Sondy, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Islam University College Cork, Sligo based Illustrator Annie West, singer Hozier and the actor and singer Bronagh Gallagher. Bronagh offers a song to the cabaret with Bronagh performing ‘Hand on my Heart’ from her new album and Hozier sings his song ‘To Be Alone.’ Pantisocracy Monologue Episode 6 “The Pope’s Visit” I think sometimes when people look at me, this big painted ‘lady’, they find it hard to imagine that I came from anywhere. They imagine that I just appeared, fully formed, like the Good Witch Glinda from her bubble. But of course I am from somewhere. I’m from a small town in Mayo called Ballinrobe. Ballinrobe is your typical, Irish, country market town. It has a couple of streets, a church, a Town Hall and huge excitement when Tescos came to town. And even though it now has a Tescos, and a black family, it hasn’t really changed much since I was growing up there, a young boy called Rory, in the 1970’s. Growing up in Ballinrobe, the much loved son of the local vet and his well respected wife, surrounded by five noisy brothers and sisters, countless animals, it was an idyllic upbringing: easy, free, fun. There wasn’t a lot to rebel against to be honest. But... In 1979, I started to think for myself. That was the year the Pope came to Ireland, and when he did, there were no dissenting voices. Or if there were, I was too young to hear them. This was going to be the greatest thing that has ever happened to Ireland – the Pope himself, this huge holy celebrity, was coming to Ireland and nothing would be the same again. Everyone was on board - even I was on board. After all, I was already putting my latent drag tendencies to work as Ballinrobe’s pre-eminent altar (lady) boy. But even my enthusiasm, driven as it was really by the perceived glamour of the occasion, paled into insignificance beside my mother’s Papal devotion. For days beforehand, our house, like every other house in Ballinrobe, was a hive of activity and nervous excitement, my mother a sandwich making tweedy blur, and at the crack of dawn on the big day she piled the Volkswagen high with egg sandwiches, brown bread, flasks of tea, Pope stools, and giddy children and drove to the next town, Claremorris, where we parked in a field. We then boarded shuttle busses to the site at Knock and in the grey early morning light it was a sight to behold – hundreds of thousands of damp pilgrims muttering their bovine devotions, stretched out across fields, ironically vacated by their actual bovine residents for the glorious occasion. We set up camp, miles from the stage, among nodding nuns, stressed mothers, praying shop-keepers, and farmers drinking cold tea from TK lemonade bottles, as an interminable rosary was broadcast over the tannoy system. By the time the Pope arrived it already felt like we’d been at a mass for days on end, but now an actual mass did start, and it was longer and more boring than any mass I’d ever been to in my twelve years. But during the mass I looked around me – and I had an epiphany of sorts. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t feel any wonder, any joy. I felt afraid. There was nothing spiritual or divine about this event; this was a cult. A cult of personality and hype. A colony of drones; a multicellular organism made up of unicellular minds. A wilful refusal to see with their own eyes. A switching off of all critical faculties. And if I’d had the courage I would have stood up and screamed, “The Pope has no clothes!” I didn’t become an atheist that day – that would be a longer process – but I took the first step... and became a Protestant. When the mass ended, the excitement was palpable, because this was wh...
E.21 To My Left Safe Word : Tescos by To My Left (Insert Topic)
Jim Cregan joins me to talk about how he went from British building site to Australia and back again. In the process launching his own brand of Iced Coffee after not being able to find it in the UK when he came back from OZ. You can now get Jimmysicedcoffee in Tescos, Sainsbuys, Waitrose, Selfridges and even in Animal's clothing shops. We talk brand building through University tastings, his Ride Club, Cinema Club and festivals. Also on todays show are sisters and Virgin StartUp ambassadors Michaela and Lois Wilson, who talk about their edible art business, Saint Aymes. We talk building a brand that transcends genres - whilst I eat their amazing chocolate that really does look too good to eat...
Clicks And Leads | For Entrepreneurs | Digital Marketing | Success Thinking | Being A Digital Nomad
We all have silly fears but are you aware of yours and that they may be holding you back from success? Nicola reveals her silly fears about becoming a digital nomad and shares what happened when she got to Greece, albeit by painting herself into a corner. She also remembers why she's never broadcast from Pefko Taverna. The bloopers at the end are particularly good on this one - starring a wasp, a large buzzy beetle and some scaffolders. Clicks And Leads is a "tongue in cheek" digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross. You can also subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes. Some of the insights shared in this week's Vzine... OK, what I want to talk to you today about is fear and you know, the whole Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway thing. Well I've got more fears than most. I never realized it, but I am quite an anxious person, it turns out from my great, long list of things I was afraid about. Before we came out here, I was afraid of, in no particular order, insects, quite afraid of insects, don't like spiders at all, not very keen on other things either, that fly about. I can just about cope with the ones that creep along the floor. We had no idea about Mani Worms though. Mani worms turn out to be persistent little buggers, that go up the walls and along the floor and if you tread on one in the middle of the night, it makes an almighty stink. They can't hurt you though. I was afraid of having no car. I was so worried about that, I wanted to drive across Europe to bring my car out here, because I didn't want to be without a car. As it turned out, it's a really good thing to be without a car, 'cause it forces you to walk up and down and the thing we didn't realize before we got here was that the local supermarket, Katarina's, they have a gentleman in the white van, they're very happy to take you home after you've done a big load of shopping and they will drop you at your door. You can't see Tescos doing that, can you? But it means that you don't have to have a car, because you can walk to the supermarket, do your shopping and get transported home, albeit in the back of a van with a dog protection grill on , so I get to sit in the front and Sarah sits on the little fake tree stump in the back, it's very funny. I was afraid of the dark, but we got round that one too. It is pretty dark, to be fair, and when you wake up in a room, where there's no, no light at all, because you're out in the middle of the olive groves. But one of my neighbours heard that I was having a bit of a hard time with it and she dropped in a nightlight. She just bought me one in the shop and it was a nice blue kind of light, so it makes you not so... it doesn't wake you up so much, when you get up to go to the loo in the night. I was very concerned about sleeping downstairs, because of the serial killers. Everybody knows there's a lot of them in the Mani, almost as many as in Shoreham (my family think I'm absolutely bonkers), but I was concerned about sleeping with the window open. But not now I know about the Serial Killer Stones. Basically, everyone's got stones on their windowsill, which means that if anyone tries to push the window open in the middle of the night, a stone drops on the floor and wakes you up pretty sharpish, because it makes a very loud noise. So, now I'm utilizing the serial killer stones and I'm feeling absolutely fine about sleeping with the window open now. Also, what else was I worried about before moving to Greece? Giving up everything, selling everything, giving up the house, giving up, you know, the stable base, that I perceived it was. I was particularly concerned about giving up the cutlery. The things you cling onto.... But all of these fears were completely groundless. Yes, we've had the odd insect or two. Yes, I've had to wrestle with the odd spider coming in, I've had to cope with super large mosquitoes on occasion, except they weren't,
This week on the Moonbase 2 Mikey joins Andy again but unfortunately its that time of year again were news is super spars but there are a few tid bits here and there such as more images and info on statues from Prime 1 Studios G1 Megatron and XM Studios Optimus Prime. There's also info that Titans Return Fortress Maximus is in the UK and can be for at Tescos and Earth wars app is getting combiners in it finally. Also the other garbage the 2 lads have done over the week like Mikeys thoughts on Dr Strange and Andy plays Mordheim: City of the Damned!
In this week’s episode of the Business Finance Bulletin finally some good news on late payment with the announcement from Tescos of a revision in its payment terms with their small suppliers. Could this be a start of a trend of big businesses listening to concerns around late payment? Turning to the alternative finance scene news from single invoice discounter Platform Black on reaching a new milestone in terms of finance raised for growing businesses. Have you ever had a Notice to Close your bank account? It can happen and Rob explains what you can do about it. With the government keen to ensure finance companies are lending there’s news of a line of funding being granted by the British Business Bank to leasing and asset finance provider Hitachi Capital. And in the Business Finance Tip of the Week a clip from a live seminar in which Rob shares his thoughts on the importance of knowing what your credit report reveals about you.
Communism, capitalism; I just spent a week in Hungary, where anyone in their 50s has spent more or less equal parts of their life under each system and what many of those people find surprising now is just how little has changed. As one resident of Budapest, exclaimed with a sigh: “Twenty five years after the transition, the one thing we didn't expect was for so much to be the same.” It's a cautionary tale for those in the US who talk about creating a “new” economy. Just what's really new about it? In the late 1980s, my Budapest friend and her colleagues believed they were about to make a new world. To some extent they did; they travel more freely now and can start their own businesses. With Western encouragement, Hungary's state owned companies were mostly privatized, its cooperative farms split up. But instead of redistributing assets into more hands, Hungary's merely passed from one, one-percent to another. Today Starbucks, McDonalds and Tescos are a common sight on Budapest's broad boulevards but so are homeless people, beggars and the unemployed. Eurostat, a data firm, reports that more than a quarter of Hungarians were living in extreme poverty last year. And the old practice continues of playing politics with people's needs Today's power elite dispense shrinking benefits and scarce public jobs just as the old regime passed out perks and favors to their allies. To explain the pain, right-wing demagogues blame familiar targets: among them, gypsies, queers and Jews. In his State of the Union Address this year, Prime Minister Viktor Orban attacked immigrants, foreigners and multiculturalism (as well as communism) and called for a higher birth rate for Hungarians. Did Hungarians hope for more? For sure, and gradually they're figuring out how to get it. As I left, hundreds were in the streets protesting corruption. But the big picture is that while ownership in their new economy has shifted from public to private hands, the question they have to grapple with now, is what's the economy for? For community or control? You can watch my interview with Judy Wicks co-founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and former owner of Philadelphia's White Dog café, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.
Director Sue Womersley and performer Scott Kentell introduce Tuesday at Tescos, showing in Replay Festival 2015.
We have had some horrific storms … mostly down south…poor folk flooded out as the torrential rain burst river banks…I don’t know how these people can get insurance..let alone sell up. We haven’t had it too bad here…but I went on line to insure my house and one on the questions was “do you live within half a mile from a river…if so we wont insure you”…bad news. The damage at New Brighton after the recent high tides has been sorted…I went down there on my bike on Xmas morning (bit of pre dinner exercise) …there weren’t many takers…probably because it was very cold…but everything looks O.K…..until the next high tide and 60mph gale. What I will NEVER understand is the mass panic to the build up to ONE day….I went into TESCOS to buy a jack plug (£2.50)…I couldn’t get out…there were raving loonies at the checkout with trolleys piled to the ceiling….it’s like a disease…and as for the boxing day sales….unbelievable…we are a sad lot really. 4.I don’t gig a lot these days…so I can relax up to Xmas without worrying about getting a cold or damaging my fingers etc….so I watched a bit of tele…oh dear…the BBC put on a three hour drama about the Great Train Robbery….same old stuff…we KNOW the story !...we’ve seen it a hundred times before !!...so why waste our licence fee (£145) on old hat?...fortunately I spent Xmas day at my lad’s house so I was spared the television…and as for the variety shows words fail me….I’m thinking of going back on the road. I have just completed a DVD about the history of my birthplace..Wallasey…I did all the filming throughout our lovely summer and recently finished the music and narration (which takes a long time)…I enjoy making these local DVDs because you learn a lot of things you didn’t know….for example The Guide Dogs For The Blind was founded in Wallasey in 1930 and there is a statue of a dog outside The Floral Pavilion commemorating this (I must have walked past it a hundred times)…also the Stableford system of scoring in golf was invented in Wallasey Golf Club in 1930 by a doctor Frank Stableford….plus a long list of powerful men from the early 1900s who were involved in shipping and the slave trade……all good stuff…..I intend to distribute the DVD through my website to those who know the area…it has limited appeal but ex pats will definitely enjoy it.
We have had some horrific storms … mostly down south…poor folk flooded out as the torrential rain burst river banks…I don’t know how these people can get insurance..let alone sell up. We haven’t had it too bad here…but I went on line to insure my house and one on the questions was “do you live within half a mile from a river…if so we wont insure you”…bad news. The damage at New Brighton after the recent high tides has been sorted…I went down there on my bike on Xmas morning (bit of pre dinner exercise) …there weren’t many takers…probably because it was very cold…but everything looks O.K…..until the next high tide and 60mph gale. What I will NEVER understand is the mass panic to the build up to ONE day….I went into TESCOS to buy a jack plug (£2.50)…I couldn’t get out…there were raving loonies at the checkout with trolleys piled to the ceiling….it’s like a disease…and as for the boxing day sales….unbelievable…we are a sad lot really. 4.I don’t gig a lot these days…so I can relax up to Xmas without worrying about getting a cold or damaging my fingers etc….so I watched a bit of tele…oh dear…the BBC put on a three hour drama about the Great Train Robbery….same old stuff…we KNOW the story !...we’ve seen it a hundred times before !!...so why waste our licence fee (£145) on old hat?...fortunately I spent Xmas day at my lad’s house so I was spared the television…and as for the variety shows words fail me….I’m thinking of going back on the road. I have just completed a DVD about the history of my birthplace..Wallasey…I did all the filming throughout our lovely summer and recently finished the music and narration (which takes a long time)…I enjoy making these local DVDs because you learn a lot of things you didn’t know….for example The Guide Dogs For The Blind was founded in Wallasey in 1930 and there is a statue of a dog outside The Floral Pavilion commemorating this (I must have walked past it a hundred times)…also the Stableford system of scoring in golf was invented in Wallasey Golf Club in 1930 by a doctor Frank Stableford….plus a long list of powerful men from the early 1900s who were involved in shipping and the slave trade……all good stuff…..I intend to distribute the DVD through my website to those who know the area…it has limited appeal but ex pats will definitely enjoy it.
What are we like in the UK?…We have had two weeks of a heatwave …NOW they are issuing health warnings…”people could DIE!! In this unbearable heat!!!”….employees are threatening to walk out of the workplace if the temperature gets to 30 degrees………a month ago we were all complaining about the COLD and worrying about DROWNING with the floods…..I’m waiting for the “Drought Alert” which will happen any time now. I must say it certainly brings out some strange sights on the streets…not pretty ones. Our fundraising organisation The Cheshire Cats gave £500 to a local kids charity and our “chairman” was invited by the charity to join them on their invite to Prince Charles’s house…This included a tour around the gardens and a two course meal….for which you had to pay 32 quid….this plus the train fare and suit hire obviously put him off…...reminded me of my friend Monty Lister being invited to the Queen’s garden party at the Palace…..it bucketed down so Liz and Phil vanished back indoors and left the 3000 guests to brave the blizzard in the Palace Grounds…before returning home on the train soaked to the skin….er…don’t think ... The education system is being changed AGAIN by you-know-who…..11 year olds will now be graded form 1 – 6…and compared to other schoolkids around the country…can’t see the point…the teachers are saying that it will lower the kids confidence and the government are saying it gives the parents a better insight…I don’t know why the MP’s who have NEVER taught just leave it to the teachers who KNOW what they are doing. There was a programme on the tele about being ripped off on foreign holidays….Car hire was one subject whereby you think you have paid in advance for a car but when you go to pick it up there are allsorts of added extras…ie no refund on returned petrol…extra for damage insurance etc…one woman paid an extra 120 euros for a weeks car hire. Also it went on about cruises…whereby when you buy a drink there is service charge and VAT added…and if you travel as a single person you get well and truly ripped off….but that is the way of the world…and what can you do?.....I recently bought some “Extra Long Life Batteries” from TESCOS..their own brand….lasted a couple of weeks in my radio…I shall be notifying the customer services and telling them where to stick their batteries very soon. We have had the final rehearsal for the James Burton Show this weekend…This show is to celebrate 40 years since the “Aloha from Hawaii” which featured Elvis Presley….James backed Elvis on that show but he was also Ricky Nelson’s guitarist in the 50’s and early 60’s which is what I’ll be doing….I’m singing 5 Ricky Nelson hits and Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as JB has also backed him….the band are really good and we all know each other so we should have a good time.
What are we like in the UK?…We have had two weeks of a heatwave …NOW they are issuing health warnings…”people could DIE!! In this unbearable heat!!!”….employees are threatening to walk out of the workplace if the temperature gets to 30 degrees………a month ago we were all complaining about the COLD and worrying about DROWNING with the floods…..I’m waiting for the “Drought Alert” which will happen any time now. I must say it certainly brings out some strange sights on the streets…not pretty ones. Our fundraising organisation The Cheshire Cats gave £500 to a local kids charity and our “chairman” was invited by the charity to join them on their invite to Prince Charles’s house…This included a tour around the gardens and a two course meal….for which you had to pay 32 quid….this plus the train fare and suit hire obviously put him off…...reminded me of my friend Monty Lister being invited to the Queen’s garden party at the Palace…..it bucketed down so Liz and Phil vanished back indoors and left the 3000 guests to brave the blizzard in the Palace Grounds…before returning home on the train soaked to the skin….er…don’t think ... The education system is being changed AGAIN by you-know-who…..11 year olds will now be graded form 1 – 6…and compared to other schoolkids around the country…can’t see the point…the teachers are saying that it will lower the kids confidence and the government are saying it gives the parents a better insight…I don’t know why the MP’s who have NEVER taught just leave it to the teachers who KNOW what they are doing. There was a programme on the tele about being ripped off on foreign holidays….Car hire was one subject whereby you think you have paid in advance for a car but when you go to pick it up there are allsorts of added extras…ie no refund on returned petrol…extra for damage insurance etc…one woman paid an extra 120 euros for a weeks car hire. Also it went on about cruises…whereby when you buy a drink there is service charge and VAT added…and if you travel as a single person you get well and truly ripped off….but that is the way of the world…and what can you do?.....I recently bought some “Extra Long Life Batteries” from TESCOS..their own brand….lasted a couple of weeks in my radio…I shall be notifying the customer services and telling them where to stick their batteries very soon. We have had the final rehearsal for the James Burton Show this weekend…This show is to celebrate 40 years since the “Aloha from Hawaii” which featured Elvis Presley….James backed Elvis on that show but he was also Ricky Nelson’s guitarist in the 50’s and early 60’s which is what I’ll be doing….I’m singing 5 Ricky Nelson hits and Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as JB has also backed him….the band are really good and we all know each other so we should have a good time.
Here's Don's take on the week in the UK..... The price of fuel is under investigation in the UK with the big boys being accused of price fixing on oil…..we all know already that we are being ripped off as companies like Sainsburys and Tescos offer up to 12p off a litre when you spend a certain amount in their stores so they are obviously making a tidy profit to begin with….apparently the offices of the big oil companies have been raided and evidence gathered…this is after the Office of Fair Trading looked into the situation and found nothing wrong……a pointless organisation with no doubt highly paid staff…they are about as useful as a sponge hammer…. It’s all getting a bit out of hand with all these “researches”…the latest one is by The Institute of Economic Evironment ..or something…who have stated that their “research” has revealed that people who stay at work and don’t retire are healthier and happier than those who don’t…...Don wonders how much that cost…."I remember back in the day when I played squash…some geek who was a “Sports Scientist” clipped a load of electrical things on one of the lads and after his “research” after the game came to the conclusion that you are tireder after 5 sets than you are after three…I never went to Uni but I think I could have told him that before he started." …..someone has been trampled to death by a bunch of cows….apparently they were walking through a field with their dog and the cows attacked ….this is very tragic but of course the media are straight on to this…and during a phone in on the radio there were all sorts of similar tragedies with everyone jumping on the bandwagon….”cows forming semi circles and attacking”….”people getting chased by angry stampeding herds”……I am a walker and spend a lot of time hiking through fields of cows…if they have calves you give them a wide berth…which is obvious…and if you have a dog you give a bit of thought before disturbing a bunch of animals who wish to protect their young…..the nation are now programmed to think all cows are KILLERS…..the actual statistics are 10 people have been subject to fatal injuries from cows….in the last DECADE.….but I suppose it will make people think and act responsibly in the countryside…as well as being paranoid about cows. The government are trying to alter the law to make criminals who kill a policeman to remain in jail until the end of their days…this is due to the two policewomen who were recently murdered by a gunman while on a routine call out….whereas I totally agree with this I still think the stone cell and bread and water is the answer………I remember when killing a cop was a hanging offence….but they once got it wrong and hung the wrong bloke…hence it’s abolishment. ... on a lighter note….I have just spent a few days in Anglesey and have slowly come to the conclusion that the Welsh Tourist Board definitely need serious help….I visited Llanfair P.G. and had a wander around Pringles which is on the car park of the station with the longest name….I have never seen such a load of overpriced rubbish….people were arriving by the coachload and wandering around with blank looks on their faces buying NOTHING…..twacky overpriced clothes and tacky overpriced souvenirs…the place could be a goldmine if anyone had ANY idea……I also went to Caernarfon which consists of a wonderful picturesque famous castle and waterfront with a load of run down shops behind it….I just don’t get it…they should visit Chester or Shrewsbury and see how it’s done….if Llanfair P.G. was in Vegas it would bring in millions.
Here's Don's take on the week in the UK..... The price of fuel is under investigation in the UK with the big boys being accused of price fixing on oil…..we all know already that we are being ripped off as companies like Sainsburys and Tescos offer up to 12p off a litre when you spend a certain amount in their stores so they are obviously making a tidy profit to begin with….apparently the offices of the big oil companies have been raided and evidence gathered…this is after the Office of Fair Trading looked into the situation and found nothing wrong……a pointless organisation with no doubt highly paid staff…they are about as useful as a sponge hammer…. It’s all getting a bit out of hand with all these “researches”…the latest one is by The Institute of Economic Evironment ..or something…who have stated that their “research” has revealed that people who stay at work and don’t retire are healthier and happier than those who don’t…...Don wonders how much that cost…."I remember back in the day when I played squash…some geek who was a “Sports Scientist” clipped a load of electrical things on one of the lads and after his “research” after the game came to the conclusion that you are tireder after 5 sets than you are after three…I never went to Uni but I think I could have told him that before he started." …..someone has been trampled to death by a bunch of cows….apparently they were walking through a field with their dog and the cows attacked ….this is very tragic but of course the media are straight on to this…and during a phone in on the radio there were all sorts of similar tragedies with everyone jumping on the bandwagon….”cows forming semi circles and attacking”….”people getting chased by angry stampeding herds”……I am a walker and spend a lot of time hiking through fields of cows…if they have calves you give them a wide berth…which is obvious…and if you have a dog you give a bit of thought before disturbing a bunch of animals who wish to protect their young…..the nation are now programmed to think all cows are KILLERS…..the actual statistics are 10 people have been subject to fatal injuries from cows….in the last DECADE.….but I suppose it will make people think and act responsibly in the countryside…as well as being paranoid about cows. The government are trying to alter the law to make criminals who kill a policeman to remain in jail until the end of their days…this is due to the two policewomen who were recently murdered by a gunman while on a routine call out….whereas I totally agree with this I still think the stone cell and bread and water is the answer………I remember when killing a cop was a hanging offence….but they once got it wrong and hung the wrong bloke…hence it’s abolishment. ... on a lighter note….I have just spent a few days in Anglesey and have slowly come to the conclusion that the Welsh Tourist Board definitely need serious help….I visited Llanfair P.G. and had a wander around Pringles which is on the car park of the station with the longest name….I have never seen such a load of overpriced rubbish….people were arriving by the coachload and wandering around with blank looks on their faces buying NOTHING…..twacky overpriced clothes and tacky overpriced souvenirs…the place could be a goldmine if anyone had ANY idea……I also went to Caernarfon which consists of a wonderful picturesque famous castle and waterfront with a load of run down shops behind it….I just don’t get it…they should visit Chester or Shrewsbury and see how it’s done….if Llanfair P.G. was in Vegas it would bring in millions.
In this podcast I'm interviewing respected coach and business trainer Richard Nugent. Richard works with some high profile organisations such as Tescos and Merlin (Alton Towers) in all areas of their business, working to optimise their systems and processes. He also works with professional footballers and athletes on the mental side of their game through his consultancy Success in Football. In this fascinating call we covered the following areas: What is the Richard Nugent Brand and how does this differentiate from the competition? 21 and success in football? How does work in sport versus business differ and are there any common principles that can be applied? What challenges does he face in his clients and how he overcomes those challenges What advice would he give to up and coming business owners/entrepreneurs looking to build a personal or business brand What are the Common Traits for success in high performance people? Where can people find him and read more about his work
Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/jeffjapers/tescos Lyrics: http://jeffjapers.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/tescos.pdf Video: http://youtu.be/9PETitQYvug www.jeffjapers.co.uk
Euro Championship 2012 becomes DLC for FIFA 12, Raspberry Pi distribution blocked by lack of CE mark, former Irish GAME employees have sit in over lack of redundancy pay, GAME rescued by OpCapita, ShopTo removes GAME Reward Card scheme, Sainburys and Tescos up their game with video game retail and Good Old Games becomes GOG.comRunning time: 00:05:39
Oscar builds an Ark, Disneyland gang wars, words on the recession and how to survive a zombie attack at Tescos.
This week: how to protect your property against flood damage. Is the bottom falling out of the buy-to-let market? Plus divorce at the supermarket - is there anything that Tescos won't sell? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.