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

This sounds like my dream come true. A giant treasure hunt - in a superbly good cause. Bring it on!

I’m image hunting for a man with a beard (bizarrely) in an office. And Getty Images threw up this:

Emperor Nicolas II in his palace in St Petersburg in 1914. All of 4 years before he was shot to death with wife and kids in the woods outside - if my memory serves me rightly - Ekaterinburg. How cultured Getty has become.

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

The Little Prince.

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

Planet Leith, your one stop shop for snobby cards!

Only in Leith!

Despite a late finish the night before for Batter of the Bands, Messrs Thorne, Ireland, Nicholson, Scott, Grenfell and Davies made the early trip to Glasgow full of confidence and bacon rolls. After an hour or so in make-up, form-filling and shirt-ironing the team, minus Davies who was warming the bench, swaggered onto set to meet Dermot and the heads of egg.

From then on, it moved into slick BBC production mode. There was no wasting of tax payers money here. And before you could say CJ de Mooi, the boys were in a taxi to the station, ready to take on an afternoon of World cu..sorry work.

But did anyone whip Daphne? Did anyone need 7 takes just to do their intro? Did anyone hand in their notice on Monday?

I’m sure you want to know how they got on. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait until summer 2011 when it goes on air.

There are odd bits of chat flying about on the subject of what proper trend seekers might call “fashionable austerity” or maybe I’ve just made this term up. But you know the sort of thing I mean - vintage or customised old clothes as cool, sprucing up old furniture to give it new life, of course carrying your canvas bag with you at all times rather than taking dirty wasteful plastic bags from supermarkets and such like.

Some commentators endeavour to see a return to the ethics of the great wars which seems a bit of an over-optimistic reaction. But then I have just finished reading a rather superb novel called The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Littell) which in 1,000 glorious pages charts the wartime experiences of an SS officer. It’s a cracking read if you have the patience. The point being that fashionable austerity wasn’t really a feature of the normal person’s experiences in the second world war. It was more about getting by.

But I’m rambling. The point is, there’s a lovely ad in today’s Metro, courtesy of Sainsbury’s for their nectar card, which in the face of yesterday’s austere budget, is brilliantly topical.

Childish but hooray for Costa!

Great pic / comment on blipfoto about a poor discarded ’see me’ leaflet. Found its way to them via the magic of their twitter feed which is also worth following.

Keep it up, Mandi!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn about what you feel about your identity

And respect your relationships

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

She finished with a lovely thought:

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

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

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

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

Today goes horticultural. Lovely stuff.