Extra Salt & Sauce

There's a cracking little coffee / sandwich shop on the opposite corner of the street to our offices called The Clock. And there's a little cohort of Leithers who fetch their morning lattes (and often noontime lattes) from the aforementioned place.

But this week, The Clock has been sadly neglected. Despite the beautiful just-back-from-Italy tan of the man that owns the place, my fellow latte buyers have been largely on holiday. Brian and Ian Hartley, two of the loveliest account directors you could hope to meet, are sunning themselves in York and Rome respectively. Surely the most charming man in advertising, Mr Brooke, is trying to sun himself on Mull as we speak. And so I'm left with Sir Alan as coffee shop chum. Lean conversational days.

At least they do good coffee.

Lovely new website from Urban Splash for their latest Leeds-based apartments. Following on from their Manchester tower blocks named after suffragettes and Chimney Pot Park in Salford, there's no place like gnome uses a bunch of customised cheeky little chaps to promote the different features of the new development. They're putting up a shed in the city centre to pre-promote the development and promising to scatter the city with 'real live' gnomes to bring the premise to life. More marvellously creative work from the regeneration specialists.

Sir Alan was down in London recently and snapped a few photos of our Sol work looking sunny and sultry in the underground.

Weather that we apparently can only dream of up here in Scotland.

In the short period between the ink drying on the sponsorship contract and the start of the season, Leith and Blonde have been working on materials to promote IRN-BRU's sponsorship of the Scottish Football League.

So far this has involved the development of a season calendar in which football is given the IRN-BRU poster treatment, and a new PHENOMENAL FOOTY website.

The site is effectively a template to hold some really interesting interactive and User-Generated content that will be added as the season progresses. It has been soft-launched, with very little active promotion so far, but is already generating significant traffic as links are posted on the official club websites and on various fan forums.

And Leith content is already being adopted to add colour to some of these places. Click on the thumbnail to read the first line of copy that this fan has written about Arbroath's first game of the season.

Mariapia and I are having a cake sale today to raise money for orphans.

The 4th floor meeting room is currently full to the brim of cakes.

So if you happen to be passing the Shore today, do pop in for a muffin, delicious cookie or various assorted chocolate, apple, coca cola, carrot cakes.

But be quick. I've never seen so many guzzling gannets in one meeting room.

So today was the day of the great cake bake. And I haven't seen such excitement in the 4th floor meeting room for a long time.

More or less as the clock struck 11am - the allotted eating time - people began streaming onto our floor. And even the thinnest of girls seemed to manage to put away a very considerable amount of cakes. Many sugar induced headaches were filling the corridors by lunchtime.

Matthew wisely observed that the married were able to eat so many cakes as they no longer needed to care about their weight. Unlike the spinsters amongst us who limited their intake to a simple piece of Paul's apple cake, of Sarah's coca-cola chocolate cake and one of Mark's beetroot (organic veg obviously being an integral part of any cake bake). Matthew was even more restrained, sticking to the delicious biscuit-coated marshmallows.

We'd raised about £100 by lunchtime. Haven't counted all the loose change yet. And have just delivered the remainder of the wealth of cakes to the homeless of Leith.

I think we should save the orphans more often.

£154.85 was gathered from the sale of cakes. Good work, bakers of Leith!

It's the most expensive show on the Fringe, but is worth every penny of it. The title means brute force and from the moment it started it felt just like that. Music pounds, lights flash and water is sprayed into the air. A man runs endlessly on a travelator, defying bullets and crashing through brick walls made of cardboard. The best bit is the young women throwing themselves across the transparent swimming pool, which then is gently lowered towards you, but they remain just out of reach. The visual ideas throughout are spectacular, worth experiencing. Loved it. Sir Alan.

We've produced a lot of work for the lovely clients at Spurs for sometime, from the new membership scheme 'One Hotspur' through to our work on their 125th Anniversary branding. This all came from the original rebranding work that Sir Alan did whilst at another agency. 'One Hotspur' came from the positioning, that in a world full of Uniteds, Citys and Rovers there is only one Hotspur. Clever words from Neil Taylor at www.thewriter.co.uk

The new mark has obviously gone live this season, as Aaron Lennon shows, courtesy of Simon Mooney's cracking image. (http://www.mooney-photo.co.uk/ All images copyright.)

One of my clients, the EDI Group, have offices above Hunter Square in Edinburgh. For those that don't know the location, it's set slightly back from the Royal Mile which of course is currently awash with fringe performers of varying degrees of competence. And in fact, the precinct area directly in front of their offices becomes an inpromptu performing space.

Wednesday's monthly meeting began as a bunch of (peaceful) fan dancers took to this spontaneous stage so the studious atmosphere of the meeting was only disturbed when the throngs of people who had collected to watch decided to applaud them at the end of their routine. We weren't so lucky with the next act - some kind of children's Japanese choir. And as one of the clients bravely struggled through explaining a 3 page epic colour-coded spreadsheet to the accompaniment of energetic caterwauling, it all eventually proved too much for poor Becky and after several exasperated looks, Jim leapt up and shut the window, shutting out the lively festival soundtrack.

I feel sure that this variety and energy should be inspiring but of course in certain circumstances - as anyone who's ever tried to walk up the Royal Mile during these 3 weeks of August in a hurry will surely testify - it is only mildly irritating. Sour puss rant of the day over.

For the Stagecoach shoot done with Farm we filled up a bus with crashtest dummies and drove it around the countryside. At one spot the coach stopped and a random punter got on. And then got off (fairly quickly)

Recently we visited the new Barr's factory in Cumbernauld. The place was vast and extremely high tech with robots everywhere.

On a recent trip to the Lake District for an extremely enjoyable away day our master of planning ceremonies, Professor Amers, lost his coolant.

Alongside fetching my morning coffee from The Clock, once a week I like to fankle around in the 4th floor kitchen cleaning out Tiger, the planning fish.

Today was one such morning. A nice bit of variety on the to do list. But do tell Sir Alan if you see him, that a fish is for life and not just for Christmas...

A former England footballer Geoff Thomas was fit and in his prime when he suddenly discovered he had leukaemia, he was given three years to live but thanks to amazing medical care and support, he is still alive. Not only that he is now dedicated to raising money for the research that he believes saved his life and one of the things he's just completed is a charity tour de france ride. It's an amazing feat. We gladly helped Geoff in a very small way by creating a new site for him with our colleagues at Blonde as well as the branding for his foundation. Find out more and if you can, spare a few pennies for a very worthy cause and an inspirational man. www.geoff-thomas.com

Agency summer party yesterday. Brilliantly recreating the IRN-BRU summer ad, a pack of Leith Agency Goths took to the beach with a session in the amusement arcades closely followed by bouts of sumo wrestling, lashings of lager and copious quantities of black eyeliner.

The beachside frolics concluded with a gothic game of volleyball as the sun sunk behind the sea.

And then the Goths retired to more lively drinking establishments in the city centre.

Huge thanks to Terry and Alison for their exceptionally kind hospitality (and exceptionally delicious buffet) at the Dalriada on the seafront in Joppa. And to the patient owner of Revolution who fed us vodka for the remainder of the night.

Hard to know whether the smudgy black eyes drifting round the agency today are the result of left-over eye make-up or too much vodka and too little sleep.

Prize of the night should go to Richard Thomson for a rather fabulous effort.

With the very lovely Katie Connelly as a close second.

But in fact, small medals are probably deserving all round for tremendous costumed enthusiasm. Hats off to you all for making it a truly Gothic summer holiday.