Made in Leith – Dock

Some more inspiration for our “Design a Mug” competition, to win a night for two in a posh Edinburgh restaurant.

This was hand crafted by the talented Matt Robinson, when he no doubt should have been working on something far more important.

If you’ve got any grand ideas yourself, scribble them onto the template below, and email them in here. You’d be a mug not to.

A few weeks back we launched a competition to ask people to design a new mug for our offices, with a chance to win some fine dining in a posh restaurant in Edinburgh.

Entries have been pouring in, but it’s still open for a couple of weeks, so still time to get your ideas in. There’s a cup-ple of mug templates for you to get creative on below.

Send them in here when you’re done.

We met with a local charity project last week called “Basics Bank”.    Based in Leith, it offers care and advice to local people suffering a life crisis.

One of the ways in which they help is quite simply by providing food and basic items to keep individuals healthy and well-nourished while they sort out more pressing life matters.

We were very keen to help!  So Basic Bank left us with some empty boxes and all we have to do is  fill them with store cupboard essentials such as a bag of pasta or rice, breakfast cereal, tea or coffee – and it is worth mentioning that all donations from Leith stay in Leith.    So, if you are a business based in Leith and you think you could also help in this very simple way, please contact stevewright.nesthouse@gmail.com or call him on 07747 616209.

To raise a bit of dough for the Pakistan flood relief campaign, we had a bit of a bake sale – raising over £120 by the end of the day. That’s a lot of cake eating.

If there was a prize for top baker, it’d have to go to Bob’s wife‘s cupcakes, proving that brand is everything, even when it comes to home-baking.

Seems tickets for our Fringe show on our barge are selling faster than plump firm-fleshed fish on a prize fish barbeque-ing day. A very measley 70 remain for the entire fortnight. Make sure yours in one of them by purchasing quickly here.

Now I’m hardly a prolific blogger at the best of times but if you’re a regular attentive and loyal reader, you’ll have noticed that recent posts have been skimpy to say the least. Your digital team has been rather hampered by x2 things:

1. Jim Wolffman has selfishly been en vacances in Montreal
2. Me, I, Claire Wood, is about to launch a Fringe show upon the unsuspecting public, the like of which you have never before seen. So that’s been eating up a good portion of my free time.

We are doing, courtesy of a very smart idea from Mr Brooke, a show on our fair barge, the Mary of Guise. This show is The Tempest, by a little known fellow called William Shakespeare. It’s not quite Shakespeare as you (might) know it. I’ve cut the script to bits (such arrogance!), we have live music peppering the fine Shakespearean tongue and, well, I never saw Jonny Depp in a Shakespeare play. (Not that I have exactly Jonny Depp in my cast but you’ll struggle to tell the difference…)

The spectacle starts on Monday. Runs from 9 to 21 August at 7:30pm each night except Sunday with a matinee both Saturdays at 2:30pm. Tickets are available here and I know everyone always says they’re selling fast but they genuinely are. So do pop along if you’re in that neck of the woods and fancy a little sliver of something approximating to culture. (Although don’t pop along spontaneously as we might be sold out – get a ticket Now and Then you can pop along. I’d hate you to be disappointed!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn about what you feel about your identity

Be willing to be prepared for whatever hardships may come

And respect your relationships

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

She finished with a lovely thought:

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

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

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

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

A twelve day blogging absence when I’ve been at work for most of those days isn’t really acceptable I’d suggest. So for this, apologies. I can only blame busy-ness. A feeble excuse I know.

So apologies for being a little late in the day to draw your attention to this rather superb campaign just produced for Know The Score. Bundles of research with 18 to 24 year olds, the biggest users (mostly) of cocaine, demonstrated that:

- they were, by and large, blasé about the dangers of cocaine
- the only health risk that they took half seriously was the possibility of cocaine causing a stroke
- telling them that they might have a stroke as a sole advertising message was felt to be stretching credibility
- but presented as part of a handful of effects, some familiar and others (self-evidently) less so, built belief in the possibility and so encouraged them to question their previous perceptions

Six months of research in six lines.

Chris and David have done an absolutely cracking job with the creative. Thanks to them and to Gillian for her ever patient, pro-active and positive account handling. Judge the end result for yourselves here. And be sure to listen to the digital ads for spotify. I’m a bit biased – but they are magic.

I’m just looking through some online qual research that the fine guys and girls at face have engineered and moderated for us.

The qual was conducted with the Young. And I’m looking through various blog posts and wondering why now and again, they feature a capital D for no particular reason at the end of a sentence.

And then I look again at one particular cap D and I realise to my ageing horror that it’s a : D

Specifically:

Reminds me of when i was a kid

How to make yourself feel old.

Belatedly, some summer party pics. Not a wallflower or a shrinking violet in sight.