Most of us have checked out our “googlegangers” - the hybried term (part Google, part doppelganger) coined for typing your own name into the world’s biggest search engine to see what it throws up.
I’m sure I recall doing this a few year ago and coming across a children’s entertainer/magician and a cabaret singer. However, it’s all about search engine optimisation these days and they must have slipped down the rankings.
Googling yourself is a bit of harmless fun and a shortlived, vicarious peek into the lives, interests and thoughts of people (usually north American) who share your name.
However, it pales when compared to the shock of unexpectedly stumbling upon a photograph of someone who looks so like you that your nearest and dearest find it difficult to work out if it is you or not.
Especially when that person is not on the other side of the world - but a mere 50 miles up the road.
So, thanks to Brian Lewis at Deadline Press & Picture Agency (and soon to be at the Scottish Sun) for bringing me no end of ribbing by finding this picture which accompanied a recent press release from RAF Leuchars.
Firstly, let me congratulate the RAF Leuchars team on raising £2000 for local charity, Enable, which helps people with disabilities. And for the recent prodigious output from their media office, who have been extremely busy - and I hope - garnering many column inches of positive coverage.
For those who don’t automatically see the likeness, let me say that not only was I taken aback by this image, so were my missus and my mother. It doesn’t really get any more inarguable (damning?) than that. And just to mop up any lingering doubts, I’ve even looked out this image of yours truly for comparison:
The first thing that strikes me is that it has to be a stroke of bad luck that my lookalike wears a hat straight out of Thunderbirds, along with a comedy RAF outfit complete with lapels that look as though they would probably help the wearer to take off.
Apart from that, I suppose I should be grateful that Squadron Leader Rob de Boyes is such a handsome swine. Oh - and give thanks to anybody who’ll listen that he’s not actually called Roger de Boyes.
The big man is a great interviewee and let slip during our chat that he’d learned in the last few years that his dad was born in Scotland.
Now, this struck me as particulalry ironic, because Tony collected a hatful of Republic of Ireland caps and really made his mark when the Irish team lived the dream at both the 1990 and 1994 world cups. He was able to do that because his beloved mum, Teresa O’Malley, had an Oirish father.
His grandpa on the other side of the family was Italian and everybody assumed his dad Dominic was English, but both the England and Italian squads of the time were brimful of talent, so his chances of international calls up with either of those nations were slim, to say the least. All in all his Irish heritage worked out just dandy - big Casc loved playing for Ireland and the Irish supporters loved him right back. Fans and players alike enjoyed a fantastic, fairytale experience along the way.
Except that in 1996 Tony’s mum revealed that she’d actually been adopted, so there was no blood tie with his Irish grandfather at all. In his autobiography, he wrote about the profound effect of the bombshell news and how it left him feeling like a fraud and a fake and took the shine of his time with the Ireland national team. Of course, he was being hard on himself and everyone in Ireland was totally laid back about the whole thing. Adoption made him as Irish as the Liffey and they loved him just the same.
As Cascarino filled me in on all this (in an accent so English, at times he sounded like Brucie Forsyth!) I had to ask why he’d never chosen to play the Scottish card instead.
The answer was simple. He’d never had a particularly close relationship with his dad and the older man had also been extremely cagey about the subject. After claiming he’d been born in Edinburgh, he’d refused to elaborate any further, except to say he’d stayed in the Scottish capital until he was five and then moved to London. In the absence of any concrete evidence about this situation, Tony had chosen simply to ignore it.
Without letting on I arranged for a birth certificate search just to quietly see if it was possible to confirm or deny his father’s story. The records system and Register House in Edinburgh is superb and it literlly took limits to come up trumps with Dominic Cascarino’s birth certificate from 1939. For a small sum we were even able to get a copy.
When I broke this news to Tony, he was delighted. Something that had always been a bit hazy and uncertain was suddenly laid before him in black and white as irrefutable fact. And so we had the story of what might have been - one of the biggest charcacters in the game could have qualified for Scotland and avoided all the angst that eventually overshadowed his time with the Ireland football team.
Whatever nationality the big fella chooses, he’s a gentleman in any language - so I wish him all the best as he’s back in Dublin this week to play in the 2008 Irish Open.
I’m jsut not sure whether to wish him Good luck! Buona fortuna! Go n-éirí an t-ádh leat! - or Gaun yersel big man!
When I was 19 one of my best pals was a pretty serious amateur boxer. He ate carefully, trained with a discipline that involved a level of self-sacrifice none of our peers would have entertained and was in near perfect physical conditon. His fitness was awesome. All of this I could see with my own eyes on a daily basis.
What took a bit more understanding was the amount of sheer craft involved in mastering the noble art.
My friend was a thinker and we watched endless videos of the fighters he admired, for their speed, skill and tactics - most notably Sugar Ray Leonard. So I knew that while it ultimately came down to who could bludgeon whom most effectively over 12 rounds, the sport in its purest form involved guile, finesse, speed of thought and a a real degree of artistry.
This was brought home to me one afternoon in my friend’s back garden when he invited myself and another pal to spend as long as we could pummelling him. Two on one and he promised he wouldn’t throw a punch in return. While we wore bag gloves (not much in the way of padding), he would wear sparring gloves (which were the most padded gloves it was possible to get). In other words, even if he forgot himself for a second threw a punch at one of us, it would be as painless as possible, while any punches we landed would be felt acutely.
The aim of this exercise, as we soon found out, was to demonstrate to us two non-boxers, just how much skill was involved. In the few frenzied minutes we threw everything we had at him neither of us managed to connect with a meaningful punch. Those which actually landed (and I was utterly amazed by the number which he successfully slipped) were caught harmlessly on gloves or elbows.
It’s safe to say I was dumbfounded. In a few minutes a sport I already respected attained an entirely new status. The casual ease with which he avoided, or parried blows from two of us was like a scene from the Matrix. We must have seemed like we were moving in slow motion to his fine-tuned boxer’s brain. Bear in mind that while my boxer pal was a big talent in the local amateur scene, the gulf between him and the top class professionals was akin to the gap between the footballers at Linlithgow Rose and those in a World Cup winning team.
Needless to say, I’ve never look at any boxing match the same way since. I always try to see beyond two blokes thumping each other to see the dedication, discipline, conditioning and undeniable level of skill involved.
Imagine learning all those skills for boxing and it’s easy to see why it requires endless hours of training, repeated day-after-day and year-after-year. Then imagine also having to learn all the equivalent skills in wrestling (the olympic version, not the theatrical joke that is WWF). And judo or ju-jitsu. And maybe a spot of Thai kick boxing as well.
Consider the combined training regime for all of those combat sports - and the feat of memory and the dedication required to master each highly-technical move, throw, grip , slip or avoidance technique. Wonder at how difficult it would be to learn how to read opponents across all those separate disciplines. Finally picture the culmination of that process - and stepping into an arena to face an opponent every bit as highly trained, motivated and hungry.
Welcome to the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Step into the controversial subject that is cage fighting - and to a fiercely contested debate on whether this is a genuine sport, or a form of bloodlust and barbarism with no place in a decent civilisation.
When Holyrood Partnership agreed to provide media support to Cage War Productions for its Max Xtreme Fighting event at Braehead Arena, it was with a degree of trepidation. I expected us to be firefighting constanlty while knee-jerk reactionaries would all too easily command the moral high ground. Previous experience told me reasoned argument in favour of cage fighting would be virtually ignored - steamrollered by a heady mixture of righteous indignation and misplaces anti-violence sentiments.
However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Firstly the coverage by STV (which has been slightly amended in the YouTube video a the top of this post) is pretty well balanced. Even more impressive is this article (click here) by Alasdair Reid in the latest Sunday Herald magazine. Inscisive, insightful and effortlessly written it is also gives a genuinely thoughtful - and thought provoking - view of the world of cage fighting for Britain’s aspiring competitors.
Each piece of coverage introduces a separate MMA fighter - and both are eloquent and persuasive advocates for their sport. At best MMA is misunderstood. At worst it is reviled. Add to that its status as little more than underground and minority sport in the UK, factor in the dedication and training required and the lack of financial rewards. All of these factors make it quite remarkable that Glasgow should boast two such impressive spokesmen as Anthony Thompson (the philosophy student featured in the video)and Paul McVeigh, who is quoted in the Sunday Herald article.
Pick of the quotes for me is Mcveigh’s snortingly comical dismissal of the local politician, who branded cage fighting a danger because of the strobe lighting and loud music. His riposte was this classic put down:
“Disney On Ice has strobe lighting, music and fighting and nobody talks about banning that.”
Now that is a quite brilliant piece of fighting talk.
What is the official term, I wonder, for the pressure that builds up just behind the eyes when you have loads of subjects you want to blog about - but no time to get them typed out?
Blogjam? Bloggage? Backblog?
Whatever it’s called, I’ve got it bad. I’ve had one of those busy periods of such intensity there’ve been times when I wondered if the old ticker will see me through to my 40th later this year. And the casualites (along with family, social life and regular sleep patterns) have included any faint hopes of regular blog updates.
So I’ve got plenty to catch up on. Earlier this week one of those busy days was spent driving to Liverpool to meet with a potential new PR client. It was my first ever trip to that fine city and I hope to hear soon if we’ve been successful with our pitch.
While I was drawn there by work, the venue was next door to historic Aintree Racecourse, better known to millions of previous visitors as the home of the Grand National. However, gambling is not one of my many vices, so I don’t profess to know much about the nags.
What I DO know about is breakfast. Anyone who’s worked with me knows my epic, albeit unorthodox appetites - especially in the morning. For instance, here is a recent missive from Danny Groom, the man who now runs the dailymail.co.uk website and whom I caught up with recently for the first time in years:
Spookily, I was telling one of my colleagues the other day about the famous Douglas breakfast of a baked bean toastie, jam on toast and a banana - all served by a drug-fuelled lunatic with dirty fingernails.
Danny, who has worked on the newsdesks of PA, The Observer and the Daily Mail, was referring to our time together on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. There was no canteen in the building so we used to send out for breakfast to the local sarnie/snack shop - which had dodgy hygiene standards but would deliver to our desks.
Anyway, I digress, purely to explain why the horseracing Mecca of Aintree held little interest for me, particularly when my belly started rumbling after a four hour drive down the M6 (including a rather scary white out experience on the Biggar Road).
Within minutes of arriving I’d found my way to a greasy spoon cafe (bypassing the fish and chip shop which was, bafflingly, open for business at 11.30am) dragging a reluctant Raymond with me. I knew exactly what I wanted: a cup of tea and a roll with sausage and brown suace.
This proved frustratingly difficult to get hold of. The Scouse woman behind the counter made extremely hard work of my accent - and after several minutes of negotiating, still seemed not to understand the concept of a roll with sausage.
At one point she tried to serve me a baguette. The fact this run down caff even had fresh baguettes was a minor miracle - but didn’t divert me from my hunger for a simple breakfast roll. Finally the woman grasped that all I wanted was a round roll - “Ahhhh - a barncake!” she exclaimed.
Shortly my cuppa arrived - along with the most ginormous roll I’ve ever been served. This thing was like a gargantuan, floury, freak-of-nature big brother of the roll I’d been expecting. And I swear, there must have been six or seven separate sausages on it.
Raymond’s eyse widened in awe. Mine simply widened in anticipation.
True to form, I polished it off in short order and have to offer my hearty congratulations to the makers of Liverpool Barn Cakes, which seem to be a regional variation of the Stotty Cake I’d previously encountered in Newcastle.
An hour or so later it was lunchtime, and our hosts laid on a fine spread of fruit and sandwiches. I felt obliged to tuck in again.
As well as being easy on the eye, the women from Smack the Pony were a bunch of gifted comdians - and dozens of their sketches now appear on the web, including this bit of fun.
It made me laugh, because I’m a lifelong fan of tap water and have resolutely - and rather unfashionably - refused to buy into the culture of bottled water.
To me, it verges on moronic that anyone will spend their hard earned cash for something that each of us already pay for to come out of our taps. Esepecially since there isn’t a money-spinning bottled water business out there that will produce anything as pure or fresh as what we take for granted in Scotland.
Off and on over the past five years, I’ve spent time helping out at the Scottish Water press office. Oh aye, I’ve heard all the arguments. Bottled water just tastes better. Tap water is full of unpleasant additives, whereas the expensive paid for stuff is actually good for you. Whatever. There’s no point arguing with some people.
I remain baffled why so many seem utterly determined to run down Scotland’s publicly owned water service; to denigrate the high quality product that comes out of their taps for a laughably tiny cash outlay; yet think nothing of paying an obscenely inflated amounts for what is effectively a marketing con.
So I found it even more refreshing than a tall glass of iced water when the revered and respected old lady of BBC documentary making - Panorama - redressed the balance somewhat on Monday night. And I hope the bottled water brigade were choking on their overpriced tipples at the revelations.
Firstly, a series of blind tests had bottled water drinkers oozing confidence that they’d be able to pick out smelly old Thames Water (after all, each drop has passed through seven other people before it reaches the tap!) from a series of refined bottled offerings. Nope. Thames Water was rated consistently high and not a soul managed to correctly pick out cheap and cheerful tap water from the pricey alternatives. Bear in mind Thames Water is nowhere near as tasty as Scotland’s water. All of which sort of explodes the myth (trotted out repeatedly) that tap water “tastes funny”. What’s really “funny” is the number of people who bypass their tongue and actually taste with part of their brain that can only be described as the fad cortex.
No you can’t tell the difference between bottled water and the tap variety. Just deal with it.
Then Panorama trotted out the science: Just how many eminent chemists does it take to tell the average Joe that tap water is perfectly clean, fresh and pure before they stop shelling out for the overpriced bottled variety, in the mistaken belief it’s better for them? In Scotland the only sector I can think of that is more heavily regulated than the water industry is nuclear power. The battery of tests - for purity, clarity and value for money simply would and could not be replicated by bottled water producers.
Next up were the marketing gurus. The people behind the eau seau clever Perrier adverts of the 1980s, which turned bottled water from a minor business backwater, into a thriving £10 billion a year industry. The ad man in question still seemed charmingly baffled as to quite how they’d pulled off the unthinkable - by actually persuading people to pay for something they could already get from their taps.
But the final indignity for the bottled water lovers had to be the Environmental damage wrought by the money spinning aqua industry. Bottled water has a massive carbon footprint compared with the green credentials of tap water. And did I mention the damage plastic bottles (not to mention the pellets used in raw plastic production) are wreaking on our coastlines and aquatic life? Worse, though, is the exploitation of communities (like those in Fiji) suffering from the disease, hardship and indignity of life without clean water. While just a few miles down the road big commerical industries plunder the pure water sources to sell to rich Europeans and Americans (who, ironically, already have the world’s purest water quite literally on tap).
But despite all the debunking of myths by Panorma, I’m sure the broadcast will have made virtually no difference. Quite simply for politicians and the media it’s just too convenient to stick the boot into the water business . Indeed, a the weekend Scotland on Sunday let rip with an unbalanced and inaccurate tirade against business water charges in Scotland. A week or two before the same paper was putting the boot in over leakage figures - again without giving both sides of the argument.
Then there’s always some politician trying to build support or credibility by calling for Scottish Water to be privatised. Oh aye. Magic idea. Take our biggest national resource out of public hands and give it to a profit driven company to run - as a monopoly - and see how quickly that drives up standards. How is it everybody understands that competition is the only persuasive driver for businesses to give customers value for money, yet everyone seems to forget that when talking about putting Scotland’s water sector into private hands - with no alternative supplier of tap water?
None of these commentators ever seem to mention that there isn’t a successful business that would actuallybuy and operate Scotland’s water infrastructure at the moment. It’s all to easy to forget that Scottish Water also deals with all our sewage and has to maintain bathing water standards round a vast coastline, but it has to deliver highest quality drinking water to remote Highland and Island communities. Neither of these are problems encountered by any of the privatised English water companies.
Another convenienty forgotten fact is that until Scotland has been saddled with water infrastructure that was ancient and neglected. Since 2002 Scottish Water has been replacing it - and while the billions involved sound like a lot of money the amounts are modes compared to those spent south of the border. What’s more, those English companies also had a 15 year head start.
Yet in little over five years Scottish Water has been transformed from disant also ran into a water business which performs as well (if not better) than many of those privatised English firms. What’s more it has all been achieved while merging three separate water authorities in the east, west and north of Scotland, meeting ever tougher EU standards, achieve huge operational efficiencies by dramatically reducing staff numbers AND delivering the biggest ever programme of civil engineering works seen in Scotland.
All that and the quality of drinking water has STILL improved every year and independent experts appointed to monitor it the most exacting European standard say 99.7 per cent of the thousands of random samples taken all across Scotland pass the test. And did I mention that the cost of providing that water and removing and treating all waste so that it has no negative impact on the environment costs each about £1 a day?
Phew. With all that going on, surely Scottish Water gets the media or public recognition it deserves. Bloody hell! It’s a model of public sector efficiency that would put many a ruthlessly run private enterprise to shame. But naw, rather than celebrate a Scottish success story it’s to easy for papers like Scotland on Sunday to take a pop. It was ever thus for public bodies - and I’d be a liar if I tried to say that I didn’t have a go at a few during my own time as a journalist.
But now that I’m on the other side … well, it’s enought to drive you to drink. So come on in - the water’s lovely.
I was a bit busy last week, hence the enforced blog break. So I was glad of a rare funny moment to provide a bit of light relief.
It came courtesy of some very nice - if somewhat confused - young woman from a newspaper group down in the south coast of England.
The bubbly lass by the name of Josie was on the phone to Holyrood PR trying to arrange a promotional tie up with our clients, the Tigerlily hotel. Since a new flight is opening up between Newquay to Edinburgh the paper wanted to offer readers the chance to win a trip to Scotland’s capital, complete with a stay in the city’s trendiest venue.
But it all started to go wrong from the minute I picked up the phone and the unfortunate Josie got confused about who she was looking for.
”Oh hello,” she trilled cheerfully. “Can I speak to Holly please?”
Of course, there’s no Holly working with us - and never has been. So I responded to this honest mistake with a polite: “I’m sorry there’s no-one called Holly working here, I think you’ve probably got the wrong number.”
But Josie perservered: “Oooh. It’s definitely Holly I’m looking for. Are you sure there’s no Holly Rude working there?”
The penny dropped. Agog, I could only swallow down my indignation, while patiently trying to explain to the young woman the significance of the name Holyrood - seat of the Scottish parliament etc. I can only preume she followed up her call to us with a call to some media business in London’s W2 postcode area to ask for Wes Minster.
It seemed strange to have a newapaper phoning a PR company asking stupid questions. Ask anyone working on a newspaper newsdesk and they’ll tell you there are few things more annoying than junior account executives with PR companies who phone to check if their press releases have got through - and if they are likely to be used.
Inviarialy they phone at the wrong time of day, with stories that have no chance of getting in and compound their error by asking for the wrong person (or for people who have long since left).
A few classics I remember from my own newspaper days include the junior PR person who was looking to my good pal Barbie Dutter - but got her name all wrong and ended up looking for Bambi Duster.
But my pesonal favouriet was during my Daily Record newsdesk days - when one London PR couldn’t get her head round the Scottish name of popular colleague Murray Foote (Dundee’s premier pie fan) . Despite repeatedly querying the spelling of his name, still managed to address all her subsequent press releases to Marcie Toot. Highly entertaining idiocy.
But the most important words are the simplest. I’ll miss him.
For those who haven’t heard already, Dave has now left Holyrood Partnership to combine his two main passions, golf and writing. So first let me wish him the very best of luck with his new enterprise, Red Top Sport and Media.
That’s the easy part done. The tricky job will be getting used to working without the big man at my right hand side, as he has been for the past six years.
I’d list the qualities I admire about big Dave, but I’d be worried about damning him with faint praise. Suffice to say he sums up everything I most admire: passion, integrity and industry.
He remains the best news editor of Deadline Press and Picture Agency to date and was the trustworthy rock which helped see the agency through its toughtest times. He was uncompromising in setting the highest standards and unflinching in letting staff know when they’d failed to achieve them.
When Holyrood Partnership started to take off, it was inveitable Raymond and I would look for the best possible person to help us with our fledgling public relations enterprise. There was only one choice.
Dave made the jump to PR look effortless and within six months was named Scotland’s Young Communicator, by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. High praise indeed, and he was worth every part of it.
Hopefully he’s received as much during his time at both Deadline and Holyrood as he undoubtedly gave. If nothing else it was me who finally persuaded him to pluck the monobrow, so revealing two shapely eyebrows.
I’m also claiming credit for the improved dresss senses and haircuts. The rest is all his own work: A fine writer, journalist, PR expert, sportsman and, most recently, father to baby Andrew.
Most of all though, he’s a great friend. All the best, Dave.
To last night’s Scottish CIPR awards - we came second in the Outstanding Small Agency category, picking up the silver award.
No point trying to put a gloss or spin on that - just congratulations for the winners, Artisan PR.
Pluses from the night were reasonably plentiful (though I’ve not yet seen our bar bill and still not heard what happened to the bus that was supposed to pick us up).
<>The biggest plus is that Holyrood Partnership now feels like a real part of the PR firmament. We started out as a pair of journos with a couple of media relations tricks up our sleeves. But in industry terms we were unknown and outsiders. A few years ago Raymond and I attended our first ever PR awards to cheer on Emma Gregory, as she picked up the Young Communicator Award and I can safely say I knew only a handful of people. Certainly, I don’t think many people in the world of PR had heard our name.Two years ago we were at the awards again, when our own David Connor deservedly collected the Young Communicator Award and Holyrood Partnership probably blipped on the radar of other PR companies in a small way for the first time.
At last night’s awards the first thing that struck me was the number of familiar faces at a very, very big award ceremony. Over five years we’ve put in the graft, got the coverage we’ve deserved and made our clients happy. We’ve also earned our PR spurs and last night I felt as though Holyrood Partnership was in the right place. We belonged.
Another plus is that while many awards can seem like an industry backpatting exercise, the CIPR awards are a bona fide recognistion of talent and effort and are, for the most part, made on merit. Certainly I’ve got no quibble with the judges’ decision in our category.
Which means we’ll certainly be entering again and I’m a sure as I can be that we’ll be back on the podium - and next time hopefully we’ll be collecting gold.
On to matters more entertaining. The big talking point of the night was that the Italian football team were in the same hotel as the awards ceremony (the Radisson). Every woman in the building was aquiver at the thought of meeting the Serie A poster boys in the flesh. Every bloke was hoping the Tally nemesis would all be immediately confined to their beds with mild (but just debilitating enough) food poisioning.
All of which provided plenty of fodder for Grant Stott who was hosting the evening - and who I have to say was outstanding. Even the resident Jambo at our table had to grudgingly admit that, for a Hibee, Stott was on stonking form. As well as poking fun at the Italian football I particularly enjoyed his gags at the expense of Cumbernauld and well-upholstered ex TV newsreader, Alan Douglas.
Best of all though was when he suggested the gold medals for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow would be made from melted down sovvies and would be hung on Burberry patterned ribbons. Weedgie-baiting at its best.
All in all can just about manage the disappointment of missing out on first place, especially since there’s a more important prize up for grabs in Glasgow today. If McLeish’s lads can turn over the Italians for a famous victory Friday night’s else will pale into utter insignificance. And I don’t think I can cope with a double dose of disappointment in one weekend.
Excitement is mounting here at Holyrood Partnership over the annual Scottish PR Awards.
We are travelling through to Glasgow en masse on Friday (complete with partners) to find out if we’ll be named the country’s Outstanding Small Agency.
We’ve been here (or hereabouts) before. Two years ago we attended the event and came away with a commendation in the Best Newsletter category, while our able young assistant David Connor (aka The Big Galoot) was named Young Communicator of the Year.
That was quite an achievement for Galootski, given that he’d been in PR just six months after previously working as a news reporter. But in truth, it was an individual award, so while he was able to bask in the glory it didn’t really recognise our efforts as an agency.
For my part I am genuinely keyed up over our latest nomination. No matter how hard I try to remain calm, I know that by close of play on Friday night I am going to be elated like never before. Or crushed.
So imagine how it must feel for Barbara Clark and the rest of the comms team at VisitScotland. Word reaches me that they are up for a mind-boggling 10 awards. Congratualtions to them all on receiving quite so many nominations - it seems improbable they could be heading home empty-handed.
Hopefully the judging has already been completed and the winners decided - because I wouldn’t want my next gripe to count against us. But I’m not one for conspiracty theories, so here goes:
The awards - run by professional body the Chartered Institute of Public Relations - are costly to enter in the first place. Presumably those entry fees help cover the organising the event, the administration and all the other sundry costs that soon mount up.
Agencies like ours also soak up the costs of getting guests to and from the Glasgow venue. But what really gets me is this - the cost of £90 per head buys each guest a three-course meal and the privilege of being entertained by pantomime villain Grant Stott, probably best known for his turns as a presenter Forth One and as the face of Scottish TV’s football programme, Scotsport.
But it seems the cost doesn’t stretch to putting a couple of bottles of wine on the table.
Totally Outrageous.
In the past couple of months I’ve been to charity balls, business dinners and formal annual events and haven’t heard of anything this money grubbing. At first I thought it was just me, but my friends, family and colleagues have also been amazed by this.
I hope the CIPR sort this out in time for next year’s event, whether that involves a change of event organiser or whatever. Nobody begrudges paying to enter the awards, nor to attend. But being fleeced is an entirely different matter.
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