Diary recently thought it had come up with a groundbreaking idea for what to do with thousands of old yoga mats. Our plan? To cut them in half, stick an H on them and market them as drone landing pads. We would have made millions. So imagine our dismay when it turns out Cubex Land and Palmer Capital have beaten us to it, sending over images of the swanky drone pad on the top of the Aurora office in Bristol, which they have just sold to Royal London Asset Management for £62.1m. We feel we should be due a cut of the amount it added to the value.
From old school to back to
Only in June was Evans Randall executive chairman John Slade writing for EG extolling the virtues of WeWork, after his firm made a temporary move to shared office space. Now, word reaches us that the industry veteran has joined Twitter. Whatever is going on? Perhaps an effort to recapture his youth, based on the debut post of @JohnSlade____ (that’s four underscores, in case you wondered): “First tweet – back to school yet again.” Accompanied by a photo of the Cheesegrater, the image suggested the City is his playground. But Diary thinks he missed a trick. In the week that everybody’s social media feeds were full of proud parents showing off their newly-uniformed offspring, we would have loved a pic of him stood in a doorway wearing a blazer and a big smile. That would have been guaranteed to get Slade trending.
Nosy neighbours
In the troubled retail landscape, it’s easy to leap to prognostications of doom when you hear a chain may be facing difficulties. That’s why Debenhams chair Sir Ian Cheshire was keen to stress this week that the department store is “not insolvent”. Diary particularly enjoyed the colourful way he described the “circus” of speculation while speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “It is like having a bunch of nosy neighbours watching your house,” he said. “Somebody sees somebody in a suit going into a room. The second person concludes it’s a doctor, the third person concludes it’s an undertaker and by the time it gets to the end of the day you’ve got cause of death and everyone’s looking forward to the funeral.” Glad to hear there’s no need for grave concern – but we’ll keep peering in through the curtains, just in case.
University challenges
Judging from the press releases in Diary’s inbox, it’s back-to-university time. News just in: teenagers don’t listen to their parents! According to student accommodation provider Campus Living Villages, students in the UK consult their folks but don’t listen to their advice when it comes to choosing where to live while studying. Or, as Campus cleverly put it, parents are “seen but not heard” by their children. Once the tricky issue of uni housing is sorted, thoughts turn to stocking those cupboards and, helpfully, Waitrose has unveiled a “starter kit for the fledgling cook about to fly the nest”. Rather than beer and Pot Noodle, the list (much mocked on Twitter) comprises: Marigold Swiss vegetable bouillon powder (£2), Aspall organic cyder vinegar (£1.70), organic Italian seasoning (£1.89), Belazu Rose Harissa paste (£4.35) and Clearspring organic Tamari soya sauce (£3.15). Sounds ideal for the £11,500-a-week Knightsbridge student digs JLL was marketing last week…
Words create headlines
Diary is a huge fan of Damn You Autocorrect, which collects the best predictive text bloopers out there on the interwebs. From such low comedy, however, it is a short step to high art – as demonstrated by Canary Wharf’s #UnpredictiveText campaign. It features a series of randomly selected words, extracted from the 30-year archive of articles and interviews by journalists “who have captured the Canary Wharf story”. It says: “These words have been entered into a generative algorithm that randomly combines noun, verb and noun to create hundreds of unexpected three-word statements. Randomised, these phrases are the perfect analogy for living at the heart of Canary Wharf.” Examples include “art creates connection”, “heart is life”, “depth inspires connection” and “love creates stories”. Diary is looking into crafting a future page solely from randomly selected words from its archive. Some readers may welcome it as an improvement.
