And by “it”, it’s still more likely we mean “work” than “football”. Sure, England won their opening game at a European Championships for the very first time, but Diary isn’t going to get carried away. Yet. What we can’t help but wonder though is what impact a couple of weeks of football on the telly at 2pm and 5pm might have on the ever-evolving return to the office/WFH debate. With Wimbledon a little over a week away, and the prospect of footie and tennis on in the background to liven up our working days, how will the balance shift? We look forward to keeping one eye on all the press releases and comments analysing the latest figures – while we train the other on poring over all those possession stats, distances covered, expected goals (and unforced errors).
When the fun stops, stop
You know that bit at the end of the latest flashy, expensive bookmaker ad, featuring Jeff Stelling, Chris Kamara, or Ray Winstone’s disembodied head, where they half-heartedly suggest you gamble responsibly? Diary couldn’t help but be reminded of that when we received this warning about house raffles from, erm, Winmydreamhome.com. “Winning a house at raffle can be financially crippling,” it says, noting that it costs 1% of a home’s value to maintain and run it for one year. So, in short, if you don’t earn much, maybe don’t enter that raffle for a £3m mansion in Fulham. Though, Diary supposes, you could still sell it. Get out while you’re ahead, as Winstone might growl.
Word up
EG’s deputy editor Tim Burke didn’t get where he is today without knowing a thing or two about words. Their spelling, naturally… their meaning, of course… but also, it seems, their frequency of use. In last week’s issue he crunched the numbers on the abundance of “unprecedented” in company reports covering the pandemic period. At the other end of the scale, this week he noticed the use of “gobbledygook” in a quote from housing minister Christopher Pincher, and discovered this was the first time it had featured on the EG website. On News, at any rate – it may come as no surprise to learn that Legal has had cause to resort to gobbledygook on three previous occasions. Inspired by Burke’s efforts, Diary thought it would take to the search bar in the hope of finding more never-before-used words – and, like a schoolchild holding their first French dictionary, we obviously looked up the swears first. The S-word has featured 28 times, and the F-word eight (all in quotes), but we’ve never dropped a C-bomb – unless you count our 185 stories about Scunthorpe, which thankfully the search system doesn’t. Any budding EG authors may struggle to break that taboo, but other new frontiers are there to be claimed. We can’t type them out here, as that would ruin the fun, but use of each of the following would be a genuine first. The two most famously long words (one starts with “anti” and the other with “flocci”) are so far absent. The same is true of a six-syllable word for realism that is also a Teenage Fanclub song. And a word created for The Simpsons, later added to the dictionary, is up for grabs – and perfect for development talk. But bad luck if your mind, too, went to nincompoop – with one, solitary appearance it, like gobbledygook, stands as what Diary is calling an “EGwhack”. If you find any more unused words (or EGwhacks) please do let us know on Twitter.
Kids and grown ups love it so…
…and the happy world of Haribo seems a buoyant, pandemic-resistant one. The confectionery giant has announced a £22m UK investment into its already state-of-the-art facility in Castleford, all of which can only mean more cola bottles, cherries, goldbears and Smurfs (European imports preferred) for Diary. Jon Hughes, managing director of Haribo UK, said (in what we choose to believe, based on their famous ads, is an endearingly juvenile voice): “As we continue to face tough challenges following the ongoing impact of Covid-19, we are showing our resilience and commitment to world-class production in an increasingly competitive market. Investing £22m into our already world-class manufacturing facility will give us greater opportunity to produce the variety of sweets that we know bring childlike happiness to our customers.” Mission accomplished, if only for Diary.
She does have authority here
Jackie Weaver is back! Already one of the heroes of the pandemic, the viral Zoom star – made famous by that now-iconic car crash of a Handforth Parish Council committee meeting – has teamed up with housing secretary Chris Pincher and the Royal Town Planning Institute to launch a new network to support politicians in planning. Politicians in Planning is its well-chosen name and we trust that its online launch, at which Weaver gave the keynote speech, went more smoothly than the virtual meeting that first brought her to the public’s attention. The network is intended to enable better sharing of best practice and access to information, one hopes in a more collaborative, less combative way than they do it up in Handforth.
