Sunday P

I took the day off. No work, nothing. Got up early, walked the dogs, finished a bit of cleaning, moved the remains of the jumble sale into the loft - and then just gave up - and went back to bead. I must have needed it, woke up at 4pm. It's very hot and impossibly humid.

I'm just working my way through the papers. All political careers end in failure, we've all heard that one a million times, the current incumbents are looking increasingly like very late career Thatcher era - all that infighting, madness, extremism, self promotion and lack of self control. Theresa May has turned in to very late career Thatcher - the bit where she was a ranting imbecile, turning up at the Guildhall in a regal robe - and Michael Gove is all the worst excesses of Keith Joseph and Michael Hesletine - but smaller and more bitter. Perhaps Clegg is John Major - don' laugh, stranger things have happened for all the wrong reasons - we are almost certainly heading for another hung Parliament, with far too may of the floating voters sucked up by UKIP to change the balance of anything. I now understand why so may people waste hours every day watching Youtube videos of cute kittens and funny babies - it's an anaesthetic.

A client may call later so I re-prepared some questions for them yesterday - so that I don't have to think today. We are working on something rather tricky - a large national store group realises that certain stores in a certain kind of demographic area ( poor, white, working class ) perform badly when they try over-develop them - white bread and chocolate  sells better than humous etc. The want to strip down to a basic them and are trying to 'dumb down' the stores in a way that I think is quite patronising - if you want to develop a theme that could roll out across a number of stores, think carefully about what you are doing. Traditionally - areas like this would have been far more mobile, people could have worked their way out of benefits dependency and semi poverty, but now they are stuck - in cities certainly - so you will be working with a much more nuanced customer who deserves better - even a basic store can work 'with' the customer. Just giving up on the consumer and throwing white bread, biscuits and sweets at them is pandering to the worst kind of mediocrity. This customer works to a specific timetable - before work purchases, lunches, evening ready meals and BWS - with sections inbetween where people prowl the store looking for cheap bulky carbohydrate fillers, lets not reinforce every negative stereotype of them - they already know where they are.

Alison Goldfrapp has curated a section on Radio 6 - listening to it now, her taste in music is superb.