Glass Half Full
A former drinks PR’s optimistic guide to life after redundancy
9 April 2009


Days since redundancy: about six months
Invoices issued last month: seven – a ShielComms record!
No. of Sky boxes installed: two
Hours spent watching Sky: about a half
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Just when it doesn’t seem possible to find any new foes for the pub industry, an unlikely candidate emerges in the form of Eurostar. Its latest press ad proposes two ways of spending £59, either a “Friday night down the same pub, again” or “an aperitif as the sun sets behind Sacre Coeur”.

As a PR, I am, of course, all for a bit of poetic licence, but this is surely stretching it beyond credibility? For starters, I can’t believe £59 will get you through le Chunnel on a Friday night, which is, unsurprisingly, peak travel time for the UK’s aperitif-seeking community. I’m also willing to bet several Euros that pre-dinner drinks in one of Europe’s travel hot spots won’t come cheap, either.

Whereas, £59 in my really quite posh local will buy you three bottles of very decent wine on any day of the week. Or 20 pints of Harvey’s Sussex Best. Or 15 large G+Ts. Frankly, I’d struggle to spend £59 in one evening and remember much about it the next morning. So come on, clever Eurostar copwriting guys, make it believable! And give pubs a break, we’ve already got plenty of legitimate competition, what with coffee shops and bowling alleys and internet shopping and wide screen telly and….

Talking of TV, I have finally surrendered to a long-running and relentless campaign by the junior Shiels and installed Sky. After the initial thrill of buying a big screen TV and waiting in twice for the Sky engineer - who was, incidentally, pretty hot and I really won’t mind if it all breaks down tomorrow - I’m left wondering, why? I’ve lost half the family members to daily repeats of ‘The Wire’ that run until about 2020, I think. I’ve also, sadly, lost those evenings where I waved them all off to watch the big match on someone else’s Sky set and then reclaimed the sofa for a viewing of ‘Mistresses’. Technology, I’ve found, always delivers less than it promises. Like the men who, no doubt, invented SkyPlus.

Readers of Glass Half Full will have noted that my posts have become infrequent to the point of absence over recent weeks. I’ve not been deluged with virtual fan mail, though several of my sadly-neglected friends have remarked, rather pointedly, that without the blog, they have no idea what I’m doing. But, I’ve missed the blog. The process of turning the week’s highs and lows into 500 pithy words was, in retrospect, cathartic, energising, and, strangely revelatory. Frequently, I found the words that appeared on the screen told me how I felt about something before I’d even acknowledged it myself. A bit like therapy, but without the fat cheque or judgemental counsellor.

Finally, I can’t let National Cask Ale Week pass without a word on beer – and women. This Wednesday was the first ever FemAle Day, and let’s hope it’s not the last. At The Rising Sun in Henley, part of the Brakspear estate, licensee Jude Bishop offered a free half of Brakspear Oxford Gold to every woman who came through the pub doors that day. Apparently, she served around a dozen women, which may not sound a huge number, but it’s nonetheless a dozen women who wouldn’t have drunk beer otherwise. Especially pleasing as, apparently, around 40% of women who try cask ale then make it a regular drink. That’s surely worth raising a glass to, any day of the year!

www.shielcomms.co.uk or http://twitter.com/rosshiel