Like many of our training initiatives, the #speedvideo challenge was speedlearning – some instructions, some theory, and then put it into practice, with a prize for the winning team. The three-minute videos were then edited, formatted and finalised by our video partner Blueprint TV (thanks again guys for giving up your time to help with this).

The judges considered communication clarity, interest level for the target audience and strength of delivery of the message that video/SEO are now core components of expansive, true public relations, as opposed to a restrictive media relations-only approach.

Without further ado, the winning team was Cakie (sorry, Katie) Swan’s, which served up a receipe for perfectly-baked SEO in PR.

A close runner-up, by a mere point, was Lisa Corbridge’s team for a video about the fundamentals of video in PR.

Well done both teams, amazing what you can achieve under a tight deadline pressure with a camera, light, microphone and large bag of Sainsbury’s plain white flour.

I’ve long been a fan of Lucy Kellaway’s column but today’s piece on whether male executives should get hair transplants to extend their careers certainly bring matters to a head.

It’s a great article and made me chuckle enormously. Anything in the FT that mentions Wayne Rooney has comic potential. And it’s fair of me to do so - no I’m not bald as a coot, but as grey as a (greying) badger and have been heading that way since my early 30s.

But while Lucy gives a cutting assessment of the value of hair in senior career aspirations, there’s a PR point to this too – would having hair replacement treatment, or trying to deny the onset of baldness, have an impact on your brand’s reputation or your own personal reputation? Does being a baldie, a hair transplantee or a wiggy work against you in media interviews?

Well looks do play a major part in determing how someone is pereceived of course. But would someone who tried to cover themselves up look like they had something to hide? Would a silver fox like me appear to be past it? Does the insistence on keeping remaining hair as-is despite the rapid emergence of chrome dome glory smack of being ill-at-ease your own abilities?

Well there’s more to reputation than immediately meets the eye, but here are some hair tips for blokes in senior roles who have to face the media and their publics as brand ambassadors:

- If you’re going bald, shave it. It’ll show self-confidence

- If you’re going grey, get used to it. You might even look more experienced. Just go easy on the light clothing (particularly shirts) for TV, videos and pictures as you might look a bit like Fred in Scooby Doo

- If you’re not going bald or grey, try not to be too smug because the rest of us are. Equally, have answers prepared on whether you use dye

Bald can be commanding, authoritative and the basis of an aura. It’s part of you, it’s part of your reputation; revel in it.

Videos have had valuable since their infancy, but in the past couple of years agencies really seemed to have cottoned on to their value in explaining things, relaying stories, interesting the audience and stirring word-of-mouth.

Yet most agencies don’t really understand how to do videos well. Some agencies have restructured to develop expertise in content creation, which might help them but doesn’t always help clients looking for PR people to counsel them about more than content. That’s another discussion altogether though.

We’ve done lots of videos at Speed, but thought we can always improve skills throughout the team in applying a brand’s narrative to video, ensuring clarity of communication and apply understanding to make the content really potent. There are also lots of practical tips to consider too.

So we’re doing a Speed Video training morning today and have set two teams of all-rounder PRs a challenge: make the best video you can by lunchtime. The one that is clearest, most compelling and best tells the story of where Speed is heading as a business wins a prize. A very PR-ish prize. Being racy might help too, but let’s keep it decent.

The teams are hard at it at the moment. One video will be on the planning of editorial content for SEO, the other one best practice in using videos in PR campaigns. They’ve done their homework. Some people have brought props. Creative process PR rooted in audience nous has clearly been undertaken, rather than just one of those wafty PR brains storms that start with “what shall we do then?”

 Quite what they’re doing though, no-one is sure. Overheard in one plotting meeting:

“Sarah is going to roll, I’m going to sprinkle and then we need to work out what to do with the flour.”

And in another, awash for fluorescent sticky notes: “As cheesy as it is, it does make for a good link. I’ll just have to gaze into your eyes as I talk about rich media.”

Stay tuned for the results later.

There were other points about us not trusting the media very much, which given the obvious commercially-sensitive slants most media have put on the information - Huff Post says lack of trust in established media is a social media opening, The Guardian says trust in the media has increased - were surely a foregone conclusion anyway. When the media (new and old) spins something about apparent lack of trust in media, my eyeballs roll. 

Edelman has clearly long been onto a good thing with the Trust Barometer, but behind the headlines squats the whole issue of not just the fact (well, the fact according to a representative sample of people asked to give their opinions) that trust in business leaders and politicians is at a low ebb, but what can be done to improve it.

Of course the obvious points, mostly already made in coverage of the survey, are that transparency must reign and social media engagement to forge direct relationships with the public is something to cling to. But there are deeper issues to probe here.

Trust may be at the forefront of the story, but trust can’t begained without belief. And while the statistics have editorial appeal given the current state of the country and its economy, they do beg the question of whether Britons have ever trusted business leaders and politicians. We may need them, we may favour them over other alternatives, but we don’t necessarily trust them because we (probably) won’t ever really believe them - because they have a personal and commercial/governmental agenda to pursue. Their intentions are not typically seen as pure, so what comes out of their mouths and the way in which they behave will always be perceived with that in mind.

Sometimes I don’t completely trust my friends or those around me. That’s not a character flaw per se, but a consequence of me knowing that the thinly-veiled reason for their question, comment or behaviour may be something like giving me the ‘opportunity’ of some more work to do, or convincing me that it really is my round at the pub.

I doubt whether merchants in medieval times or past kings were trusted much by the public, and many may have been despised. We didn’t know about trust levels back then because we didn’t try to measure them scientifically, but I doubt a survey of the Holy Land about whether the local populace thought Herod was a nice chap would have given us fascinating and hitherto unknown insight. 

My point here is that while the powers that be do appear to be doing a worsening job of engendering trust in their audiences, that in itself is nothing new. Scepticism has always existed, and nowhere has it been more at home than in Britain. What communciators should be focussing on is how to make the truth believed.

A changed media landscape means the truth will out. So spinning it and trying to control media agendas won’t work anymore, and the public probably didn’t trust you any more even when you could do that.

These days your work to build trust must centre on a communications strategy that seeks to build reputation in layers over time, believably. To use Alastair Campbell’s analogy from the event Speed ran last week, it’s about landing dots on a blank page.

The difference is that – providing you tell the truth – the immediacy and transparency of digital media can be combined with the reach and calibre of conventional media to join those dots faster. No one media type will create belief, it needs to be built over time, using all appropriate media outlets in the right combination, with the right content, rooted in an intimate understanding of the audience. That’s how PR can best help to improve overall levels of trust.

It’s PR’s (public relations, not media relations) central challenge in modernising, and it will take time, trust me.

That’s something which has been drilled into everyone in this line of work for years now. Yet being a communicator is a pretty broad remit isn’t it? Anyone with a mouth and a pair of ears has the potential. Which might be why the people who work in comms teams typically find themselves doing all manner of things in the course of their jobs.

On paper at least, such a broad take on what comms is might be a good thing, given fragmented and more accessible media is stretching the boundaries in so many directions.

In the future though, the role of comms teams, and in particular that of the communications director, is going to have to be clarified, focused and ‘upgraded’ if brands are to use the potential of communications to increase their value.

Live, breathe and champion

In short, brands are going to need to sustain joined-up, empathetic, collaborative and near-instantaneous communication if they’re going to defend and build their reputations through content that really influences. And this is going to mean comms teams have to live, breathe and persistently champion the cause of communications.

Communications itself needs a PR job doing, and rightly so. And who better (who else?) to do that than the communicators?

At Speed’s Control in the Age of Anarchy event last week (yes, I’ve mentioned it before, but hey that’s anarchy for you), Alastair Campbell talked about why communicators are going to have to “land dots on a blank page” through sustained communications strategies that build reputation long-term. One campaign doth not a reputation make.

What struck me is that the change that’s coming for communications teams, and has already started to take effect actually, is that communications is becoming a long-term game rather than something overly caught up with shot-term wins. Tomorrow’s comms teams are going to have to both mastermind the brand’s story and tell each of its chapters – and pages – in the most compelling way to hook readers in. They must both sustain their interest and build their belief.

It’s storytime

To succeed with this, brands will need storytellers, not just good orators, curators, conductors or stuntmasters. Those storytellers will need to know the beginning of the story, its intended end (of that instalment) and how they’ll get there. And most of all, who they’re writing for.

The 10 primary skills and traits they’ll doubtless need, given what Campbell and others said last week and the digging I did in researching for the book Brand Anarchy (due out by Bloomsbury on 29 March), are:

1. Leadership: not just of a comms team, but to lead the evolution of a communications function that is central to the organisation, with a clear remit from the person at its summit
2. Ambassadorial: the ability to speak eloquently, appropriately and convincingly on behalf of the organisation across all forms of media and with all audiences
3. Diplomacy: in ensuring that the communications function becomes sacrosanct within the business and is seen as part of its oxygen rather than something that can be cut detrimentally with little notice
4. Confidence: not just on a personal level, but true strength of conviction in what they’re doing to employ more progressive and valued  communications – they must devise delectably potent strategies and stick to them no matter what
5. Decisiveness: they must determine what to communicate, how and when, and why, in challenging circumstances and with little time to think. They cannot shirk this responsibility
6. Analytical: an intimate understanding of the audience, and how the beliefs and interests it holds dear are changing, interpreting the myriad of data now available shrewdly. And a close observer of media change too
7. Commercial: a detailed understanding of how the organisation makes money or fulfils its duties, and how those fortunes may change as market forces do
8. Educational: the ability to teach others what they know to the point where stronger communicators across the organisation fuel the development of the brand’s reputation internally and externally
9. Marketing: understanding where modern communications fits into – or leads, or usurps – other areas of marketing and accordingly utterly refusing to operate in silos
10. Narrative: per the rest of this post, they must be natural’ storytellers, and always looking to develop those inherent skills further with new techniques

Today’s better communications directors and their colleagues have probably made swift progress with amassing many of these skills. As communications techniques and media continue to change, the trick will be keeping pace with that while maintaining the skills requirements in sharp focus.

Perhaps there’s a story in that.

When we talk about results, we have tended to concentrate on the volume of publicity achieved. Yes fragmenting media is changing that and increasingly campaigns are being engineered to target commercial outcomes, but fundamentally a lot of targets that agencies work to are to get high quality and quantity of media exposure.

Chance and best guesses

So the flimsy fib upon which PR is based is that getting stuff about you in the papers, on radio and on TV will actually make a difference to you or your business. Because we have, ultimately, no way of knowing whether anyone is going to read it, see it or believe it. We don’t know whether it’ll be of influence and what they’ll think.

PR has always been a game of chance and best guesses.

But before I get my coat having completely done myself out of a job, let me qualify those brash statements a little. Of course publicity can have an enormously positive effect on brands and their reputations otherwise PR firms wouldn’t exist. And of course PR agencies can’t be taken to task when publicity campaigns don’t have the desired commercial effect because these things can’t be guaranteed.

Indeed I have successful argued that last point in court on more than one occasion.

Fantasy footfall

Yet the PR game has always been over reliant on its supposed ability to influence people. We talk about it being more effective than advertising because of the power of third party endorsement, and that is probably true. We have even dreamed up daft ‘industry standard advertising value equivalent ratios for measuring PR output. Because we had nothing better and had to do something to justify ourselves.

The lie, then, is that we’ve been planning PR activity and telling people that the topics or content we pursue will be effective ‘because that’s what will convince people’ or ‘because that’s what will inspire the audience. Guff like that. When we have no real way of knowing that, or didn’t until relatively recently, beyond a smattering of largely unrepresentative focus groups.

And yet PRs and those paying for their services were always happy (or mostly happy) to pursue the illusion, knowing that their competitors were all doing the same thing and they had to do what they could to influence the market through the established media.

Now though the lie is being undermined by the very thing that lies get brought down by: the truth. Because the transparency of two-way digital media – not just social media, but conventional media publishing online, and branded media assets too – means the audience can actually tell us what they think of the content they’re presented with.

They can answer back

When we undertake a campaign, carry out sustained communication or even answer a question posed by a customer or critic, we can actually see what that person thinks. It’s direct, visible feedback, and it’s typically provided because they really care about the topic. For better or worse, as we heard at Speed’s Control in the Age of Anarchy event last week. Providing they’re being truthful of course.

What’s more, this level of engagement enables brands to actually learn from their audiences over time – not just about what might influence them better, not just about their purchasing habits and views on issues that might impact them, but about how to better tailor products and services to what customers actually want. Over time, we can even get them to participate in the brand’s story.

So why haven’t more PRs woken up and realised that, while it may be imperfect at the moment, the possibilities for finally measuring what we do more accurately, using direct feedback from the audience we want to reach, is obvious and we should start to change the way we plan and deliver our work accordingly?

We could start to put an end to the intangible nature of PR, start to think about how we could offer consultancy that has a more clinical commercial outcome, and stop coming up with daft, unsubstantiated statements about why the results we achieved were really good. We could fill our boots with this.

Growing up time

Instead, while more progressive agencies are investing time, money but most of all energy in enhancing how they measure their work, a lot of firms seem to be burying their heads in the sand.

PR’s days of being a game of chance are numbered. It’s a really good thing for us. We can devise clever long-term communication strategies and deliver on them. We can be braver in pushing the boundaries of how brands can plan and create influence, because it’s no longer built on foundations of fudge.

Let’s man up, grow up and say goodbye to guesswork.

Ever done a 5k run? 10k? A marathon? Good for you.

How about walking 2012 miles after having been told by doctors that you’d never walk again?

Feeling inspired now, or are you still too shocked to even contemplate that feat? Well it’s actually happening: Phil Packer MBE, the former Major who received severe spinal injuries while on duty in Iraq and has since completed several gruelling, daunting physical challenges, is going to top them all this year. He’s going to walk 2012 miles over the course of 2012.

Why? It’s the centrepiece of his bid to build a £15 million facility to inspire young people in Britain who are at their lowest ebb, facing physical and mental adversity and who have lost belief in themselves.

How? Phil is going to walk 2012 miles over the course of this year, starting from Chichester College on Tuesday. It will see him walking in every county of the UK, including the Channel Islands. And he’s seeking the support of the general public, businesses and charities to help him inspire the youth of Britain. He’ll be assisted by the Armed Forces in undertaking the walk, and by a team of mentors including Sir Richard Branson, Jamie Oliver MBE, Sally Gunnell MBE, Kate Silverton, Suzanne Dando, Iwan Thomas, Eamonn Holmes and Gabby Logan. He will also have the support of Speed, which is managing the national, broadcast, regional and social media publicity for free, helped by Ketchum Pleon on regional media.

When? He sets out on Tuesday.

Where? All around the UK, starting on the south coast and moving to the south east in the coming weeks. Keep checking the web site for details.

What made Phil want to do this? In his words: “This is the biggest challenge I’ve undertaken but we must come together as a society to help our young people believe in themselves. We want the whole country to sit up, take notice and take action to inspire the people who are the future of Britain.

“My work supporting other charities and meeting young people facing adversity identified the importance of regaining self-belief, self-confidence and self-worth. The mental and psychological challenges of facing adversity are immense, and meeting positive role models and inspirational figures who are willing to spend time with young people is a stepping stone to overcoming adversity. My vision is for a centre that serves young people and brings charities and their best practice together, helping our youth to decide what they want to achieve in life and how to do it. 

“Walking 2012 miles will be an enormous challenge. I want young people to take part in it and show them that they are not alone. I want to connect them with inspirational figures, sporting teams, businesses and the British public.”

And a word from General Sir David Richards, the Chief of Defence Staff and head of the UK Armed Forces: “The support from the public to the Armed Forces and to service charities in recent years has been extraordinary. To thank the public for their support, kindness and generosity, I am encouraging Armed Forces individuals and teams to participate in the BRIT 2012 Challenge to raise money not only for service charities but also charities in the regions and communities in which they are based. I commend the challenge to everyone and in particular to schools, colleges, universities and youth groups.”

What next? This is going to be an important story throughout 2012 on many levels. I and the team supporting this from Speed are privileged to be involved, and would appreciate as much help as is feasible from the PR world to publicise this work far and wide.

Stay tuned to the media, social media, the BRIT web site and the Speed web site to learn more about the challenge’s progress, and how you and others can get involved.

We launched with a bang, we’ve always aimed to set the bar higher with our campaigns, our approach to working with clients and the work environment we create for our people.

Tomorrow we’re aiming to mark the beginning of the next stage with an enviable sales event featuring former Government communications head Alastair Campbell, former Virgin PR mastermind Will Whitehorn and Speed’s Stephen Waddington, who co-wrote the new book Brand Anarchy with me.

Yes it’s a sales event, but only in the contact-making sense, with no hard sell (not even a copy of the book). In the course of compiling research for Brand Anarchy, Stephen and I undertook many interviews with experienced, expert and infamous communicators who’ve been at the sharp end of the media and its changing times over the past few decades.

Alastair is one of many people quoted in Brand Anarchy, and agreed to come and talk tomorrow about the end of the age of spin and the need for a more authentic style of communication in the future. It’s something that many brands will say they’re already doing, yet most are being challenged by the dizzying pace of media change and requirements to overhaul how they plan reputation management.

One of the reasons Brand Anarchy took 18 months to write, besides the fact that both of us lead really busy lives and did the copy in the evenings, and on trains and planes, was that some of the chapters had to be updated twice because they were out of date by the time they’d been written.

It’s symptomatic of how fast media is changing, and how fast PR is having to change too. Which is why Speed’s next stage is going to be about taking the PR programmes we run beyond audience engagement with clients’ brands, so that the audience has sustained participation in the brand story. It’s a long way from just broadcasting a message at people via conventional media outlets.

What do we mean by that? Well we’re not giving it all away yet, but suffice to say the expertise we’ve gathered and been exposed to in writing the book has given us some insight into how to push the frontiers of PR a little further.

In many ways, what we’ll be doing is getting back to some of the true principles of PR – proper public relations, not just media relations.

Stay tuned. We’d like you to participate in our story too.

Yes, my local offy does a weekly newsletter. It’s only a small business, and yet its timing (Friday early afternoon), style (chummy, quite bonkers and excited) and content (loads of stuff about loads of really nice wine, all with a clear commercial objective though) always makes it a winner. Yes it goes on a bit, but so would you with some of those wines inside you.

Without further ado, take a look at this:

Dear Samplers,

My goodness, it feels like months since we chatted (in the one-way kind of chat that email seems to dictate).  In the usual “back to school, write a story on what you got for Christmas” kind of way, I thought I’d share with you my favourite prezzie from the festive period – beer making machinery. 

I know we don’t actually sell any beer, but I do have a fondness of the hoppy sort hidden inside me. Not any of that nasty lager stuff, or even worse a ruby ale or English stout, but for a decent IPA or golden ale. The only problem is that the chance of me making a decent IPA or golden ale are approximately zero. Not exactly zero though, so I’m going to have a go. 

I spent an evening last week sterilising stuff (how many funnels is it really necessary to own I ask you), and then mixed everything together, sealed up and put an airlock on. I admit that I’m using a kit first time out – the idea of having to buy a wort-chiller before I know whether I can only make beer vinegar wasn’t financially that appealing. Anyway, 5 days and a lot of bubbling and gurgling later, the hygrometer said it was fermented. This being a quality product, a second period of both bottle and cask conditioning is required (simply because I don’t have enough to do them all in bottles), so after more sterilisation, they were decanted away from the filthy looking produce of the first five days and bunged into a bottle or pressure barrel with some sugar and then sealed up. If I get no joy with the beer itself, the act of putting a crown cap on a bottle of beer was joy enough – the machine makes lovely satisfying clicking noises when you get it right.

So now, Chateau Hutchinson is maturing and clarifying in my new cellar (actually in the kitchen to be more precise). If it tastes any better than dishwater, I reckon I’ll be ditching this wine lark and becoming a brewer. Maybe if it does taste like dishwater I can distill it and make a whisky instead… 

Back in the real world, stuff is happening:

Burgundy (and Beaujolais) 2010 En Primeur – our offer opens today, and our tasting starts this evening!

You may have a heard quite a bit  about Burgundy 2010 already from the press. Its incredibly different in style to the luscious, easy going 2009’s, but there is huge excitement over how pure and focussed the wines are with very classical balance that will repay bottle ageing. We have a tasted a huge number now over the last few months, and really think that this is going to turn into one of the great vintages.

Even better, you don’t even have to believe our marketing nonsense, you can come along to our South Kensington shop from this evening to taste 32 of the wines (we have more so they will rotate as bottles are finished). The tasting won’t last terribly long as we don’t have many bottles of each wine, so if you would like to try some, I’d pop along in the next few days. 

This year we are offering wines from 20 estates ranging from Jean Foillard in Beaujolais through to some of the greats including Roumier and Fourrier.

If you are interested, you can read our full offer here . 

Some of our best buys are as follows:

• Most Exciting yet Affordable White:        Maroslavac Leger St Aubin 1er Cru “Les Murgers des Dents de Chien”
• Most Exciting yet Affordable Red:            Hudelot Baillet Chambolle Musigny Les Charmes (again!)
• Most bonkers:                                                   Everything from Henri Gouges (wild wines, gamey yet full of fruit)
• Best Value:                                                         Jean Foillard Morgon Cote de Py
• Biggest Positive Surprise :                            Daniel Rion Nuits St Georges 1er Cru Vignes Rondes 
• Sell your Family to Obtain:                           Fourrier Mixed Case

Fine Wine Offers

I’m saddened to say that Sebastien has finally been given the leg upstairs, so from now on he will be working full time on flogging wines by the case to trade and private customers (can you hear all the other staff shout whahey?)

For a number of years now we have been building up the number of wines and estates that we ship from abroad (which last year made up the majority of our sales for the first time). Importing so much wine allows us to be able to add bits and pieces here and there whenever we have a lorry doing a collection, so we now are able to do the following:

• Offer co-shipment of wines that we are going to import anyway but at lower costs
• Offer oddities and rarities that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to stock otherwise
• Offer museum stocks from the domaines that we buy from already

If you would like to sign up to these, please add your name to the En Primeur email list here 

New Wines

Well, its January, so we don’t have any. (Actually we do have quite a few, but I’m going to wait until the next email to tell you about them as with all the fuss with Burgundy 2010, I haven’t had a chance to price them up yet). Next time will have news on some new champagnes with a bit of age on them, bottled stocks of Fourrier and Rossignol Trapet, a very strange sherry, lots of cru classé Bordeaux, and probably some other things that I’ve forgotten about.

Icons

As usual, a bunch of vinous lovelies for your delectation. The Musar vertical in Islington is fascinating – three vintages from the finest period in Musar’s history, and all three completely different. 

Tasting Events

Kicking off our 2012 full format offering is the long awaited South West of France tasting on February 15^th in Islington:

The Wines of South West France – Sebastien and Jamies’ Excellent Adventure, Islington February 15^th 7pm, £35

You may have read the trip report that we sent out a few weeks reporting on our week long travels across the south west. We got such a big response to it that we thought it would be fun to do an evening where we can talk through each domaine and let you try the wines as we chat. Sebastien is already thrilled that he might be able to show you some slides from his endless snapping away at inconsequential signposts and petrol stations in the area.

For those of us who find that kind of thing rather easy to ignore, we will also be able to discuss the wines – there will be far more wines than in one of our usual events, so we would expect it to last until 9.30ish. As usual, there will also be a special offer on each wine available to order on the night only.

If you fancy learning about Jurancon, Madiran, Cahors, Quercy, Marcillac and Gaillac, why not reserve a place on 0207 22 66 555.

Don’t worry, the Sunday schools are returning too:

Sunday School, 29th Jan, 5pm Islington, £15 -  Portuguese reds with Ben.

Introducing a range of six red wines and giving an overview of the regions and grapes that make Portugal a great value red wine producer. Call 0207 22 66 555 to book.

The line-up for tastings in the next few months is beginning to shape up nicely – hold your hats for upcoming evenings with Maria-José from Lopez de Heredia, Fernando Remirez de Ganuza (oooh, rioja-fest), and Jim Clenenden from Au Bon Climat (just don’t mention Robert Parker)

OK, I’m off to look at my pressure barrel in case anything exciting happens.

See you soon,

Jamie

Jamie Hutchinson

The Sampler

266 Upper Street N1 2UQ

35 Thurloe Place SW7 2HP

But because in Britain – or at least in England, which of course gave rise to it – we have abandoned the very thing that binds us as a people, that stiffens the backbone of our culture, and that marks us out as the country which did most to kick-start the formation of the modern world.

Not that we should be proud of all of that, but we should at least be proud of the thing I’m talking about here: our language. English. British English. Or, as it really is (cue patriotic drumroll), English English.

But that pride has gone now, torn to pieces and abandoned to pick its path slowly along a miserable gutter to the darkest of sewers. Because we have succumbed to the utterly morose. We’re beyond caring. We’d rather be idle, dim, cheap – we want the easy way out. We want convenience, and to get it we’re prepared to tolerate the banal. We’re prepared to gaze lazily upon centuries of history and scoff slovenly.

And the reason I say this, the reason that the tipping point of the true English language’s fall from grace is now behind us, is that Waterstone’s has dropped its apostrophe. Which is incorrect. One of the country’s foremost providers of books (yes, books, full of the supposed English language, source of intellect, where we expect our language to be beyond reproach) thinks apostrophes have no point any more because too few people understand them these days and digital media doesn’t register them as well as it does words without them.

So ’people’ need to learn their own language and digital media needs to grow a brain.

I don’t care if Mr Waterstone hasn’t worked there for years. An apostrophe is an apostrophe. English is English. Wrong is wrong.

Anyone who has read Bill Bryson’s excellent Mother Tongue (probably available at Waterstone’s, but beware the crowds of punctuation-hating moronic shoppers if you elect to visit and buy a copy) may have considered that American English is ‘purer’ than British English these days anyway.

Yes American English may be a little laughable to us Brits, but our own language has been subject to whims and fashion for generations, so we can hadly criticise. It’s just different.

And now, given the irreperable rot that has set in with the original, I think the only thing I can do to preserve my sanity is to cross the pond, linguistically speaking. American English may be a bit sloppy in places, but at least punctuation and grammar hold firm, even if the sentence structure is somewhat ‘out to lunch’. From now on, I may as well just use (shudder, horror, the turning of souls in their graves) American English.

So, Waterstone’s, let this sorry episode be a lesson to you. And if the apostrophe has truly gone, and it’s not set to later return to raise suspicions of a planned PR exercise, at least update your web site rather than commiting brand inconsistency too.

No good can come of this.

Although for Daily Telegraph readers, as least it has provided an opportunity for another picture of Cheryl Cole. 

And if this is all a PR stunt, should I undertake my own, visiting branches across the country to put the poor little blighters back?