What a dish

The latest weekly mens mag to hit the streets. Surely a crushing blow for Nuts and Zoo mags cos it's free (although noticeably less tits n' ass). Heavy on big ads and advertorial pieces allow for the no-cover-price I guess. Decent publication on first skim.



Grizzly Grieve

Last night we had dinner at ours with an old pal who's just back from St. Tropez (94 Euros for four drinks - and he's unemployed just now - crawler). The wee man off to bed, we sat down and flicked between Scottish World Cup Rugby and Champions League Football.

At half-time we switched to Channel4 to watch an old work colleague of ours perform some culinary killings in the wild. His new show The Wild Gourmets was great - similar to a couple of others but still unique. He indulges in some of our "UpNorf" pleasures - shooting, collecting mussels and picking funghi for scranning. He was into his wild food I recall. He would peddle me his home-grown rocket.

Guy was some boy in here. Now he's all shot-guns and carving knives. I remember, in his office, he had a picture of 50Cent next to a picture of a couple in their 50s sat on a bench by their lawn out the front of their big house with their golden retriever at their feet. "This is not our target audience" above the former, "This is our target audience" above the latter.

I remember chatting to him about father-son relationships after my old man had died. His had done so too when he was younger and he had wise words. I think his old man liked an adventure. That figures. He left the Scotsman to survive in the wilds of Alaska but in order to do so he needed a masterplan. He showed me this amazing presentation that he intended to pitch to various groups for his big idea and swore me to secrecy. It was a copy of The Great Bear of the London Underground with all the coloured lines indicating finance, sponsorship, travel, publishing, media etc. The effort, thought and planning was incredible. In the end he did it, roped in sponsorship from Highland Park and Tiso, built a log cabin, chilled with the grizzlies, killed his food, travelled by huskies, survived, wrote a weekly column for The Scotsman, wrote a book AND had it published. I'll be watching each week at 8.30pm. The missus thinks he's a dish. Proper Mark Twain / Ray Mears / Bill Bryson character.



Observations:

Rubber-bands perish fast
The digital smiley is 25 years old
Everyone has a mate called Dave