The ‘staycation’ is back and that is terrible news. Not the prospect of being able to get around the country again, that’s great. What’s terrible is the reappearance of this festering portmanteau that has been so eagerly adopted, so enthusiastically rammed into any utterance on travel, that its meaning has been mangled beyond repair.

LOCKDOWN has polarised people’s views and made social media an increasingly fraught arena for brands.

It is difficult to remember much going right for the proprietors of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

Users have their occasional triumphs, Marcus Rashford being the most recent (and most striking) example of someone using social media to campaign successfully for something truly worthwhile. But he already had the fame granted the best footballers in the country. Similarly, Joe Wicks’s mission to keep our kids healthy when schools were closed during the first lockdown got a great boost from his social media posts. But he was already well known through his presence in books and newspapers and on TV.

Do you know why people enjoy debating the order jam and cream should be applied to scones? It’s because it doesn’t matter.

PETE BELL says choose the wrong influencer and you won’t just fail to grow your brand, you may even damage it.

INFLUENCING goes back way before Instagram’s pouty advent. In the 1760s, Wedgewood started using its Royal Warrant for marketing and since then the coercion and sponsorship of the famous to endorse brands has grown to see companies annually adding billions of (usually) dollars to the pension funds of sport and film stars.

PETE BELL writes a dangerous post on pedantry, typos, homophones and failed puns.

NOBODY likes a pedant. Except other pedants. People who spend their time on social media correcting other people’s posts rarely have many – if any – friends. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook posts, unless issued by a company in an official capacity, are as throwaway as pub chats and should be treated as such.

YOU may have noticed another royal baby has happened. You may also have noticed a flurry of PR activity as some brands desperately try to hitch their wagons to the new lad’s Christening gown. That may be a laboured metaphor, but it’s nowhere near as tortuous as some of the attempts to use this baby as a nascent brand ambassador.

YET again we are reminded that crisis management is simple. But very, very hard.

Setting aside morality for a moment, the odds can never justify gambling on a cover up.

HE’S made it to 95 years old, so Pierre Cardin is not yet turning in his grave at the parade of artless trash that these days bears his name.

THERE is a grisly irony to the fact that last week’s TTG discussion on the future of tourism in Tunisia was held at the News UK HQ in London Bridge.

easyJet’s £4 charge for stowing hand luggage in the hold is brazen, but it seems the public are falling for it.

I RUN to work (this makes me both proud and smug, but this is not the place to expand on that).

It gives me an hour to myself each morning. My phone is at the bottom of my rucksack but I feel truly connected. Connected to real life.