A campaign against warm beer

It's all got a bit political on here of late so I thought I would lighten the mood.

I was intending to post about this after coming back from the IoW Festival in June, but I completely forgot until I was in a pub this weekend. But for those of you who have been to festivals over the last couple of summers it's likely you would have experienced Carling's campaign against warm beer. At various festivals Carling has been operating a Beer Amnesty. You can take any brand of warm beer to its tent and swap it for a nice cold Carling - even Tesco's own value brand! Admittedly after three days drinking Carling it can get a bit too much but it's a great example of a brand being generous.

It also seems quite fashionable these days for brands to adopt some kind of environmental or political position. Some of which are genuine, but often they're too far detached from the product and people's relationship with it. They are merely token gestures. So it's nice to see Carling doing something small but massively relevant and helpful. There's not much worse than drinking warm beer. OK, maybe global warming.

Isle of Wight Festival - Let the children play

I haven't blogged for a few days as 1) I was at the Isle of Wight Festival and 2) I needed time to recover and catch up with work. I had an awesome time. Highlights for me were obviously the Stones, but Kasabian rocked. Snow Patrol, Keane, Groove Armada and The Thirst also put in great performances. The Isle of Wight Festival has such a different atmosphere to the likes of Reading and Glastonbury. It's definitely more family orientated and generally more laid back. However there were still plenty of people passed out around me through out the entire Stones set. You could smell weed pretty much everywhere you went and there is absolutely no chance of getting more than a couple of hours sleep and a clean toilet, so it certainly isn't a picnic in the park.

On top of being jealous of the children who probably don't realise how lucky they are yet, after all these are about as far as I got for a weekend during term time. It was great to see families doing something different together. Something that many parents probably consider to be unsafe or unacceptable to take young children to.

In The Telegraph last week, David Willetts the Conservative Shadow Education Secretary suggested that the reason Children in the UK have such poor basic skills in Mathematics and English isn't necessarily due to an inadequate education system, but because our culture is too protective of our children. Willets stated that: "Children are so cocooned by their parents that they rarely venture far from home and have little concept of space, volume and how the world actually works". Coining the term 'nature deficit disorder' the article cites research that alarmingly says the area in which children are allowed to play in by their parents is a ninth of what it was a generation ago.

Willets continued: "It is very hard to make sense of geometry if you haven't thrown a ball around or make sense of volume if you haven't messed about with water and sand or do arithmetic if you haven't collected things and arranged them." I don't often agree with much of what the Conservatives have to say, but on this I do. You can read the full article here.