Rachael McKelvey

• The Paperchase scandal continues…
• Netflix has absolutely no chill
• The 28 days of February
• The best fruit tea is hot squash
• International Snow Sculpture Championships

The Paperchase Saga Continues…
In out, in out, has Paperchase in Administration again? The news almost isn’t news anymore. It’s been a week for Paperchase, whose last decade has not been without scandal from plagiarism, advertising in the Daily Fail and the wake of creditors it’s left in the last 3 years.

Since the early 2000’s Paperchase has been on a wild ride, the buyout from Borders, the subsequent administration and closure of Borders in 2009. It’s new retail partners of the 2010’s and subsequent management buyout that did see new stores and growth but significant loses accruing in the background.

2021 and administration knocked on the door for the first time and less than six months after the previous buyout we are here again. PwC just need to dust off the working papers and they’re good to go again.

Paperchase has failed to secure any viable offers as part of the sale process to buy the business as a going concern (all of it, buildings, staff, name the lot) so now it can be stripped for parts. Tesco has entered the chat. Tesco has bought the Paperchase brand and its intellectual property and hopes to roll out products under the name as part of existing plans to build out their home and clothing department.

Netflix has absolutely not chill
It’s the announcement that Netflix has been warning users over for months and now is finally year, once every 31 days your device must log in on your home Wi-Fi network or you account will be blocked.

The start to 2022 wasn’t exactly Netflix finest year even by its own subscription count standards, but in the final quarter of the year it grew by 7.7m subscribers, reporting a lofty 8.9m growth for 2022 but now where near the height of the pandemic.

The launch of the Anti-Password sharing measures are in the hopes of boosting revenues to hopefully attract some of the estimated 100 million share log in users to become subscribers…sometimes when you are so popular there aren’t that many other things you can do to increase your revenue.

I’ve just renewed my existing budget for next year – how much on subscription services! So we don’t have multiple Netflix account monies for the few days a week I don’t live with our current account holder, good luck with the other 999,999 users!

The 28 days of February
February is an underrated month simply by its proximity to January and all the motivational dirge that January brings, chances are you’re not as resolved in February as you were in January, you’ve likely had a statement of some kind that quantified how much Christmas cost and it’s dark all the time.

But February is the kindest gift when you really think about it, 28 days short in a standard year and the return on investment for just making it through February is astonishing. It starts off standing way too close to January but by the end you have all the pre-emptive Easter goodies in the shops, you hear the birds sing, you might even start to see some snowdrops and other bulbs appear and sunset is closer to 6pm!

Hang in there, we are so close.

The best fruit tea is hot squash
There has been a lot of fruit tea chat going on this week, in real life, online, everywhere and my unpopular opinion is if you want a hot drink that’s not tea or coffee then you can’t go wrong with a hot squash, some form of blackcurrant based beverage to be exact.

I don’t know where you’ve been the last few months but we have had some cold snaps and with the price of heating (and eating) I think we’ve all be like I’ll just have another hot drink & put on another jumper…but you can’t drink endless tea and coffee, so what else is there? Herbal teas…again you can’t drink lots of those, hot water…which if you’re not a fan of water cold it doesn’t get better just because you boil it, so that leaves the humble fruit tea.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice fruit teas that exist but the best fruit tea is hot squash. Fruit teas tend to be over marketed and therefore over priced, smell great but taste at best like different coloured water and at worst a little like jazzy coloured pond water (I’ve drunk a fair bit of pond water in my time, I am qualified to say this)

Last week I lamented the abandoned Sports Direct mugs in office cupboards up and down the land, because when I want a hot squash I want a pint, not a cup. I said what I said.

The International Snow Sculpture Championships
Please can we talk about International Snow Sculpture Championships, this house love hates the cold, we are both allergic in our own ways to the cold (Raynauds) but he loves to ski and I like swimming in cold water.

The winners of the 32^nd annual International Snow Sculpture Championships held in Colorado were announced last week and they are SO good. 12 teams from eight countries battled it out for just short of 100 hours, starting on the Monday and finishing on the Friday, 24 hours a day, in freezing temperatures to turn 12ft 25 ton blocks to snow into art ready for judging and display.

Team Germany-Bavaria won with “Sub-Zero-Gravity”. All the pieces are absolutely breathtaking but I think my favourite was Lithuanias entry “Warn(m)ing Clouds Intersect, it won Bronze Place and Artists Choice Award, it can be seen in this nice news article.

Current watch: Searching for Sheela – I first heard about Rajneeshpuram on 99% Invisible when the episode aired in 2015 about a utopian city built from the ground up on ranch land in Oregon by Indian philosopher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela, his secretary. With devoted imported citizens the dream became a reality until it all started to fall apart one allegation at a time from murder, sterilization, the worst domestic bioterror attack in history and a firebombing all linked back to Rajneeshpyram. Netflix in 2018 released a documentary Wild Wild Country that bought what I already knew about the scandal inside Rajneeshpyram and the part that Sheela played.

Sheela fled to West Germany but was extradited back to the US and was convicted of attempted murder and fraud along side some other charges, she served 39 months of her 20 year sentence and on release moved to Switzerland and bought two care homes supporting disabled senior citizens. This hour-long documentary follows Sheela on her first trip back for India for many years to promote her autobiography, she visits her old home and goes to events to talk about how people need to move on her past.

Current read: Say it with Charts – Gene Zelazny – Learning that doesn’t feel like learning, or a fun refresher. Written as workbook this is your one stop guide to visual communication. I had reason to pick it up this week just to reaffirm the basic concept of how to put my message in visual form and create a persuasive powerful chart and I forgot how useful and fun I find this book, with work projects and solutions to test your knowledge and just written like you’re in this together problem solving. It’s on its 4^th edition (2001), with a lovely little splash on the front that says “Covers New Technologies and the Internet” but despite being 20 years old, it still holds up today.

Most Impactful Listen: The Diary Of a CEO – Davina McCall: How To Overcome ANY Trauma & Live The Life You Deserve – My memories of Davina are Streetmate in the late 90’s and Big Brother from the 2000’s and then I feel that Davina went full on diet culture and then there was the ill-timed tweet on the disappearance of Sarah Everard that just meant I had mixed feelings and I just wanted to find out a little more about her. I don’t think there was anywhere left to hide, this interview is so vulnerable and insightful. Davina talks about her childhood, her battle with addiction, what made her get into TV and where her positivity comes from. In the last guest question section, she addresses the mistiming of her tweet and while we will never be the kind of friends we could have been during her Streetmate days, I feel like I understand a bit better where she’s at and I’m happy for her.