Someone wise once told me that there are only two good ideas in the world at any one time, and that somebody else is already using yours.  That reality of that struck me profoundly, at the end of 2017, when after five years of heroically failing to raise enough funding for an original screenplay project called Leicester Square, I sat back in a recliner seat in a cinema in the very same named square in London. 

We often blithely talk about disruption, innovation and change as irreversible forces, and swap tales of the demise of Nokia, Blockbuster, Kodak, and Toys R Us. But now a wave of change is swamping theatrical cinema, and this time it feels more personal! Will cinema survive a world of streaming, social-media and nanosecond attention spans? If an Art Deco gem in a borough with some 400,000 residents can be shuttered, what hope for small towns, art-houses and niche theatres?

I am just got back from a trip to Australia. I had never been before, so the time, distance and investment all felt very “bucket list” and my anticipation was high.

I was delighted to contribute to some ideas to ‘I”, the IMD thought-leadership journal, on the importance of the side-hustle. The evidence is growing that the nature of work is not only now determinedly hybrid, but organisations are being staff with blended networks of different types of employees, affiliates, consultants and gig workers. But even amongst those contracted to an employment entity, staff are increasingly finding their most productive, enjoyable and fulfilling hours at work are AWAY from their main employer. I conducted a survey amongst my network and found that over two-thirds of respondents, many of them senior managers in large, well-known companies, are actively working on something “elsewhere” from their normal day jobs.

So the world’s biggest superstar Taylor Swift has just released a mammoth break-up album, with the Morrisey-esque title, The Tortured Poets Society.  Her new record is “inspired” (if that is the right term) by two deep, heart-breaking and over-wrought love affairs with two of the finest of the male species - British men; an actor called Joe Alwyn, whom she was with for six years, and then Matty Healy, the lothario frontman of The 1975.