It was an evening for nostalgia last night as a team from Macmillan Distribution (MDL), ably supported by their colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan, paraded around the streets of London, masquerading as Bobby Moore and the boys from the 1966 world cup winning team.  (MDL: A Winning Team.)  David Smith, MD of MDL, took the part of the referee in leading his team round the course and even took the opportunity to send off one of the ‘Wayne Rooneys’, from the HarperCollins team.  For the evening I became an honorary member of MDL and adopted the persona of Geoff Hurst (he was the guy who scored the winning goal against Germany in 1966), joining the boys and girls in red.  We certainly made plenty of noise with our football rattles and World Cup Willie blaring out of the loud speakers.

And the reason for all this was a charity walk on behalf of BTBS known as Walkies.  BTBS is the book trade’s own welfare charity and Walkies is their yearly sponsored walk around checkpoints that include the likes of the Publishers' Association, Foyles bookshop and Bloomsbury.  MDL were not the only ones to send up a team and a variety of costumes and themes were on display.  In the end the prize for best team went to Vista who were dressed up in medical outfits with ‘Vista Cures’ on the back.  The Macmillan team were very proud to come an honourable second although I have had to point out that being a good loser sucks.

The Guardian has an in-depth article about Google and publishers. There's not much new in the piece although it's well written and informative. What I found most interesting is that it is clearly the result of a public relations exercise by Google to influence public opinion in their favour. I can quite understand this but I do wish that such a great organisation would spend less money on spinning their story and concentrate on finding solutions to their impasse with copyright owners.And incidentally, one might think that Google is the only search engine in the world. Thank goodness it is not (monopolies are rarely beneficial) and perhaps newspaper journalists should talk to some of the other organisations in the business. They seem to be able to cope with copyright. 

And finally, now for some thing completely different. Can anyone work out what this ad was intended to say? I am entirely mystified by the hilarious typo. Answers on a postcard (or more simply post a comment) please....