Langford Ink is here.

Temporarily the Langford Ink website is being hosted here. It's my own blog...you can read my story if you check out the archives. Soon Langford Ink will be hosted at www.langfordink.com. Watch this space and get redirected there when it's ready.

So is a blog the right place to have a company website? Good question. The immediate answer is probably 'no' but I'm game to experiment. Recently I've been encouraging some of my clients to look at the potential of blogging websites where they can engage more directly with their audience. Personally I've enjoyed and learned a great deal from the blog components on other business websites: web design, graphic design, marketing consultancy - I love being able to tap into the experiences of other professionals. For one thing, a blog site brings a human element to the business transaction; it shows there's a real-life person behind the brand who really cares about the service they provide.

Langford Ink is nothing if not human. My aim is to dismantle the corporate speak that so often drowns the concept of marketing. Really, marketing is just about showing your best angle to the right people, whilst highlighting what makes you different. There's no reason why we have to dress it up in fancy clothes.

For those small businesses who are new to marketing, I help strip away the fear often experienced when embarking on promotional activities. This 'fear' can obstruct you from finding tailored marketing solutions so that you risk settling for second best. I will guide you toward a professional solution within your budget, with some gentle education along the way.

For those who are experienced in marketing but time poor and perhaps wary of overspend in this area, I offer a sensible, down-to-earth marketing service. No jargon, I promise. First of all, I listen to you. You know your business better than I do. You might just need an objective viewpoint to get you started. And you you might find that having someone trustworthy and external to the business is exactly what you need to help your business grow.

I provide general marketing management, from consultancy and planning to day-to-day administration. I organise good graphic design, full branding programmes, signwriting and web solutions. I offer print management and copywriting. I give fair quotes and I'm realistic about budgets and timescale. I deal direct with associated marketing and promotional contacts to make sure my client is getting the best deal.

I don't know all the answers, but I always know where to look.

absent minds are not the recipe for rich lives.

A man gets into a cab at the airport, but he isn't certain where he's going. He just disembarked a flight from Italy, landing back in his home country as before.

As before.

As the cab draws up, he realises there isn't an as before; the "as before" he knew can't happen now. However, what should or could happen instead is equally obscure. All he knows is that he can't go back.

It is less what actually happened whilst he wandered the foreign streets, with unknown languages blistering across sun-soaked alleys. It is more that while he walked he found himself staring at the face of time, almost holding it in his hands. The intimacy astonished him. Time had become frighteningly present; no way to lose it or be distracted from it.

As the hot Ligurian days passed by in a slumber, a lightness replaced the gaping horror and with lightness, the suggestion of possibility; possibility that he didn't have to be the way he was before. It seemed that only absent mindedness had kept him there for so long.

"Facebook is becomming a bit low rent" (Discuss)

So says Stephen Fry, even though he concedes that online snobbery is absurd. And snobbery only in the UK of course (if the dub dub dub can be country-specific, that is, as not everyone is quite so obsessed by class).

Jury's out for me on Facebook; neither love nor loathe but can't help checking it with ridiculous regularity. I've just learnt how to attach my blog to my facebook page (this bit of technical widgery pokery has taken me a year or so to figure out). I am also learning how to delete friends that aren't really friends. This has also taken a lot longer than it would in real life, because in real life I am blunt and unpleasant sometimes, which is perfect deterrent for unwanted befriending. Hard to cultivate a blunt online persona apparently. Or not? Interestingly, I realise that I'm not online friends (there's another more with it expression for an online friend isn't there?) with some of my very truest bestest real world friends, which is reinforcing my sense that it's all a bit of a farce. Still, I like noseying in on my friends' and associates' business back in the UK while they were sleeping from my 13hr-ahead vantage point. And for a while I liked trying to think of quirky oneliners that might elicit a shes-so-clever smile from my pals; but I soon found I was bored of reading other people's quirky oneliners and that I should probably save myself the bother of dreaming them up.

So, it's not low rent, it's just old news. And that's the internet for you I suppose. My blog's old news - ex-colleagues looked at it for relief from their cavernous dungeon in Farringdon for a couple of months, just to see where in the world I was. Now that I really have stopped moving, I'm just another worker bee trying to find a moment of individuality in a samey world. Sadly, if Facebook or a google blog is the place to display our quirky one-offness, then all our moments of creativity are a bit samey too.