Dom Pannell's Blog

Christmas comes but once a year

And so does London’s annual Pillow Fight Club. OK, OK I know I'm late posting this... I actually wrote most of it on 23rd December, but went away before hitting the publish button and then I spent half of last week helping with the Crisis Open Christmas (blog on its way imminently).

2005's festive bash-up moved from Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden, next to Santa’s Grotto. It wasn't long before the Piazza was filled with feathers

I didn’t spot too many of my chums from the previous year (Paul smashed his heels in the summer, which I accept as a reasonable excuse even though he did manage Santacon the previous weekend). Not to worry though, because a group of people from Last Thursday showed up and displayed a very healthy lack of dignity or adult behaviour.

Hats off to Steve (seen here in a brown jacket)
who laid in to all and sundry as soon as chaos broke out on the stroke of 18:47 (don’t ask me, PFC always kicks off at unusual times). Come to think of it, given the ferocity with which Steve was beating people up
perhaps heads off is more appropriate than hats off. He kept going for a good fifteen minutes, which was far longer than I managed – mind you, I was keen to test the camera on my new Handspring Treo.

When he returned to the side to regain his breath, Steve’s lovely wife Kay
not to be out done, despite having just got off a long-haul flight (from Thailand?) grabbed his pillow and charged into the fray. Occasionally we could see the flash of her white coat as she did her best to decapitate all who dared to stand in her way. Mind you, even someone as dangerous as Kay couldn't escape being on the end of the occasional walloping.

I reckon that I gave at least as good as I got, even though I didn't last as long as I did last year. that's me with the brown leather jacket giving it some (and before anyone feels the need to point out how much weight I've put on, I'd like to observe that I was wearing five layers...).

Once again I demonstrated a combination of agility and unreserved brutality in the thick of battle

Craig adopted a style that was far more energy-efficient, using all of his height (a mere 6 foot 8 inches), he would occasionally bring his pillow down on the heads of any unsuspecting battler who caught his attention. Here is Craig bashing Steve: the bubble came from Santa's Grotto and has nothing to do with Steve...

Once again, the whole affair was good-humoured and the tourists looked on with bewildered expressions. You’d think that several hundred people suddenly pulling out pillows and bashing each other was not a normal way to behave.

Nicely exhausted, we slipped away to the mulled wine stand from where we did see some of the security guards from the nearby pubs trying to corral pillow fighters away from Santa’s grotto, but they realised that they didn’t really have much of a chance of controlling the mob. Best let them get on with it, so they did.

Special thanks to Leanne
who observed that we were “definitely the oldest people” taking part!

Who wants to grow up anyway?

Post Script 23rd January 2006:

Several people have asked me (offline) whether the Pillow Fight Club is an example of 'Flash Mobbing'. Well, I just found a reference to London's December 2005 pillow fight in Wikipedia's entry on the subject, so I suppose the answer is yes!

Santacon 2005

Well, I made it even though I was a little late as I had to wait while my washing machine was being fixed!

What excellent fun Santacon is! I don't know how many santas turned up yesterday, but Soho was full of them when I arrived in the middle of the afternoon.

The police were out in force, monitoring discreetly and chatting to any santae who wanted to share some Christmas cheer with them. At one point they seemed to be trying to encourage the santas to move along, but generally they just let us do what we wanted, which mainly involved singing carols and moving to the next pub.

Santa Steven has written a very good and complete write up of the entire day and I don't think I can do much better than that, although I ought to say that the meat pie I tucked into after we were kicked out of the Tate Modern (Santa had lots of fun slilding on the floor) was anything but vegan. I also disagree with Steven that the Rachel Whiteread exhibition is boring. It is reminiscent of igloos and Santa felt quite at home (I know that Finland isn't renounded for igloos, but it does snow a lot in winter).

I'll post a few of my own photos as soon as I can remember how...

OK, I have learned how to add photos on MT again (for a non-techie, this was quite a feat). Here are some of the snaps I took:

First up this is Big Bad Wolf Santa whose fault it is that I even heard about SantaCon in the first place:

Sadly I didn't manage to capture BBWS's trusty companion Little Red Riding Hood Santa on film - they made a great team! Hopefully someone will pubish a photo of her.

After singing carols on Oxford Street, we all headed to St Paul's on the tube (effectively losing our police escort at the same time). Not sure what the tourists made of it when 400 santae entered the train.

After St Paul's we trooped across the Thames to the South Bank

where we joined in with some proper carol singers... actually they joined in with us, but who's being picky?

Onto the Tate Modern where most santae were appreciative of the exhibition

although that didn't stop a little horseplay on the shiney sloping floor (made an excellent slide)

Finally, here's a pic of a very handsome Santa (ahem!):

MERRY CHRISTMAS! HO HO HO...

Good news sporting story

I'm not much of a snooker fan (it's far too difficult... I have a highest break of 14, which is hardly impressive), but I have been following the exploits of Steve Davis in the UK Snooker Championship this week. At 48, the man who dominated the world snooker scene in the '80s when he won both the UK and world titles six times apiece had widely been written off as a has-been.

In particular, Davis was eclipsed by Steven Hendry who won the World Championship seven times in the '90s, a feat that included claiming the title five in a row. To make matters worse, Hendry has beaten Davis 41 times in their 57 meetings, winning their last nine matches.

Then all of a sudden, Davis was back with a vengeance, fighting his way to a semi-final against Hendry and last night he made it into the final by beating his "nemesis" 9-6 (it would have been by a bigger margin, if Hendry hadn't staged a comeback at 8-2).

It's too early for Davis to claim the UK title yet, but I'm rooting for him... it's good to see that old-timers can still cut it!

-------------------------

Post Script: Well, Steve's run didn't stretch to winning the final, as he was beaten 10-6 by 18-year old Chinese revelation called Ding Junhui. Talk about a battle of generations, apparently Ding had only just been born when Davis last the UK crown!

I listened to Steve Davis on the radio and he was gracious in his defeat; saying how much he is enjoying playing at the top level again and praising his victor in the highest terms. Ding's magnanimous comments have also been exemplary.

Bravo!

Now when does the rugby Six Nations start? It's time for some proper sport...

The power of blogs on corporate reputation

Onalytica has published an interesting white paper on blogging and its potential effect on corporate reputation, by analysing the influence of Dell Hell on Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine blog.

Instinctively I expected the result would be to show that blogging has not yet come of age, so I was quite surprised to see that Buzzmachine was the 11th most powerful online influencer on Dell's customer services by dint of its being the primary source of information for other bloggers. I didn't expect a single blog to score so highly.

The really interesting point though is that when taken together, blogs are the second most influential player ranking close to three times more significant than Yahoo! in third spot. Given the propensity of bloggers to link to one another and the speed at which some authors are building up reputations (and presumably the number of people who read them via RSS feed) this is surely a shot across corporate bows - I can't imagine that blogs are going to become less influential over the next few years...