Leeds city centre

We were doing an XO race, one of the fantastic urban orienteering races.

And I wanted to go, I think, if I recall correctly, it was a photo of the wonderful Hibiscus Rising sculpture in Leeds City Centre.

And it looked really beautiful.

Sorry, Neil, just going to go and take a photo of this and then when we come back.

The old way to scale a packaging company, B2B, would be to think of it as demand gen.

So I would say, imagine you pulled a wooden block to Leeds Town Centre, you stood on it, and you started shouting at how you did packaging for brands.

Let's say you did the labels for food and beverage companies.

You'd stand on that town square, you'd shout, does anyone want anything? And every so often, someone would walk past and be like, oh, actually, we are looking for that.

It's gone on a long time as it has, hasn't it? And I think if we could introduce a new circuit, it'd probably be in either an industrial area, wouldn't it? Or like a financial district, which can be shut down at the weekend in a big city like London, I guess.

I don't think the cost and the objections to shutting down, say, where I live, Leeds City Centre, because it wouldn't just be an hour on a Sunday afternoon, would it? It'd be all weekend because you're practising.

You'd have to set it up in the weeks before or the days beforehand.

I just don't think people would be...

Yeah, it wasn't that long ago.

It was 20 plus years ago, which is... terrifying but yeah I fell into it really I fell into HR I didn't really know I did marketing and media at university went there just to experience life not necessarily thinking I wanted a career in marketing and there was I remember there were there were two job offers that I had on the table one was a marketing analyst in Leeds City Centre and And the other one was a HR assistant for a small distribution company in a small town called Weatherby.

And I was debating which one I should go for.

And the HR role came with a professional qualification.

And it comes during the period of when Leeds was undergoing gentrification.

And the charge to the police officers was to clear all the homeless people, whom they refer to as dossers, off the streets, particularly in Leeds city centre, which is where David used to stay.

And two officers in particular were brutal in the way they treated him.

They'd drag him into the police station and would beat him up.

And drive him 10 miles out of Leeds and dump him there in the middle of nowhere later at like midnight, 2am.

And he would always walk back.

to Leeds City Centre.

So they always knew where to find him.

I do recall jumping up and down on some Cape Apples outside London.

of Safeways once in Leeds City Centre.

I mean, I just joined in with the anarchists because they said...

Yeah, you just wanted to jump up and down on some apples.

The opening scene begins with a bunch of rowdy teenagers from the two warring factions, the Houses of Montague and Capulet.

I read this play closely for the first time a couple of years ago, and right from the start I was transported back to Leeds City Centre on any Saturday night in the mid-1970s, navigating my way back to the No. 34 bus stop, desperately avoiding the various warring factions and due-hating Leeds fans letting off steam.

Actually, even before that opening scene, there's a little prologue.

Short, but a great big spoiler alert that warns us this is going to be the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers.

He's coming out and he's saying positive things about these people, which is fine when it's about football, right? But what if they have a different agenda? What if it's a different type of person that comes in? We have a completely different ideologies to what we have in Britain.

Who's to say if they don't, if they invest 50 billion pounds in Leeds City Centre, then they won't have influence over Leeds.

You know, whoever it might be.

I mean, this goes away to some degree when Andy Burnham, you know, whenever it will be that he leaves his post.

That'd be stupid.

But anyway, it was a nice venue in Leeds Centre.

Oh, lovely.

Good place to

Uh, with my wife, I should point out that she's a commercial property solicitor.

We merged into Brodies last, uh, December to form their first sort of full-on English office, so we moved into Leeds City Centre.

So whereas most people at my advanced age are either retiring or, or working less, we opened their new office and I s- as I say, I specialize in, uh, contentious and non-contentious construction, both UK and also internationally.

I was just saying to Renee, I've just came back yesterday, so slightly jet lagged, from Seoul, where I've been for a week, uh, speaking to the contractors and various law firms there.