With Covid-19 numbers on the rise again, Diary isn’t wholly convinced that now is the time to launch an immersive experience, but are we a doctor? No. So, we have to say, this one sounds very tempting indeed.
Imagine Experiences is offering the opportunity to be “Bond for the day”. The London-based activity includes weapons training at a gun range – including the chance to handle James Bond’s trademark Walter PPK – and “perfume samples” at Floris, where you can wear 007’s official scent, Floris 89, and visit its “museum collection of perfumes of the rich and famous”. Then it’s off for Vespers and Martinis at The Taj Hotel (one of author Ian Fleming’s favourite bars).
Also promising immersive “counter-espionage” missions (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, no doubt) that could scare The Living Daylights out of you, it only seems to be missing one element of a typical Bond day – and, in these enlightened times, probably best not to offer that. Make your own arrangements instead, For Your Eyes Only.
Full Covid-19 safety measures are in place throughout – this is No Time To Die, after all – and the experience can be yours for £225 – so no need to win the Thunderball lottery first. Sounds like a day guaranteed to leave you shaken and stirred.
Trainspotted
Choose death pic.twitter.com/ub5NL3Sa3V
— Irvine Welsh (@IrvineWelsh) September 3, 2020
So, the schools have gone back, and you’ve worked up the courage to return to the office. You head down to the Tube, and there is a cheery tunnel ad to remind you of all the things you’ve missed – plus a few you probably haven’t.
We’ll leave it to you to decide which goes in which column, but examples include: putting on a tie, face-to-face meetings, weird carpets, not having to make lunch and, ahem, “proper bants”.
But then you get to the bottom and are told to disinfect everything you touch all the time, just so you can do it all over again tomorrow, and suddenly, your nerve is gone. Maybe next month? Or, as Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh summed it all up (much more succinctly) on Twitter: “Choose death.” Maybe the government should get him in for the advertising?
Failing grades for landlords
Much has been written in these pages of the investment opportunities associated with student accommodation. Now, with terms about to start, we have some news in that might just guide savvy investors towards gaps in the market that, by the sound of things, really need some filling.
Thanks to HeatingForce.co.uk – which collated student reviews from sites including Yell, Trustpilot and Google – we now know which universities are home to the worst landlords in the UK. Bottom of the pile is the University of Southampton, where landlords score half marks: only 2.5 out of 5 on average.
The Universities of Liverpool and Leeds fare little better (2.6), but Diary is very pleased to see that the University of Oxford, where it spent three happily accommodated years, ranks highest, with an impressive 4.1.
Congratulations, too, to the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Manchester, whose landlords are also first class with a rating of 4. If you think you can do better, get yourself down to the south coast, or up to the M62, and start fitting out some quality student digs.
Unsafe sex
File this one under “it’s not really Diary page material, but…” When someone goes to the lengths of sending you an e-mail with the subject title “Thrust, Fall and Slip: The Most Dangerous Rooms to Have Sex in,” it’s only polite to actually print something.
The self-styled “experts” at End of Tenancy Cleaning London surveyed 2,397 people to investigate which household rooms had caused “the most sex-related injuries”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bathroom is the most perilous, with 91% of respondents admitting to sustaining injuries there. Meanwhile, the safest room of the house for such activities is… the larder, where only 3% have come a cropper. Diary doesn’t even have a larder, so cannot vouch for its suitability.
If you’re reading this, EoTCL, we really need an office version (with suitable reminders to disinfect, naturally) to make it fully relevant to our readers.
