What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 27 June 2016

Welcome to another week and if you are off on your hols anytime soon, you will recognise the importance of a good read whilst you are sunning yourself. So, we're going a bit off topic this week and looking at some glorious summer stunners to keep you entertained - after all, even us busy event professionals deserve a little downtime now and again!

 

So here is the Cloud 9 guide to nine essentials to devour starting with What She Left Behind by Ellan Marie Wiseman. On Amazon it reads,  Clara Cartwright, eighteen years old in 1929, is caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant. Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, Clara’s father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash, he can no longer afford her care — and Clara is committed to the public asylum.”

 

Anyone who is worried about bearing all in a bikini will appreciate Dietland by Sarai Walker, which according to Amazon is a part coming-of-age story, part revenge fantasy. It's a bold, original, and funny debut novel that takes on the beauty industry, gender inequality, and our weight loss obsession — from the inside out, and with fists flying.

 

The Rocks by Peter Nichols also looks intriguing! From Amazon: “What was the mysterious, catastrophic event that drove two honeymooners apart so suddenly and absolutely in 1948 that they never spoke again despite living on the same island for sixty more years? And how did their history shape the Romeo and Juliet-like romance of their (unrelated) children decades later?”

 

From Amazon Among Ten Thousand Things looks good and is written by Julia Pierpont: “Jack Shanley is a well-known New York artist, charming and vain, who doesn’t mean to plunge his family into crisis. His wife, Deb, gladly left behind a difficult career as a dancer to raise the two children she adores. In the ensuing years, she has mostly avoided coming face-to-face with the weaknesses of the man she married. But then an anonymously sent package arrives in the mail: a cardboard box containing sheaves of printed emails chronicling Jack’s secret life. The package is addressed to Deb, but it’s delivered into the wrong hands: her children’s.”

 

Yaa Gyasi's debut is stunning. Homecoming is a sweeping, multigenerational story that begins with two separated half-sisters in Ghana who are unknown to each other. Each leads entirely different lives—one ends up as royalty, the other imprisoned as a slave. The novel traces their descendants through hundreds of years and across continents, chronicling their histories and hardships before ending up in 20th-century Harlem. It's not an easy book—but it just may be one of the richest, most rewarding reads of 2016.

 

If you were as obsessed with The People vs. O.J. Simpson (and as won over by the character of Clark, who, of course, prosecuted the trial) then you’ll want to pick up the first in her new legal series, in which criminal defence attorney Samantha Brinkman ends up on a double-murder case in which the defendant is a veteran LAPD detective, and one of the victims is a popular TV star. Blood Defence by Marcia Clarke is a must!

 

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne is out soon. The 8th installment of the Potter series, based on an original new story by Rowling, will also be a play. Oh yes, and it’s set 19 years after the last book, when Harry is a dad with three kids working at the Ministry of Magic. How could you resist?

 

If you have a taste for the Classics, then Eligible, by Curtis Sittenfeld might be for you. A compulsively readable retelling of Pride and Prejudice that makes Darcy a neurosurgeon, Bingley a TV star, and Lizzie a magazine writer in her late 30s. Pair with the original for a summer reading extravaganza. 

 

Most of us avoid self help books here at Cloud 9 but How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life, by Heather Havrilesky is pretty good. If you believe advice can’t be a summer read you’ve never encountered Havrilesky, who has the amazing ability to entertain while also helping you feel so much better about absolutely everything.

 

So happy reading, have a great holiday and even if you are not jetting off anywhere, a great week!

 

 

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 20 June 2016

Welcome to another week and after a bit of a delay, we're finally up and running with the 2016 Midlands Media Awards which we run for the Birmingham Press Club. This years Awards will be held at The Birmingham Rep on Thursday 20 October and you can find full details of the programme on the website.

 

One of the titles which always does incredibly well at the awards, is The Birmingham Mail and they published a great article a couple of weeks ago which we kept until now, as its seemed timely to share! (Our thanks to the Birmingham Mail).

 

The Birmingham skyline is set to be transformed by a 270ft, 26-storey hotel opposite the city's new John Lewis store. The striking development is being planned by boutique hotel group Bloc. The company, which currently operates a 73-bedroom hotel in the Jewellery Quarter, wants to demolish Gallan House in Hill Street and construct a new tower containing 238 rooms, to be called 'Bloc Grand Central'.

 

Bloc hotel rooms are designed around a 'pod' or compact concept - removing extra fixtures and fittings to maximise space and create more bedrooms. But the narrow triangular design may not be to all tastes. It was reported last year that the group, which also runs a hotel at Gatwick Airport, was eyeing an unnamed site for a second hotel in Birmingham city centre as it added 31 apart-hotel rooms to its existing complex in the quarter's Caroline Street, which opened in 2011.

 

It has now lodged a formal planning application for the new building which would become one of the tallest hotels in Birmingham, rivalling the Hyatt Regency in Broad Street and sitting in the shadow of the Radisson Blu, the second tallest structure in Birmingham.

 

It would also neighbour the 241-bedroom Holiday Inn and be one of the first things people see when exiting this side of New Street station. The new hotel will create around 40 jobs and also have a capacity for ground floor coffee shop, to be run by an external operator. Like its sister site in the Jewellery Quarter, Bloc Grand Central will have a mixed offering, with 194 standard hotel rooms and 44 apart-hotel rooms.

 

It will have no parking but Bloc said it planned to sign a partnership agreement for guests with a local car park operator. Birmingham practice Glenn Howells Architects has designed the scheme.

 

In other news this week, love it or hate it, there is no escaping football at present with the Euro 2016 Competition in full swing. Here at Cloud 9 Towers some of us are more interested than others and the added dimension this year, is that thanks to the lovely team at the NEC, if Jamie Vardy - yes Leicester City's own - wins the Golden Boot Award as part of the competition then we could win a weekend for two to Barcelona.

 

They've allocated us a player and we don't know who else has who, but we won't hold our breath or cross our fingers too much just yet, but we are reliably informed that if you have to bet on anyone he is as good a choice as anyone!

 

Now, we don't know if the following is speculation or not, but if you have been drawn with the following couple of players or have them in your fantasy league, you might want to watch out!

 

Villified by many following his histrionics in the Champions League final, Pepe is well-versed in the dark arts of defending and has previous form at international level, having been sent off at the 2014 World Cup.  In club football, Pepe has been shown the red card eight times so he might start but not finish!

 

Dele Alli is another you might want to swap if you get chance! The 20 year-old’s breakthrough season at Spurs came to a premature end and he was forced to sit out of the club’s final three games due to a retrospective ban for punching West Brom’s Claudio Yacob. He hasn't actually been sent off yet but 27 yellow cards in 134 games is not that great a ratio we feel.

So have a great week and come on England!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 13 June 2016

Welcome to another week and there can be no other topic this week than The Meetings Show  which starts on Tuesday down in London. Whilst Olympia is a bit of a pain to get to, three of us from Cloud 9 Towers are going as hosted buyers, meaning at least we get our travel and hotels all covered.

 

So between us we will be doing in the region of 60 different appointments looking at different venues and destinations for clients. It's always nice to catch up with existing hotels, venues and suppliers that we know well and have a great working relationship with, but one of the core reasons for attending is to discover something new, something unusual and to educate ourselves.

 

It doesn't matter to us whether you have been in the business for five minutes, five years or even twenty five years, we are convinced that you never stop learning, and as a business it is really important to keep evolving and to keep on reviewing the ways in which you work.

 

One of the great things about The Meetings Show is that there are lots of very educational sessions covering everything from delegate engagement to social media skills and public speaking, so irrespective of the topic, there is bound to be something that is of interest no matter what level you are at within your career.

 

We're all appointment upped - and ready to party as between us we have some rather lovely events to attend as part of the social programme - Dinner at the Montcalm, BBQ at the Kensington Roof Gardens, Cocktails at the ME Radio Bar - we'll no doubt see you there!

 

In other news this week we're very keen to hear from you if you run, manage or oversee an awards brand or programme. We're conducting some research for a special event coming soon and we're keen to learn the various different ways in which awards events are put together.

 

Whilst most programmes have a tried and tested format, some of them are more transparent than others, some provide feedback from the judges, some charge for entries, some don't and some only deliver their results via a webinar or online announcement rather than holding a ceremony.

 

We're trying to gather as much data as we can and so any help or assistance you can give us would be most appreciated. Please email us and we'll pop you over a quick link to a survey we've created and you can win quite a great prize....

 

Have a great week and we hope to see you at The Meetings Show!

 

 

 

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 6 June 2016

Welcome to another week and we need to keep our blog a little short and sweet this week. It's slightly manic here at Cloud 9 Towers (just for a change) so with apologies for the brevity of our post, we'd like to wish everyone a great week. Enjoy the sunny weather and we will be back soon with lots of news, event updates and information. Have a great week!