It’s been a fun start to the New Year, not least because I spent the first part of it in hospital with the nosebleed from hell.
I woke up on the Saturday morning after New Year with a bit of a trickle, so to speak, tried to stop it by shoving three tons of tissue up my left nostril (big mistake, in hindsight) and went back to sleep.
Woke up, removed the tissue and voila! Nosebleed Niagara.
Four hours later I was in the back of an ambulance heading for the the Royal Shrewsbury looking like I’d been in a punch-up. Thanks to Shropdoc, to the paramedic and to the ambulance crew from Market Drayton for their assistance, by the way.
At the RSH the doctor who saw me first struggled a little to staunch the bleeding with what’s basically a tampon. He was offered assistance by a nice nurse, but bravely carried on poking my brains out with the thing.
I only fainted the once, mind.
To cut a long story short-ish, it didn’t stop Saturday and didn’t stop Sunday, when they replaced the tampon with a balloon and started talking darkly about surgery. And they would have, but for the fact an explosion in Shrewsbury occupied the theatres with rather more worthy causes. I’ve always been terrified of the thought of general anaesthetic, but by the time they found me a space I couldn’t give a monkeys to be blunt. Sorry to the nurse I mistook for Jordan as I was going under.
Everyone at the RSH was fabulous. I think I may have even told the ward sister on Head and Neck that I loved her. In fact, I know I did. Sorry Sister!
All’s well that ends well. Even now I’m still sniffing a bit and the effect whatever they did has had on the proliferation of what you might call nostril residue is amazing….
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Back in harness, it was down to Olympia for the launch of Knowledge, the new digital content management and publishing system developed by PCS.
The system, which is still in development, caused a good deal of interest, with the guys showing more than 40 demonstrations and the stand busy most of the time.
It also attracted a fair bit of interest from other system manufacturers. One guy must have gone home with a stiff neck from the amount of time he spent craning it in our direction.
The thing for PCS now, of course, is to follow up the interest, which has come from the UK newspaper and magazine market and from abroad. Watch this space.
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I sat in on one of the theatre sessions at Publishing Expo, the two-way with Paul Keenan, CEO of Bauer Media. Within the general discussion he made one telling point on the ‘monetisation’ of digital content. And that was that while the web has by convention offered content for free, mobile phones have always charged. Therefore it’s probably going to be easier to charge for mobile content – with micro payment mechanisms already built in – which should be a plus for content providers.
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Another interesting trend at Publishing Expo was the number of small-scale publishers who weren’t necessarily interested in print at all – or at least not from the outset. Quite a few were talking about launching online and only moving into print if the interest warranted it.
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The crew had a couple of interesting nights out, especially at a Thai restaurant where the host was as chirpy as a slightly racist stand-up comedian right up to the point that we twigged his tendency to reload the wine without asking. When we moved on to beer we got a lecture on ‘going cheap early’ and how he never shied away from prosecuting diners who did a runner. Nice.