All Good Things Must Come To An End.

Last week I formally announced to my amazing colleagues at Dentsu Creative in Edinburgh (formerly Whitespace) that I was hanging my boots up on April 30th.

I’ve been in this role for just about five years and it’s been an amazing place to work. I’ve met some of my all time favourite colleagues (friends) and managed to have a ball despite the fact that the world is steadily going to hell in a handcart, and “advertising” is not in any way what it was like when I jumped onto that rollercoaster in 1985.

I’ve been in the “advertising” industry now for just about 41 years.? Before that I put in shifts in theatres, sandwich shops, restaurants, pubs and newsagents (John Menzies specifically) for a further 10.? So that’s fifty years of paying my stamp. (Still don’t have enough for a full state pension though – how is that possible?)

When I started working there was no internet. Only four TV stations (well, actually when I first started there were only three). Mobile phones were devices with long cables.? Woke was what you did in the morning. Politicians were (largely) moral and believable.? Even Margaret Thatcher seems reasonable by today’s standards. Ads took a week to place (that’s press ads) and several months to conceive, now you can birth one in an hour.

It was the days of “telling your mum you played piano in a whorehouse” because that was more respectable than working in advertising, but the truth is it was entirely respectable, entirely dedicated, committed, creative and relatively egalitarian.

But all good things must come to an end.? I hope to walk more, travel more, lunch more, golf more.? Go to the cinema on a Tuesday afternoon more, see more Plays, Pies and Pints at The Trap. And I’ll spend more time with my Grandchildren (only joking, that last point is a wish, not an actuality).

Halls, Leith, Citigate Smarts, Dentsu Creative, Robson Brown, Nexus 24, Front Page, Whitespace and, above all, 1576 you have made me very happy.?

I salute you all.

(Oh, by the way, if you happen to need a wee spot of freelance jiggery-pokery, I’m available from 1st May.)