Every music festival that I’ve ever been to has ended with a previously green field submerged in a swamp of rubbish. Now that there are so many festivals around the UK each year, a sustainable solution needs to be found.
Coca-Cola Enterprises introduced its Happiness Recycled Initiative to two Scottish festivals this summer – RockNess and the Royal Highland Show. To get festival-goers engaging in recycling, Coca-Cola set up interactive recycling bins and hosted a series of games and flash mobs.
The reactions of festival-goers were captured on camera and they were able to collect their photos at the Happiness Bank, a converted shipping container manned by Coke and Zero Waste Scotland volunteers.
Beyond the festivals, Coca-Cola is also giving the chance to win recycling-themed prizes online.
To see the Happiness Recycled initiative in action, visit Youtube or watch this video below….
Actress and author Lucy-Anne Holmes holds a literary court at the Bloomsbury Street Hotel and recites Letter From The Tower by Anne Boleyn, an intense, poignant letter from ‘Love Letters of Great Women’.
The heartbreaking letter was written by Anne Boleyn from the Tower of London on 6th May 1536 to her love Henry VIII, begging for her life. As we all know the outcome of her almost persuasive words, it makes for a rather bittersweet Valentine’s Day tale!
Following the success of The Book Club, Radisson Edwardian Bloomsbury Street Hotel launched their second literary initiative – Book Bytes. The regularly updated videos are perfect for book lovers who can’t make it to London for the events.
The Book Bytes series includes a collection of eight five minute films, featuring readings by Lucy-Anne Holmes across a broad genre of literature.
If you’re a fan of the Bloomsbury Set, you’ll be interested to see the hotel’s tribute to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – the archetypal Bloomsbury Modernist novel.
Taking pride of place in the reception area, the art installation incorporates a whole wall made of pages of the novel.
Alluring, coquettish, enigmatic and knowingly seductive – this is the new French Connection woman. Paying homage to their name, French Connection have reinterpreted their image with a chic new campaign for Spring/Summer 10, inspired by French New Wave cinema.
The provocative FCUK logos that were so synonymous with the brash 90s have been replaced by a demure, intelligent advert with a typically French sense of humour.
The irreverent short film presents a critical study of ‘The Man’ and ‘The Woman’ and builds a story around their emotions, quirks and contradictions. It references the stylish absurdity of French New Wave cinema and French Connection’s Anglo-French heritage with a little bit of ‘franglais’.
French Connection’s philosophy is that it is the woman or man wearing the clothes that gives them life and a unique personality. Their style DNA is based on well-made classics with a fashion-forward edge and as the film suggests, the quality of the clothes speaks for itself.
French Connection has always been about affordable luxury, with feminine tailoring, the perfect LBD and well-cut jeans being the foundation of any wardrobe. They have established their bestsellers and reintroduce them each season, building up a collection of French Connection ‘classics’.
But lets not forget about ‘The Man’! Monsieur is the stereotypical French belle-bête, complete with beard, furrowed brow and philosophical air, modelled on Serge G
How would you describe a city like Paris? Do you automatically think of a Robert Doisneau image of two lover kissing in front of the Hotel de Ville or is the Eiffel Tower lit up at night inscribed in your memory? Paris is undoubtedly magical, but the beyond the confines of the tourist trails is one of the most multi-cultural, artistic and unconventional capitals in Europe.
The three and a half minute film entitled Kisses From Paris is directed by French actor/director Yvan Attal (who is also Charlotte Gainsbourg’s partner) and is sound tracked by Rufus Wainwright’s atmospheric Leaving For Paris. The Paris tourist board loved his sketch in New York, I Love You so much that they commissioned Yvan to express his own creative vision of the “New Paris Ile-de-France”.
The film features two young lovers, played by Zoé Schellenberg and Pierre Perrier snogging their way through Paris, stopping only to marvel at the amazing sights around them. In between declaring how much they adore each other, the couple study the art at the Beaubourg and the Palais de Tokyo, stroll along the Canal Saint-Martin, go to a gig at the Chateau de Vincenne and hunt for vintage treasures at the Saint Ouen flea market.
The film is intense, stylish and dreamy but in a more realistic than whimsical way. It reminds me of Before Sunrise and its sequel Before Sunset (shot in Paris), where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train and get to know each other in a day before going their separate ways, then meeting up in Paris nine years on.
Kisses From Paris does nothing to dispel the myth of Paris as a city for lovers and not all of us have a Louis Garrel look-a-like to kiss all over town, but it offers a new, alternative Paris to fall in love with.
To find out more about ‘le nouveau Paris’ and to win a trip to Paris, visit the website.
