Getting away from it all
Rocking the grass verges and lowland passes there is nothing your intrepid reporter will not do to bring you the very latest in marketing buzz.
This week we are in Grasmere, enjoying a short break with my family and yet still finding time to be chained by the eyeballs to the world of marketing.
Grasmere, as any walker under the age of seventy five will know (and those older will just ignore) is as heavily branded a place as Paris or New York. The locals know what draws people to its grassy shores and willingly regale with tales of rushbearing and fellrunning (the closest to which yours truly gets is when stumbling arse over hat after his lunch bag). A shop selling ‘Herdy’ the latest mascot for these parts offers tourists a more modern, branded slice of Lake District life and locally made jams and chutneys line the mouths of children.
Everywhere you turn is a piece of slate engraved with that damn daffodil poem (I’m more of a Coleridge man myself) and only the garden centre seem to stand against local custom with their admirable range of Japanese shrubbery.
Walking through the graveyard on the sunniest of days, I even overheard a teacher giving her charges a masterclass in branding by pointing out the reasons why Sarah Nelson’s Gingerbread was so successful. No, not taste and customer service but a face. A wizened old lady lending her increasing senility to the promotion of spiced biscuits has done almost as much for Grasmere as that Wordsworth hack.
Of ocurse marketing is hard to escape from. If we are to keep our villages as History intended then they must suffer the attentions of the marketing agency in order to draw people in to spend their money. The trick is not letting the marketing overtake the actual charm a place has to offer.
Then, as the sun began to set beneath the postcard hills, a sales assistant in authentic black dress, white apron and Top Shop bag trekked home just as she would a hundred years ago.
You just can’t escape to the country anymore.