This is Whistlestop. Or to give it its full name, Whistlestop Foodwine. So fast are they moving that they can’t even pause for an “and”.

Whistlestop is the shop right next to the domestic arrivals area at Newcastle airport. It markets itself as ideal for picking up some bread, milk, or other sundries on return from one’s travels. The bizarre thing about this proposition is that in all the time I’ve been a regular user of this airport, I think I’ve only seen it open once. It seems to have absurdly restricted opening hours.

Now forgive me, but I would’ve thought that a shop like this would cash in on, for example, travellers who return on a Sunday night and need supplies for the following morning. Other shops are frequently closed, so this small store could cash in. Except it’s not open.

Which begs the question… what is its market?! It’s been here for years, so it must be doing something right!

I wrapped my first Christmas presents today during an atypical moment of organisation…! My brother and sister-in-law tell me that they’ve already bought all of their presents, which shows far more organisation than I possess.

Well, I say that, but I did get this year’s Christmas cards printed about 12 months ago, so I guess Wendy and I are a little ahead of the curve on that one!

A week ago, my 13-month old nephew came to visit, with my brother and sister-in-law, which was lovely! Wendy thought that he might be entertained by stickers, and she seemed to have great fun playing with him and them. A week later, I’m still finding stickers around the house… but I’m not entirely sure which of them is to blame!

You might have read that today M&S reported a £297m drop in profits for the first half of this financial year, with non-food sales particularly suffering (though admittedly improving somewhat towards the end of the period).

Mark Bolland is working on supply logistics, merchandise design and technology (including thousands of iPads) as the solution to these problems. There’s also, of course, the oft-cited problem of the M&S bust of the 1990s – over-diversification, especially of brands – which Mark Bolland is ploughing an awful lot of time and effort into repeating for reasons that frankly baffle me.

But I think there’s a slightly under-discussed problem: the state of the estate. Despite Sir Stuart Rose investing some £2bn in the estate only a handful of years ago, the estate is a mess. Here’s some pictures I took last weekend in the Newcastle flagship store:

The store has broken signs, patched up floors and fitments, the whole works. Note that these are not front-line problems – these are problems caused by poor quality, poorly designed store fittings. This despite going through Mark Bolland’s slightly half-hearted £600m store re-invigoration programme.

At heart, M&S is a premium retailer charging premium prices, which needs a premium retail environment – not shoddy broken fitments and badly scratched floors.

Clearly, the estate isn’t M&S’s biggest problem, but I think it needs further consideration. But then, when you’ve spent £2.6bn on refurbishing the estate in just eight years – the better part of £1m per day – how can anyone possibly convince shareholders that further investment is warranted? Does it start to look like serious mishandling of the original investment?

I don’t have the answers – and, frankly, I’m not convinced Mark Bolland does either. I’m obviously not party to the details, but I don’t think integrated multichannel retailing should be a massive priority – multichannel sales are increasing, but almost half of online orders are collected in store. In fact, if I were Mark Bolland, I would be trying desperately to retain in-store sales where service – M&S’s primary point of difference – is maximised. I’d be worried that one in five sales of men’s suits is online, not celebrating, as it puts customers a click away from, say, Brook Tavener, who compete strongly on price and quality, but without a bricks-and-mortar presence can’t hope to compete on service.

Why isn’t M&S pushing it’s service? If it wants to embrace multichannel, why not do it in a novel way that makes the most of bricks, mortar and service? ASOS famously advertises it’s free returns service, inviting customers to order clothes in a number of sizes and return the ones that don’t fit. Why doesn’t M&S push a similar order-a-range-of-sizes-to-store service, which could be a strong competitor, losing the complexity for the customer of organising parcel drop-offs and pick-ups? It’s a service which is pretty much already available under the current system, but isn’t pushed at all online.

Anyway, this is getting remarkably ranty for photo-a-day. I do hope you’ll forgive me! I’ll be back to normal service tomorrow, I’m sure!

This arrived today. Clearly, the news that the government has scrapped direct.gov.uk has yet to reach the government…!

This lamp in our living room spontaneously broke itself today while I was in the kitchen, very nearly causing me a heart attack! I have no definite explanation as to what happened… the bulb went, so that might have been connected somehow. Or it might perhaps have overheated? Who knows? It’s all a bit bizarre.

You can consider this photo as being in lieu of one yesterday, since I failed to post one then. This scene just felt appropriate given the news!

I have an oddly large head, as proven by my inability to wear Christmas cracker hats or round neck t-shirts. At least it’s not quite as big as this artwork at Newcastle University!

A few months ago, I tweeted this:

The response was comprehensive – everybody else in my personal twitterverse manages not to destroy them:

So take today’s photo-a-day as my defence! The pictured card is a little under three months old. It has lived in my wallet, I haven’t done anything other than use it to pay for stuff and to get cash out of cash machines, and yet already the plastic coating is peeling away. Within the next few months, the peeling will increase in size, the card will become a complete virtually unusable mess, and I’ll have to get it replaced.

I have no explanation for why this happens. It happens across all my cards, no one provider is worse than any other, and is but one of many problems I seem to experience with bank cards failing to thrive. Does anyone have an explanation? Or, for that matter, the same problem?

One assumes that customers weren’t asked to rate staff members’ knowledge of possessive apostrophes…! And I’m sure I can’t be the only one who thinks those teddy bears look slightly threatening!