Sarah Sturt's Blog

Sunny days, billboards and broken stuff

Good to see a few blue skies creeping into the week and not quite so much of the wet stuff around - my home town of Tonbridge suffered a lot a couple of weeks ago when many car parks, the swimming pool and virtually the whole of the sailing club at Haysden all but drowned. The pool was shut to prevent the famous moment years ago when the Medway decided to join in and our local paper ran a great pic of fish swimming around in the indoor pool. Had a great meeting with Tonbridge & Malling planning guru, Steve Humphrey, at Kings Hill during the height of the flooding about the future of the town over the next few critical years and he generously gave me a lot of his time, despite clearly needing to don wellies and get out into the field of action!

My own garden, which I love and despair over in equal measure, is on a downward slope and all the rain collects in the corners of the beds, which is not a good look. And heavy clay soil means it takes forever to dry out, but I actually got outside at the weekend to do a bit of digging and general tidying up, so it feels positively spring-like now and looks a lot better. More or less everything else at home has, however, decided to fall apart at once - from the bathroom light to the phone to the garage door: is there some kind of strange law that means everything has to break down at once, do you think?

It's been a strange week altogether, the most bizarre being meeting Kent Life snapper, Manu Palomeque, in Maidstone Museum to have my photo taken for a giant billboard that's being erected in the town to celebrate '30 Creatives' - of which, apparently, I'm one - working in the 'Creative Quarter' of our county town. The background was to reflect my love of research and history, and that my parents were both archivists, although I am a little concerned that readers may take away the impression that Kent Life is handwritten by quill pen in a tranquil library setting, rather than the frenetic reality of laptops and mobile phones and deadlines... Just praying that the graffiti artists can't reach my pic when the whole thing rolls out in acouple of weeks!

Back to the day job - Sarah

Website wunderkid

Regular users of the Kent Life website will be aware that at this stage of the month, it's 'all change' on our website - and I just wanted to acknowledge the work that goes into keeping the site up-to-date and fresh. Michael 'Monkey' Palmer, my trusty sidekick, steps aside from his day job to spend many hours updating our web content, to reflect the new edition that will be on sale in a matter of  hours. 

He has tried to show me how it's done, and I have indeed slowly and probably quite painfully, actually uploaded some content (and how proud I was!), but Monkey is the real expert and the creation and the maintenance of this invaluable side to Kent Life is all down to him. So a big hand for my right-hand man.

Hopefully looking at the February highlights will have whetted your appetite for the real thing - February Kent Life will be on sale Wednesday this week. There's nothing like the anticipation of a new edition, even one that we've put together - and nothing beats that smell of a brand-new magazine straight from its wrapper. Or maybe that's just us publishing junkies?

Anyway, I hope you'll like our romantic-but-not-slushy February - don't forget you can let me know what you think via the website, or email or write me a 'letter to the editor' - your comments, good and bad, are always fascinating and always warmly welcomed.

And if you are a really committed Kent Life-er, why not join our reader panel and let us know in person what you think about your county's leading magazine? We won't bite, honest.

Until next time, Sarah.

Join our reader panel

Back in sunny Worthing again - we just can't keep away. The challenges of publishing at this time of year mean that we still have to close our February issue, which is a little challenging as it sort of 'straddles' Christmas. Hard to pick up the threads, but we're managing - and we have a cracking cover that manages to reflect the Valentine's romance of the month of February without being overtly 'sickly.'

There has been a lot of actual sickness among the work force - everything from chest infections to winter vomiting, which sounds ridiculously exciting but probably isn't at all - but people seem to have drifted back at last and head office is as bustling as ever. Monkey and I are 'sharing' our designer, each sitting with her to oversee 'our' pages: we get very protective over our own work, but it is extremely rewarding to see words and pictures coming to life on the screen.

Next week I start on the March edition, which means I have nearly completed three years as editor of Kent Life, or to put it another way - got 36 editions and numerous supplements to press on time. Hopefully you have seen a few changes en route; the magazine is certainly almost unrecognisable from those early versions I oversaw in 2005.

Finally, I hope you will have noticed in the January edition and on our web home page our call for readers to join the Kent Life forum. We had a highly successful meeting last spring with a great bunch of readers, so if you would like to join us, and have your say about your favourite county magazine, drop us a line and register your interest - we'll do all the rest. And if you were part of that original panel, of course we would love to have you back again!

Until later - Sarah

Happy New Year!

I've been saying it and emailing Happy New Year all week, but seem to have forgotten to mention it in this most important of forums - so happy 4 January to all Kent Life readers! Many of you are still on holiday until 7 January, so good luck with that when you try to remember what on earth you were doing more than two weeks ago, the rest of us staggered in on the 2nd, so Christmas already feels a very, very long time ago.

And in publishing, of course, we have been writing 2008 for weeks: our February press week looms, and I am now so grateful that I was such a slave driver pre-Christmas, as we have written the bulk of our pages. Hurrah for organisation! Monkey and I are in Worthing today with Kerry, our designer, working on a fresh style for what we, bizarrely, refer to as the page 'slugs.' These are the bits that sit at the top of each page and help the readers navigate through the various sections of the magazine. It will be interesting if you notice the change: the idea is to make life simpler and create a 'cleaner' look.

I wonder how you are all doing with your various resolutions: broken them all yet? I managed two whole days without coffee, exisiting on rather disgusting 'detox' teabags instead, but headed straight for the caffeine without a glimmer of conscience after our usual dawn arrival at head office. Well, I did do the drive (for a change, mutters Monkey), and the M25 was as horrible as ever. I also managed to stagger into my local gym last night, so have a virtuous glow around my head (and aching limbs), despite not actually having stayed there very long and largely done a lot of chatting.

Well, back to the grindstone now - to be continued!

Sarah