The Crucial Blog

Submitted photographs . . . . we often have to ask people to supply photographs for our clients' own in-house publications or to be forwarded on to newspapers and magazines for their use, but it's always a little bit of a trip into the great unknown.

Even the simplest of digital cameras can provide perfectly useable images but, at a time when more and more publishers are relying on contributed photos as illustrations, it's only the minority that understand the few basic requirements of that image's format.

2012 - where did it go? In the blink of an eye. For the UK, Washed away in a deluge of rain - many, many times.

Yes the summer was rubbish, yes the autumn brought even more flooding and yes, the economic gloom shows scant sign of brightening. But there were many things to celebrate.  Here's our round-up of just some of the happier news stories of 2012.

I’ve done a lot of hanging round school gates at home time over the years. In a nice, perfectly legal, way.So I’m not in the least bit surprised by the BBC report of the Bristol University study that mums in deprived areas are put off taking their toddlers to playgroups because they don’t think they will fit in with the other parents and, more directly.I’ve been steaming about that story, and all I’ve observed of the sometime school...

When that old stirrer-in-chief John Humphreys hinted in a recent Today show that Ed Milliband might be too ugly to be Prime Minister millions of Radio Four listeners of all political persuasions understood immediately what he was getting at. After all, 21st century politics isn't so much about what you say as what you look like when you're saying it. But are we really only looking for leaders who are easiest on the eye?