The countryside may be closed, whatever Government ministers say, but Bogof is still getting plenty of exercise. Take the one day Tube strike in London. Like millions of others in the capital, I trudged from meeting to meeting on foot, until, thanks to a smart PR agency, I made five trips by pre-arranged black cabs. And according to one cabbie he and his mates were making "an absolute b-----dy fortune, guv" from PR groups who had decided they couldn't walk like lesser mortals and were chartering Hackney carriages instead. Who said the UK's PR folk lacked initiative? Then it was across the Severn Bridge to the cavernous Celtic Manor Hotel in Newport for the Federation of Wholesale Distributors' annual bash. What a venue! I felt like I'd walked half way round Wales just getting from check-in to my room. Today's md Rod Hunt told delegates about an earlier conference where the speaker talked about demographics. He contrasted two towns. Kingston-upon-Thames, with its seriously rich, was said to be the perfect place to open a store, while as an example of a location with high unemployment and poorly paid workers he chose Scunthorpe ­ ironically, Nisa-Today's headquarters town. But a smiling Hunt assured delegates that Scunthorpe was "the commercial, and particularly the cultural, centre of the UK", although he joked that they had changed the address on their letterheads to North Lincolnshire. {{COUNTERPOINT }}