Howls over towels
This week has seen some major news emerge.
My colleague Natalie Harms wrote last week on the often very combative struggle to secure a poolside sun-lounger or sub-bed at a resort.
Many guests — and this is not a new struggle — believe by placing their towel on a sunbed, the sunbed remains effectively theirs. However, a May decision by a German court penalized a tour operator €900 for not enforcing a resort’s ban on towel reserving and not confronting guests who were engaging in the practice.
In addition to Harms’ comments and asides, I note that in 2025 a city in Spain, Valencia, turned the tables, or at least the sunbeds, on the issue.
The city fined two sun-worshipers €250 each for placing their towels on “their” sunbeds at a beach, not a resort, before 8 a.m.
Apparently, according to Birmingham Live, the two guests were “stunned” on receiving the fines.
I am quite proud of Valencia, the home of my wife’s twin sister and family and a place I know very well and like even more.
UK political swings and roundabouts
I used to tease my Italian wife that Italy had a new prime minister every week, but this joke has been turned on its head, and it is the United Kingdom that seems to change them weekly.
Confidence in business and hotels, and among consumers, starts and ends with the person at the top of the Houses of Commons, and it is sad to say we had six different prime ministers in the eight years from 2016 to 2024.
The way things are going is that we might have a seventh soon, following the losses of the Labour Party in the May local elections and the calls for current prime minister Keir Starmer to go.
Politics in the U.K. mirrors Premiership football, I increasingly think.
At the start of the football season, if a team loses a couple of matches, out come the calls for the manager to get the chop.
It takes time for teams — sporting and political — and policies and tactics — also sporting and political — to knit and work, but in this heightened age of a bottomless pit of social media, time is no longer permitted.
There also is the relatively new concept that the leader of the political party or sports team can very quickly lose the locker room, that is, their teams stop supporting them.
I would assume this has to do with the huge amounts of money at stake, and the geopolitical and macroeconomic machinations of the world.
Everyday life has sped up noticeably, so everyone must sprint, not jog.
Sad is that once one person has gone, the candidate list of successors is never ever more inspiring. Better the devil you know, and all that.
Victor cave
Conqueror beware!
I suppose this one is a good change.
At the end of April, the U.K. government signed into law the Crime & Policing Act 2026. This new law covers multiple aspects of crime, but one major component for businesses is the law has been tightened to make it far easier for corporate entities to be held liable for offences committed by senior management.
Legal firm Fieldfisher puts it bluntly: “Corporate exposure will no longer depend on whether wrongdoing can be pinned to the board or top executive tier, but on how decision-making authority is exercised in practice across the organization. … In practical terms, any offence capable of being committed by a corporate entity may now be attributed to it where it is committed by a senior manager acting within their actual or apparent authority.”
Pinsent Masons, another legal entity, added that the new legislation “marks a wholesale and seismic change to U.K. corporate criminal law.
“There is no specific defense provided for. … If a senior manager has committed the offence, the organization can also be prosecuted. It does not matter if the senior manager was not expressly authorized by the business to carry out the criminal conduct provided the offence was the type of act that fell within their authority.”
Time for some fresh, mandatory training, methinks.
(I would add that in my opinion the major fault of the current government is that it does not market, communicate or boast enough about what might be construed as political successes. The new corporate law is a good case in point, that is, if it is generally accepted to be a progressive move.)
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