Last night I took myself off to the (very last) Stockport CIDS get together.

I’m ashamed to say in my nearly 5 years of living in the shadows of the impressive viaduct I’ve never attended a local meeting of creatives. I’m involved in the vibrant Manchester creative scene but poor Stockport always seems to play second fiddle, despite having an impressive array of museums, creative industries and cracking businesses.

But it looks as though things are changing. Last night the stage (well Stockport Art Gallery) was given over to Stockport College and Thoughtful Ideas agency, and their Thoughtful six project.

This is seriously different - it’s not work experience, it’s not crappy placements where you get shoved in the corner, filing and making cups of tea.

Thoughtful have relocated for the next few months to Stockport College, and effectively taken on six new employees in the shape of six students who will help them run the company. Really. They’ve already been involved in creating work and delivering pitches. And not to any old companies - organisations like the Tate Liverpool and Howies.

I’m often approached by graduates looking for writing jobs, and much like in the design industry they are often creatively brilliant but lack the ’soft’ skills needed in business. The concept of deadlines, answering a phone, putting on a smart shirt, pitching, responsiveness, just pass them by. And as a small business I often don’t have time to teach them, much as I wish I could. So it is really inspiring to see the worlds of education and creativity coming closer together.  The end result of the project (apart from the amazing experience the students get to put on their CV) will be a guide to the creative industries.

The most impressive part of last night? The Thoughtful guys seem to be learning as much from the students as they are teaching.

After coming across this corker on Gumtree, a fellow writer blogged about this gem. Let’s hope one of those 290 views helps them find it.

The thing that makes comedians distinctive is the language they use - check out Ginger and Black. Musical storytellers indeed.

A little gem for a wintry January day.

If there’s someone on your Chrimbo pressie list who hasn’t got anything against their name yet (i.e. everyone, if you’re as organised as me), you might want to consider an old favourite that’s back in the top slot after two decades in the wilderness.

Apparently the game that’s all about words, Scrabble, is once again the nation’s favourite board game.

And the irony is that it’s all being accredited to Scrabulous, the online version of the game that took Facebook by storm - and caused more than a storm in a teacup over at toy-makers Mattel and Hasbro, who ordered Facebook in no uncertain terms to remove the online game designed by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, which they did earlier this year.

Some say its proof that the old-fashioned favourites are still the best… others that it’s proof of the contemporary power of “social meeja” when it comes to setting trends that affect not only the virtual world, but the “real” one too.

As for me, after reading a few articles about the topic, it’s made me really, really want to play Scrabble while 13,000ft up in the air…

I love it when new words are invented and last night I had the pleasure of picking up a corking new phrase, ’sweded’. I was watching, Be Kind Rewind (which was an interesting expression I’d forgotten with the demise of VHS). Sweded is (according to Urban Dictionary), “The summarized recreation of popular pop-culture films using limited budgets and a camcorder. The process is called sweding. Upon completion the film has been Sweded.” I’d highly recommend this cute and quirky film, watch out for other ‘interesting’ uses of language.

I’m yet to be convinced that the words healthy and chocolate can co-exist in a sentence, however, I would be willing to test my theory with some free samples.

We all need something to sustain us through our working week, after all…

We’re a funny lot down at All Words - we hate jargon but we love interesting and unusual words. So I guess you could call us sesquipedalians - given to using long words (only when needed, of course). And I’ve found out we’re not alone.

And in an amazing co-incidence, defenestrate is also my all time favourite word. It means to throw something or someone (usually forcibly) out of a window. I used it frequently this week in reference to my broken-yet-again Blackberry (phone, not fruit).

So what’s your favourite word?

You’ve heard of Beer Goggles - those invisible yet powerful spectacles favoured by the inebriated that can miraculously transform the most ordinary of beings into a clone of Brad Pitt, or Kate Moss.

Well, Google have now come up with Mail Goggles - a device that, once enabled, serves as a kind of sobriety test for those late-night workers who might be suffering from the lethal combination of a belly full of booze and a head full of frustration for a work colleague whose email address is tantalisingly right there…

Now, if only they could do something similar for mobile phones…