Meet the Editor: Tom
WORDS BY TOM CRONKHello 👋
If you’re new here, welcome! I’m delighted you’ve found us.
And, if you’ve been around a while, thanks for sticking with us. As Charlie wrote about for the first iteration of this new newsletter, we like change around here.
For the past 11 years I’ve been, what you might contemporarily term, ‘creating content’ for our small collection of businesses in Hawarden and later Glen Dye.
My job title is ‘marketing’, so I’m more way back of house than front. You’re more likely to know the people right at the forefront of our fantastic businesses by face or name: Charlie and Caroline, Tara, Sarah, Rhys, Sarah, Ruby, Adam, the list goes on…
Think more: websites, socials and newsletters.
Think less: leading workshops, cooking feasts, pulling pints.
But in that weird way a marketing guy’s brain is wired, if you’ve ever bought a ticket to Summer Camp or The Good Life Experience, or bought something from Pedlars± or Some Good Ideas, or booked a holiday to Hawarden or Glen Dye, then I’ll probably recognise your email address. I hope that’s not too weird?
I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of our company-wide Dropbox, I can recall most of the tens of thousands of pieces of copy I’ve written in the decade I’ve been around and, perhaps risking an overshare/TMI, in 2023 I suffered a TBI (traumatic brain injury) following a cycling accident*.
Brain surgery^, a lengthy coma and nine months off work followed.
In those weird, whacky and scary early days of recovery I remember testing my memory in all sorts of specific ways: the names of my colleague’s (friend’s) children, the cars people drove, the line-ups from past festivals. I never got quite as far as recounting customer emails to the neuro consultant, I promise, just in case GDPR reps are reading this.
Brain injury abated, I’m now fully back to the job I love, albeit four days a week. So, apart from Mondays, I’ll be around to discuss, be challenged, share ideas and generally chat about all things Good Life and beyond.
My shy and retiring ego finds the moniker editor-at-large or editor-in-chief all a little too look-at-me. So just call me Tom, or Cronk.
Find me at my laptop Tuesdays-Fridays via info@thegoodlifesociety.co.uk, with a couple of snoozing Salukis beside me and a few cans of AF beer chilling in the fridge.
Cheers,
Tom/Cronk
±When you’ve written thousands of newsletters you’re allowed the odd typo, yes? Well, Charlie still regularly smirks and reminds me of the morning I sent a Pedlars newsletter to 30,000+ subscribers expressing the brilliance of our latest find: Swiss Army Camo Shits. Dear reader, I meant shirts. Of course I meant shirts.
*Yes, I was wearing a helmet.
^If you’ve watched Critical: Life & Death on Netflix, I went through that same trauma system a year before the camera crews arrived. That place blows my mind.
