Wieden + Kennedy London planning director Kevin Chesters writes:

As you may know I've been an enthusiastic attendee of the TED conference for a few years now, and an equally evangelistic fan of TED.com, so I was delighted to get invited by the brilliant Neil Cocker, via our Visit Wales client Hannah James, to speak at the second TEDxCardiff event last month.

Anyone can now host a TED event, and many take place around the world every week. It was a pretty scary thing to be asked to do, but equally exciting and flattering. Maybe one day I'll get to do this in Long Beach.

  There was no brief. You can talk about anything at all as long as it takes less than 18 minutes & the TED organisers think it will be inspirational, interesting or hopefully, both.

  I spoke about a subject very close to my own heart: me.

The talk also included references to the Great Fire of London, Soichiro Honda, Norwegian princesses, plus multiple references to plastic dinosaurs and my mother.

It was a great day, there were some amazing other speakers and all the content can be enjoyed at Tedxcardiff.co.uk  

Hawksmoor's Christ Church Spitalfields is very close to Wieden + Kennedy Towers, our swanky offices in London's fashionable east end.

I'm currently reading Peter Ackroyd's London Under and came across this interesting snippet of local info:

The graveyard of Christ Church, Spitalfields, was opened for business in 1729 and closed in 1859; between those dates some 68,000 people were somehow buried in the straitened space. At the time of excavation in 1993 soft tissue was still preserved on some of the bodies. Fears were expressed of a miasma overwhelming the archaeologists but they were misplaced.

Ackyroyd doesn't record what was done with those 68,000 (68,000 buried in that little church garden?!) exhumed bodies.