It’s that time of year again when John Austen and I get to spend a little less time discussing and publicising what’s going on in our industry, do some essential housekeeping on our hardworking servers, (which have been slowing up a little) and have a much-needed break. Yes – this is our final broadcast before our break and I couldn’t be happier about having some time off. 

  

If you’re one of those who’ve emailed me a press release over the past month and are relieved to see that it’s finally got some coverage in Cleanzine you’ll already be aware that I finally regained access to my emails after a full month of being locked out in the aftermath of an outage experienced by my service provider. I don’t recall having been this stressed over work since I accidentally deleted half the content of a cleaning magazine I was editing some 30 years ago, just a few days before we were going to press. As I’ve done over the past month, I managed to get by but they were both tough calls and involved many sleepless nights. 

  

I’m disappointed that there’s a lot of important news I just don’t have room for today, but I’ll do my best to include it in our next broadcast. Our strapline when we launched Cleanzine 23 years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy and e-zines were extremely rare, was ‘First with the news’. Letting you, our readers down, by not being able to bring you the news as it’s broken over the past month, has been difficult to deal with, so some of my break will be spent creating a foolproof back-up so this type of thing doesn’t happen again. 

  

We’ll be back on 4th September and do keep your news coming in the meantime. Anything crucial I’ll endeavour to post on our Facebook page and also 'tweet' it out via X.