Author name: David Parkin

IT takes a lot of talent to run a Michelin star restaurant. It takes another set of skills entirely to run a restaurant that collapses with debts of £1m. Michael O’Hare has done both. The acclaimed chef who won a Michelin star for The Man Behind The Curtain restaurant in Leeds and appeared as a […]

I’M not the quickest to respond to invitations to connect on Linkedin, mainly because when I do I get a message trying to sell me some random marketing service that is going to generate so much new business that it will transform my enterprise into a FTSE-100 company overnight. But when I received an invitation

THERE are fewer and fewer places you can go these days and feel entirely at home wearing a suit. I once went into the notorious Leeds pub the Admiral Duncan as a bet and, the drinkers seeing me and a colleague wearing suits, cleared the bar thinking we were Special Branch. When a bloke with

AS the warm, orange-gold sun rose over the towering Humber Bridge just before 8am last Friday morning, it was hard to comprehend that less than two hours before I had been scraping ice off my windscreen. That, combined with a broken boiler which had meant I had to endure an ice-cold shower (it reminded me

IT seemed a good idea at the time. When I met Jamie Roberts, chairman of the Yorkshire Dales Rivers Trust, at the West Park Hotel in Harrogate in the summer, he enthusiastically told me about his daily ‘wild swim’ in the waters on his family’s estate. As I sipped my coffee and looked out at

WHEN was the last time you got in a lift and started talking to a stranger? Other than to say: “Which floor are you going to?” I can’t remember when I randomly chatted to someone on a lift journey. The ‘Elevator Pitch’ is a concept that your initial business pitch should be short enough to

“ARE you causing trouble again?” I’m used to this kind of question just before I’m asked to leave a social occasion, but not when I’ve just arrived. Given the person asking the question is a senior Labour peer and member of the House of Lords, then perhaps I do need to think about a reputational

I’M feeling a little bit overwhelmed. There were some lovely comments prompted by last week’s blog about Rodney Dalton. But the biggest thing to come out of it was that so many other people felt exactly the same about the late, legendary Leeds lawyer as I did. So many people knew him in so many

THIS is the blog that I hoped I never had to write. My friend Rodney Dalton died this week. He had stoically and successfully overcome two cancer diagnoses over the last two years but the ferocity with which it returned earlier this summer was too much. I visited him in hospital just over two weeks

MORNING! That felt like a long break. This blog was last published just over a month ago and the past four weeks have included a holiday driving through France to stay with friends in Provence, catching up with old pals, watching Derby County win in the Championship (these rare pleasures must be savoured) and even