It’s 14.00 (British Summer Time) on Saturday and I’m in my corner-office perch at Midori House filing this column while waiting for a little lunch delivery from the grill three floors below. It has been a while since we’ve had a proper weekend summer market in London but I’m happy to report that things are in full swing in our converted parking lot-cum-courtyard and visitors have travelled from near and far for a beautiful blend of Swiss and Monocle-style hospitality in the heart of W1. While we’re perhaps best known for our Christmas markets in Zürich and London, we seem to have managed to create a great atmosphere with the help of Switzerland Tourism and a clutch of cities, regions and brands from all corners of the tiny alpine nation.

This is not the first time that we have co-hosted an event with a national tourist organisation but the Swiss seem to be teaching everyone a few lessons about how to lay on a gathering and offer up enough activities and prizes to get people excited about booking a holiday. For starters, there’s a generous giveaway of two plane tickets, four nights at The Omnia in Zermatt and two First Class six-day rail passes. It’s a bit of a tone-setter for all the other stalls that are dispensing rosé from Lugano, slicing samples of belper knolle, pouring whisky and asking people to fold up paper aeroplanes and aim them through the window of a mocked-up Swiss Airbus fuselage. To ensure that even the least dexterous visitors walk away with a little treat, the windows are rather oversized and the fuselage not more than four arm lengths from the throwing line. The result is that every kid under 10 is walking around with a Swiss baseball cap. Not bad as an out-of-home advertising concept and a clever way to convert future travellers long before they’ll be picking up the tab for their own flights.

As I’m one of the hosts, I should be getting back down to my post selling subscriptions at our Monocle stand. If you’re not a paid-up Monocle subscriber yet, I encourage you to take advantage of our graduate campaign that we’re currently running. You don’t need to be a student or even a graduate (I’m certainly not!) to enjoy the discount, so sign up here. Just as institutions of higher education need people to pay tuition (unless, of course, they’re state sponsored), Monocle needs generous readers and listeners to help pay for our reporting, essay writing, broadcasting and more. As a family-owned organisation, we’re not state sponsored, so it’s important that we have an audience who understands that we can’t do what we do without people purchasing our publication on newsstands or bookshops or taking out a subscription.

If you’ve been passing through airports and rail stations of late, you might have noticed that space devoted to print media continues to vanish. The shelves once devoted to books, magazines and newspapers have now been replaced by more refrigerators full of fizzy drinks and chilled milky beverages. It makes the task of getting our magazine into peoples’ hands rather difficult, kills off any potential sampling and ultimately means that we need to depend on subscribers and our advertisers to deliver this newsletter, magazines, podcasts and assorted special editions. The trend of actively deleting culture in favour of beverages is frankly depressing. Do consumers really need every shop at Basel or Hamburg or Penn Station to sell cold drinks? Don’t people need to be nourished on page and not just on screen? Until we open up more of our own shops (Frankfurt Airport opens 1 August), it’s going to become increasingly difficult to find Monocle and many other of your favourite titles. That’s a simple fact.

If you’d like to get our titles and other treats to your door or desk, sign up here or drop my colleague Ailish a note if you want a special deal for your company or whole family. And finally, on the topic of family, it’s time for our annual reunion of readers and staffers. I’m happy to report that you’ve got three and a half months to work on your outfits before the Monocle Quality of Life Conference gets under way in Istanbul. We’ll be touching down by the Bosphorus from 10-12 October. Secure your tickets here and stand by for our flight and hotel offers via our partners over the coming weeks. We very much look forward to seeing you for some early autumn warmth on the terrace of The Peninsula Istanbul.