Is there anything better than a proper sporting rivalry? Whether it’s England v Australia on the cricket pitch, or Muhammad Ali v Joe Frazier in the boxing ring, there is something special about two local rivals coming together. Today we’re being treated to three classic football derbies, in North London, West London and Merseyside. Although there’ll be the usual how’s-your-father type chants at these games, the derby that has really been catching headlines this week has been in South America, where the second leg of the Copa Libertadores final between Boca Juniors and River Plate has had to be moved 6,000 miles away to Madrid due to crowd troubles! The original Buenos Aires match had to be called off last weekend, following an attack on the Boca team bus, leaving players suffering from cuts from broken glass as well as exposure to tear gas used by police to disperse crowds! Couldn’t be further from Rupert and Henry arguing over who ties a better cravat at Stamford Bridge this afternoon!

The Weekly ventured across to CBRE’s West End offices on Thursday to hear from Head of Industrial & Logistics strategy, Jonathan Compton, on the rise of online retail and technology. If many of the audience went in thinking that the rapid rise of ecommerce was only affecting retail in the UK, they came out appreciating the sheer global scale of the phenomenon. China’s Black Friday equivalent, Single’s Day, set up by online retailing giant Alibaba, has once again dwarfed Black Friday sales in both the US and the UK. It brought in a whopping 30.8 billion USD in the 24-hour period! Alibaba delivered 1.3 billion parcels, with the first 100 million being delivered within 2.6 days. That's an enormous world record! But with most of those parcels being delivered to people’s workplaces it seems mail rooms across the country are overflowing as can be seen in Shanghai! Jonathan Compton finished by covering the comeback of speculative XXL warehouses throughout the UK, with record take up of over 10 million sq. ft so far in 2018, with 50% of this going to online retailers and third party suppliers. This comes on the back of news this week that US online furniture retailer Wayfair is in negotiations to pre-let a new distribution centre in the East Midlands measuring in at a massive 1m sq. ft!

Two days in and you’ve probably already got mixed feelings about The Elf on the Shelf? You won’t be alone. Every night during December, once the kids are in bed, parents place the toy elf in different locations around the house so that he 'pops up' somewhere new when they wake up each morning. This is a relatively new family tradition, but finding 24 suitable places around the house to hide the elf can be challenging! Spare a thought then for one mother who last year had the ingenious idea of telling her children that their elf had broken his leg and was unable to perform his duties for the first 14 days of December. Clever right? All went well until the morning of the 15th December when she realised that she’d forgotten to move the elf and in a desperation quickly hid the toy in the oven…. Of course, the busy mother forgot she had put the elf in the oven and began cooking breakfast, along with said elf, all in front of her 5-year-old son. She had to call Santa in front of her children to explain that their elf was going to struggle to make it back to the North Pole that evening because his head had unfortunately exploded and his feet had melted off! Enough to scar any child! Maybe just play it safe and put your elf on the sofa tonight?