Skip to main content

What a morning

No fewer than three ads got my mind working overtime as I travelled by train and tube into central London today.

I discovered that Gok Wan is the Vodafone 'World of Difference Ambassador', which bemused me until I realised that the role was all about encouraging people to give up their day jobs for charity. No one is better placed than Mr Wan to persuade us we need to leave the UK and spend a year in a refugee camp on the other side of the world.

First Direct meanwhile are encouraging me to sign up for one of their accounts. I get £100 if I like it and £200 if I don't. I have to admit that I am starting to like them. But I am starting to dislike them about twice as much.

The most disturbing of the ads was the one which told me I can make a purchase 'in less than a second' with Visa Contactless technology. I reckon they're experimenting with neutrinos. Before long, I'll be buying things before I know I want them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

When one name isn't enough

You may have heard the news reports about the turmoil in Kingston, Jamaica, resulting from the government's attempts to pin down a notorious drug lord on behalf of the US. I was struck by the number of self-styled monikers this guy has given himself. He is, depending on the channel you listen to, known on the street as 'Dudas', 'The Big Man' and 'The President' - worshipped by many impoverished Kingston residents as a benefactor to slum dwellers. It's his real name that seems most appropriate, however. If you were a drug baron called Christopher Coke, wouldn't you leave it at that? It's certainly not a name to be sniffed at.
Post a Comment
Read more