Wednesday 22 September 2010

Childhood Memories: Now Available in Superdrug, £2.99

Merchandise is a profitable business. The amount of money you can make selling duvet covers with Michael Ball’s face on it, is bewildering. My Nan mixes and matches her pillow and duvet sets so she can be joined in bed with the faces and torso’s of her beloved Titchmarsh, O’Donnel and Ball. I’m going through a neutral colours phase at the moment, but I’m guessing it’s natural progression from when we once surrounded ourselves with Transformers and Teddy Ruxpin.

However the band JLS, have taken merchandise to a whole new level in my eyes. Their management have decided that fans are no longer happy with their face on a calculator, pencil case, or a sticker album. No, sticker albums for kids are outdated; they’ve decided they want their face on contraceptives. In effect, JLS are telling kids just stick it anywhere- just don’t swap them afterwards, even for a shiny. Still, At least they have standards, I remember Noel Edmunds Swap shop. He’d swap anything.

Part of me wonders if when opening the condom, a tune plays like when you open a birthday card, or if they’re saving that trick for when they release a new range of umbrella’s next month. All this makes me look back on my childhood quite gladly. Glad that the Chuckle Brothers were never afforded the opportunity of fronting a safe-sex campaign to distract me from my Italia 90 sticker books and pogs.

Monday 20 September 2010

London: Part one

Time seems to go very quickly in London. It makes me worry that I’ll start to look even older than my face suggests already. I estimate that one year from now, my forehead will have more lines than a Hogarth etching; and who knows by that point to sooth my impending depression, I may have even started drinking Gin with my Coco-Pops, to make life a little more bearable.

I opted to get the coach to London, I was seduced by the cheap ticket. Five minutes into the journey, the lady in front decided to recline her seat back, and as a result, it soon felt that I was performing dentistry. Her molar’s were in a poor state of repair, which I put down to box of Jaffa Cakes she decided not to share.

People’s lack of courtesy on Public Transport is galling sometimes. I’m not bitter that the woman kept the Jaffa Cakes to herself; it was the fact that I had to see her eat them upside down, and listen to an orchestra of chewing and chomping. I’ve had quieter and cleaner colonic irrigations than the horror show she performed getting through that box of Jaffa Cakes. I feel that if it’s not my eyes being scarred by the sight of atrocities, it’s my ears getting fingered by strangers with their rubbish singing. Thirty years ago, I might be wrong, it would be considered normal practice to walk around the streets with a jar of Chloroform. It was handy to put to sleep anyone that might be considered a nuisance. Nowadays using Chloroform is frowned upon, so I have to listen to people singing like Celine Dion, but Celine Dion being chased through the woods by an angry bear.