It’s like the traditional spot the first cuckoo in spring competition but a lot more irritating — coming across the first ‘Book Early for Christmas’ outside a pub or restaurant.
Driving up to the Bucks County Show on Friday I spotted the first offending banner of the season hung outside the Horse and Jockey in Aylesbury. This was 26th August — fully four months before Boxing Day — that’s what I calculate to be a mere 131 days before the event itself.
I thought it was bad enough that I saw Trick or Treat pieces of junk on sale at John Lewis in Oxford Street on Monday — though that may be worse in some ways as those imported American Hallowe’en ‘customs’ are just a consumerist abomination — what’s wrong with Guy Fawkes night.
If I were a pub or restuarant owner I’d calculate that hanging prominent ‘reminders’ (does anyone need reminding about Christmas) outside the establishment before the August Bank Holiday is out would lose more customer by annoying people rather than generating bookings — surely only those organising large work celebrations book so early and they’d either have done it months beforehand, not in the middle of the school holidays.
Even though the likes of B&Q and Homebase seem to start hawking their Christmas decorations in September (to the extent they’ve usually sold out by December) I prefer to try and banish all thoughts of Christmas until after 5th November — despite being an unashamed enthusiast for all things seasonal.
Mind you, the weather last week, particularly the deluges on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, were more fitting for November (the thermometer outside my house read 12C yesterday afternoon). Perhaps someone at the Horse and Jockey woke up, took a look out of the window and hung the banner out in panic that they’d overslept by three months?
…would appear to be the A14, which runs from the intersection of the M1 and M6 through the lower East Midlands, past Cambridge, Newmarket, Bury St.Edmunds and Ipswich to its end point at Felixstowe Docks.
I came back from Suffolk along the A11 on Monday, which combines with the A14 for a few miles near Newmarket and I was amazed at the number of lorries carrying shipping containers going the opposite way — one about every fifteen seconds.
This traffic says a huge amount about the British economy as all these (presumably mostly empty) containers were heading back to the container port at Felixstowe, which handles 35% of the UK’s container traffic. Nowadays, almost all consumer goods seem to be imported, mainly from China — and essentially the A14 is a conduit for all these goods to be shipped into the country from the far east. (A fascinating fact quoted by Wikipedia and also very apposite to the state of the country today is that much of the land that’s occupied by Felixstowe Docks belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge — so we have another instance of the old money of the elite profiting from the removal of livelihood of those further down in the social pecking order.)
I’ve always thought Argos epitomised the flooding of British households with dirt cheap, almost instantly disposable consumerist tat imported directly from China. Because they don’t need to use nice packaging your product is usually handed over in some grubby beige box with Chinese lettering and some barely understandable instructions in some strange variant of English. However, I didn’t realise quite how efficiently their operation works.
In 2007 Argos opened a warehouse (or what it calls a Direct Import centre) in Kettering (by the A14) which basically receives the containers from the docks at Felixstowe (or perhaps Immingham or Southampton) and pulls out the many smaller boxes from within and then loads them on to lorries to their regional distribution depots — which tend to be dotted around the motorways and trunk roads — predominantly in the Midlands as that’s where all the imports are channelled towards — flowing inwards to the depots and then radiating back out again to the stores. They handled 12,000 containers in 2007 — which is about 33 a day assuming 7 day a week operation. There’s a few big ones on the M1 (near Leicester and Milton Keynes) and there’s a huge one at Burton on Trent.
Argos has quite a useful website where you can check whether items are in stock at your local store and, if they aren’t, then search for stock at nearby branches. However, this facility isn’t quite as useful as it might seem because their stock control seems to be so centralised and ‘just-in-time’ that once an item disappears from one store then it’s often unavailable anywhere because the reason it’s not in stock at the first store is because there’s none left at the huge warehouses that serve more or less the whole country. If there’s been an unexpected rush on any stock then the replenishments are likely to be in a container going through the Indian ocean or, just as likely, it’s gone forever as the factory in China will now be making something else.
This is unlike the things we still produce in this country — food perhaps — where the supply lines are short enough to mean the producers can respond to demand.
The new Argos catalogue came out this week — a massive doorstep of a thing. It covers the period up until Christmas so shows the lead time involved. The catalogue will need to have been sent to the printers a couple of months ago so all the merchandising and pricing decisions will need to have been made several months ago…and the buying before that. The stuff will need to have been designed before that. It’s quite likely there’s at least a year’s lead time on a lot of the products before the catalogue goes on sale.
Of course there’s then a massive risk that these products — once manufactured won’t sell in the quantities that are required. That’s why global capital tends to associate a lot of the riskier stuff, like faddy toys, with huge marketing events — like films aimed at children.
Argos, because of their catalogue, are only an extreme example of this process of feeding global capital — big companies like Tesco and, perhaps, even those nice people at John Lewis are all rolling their containers along the A14, disguised anonymously with names like Hapag or China Shipping — but they’re still full of junk that they’ve decided we’re going to buy and their marketing departments will succeed in brainwashing us to comply.
I’ve got a vintage 2003 Dell desktop computer that is used to drive the HP printer (with its appalling software) and it also runs a wi-fi network. It’s not used too often for much else but it should be a perfectly decent machine for what it’s asked to do (occasional word processing, web surfing and so on).
It came with 512K memory, which has generally been fine up until the last year or so when the combination of ever-more intrusive McAfee anti-virus software and the general bloating of almost all web-sites to include AJAX type interactions has virtually killed it. (Why does the National Rail site need to second guess your train station and retrieve lists of all stations beginning with L from its server while you type?) It seems the McAfee software has embedded itself into IE and filters every web transaction, which I didn’t want it to do but can’t be bothered to find out how to turn off.
I’ve been looking at the Task Manager and seen that with IE running the virtual page file usage was almost constantly at about 800k, more than the physical memory, so it was basically killing the pc. It would take five minutes to start IE and if a virus download or scan was taking place then the computer would completely stop (McAfee giving their software total priority over everything else).
Eventually I got round to the simple solution, I bought 1GB of memory for about £25 and opened up the computer and added it into a spare memory slot. (It needed a surprising amount of pressure to do this and I was scared of smashing it. First time round I hadn’t pushed the new or old memory in hard enough and I started the computer with no working memory — it just beeped a lot.)
Once installed, it was like having a new machine. The tripling of the memory allows the internet bloatware, and the virus and HP printer crap software and the rest of the 7 years of crap on there to hog what they did before but I now have about 1GB of virtual memory to get the computer to do what I want it to.
It’s a lesson typical of the IT industry. No-one has a choice as to whether the web site they use will download a few K of data once in a while or set up a constant dialogue between server and web browser of Megabytes of unnecessary data. Geek nerds would see it as ‘innovation’ but really it’s just global capital’s old friend — built in obsolescence.
Also, it shows that a lot of computer processing is just an absolute waste: memory and CPUs in particular are quite power hungry and if you add up the MIPS burnt in both the server farms and in desktop pc’s (laptops are a bit more efficient) for processing absolute crap it’s frankly scandalous.
After taking scientific advice that cost millions and disrupted hundreds of thousands of people it appears that the air travel regulators had a very unexpected change of mind when BA decided to load passengers into its long haul aircraft and set off to London knowing that, when they set off, that British airspace was closed. Presumably they had alternate airports arranged other than Heathrow but they won’t have had a great deal of choice as large amounts of European airspace were also closed — perhaps Madrid, although Gordon Brown’s plan was to have every British long-haul plane head there, or Turkey. Even so, to divert to southern Europe would have needed a decision a couple of hours before arriving in London. Given that the first BA plane arrived at Heathrow around 10pm and the re-opening was announced at around 8pm then it seems BA took the routing of these planes right to the limit. Even if I was desperate to get home I’m not sure I’d be happy to be used as a human bargaining chip to put pressure on the CAA to agree to change the tolerance limits on ash in engines.
Lord Adonis has been trying to defend the indefensible again on television. With such a sudden change in policy, made with the BA planes bearing down, he can’t have it both ways. Either the original decision was far too cautious and nowhere near enough effort was made initially to examine the potential consequences of flying through the cloud or the airline industry has heaped commercial and political pressure on to the regulators and, if the science was sound originally, that some sort of risk is being taken by re-opening the skies. What seems to be certain is there is no current change in the amount of ash that’s in the atmosphere at the lower levels — at least when the airports started opening.
What seems clear is the government’s response was pretty pathetic overall — trying to use spin instead of practical measures. Gordon Brown’s 100 coaches setting off from Madrid are still in this country and his naval armada turned out to be one ship that picked up what seemed like a handful of kids in addition to the troops it was really sent for (and people had crossed Europe under the delusion there was a mass evacuation planned for Santander). Despite the assurances of Adonis that the experts were making decisions the way that the government reacted seemed to suggest it was spin doctors like Malcolm Tucker who were really calling the shots while reacting to every different angle on the 24 hour news channels. First it was ‘don’t want a plane falling out of the sky before an election, ground them all’, then when it became evident it wasn’t all going to blow over (literally) in a couple of days, it seemed to be ‘we need to get the planes up but we need to find someone to pin the blame on rather than us if one drops out of the sky’.
In the end, as has often been the case with this supposedly Labour government, it seemed like they listened most carefully to the interests of global capital. After all, Willie Walsh has already had Brown denounce trade unionists for conducting a perfectly legal strike with a massive mandate.
The ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano has had a transformative effective on some aspects of life. For the first time in probably seventy years or so the skies have been almost completely quiet and as nature intended. The vast majority of northern Europe’s population will never have experienced life without the intrusion of aircraft noise or the despoliation of blue skies with vapour trails.
I guess the magnitude of the effect depends on where one lives — those near other sources of noise, such as busy roads, won’t notice much difference nor will those who live a long distance from airports and away from flight paths. Here it’s been noticeable as we tend to get low-flying take-offs from Luton in the summer when they have to keep to low altitude to avoid the increased traffic coming to and from Heathrow. In the winter the planes seem to be able to climb more quickly. We also have a lot of activity associated with theBovingdon stack for Heathrow but, as these planes are circling and their engines idling, that doesn’t create so much noise. Nevertheless, we’re experiencing an alternative that is completely unexpected and people will be much more aware of the environmental costs when flights do eventually resume. I would expect the relative tranquility over West London will now put paid to any thoughts of a third Heathrow runway.
The response of the airline industry to the crisis has been completely self-serving and casts the managements in an appalling light. When they thought the ban was very transient, they were reasonably happy to shut down their operations and many have left their passengers abroad in appalling conditions — with little regard for their welfare or even legal obligations in providing food and accommodation. British Airways, bmi and Ryanair have consistently extended their own cessation of operations beyond the NATS deadlines. BA decided to cancel all its flights for today when NATS had only announced a closure of airspace until one in the morning (it’s now been extended to 1 am tomorrow). Theoretically, airspace could have been opened and the airlines would not have started their operations up until it suited them.
Now the closure of airspace has extended to several days the airlines have changed tune and seem to be more motivated by their bottom lines than any other consideration. Sending up one or two of their own planes seems to be nothing more than a sick publicity stunt designed to undermine the credibility of the air traffic regulators. The point about this cloud is that it’s not homogenous. There are concentrations of ash that can’t be forecast. A hundred planes could go up and fly through it without too much trouble but one may hit a concentrated plume of ash that would bring it down. Naturally, if the airlines manage to pressure the regulators into opening up airspace and a disaster occurred then they would be first to pass the buck on to the air traffic control authorities who declared the skies safe. They are basically putting pressure on someone else to take responsibility for a decision that may cost thousands of people their lives — which is despicable. The pressuring of the safety authorities by the airlines makes me question their overall commitment to safety and makes me glad that aviation is such a heavily regulated industry — it needs to be with such unprincipled sharks for management.
Another effect is to remind everyone who takes the Internet and mass air travel for granted that the world is a bigger place than it seems. When people take long haul holidays they really are going a long way away from home and it’s perhaps not a bad thing that we all realise that globalisation in its various guises depends on some very tenuous and fragile links: some big, expensive, vulnerable machines (there can’t have been more than a few thousand long-haul jets ever been manufactured) and perhaps a few hundred cables and a few dozen satellites to carry communication. It only took a ship’s anchor to cut through the main cable that links India with Europe a couple of years ago.
There are some genuinely distressing cases of suffering caused by the cessation of air travel, such as the people waiting for bone marrow transplants. However, most of the consequences should give us cause for thought — do we really need to cause so much environmental damage to bring green beans and baby corn to our supermarkets, especially as these products use up so much water in the developing countries that grow them? There will be a lot of manufacturing supply chains disrupted — high value items like computer processors are flown from the Far East to Europe and North America on a just-in-time basis. No-one should feel any sympathy for the companies whose business models have been disrupted by this — it’s a risk of doing business that way. They’ve made a lot of money by not having working capital invested in stock and it’s no bad thing that they are reminded of the inherent recklessness of just-in-time and lean manufacturing. Unfortunately it’s likely that workers in manufacturing industries might get laid off due to parts shortages but this isn’t due to the volcano — it’s down to their spiv managements and those who feed the destructive demands of global capital — the bankers and management consultants.
And is it really so important that the elite athletes can’t make the London Marathon for a year or that Liverpool might have to go on a train to a football match? Or that Mylie Cyrus can’t make her film premiere in London? (Actually, the increasingly hysterical ‘something must be done’ tone of the news reports seems to reflect the frustrations of the journalists themselves who can’t fly off on jollies and are being forced to slum it on the trains or on the motorways.)
It’s tempting to think that this volcano is some sort of Gaia response from the planet to stick two fingers up at globalisation and global capital through its dependence on aviation. Those not completely in thrall to global capital might want to look back on the last few days and consider whether things always have to be the way we’ve come to accept them.
Like most web users I’m an almost habitual user of Google search and I remember being one of its earliest adopters around 12 years ago when the likes of Yahoo and Alta Vista were the dominant search engines. I’m also quite an enthusiastic user of some of its derivative services, like Google News and Maps and I’m a tentative user of Google Scholar. However, I’ve thought for a while that its influence is far too dominant on the web to the extent that its famous motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is pretty meaningless — it’s almost irrelevant whether the people running this size of organisation are evil or not (and it would be very surprising if they were) as the fact of its very pervasiveness and power is inherently a ‘bad thing’.
I’m particularly suspicious of its plans to ‘digitise the world’s information’ because of its potentially disastrous effect on intellectual property rights — potentially creating much more widespread damage than Google News is currently wreaking on newspapers. Showing that these principles are generally as old as the hills it’s a classic case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s amazing how many people’s considered judgement is disregarded by puerile ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ arguments because Murdoch’s News International is the biggest critic of Google in this area. If Google undermines intellectual property principles then it will be the viability of the small, niche publishers which vanishes first — not the Digger’s empire.
I also find Google’s arguments that it is a mere directory and conduit for other content to be completely disingenuous. It could make a lot more effort to remove links to illegal material — it’s just a cost that it doesn’t want to pay. After all, when it came to a question of making money or not in China it was happy to side with the censors then. Moreover, Google’s business strategy is primarily now devoted to loading content on to its site — either through user e-mails, videos or blogs or by uploading cheaply sourced material like scanning books (out of copyright ones for the time being). One of these sources of cheap content that I’m not convinced about is Google Street View so I was very interested to see the spy camera car in action today around Princes Risborough. It was happily cruising around taking six photos at once of everyone and everything on the road around it so I followed it for a while in my car with the objective of taking a picture of the spy vehicle itself.
Google Street View Car on Station Road, Princes Risborough
When the driver realised I was following him he seemed to get quite agitated — quickly pulling over to let me past but I then stopped in front. After all what’s wrong with trying to take a photograph of someone who’s literally taking thousands of photographs with the sole intention of publishing them so everyone in the world can see them? I got a couple of photos but decided not to follow too long as I didn’t want every photo of Princes Risborough to also feature me. As far as Street View goes, I can see it may have some limited value in very public places like city and town centres but I can see no benefit whatsoever of it taking photographs of residential streets. They just do it because they can — and if an organisation has that sort of ethos then it’s on the slippery slope to becoming what some people may term ‘evil’.
Google Street View Camera Car on Poppy Road, Princes Risborough
Google should learn the lessons of other companies who have tried to dominate a platform — Microsoft has arguably inflicted more damage on itself with disasters like Vista which no doubt had root causes in the company becoming too big for mistakes to be spotted and rectified by competent managers — maybe managers whose time was being taken up fighting anti-trust suits. In desktop terms Microsoft really fulfilled what customers wanted with XP and late 90s/early 200os versions of Office. It’s a feature of global capital that it demands ever more growth but the pursuit of this is problematic when your company’s products have met about 95% of what any customer will ever need. Perhaps Google is in the same position now. It should stop expanding its empire — concentrate on what it does well — boring old search and leave the intrusive, customer-alienating expansion alone?
The poll in the Sunday Times that gave the Tories a lead of only two points is a wake up call for everyone with an interest in politics. It is a very damning verdict on the competence of Cameron and also shows the lasting hostility to the Tories nearly 20 years after their removal of Thatcher’s divisive influence. I have a theory that Thatcher’s worst legacy was to leave an embittered and deeply politicised academic and cultural establishment which became receptive to the abhorrent and cynical use of political correctness (for want of a better description) as a neo-Stalinist tool of power and manipulation that has been the most insidious hallmark of New Labour — something that will wreak far more long-lasting damage to the country (IMHO) than anything Thatcher did.
This fairly superficial embitterdness towards the Tories seems to suggest that there isn’t the sort of popular acclaim for removing this clapped-out disgrace of an administration that there was with Major in 1997 — ironically a government now which seems to have been the most effective of the last 50 years (so much for the threat of hung parliaments). Even so, I think the whole country would want to see Cameron and company ritually disembowelled if they wake up the morning after a general election to see Brown’s psychotic grin as he walks back into Number Ten — no doubt with Alistair Darling, James Purnell, Caroline Flint and the rest on their way to the Gulag as he preaches about a listening government of all the talents.
Almost all Labour MPs seem to realise it’s in their best interests for Brown to lose by a small majority so they can cast him out to howl impotently with his forces of hell (Balls) and that they could look forward to a fairly new election with a leader who’s a member of the human race. Personally I’d consider voting for a Labour Party led by Darling — the only one with any guts shown in the last couple of years.
There are really two words that describe Cameron’s biggest mistake — George Osborne. Bad enough that Cameron is an Eton toff but at least he presents a semblance of humanity. Osborne both looks and acts irredeemably like a complete anachronism and irrelevance to the vast majority of the voting public — an image of the Tory party that goes back to Douglas Home and Eden. He reminds me of that awful upper-class ventriloquists dummy that Ray Alan (remember him) used to turn up with on dire 70s variety shows — mind you the dummy showed more independence of thought and character than most Labour MPs.
I’ll be disenfranchised — voting in Bercow’s constituency so no Labour, Tories or Lib Dem candidates. Should UKIP stand I certainly wouldn’t vote for them but I’m hoping the Greens put someone up. While I disagree strongly with a lot of their practical policies, I have great sympathy with their basic premise — that global capital is a rapacious monster that’s defiling and destroying the world for the benefit of few but the very richest elites — which makes it bizarre that Brown and Blair so worshipped it.
I also like the practical application of green principles — protecting nature, growning your own and so on and I took delivery of a box full of seed potato and onion sets yesterday to prove it. Give a man a potato and you feed him a bag of crisps, give him a seed potato and some soil and (in my case) you get the magic of digging up a few knobbly organic specimens and you give the slugs a feast.
When I received an e-mail with the title ‘Nothing Says “‘I Love You” Like A Pink Drill’ I thought it was a stray mail that should have gone in the spam folder with the blue pill offers and the mails that promise to stretch parts of the male anatomy. Either that or it was an interesting reference to obscure sexual practices.
But no — it was a genuine marketing attempt from Screwfix. You have to admire their chutzpah in trying to get mail order DIY muscling in on the Valentines market but I’m quite dumbfounded by who they think might be the recipient of the drill. And, yes, it is bright pink. It can be seen online here along with their other Valentine’s offers.
I’m not sure that any sort of handyman, however in touch with his feminine side, is really ever going to want a pink drill so I’m inclined to think this advert is aimed at men buying Valentine’s presents for women. Apart from the fact that a drill is an ultimate utility purchase that has little romantic interest as far as I can see, this sort of present suggests that the recipient is expected to make good use of it. Rather than put up a few shelves or picture frames on Valentine’s day I can imagine most female recipients wanting to use the present to inflict violence on whoever bought it for them. Maybe I’m being old-fashioned and sexist but I’m not going to try it.
Ever wondered how Asda and Tesco can sell their supposed £6 a bottle wine for 3 for £10. One trick is to cut the distance between the manufacture of the glass bottle and the place where it is filled with the unctuous liquid. In the case of Lindeman’s Tollana Shiraz/Cabernet the distance is probably about a few hundred yards.
If you look very carefully at the label you’ll see the wine is bottled at CH2 4LF — doesn’t sound very Australian as it’s not. It’s actually on an industrial estate, not near South Australia’s Barossa Valley, but next door to the picturesque Stanlow Oil Refinery on the plains of the Dee outside Chester (yes, in Cheshire). You can see an aerial view here.
It’s a long way from the old French ‘mise en chateaux’ guarantee of quality as the Aussie wine is transported in bulk to its export markets and bottled close to its eventual consumers. There’s a sound environmental reason for doing this — it prevents carbon being wasted by unnecessarily transporting the weight of glass bottles around the globe (and it also means the recycled bottles don’t need transporting back again.) However, it’s an interesting reminder of how economics and globalisation have made the wine come to the bottler and not vice versa.
The concept is taken to its extreme in Chester as the bottler is also the glass maker — a company called Quinn Glass. They even have a video on their website of the 400 bottles per minute production line where your Aussie plonk is put into bottle — get to it via their filling page. They also operate a bonded warehouse which means they can hold their customers’ stock so they don’t have to pay duty until the wine leaves the premises just before delivery. It’s a clever and lean operation with the cullet (smashed up recycled glass) arriving at the factory and conceivably being turned into a full wine bottle within hours. There’s no doubt this ingenuity must knock a substantial amount of the cost of a bottle of wine — which makes the con of something like Hardy’s Crest being retailed at an RRP of £9.99 even more ridiculous than most people already realise when they see it perpetually ‘on offer’ for £4.99.
Quinn don’t just do wine. They do beer, spirits, alcopops — the lot. One interesting page on their website exposes the manufacturing process for a lot of drinks: ‘Product can be processed at sales gravity or high gravity product then diluted and carbonated. Flavoured Alcoholic Beverages and soft drinks can be made from concentrate or from a recipe.’ That is to say that a lot of commercial drinks are watered down on bottling. Again, it might be an economic and environmentally smart idea to produce alcopops or even beers in concentrated form although it makes the stomach churn to think of what some concentrated version of WKD or Smirnoff Ice might be like.
How can the company that made the iconic, delectable Flake adverts have succumbed to a crass American brute?
The classic adverts below (embedded from You Tube) are an integral and much-loved part of my past — I remember watching transfixed when they graced commercial breaks in the 80s and 90s.
On this one where the short-haired brunette’s watercolour gets ruined by the rain, I particularly love the cornfield stained crimson with poppies — and see that eye-liner and lipstick. (And listen out for Bernard Cribbins doing the Ross voiceover at the start — 25 years on and he’s gone time-travelling.)
This one, from the 90s, is a bit too unsubtle for my liking with a hint of self-parody. The close up of the woman enjoying the flake is a little too obvious and the music is a bit too gothic as well. Yet it’s still compelling viewing — she’s certainly getting satisfaction from the flake but what’s the lizard doing? (Even though it’s a relatively recent advert, the cars in the Sunday Times supplement look very dated — and it’s ironic that there’s an advert for the N&P Building Society — remember them? Another worthy institution trashed in the search for a fast buck.)
Slightly more subtle and more to my taste is the waterfall advert from the 80s. This must set a world record for the most Freudian imagery that can be crammed into 30 seconds. The girl places the flake in her mouth much more seductively, especially with those two big white teeth, and the way her eyes flash open in wonderment after she’s taken a bite is electrifying. The attention to detail is great: it’s gratifying to see how she wastes none of the chocolate, pushing in crumbly bits that’s she’smissed into her mouth with her fingers as she loses the paddle. Then she enters a whole, hidden underground world in the flooded cavern which is full of phallic stalactites and stalagmites. She looks fantastic after her drenching under the waterfall — hair stuck across her forehead as she eases herself to lie down on the floor of the vessel, taking another satisfying bite as she reclines. Blimey. I’d like to float her boat.
My favourite is one which is a little more innocent — the gypsy caravan from 1985 (it’s easy to check the clip’s vintage as there’s a glimpse of an advert for the GLC at the very start of the You Tube clip). The field of sunflowers is such a striking image that it’s stayed in my mind for 25 years — and it’s quite clever as the sunflowers are the same colour as the Flake wrapper. This advert is probably the most explicit in terms of showing the flake eating — a lingering, side-on view. The way she unwraps the flake at the beginning is incredible — gently undoing the twist at the top and then getting down to business by pulling the wrapper down the length of the top half of the bar with efficient determination. What interesting symbolism is represented by the empty gypsy caravan that she suddenly comes upon — she perches on the back and the caravan moves off mysteriously and she’s happy to accept the ride.
And speaking of glamorous Cadbury women, what about Fry’s Turkish Delight (itself acquired by Cadbury) – ‘full of eastern promise’. Indeed (although she does look a bit like the dark one from the Human League).
And no collection of nostalgic Cadbury adverts would be complete without…
The Quaker founders of Cadbury’s will be gyrating in their graves after the company — an original model of benevolent capitalism — has been sold out by its management to bland global capital processed cheese makers. It might be an appropriate epitaph for the era of New Labour — so much meaningless bluster and posturing (such as came from Mandelson’s reported hostility to the bid) ends up being utterly cynical and worthless.
Maybe it’s appropriate for the times. The Cadbury family cared enough about the people who worked in their Bourneville factory that they built houses (with gardens) for their Victorian workers and set up other countless benevolent institutions for their workforce.
New Labour have been mystifyingly craven towards global capital so it’s perhaps appropriate that they impotently preside over the destruction of one of the last companies that seemed to offer a compromise between the naked greed of capital and the humane welfare of the people who worked in that organisation.
If ever there was an award for meaningless, misleading and insincere prattle it should go to Mandelson’s words on Cadbury as reported in ‘The Times’: ‘Lord Mandelson, who was unable to intervene in the bid process, nonetheless warned Kraft last month: “If you think that you can come here and make a fast buck you will find that you face huge opposition from the local population . . . and from the British Government.”’
Gordon Brown will be jubilant that the High Court’s disgraceful decision to overturn a democratic ballot will convince global capital that this country is even more disposed than it was before to treat its citizens as serfs to globalisation. In the miners’ strike the police were politicised and used to enforce an energy strategy that was clearly, in retrospect, shockingly irresponsible. The behaviour of the police in kettling, and allegedly killing, demonstrators in the City of London shows that they are still partisan in the service of their political masters. Now the judiciary can be relied on to magnify technicalities that were irrelevant to the overall result and annul a democratic ballot. It will do absolutely nothing either in the medium and long term for BA except reduce morale further and increase the intense loathing for their digraceful, incompetent, muddled management that is held by the staff BA depends upon to deliver service to its customers. What it does is avoid unfavourable headlines over the Christmas holidays. Now all the BBC newsreaders and broadsheet opinion writers can jet off and pump carbon behind them on their Christmas holidays but a dangerous precedent has been set that sees further encroachment of the litigious into our society. What John Lennon said 40 years ago about our bondage to capital is even more true now it’s global: ‘Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV, And you think you’re so clever and classless and free, But you’re still f*cking peasants as far as I can see.’
Wonder if any of the judges or their friends and family were planning to fly BA for their Christmas holidays?
I’ve just ensured my enduring popularity this Christmas — or perhaps guaranteed myself some exile from others’ jollity — as Amazon have just told me my copy of ‘Christmas from the Heart’ by Bob Dylan is on the way. I look forward to inflicting it on whoever I can.
If Dylan’s croaking, out of tune versions of ‘Winter Wonderland’ or ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ was used as backing music on the procession of television adverts crossing our screens at the moment then perhaps I’d feel more charitable towards the retailers who try and convince us it’s the season of peace and goodwill to all men already (when will they realise that’s for one day only?).
It’s only 7th November and there have been two consecutive adverts on ITV featuring a Christmas roast turkey. It’s nowhere near Christmas. Global capital is obviously trying to burn a hole in consumers’ pockets and trying to get them out to spend cash they don’t have at the moment on rubbish they don’t need. Maybe there’s a case for buying presents ahead but certainly not turkey. I think advertising those kind of Christmas goods is completely counterproductive and will annoy people intensely.
Chirpy Richard Hammond was doing a Morrison’s advert where he pushed a trolley through a variety of Christmas scenes (ice rink, carol singing, church service). Isn’t this a bit odd. Normally only hooded chavs and students push trolleys down roads away from the supermarket car park and abandoned trolleys are a sure to make middle-class housebuyers run a mile from a neighbourhood. Yet here is the lovable hamster setting a thoroughly bad example (there’s not even any shopping in his trolley). Perhaps he’s taking it to his public school mates on Top Gear to blow up or something? Either way he should be locked up. However, there is something quite authentic in using a shopping trolley as a representation of Christmas present because, as far as most business is concerned, Christmas is just an orgy of consumerism.
Wherever in America that the idea for trick and treating came from must have been a very innocent place. Suggesting
Shame It Doesn't Issue On The Spot ASBOs
that children be sent out in the dark to knock on strangers’ doors to ask for sweets would probably get the average British person banged up in jail these days. These days the little children are shaparoned by parents to a few friendly houses early in the evening and then leave the streets to be menaced by gangs of feral teenagers who think this ludicrous ‘custom’ obliges them to commit vandalism, intimidation and all other manner of anti-social behaviour. One step in the right direction is this poster that Thames Valley Police have produced to tell these obnoxious oiks that they’re unwelcome before they even get to the door. It’s a shame there’s no legal sanction that automatically comes with ignoring it. In our current police state it would be unsurprising if these posters came with their own CCTV camera that filmed any idiot who ignored it and issued them with an automatic ASBO as soon as they knocked on a door. I doubt the poster will do much good apart from provide more work for the police poster making department — this seems to be the busiest part of the police force at the moment with all the signs around saying ‘Thieves will take your sat nav’, ‘Don’t leave valuables in your car’, ‘Pickpockets at work’. The next thing might be signs at the end of every street saying ‘Burglars around. Don’t leave anything in your house’ or ‘Muggers have been known in this town. Don’t get out of your car.’
Going back to Hallowe’en, which I think is the most banal, tasteless, over-commercialised, crass, money-grabbing, cynical marketing exercise that has emerged from the United States — and that’s saying something as there’s plenty of competition. I don’t particularly object to the underlying idea of Hallowe’en itself — a few ghost stories, maybe even a party with a ghoulish theme is ok. However, the shops have been desperate since the end of August to peddle complete over-priced rubbish: Marks and Spencers sell outrageously expensive tiny chocolates themed with some pathetic horror element. Some cake companies are churning out blood-themed sponge bars. It’s all just gimmickry designed to rip people off. The worst thing is that these products are mainly aimed at children — using pester power profiteering out of parents’ pockets.
And before all this commercial Hallowe’en rubbish we had a perfectly good autumn event with fireworks, bonfires and so on. Fortunately Guy Fawkes night is resolutely holding on to its popularity, although increasingly anal retentive health and safety concerns (often totally unfounded) have meant many communities have dropped the bonfire aspect. The thing global capital doesn’t like about 5th November is that there is limited scope to flog us overpriced tat to go with the fireworks — apart from parkin and black peas (for good northerners) there’s not much else for capital’s profiteering. The bonfire can’t be picked up in a supermarket although it’s the most appropriate destination for most of their Hallowe’en merchandise.
In a smart move, George Osborne has made Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a resolutely independent think-tank, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Following a commitment made by the chancellor of the exchequer in July, an appointment to the job can be vetoed by the Treasury select committee of MPs, but th […]
Today’s trade figures from the Office for National Statistics for July were not a pretty sight. The overall deficit in goods and services widened from £3.9 billion in June to £4.9 billion. The deficit for goods alone rose from £7.5 billion to £8.7 billion. These yawning gaps appeared to undermine long held but rapidly diminishing hopes of an export-led reviv […]
CONNAUGHT is not a household name. But it is a big company that has been growing fast in recent years: its revenues have risen from £240m in 2005 to £660m last year, and it boasts a total workforce of around 10,000 people. Its main business is in the social-housing sector (it used to be called council housing, in a simpler age), where it has around 150 maint […]
