The Laughter of the Gekko
The whole country has gone world-cup-marketing mad!
I was in PC World today and I came across shelves of England Computer Accessory Gift Packs.
Later I was in Sainsburys and there were several displays of what can only be described as worthless tat!
And yet people buy it. I’ve lost count of the number of houses swathed in often two or three St. George’s Cross flags. They are flying from a fair percentage of cars on the road. People wander by with St. George’s Cross baseball caps on, sunglasses, lapel pins, t-shirts, handbags, mobile phones, wrist watches, shorts and pretty much everything else you can think of – all of which will be binned or forgotten at the back of the closet two weeks after the World Cup is over, regardless of whether England win or lose the tournament.
What’s the point?
It’s not patriotism, it's just another way of extracting money from you for things you really, really don’t need!
I swear I am expecting the Visigoths to come sweeping in from Essex any day now.
Thoughts on the Tube
Just a couple of thoughts from my journey home on the Tube last night. The first is that I notice the Bakerloo is celebrating its centenary this year.
Hopefully some of the celebrations will involve improving the ride quality of the track so that every journey doesn’t come with free whiplash injuries thrown-in, or maybe the temperature in the cars can be improved so that when it’s 28°C in London it isn’t 32°C on the trains!
The second thought was something of pathos. I spotted this lady a little further along the train.
She was very well dressed; wearing quite fancy shoes, she was well made up without being overdone, she had on some quite smart looking jewellery and all the way from Regents Park to beyond Waterloo she sipped a bottle of cheap lager and looked regally miserable.
She was a sight redolent of pathos and I so wanted to ask her if she was alright and if I could help, but the etiquette of the Tube and maybe some of that double-edged British reserve held me back. Now I’ll always wonder what happened to her when she arrived at her destination (surely it was Lambeth North, or was she really going on to Elephant and Castle??)
…But I’ll never know.
There are some moments in time that you just want to capture and hold onto forever. This afternoon was one of them as I looked out of my window onto a beautiful, peaceful summer scene. Here is a two-dimensional view of it.
