Feline like a break from the ads

Adverts - you can’t escape them. How can you avoid the seemingly endless overload of selling? Fear not, for help is at hand... or should that be paw?

We live in a pressurised world, where messages imploring you to try, buy, be cooler, fitter, smarter, trendier, cleaner, happier, calmer and a million other things are full-on and in your face, 24/7.

From the moment you pick up your phone in the morning, via the radio, TV, your tablet, laptop, desktop, in the newspapers and magazine, on billboards you pass, inside the trains and buses you ride, someone is trying to sell you something.

If only there was some kind of temporary respite. A way to feel, even briefly, less pressurised by the constant messages imploring you to consume. Maybe even something to make you feel a bit happier and calm, in amongst the maelstrom of shiny things parading constantly in from of your tired eyes.

Perhaps it could involve cats. Cats are nice, right? If the internet has taught me anything (other than my teeth not being white enough and that I’m not as beach body ready as I thought) it’s that cats make people happy. How about having a space where all the adverts are replaced with pictures of our furry friends? No requests to buy anything or do anything. Just cats, looking out at you and being cute. Wouldn’t that be awesome? “But it’ll never happen, you deluded columnist daydreamer!” I hear you cry.

Sorry to disagree with your imagined objection, dear reader, but it already has. If you happened to be heading underground at Clapham Common Tube Station this week, you would have discovered that all the posters there have been replaced by the Citizen’s Advertising Takeover Service (or CATS for short) with picture of – you guessed it - cats.

Replacing the cacophony of advertising with a catcophony of calm seemed to go down well with commuters, who enjoyed the welcome break from being barked at by advertising messages. Should you be in London soon, you can grab yourself some kitty-based calm too, as the moggies will be present underground for the next two weeks.

Glimpse, a collective dedicated to “making positive social change feel attractive to millions more people” is behind the purrrfect way to start the working day, and raised £23,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to make it possible to replace the 68 ad spaces at the station and leave commuters feline good.

It’s probably a bad time to be a mouse in Clapham Common if you’re of a nervous disposition, and there may well be some Ailurophobes who’ve decided to walk for the rest of the month, but in general, this seems like a wonderful, quirky, idea.

We all need a break sometimes, and it’s rare indeed for something as gently delightful as this to happen.

Good grief – we’ve not been advertised at for several minutes whilst contemplating this. Get back to buying things and feeling insecure immediately.

This post might have appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 16th of September 2016. Still don't know!

Did love this concept - take over an entire Tube station and replace all the advertising with cat pictures. Wish I'd thought of that.

(CD A:Z again suspended - this time for a new album of fresh tunes by assorted 80s icons, on "Fly - songs inspired by the film Eddie The Eagle". And you know what - it;s decent stuff n'all.)

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