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heading underground at Clapham Common Tube Station this week, you would have discovered that all the posters there have been replaced by the Citizen’s Advertising Takeover Service (or CATS for short) with picture of – you guessed it - cats.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.)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog