A lime green crepe-ish strappy vest top, with a cut-away rectangle over the Croydon-facelifted wearer’s corpulent stomach. The cut-away was covered by a lime green string meshing, kind of like that which you usually see covering fruit or in a string hammock. The wearer’s flesh was straining the meshing, poking through like a bound ham. Call me a judgemental snob if you like, but I guarantee you wouldn’t have liked it either. 

I am not sleeping

by Roger McGough

I don’t want any of that

“We’re gathered here today 

to celebrate his life, not mourn his passing.”

Oh yes you are. Get one thing straight, 

you’re not here to celebrate

but mourn until it hurts.

I want wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I want sobs, and I want them

uncontrollable. I want women

flinging themselves on the coffin

and I want them inconsolable. 

Don’t dwell on my past but on your future.

For what you see is what you’ll be

and sooner than you think.

So get weeping. Fill yourselves with dread.

For I am not sleeping. I am dead.

Facebook takes a punch in the gut as GM pulls advertising

Attention spans, like the news cycle and my potential suitors, are now so fast and fleeting that periods of prolonged concentration will soon become as rare as white tigers, typewriters and dressing up for church on a Sunday.

The internet does not generally require long periods of concentration, nor is it built for it. This is why I maintain my paper subscription to Vanity Fair. I can’t stare at a more-or-less static screen for long enough to get through a whole 5,000+-word article - I have to read it on paper. 

The process of buying a car requires similar concentration… unless you’re an oligarch or the playboy brother of the Sultan of Brunei, on whom I read a crazy article in my paper edition of Vanity Fair recently. It requires consideration, thought, second-guessing and general concentration.

I imagine people most likely to heed advertising on Facebook are, not to sound like a fogey, of the younger set and probably not in any position to buy a brand new car. Even if there were more new car buyers on Facebook, though, I imaging their decision is unlikely to be swayed by a fleeting image they catch sight of at the side of the screen while they flick through the family holiday photos of someone they took biology with in Sixth Form. 

Opinion: Why Cigarette Packets Should be Plain.

I’m going to take a chance and write this now and pray that my mother never reads this blog: I was one of the suckers who used to buy cigarettes based on how they looked.

In university a pack of 20 Silk Cut Silvers would last me about 3 weeks (though this would diminish to a week during exams and essay writing). They somehow seemed more ‘elegant’ than, say, Marlboro Lights. I was one step away from heading to Portobello or Brick Lane and finding me a vintage cigarette holder to smoke them through. 

When I moved to New York things got even more ridiculous. Capri Menthol Slims. I didn’t just smoke them because they were, as I described them, 'lady-like’: I did like the menthol and the difference the slimness made to each drag, but, yes, I did particularly like how 'lady-like’ they were. Giant sucker.

I was easily influenced by advertising & appearance - and that has turned out to be a good thing. It means I have also been easily influenced by anti-smoking advertising and horrible pictures on packets. I have heeded the horror stories and don’t smoke at all any more. I never smoked a lot and could easily go for days, weeks - at one point months, even - without a cigarette, so giving up was not a problem.

For whatever reason, dedicated smokers do not heed these things. Their continued habits show that they are fairly impervious to the influence of advertising - not that there is any pro-smoking advertising left in the UK. People don’t buy Lambert and Butlers because of the pretty, shininess of the packet or Superkings because the gold packet somehow implicitly suggests wealth. I presume that they buy them because they are the cheapest way of keeping the habit going. 

The business politics and economics of the situation is far beyond my knowledge but surely the most effective way of stopping smoking would be to wap even greater taxes on cigarettes than already exist. Make it so prohibitively expensive that people are forced to choose between food and cigarettes. A roof or cigarettes.

I’m not saying anything new here - this point has no doubt already been debated to death in many meetings between politicos and Big Tobacco - but I just fear that the unquestionable good intentions behind pushing for the packets to be changed will only amount to tilting at windmills.

The scene: M&S Charing Cross Station, about 3:30pm, Sunday, May 6:

Woman: [Jabbing repeatedly at her phone, looking a little irritated] Shell! Shell? Shell, how do you spell ‘drunk’?

Shell: What? Drunk? That’s, uh, d - r - u - [thinks] n - c … No, no - there’s no c. It’s d - r - u - n - k. What are you saying to him?

Woman: Just that I was totally pissed last night. 

True story. Seen with these eyes, heard with these ears.