The Common Touch

Has anyone else noticed the disproportionately large head atop the diminutive shoulders of the little chap (‘Thomas from Leeds’) in the new Halifax ads? My lovely wife pointed this out the other day, and since then, his unsteady cranium seems to get bigger with each screening.

Halifax’s policy of using employees to advertise their wares in order to show they’re in touch with the needs of the clichéd ‘man-on-the-street’ is an oft-used marketing ploy. Steve Punt once said that in order for companies to show normal people in their adverts, they have to make them a little bit ugly. In other words, in order to make them more believable, they can’t look like actors. For instance, you wouldn’t find Tom Cruise in an ad for B&Q (though they probably wouldn’t be able to find a uniform small enough anyway).

I’m not sure I’d go as far as to call them ugly, from the geeky bespectacled Howard, to the bargain-bin Aretha to the new smiling wobbly-headed individual, but they’ve all got something not-quite-right about them which presumably just proves how ordinary they are and how well-placed they are to flog you a mortgage or a fixed-rate savings bond, or something…

It’s a paradox for any budding actors hoping for advert work in order to further their career: the only way their physiognomy can be presented to the nation is if they are essentially nondescript, and are therefore destined to a life of “It’s him, you know, whatsisname off thingy…”

Rich Within Our Mildest Dreams

As mentioned in a previous post, we don’t really do the Lottery in Castle Collier. Last Saturday however we dutifully spent £3 and sat with bated breath, holding our little pink ticket twixt tremulous thumb and forefinger as the chirpy chap with the ‘80s DJ tones reeled off four of our numbers, much to our astonishment. What do we get for four numbers? we excitedly speculated – is it going to change our life, could this be a nice little windfall?

A swift shufty on tellytext a few minutes later however revealed our winnings to be the princely sum of just £36 (thirty-six pounds. I’ll say it again – thirty-six pounds!) Frankly I was disgusted. I had visions of driving smugly into work on Monday, having a shit on my desk and marching triumphantly out the door pausing only to push over the water cooler and upturn some bins. In the light of our “winnings”, this seems like madness, though it’s still tempting.

We spent a third of our winnings at McDonalds within half an hour of collecting it, and the rest of it at B & Q on a number plaque for our house which, for the moment remains a ‘30s semi- and not an opulent and palatial Cribs-style pad. Might need to tick a few more numbers off for that.

Superbook

I spotted Christopher Reeve’s autobiography while browsing in a charity shop recently. It’s called Still Me. Is this a pun?

Not Alarmed

We have the worst alarm clock in the world, as it gains approximately 30 seconds each day. This may not sound like much, but over the course of four weeks, it increases by 15 minutes so we end up waking up quarter of an hour earlier each month.

If left unchecked, this means that by August 2010 the alarm would go off at 11pm the previous night – roughly the time we trudge up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, thereby allowing us no sleep at all (any date beyond this and we would have to get up before we went to bed). However, this is sweetened somewhat by the fact that we would be allowed 180 successive ten-minute snoozes before clambering out of bed again and heading bleary-eyed downstairs for cornflakes.

We would change it but we're just too tired.

PC Softly Softly

Odd story on the Beeb recently (actually, not that recently at all, but I’ve only just got around to posting this) about Thai police chiefs who are forcing officers who commit minor infringements, such as being late for work or parking in the wrong place, to wear bright pink Hello Kitty armbands as a mark of shame.

The intention is to embarrass the officers into not repeating their misdemeanours by publicly humiliating them as they pound the streets of Bangkok. "This is to help build discipline,” Police Colonel Pongpat Chayapan told Reuters, “We should not let small offences go unnoticed."

Nice one Pongpat. It’s a decidedly odd, but inventive (and probably effective) form of punishment which should be adopted in the UK. British bobbies guilty of similar “crimes” should be forced to walk the beat with those rucksacks shaped like sheep (complete with dangly legs) strapped to their backs, or wear anti-stab jackets with ‘I [heart] NY’ or the logos of West End musicals emblazoned across the front.

Mind you, many more cases of police brutality might go unreported as your average Mr Victim isn’t going to be too proud of being beaten up by someone who looks like a camp tourist.

Mysterious Musical Raymond

It’s A Shame About Ray – The Lemonheads
I’m Worried About Ray – The Hoosiers
The Cult Of Ray – Frank Black

Who is this Ray? And why does he generate so much concern (and revere) among guitar bands?

Space Race

The title of this blog comes from a pub-time conversation around the turn of the millennium, in which the possibility of firing the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) into the sun by launching her from a giant cannon at the top of Greenwich Hill was considered. The logistics of doing so can be found in the very first post.

Now, seven years later, another excellent suggestion has been proposed involving sending Thora Hird on a giant stairlift to the moon. This got me wondering though: if it had been a race between the two sturdy old pensioners, who would have reached their celestial destination first? The sheer velocity of the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) would have stood her in good stead, escaping the earth’s atmosphere with the speed of a rifle bullet like a powder-blue projectile, but then eight light-minutes worth of distance is a very long way. Dame Thora’s progress would be slow and steady on the other hand, inching her way heavenwards at a considerably slower pace, but towards a much closer target.

It was calculated that the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) would have taken around 155 days to plummet into the fiery hell of our nearest star, but how long would it have taken Dame Thora to chug gradually towards the Earth’s only satellite? The similarity in the weight and combustibility of the two can be assumed to be roughly the same and they therefore make excellent subjects for a comparative test.

Logistically, it’s not without its problems. Stannah (or similar) would need to be commissioned to manufacture a bespoke stairlift at least 238,855 miles high – the average distance from the Earth to the moon. A staircase of corresponding length would also have to be built to affix the stairlift to (carpet, treads and a banister would be optional).

For the purposes of the experiment we can take Greenwich as being at sea level, and a few seconds' swift Googling tells us that the typical travel speed for domestic stairlifts ranges between 0.07 and 0.15 metres per second (a mean of 0.11).

From a standing start at Greenwich observatory Thora would have started ascending slowly skywards as soon as Big Ben struck midnight. We can therefore calculate that it would have taken her only around eight minutes to reach the height of Nelson’s column (51m) and just under an hour to surpass the height of the Empire State building (381m). At 10:34pm on the first day of the New Year she would have achieved the height of Everest (8,848m) and would have eventually escaped the earth’s atmosphere on 15th April 2000, some 105 days after her journey began. By stark contrast, at the time when Thora was being jostled by satellites, the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) would have been some 85,000,000 miles distant and well on her way to victory.

The earth’s gravitational pull would need to be factored into any objects (or dames) heading through the outer reaches of the troposphere and into the inky blackness of space, though it’s safe to assume that once she’d escaped gravity, the corresponding reduction in mechanical friction (which would normally impede her progress) would result in her picking up speed.

Even with this increase however (which we can arbitrarily take to be around 10%), she would have lost in spectacular fashion en route to her lunar landing. The remainder of her journey would have taken another 3,611 days, which means she would still be traveling today, and would be scheduled for touchdown on 20th November 2009 – 3,455 days after the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) had been incinerated her into space dust at temperatures approaching 15 million degrees.

Thora would have the last laugh though. Whereas the Queen Mum’s (God rest her soul) final destination would end in her spectacular demise, Thora could feasibly begin her homeward journey with a flick of a switch, heading back “downstairs” to a hero’s welcome on terra firma (though care would have to be taken though to ensure she didn’t burn up on re-entry). National hero status would be assured, and her jowly bespectacled Northern remains could occupy the fourth plinth overlooking Trafalgar Square as testament to British endeavour and achievement.