Hurt

We’re just back from a week in Portugal where the sun shone brightly, and now as the suntans fade and slide down the colour charts from the colour of teak to milky coffee, they seem to have settled on a shade which I can only describe as being like an unhealthy cat’s litter tray. Very attractive.

It was a hectic and busy week in the tropical heat what with having to oil myself up and get up and down from the sun lounger to pour cold drinks. Then there were restaurant buffets to be cleared, bars to be inspected, packets of Ibuprofen to be consumed in the name of the god Hangover, and it would have been rude not to do a tour of every shopping centre in the area. And people think my life is easy.

The holiday came at a good time for me as I had injured my back at the gym and needed a break somewhere other than my lower spine, and I’ve learned since returning from holiday that there are two things about having a back problem that are very annoying. The first is that it’s painful of course, but the second aspect hurts even more. It seems that back pain is a bit like Colonel Gaddafi. Everyone has an opinion on what you should do to get rid of it.

I have been advised to do yoga, Pilates and swimming. I have also been told to sit in a sauna, have a chiropractor visit the house, make friends with a physiotherapist, change my diet, have someone rub my back with tennis balls, stretch out more, buy new shoes, wear a back brace, get down the local DIY store, buy Easter eggs and have more sex. Hang on, now I’m getting carried away and reading from the “to do” list on my desk.

Silently and stealthily there has been an explosion of growth in the “fix it” side of keeping fit. We’ve all gone daft for the gym without us realising that this health kick is really a big swindle. We’re being conned in to doing fitness to bankroll physios and sports scientists who simply know the words to “Your Hip Bone’s Connected To Your Thigh Bone” a bit better than the rest of us.

If healthy living really IS healthy then why does it take two weeks to get an appointment with a physiotherapist? Why do most gyms have a masseur and masseuse wafting the smell of eucalyptus round the place all day as they count the cash coming through the doors of their consulting rooms?

I love the gym but I’m starting to feel that in future running machines and spinning bikes will only be seen by my great grandkids when they’re taken on school trips to see how people once lived. In a museum somewhere a gym will be reconstructed with an authentic sweat smell conjured from oils like that old Viking town at the Yorvik museum.

I can imagine the history books now. “You may find this hard to believe children but some ancient Brits not only used to prefer vegetables to a good pepper steak, they used to punish themselves by running and cycling without actually moving or going anywhere. Some even used to wave their arms around and wiggle their bottoms to a type of music known as Aerobics. Apparently some women didn’t like the fact this made them sweat and they invented something called Pilates so they could have a good sleep on the floor instead.”

My back still hurts but my ears hurt more from listening to everyone’s opinion on what I should do about it. Surprisingly, none of the health brigade has suggested I give up the gym. That would put them out of business in the future.

For the moment I face a choice – keep on going to the gym or give it up and save money which I can then spend on more chocolate. Put like that there’s no real choice to be made is there?

Word Up

As my chauffeur had the day off and the Aston Martin was having its gold wheel trims studded with fresh water pearls, I ended up waiting for a tube train on Wednesday at Vauxhall underground station when I started reading the posters on the wall across the tracks.

How on earth they get these big adverts up there is a mystery to me but secretly I’d love to believe there’s a wee man who runs across with his paste bucket between departures, desperately running to get the advert up before the next train squashes him.

Anyway, however it’s done it must be rushed. All the sheets are badly put together with overlaps that cause unintentional hilarity and I had a good laugh at the new giant advert for the local Virgin Active gym. The poster man had hastily overlapped the sheets, obscuring some letters. This didn’t matter till the final line which now reads “I love to swim at a gym with a big poo”. I’m almost sure the letter “L” has gone missing beneath the next sheet, but perhaps it’s some new swimming game launched by the environmental lobby.

Posters tell their own story and at Oxford Street station, on the escalators, you instantly get a snapshot of the recession. Apart from the empty poster boxes as you rise towards street level, there are still any number of adverts for Christmas sales and west end shows that closed a year ago. Perhaps I just imagined the advert announcing the sale of commemorative dinner plates for the upcoming royal wedding - of Victoria and Albert.

Advertising must be a rubbish business to be in. You spend all day thinking up a slogan like “go to work on an egg” and it’s used for decades but you don’t get a single penny extra, while whoever writes Cheryl Cole’s songs gets royalties for years, which presumably helps lessen their embarrassment.

We all know the great advertising slogans like “A Mars A Day Helps You Work Rest And Play” or “It Does What It Says On The Tin” but I think the duff ones are more interesting. Nothing brings a dose of humility to an ad agency more than the smell of failure. For instance, a hotel in Plymouth that specialised in weekend breaks for pensioners wondered why their new agency’s slogan failed to bring in the punters five year ago. It concentrated on the relaxing sleep waiting for the oldies in their luxury beds but said “Stay with us for the rest of your life”.

Warsaw tourist bosses allowed a slogan in the Seventies which went “Poland, you’re welcome to it” and during the SARS epidemic, which claimed the lives of many in the Far East, I saw in Hong Kong a tourism slogan that described the city as the place that “Takes Your Breath Away”.

Clairol introduced a curling tong called The Mist Stick to Germany and literally translated the product name without realising the German for Mist is also a slang word for Manure. Funnily enough the “manure stick” bombed. Then the Coors beer slogan “Turn It Loose” appeared on posters in Latin America translated in to Spanish as “Suffer From Diahorrea”.

Perhaps then advertising isn’t a boring drudge of a career after all, so long as you have a sense of humour and can laugh at your mistakes. And when you get bored there’s always that great game to play using someone else’s successful slogan but putting it with some other product. For instance “If You Like A Lot Of Chocolate On Your Biscuit Join Our Club” worked well for Jacobs Biscuits but would work even better for Weight Watchers don’t you think?

How about ”Every Little Helps” for an enhancing bust cream, or maybe that liquid coffee slogan, “Camp, It’s Best”, being used by west end theatres. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the curry eating, beer drinking blokes you know should get to use “High Speed Gas”, or where you’d reuse Burger King’s “It Takes Two Hands To Hold A Whopper”.

But be careful. The Nike slogan “Just Do It” might be great for sport, but it wouldn’t be so good for The Samaritans, would it?

Somethin's Cooking In The Kitchen

Here’s an idea for a TV show. We get Bruce Forsyth to solve world poverty, Lady Gaga to work in Iran with NATO’s nuclear disarmament inspectors, and then Nicholas Cage and Kerry Katona can lend their expertise to the next World Economic Forum at Davos to tidy up Third World debt. Good idea, eh?

Well, no, of course not. It’s a ridiculous idea, stupid and childish. Put it forward as a TV programme format and you would be, rightly, laughed out of the commissioner’s office and forced to watch boxed sets of Benidorm as punishment.

Yet this week we have the pleasure of Channel Four’s Jamie Oliver setting up a school to see if unteachable kids can be controlled, interested in education, and ultimately taught to love learning. So, forget about all the years of academic research and millions of pounds of analysis by the Department of Education, social scientists and university doctors struggling with their theses on education failure.

All we ultimately needed for the answer was a television cook.

Now Jamie seems a lovely bloke and his autograph proudly graces my kids’ playroom wall but, how can I put it? I repeat - he’s a flippin’ cook for goodness sake. A chef. He can surely tell you how to drizzle vinaigrette artistically on your Cos lettuce, make fluffy cous cous or cook pasta al dente, but run a school? What’s he qualified to do? Bin the frogs from Biology and have the students dissect wild guinea fowl instead? Returf the five a side pitches in lemongrass? Have the woodwork class make sculptures from polenta?

Perhaps he’d be happy if I ask our local sixth form college headmaster to work for a few weeks as chef of his restaurant in Kingston. It’s the same principle. No doubt we’ll get a book – Jamie’s Ten Minute School Makeover – and a themed restaurant out of it where noisy diners are given lines.

Nice fella but hopelessly out of his depth and remit. Mind you, I wish I had his agent.
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My older daughter watched the Spy Kids movie and was fascinated by the idea of retinal scanners for security. These devices check your unique eye print to see if you are who you say you are. Now she’s decided she wants one of these for access to her bedroom, but she hasn’t quite heard the name properly. She asked me if she could get a “rectal scanner” for her birthday.

Bottom line is I’ve said no.

Meantime my other daughter has started freaking out over recycling. She was all in favour until she picked up the new pack of toilet tissue from the supermarket and saw the recycled logo on the wrapper. “Does this mean the toilet paper’s been used before?” she asked with a horrified look.

Kids constantly make you laugh and then remember how innocent those years, long ago, really were. When I was a kid someone told me that a certain type of garden pebble had coins inside and I used to waste days trying to wear them away by rubbing them on the garden wall. I also believed I’d become a millionaire if I left home at six or seven but was back in my bedroom after five minutes because I didn’t know how where the bus stop was.

Life was simpler in those days as there were no retinal scanners or recycling ideas around then. But I guess nothing really changes. Perhaps technology is just today’s old stones with sixpences hidden inside.