I'm back!

After a fabulous holiday, I am back!

I like to try something new each time I go away, to stop myself being accused of being boring. This year it was exploring caves. Given my claustrophobia and hatred of all small spaces (particularly lifts), this was no small thing.

However, once walking the 1.7km underground, I needn't have worried. These caves were more like caverns the size of the Albert Hall. We walked along, guided only by torches and an excitable Frenchman (stupidly, we thought our 'we can get buy relatively well' French would cope with cave lingo - it was interesting) until we were ordered to turn our torches off. Apprehensively I did so, grabbing onto some poor man's arm. The electric spot lights then flickered and, suddenly, I was staring at the most wonderful prehistoric doodles. The excitable Frenchman explained that the horses and bison were believed to have religious or sexual symbolism.

I maintain that some poor caveman/woman, 1.7km into the Earth, had looked out at the miserable Pyrenean weather that morning and decided to stay in. When bored of staring at the fire, s/he decided to decorate his/her cave with pretty pictures. Or maybe it was advertising the menu for dinner? Or maybe I'm being flippant?!

An advertising factoid...

The advertising industry is bigger than the UK film industry by £800m.

Cracked Heels

Something disturbing happened to me yesterday evening.

I was watching T.V. and an advert for Scholl Cracked Heel Cream came on. Before I could stop myself, I automatically reached for my feet and checked what state my heels were in.

How can anyone say advertising doesn't work?

All about cars

Can someone other than the automotive industry do some inspiring advertising, please?

Advertising musings...

Our visit to Tesco also raised another interesting point I have been pondering over. It was clear that this gentleman’s position on advertising was that it was a tiny part of his overall job.

Would it be fair to say that sometimes agencies forget this?

I think they forget it at their peril.

Violence

There are not many advertisements I really dislike, but this is one of them:



I was always taught it was extremely bad manners to threaten violence with cutlery.

Ride a White Horse

A white horse on the hillside, 300 ft by 300 ft. Romantic explanations for the phenomenon have been batted around over the centuries – tribal symbols, religious images, icons, gods…

The modern explanation for these chalk cuttings is simple; the genuine, bronze age, white horse is an advertisement to passing travellers, pointing the way to farriers. In an ironic twist of fate, these white landmarks were covered up millennia later to prevent them advertising navigation points to Luftwaffe bombers. It seems they did their job rather too well.

From apparently very pragmatic beginnings, these advertisements have become symbolic landmarks and art. I wonder how many adverts today will stand the test of time in the same way?

Rare Creature

I am a rare creature, a former state school pupil who studied Latin. I should probably have done something more sensible and, dare I say it, useful, like German. However, the romance, the brutality and the logic of Latin appealed to me (read into that what you will!).

Natalie Haynes expressed the appeal of Classics beautifully in The Times this morning: “I ran straight into the welcoming folds of A-level Latin and Greek, where I was reasonably certain to be reading about people killing their mothers (Electra), embarking on an elephantine alpine excursion (Livy XXI) or committing big, messy suicide (all classical literature).”

One beautiful day in early spring, in a little town of no consequence except to those fortunate enough to have lived in it, we began translating Orpheus and Eurydice. To this day, the description of Hades and the Underworld fills my head as I trot down the steps into the tube. “Then Orpheus held a torch as he entered a pitch-black region where horrible sounds echoed through a cavernous landscape, and buried ghosts and phantom dwellers floated by.” One question that occupies my thoughts as I stand, phantom-like, in the train is whether there were any advertisements for hair loss treatments in the Underworld? Ixion’s Wheel strikes me as prime advertising space.