Our basements are full of junk

The King of Bhutan would like to abolish adverts. No, seriously.

Think of any Vintage advert. Like this one which they've preserved for posterity here in Viking City. Isn't it pleasingly straightforward? While possibly not being 100% truthful, it does at least have the redeeming feature that any out-and-out porkies remain at the front of your mind where they can easily be dealt with, rather than being quietly slipped down into the subconscious, from where they are almost impossible to remove.

Like a lot of other things in life, adverts have simply become too "efficient" for their own good. What started out early last century as a business of simply informing people about your business, has now morphed, with the help of thousands of millions of pounds, some disciples of Freud, and a conniving nod from every government on earth, into an industry that does for people's mental landscapes what the coal and oil industries (among others) are busy doing for our physical ones.

Don't believe me? That bottle of fizzy sugary liquid should put you in mind of the resulting unwanted flab or trip to the dentists. Instead it probably invokes images of slim, tanned people (with perfect teeth) on tropical beaches or having a fun night out on the town. The sports kit with the same logo as that worn by the indifferent local likelies in the pub, rather than reminding you of them, in "advertising fact" turns you into an elite athlete. I could go on.

It gets worse...adverts have also been busy telling us that our own efforts are futile: don't struggle to find the words for that thank-you letter, just buy Auntie our chocolates instead. Don't bother making your own jam, buy ours instead. I wonder what decades of this pep-talk has done to people's confidence.

But...supposing I have bought something and am genuinely delighted with it, and think the world would be a better place if more people would do the same? I might put up comments on, for example, a public internet forum, about our new PV roof. Is that an advert? The people who installed it are, after all, a purely commercial enterprise. Going a step further, ethical or mutual firms need to be able to tell people why the world might be a better place if we would put our custom their way. They put their information up on (for example) my Facebook page and I "share" it: not just information about the goods this time, but the name of the provider too: would the King of Bhutan's finest come round here and drag me off to the slammer?

And there's more: how would anyone know what was on at the local theatre or music venue if there were no flyers? Would a web-page count as an advert? Even displays in shop-windows are designed to entice buyers in: they, too, are therefore adverts...

In the time it has taken me to write this page, the post (with its usual complement of adverts) has arrived, and an ice-cream van has played its amplified chimes in our street (with the weather a balmy ten degrees, I might add).

The Advertising Standards Authority (remember them?) exists to make sure adverts are "Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful". Given that "Honest" and "Truthful" are synonyms, perhaps we should change the last to "Don't raid the subconscious"? 

Because I'm willing to bet that there are genuine health benefits from not having a subconscious that's cluttered with the festering by-products of adverts.

Space-age roof

Sometimes, when I'm walking along streets blessed with an absence of traffic, I look up at the roofs. Sometimes these are pretty and atmospheric, with gothic turrets, or art deco friezes, or perhaps they are thatched or gently undulating along the ridge where weight has been borne for hundreds of years. And sometimes, they are just ordinary. Our roof is, or at least was, definitely the latter.

And that is why we had no difficulty deciding to put its large, and previously idle, area to some use: making electricity. We invested in a project to install nine of these futuristic works of art:


On the big day, the British weather obliged with its finest, wettest, rain!


But the gentlemen who came to do the work were no sissies, and carried on regardless

In just one day, everything on the roof was finished!

Arty close-up:


Another atmospheric shot, with reflections of clouds (for people who like that sort of thing):

There's something pleasingly geometrical about that pattern (getting a bit carried away now):


It also co-ordinates perfectly with the décor in the room inside the roof:


It's an interesting coincidence that a set-up like this provides roughly the same amount of energy that a person would spend on physical work (for the curious, the daily average of 4 kWh is the same amount of energy as 3,440 food calories).