Sunday, January 28, 2007

Not shopping

Here's an idea to waste an hour or two. Get the new Argos catalogue (as Bill Bailey calls it, the Laminated Catalogue of Dreams....) or go online here. Find the five daftest things they sell and then congratulate yourself on not having spent money on them or found space for them in your life.
Here are mine:
1. A Dr Who TARDIS wardrobe (actually this is quite clever). Make tidying your room an adventure in time-travelling BBC marketing:

2. A pink gear stick and handbrake cover for the car. Express your zany individualism with some gaudy ill-fitting plastic stuff for your Nissan Micra:

3. A number 1 Dad pendant. Show your love with a piece of football-related costume jewellery:

4. A POWERbreathe 'insipratory' muscle trainer. Make breathing harder!:

5. A Manhattan skyline trolley-case. Fail to capture the image of a transatlantic jet-setter with a picture of some large buildings on a bag:


Once, while waiting for an order to be fetched at an Argos, I tried to fill the time by wondering aloud to the person serving if the name of the store had been chosen because of the Greek for 'lazy'. (A lazy way to shop, I suppose.) She didn't know and, in fact, seemed a bit upset. Looking back, I think now that perhaps she thought I was commenting on the service.

4 comments:

Catherine Rowett said...

Though you don't say so, I take it this should have something to do with Socrates (or if it didn't before, we could make it do so now). See here http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism/Posts/00005254.html

stc said...

My family has a similar favourite game to while away the hours at Christmas: "Find the most awful thing in the Christmas Argos (or Past Times, etc. etc.) catalogue". Play with at least four people, and it provides sheer hours of fun: you'd be surprised how heated a debate can get as to whether the cast-iron garden fairies are worse than the Swarovski crystal hedgehog, and so on....

PD said...

Hey - my brother uses a power breather, and he's coming to the QBF this Friday; you'll see then what it does for you...

RJR said...

My entire childhood I wanted a bed tent such as this one but my parents wouldn't buy me one and now I am scarred for life.
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/1190081.htm