In this guide from 1986, nightmarish characters tell you…
Category Archives: Stuff
The hairdressers of New Malden
You’re looking for a book that isn’t by James Patterson or Maeve Binchy.
You’re under 30 and you fancy a new shirt or a pair of trainers.
You like browsing around antique stores and record shops, and enjoy buying your meat from a butcher and your fish from a fishmonger.
If any of these apply to you, you can safely give New Malden High Street a miss. Try Wimbledon or Kingston instead. But if you want a haircut, our local high street is definitely THE place to come.
At the last count (2013) there were no fewer than 11 hairdressers on this half-mile strip of road. (That’s excluding the slightly dodgy-looking ones located up narrow staircases, behind single doorways at the side of shops.) In New Malden, only estate agents and food outlets are thicker on the ground.
Slap-bang next to the station, this was briefly New Malden’s busiest barbershop. Now… less so.
Inside Sam’s. ‘Quick number one for me and the boy, yeah?’
Judy isn’t sure whether she needs an apostrophe or not, so covers both bases
Inside, the owner seems to have settled on Judys.
Located just a few doors down from Judys. #KoreanHairFight
I was tempted to ask the Hair Salon where they got their wallpaper but thought it might sound a bit weird coming straight after ‘can I take a photo inside your shop?’
Headmasters was one of the few shops that wouldn’t let me take an interior shot. “We have a marketing department, and they’re very strict on that sort of thing.” Surprisingly, it is also the only local hairdresser to have a hair-based pun in its name. I know!
Hairdresser shops tend to come and go on this site. They suddenly sprout as one neat single shop, then grow in volume to become double-fronted before being trimmed back to a single shop. The staff can vary in sex, number and ethnicity, while the name of the shop changes with the frequency of Lady Gaga’s ‘do.
Just days before this picture was taken, ‘BARBERS SHOP’ occupied the left-hand side while the takeaway ‘Baguette, Set, Go’ enjoyed its all-too-brief existence on the right.
That’s Sam, or Sunni, on the left, and me (dammit) in the mirror
Open 7 days a week. All gens welcome
The Sopranos at work. Perhaps it was a combination of their shop’s name and the staff’s access to super-sharp scissors that prevented me from mentioning their spelling and punctuation mistakes
Dee Biarsee? Die Bias? Never heard anyone say it out loud
Apparently, DiBiase has been in New Malden since 1914. I hope they party hard for their centenary next year. With a bit of luck Haircut 100 will be free
Agassi is fully air-conditioned. Have you ever seen a sign saying ‘partially air-conditioned’ or ‘air-conditioned at the back, on Thursdays’?
According to staff, essensuals is ‘the diffusion group of Toni and Guy’
Here they are, diffusing away
Could this be the strangest retail pairing in history? From the outside, Carrington Wood looks (and sounds) like an estate agent. Then you notice those posters in the window advertising eyebrow threading and waxing. So what exactly is it? Well, it’s perhaps Surrey’s first hybrid estate agent/beauty parlour/hairdresser/lettings agent. Inside, the front of the shop has a few office desks and filing cabinets in a typical (though slightly down at heel) estate-agent style, while the back is given over to the hair and beauty side of the business. They wouldn’t let me photograph inside the shop, evidently thinking it a bit of an odd request. They know all about odd at Carrington Wood.
“Hi! I’m looking for a Victorian semi, three beds, about £350,000?”
“Sorry mate, the best we can offer is a modern terraced for £395,000. But we can wax your eyebrows if you like”
“Oh, OK.”
“Take a seat and we’ll go through your finance options.”
“Wha?”
You know how some of the finest shows in New York are found off-Broadway? Well…
It’s not a universal rule. Mind you, George did a good job on my barnet. And unlike Sam or Judy or Sunni or the other Sam, I’m pretty sure George is his real name. He’s cut hair in New Malden since the 1970s and I don’t think he’s ever going to expand into eyebrow threading, diffusion products or property sales.
£9 to you, squire.
Edit: Thanks to New Maldenite Matt Lord (@ThatChapLordy), we now have a pic of the hairdressers that catered for the very, very old of New Malden. Bebe was demolished in 2006 to make way for an area of rubble.
Behold the Mekon hair domes of death!
Filed under London learnings, New Malden, Stuff
You can’t write this sign any better. Or can you?
This sign has become a familiar sight on the back of many of Britain’s vans and lorries:
I like the sign’s brevity and its irrefutable logic. I don’t know how it can be improved. But that hasn’t stopped some people from having a go. In recent months I have seen several versions*:
IF YOU CAN’T
SEE MY MIRRORS
THEN I CAN’T SEE YOU
The addition of the word ‘then’ seeks to cement the link between the two clauses of the conditional sentence – the protasis, which expresses the condition, and the apodosis, which conveys the consequence. But in my opinion it adds nothing but five additional characters.
IF YOU CAN’T
SEE MY MIRRORS
I CAN’T SEE YOU
See the connection? We’re talking about you and my mirrors, here. Think mirrors and you, mirrors and you. It’s not about looking for my door handles or sun visor. Ignore those; they don’t matter. It’s mirrors you should be looking for. Sorry, MIRRORS.
IF YOU CAN’T
SEE MY MIRRORS,
“I CAN’T SEE YOU”
This is a weird one. We’ve got an added comma, which is probably correct for formal writing though unnecessary in a sign, but then we’re suddenly hauled inside speech marks. So who’s saying the “I can’t see you” bit, the van driver? Who’s saying the rest then, an anthropomorphised van?
Or has this been done by someone who thinks that putting something inside quote marks instantly invests it with more authority? To compound the felony, in the version that I saw the last line appeared in Comic Sans, and I know how much you hate Comic Sans.
IF YOU CAN’T SEE MY MIRRORS I CAN’T SEE YOU.
THIS MEANS THAT I’M MORE LIKELY TO KNOCK YOU OFF YOUR BIKE,
CAUSING YOU PAIN AND SUFFERING OR EVEN WORSE
This is a version we haven’t seen yet. It’s on the back of an imaginary lorryload of copywriters, one of whom has clambered out to improve the sign by adding a benefit. The benefit in this case being not getting crushed under the wheels of an artic.
How would different professions word the sign? I’m thinking of compliance officers, civil servants, manufacturers of smoothies…
A free HGV licence to the winning entry.
* No photos for these signs, I’m afraid. I saw them when I was driving.
Filed under Stuff
Fuelling anger
The Chief Executive of Consumer Focus reckons that 6 million UK households are currently experiencing fuel poverty, a figure set to rise to 9 million by 2016. That’s a lot of people thinking twice about putting the heating on, or having to make choices between eating and staying warm.
Just like petrol prices a few years back, the inexorable and dramatic increases in the costs of gas and electricity are causing anger and outrage as well as real hardship and, too often, premature deaths.
You’d expect the big energy companies to bear this in mind when briefing their ad agencies or approving the work they produce. They must be aware that the EDFs and E.ONs of this world aren’t amongst Britain’s best-loved companies. Especially as they’re French. So I can’t understand what makes E.ON think that this advert conveys the right message to its customers.
“I get money off my energy bills with E.ON. Great. More money for online shopping.”
Because that’s obviously the alternative. Not food, or clothes for the kids. Any money you don’t give to e.on can be added to that huge fund earmarked for Net-a-Porter. And what’s with that gratuitous inclusion of ‘online’? That just compounds the felony, as a simple ‘shopping’ would indeed suggest the weekly trip to stock up on life’s necessities. ‘Online shopping’, in contrast, still evokes the buying of treats and luxuries, especially when viewed in context with the image.
I think it’s insulting. But then it gets worse with that clunker of a strapline.
‘Helping our customers. We’re on it.’
To me, that comes across as ‘Helping our customers, you say? Worth a try, I suppose.’
Or: ‘We’ve heard about offering help to our customers , instead of remorselessly f*cking them over, and we’re going to give it a go.’
‘We’re on it’ doesn’t suggest an ongoing programme at all. The singular version – ‘I’m on it!’ – is what an eager young intern says when asked to perform a challenging new task, usually accompanied by a snap of the fingers. In fact it doesn’t even have the sense of a gradual process as evinced by its much-maligned predecessor, British Rail’s ‘We’re getting there’.
Essentially, the news from e.on is good. It is at last doing something positive for its customers, probably as a reaction to the criticism that’s been levelled at it from all sides saying that existing customers are always ignored in favour of lucrative new ones.
But I think they could have conveyed the news in a far more sensitive and appropriate way. Meter reading: 0000001.
Filed under Ill-informed advertising observations, Stuff
Those allegations. Do you deny, dispute, refute, rebut or contest them?
From (allegedly) kiddie-fiddling cardinals to (so they say) overly-lascivious Lib Dem leaders, allegations of inappropriate behaviour are everywhere these days.
Leaving aside whether the use of that word ‘inappropriate’ is appropriate in these cases (is it really being too judgmental to take the view that abusing children is ‘wrong’ rather than merely ‘inappropriate’?), the allegations are generally followed by a denial of any wrongdoing.
However, a common-or-garden denial is somehow seen as insufficient. So the accused party will instead say he refutes the charges, presumably because it sounds like a more robust kind of denial. Sometimes they’re reported to be ‘contesting’ the accusations, or alternatively they might ‘dispute that version of events’. A ‘rebuttal’ of child-sex allegations is heard less often, perhaps because the word sits rather awkwardly with that particular offence. As does ‘sits rather awkwardly’. But shush.
The question is, if you’re a copywriter who’s been accused of something untoward, just what type of denial should you hit back with? Here’s your handy at-a-glance, cut-out-and-keep guide:
“You’ve been in the pub!”
A straightforward denial should be enough to counter this outrageous slur, provided you don’t allow your accuser to get close enough to smell your breath, or mangle your words to the extent that your very denial becomes an outrageous slur.
“Your copy is off brief!”
This is one you can refute, because to refute something is generally held to mean disproving it through evidence. So you simply hold the creative brief up in triumph and say “See? You specifically asked for the copy to focus on the kill-rate of the MP7 Sub-Machine Gun, and for the tone to be light and whimsical!”
“You’ve lifted this copy!”
You can either deny or dispute this accusation, although disputing it suggests it contains at least a kernel of truth that warrants argument and debate. Better to deny it outright, at least until your accuser comes back with the proof. Then you’re on your own.
“Your copy didn’t generate a response”
You can rebut this criticism simply by providing a sheaf of the responses your ad did get, taking care not to mention that 90% of them were complaints about tone, veracity or plagiarism (see above). Rebut, then, is similar to refute, although back in the 90s New Labour was famous for its effective ‘rapid rebuttal unit’ (strapline: ‘Yeah but, no but, REBUT!’) rather than a ‘rapid refutation unit’. That would have been silly.
“You totally lost it with the client when he rejected all your perfectly reasonable ideas, telling him he had the imagination of a small stick before pouring coffee over his head.”
Up to you. If it didn’t happen, deny it. If you can produce a happy, smiling client, refute it. If it was tea not coffee, dispute ‘that particular version of events’. But if the accusation is that it was your art director who carried out the assault rather than you, you should take legal advice and contest it.
All clear?
Filed under Stuff
Agony Uncle, 1938-style
I came across this yellowing magazine in the vintage comic shop in Brewer Street, London W1. Rather than buy one of the Beanos or Dandys or even a TV21 that were more my era (and which would probably increase in value much more quickly), I spent my money on this odd publication instead.
It’s dated September 1938 and until I started writing this blog I thought it very much a product of its time. Britain was 12 months away from war and I assumed that the magazine was part of a determined effort by the government of the day to get the country’s youth fitter for the conflict that lay ahead. Turns out Health and Strength had been going for 40 years prior to 1938 and is indeed still going, er, strong today.
We invent post-modern irony one Tuesday afternoon
I bought the mag back in the 1980s, a time when you, being young, probably think irony didn’t exist. But it did (I think we invented it – it surely couldn’t have existed before then, could it?), and I remember taking the magazine back to the office and me and Jon, Caz and Gabby laughing like drains over ‘Pose of the Week’ and the ludicrous small ads promising ‘a new life free from care or suffering’. The pictures are hilarious – all these incredibly earnest young men adopting extraordinary poses in order to impress…well, other men I suppose. But, as a sort-of writer, it’s the ads and the articles that interested me. The authoritarian language, the nervousness surrounding anything deemed modern, and the cause of any physical or mental ailment always being identified as a lack of running about.
The greatest revelation was the problem page. This was before Agony Aunts, or indeed Agony Uncles, so readers’ ‘private problems’ were answered by a Mr. T. Bowen Partington, FIL, FRES. (If these qualifications meant something in 1938 they certainly don’t now.) The weird thing was, readers’ letters weren’t published – only Mr T’s replies. He’d identify the writer by their initials or by the name they’d given – FOOLISH of Surrey – then give them the benefit of his wisdom.
“It’s like this, doctor.”
“So I see.”
With only the answers to go by, we can only guess at the exact nature of the questions submitted (although some are glaringly obvious). I’ve abridged them slightly.
SEBASTIAN – I would rather advise that you stop using the belt and please remember that the condition you describe, on occasions when with your young lady, is the result of sexual excitement.
E.A.H.M (London) – Try to exercise greater control when with your girl.
WORRIED – Seeing that you have been stupid enough to enage in sexual intercourse, and now your “periods” are late, it is possible that you are pregnant.
H.M.S – There is absolutely no need for your pal to worry.
DOROTHY (Nuneaton) – Don’t think of it! He is almost old enough to be your father.
SORRY BOY (Swindon) – There is nothing to be gained by worry over your previous indulgence in self-abuse. Your physical state in regard to your chest may have nothing to do with your past.
NEDRAU – It will be all to the good that you stop the silly habit.
SOLEX (Esher) – I have already answered your former letter.
SPINNER (Leigh, Lancs) – Every three days or so.
Mr T didn’t miss an opportunity to flog his own publications, including ‘Sex and Morality’ (Probably no and yes, in that order) and ‘A Marriage Manual’. But most of his recommendations were in the spirit of the magazine he wrote for and included advice to take up some form of P.C. (Physical Conditioning?)
Glasto tip
There’s agonising of a different sort over in the letters page, where an ongoing debate considers the advisability of adopting the German system of compulsory fitness training in the UK. (You want to travel back in time and tell them that a year from now, compulsory target practice will be more useful.) And here’s a handy suggestion for waterproofing a tent. Remember this for next year’s festival season:
‘The canvas should be coated with a mixture of: 1. Gelatine, 50 parts by weight, boiled in 3,000 parts of water free from lime; 2. Alum, 100 parts, dissolved in 3,000 parts of water; and 3. Soda Soap, dissolved in 2,000 parts of water.’ Do that and you’ll just have time to catch the headline act.
…or shave your scalp
56 pages to read. But with which eye?
An ad that reads more like a threat
Man up, FFS!
Just plug yourself into the mains and you will feel
A NEW MAN (briefly)
That’s it! Pretend you’re reading your Kindle. Eh? No idea.
Ready to enter the water like a man jumping into some water!
You can see why, can’t you? Idiots.
Filed under Stuff
Hurtz to listen
Hertz is running an ad campaign at the moment that includes some radio commercials. I say includes, but perhaps the entire campaign is being run exclusively on the radio, and maybe the campaign consists solely of just the one ad. This matters, because the quality of any other ads in the series – on the radio, in the press or online – may go some way towards mitigating the forty seconds of crap I heard last night. Here’s a précis of the set-up:
MIDDLE CLASS MAN: I’d like to hire a car please.
DODGY USED-CAR-DEALER-TYPE LONDONER: Yeah, what’cha after then?
MCM: Well, something a bit stylish and modern.
DUCDTL: Got just the thing. Lovely motor. Very spacious. Here it is!
MCM: But…but….that’s a VAN!!!!
See? The person wishing to hire the car had visited one of the less-well known vehicle rental businesses, perhaps in a desire to save money in these belt-tightening times, and the no-good scoundrel behind the counter had tried to rent him a van instead of a car. Because that’s what must happen: businessmen in focus groups often recount the times they had to turn up to an important meeting behind the wheel of a battered long-wheelbase Ford Transit or an LDV 200-series with a Luton conversion. It just doesn’t look good.
It’s clearly a false premise, though. Discovering that Ronnie’s Rentals doesn’t have the exact model you wish to hire is entirely possible. Finding that the car is in a poor state of repair or that its ashtray is full may be a familiar occurence. But the scenario of this ad is so unlikely that I suspect it won’t even begin to resonate with the target market. And I reckon this over-exaggeration of the possible negative consequences of trying to save a few quid is deliberate. It was done in order to put more space between that and the positive aspects of hiring a car from Hertz. The creative team must have struggled to find anything appreciably better about the Hertz experience, so they made the alternative seem absurdly nightmarish.
Some fuss guaranteed
This is borne out by what’s said in the ‘positive’ section of the radio ad, the bit where we get all serious and real-worldy. The voiceover reassuringly informs us that a car can be hired from Hertz with a minimum of fuss. So there will be some fuss, you say? Despite your 94 years of experience in renting cars, it’s still a bit of a fuss to hire a car from Hertz? Expecting the process to be free from fuss is an unrealistic expectation, is it?
I detect the hand of a nervous client here. Or maybe the RACC had a problem with a previous version of the script, the one that alluded to a 100% guaranteed, entirely fuss-free transaction in every Hertz location and on every occasion. I can understand that. In which case, the solution would surely be to not mention fuss at all, wouldn’t it? In fact, why are we even in the territory of fuss at all – the commercial was supposedly about the inability of some car rental firms to provide customers with cars to rent.
Clients can be a pain and briefs can be flimsy and the RACC can be heavy-handed, but there’s no excuse for lazy writing.
Filed under Ill-informed advertising observations, Stuff
VHStalgia
That looks a bit like the name of some extreme Nazi PoW camp rather than the amusing portmanteau word it sounded in my head. Nevertheless, it sums up what we have here: a nostalgic look back at a few VHS cassette boxes.
Too soon? We’re all still obsessing with audio C90s? Oh well. These’ll still be here when the next retro phase kicks in.
A trip down Memorex Lane
Filed under Anecdotage, Stuff
Progress. At a price.
I was round my mate Geoff’s house the other day. He likes his gadgets, does Geoff. Old gadgety Geoff.
His latest was a Sonos sound system. Working via your home’s wi-fi, it lets you play music from your iTunes library and also from sources outside your house, such as Spotify and LastFM. The sound was deep and loud and rich, and the remote control was insanely easy to use. (This part was critical. Geoff’s previous foray into this area involved a system so complex that finding a song – any song – would take him ages standing in front of a huge screen and jabbing buttons on a paperback-sized remote control. The impenetrable operating instructions effectively excluded the rest of his family from ever selecting their own music.)
When I can next justify it financially, I thought, I’m going to get one of these Sonos systems.
Then last week I started noticing their ad campaign. No easy matter, as the adverts are discrete and understated virtually to the point of invisibility. But they got me looking for a stockist in Basingstoke, where I was working at the time, so the campaign worked to that extent.
The instore demonstration was pretty compelling. The guy showed me how the remote worked, talked me through the various systems and explained how to get the best out of it. Although my iTunes library probably wouldn’t be up to the job, he cautioned. Why ever not? Well, apparently when you import CDs to iTunes, it rips them at a less than optimal setting. For purposes of speed, I guess. For the least compression and hence the best quality, I would have to import all my CDs again on the Apple Lossless setting. Hmm.
Another thing that perplexed me was the set-up of the speaker. I belong to a generation conditioned by everyone from hi-fi mags to the Melody Maker to position speakers six to eight feet apart. That was the way to replicate a live performance and the best way to enjoy any stereo effects created in the studio. Mono? Pah!
How to listen to music
But here was a £350 system with only the one speaker. A backward step, surely? Not so, said the people at Sonos when I’d mentioned this very point on Twitter. Each Sonos system in fact included two speakers, left and right. You couldn’t separate them – separates are so last century – so the way to enjoy stereo sound was simply to buy two systems! You turn the left-hand channel off on one and place it to the right, and do the opposite with the other and bingo, stereo sound. (“You want to take a passenger on your motorcycle? No problem – just buy another motorcycle!”)
I thought about the number of times I actually sat down in the precise way recommended by speaker manufacturers and hi-fi buffs and realised that I didn’t any more. Not much, anyway. So the lack of true stereo might not be such a big deal after all. OK, I thought, I’ll take it. Just one problem – that store didn’t have one in stock in my choice of colour. (There are two: Apple white and Apple black.) But their Camberley store did have one. I got them to reserve it and headed back to the office.
During the afternoon, doubt started to creep in. £350 is quite a lot to pay for something which would involve me doing days and days worth of ripping. The ‘sound in every room’ sales schtick wasn’t that convincing either when I realised I pretty much had that already. And there was that whole back to mono thing. But on the other hand, the sound was truly amazing and the idea of using that chunky little remote control to summon up music from pretty much anywhere was difficult to resist. So I made a deal with myself. If I get work for next week, I’ll buy it. If not, I won’t.
I checked my emails. Yay! I had work for the following week. A couple of days, anyway. So that evening found me in the Camberley hi-fi store, punching my PIN into the terminal and looking lovingly at the box of music that was about to be mine. I checked with the salesman. “It’s got the manual in there, I take it?” Manuals are a waste of paper, he glumly told me. There’ll be a CD-Rom in the box. I nodded. I prefer manuals. This idea that a manufacturing process involving polycarbonates and aluminium and a reading process that required a £500 computer and a semiconductor laser was somehow better than printing a little booklet was unconvincing.
“And the remote and everything?”
He shook his head. “There’s no remote. The remote is optional.”
That sounded odd. How am I meant to operate it without the remote? He told me it was done via an app on my iPhone, iPad, Android phone or a desktop interface. All very well for me, as I’m never far from my iPad. But Mrs Bravenewmalden doesn’t have any of those things. Well, she’s got a PC but there was no way she, or anyone else for that matter, would be prepared to sit down in front of a computer just to skip ‘Octopus’s Garden’.
“How much extra is the remote control?”
What the salesman said next brought to a sudden end my brief flirtation with Sonos. “£280.” My jaw made a rich, room-filling sound as it crashed to the floor. No, that wasn’t a mistake. The remote represented 45% of the total cost of the system.
“So, that’s two motorcycles.Thank you sir. Now I suppose you’ll be wanting some handlebars, yes?”
Filed under Anecdotage, Modern life is rubbish, Stuff
A sunny lunchtime in the park
“Ooo, this is nice. Where shall we sit?”
“There’s loads of space! How about over there, by that man?”
“The one on his own, reading the paper?”
“Yes. Come on.”
“Or we could sit away from the man. Over there, say? There’s more space there.”
“It must be nice where he is though, musn’t it? Otherwise he wouldn’t be sitting there, would he?”
“True. Come on then. ’Ere, what we gonna talk about?”
“I reckon general stuff. This and that, you know.”
“What, like ‘so he turned round and said, and I turned round and said’, and all that?”
“What did he say?”
“Who?”
“The geezer. He turned round and said something.”
“There weren’t no geezer. I’m just saying, we could talk like that when we sit next to the bloke over there.”
“Oh. Right. And I’ve got loads of funny things to look at on my phone. They’re hilarious. ‘Ere, who’s got the dinner?”
“Well I’ve got the coke so you must have the crisps.”
“This is lovely, innit. ‘Ere, that man don’t look too happy, does he?”
“Probably just read summit bad in the paper.”
Filed under Stuff
BraveNewMalden 
