Snacks and the Cataclysm
I do have a life, you know. One of my many amusements lies in spotting symptoms of cultural decay and the decline of what is sometimes laughingly called western civilisation.
Newspapers and television are, of course, out of bounds for that game. Diagnosing cultural decay from those sources is like diagnosing cancer with a raw chunk of smoke-blackened lung under your nose: little challenge, less fun. It's tempting to exclude advertisements from the reckoning as well; but if you try to ignore advertisements in a city you can end up ignoring certain things which are, on the whole, better noticed than not: buses, for example, and walls and so forth.
Still, if you look to advertisements for the tar-choked alveolae of Albion, I can promise that you won't need a microscope. I saw, fairly recently, an advert for Kit Kat, emblazoned on the side of a building as though to provide a textbook illustration of why so many London pedestrians look at nothing but the pavement.
Everybody knows about Kit Kat. Have a break; have one. It's a popular snack, famous for the wafer inside, the chocolate outside, and the fact that it comes in long thin components which can be satisfyingly snapped off and scoffed. None of this - none of what might, when talking to a layman, be called the "edible" part of the product - has changed, but the advert wasn't talking about the "edible" part. It was talking about the wrapper. New Convenient Wrapper, it said, or something to that effect. It's been a while, and I've been trying to lose my memory, so I may not have it word for word.
Kit Kat, you see, used to come in a tinfoil wrapper which had a sort of paper sleeve around it; there were, in effect (I hope you are following this) two wrappers. You had to take the paper off, and then (still with me?) unwrap the tinfoil before you could get at the "edible". This defect, which has kept the sales of Kit Kat so depressed for so many years, has now been modernised, no doubt as a first step towards making the wrapper the only part of the package you can eat.
The new wrapper, you see, comprises only a single layer of shiny, plastic-textured paper, without the tinfoil. It is, so to speak, tinfoil-free. The tinfoil content has been radically disincreased. This means (as the astute among you may already have surmised) that there is only one stage to get through when unwrapping.
The lucky consumer need not even switch unwrapping methods half-way through. You remember how awkward it was, struggling through all that unnecessary paper-tearing only to discover the tinfoil-removal procedure still staring you in the face like a Marine Corps obstacle course. As of now, you need no longer fear. The unwrapping schedule for this particular product has been effectively halved, and possibly even more so.
That's what the advert was advertising, and that's how I knew that western civilisation that month was still, as scheduled, on the steep and downward. In fact, after seeing that advert I spent several hours hoping that it had already collapsed, and watching the pavement for portents.
Newspapers and television are, of course, out of bounds for that game. Diagnosing cultural decay from those sources is like diagnosing cancer with a raw chunk of smoke-blackened lung under your nose: little challenge, less fun. It's tempting to exclude advertisements from the reckoning as well; but if you try to ignore advertisements in a city you can end up ignoring certain things which are, on the whole, better noticed than not: buses, for example, and walls and so forth.
Still, if you look to advertisements for the tar-choked alveolae of Albion, I can promise that you won't need a microscope. I saw, fairly recently, an advert for Kit Kat, emblazoned on the side of a building as though to provide a textbook illustration of why so many London pedestrians look at nothing but the pavement.
Everybody knows about Kit Kat. Have a break; have one. It's a popular snack, famous for the wafer inside, the chocolate outside, and the fact that it comes in long thin components which can be satisfyingly snapped off and scoffed. None of this - none of what might, when talking to a layman, be called the "edible" part of the product - has changed, but the advert wasn't talking about the "edible" part. It was talking about the wrapper. New Convenient Wrapper, it said, or something to that effect. It's been a while, and I've been trying to lose my memory, so I may not have it word for word.
Kit Kat, you see, used to come in a tinfoil wrapper which had a sort of paper sleeve around it; there were, in effect (I hope you are following this) two wrappers. You had to take the paper off, and then (still with me?) unwrap the tinfoil before you could get at the "edible". This defect, which has kept the sales of Kit Kat so depressed for so many years, has now been modernised, no doubt as a first step towards making the wrapper the only part of the package you can eat.
The new wrapper, you see, comprises only a single layer of shiny, plastic-textured paper, without the tinfoil. It is, so to speak, tinfoil-free. The tinfoil content has been radically disincreased. This means (as the astute among you may already have surmised) that there is only one stage to get through when unwrapping.
The lucky consumer need not even switch unwrapping methods half-way through. You remember how awkward it was, struggling through all that unnecessary paper-tearing only to discover the tinfoil-removal procedure still staring you in the face like a Marine Corps obstacle course. As of now, you need no longer fear. The unwrapping schedule for this particular product has been effectively halved, and possibly even more so.
That's what the advert was advertising, and that's how I knew that western civilisation that month was still, as scheduled, on the steep and downward. In fact, after seeing that advert I spent several hours hoping that it had already collapsed, and watching the pavement for portents.
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