Post 451. NO TIME FOR ADVERTS.

EVEN AS AN OVALTINEY

I IGNORED THE HYPE
Still do. My mother enlisted me into the Ovaltineys in the mid nineteen thirties just after they started on Radio Luxembourg. I cannot recall welcoming the experience. Even as a small boy I did not hanker to be part of a team or have more than one or two friends at a time. 'We are the Ovaltineys little girls and boys'  sounded like gang intimidation to me: I think my membership lasted little longer than it took them to sing their welcoming words. I didn't join the Boy Scouts, either. God alone knows why, aged 14, I went into the Royal (Corps of) Signals. It certainly wasn't by dint of any advert other than the glowing testimony of an older cousin who had joined Boys' Training Company two years before and loved it. In the end it did me no great harm to escape my mother's apron strings and get the soft edges roughened up a bit. But I never accepted shouting at people and OTT bullshit as an imperative to discipline, so I spent twelve years repressing the desire to openly opine: 'the bigger the mouth the smaller the brain,' and got out of uniform.
There followed all those years at the NHS: no shortage of pointless big mouths there, either.
So I still ignore hype from whatever source. Have no time for adverts (watch commercial television only after I have recorded it so I can run the adverts on), think PR is BS, and would cheerfully join the lynch party that disposed of whoever orders the annual buggering about with our clocks. Yeah, back again last thing Saturday night. No time for it!

THE ALAN RICKMAN DIARIES.
Have reached 2005 and the Harry Potter films are well underway. Alan Rickman writes glowingly of  HP3 - The Prisoner of Azkaban - directed by Alfonso Cuarón, and bluntly about the pressure put on the directors of all the Potter films by the corporate calculating machine that is Warner Brothers Pictures. I was pleased AR thought well of The Prisoner though. It was my favourite.

NO MORE THIS MONTH.
What?

I'm an hour adrift!