On Usefulness to Garden Gnomes.

Now that I’m having nightly coal fires again, I’ve also started watching the odd TV programme (at an average of about two a week. TV programmes are not generally designed to suit aliens living beyond the Pale.) And because the TV has re-entered my world, so has the weekly TV listings guide. Ironically, what I find most interesting about TV listings guides isn’t actually the list of what’s on the TV, it’s those little marketing magazines which come with them – the ones compiled by unscrupulous marketing people and aimed at ageing suburbanites who are desperate to find something on which to spend money, no matter how useless it is.

This week’s favourite hilarious article was plastic garden hedging. (Does plastic belong in a garden, you might ask. Well, yes; plastic belongs everywhere, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than plastic. Like leaves, for example.) Its official title is Faux-ivy Privacy Fence. Each panel costs £29.99, which is a bit expensive for a bit of plastic but the blurb assures us that it ‘helps ensure your privacy.’

Privacy, eh? I like privacy, so I sneaked a look. It comes in panels of regimented little green shapes, like so many poor bloody infantrymen at Waterloo, only the wrong colour. What’s interesting are the dimensions of the panel: 3m long by 1m high. 1m = 3ft 3ins, which is unlikely to provide much privacy unless you happen to be a garden gnome, which I’m not. Not yet.

There’s also a picture of a cat scratching itself on an arch made of wire bristles. They call it ‘the Purrfect Arch.’ Such wit. At £14.99 (or 14.99 GBP as modern parlance would have it) it’s a snip, since it ensures you won’t expire prematurely from a surfeit of cat hairs. Given the restricted dimensions of the average garden gnome, that must be a very real concern.