Friday, 14 April 2017

Retro Vacuuming at Easter


Following hard on the heels of Cadburygate, Tesco is coming under fire from Christian groups for advertising Good Friday beer and cider offers using a humorous pun. I thought Good Friday was when men up and down the country got out the BBQ from the shed and worshiped the Norse fire god, Glöð, and had a glug on the side while performing the rituals.

Methinks all this bleating isn't doing Christian groups any favours and is actually counterproductive by making them look shrill, vaguely ridiculous and out of touch, especially when the country is predominantly secular. It just panders to other minority religions complaining of insensitivity when Tesco has pork offers during Ramadan or beef offers duding Diwali. It's about time the more vocal Christians with a deep persecution complex recognised that secularists have other things than magic on their minds when on holiday and stop trying to turn back the clock to the 19th century. It's more to do with a sense of loss of power than anything else.

What I find strange is that these Christian groups don't even bat an eyelid at the vast quantities of chocolate eggs and bunnies being sold in shops when there's no connections whatsoever between chocolate, eggs or bunnies and Christianity. Perhaps they should vent their ire on the hundreds of churches up and down the country that will be promoting paganism by holding church Easter egg hunts...

Hay let a personable Scouser into our house on Wednesday and ended up buying one of those retro Kirby vacuum cleaners from him. You know the one - looks like it's made from recycled Spitfire or Lancaster bomber airframes and actually has a flex.


Why the salesman targeted our house is a mystery - it's obvious target market is the middle class, Calvinistic Brexiteer, what with its 1950s look and the amount of work you have to do to use it. He gave her the usual and well-worn technique of putting a black cloth over the outlet to show her how much dust it collects (you can do the same trick with any vacuum cleaner, as most people know). She was nonetheless impressed and was horrified at the glass of Guinness it managed to suck up from the kitchen floor.

Hay loves it and is happy as a sand boy (whatever a sand boy is); it comes with hundreds of gadgets, and yes, you have to lug around something that weighs a ton and is designed to go only in straight lines; however, it accomplishes all the tasks she sets for it, from deep cleaning the furniture and wet cleaning the limestone floor to getting crap from all the crevices the G-Tech isn't capable of reaching. Believe it or not, it even has a turbo-sanding attachment, although there's no defibrillator. While you can use it as an upright or a cylinder, Hay has chosen to use it primarily as a cylinder with all the attachments.

Hay much prefers a vacuum cleaner that, while lumbering, heavy and sounding like a traction engine on steroids, enables her to do a good, deep clean, rather than one designed to make it easy but leaves the house no cleaner than before she started and is severely limited in functionality, which the G-Tech accomplishes with ease. If you want a cheap G-Tech, it's now on eBay. 

I think the Kirby should be in a glass display case as a work of retro-art. Hay is going to leave it out on display in the living room as she thinks it too beautiful to hide away in a cupboard. 

It did, however, necessitate a bit of rearrangement of the cupboard space to make room for the caddy of attachments. My flip-flop collection (or, as we call them, flim-flams) had to be repositioned. It's nearly that time of the year when I move permanently into flim-flams - we call it Flim-Flamtide and mark it with a special ceremony that involves eating chocolate eggs. 

What with this penchant we have for retro stuff, I'm going to have to buy myself a pair of flairs and some shirts with penny collars. Won't tell you what she paid for it (I was not part of the negotiations and would ahve insisted on half price), but I could have bought myself a small tractor with the money. To be fair, if you wanted the specialist appliances that do all the jobs this thing does, then you'd probably be spending around the same amount. Most reviews you see of it pronounce it expensive, but well worth the price as it lasts forever.

Reminds me of the old joke - I'm going to buy my wife  a bag and a belt.... I never want that Hoover to fail again...


1 comment:

A Heron's View said...

I have often thought that christians are first class pagans what with their body eating and blood drinking.