Open happiness

Old charm, nostalgia…, it’s cola Christmas, tis the season to celebrate and to go shopping for presents, although unfortunately, as the 'little girl who has become a woman' in the ad does, you might have to carry them all around awkwardly in your hand (carrier bags don’t look so cool). But it’s okay, in spite of that and of the overwhelming crowds in Oxford Street, you are still in the mood to smile and make your rosy cheeks glow at the chance encounter with cola Santa; and lucky you, you still have a free hand to grab his nicely shaped cola bottle (Freudian connotations at work).

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Coca-cola: Open happiness
Lascotts Road, N22
London

Flaunt those jeans

Can you still find a curvy, busty yet slim young sexy woman dressed in red as the main content of a piece of advertising today? Yes, you can and you don’t need to be looking at an engine oil poster in your petrol station: it’s Special K cereals putting forward that image as an object of desire; in particular, women’s desire to become such an object of desire: the desire to be desired.

Ultimately, whether there is nothing or a lot wrong with it, most of us have been taught to seek and to enjoy being desired: it could be, among many instances, for our curvy, busty and yet slim figure; for our clever and sharp commentaries; for our buying power; for our authority and ability to dominate others; even, in a twisted way, for our absence of worldly desires and thus our moral superiority over the rest of mundane poor souls.

In this case, Kellogg’s (note the subtle absence of Special K's parent brand from the ad) has gone for quite a simple, classic denomination of desire; enough for them, they hope, to increase the sales of their cereal flakes.

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MySpecialK.co.uk: Flaunt those jeans
High Road, N22
Wood Green, London

Come on show me your cocoa beam

I confess that for some time I enjoyed looking at this ad. Maybe it was what seemed to me an unselfconscious style, a refreshingly naive and warm-hearted quality, a feel-good element.

But then I started to wonder, and so I paused my enjoyment, that maybe I was being a little bit of a victim of my own exotic gaze, that there was something a bit patronising about the ad, or at least a reasonable suspicion of being patronising.

Although not strikingly obvious, the ad is actually an ad within an ad, seemingly a picture of a roadside advertisement painted on a wall somewhere - one imagines - in Ghana, since it is there where Cadbury claims their cocoa beans are from.
So an "unselfconscious", "naive" and "warm-hearted" Ghanaian piece of advertising - an 'authentic', an 'original' - has been basically pasted on to the billboard spaces of the grey, cynical and decadent Britain, where a bit of Fairtrade chocolate will surely bring some comfort for the soul (and for the sugar-addicted metabolisms), and the joy of life of the wise African peoples will definitely do us good.

Well, am I being too ill-thinking to see a bit of the condescending myth of the noble savage there?

How not to get in a bad mood when being awaken from a sweet dream? And sweet is the Orientalist dream, I'm afraid, even more if it's Fairtrade.

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Cadbury Fairtrade: Come on show me your cocoa beam
Finsbury Park Underground Station
London

Your kettle is full of fur and...

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Yorkshire Tea: Your kettle is full of fur and...
Russell Square Station (LU)
London

Christmas Lunch

Bottom low level Christmas lunch menu in London -they are clearly not targeting gourmets, but mainly low income customers and dedicated social anthropologists as well.
It makes me remember that I have not lived a single day of hunger in my life.

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Café Morrisons: Christmas Lunch
Entrance to Morrisons Café
By Morrisons supermarket, Wood Green
London