The Seven Ages Of Advertising

Men

1. Be one of those special moments that can only be caught on an HD ready camera, after which one is fed sieved HydrochienMange, all one needs to grow up to be Minister for Ships. Finally take a massive shit, and demand implausibly soft toilet paper and/or demand an air freshner that smells of 'summer breezes'.

2. Become the most precocious little shite in school by discovering that modern philosopher's stone the Shredded Wheat/Cornflake/Shreddie, after dissecting JS Mill's 'On Liberty' due to eating a 'whole grain' decide to roll around in mud in a plain white T-shirt. Finally run around like a border line nut case after a car with flashing lights that flips over, before outwitting your parents in an especially 'amusing' way.

3. Wake up with spots, imagining them to be a particularly virulent strain of small pox which can only be cured by gaining a centre parting and vigorous rubbing with pseudo-medically named gloop. Whinge at your mum about your football socks being dirty, then have your first orgasm over the fact that by the miracles of a particular soap they are clean. Towards the end of this troubled time you may find an urge to start a band with a group of strangers in tribute to a mobile phone tarriff. Chew gum rolling down a hill throughout.

4. Develop a hairstyle that magically morphs into the one that makes you look like the biggest cock at any one particular time, pick up failed underwear models using only your thousand yard stare and a can of Lynx. Play sunday league football with repressed homosexuals before hitting the pub and only drinking beverages of a primary colour, if not a big drinker drink diet drinks while eating doritos and dominos pizza.

5. Get a car, a silver car, a sleek car oooh what a car, drive across unspoilt uninhabited roads while talking away from a camera like Richard Hammond with a stroke. Drink unpalettable Spanish Lager (it's still primary coloured!) if good looking and succesful. Get a nag of a girlfriend who won't let you pursue an inane activity such as hug your tyres or sleep with a prostitute made of tyres. If you are a failure as a human being marry an older woman and buy BT internet. If you can't even manage that, become a teacher.

6. Serve as the comic foil for your oh so multi-tasking wife while not so much as shifting your arse off the sofa to think about mortgages, before she runs off with a younger drinker of Spanish Lager, impress her and treat her to a ready made box of tacos. Finally develop a cockney accent, bet on football, talk about vans and spray a fence a revolting shade of brown.

7. Now it's too late to make ay serious money, insure your life! That or cash in on the mortgage you never paid off. Develop an irrational hatred of lawns that aren't radioactive green in colour. Feed slightly cheap toffee to unsuspecting grandchildren before going on a cruise, marrying Judith Chalmers and dying.

Women to follow...

Cameron's attack on Brown shows the nonsensical skill of the PR man.

First of all allow me to get it out of the way that I have no truck with anyone using any sort of legal argument to get away with the parliamentary abuses that have gone on, be that parliamentary privelege or any other legal argument that the accused MPs may employ. I am not a lawyer and further than that, if they are acquitted of wrong doing there has still been an unbelievable abuse of their role. However the words of Cameron's statement once again expose his shallow politicism. He is perfectly prepared to accuse Brown of lack of leadership of his party, perhaps a legitimate criticism, while exercising none over his own party. Are we prepared to accept that a Tory can accuse gay people of being not worthy of his marriage allowance? Are we prepared to accept his own (and shadow cabinet's) far greater abuses of the allowance system than lack of discipline? Mrs Julie Kirkbride should become a major political issue given his supposed attack on parliamentary expenses in my opinion. The accusations that the Tory leader has thrown over the past day are not just idiotic (considering he has committed the same fallacies) they are counterproductive and deliberately against the interests of politics. One can only think that he is listening to Mr Hannan a little bit too much, and those of us whose economics lecture he addressed know where he leads, in fact his blog says it today.

In summary, there is no point saying 'Dave, be fair, it's all our fault' so politics will descend in to the mire.

At bloody last. Almost by accident Labour has hit upon the strategy that can actually hurt the Tories. Their inconsistencies and intellectual dishonesties have been building up for a while, and over the past month they have finally put their rope upon the gallows. However it would be completely wrong for Labour to crow over the fact that despite the best intentions of Geoff 'Buff' Hoon it's been a good month for Labour. In order to avoid the same mistake Labour must look at why Cameron's strategy has been wrong, not just over the past month but for 5 years. It starts with the phrase 'one can prove anything with statistics'. No doubt there are a lot of things about Britain that are not 'Great' but one can overstate the point, it is not 'broken' as the Tories like to say, nor are we 'broke'. On the other hand 'Voting Blue' was never going to turn Britain green, and as for 'letting sunshine win the day' fucking hell, for a party whose natural pessimism about human nature is a selling point, that is just idiotic. An opposition can say anything it wants, a government cannot. It can be darn obfuscating, it can tell you meaningless things and dress them up as profound achievements, it can even produce cringe worthy soundbites, but it quite rightly gets pilloried when it oversteps the mark (Iraq, fundraising, etc). Here is Cameron's strategy's major flaw, he consistently overstates his case, people may be fearful about crime and feel someone should do something about it, but they know it hasn't gone up 236% in 7 years, with the proliferation of CCTV it has understandably gone down. In layman's terms if you want to impress a girl and keep your dignity you may overstate your knowledge of music, you don't claim to be best mates with Oasis. Both cases smack of only one thing, ulterior motives. So instead of a credible and fair way of reducing the deficit we get 'the nation's maxed out its credit card' or instead of let's reduce crime and disillusionment with society we get 'broken Britain'. In the individual case Liam's best mate just wants the girl's nickers on the floor, in the Tories case it is power and the ability to do things the public might not want but hedge fund managers think are great. People quite rightly ask 'If you do genuinely care, then why use lies and misrepresentations?' Labour has become mistrusted because it did the same, it overstepped the mark between portraying the best of itself and dishonesty, we know the Tories are worse than they are, simply because against a weak government they can't put their case without resorting to idiotic sophistry. Labour should not crow or claim this shows why Tories are evil scum, that would be the same mistake, let the Tories show put a flush on the table or get caught bluffing. With the amount of PR men and tabloid types in their ranks, my bet's on the latter.