Financial & Travel Musings

I was just watching a rerun of One foot in the grave which was made in the 1990s and it’s amazing how different it is in some aspects from series that would be made these days.

The most striking thing about it was what seemed to be product placement yet wasn’t because it was the BBC. Or at least, one assumes that it wasn’t explicit product placement. Not an episode goes by without one product being named repeatedly throughout the show. It’s more striking because these days even labels from trainers have to be removed (often at considerable expense) before they can be approved for use in a show.

Older TV shows from the 1950s would feature Black and Mild cigars as celebration events for the arrival of a new baby yet these days smoking isn’t allowed at all in hospitals and would be seriously censured in a maternity ward obviously. That’s a particularly noteworthy different in shows made in the 1950s though, oddly, not in those made earlier.

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Guys are notoriously bad at buying gifts for girls, aren’t they?

One of the easiest choices is something that few guys would even think of and that’s spa gifts. These aren’t overly difficult to choose as there are loads of websites selling them and, of course, they’re in the shops too though online is probably the way to go if you want to avoid being embarrassed by a load of questions from the salesgirl.

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One of the most perplexing things about living in France was that there were the seemingly constant mattress sales.

Hardly a month went by without seeing a notice in one of the local villages that there was going to be a sale of mattresses. Now I can understand that people need mattresses now and again, but surely there was no need to be selling the things every month? It wasn’t even as if we were hundreds of miles from a town with furniture shops that sold the things either.

We never did get our heads around understanding that particular one.

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