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By Root 1427 0

in America, I would without hesitation tell him to get hold of a stack of New York Times advertising supplements. They show a life of richness and variety beyond the wildest dreams of most foreigners. As if to illustrate my point, the issue before me contained a gift catalogue from the Zwingle Company of New York offering scores of products of the things-you-never-knew-you-needed variety – musical shoe-trees, an umbrella with a transistor radio in the handle, an electric nail buffer. What a great country! My favourite was a small electric hotplate you could put on your desk to keep your coffee from going cold. This must be a real boon to people with brain damage, the sort of injuries that lead them to wander off and neglect their beverages. And epileptics all over America must be feeling equally grateful. (‘Dear Zwingle Company: I can’t tell you how many times I have come around from a grand mal seizure to find myself lying on the floor thinking, “Oh God, I bet my coffee’s gone cold again.”’) Really, who buys these things – silver toothpicks and monogrammed underpants and mirrors that say Man of the Year on them? I have often thought that if I ran one of these companies I would produce a polished mahogany plaque with a brass plate on it saying ‘Hey, how about me? I paid $22.95 for this completely useless piece of crap.’ I’m certain they would sell like hot cakes.

Once in a deranged moment I bought something myself from one of these catalogues, knowing deep in my mind that it would end in heartbreak. It was a little reading light that you clipped on to your book so as not to disturb your bedmate as she slumbered beside you. In this respect it was outstanding because it barely worked. The light it cast was absurdly feeble (in the catalogue it looked like the sort of thing you could signal ships with if you got lost at sea) and left all but the first two lines of a page in darkness. I have seen more luminous insects. After about four minutes its little beam fluttered and failed altogether, and it has never been used again. And the thing is that I knew all along that this was how it was going to end, that it would all be a bitter disappointment. On second thought, if I ever ran one of those companies I would just send people an empty box with a note in it saying ‘We have decided not to send you the item you’ve ordered because, as you well know, it would never properly work and you would only be disappointed. So let this be a lesson to you for the future.’

From the Zwingle catalogue I moved on to the food and household products advertisements. There is usually a wodge of these bright and glossy inducements to try out exciting new products – things with names like Hunk o’ Meat Beef Stew ’n’ Gravy (‘with rich ’n’ meaty chunks of beef-textured fibre’) and Sniffa-Snax (‘An Exciting New Snack Treat You Take Through the Nose!’) and Country Sunshine Honey-Toasted Wheat Nut ’n’ Sugar Bits Breakfast Cereal (‘Now with Vitamin-Enriched Chocolate-Covered Raisin Substitute!’). I am endlessly fascinated by these new products. Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher. All over America you can see countless flabby-butted couples quietly searching supermarket shelves for new combinations of flavours, hoping to find some untried product that will tingle in their mouths and excite, however briefly, their leaden tastebuds.

The competition for this market is intense. The food inserts not only offered 50 discounts and the like, but also if you sent off two or three labels the manufacturers would dispatch to you a Hunk o’ Meat Beach Towel, or Country Sunshine Matching Apron and Oven Mitt, or a Sniffa-Snax hotplate for keeping your coffee warm while you slipped in and out of consciousness from a surfeit of blood sugar. Interestingly, the advertisements