Being Chased by an Advert.

I was sitting on my balcony in the mountains, generally minding my own business and reading a news article on the internet www.tagesanzeiger.ch. If you are interested, the article was about the German Government’s change of mind on a tax agreement with the Swiss, when suddenly, this advert started to move about. I was trying not to pay the advert any particular attention, but it kept catching the corner of my eye.

It’s distracting enough for me to have to translate a tricky German subjunctive, and trying to work out such basics as “Have they agreed it?” or “Haven’t they agreed it?”  This can be difficult in a foreign language, which only goes to show you (as my Ali said at the age of 5) that there should only be English.

Anyway, I digress as usual. I was trying to concentrate on the article. No worries, I was scrolling down the page, so was soon out of sight of the advert. No. Wrong. It came after me, sliding down the right hand side of the screen, like the honey oozing off a spoon, not too fast, but with an inevitability that was only too depressing.

The fight was on. It was an IKEA advert and was chasing me down the page. It started its sequence with the unveiling of a curtain. I tried to escape, going up and down with the scroll bar, only to see a bouncing ball announcing 20% off all Kommodes (chest of drawers; what did you think it meant?) up until 15 October (Can’t wait for the 15 October).

Is there no escape from the Advert? It was  no good. I had to abandon the quest for the truth about the German – Swiss Tax Agreement; Will they agree? Won’t they agree?

I feel oppressed, my civil liberties infringed, my personal movements being tracked, the secrets of my mind being extracted by unknown forces..

This is all too reminiscent of the sinister TV series, “The Prisoner”, where our hero was trapped by giant balloons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner in case you are unfamiliar with this classic 1960’s cult sci fi TV series.

I’ll have to buy a newspaper tomorrow morning to “Read All About It”. Perhaps that is the strategy. Let’s make the online offering so irritating and unreadable that people will just have to buy the subscription.

Well, I am one step ahead of them here. I have just taken out an annual subscription, so that I can agonise over not knowing whether the Germans and Swiss did or did not reach a tax agreement, at 05.00 am in the morning, and without the distraction of a bouncing Kommode advert, and the sliding curtain.

Mark you, if the Harry Potter films are any predictor of the future (and you never know), we could have moving adverts and pictures on our newspapers. Now that would be something to drive us all completely mad.

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With apologies to REM’s, “Bad Day”, with the opening line “A public service announcement followed me home the other day” and who have just announced their break up after 31 years.