An Ad Break

Now, I’m not normally one to succumb to the influences of television advertising. There are a number of reasons for this. First, there have been a number of years where I’ve not had a television, and then secondly, when I have, there’s Sky plus, everything is normally watched on a delay, so the adverts can be fast forwarded through.

However football is normally watched live, and Sky do like to cram as many adverts as inhumanly possible into the half time break. Plus, with there being an episode of NCIS on one channel or another at any time of the night or day, it quite often goes on as background noise, along with all the adverts in that.

Now the advert that managed to seep through into my consciousness was one for McDonalds. It’s the one that is celebrating fifty years of the Big Mac. So we get treated to a variety of seventies, eighties, nineties and noughties flashbacks of random Muppets trying out Big Macs. There’s nothing from the late sixties, as although the Big Mac has been around since then, Maccy D’s has only been in the UK since the early seventies.

There isn’t any reason why the advert should work, as it suggests that their clientele over the years had been somewhat less than bright. So what is it that did work?

Well it’s the mention of a Grand Big Mac. Obviously the paragons of healthy eating have slipped a bit with this one, a Big Mac, but twice the size. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that?

To be honest, I’m not a massive Maccy D’s fan. I quite like their breakfast double sausage Mcmuffin, and Mcflurry’s – what can go wrong with a tub of ice cream for ninety nine pence – but their normal burgers just seem insubstantial. A Big Mac has always felt that way as well. An extra piece of bread doesn’t make up for two pieces of meat that you can see through.

Despite of all that, the advertising was telling me I had to try a Grand Big Mac.

As soon as I opened the box I started to regret the decision that had been so massively influenced by the television advertising.

Yes it was bigger, but the burgers were still see through, and if anything looked as if the Big Mac burgers had been further stretched out to fit the bigger buns. Then there was the fact that the whole thing looked like it had been thrown together by a chimpanzee with Parkinson’s disease.

There was more cheese outside of the bun than inside, and shredded lettuce filled every little corner of the box. It tasted just like Big Macs always do – just meh! Only there was more of it. I didn’t feel like it filled me up any more than a normal one ever did. It just cost more.

Next time I get an urge to get something based on an advert, I’m setting a reminder to give myself a slap first.

Don’t do it.

St Anne’s Church

Now, many is the time that I’ve been to a church or a cathedral and exited via the gift shop. Yet, not one of them has had a sign as blatant as the one it the photo above. My better half had noticed this as we were checking out the various floats parked on Shaftesbury Avenue during Chinese New Year in central London. It was above one of the numerous Londoniana shops that can be found all over the capital.

This particular one was on the north side on Shaftesbury Avenue between Wardour Street and Dean Street on the way out of Chinatown, through theatre land and into Soho. We’d been on both streets during the day and hadn’t noticed any sign of a church, so being curious I decided to look up what I could find about the church.

The original church was built between 1677 and 1686 and is said to be the work of Sir Christopher Wren, although it may have been William Talman. It was built on land that was then fields, and was consecrated on 21 March 1686 by Bishop Henry Compton (after who the nearby Compton Street is named) as the parish church of the new civil and ecclesiastical parish of St Anne, created from part of the parish of St Martin in the Fields. It was dedicated to Saint Anne because Compton had been tutor to Princess Anne before she became Queen.

It was designed as an 80 feet long and 64 feet wide basilican church, with a 70 feet high west end tower. The tower was only completed in 1718, but by 1800 had become unstable. The original tower was demolished and the new brickwork tower was completed in 1803, and kept the one ton clock bell from the original tower.

The church had a famous choir and musical, and it was from St Anne’s that the first ever religious service with music to be broadcast on the radio came in the 1920’s.

When Shaftesbury Avenue was built between 1877 and 1886, it replaced the existing King Street that used to sit as the south west boundary to the consecrated grounds. Now however, the church became hidden away from the main thoroughfare, and a gallery was put in between numbers 65 and 67 Shaftesbury Avenue to lead to the south entrance to the church.

The old church was left burned out by a bombing in the blitz on the night of the 24th September 1940; with all that remained untouched was the tower. Religious services were moved to St Thomas’s on Regent Street (now demolished), and into rooms in St Anne’s House next to the church at number 57 Dean Street.

Apart from the tower, the remains of the rest of the church were demolished in 1953 and the gallery that the flagstone now lies above was converted to be a shop. The tower was used as a chapel during the 1950’s, and partly restored in 1979, before being fully restored and becoming a grade II listed building in 1991. A new complex was built in the space of the old church and was rededicated on St Anne’s day, the 26th July in the same year.

The Church is currently thriving as a church community and as venue for many local community and charitable events and meetings; it also houses the Soho Society, the archives of MoSoho (the Museum of Soho) and anti-homophobic bullying charity Diversity Role Models. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the rebuilding of the church a redesigned entrance on Dean Street was unrevealed on 8 December 2016. The new entrance was designed by Lina Viluma and Sherief al Rifa’i, who were chosen as part of a competition to redesign the entrance of St Anne’s to make it more visible, accessible and welcoming. The new design uses concealed lighting, neon and wooden panelling to create an inviting space that is also eye catching. Push plates on the front doors carry the imprints of the hands of local community members, and the corridor is lined with illuminated display cases.

Parts of its churchyard around the tower and west end are now the public park of St Anne’s Gardens, accessed from the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street, whilst the church itself is accessed via a gate at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Dean Street, as it does not front onto the street.

The Churchyard, St Anne’s Gardens, was closed to burials in 1854. This closure was largely as a result of one Sexton illegally dumping the bodies in the ground having sold their coffins for firewood, and because the churchyards of London were full. It is believed that in addition to the essayist William Hazlitt about 80,000 bodies are buried there. This explains why the ground is so high above the entrance on Wardour St. Something people who lie there eating their sandwiches on sunny summer lunchtime are probably quite unaware of!

Chinese New Year

How many eyes does a lion have? A strange question I know, but seriously even with there being two lions, it really shouldn’t have taken nearly an hour to dot the eyes of the lion.

We had arrived near Trafalgar Square at just before midday. We couldn’t say we were in Trafalgar Square as they weren’t letting anyone else in at that point. No matter how many people were coming out, the marshals couldn’t deal with the simple one out, one in principle that nightclub doormen had been using for decades; and so thousands of people were stacked up on Charing Cross Road straining to see what was going on via the big screens either side of the stage. Straining to hear them as well, as the PA system was less use than a chocolate fireguard.

Chinese New Year was being given the full treatment in London, with lots of cordoned off, pedestrianized streets for the day. Lots of stalls, barriers, various stages and events over a reasonable sized area of Central London. Yet they couldn’t get the sound system right.

There were a lot of the usual London suspects there, you know the ones, those that would turn up for the opening of an envelope if they thought someone would give them a microphone for a few seconds.

The dotting of the eyes was supposed to take place at 12. By the time all the talking heads had finally deflated the dotting actually started at twelve minutes to one. All the time it was going on I had the thought going through my head about the fact I’d obviously missed the crossing of the teas ceremony. I found out that came later as there was a mix of Earl Grey and English Breakfast on the table as we stopped for cakes before heading home.

Wandering over to Chinatown through Leicester Square was like trying to wade through treacle. Most of the small side streets were barricaded off by little Hitlers in Day-Glo blousons shouting no entry at anyone who had the temerity to try and walk along an un-crowded street. They were forcing everyone into the same tightly packed thoroughfares.

With lots of people, there was lots of pushing and shoving, loads of people coming the other way too. It wasn’t a case of the little Hitlers stopping people from entering to make foot traffic one way; it appeared they only wanted to keep the un-crowded side streets for themselves.

Bastards!

Various stalls and performers were dotted around all over the place, and wherever they had set up, the squeeze to get past was worse than ever. Too many people pushing you, trying to get through to a non-existent space in front. Too much impatience. If I had received a pound for each time some halfwit had trodden on me, or some prat with a pushchair had rammed my ankles, then I could be sat here writing this as a retired man.

We were looking for somewhere to get food, and wanted to try for Chinese, considering the occasion, but we would still have been queuing now for it. There were queues around the block for the takeaway buffets, and the restaurants were all bulging at the seams. We found a little American bar style diner in Soho and got various snacks to share. The food was lush, as were the cocktails, but the cocktails cost a damn sight more.

Once refreshed we fought through the crowds again and made it back to Trafalgar Square where we were actually allowed back in. Typically there were street food stalls within the barricades, and without long queues, but we walked past and found some space in a line with the stage.

The presenters had the kind of chemistry that made you hope they weren’t providing the powder for the firework display later on. The acts weren’t a great deal better. The Chinese dancing was interesting, but I couldn’t understand why they were using a backing track of what appeared to be a medley of cowboy theme tunes. I was expecting the Deadwood Stage to come crashing onto the actual stage at any second.

As for the magician, well he certainly wasn’t a dynamo, in any sense of the word. The only way he’d have got a cheer if was if he’d made himself or the presenters disappear. Instead he just made us disappear, out of Trafalgar Square and for cake before getting the train home.

The first part of the journey was fine, a couple of stops to London Bridge from Charing Cross, but then on the Southern train, we had an on board supervisor who appeared to be playing a game of one station, one shot. There were a lot of stations.

The longer the journey went on, the less sense his announcements made. After the first stop at Norwood Junction, he started on a long winded, rambling announcement that went on so long the train had pulled into East Croydon before he had finished and he had to open the doors.

At Purley it was just gobbledygook. At Mersham he cut himself off about a dozen words in. At Redhill it was a slurring, rambling mess, and at Earlswood, the bing bong was followed by thirty seconds of fumbling and heavy breathing noises. Out of Salford he stopped halfway through what appeared to be the word Horley, or we assumed he said Horley, though to be fair he could have said anything and we’d just assumed he meant Horley because we knew where we were going.

Which was more than could be said for him, having come from London, when we got to Gatwick, amongst the various messages for taking care of your luggage when “in the platform, or on anywhere else”, he was advising people to change there for stations to London Bridge and Blackfriars. At Three Bridges he advised us to change for Brighton, Bedford, or any other stations in Sussex.

He was also now advising us to listen to the on board announcements which may occur from time to time. From time to time? Are you joking? They were nonstop. He’d only just finished saying that when he bing bonged again and told us we were approaching Three Bridges.

Mind The Gap he wittered at one station, which left us laughing, thinking the biggest gap was between the poor bloke’s ears. In fact we were laughing so much that some bloke wearing headphones had tutted, looked at us in disgust and got up to find another seat further down the carriage to get away from the laughter.

His last announcement before we got off at Crawley was to say to listen to on board announcements as the electronic customer screen was faulty, and so were the automatic train announcements. To be fair, we hadn’t heard any automatic train announcements; they couldn’t get a word in edgeways. The main fault appeared to be with the very human announcements as the stops went past and the shots kicked in.

Hic.