I’ve been to my GP’s surgery this morning to pick up a prescription. Admittedly it’s not news that will make the national or local TV news. Although it might make the local paper behind tales of stolen pushbikes and Mrs Tatton’s cat being neutered. .
To clarify, I’ve not been prescribed drugs for a serious complaint. I’ve merely been recommended a cosmetic medication which assists numerous men of my vintage.
No, not Viagra you cheeky get, it’s a tablet to stop me asphyxiating while sucking in my middle age spread for long periods.
Although I was delighted to pick up this script to assist my misguided vanity, I was a tad put out to see that the surgery hadn’t embraced my recent ‘suggestion box’ idea.
In these times of squeezed National Health Service (NHS) budgets, I’d suggested supplementing practise income streams by printing local kebab shop menus on the reverse of the prescription slips.
As they haven’t acted upon it, I can only assume the surgery manager wasn’t enamoured with my money spinning idea. I’m now racked with self doubt, meaning I’m reticent to share my innovative procedure for patient queue reduction.
As a result, my strategy of getting a practise employee to advise every second person in the queue to “Go bollocks!” will probably die with me.
The nature of my erratic and random mind is that, like an errant child, it often wanders off against my wishes. Like a toddler mischievously dashing around supermarket aisles, it wanders through my neurological corridors seeking a gag or creative idea from numerous outside sources.
Unlike the high maintenance toddler in the store, my mind doesn’t defiantly pick up a variety of produce from shelves, contrary to its parents instructions. Instead, it attempts to undertake lexicological manipulation with a view to produce a light hearted quip or tale.
An example of this occurred earlier in the week when I was in a queue at Costa coffee. After unsuccessfully attempting to reduced the number of people in front of me by telling them to “Go bollocks!”, I spotted an anti-scald health and safety poster advocating to Costa customers to ‘Put a lid on it’.
Within seconds, my cranial database had processed and output an epiphany of how it believed the advertising agency had missed a trick with their caption. It proffered that a take on Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ lyrics with an alternative strap line of ‘If you like it, then put a lid on it’ would be a more memorable message.
I know that an advertising agency would say it doesn’t quite scan, but I’m sure their highly paid copywriters could polish that into a more memorable health and safety warning…… Or maybe not!
In the past, more out of mischievousness than a hope I’ll be taken on as Don Draper’s (TV’s Mad Men) sidekick, I’ve tweeted corporate companies with strap line ideas. The companies that received these creative soupçons included Unilever, Apple and a cider producer (whose name I momentarily can’t recall).
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t receive a response. I say that as they were so unmemorable I can’t even recollect them myself.
Actually, I’ve just remembered the Apple marketing idea. I tweeted a close-up picture of the Apple logo on the back of my phone next to one of my eyes. I thought that if you add the words ‘Apple of my Eye’ to the picture it was a reasonably clever advert……. Unluckily for my bank account, though, Apple didn’t!
For some reason the tag line ‘An apple cider a day keeps the doctor away’ has entered my head as my idea I tweeted to the cider producer. It definitely wasn’t, though, as I’m aware messages in commercials cannot be misleading…. Nope, as much as I try, I can’t recall the real idea.
One thing this narrative has taught me about my creativity, which I hadn’t realised previously, is that I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time tweeting about apples of one sort or another.
Right, I best get off now as Karen says the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is on the phone. Apparently, he’s got wind of my “Go bollocks!” queue reduction idea and wants to discuss implementing my epiphany NHS wide.
