My Day In The City, It's Not Very Pretty

Now don't get me wrong I love adverts, British advertising at it's best can be funny and thought provoking while still trying to persuade you that the answer to your woes is to spark up a cheap cigar and that the opposite sex will genuinely find you more attractive if you smell like a professional footballer or his anorexic wife. Unfortunately the local buses in Cambridge are adorned with some of the most nauseating, shallow, tacky and intelligence insulting adverts I have seen in a long time. It would not be so bad if they were monuments to local heroes like the inventors of DNA or Disco Kenny, but it seems that making it entertain us, say something about us or to us is obviously below the advertising geniuses behind this campaign.

With a blandly smooth picture that's at least six foot in height (if local rumours are to be believed these were bought on the cheap on a computer disc of clip art!) these nuggets of arsepirational 'lifestyle' ordure encrust our council sponsored local transport in a desperate attempt to pimp the notion that it's not just losers who get the bus. These larger than life, emetically hip and upbeat profiles of the smug bourgeoisie leer down down at the gridlocked traffic as they vainly try to impress you with their narcissistic boasts of going to improbable places while doing unlikely things, like some nightmare blind date with some kind of satanic accountant who tries to steal your very soul whilst simultaneously attempting to get into your pants and explain the intricacies of triple entry bookkeeping. They seem to miss the point that I, like a substantial proportion of other local people aching to jump the green band wagon, only embrace the 'citilife' when there's not a lot of other choice. It's not aspirational it's the transport of last resort, but it shouldn't be this way! When I was a student 'ooop north' the local council sunk vast wheelbarrows of folding wedge into the local public transport infrastructure and it was a funky bus lane a go-go wonderland of affordable magic carpets that would whisk you from one side of the city with no mess, no fuss, just a council funded bus. Cambridge by contrast appears to have one of the most enthusiastically half arsed public transport policies I have ever encountered, bus lanes start, then mysteriously end just as they get to a congested piece of road, they get narrower, wider, mingle with cycle lanes and have their surfaces decorated in increasingly lurid shades or orange, you can only assume they form some part of some ritualistic message to the old gods that only makes sense from outer space.

It would be laughable if you had not actually had to stand repeatedly on the outskirts of the city for an hour and a half as the the horizontal rain whips in off the fens and in to any exposed opening in your clothing and body, waiting for the bus that might just arrive in time to get you back to work for tomorrow.

There can be nothing more dispiriting than watching eight consecutive, brightly liveried, mobile billboards trundle past on their way to neverland, or at least never to return land.

As the greatest poet of our generation said "It says nothing to me about my life" and it's about time it did, so why not tell people exactly what it has really been like by wrapping your self in one of these beauties, your shirt, your words, your real day in the city!