Going Anywhere Nice This Year?

Let’s face it; as advertisers we’re cynical, calculating bastards.

Mind you, as consumers we deserve nothing else: we’re all pathetic saps, falling for the same scam year in, year out.

The lukewarm sprouts are still being pushed forlornly around our Christmas Dinner plate when the first holiday commercials start spewing into our eyes.

Look at that family on TV: Mum, Dad, Son, Daughter – all ridiculously beautiful and hopelessly drunk on happiness as they skip along empty, sun-kissed beaches. See them ride exciting water slides free from unexciting queues. Watch them dine in quiet restaurants where that bloke who thinks that shouting at the none-English speaking waiters will somehow help them understand him must have just nipped out to the toilet.

Now look away from the TV and back at your real family.

Christ the kids have only just broken up from school and you’ve already started asking when they go back.

You’re not so much human as mutated Iceland Four-Bird Roasts: a onesie, wrapped around pigs in blankets, wrapped around a tin of Quality Street, wrapped around an empty husk of resentment and bitterness. And more Quality Street.

But with no deposit and some numbers said in such a way that they almost don’t sound like money, your family could be that family on your screens. Look at them; now they’re riding bicycles on Endor for crying out loud.

You know it’s all a lie – we all do: an unrealistic, idyllic representation of how your actual holiday will pan out, but that doesn’t matter.

Right now, as you cram yet another tube of Paprika & Balsamic Vinegar Discs into your already bulging face-hole, the thought of being TV Dad, with his absence of belly, crap jokes and greying hair, is utterly irresistible.

You know you’re not really buying the holiday; you’re buying the idea of your holiday. An abstract cloud of happiness that can flit around your brain and bubble up to lift your mood whenever you’re stopped in sidings near Shenfield, or having to break off into “informal groups” during a brainstorm on Gill’s Fragrant Lady Wipes^®, or being asked to make the logo another 10% bigger.

In your advertising-imagined daydream there are always plenty of free loungers around the empty turquoise swimming pool, anyone over a sized 10 (apart from you of course) is detained or shot at Customs, and clouds simply don’t exist. In fact, should one ever appear, the entire Photoshopped, moderately-populated beach would run (beautifully) for their lives (in slow motion), fleeing from what they mistakenly believe to be John Pertwee’s hair come back to wreak havoc on their souls.

Who cares if the reality can never live up to what advertising suggests? We all know the game that's being played and we’re more than happy to carry on going along with it.

So let’s sit back, lap up the dead-crab-free sea gently caressing the un-trampled white sand in our mind’s eye, and leave the horizontal rain, lobster shoulders and food poisoning to our Twitter feeds.

Roll on summer.