the strangest thing...

This morning I was happily going about my pre-breakfast business in the kitchen. We're a smoothly oiled machine these days - if Tom Brady, Randy Moss and Wes Welker prepped two kids for school every morning they'd do it like this - so I was letting them watch a bit of tv before sitting them down to their breakfast, when the cry went up from the sitting room.

'Dad!'

I ignored it, making the reasonable assumption that they were probably having their daily 'cartoons or sport' argument.

'Dad, come and see this!' came the next cry.

So, I thought, they're not arguing about sport, they're watching an advert for some toy or game they're expecting us to fork out cash for next month. And I ignored them further. The advert was guaranteed to be over by the time I got in.

'Dad! Quick!'

Well, finally my curiosity got the better of me. They weren't fighting over tv, they weren't watching an advert. So I got in there to find them watching the shopping channel. Now, I've just written the shopping channel as if there's only one of them, and I know there are like five hundred or something. I never watch shopping channels, so I can't be specific.

They were glued to an infomercial. An infomercial for a cleaning product. An informercial for a cleaning product specifically designed to clean up pee. It was called Urine Gone. Seriously. Look it up on Google, you'll find it. Urine Gone. Someone, somewhere put a lot of chemicals in a bottle and specified that it was for the exact purpose of cleaning up pish. And then the best name they could come up with was Urine Gone.

(If you put Urine Gone into Google you find 48,300 entries. If you put Barney Thomson into Google, you get 514 entries. I know my place in the commercial world.)

What's wrong with Urine-B-Gone? Maybe that brand name is already in use. Maybe on one of the other shopping channels there are more Americans talking about Urine-B-Gone, the original and best.

The bottle of Urine Gone, which of course looks like any other bottle of cleaning fluid, with the words Urine Gone written without any noticeable embarrassment whatsoever on the side, comes with a handy UV light, so that you can walk around your house detecting all those urine patches that you never knew were there. Some poor woman was doing the rounds of her home discovering urine in just about every conceivable place. God knows who she lives with.

The kids' motivation for watching this mince was that we could now bring Budgie the Netherland dwarf in from outside, on the basis that we can just follow him around with a bottle of Urine Gone and spray the wee fellow every time he lifts his leg.
I got them to change over to a normal channel and we immediately stumbled across one of those awful M&S adverts. The strange thing was, that apparently M&S are now doing their own line of cleaning products.

"Made from the most toxic chemicals and guaranteed to burn its way through the very fabric of your house," breathed Dervla, "this isn't just any old pish stain remover, this is M&S pish stain remover...."