D is for….

DOG!

(This is a picture of my friend’s dog, not mine, as you will see.)

I’ve never really been a dog person. You know, they’re just there, being dogs. And I’m just here, being me. And our paths very rarely cross.

One of my first doggy memories is of a little girl racing across the back field at a million miles an hour, closely followed by a barking dog. Behind our back garden was the large back field that she was running across and she was heading in our direction. We opened the gate into our garden and she ran in and we shut the gate so the dog couldn’t follow her. In my mind there are quite a few people there, all watching this little girl being chased across the field by the dog. Now that I’m writing it, it seems like a slightly wierd thing to have happened. I’m not sure of this is an actual memory or a creation of my overactive childhood imagination.

My next experience of dogs was when we, as a family, decided to get a dog. My brother was excited and I did whatever he did so suddenly, without really thinking about whether I really liked dogs, there was one there, in our house, yap-yap-yapping. I was about seven and too nervous to speak up but I was pretty scared of it. It was little and excited and loud. I was horrified at its jumpy-loudness.

My brother played with it and threw it things and what fun he had. I stayed in the hallway and listened to them in the front room. Eventually I decided to go and see the new dog. I went into the front room and it jumped for me. I ran away from it and it chased me. I ran around in a circle panicking and shouting for someone to open the door, which they did, and I made my escape.

I did not approach the dog again that evening. The next day, when I came home from school, it had been returned to the shop.

And that, my good friends, is the sum total of my experiences with dogs.

Well, I lie. We had a dog when I lived in Africa but that was more like looking after a child in a dog’s body. She came and went as she pleased and very often wet herself while sleeping.

G is for…

GIFFGAFF!

What’s Giffgaff, you might be thinking? Well, what might it be?

My first thoughts were that it’s a word for what well-to-do people say when they mess up a sentence, as in “I’ve made a real giffgaff there.” Or it could be an insult, along the lines of a nincompoop, eg, “O, you giffgaff!” Maybe it could be some kind of cleaning product, given that it sounds like Jif, which later became the way more rubbish ‘Cif.’ The advert might say something like “Look at how Giffgaff cleans away all the dirt! Proven to be 98% more effective than other leading brands.”

Add to these suggestions anything you also might have come up with, maybe it’s a kid’s clothing brand or another euphemism for nakedness. All fairly decent guesses I think.

But no, it’s a mobile phone network! It just seems silly to me, a mobile phone network called Giffgaff. And who thought it up? Were they sitting around in the board room, bouncing ideas around and THAT came out as the best one? Really? What were theothers? Fliff-flaff? Binkbonk? Doodah? Fluffoff?

I know Orange and O2 and 3G aren’t particularly inspiring names, or anything to do with phones, but they’re at least credible. Just straightforward. And the advertising which includes the name is memorable. The future’s bright, the future’s Orange. Simple. I doubt many people would sign up if the advert went ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Giffgaff.’

Quite a few things have names that I think must have been a result of no-one else turning up for the Ideas Meeting in the board room, or everyone being tired/on drugs/too scared to say it sounded rubbish.

Wii. It’s just basic silliness. Playing on the Wii is NOT an appealing prospect and, in fact, I believe most people grew out of that after doing it once as a toddler and being told that it’s not for playing with, dear, it belongs in the toilet.

A brand of biscuits that was quite popular when I lived in Southern Africa was called Eet-Sum-Mor. What is that about?! It’s like they asked a 14 year old what might sound ‘cool.’

“O just do it a bit like text-speak and it’ll raise your coolness ratings by a billion!” says the 14 year old. “Ok,” say all the grown ups. “If that’s what the kids are doing nowadays, let’s go with it. We were going to call it Eat Some More but Eet-Sum-Mor is better. Should we add ‘LOL’ on the end too? Oo! Tempting!”