Your anal retention superstore

It’s one of the unwritten rules of life that once you’ve been living in a place more than say, 10 minutes, you’ll find yourself on the Lakeland Plastics mailing list. For the uninitiated (and don’t worry, your copy will be in the post on Monday) it’s a collection of those-household-gadgets-that-you’re-really-not-sure-how-you-ever-managed-without - wine racks that double as boxes to take the empties back to the recycling point for example, or the Park-A-Plug - “instead of wrapping your plug chain around the taps, you can park the plug neatly in its own home!”

The online store really doesn’t capture the breathless excitement of the paper edition - partly because they don’t have the excerpts from letters sent in by Mrs Trellis of North Wales, waxing lyrical about how their lives were transformed when they discovered the Natural Ostrich Feather Duster. Difficult things to dust, those ostriches.

And the website also lacks the chatty welcome-to-our-latest-catalogue enclosure penned (allegedly) by Michelle Kershaw, Customer Director. I’ve got my suspicions about Michell Kershaw, Customer Director. For a start, her head-and-shoulders studio portrait has been getting steadily more soft-focus over the years, to the point where she’s starting to look like an extra from a soft-core hotel cable porn film. So soft-focus, in fact, that I wouldn’t be at all suprised to find that she was born the year before the Queen Mother and has gradually mutated into crocodile hide. She also appears to have personally sampled or tested every one of the five thousand-or-so products lines that the catalogue carries - which means that her home must have been subjected to so many different cleaning chemicals that Hans Blix wouldn’t go near the place without another UN resolution. She’s got no less than 20 pages of Speciality Cleaning products to go at, so if your Specialities are in need of cleaning, Lakeland is the place for you.

I always thought that this was a peculiarly British thing - that somehow deep down in the collective national psyche we were compensating for the loss of the Empire by obsessively purchasing Delia Smith’s Beachwood Citrus Reamers. There’s noone I’d want to be reamed by more, naturally. But then I came across Harriet Carter, or as A Boy And His Computer more accurately describes her, “your anal retention superstore“. The word “organizer” results in 38 hits for such essential household items as the microwave popcorn holder, a trouser organiser or little plastic boxes to keep half-tomatoes in.

So I was all set to get a bit depressed about how the US was out-anally-retenting us, when I came across Lakeland’s piece-de-resistance, the vacuum-powered spider catcher. No matter that we lost the Empire, our national sporting ability is so crap that the only sport we can call ourselves World Champions in is only played by another five countries, and our trains can’t cope with the wrong kind of snow. At least we can hold our heads high at the United Nations secure in the knowledge that no true subject of the Queen should ever need to make physical contact with a creepy-crawly in the bath…

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