My new job involves reading lots and lots of advertising case studies. Today, it was potato chips. Two recent award-winnning marketing schemes – one in the UK and one in India – were based on getting people to suggest new flavours then running massive campaigns to get the public to vote for its favourite. In both India and the UK more than one million people offered ideas for new flavours and millions more voted. Video from the India campaign looked like an Obama outtake with added snacks.

What the hell? Why do people can’t be arsed to vote in real elections go into frenzies over fried food flavours? It would be easy to say, “Because they’re stupid,” and probably some of them are. But even dummies have a survival instinct and I refuse to believe that a sentient being in modern world seriously believes crisps wield a greater influence over…

So, I’m sat in a bar with two women. Bee is slight and curvy with a smile you could use as an emergency power generator. Her boyfriend is wrapped around her, hands resting comfortably on her tawny stomach. He can’t wipe the adoration off his face.
Her friend, Tara has eyes like a prairie dawn — all space and light — and legs a racehorse would kill for. Her boyfriend has been wearing a Cheshire grin for their entire relationship.

Apropos nothing Tara starts talking about dieting. Bea points out that Tara is perfectly shaped.

“It’s easy for you to say, you’re so tiny,” Tara responds. “I just feel better lighter.”

“But you have curves and hips and…”

The maddening call-and-response of female self-loathing continues. I want to drown myself in my G&T.

I’ve heard the same conversation a thousand times. I’ve had the same conversation a thousand times. It…

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death floored me. Celebrities die more-or-less self-inflicted deaths at a depressingly regular rate but we usually find (or invent) a justification: too much or too little praise, an unhappy childhood, failed relationships, or general neurosis. We are far from comfortable with the fact that we die alone; the actor’s death reveals the unspeakable truth that at a fundamental level we live alone too.

I was unaware of Hoffman’s struggles with addiction. I knew him only as an actor who owned every scene he played. He had everything in the right quantities, or so it seemed. Not just acclaim but authentic, blazing talent. Artists are known to crumble under the weight of adulation but Hoffman wasn’t showered with facile praise, he commanded respect. He was a bona fide genius, recognised and rewarded as such. Success, talent, vocation, material comfort – he had it all. He also had a…