An Spailpín was just driving through the city at night, having an Iggy Pop moment, listening to Friday Night Eighties on the wireless in his chariot, when he heard the most remarkable ad.
The ad was for Champion Sports. It concerns a young man who unwraps a gift from his mother.
"What's this?" says he.
"It's the strip of your favourite team," replies the mother.
"But it's the away strip. I wanted the home strip. Everyone knows the home strip is better than the away strip. You've ruined it," says the stripling, before finishing with "I hate you."
And then the strangest thing happened - some sort of reverie descended, possibly due to my driving through a cloud of that gamma radation that made so much money for Dr David Banner's tailor. Either way, something got into my system as I thought, I laboured under the illusion, I somehow got the impression, that the ad went out to say that if mothers didn't want to face such harsh words from their succubi, they ought leg it down to Champion Sports fairly lively.
But I know this can only be the awful side effect of that gamma radiation, a cloud of which must have been blowing in from Wales or somewhere. Surely no sane person would run an ad like that and expect to sell soccer shirts to the mothers of petulant young men as a result. As such, I can only presume that Champion Sports are branching out into the corporal punishment business.
I'm sure that in the real world, instead of attempting to blackmail mothers who went through God only knows what to deliver of the infants in the first place, Champion Sports are supplying a corrective, a coporal punishment solution, to put manners on one's stripling in two shakes of a lamb's tail.
It can only be the case, then, that Champion Sports are pleased to introduced a product like Dr Whippy's Stingray, hand crafted by artists from the two most basic of woods - the ash plant, for flexibility, and the sally rod, for durability. Dr Whippy's Stingray makes a lovely ffffttt! sound as it whizzes through the air, before connecting smartly with the botty of the chastisee. Next time out, if Junior is delivered the away strip of Accrington Stanley, he will say thank you, and say it pretty damned promptly. So that's a relief.
