Mark Daniels: Muddying the waters
On holiday last month, my wife found an excuse to drag us all into a shopping centre to have a browse around the local superstores. This is something she is very good at.
From our pub we have easy access to both Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds; if we want to travel an hour or so we can be in Ipswich or, worse, that shopping centre metropolis that is Milton Keynes.
I have been lucky, in my life prior to the pub, I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world and one thing has always struck me: wherever I go, the shopping centres (or malls, if you're American) look the same. From Chicago to Paris and London to Tokyo, shopping centres all share a similar theme. Once, in Hong Kong, my wife dragged me in to a Marks & Spencers, because she wanted to have a look around.
It's the same with La Cañada, a sprawling shopping centre in Marbella. Brimming with clothes shops and record stores and electronic outlets, the only real difference between it and The Bullring are the shop names. As we get dragged from one lingerie store to another, I find the only way to keep myself entertained is to look for anything that might remotely stand out in this shopping centre from any other I've been with.
So as we wandered around, I was a little shocked when I saw a boutique in the centre of the complex with a name that could have been misinterpreted. From the distance I'd spotted it, if its windows had been laden with magazines, I might truly have been outraged. Then I got closer and saw that the name of the outlet was actually Kittie Pon - but, from a distance, and with my eyesight, you can see why I might have been concerned. Rather than dodgy magazines, it sold cheap jewellery and so I steered my wife in the other direction.
We've all come across euphemistically titled products in the past, or items named to create mirth. Indeed, the television in our bedroom is made by a budget manufacturer that, in times of drunken merriment, often causes me to invite guests to our bedroom to admire my wife's new Bush. It wouldn't be the same if we all translated words and names we see the same way and it is funny when you look around this fine globe of ours and find that in Jamaica you can buy Cock Soup, that there is apparently a place in Arkansas called Dick Lick Springs, in Nova Scotia you can dine at the Lick-a-Chick restaurant and that in Cowley (yes, Middlesex, UK) you can get air conditioning services from a company called Stiff Nipples.
These are all names designed - either by accident or intent - to muddy the water slightly, to be elaborately translated in to something they aren't, and to cause a little humour. They're the sort of names that make your mother go "Oh, Mark, you're naughty!" They'll make your grandmother slap her hand over her mouth in mock horror and your new girlfriend will blush desirably when you point out to your friends in the pub that back home you've got some Finnish bread rolls for breakfast called JussiPussi.
But to try and use these muddied waters to launch a drink that can be sold to impressionable teenagers that glamorises the name of a Class A narcotic - even if you're not launching the one that simulates the effects of the drug it's so clearly named after - well, that's just plain dumb.
