I heard an advertisement on the radio the other day.

It must have been on the radio as I mute the television ones. It’s the one irritating thing about radio advertising – you can’t mute the fucking things because then there is no way of knowing when they are over.

There is actually a feature of radio ads that I find mildly amusing. I’m talking about the “small print” which in radio terms is a ridiculous stream of almost incomprehensible gabble. They tell you about their amazing offer that is a world beater and that you “must have” if you want a meaningful life [usually in a sing-song voice that sounds patronisingly like they are talking to four year olds] and then launch into several seconds of babble that probably states that there are “terms and conditions” and that the offer is only open to eighty year olds of Norwegian descent living in Wigan.

Anyways, the ad that caught my attention was for a car. I don’t know what breed or flavour of car as I wasn’t listening that carefully. Frankly I was just waiting to snigger at the babble at the end, as car ads tend to be great for that. The one thing I did hear was that this car featured a twenty inch touch screen display that had every bit of information on it that the driver could possibly need. Wow! How I wish I was an eighty year old in Wigan so I could lie about my ancestry!

But then I realised. I already had that. Even better, my screen is about fifty inches [I didn’t actually measure it] and it is amazing the amount of information it contains. It tells me what lane I am in or whether I am wandering off that lane. It warns me of bends in the road. It informs me if there is an obstacle ahead and even goes so far as to distinguish between a car, a cyclist or even a fallen branch. All of this is in incredibly realistic ultra high definition display and in full colour. They didn’t even mention this display as a feature of the car when I was buying it.

I call this incredible screen my “windscreen”.