Blackspot Sneakers

I like brands. Some of them quite a lot. I love the stories behind them, especially if they’re about people having a good idea then knuckling down and working hard and smart to make it a reality. I work in advertising because I love the challenge of getting people to engage and fall in love with brands.



I like trainers too. That’s a picture of my floor, where I keep some of my shoes that I wear every day. I can see a £110 pair of Nikes there, which might have been made by poorly treated workers. Sorry.
(But yuh, I would still buy another expensive pair of Nike sneakers if I really liked them.)

Enter the Blackspot Unswoosher



It’s made by the guys from adbusters – they think megacorporate brands and the way they advertise is evil. I can see where they’re coming from. Anyway they have made trainers.
It’s a great idea – they’re made from sustainable fair trade bits of recycled tyres for you to go kick megacorporate ass in. It’s a useful bit of footwear, a visible symbol of the anti-consumerism movement, a boon to the environment and you’re also supporting their cause – buying a pair gives you a voting share in the Blackspot Anticorporation. They’re so different, and beautiful in an ugly way because they have such a great single-minded idea behind them.
The bottom line is that I really want a pair – but do they want me? The guy who spent 2 days last week working out a strategy to sell people more (megacorporate brand) crisps while entertaining them?

Stem cell research in high temperature environments

At work, we just don't have any aircon. It's 36 degrees celcius in the office.

So after about 2pm it just gets too hot to do anything at all productive and everyone gets apathetic or stroppy. The net result is this.





Sheesh.

Bethnal Green Road

I found out that the whole wall behind me at work is one giant blackboard.

my office wall, post chalk


The whole panels are covered in blackboard paint. Cool, huh? So I went to find some chalk, in what I thought was a pretty good start – a newsagent, but one of the ones that stocks a suspiciously large range of products. No chalk, he says, try down Bethnal Green Road – they have h’all kind of funny shop down there.

Damn he was right.

The Bethnal Green Road is covered with all shops that are crammed to the rafters with everything. A good rough way of describing each shop, is to break it down and say it’s X parts cash ‘n’ carry, Y parts pound store and Z parts newsagent. So you can describe stores like the Haziz Good Mart as a (3,4,2) and so forth.

Girly blinging stuff in a shop window


Then there are some eateries – good proper culture clashes of kebab, curry, greasy spoon, with two old school eels pie and mash stores, plus Greggs, McD’s and a KFC.

On the streets, you can buy DVDs, aluminum pots, Bhangra CDs and tyres. I am a big fan of all of these listed items.

In total contrast to the rest of the road, there is this one store that sells nothing aside from Asian-inspired costume jewellery. It's huge and bright and airy, and sells only one type of thing as opposed to 50,000. Awesome.



bangle wall


Some girl at the office asked if there was Holland and Barrett near us the other day. If she asks again, I now know to direct her to the The Nut House:

The Nut House


they sell nuts


That concludes my first was-supposed-to-be-5-minutes visit of Bethnal Green Road. You feel invincible as a shopper there – I honestly believe that there isn’t a single product that I couldn’t find given an hour on the Bethnal Green Road. And if you could think of one, then what does that say about the product?

ASDA George Challenge

ASDA’s own range of clothing, George, is really, seriously cheap. Jeans are £4 and t-shirts top out £6 for their most cutting-edge-fashion ones.

The people at my work are cool. They wear scruffy distressed clothes and t-shirts with cool or irreverent things on them like from www.bustedtees.com/ or www.defunker.com (I like these), and sniff at my TK-Maxx stories.

defunker tees


So my latest game is wearing ASDA George clothes to work every now and then and seeing how perceptions of me as shabby, trendy, or idiotic are affected.

No-one has said anything so far, whereas comments, both +ve and –ve, on my normal clothing are pretty frequent.

Embankment. Almost home.

Everything looks perfect across the river. It was a combination of the sun, clear sky, crispy air and the utter tranquility along the normally traffic laden Chelsea Embankment.
This is one of the only times where I am just walking, alone, generally soaking up things, without a hundred other things to do and think about – I love it.







The reality is that it’s 6:30am Saturday morning and it’s taking me an unfeasibly long time to walk home, due to hunger, booze, fatigue, and the fact I keep stopping every 5 minutes to take pictures of ducks.