Mind you, just so I don’t give the impression of liking the Grauniad too much, I think it’s a bit rich of a paper that runs a weekly Bad Science column to run huge two-page ads for a device that “gives off streams of positive and negative ions, components of healthy air” which apparently “actively seek out allergens”, turn into “cluster-ions” (WHAT? Don’t these people do GCSE chemistry?) and render them harmless. Which is all very good news for little “James”, the emetic blond child whose likeness takes up one of those two pages with the tag “Mum, I can’t breathe”. Surely an exclamation mark missing? Mind you, the lad looks weirdly unconcerned by his predicament, but then I suppose you can’t really express emotion if your eyes have been obscenely enlarged by PhotoShop until you look like a deep-sea fish. (You’re colder than the fishes/in the Arctic Ocean/But at least they flap their fins/to express emotion…”A Fine Romance”, Cole Porter) With floppy blond hair. What Sharp are trying to push on parents of asthmatic kids is nothing more or less than that good old fashioned 1980s fraud object, an ioniser! Yes! That weird little box well-off health freaks used to swear by, which contained in effect a piece of wire carrying current and a little red light!
Now what did I say about newspaper ad managers?