Apathy Sketchpad

Manchester’s Oxford Road has a large number of those strange vertical freestanding billboards along it. The obnoxious little structures that serve no purpose other than to be adverts. They are, I imagine, a nice little earner for the council, and for JCDecaux, who appear to operate every billboard in England. But some people, apparently, think that the road would generally be a more pleasant one if they were replaced with, say, trees. Which it would.

I say “apparently”, because although nobody has voiced this opinion to me explicitly, this morning every single one of these adverts was obscured by a rather stylish beige fabric cover bearing a picture of a tree and the slogan “trees breathe adverts suck”. This made me smile also.

My favourite part of this was the JCDecaux van parked next to one of them. The occupants of said van were sat looking at the cover, apparently deep in thought. I watched them for a while as I walked to work, and neither made any effort to remove the cover, or indeed any of the other ones they would have had to drive past to get to where they were parked.

I really don’t know what those guys were for.