A Place in the Spam

Wednesday 30 May 2012 – Today I rose, turned on the iPod and allowed Antony and the Johnson’s to welcome my day in with, ‘Paddy’s Gone’. I had my breakfast; toast with one of Jan’s wonderful eggs – When I say Jan’s, I mean from her chickens, I’m sure there’d be laws about harvesting human eggs for breakfast, not to mention it possibly being an invasive activity.

Talking about invasive activity; as we move ever forward in a digital world, there’s one thing that is the scourge of electronic communication, spam. Now you’d have to either have been sat on a rock just off the coast of Madagascar for the last fifteen years, or my dad, to think I’m referring to the tinned pork shoulder and ham. (It’s name by the way is a portmanteau: meaning a combination of two or more words to make another, in this case, (sp)iced + ham = spam). Random fact over.

A few months ago I went to the NEC, for the overseas property fair organised by the magazine and production company, A Place in the Sun. A friend has an estate agency over in Italy and he sent me some free tickets. Being always on the look out for anything that may make an interesting magazine feature, I accepted the tickets graciously.

The day of the fair arrived, and with camera, notebook, pencil (steadtler of course) and tickets I drove down the M6; passing Willow and her chums, (sorry that’s an in-joke for those in the know), and made my way to the NEC. We navigated the car parks, paid a fiver for parking and went to spend the day collecting brochures, grabbing anything that was free and paying over the odds for food and beverages.

Before we could enter the halls we had to fill in a form and give an e-mail address, now I hear you all say, (well some of you, the unkind ones.) “Idiot, you should have made up a fake one. You’ve only yourself to blame. Blah, blah, blah, etc.”

Well, the fact of the matter was I thought, I’ll maybe find something of interest in the occasional newsletter, and maybe there’ll be an opportunity to sell them a feature in the future. The sad fact of the matter is that they have since my visit bombarded me with e-mails, every day. Now when I wake I no longer look forward to a place in the sun, I go straight to my spam folder and press delete.

Oh how soon the dream can sour.