Back in those far-off days when colour TV was still brand-new and expensive, my grandfather saw a newspaper advert for a series of special screens which, if you only placed them over the top of your usual TV, the spiel said would immediately and miraculously render the image in full Technicolor for a fraction of the price of a new machine. Sending off for it, he was disappointed to receive a packet full of flimsy rectangles of various-coloured cellophane which you were supposed to stick to the set so that it looked like everything on it was suddenly being viewed through the prism of a single different hue of the rainbow. If he had only thought to pin the brown one up over an early 1950s BBC Jane Austen adaptation, he could have invented Bridgerton seven decades early.
Granddad didn’t learn his lesson. Several years later, gypsies pushed an equally misleading printed flyer through his door, promising “fresh” and “cheap” manure for his garden. He called the listed number and took them up on the offer. The dung was indeed freshly laid – by the gypsies themselves, straight into a canvas sack, not by their caravan-pulling horses, as he had naturally presumed. Not wanting to waste his money, he still sluiced it onto the roses nonetheless. They died.
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