...so i was just idly staring into space (one of my hobbies) when my eyes fell upon the box of 'Taylors of Harrogate YORKSHIRE TEA' that my friend left in my house while i was away. yorkshire tea. so local, so natural, so english - because tea IS english isn't it, its been our traditional brew since, oh, for centuries hasn't it? and yorkshire tea, from that county of tradition and english values - you're not from round here are you, the jukeboox falling silent when a southerner walks into the pub, james herriott, geoff boycott saying 'i just don't understand it' on the cricket commentary - so tea from yorkshire - that's as english as you can get, isn't it? like tea would grow in yorkshire's climate, like the english have EVER grown it, like there is any relationship at all between tea and yorkshire - but you know what they mean, don't you? you can FEEL the tradition as you look at the 1930s font saying 'YORKSHIRE TEA' - you can even here the music to the hovis advert somewhere in the back of your mind... we are full to the brim with these fictions, they make up a huge proportion of the tapestry of reality in which we live and it is only in exceptional periods of clarity that we become momentarily mindful of that fact. i had a client once (i am sometimes a counsellor - despite the screaming irony inherent in that) who was obsessed with an idea of the sort of man he should be and very hard on himself for the numerous occasions on which he failed to live up to his ideal. after some conversations about ways he could be less strict and punitive with himself, and reality-testing some of his ideas about what people should ask of themselves (none of which proved to be very helpful), we eventually got round to the question of where he had derived this archetype of the perfect man from - had it been someone he'd met in the past - a teacher, maybe, at his school or a priest? after some time he was able to admit that in fact he had been beating himself up for years because he was failing to be David Carradine's character in the '70s television series 'kung fu'. He had never known any real human being who was able to consistently behave in the way that this fictional creation did, and thus it was no wonder that he found it so hard to achieve his 'goal' as it was, quite literally, unreal - derived from fiction - someone's idea of how they would LIKE the world to be rather than from the world itself. Now this is not new, of course. i am sure there were many sweat-soaked nights spent by the daughters of english country parsons in emily bronte's day as they awaited the arrival of their own personal heathcliffs. what is newer is that much of the fiction upon which our unconscious ideas of reality now rest derives from advertising and branding rather than, say, novels or television shows. these value-soaked ideas have been injected into our meaning-schemata for no purpose other than to increase the likelihood that we will buy a given product when we next come upon it - any alterations to our perception of the world or ourselves that results are considered mere irrelevant collateral damage or, most commonly, are not considered at all. the results though are, i believe, far-reaching.