YouGov

I seem to be back on their list again, having just been asked to do one of their surveys.

Rather different in that it felt more like a psychological test of me than a marketing test, all about the latest brand of toothpaste, travel insurance or whatever. The only marketing angle there might have been, lurking among a sea of seemingly non-commercial questions, was my level of interest in wearable gadgets, that is to say gadgets disguised as clothing.

Bing knows all about such stuff, even if I don't. ... Maybe 'disguised as clothing' is not a very good gloss - but just presently I fail to do better.

In any event, I reported a complete and total lack of interest in the stuff.

PS 1: the snap at top of this post is taken from one of the image results for a Google search on 'yougov'. The suggestion being that there are people out there who value their services. But I jest: there are clearly plenty of such people out there as their surveys pop up regularly in the media.

PS 2: a little while later, for some reason, possibly my poor performance after lunch at Kim's game, I got to thinking about my Saturday morning shopping expeditions to town as a child, travelling by bus, charged with a large wicker basket and a shopping list. Shopping which usually involved visiting a greengrocer with a stall at one corner of the market square (northeast) and, possibly, the Lipton's store across the road from another (southeast). At that time, a lot of the stalls on the market were run by market gardeners who grew their stuff in the fens, somewhere to the north; stuff which often carried a fair bit of the black soil of the fens. A time when celery was white rather than green. There are two points of interest here. First, apart from peanuts - in their shells - I can remember nothing very definite about what was on the shopping list. At least, not today. Second, my secondary school worked on Saturday mornings - while primary school age seems a bit young for such stuff, even then. Maybe the clouds of memory will part as the evening progresses.

PS 3: maybe he is just a bit grumpy that he can't play golf on his own golf course without being pestered by talkative ladies from somewhere in Europe. Surely as both a senior citizen and POTUS, he is entitled to a bit of down-time. But maybe the visceral need to keep up there in the headlines trumps all. As it were. See reference 3 for the full story. Or reference 4 for a crypto-Freudian take on it all.

PS 4: the word 'narcissus' occurs just twice in my copy of the collected works. I have yet to look into the various variations. And I never did get a reply from the psycho-analysts to my query, back in March, about the standing of that copy.

PS 5: it occurs to me this Monday morning that, one day, I might get into wearable gadgets. The sort of thing that phones for a ambulance or texts my next-of-kin in the event of my falling over. I think FIL had an early version of such a thing, issued by his local authority to senior seniors.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/an-evening-digression.html. Just over two weeks since I last noticed them. Not so long after all.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-bout-of-top-down-thinking.html. A previous outing for Lipton's. The reference still works and it is still Optical Express.

Reference 3: US and EU reach tariff agreement to avert trade war: Deal announced after talks between Donald Trump with European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland - Henry Foy, Aime Williams, Andy Bounds, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 4: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662.