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On the margin
Page 12
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Pads on display
Take a stroll with us through the little side roads of haulage, the diversions and detours, the quirky, the quixotic and the downright strange...
If there was one thing that was drummed into On the Margin's sweet little head as a youngster — apart from the stuff about strange men and offers of sweeties — it was the old dictum about every action having an equal and opposite reaction.
So it came as little surprise to us when we first discovered the delights of scrumpy that this followed that same rule: consume the night before in a state of blissful enjoyment: awake the next morning a pain-wracked shell of our former selves, wondering when the next 'reaction' would drive us to the toilet. Ditto asking the local meathead in the pub whether they'd like to 'step outside', which usually provokes the sort of reaction that fills A&E wards at 2am.
It's the predictability of it all that is particularly resonant; the knowledge that as sure as the sun rises every morning, there will always be some things that are as safe a bet as the favourite in the 3.15 at Ascot that your booze-swilling uncle always encourages you to back. So when you hear that a car parts company is seeking to relaunch itself, you can almost re-mortgage your house on the fact that it's going to involve female nudity.
Lo and behold, Unipart Automotive wants to reposition itself in the market and, to this end, has engineered the "re-launch of probably the most famous and best remembered of all Unipart's marketing initiatives, the Unipart Calendar". Which, much like its counterpart from Pirelli, features glamorous women in glamorous locations pretending to be engine parts — at least, that's what we think the press release is trying to say.
"The photographs for each quarter of the calendar have drawn inspiration from Unipart Automotive's ranges of most commonly requested products," the PR blurb gushes. "All product promotions during each of the four quarters will focus on the calendar theme for that quarter and feature the relevant product groups as listed below."
To wit: fire power (combustion gubbins); cooling effect (fans and that); body beautiful (spray paint), and suspension (er... suspension). Having not seen the calendar we're not sure just how these things are represented by women in various states of undress, but what we do know is that it features a cheetah at some point.
Rumours that CM'S bevy of preening technical wordsmiths were planning to go down the same route have yet to be confirmed.