Ballito now has at least five enormous electronic billboards that broadcast TV-style adverts to passing commuters 24/7.
Like evil mushrooms, these billboards appear to be sprouting overnight. There is no escape.
As you may have guessed, I am not a fan.
Sitting in traffic, my eyes are attracted by the shiny TVs and I find myself watching them like a zombie.
As if it is not hard enough to escape the screens which already dominate my life.
In the love triangle made up of my cell phone, office PC and TV, those three already demand a huge chunk of my day.
Argh! And normally I do very well to avoid watching most adverts.
But when I’m trapped in traffic I have no remote control to skip ahead or change the channel. These screens may be the latest in fancy advertising opportunities and they very likely work like a charm, but I find them disturbingly invasive.
The old billboards looming large overhead were bad enough, but at least as a static image I felt I had more choice over whether to look at them or not. A glance would suffice if I was not interested.
I would bet that advertisers are paying a pretty penny for these prime spots in town. But as the viewers and residents of this increasingly visually polluted town, when do we get a say?
As a tourist attraction we need to be especially careful to safeguard the image of our coastal town.
I would love to hear readers’ opinions on the matter? Write to me at editor@northcoastcourier.co.za.
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Whoever designed miniature trolleys was either someone without any experience with children, or a sadist.
While attempting to survive a grocery shopping expedition with my two angels on Sunday, the cherubs discovered these fiendish instruments of torture.
The gleam in their eyes instantly told me what I was in for. These are not simply smaller versions of an adult trolley.
No, they are in fact the awesome combination of a racing car, bumper car, ankle biter and bowling ball, all rolled into one.
Let me apologise now if you were one of the unfortunate shoppers who was in the store on that day.
It is quite possible that I gave up on trying to settle the rolling arguments on who was to lay siege to the next item on my shopping list and tried to create as much distance as I could between myself and them in the vain hope that they would be mistaken for someone else’s children.
I console myself with the belief that I am raising world changers and not walkovers.
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