What's a Sarah Jessica Parker?

"We have the Sarah Jessica Parker", I heard the girl pushing the trolley filled with in-flight duty-frees offer. "Would you like that?"

Now as she'd already passed by my seat, I couldn't see what the 'Sarah Jessica Parker' was. (In truth, I only just about know who Sarah Jessica Parker is!)

Now one doesn’t have to be a genius to guess that the ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’ will be toiletries or cosmetics of some kind, of course, but being in the sort of frivolous state of mind which holidays bring on, I leaned across the aisle and asked my wife.

“What do you suppose the ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’ is?”

She thought for a moment.

“A lager,” She replied confidently. “I think it’s a 7% Danish lager brewed for the export market.”

“Yeah”, I nodded. “You’re probably right. Or else it’s a small electronic language translator which converts travellers’ vocabulary freely from and to any of 4 preconfigured European languages.”

Now apart from evidencing that I was, clearly, long overdue the holiday on which I was headed, this is actually quite a decent exercise.

Make a list of say half a dozen celebrities. Then try to find three products which each of them would lend genuine weight to by applying their name, and three more to which the application of their name would not only lend nothing but would be, in fact, clearly preposterous.

And when you’ve done it… try to figure out for yourself why George Foreman has then turned out to be the best celebrity name imaginable for a low fat griddle.

That’s the thing about rules. Some things just defy ‘em.