SPAM UNDERPINNINGS

A couple of days ago, I received a letter from a well-known mail order company, explaining to me the reasons why I really needed the black underwired bra, as illustrated by the photograph on the right-hand side of the page. I dutifully studied the picture of the smiling young woman, who, I felt, little required the underpinning, and came to the conclusion that no more did I. I am aware that my man-boobs have increased in size over the years, but gravity has not yet impacted on them to any great extent.

Among the many unnecessary and unsolicited items delivered to me by already overburdened postmen each week, perhaps the the ones which are consigned, with the greatest force, unopened, to the bin, are the offers of pills, potions and other quasi-pharmaceutical products and treatments. They claim to cure back pain, joint inflammation, haemorrhoids, penile deficiencies and hair loss, as well as a plethora of women's complaints. Those which appear in my email inbox are equally personal and irritating, and are just as summarily dealt with. Items from insurance companies get similarly harsh treatment (but I'll save these for a special posting later!).

My business adviser, web designer and friend Igor Mournly informs me that the spammers only need one response in a thousand sent emails to make their enterprise worthwhile. I am amazed that even this proportion can be stupid enough to respond to such material. Actually, many of the purported purveyors of medical aids to sexual deficiency seem to have given me up as a lost cause - I haven't heard from them for some time. Either that, or my Kaspersky internet security package is preventing them from getting as far as my inbox. What I tend to get more of nowadays is offers of relationships with Russian women. I haven't the heart to tell them that, for me, the sun is a bit far west for such activity, and I had difficulty enough understanding women of my own nationality, without introducing a language problem into the equation. So, with a sigh, I consign these beautiful girls, reluctantly, to my Deleted Items folder - sorry, Ludmila, Olga and Tatiana!

I think many of these spam messages are franchised in some way. I tend to get identical emails from several different sources simultaneously. Over the course of a few days, about a year ago, I was bombarded with similar messages, claiming to be from different people, offering me teeth-whitening. Sadly this fell on stony ground too, as my teeth ceased to be an issue more than thirty years ago. Tell you what, though - I've got really hard gums!

Maybe I should take the mail order company up on the bra offer - I wonder what size I am......