Have you seen the new traffic light symbols on foods? The little round blobs that are green for the good-for-you foods like water and porridge, orange for the boringly safe Daily Mail recipe foods, or red for all the cakes and crisps you really want to buy. The blob’s colour really tells you how quickly you will die if you eat all red ones.

It’s a very clear and easy to understand system, unlike the one that various shops and food manufacturers would prefer us to have. This has a completely confusing system showing %DA in the blob’s centre and no colour code either. Is it just coincidence that the makers of the highest fat, sugar and salty foods are the very same who have devised this stupid system? Their products would have so many red blobs Rudolph could hide in them.

Isn’t it about time the same coloured blobs were put on other things? Take computers for example: they could have a red, orange or green blob showing whether the video card is good for games. The same for the CPU, with a coloured blob showing whether it’s just another Celeron you can type faster than it can keep up. A green blob would show it is a Xeon that will blast away at just about any task without using more than a nanometer of it’s full potential. Dell laptops could have a special deep red blob to show how hot your thigh will get when using it as a, well… a laptop. Especially if you haven’t changed the battery and it’s “one of those”. Inkjet printers would surely have a red blob signifying how quickly they will spend your wealth on ink, with laser printers the same to demonstrate how much ozone they’ll pump into the office. My partner puts a large pot plant next to ours to absorb all the bad stuff.

Other electronic items could also benefit from blobs. Mobile phones would have a coloured blob rating their ring tone’s degree of inanity. After spending 20 minutes in Waitrose listening to Eric Satie ring-ringing on someone’s unanswered mobile phone (Satie as a ring tone - only in Waitrose, eh?). it’s turned me right off Gnossienne 5, if only they’d used Avant-dernieres pensees instead. Mind you, either are better than Nokia’s default, a definite red blobber. My tiny Samsung is so old I dare not use anything more than the standard telephone bell and even that sounds like a 1930’s American candlestick phone. But as all modern phones are much bigger I’ll stick with it.

Operating systems are a little more difficult to blob. Microsoft would probably be in the %DA camp and spurn the government’s blob rating. In any case, Windows XP would be an absolute redder, for the guarantee that it will crash at some point. Unlike, hum hum, Mac OSX and Linux which would have a fluorescent green blob for the same. Confusingly, according to Greenpeace, Apple would get a red one for its green credentials. Conversely, in the %DA, non-coloured blob system, Vista would be 25%DA as a measure of time wasted watching “helpful” wizards and non-essential dialogue boxes asking stupid questions.