What?
For reasons which will become obvious very shortly, I should emphasise that helpmeimmad.com is in no way affiliated with, or endorsed by, Nestle Foods.

It's pure coincidence that one of my most homeric obsessions to date involved one of their pieces of advertising hardware.

The Man in question is shown below. As you can see, Nestle Man was a blue figure, made of tubular steel, fashioned by corporate advertising goons to sell ice cream. With a sign for a face, and big, blow moulded plastic hands and feet, Nestle Man somehow managed to be both friendly and domineering.

When?
June 2005 -
First sighted on the Benodet Pointe St. Gilles campsite in Brittany, France. Over the following fortnight, he developed a strange hold over me. In a holiday also notable for such pointless obsessions as Self Tissus, Nestle Man was the cream of the crop, and, as you will find out, possibly my most taxing obsession so far.

Why?
Take a good look. This thing isn't just saying "Hey kids, how about you pop in here and buy some ice cream?". To me his stance is more like "STOP!!! Get in there now! Buy some ice cream right now! Now! Now! Buy buy buy!" and so on. He doesn't ask you to buy ice cream. He damn well tells you, and by god, you'd better listen. I like to imagine how it would be if he could spring into bendy blue life and go into the bar next door to where he stands. I think his mind would be warped by long days standing in sun so hot you could fry an egg on his metal face. He wouldn't talk so much as drone on, and always on the subject of ice cream. Whatever turn you tried to make the conversation take, he would always steer it back to his favoured foodstuff, edging closer to the freezer as he did so. At the end of the night, you'd see him stood alone, unable to stop himself from pointing at the freezer by the bar, desperately trying to cause the sale of more ice creams. If there really is a soul inside Nestle Man, I imagine his one little bit of pleasure now comes from sensing that someone, nearby, is eating one of his ice creams. He wouldn't see you doing it, he'd just know. With that in mind, we ate a lot of ice cream that holiday.

1. We wait till the early hours of the morning.
2. Jim creates a disturbance at the far end of the campsite by letting off some fireworks he happened to have.
3. The security guard for the site (who lived in a box opposite our Man) runs to find the source of the noise. The campsite is so massive that he's safely out the way by the time Spanner and I go in for the snatch (so to speak).
4. We grab the Man, run like hell, and get him into our tent.
5. We dismantle him at leisure, disguise him as luggage, and get him out of the country.

This all made a lot of sense at 3 a.m. when we were, to be completely honest, somewhat the worse for wear. Plans not unlike this one have probably led to countless untold problems in disposing of street furniture, municipal flower displays, road signs, confused grandmothers, etc., all of which seemed like a really great idea the night before. In the cold light of day, though, I got the jitters. What if Nestle Man's rightful owner alerted customs? What if I was stopped at Calais, only to be betrayed by one desperately pointing white hand sticking out from under a suitcase? What would the penalty be in France for theft of a Nestle Man? Would it be treated as attempted kidnapping?

Ultimately, and to my great sadness, I decided that the risks outweighed the benefits. The day came for us all to leave the campsite, and, with a terrible wrench, I waved goodbye to Nestle Man for the last time. I can't tell you how sad I felt, seeing his domineering figure receding in the rear view mirror, desperately trying to sell me one final ice-cream for the road. I thought that would be the end. I thought Nestle Man would become just another lost obsession on the scrapheap of my mind.

Fate, it transpired, had other ideas...