Very early on in my blogging career, way back in the heady days of July, I came clean about my ironing policy.

It is, put simply, iron-on-demand. Drive-thru ironing. The kids go on a conveyor belt: they wake, they drink hot chocolate, they wash faces and clean teeth, and then they reel on by the room where I iron, to pick up their warm, flat clothes.

It may be last-minute, but I find the arrangement works admirably for all concerned. And as I iron, I watch the morning BBC Breakfast News programme on my trusty, all-encompassing laptop.

I settle into this day to see how it feels: I step back from the crazy day planner inside my head and watch some companionable presenters ease me through the picture of The Day This Is.

I am not an accurate listener. I love the ambient sound of words, and I think they have washed over me since those days, long ago, when I toddled around my childhood home as my mother listened to the talk channel here, Radio Four.

But the words do just that so often: wash over me. The actual facts don’t sink in. It is an abominable habit, especially in a journalist.

This morning I half-listened to details of an exhibition being held in this country to celebrate all that is great about Brands.

Brand Licensing Europe 2010 is taking over our exhibition behemoth, Olympia, which crouches hugely amoung the clutter of Kensington.

For the next two days it will be crammed with some great brands, sure: but also the faceless men behind them.

Unsettling.

Because a brand is, put simply, an idea. It is an identity that has been given to a thing you can buy. There’s nothing like a Starbucks, or a pair of  Reebocks, or a night at the HIlton. Brands label what we can have.

Take Lego, one of the exhibitors over the next few days.

We all used Lego when we were little. Folklore has grown up around this product. My husband prides himself on having been an official Lego Builder. His dog Jack disgraced himself by eating the nose cone of Phil’s lego rocket when Phil was about 12. We know and love these little bricks.

We also know what the font on the box looks like. We know what colours to expect from the packaging. When I dash into the department store just before Christmas it is as if I turn on a scanner in my head. I scan the shelves for the recognisable face of this brand and quickly identify it. Pick it up. And buy it.

Very useful. Pricey, though.

There are thousands of these brands which dominate our lives day after day, and we make no complaint. Many of them are integral to our comfort, and many of us are affluent enough to be able to subscribe to them.

When we need a naughty pick-me-up takeaway burger, we head for a multinational corporation. When we want information, we use cyber corporations which have grown enormous at speed. When we wish to dress, we are so well schooled that we even pay more for clothes with a brand name on them.

Does this sound spooky to you?

Back to my old favourite horror tale of the future, 1984.

There’s this scene. Winston is walking through the streets one day, wishing upon wish that something would happen. And he hears the most heart-rending wail, as if some mother has lost her child. It is full of anguish and utter desperation.

He hurries to the scene. This is it, he is thinking, this is the moment I have been waiting for. It is time for change. It is time for freedom. Someone has woken to their fate: their eyes are finally, irrevocably open.

But when he arrives, he finds only that a new consignment of saucepans has been delivered to a stall, and an argument has erupted over possession of one of these prized acquisitions.

All that pent up emotion is simply sentiment, wasted on a piece of kitchen equipment.

It’s so easy to divert people, if you know how. It’s simple to pop inside their minds and plant a few ideas. Before you know it, the ideas are accepted as status quo. They are the way things are. We become affectionate towards these commercial backdrops to our lives.

And now for a film. It is very rude and irreverent indeed, and I love it. It is called Idiocracy.

GI Joe Bauers is singled out because he is the most average soldier in the United States army. He is to be frozen for a year in a military experiment, but the man who conceived the idea is discredited, and everyone forgets he and his cryogenic unit ever existed.

Five hundred years later, an avelanche of rubbish jolts Bauers into consciousness once more.

It appears those who have thrived in this futuristic morality tale are the dull, the base, the ungifted. Intelligence has simply turned its back on the earth. The fabulous technological achievements of yesteryear are being used by those who don’t know what goes on under the bonnet.

Phil and I find it screamingly funny, because it is a new take on those old saucepans. Mankind is now entirely preoccupied with material gain, and there is no longer anyone in the driving seat of civilisation. The human race is careering out of control.

The comment on brands is quite brilliant. Their true meaning has been lost in the mists of time, and many brands have become all encompassing.

The place you go to get your degree?  COSTCO.

When our hero arrives he is perceived as a great mind of the time, which is quite true, because there’s not much else to choose from.

They enlist his help: the crops are dying and no-one knows why. He realises with dismay that they are watering the crops with a sports drink: Gatorade.

It is wonderful to laugh in the face of a future like that.  It’s like that little boy who saw the emperor riding naked, and laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it, when all around him saluted the monarch’s ‘new clothes’.

But from now on, I shan’t coast on auto-pilot through the news any more. I shall file my facts more carefully. Because I have a feeling we need to keep an eye on those Brands, and what they choose to make everyday.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch Idiocracy one more time…