"The bestiary of power" was the metaphor Roland Barthes used to capture the symbolic power, and more often than not, the awesome power, we assign to particular items, and in so doing, move them from mere commodity to icon. An example might be the Porsche, it's just a car, when all is said and done, except it's not, there's so much in there, beyond the tangible. Mont Blanc pens are another. Again, nothing more than a pen...but it is. Picture a huge business deal being signed off with a humble bic, or a pen picked off the bookie's counter. Does n't work, really, does it. That's Mont Blanc territory. They own it.

Porsches and Mont Blancs are, in Barthes's terms, full-blooded examples of "...the supreme creation of an era conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object". Barthes's words...I wish they were mine since they are so apposite.

I read them today on the tube home and I had to stop, and gaze out of the window for a moment, to properly absorb their weight; it seemed churlish to have read on without pausing.

What fascinates me is that we are so capricious in what we symbolically confer on some items. Diamonds are forever. They live on. But brands ? Goldman Sachs has heft to it, there's an oaky, mature, collegiate sense; it evokes discipline, an informed, elegant, understated body of people. Reputable.

Then there's Starbucks; when that pioneering latte stumbled ashore, life felt bohemian, creative, zany. Without being consciously aware I, no doubt alongside thousands of others, charged it with that power. A life changing power,

Today the battery's flat. Starbucks has extended itself so much that I no longer seek it out; it's everywhere. The charge has dissipated. Barthes's "...magical objects..." can, and do, have shelf lifes.