Designer This, Designer That....

....but Designer Alliterations??

I did a double take when I saw this sign on a tired old building backing onto the tracks on the way into London Bridge station. I know I'm a person with literary preoccupations (not to say literary pretensions) but all the same...

I pushed my brand-new specs further up my nose and looked again: designer alterations!  Of course! But  the seed of the idea was sown, I couldn't help pondering what a designer alliteration might be -- lots and lots of different skirts in the same colour, or in different lengths?  And then I started thinking about alliterative blackness -- the different shades of a night sky? - and it seemed to me that alliteration is a delightful device (!) and that you could have fun using it as a warm-up exercise to some proper writing, or sparingly in your actual work.

At the risk of stating the obvious, alliteration is the repeated use of the same consonant in a phrase or sentence and is much favoured by advertising execs and headline writers as it can be a great way of grabbing the attention : I'm Backing Britain  is a good example. Why not have a go at half a dozen phrases of your own (on the lines of around the ragged rocks of the ragged rascal ran, only better) and see if they get your juices flowing: they might work as the basis for a poem, or perhaps just be something you can file away and possibly use later....