This year marks a milestone in my life: 25 years since I began my boycott of Snickers, after they changed the name from Marathon.

Sadly, the signs are that 2015 is not going to be the year when the manufacturers finally bow down and change the name back, but you never know. I am prepared to stick it out for another 25 years, if necessary.

And I have been encouraged to find, when I Googled the Marathon v Snickers controversy, that there are a few other people out there who also took a stand, and have now also gone Snickerless for a quarter of a century.

There’s at least one bloke in Leicester, for a start, and another in Merthyr Tydfil. Solidarity, brothers.

You might think it’s only a name, but when it happened, all those years ago, I knew it was the thin end of the wedge.

Grab a chocolate bar to keep you going while I explain (I suggest a good old Twix, which they nearly renamed Raider in 1991, so deserves our support).

It’s all a sign of malignant consumerism, if you ask me, like when Black Friday comes and some lose all perspective and their dignity in pursuit of things they really don’t need.

There are plenty of other things to disapprove of in a modern consumerist world in which money and greed have replaced sense, and like me you’ve probably come to the conclusion that we’re stuck with most of it.

But I have to draw the line at the way some people now market and advertise their products, especially on telly.

The Snickers outrage – giving a nonsense name to a bar of chocolate that tells you absolutely nothing about the product – was more or less the start of it.

It’s a symptom of the obscene clamour for our attention that all those products and brands must now engage in to get themselves noticed.

Their chief tactic is not to tell you anything about the product, but simply to shock you with some pointless scenario or other, or, as in the case of the chocolate bar formerly known as Marathon, just give it a stupid name.

It’s the equivalent of a child throwing itself on the floor in the supermarket and throwing a ridiculous tantrum to get your attention – possibly because you rightly refused to buy him or her a Snickers. The best thing you can do in the circumstances is to ignore them, and not give into childish attention-seeking.

It wasn’t always like this. If you are old enough to remember chimps drinking PG Tips, robots eating Smash or Coca-Cola wanting to teach the world to sing, you’ll know what I mean. As some kind of apology for forcing their way into our living rooms, advertisers tried to entertain us or woo us subtly and quietly.

As a minimum they would try to think up a clever phrase, like Beanz Meanz Heinz, or write a catchy tune, like my all-time favourite, Toblerone, but they don’t bother much these days, apart from the odd meerkat puppet.

And, just as I foresaw, the nonsense that Snickers started has led us all the way to an advert you may have seen on your screen recently. It features a man taking to the streets in high heels and denim hot pants, thrusting his over-sized bum at passers-by, including Sharon Osbourne. It’s trying to sell some kind of internet comparison site, but for those of us with brains it’s surely an insult to our intelligence.

So enough is enough, and I am thinking of forming a protest group. Join us, comrades, and don’t forget the Opal Fruits.