Dawn of the Dumb (36 page)

I
need a wife. Strangers keep advising me to get one. Three times in the past fortnight, women unfamiliar to me have broached the subject with a blend of amusement and pity.

Two weeks ago I was on the phone to the bank, absent-mindedly bemoaning my own uselessness at opening bills until it’s too late. ‘You need a wife,’ chuckled the woman at the other end.

A few days later I took a jacket to the dry-cleaners and asked the woman behind the counter if she could sew one of the buttons back on. She laughed and said she would, before explaining that what I really needed was a wife.

Today I was at a supermarket checkout, and when it was time to pay I delved in my pocket and pulled out a crumpled wedge of notes, receipts, distressed flecks of tissue, and a pen top. As I picked through the bird’s nest in my hand, hunting for change, the cashier sighed that a wife would sort me out. Another woman, in the queue behind me, agreed. Quite loudly.

It’s all quite warm and fuzzy really, this unsolicited maternal attention, but what’s troubling is that they instinctively knew that I’m not married. Clearly I’ve been shuffling around emanating tragic waves of wife-needing energy. It shows up on their internal radar as a flashing alert: clueless bachelor at ten o’clock. Launch sardonic advice. Target patronised. Mission accomplished.

Well stop it, all of you. I don’t want a wife. I can’t imagine proposing marriage. Never. Not to a human. We’re too unreliable.

Besides, marriage inevitably leads to kids, and that’s just weird. I don’t want to stand in a delivery room watching someone I’m supposed to love blasting a baby through her hips in an orgy of mucus, gore and screaming. My mind couldn’t stand the horror. I would probably grab a rake and start thrashing at it like a farmhand startled by a rat.

Speaking of farmhands, don’t assume that by ruling humans out of the marriage stakes I’m ruling animals in. Cows may have beautiful eyes, but no one wants to accompany their wife to a dinner party only to leave beneath a cloud of embarrassment because she spent the entire evening chewing with her mouth open and emptying her bum on the floor. On the drive home, the atmosphere would be poisonous. Silent opprobrium at your end, oblivious drooling at hers. What’s more, a cow belches out almost eight pounds of methane a day, so good luck on your honeymoon.

But we’re getting off the point here. If I must have a wife—and womankind has evidently decided I must—can’t I just be assigned one by the government? It would take all the guesswork out of things—the root cause of the chronic commitment-phobia I’ve suffered for the past few years. The moment I so much as shake someone’s hand I start assuming I will be sharing a cell with them for the rest of my life, and my subconscious ruthlessly scans them for character flaws that might grow annoying when experienced at close quarters for several decades. What’s that? A faint lisp? Oh, sure, it’s endearing now. But come the year 2029 you will want to smash yourself in the mind with a housebrick each time she opens her relentless, lisping gob. Better get out while you can. Run! Run for the horizon! And when you get there, keep running!

A government-arranged marriage would relieve all the pressure. Whenever my cellmate pissed me off, I would blame the powers that be instead of her. And it would work both ways: after six months of my shambolic company, she would want to punch the House of Commons into gravel-sized chunks. Our mutual loathing of the system that brought us together would keep us together. We would lie awake for hours, plotting our revenge against the bureaucrats who introduced us, sharing bitter jokes about how much we despised them. Just me and her against the world.

What could be more romantic? Mail me the forms. Show me where to sign. Finally, I’m up for it.

I hate MaCS

[5 February 2007]

U
nless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark—unless you have been doing that, you surely can’t have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don’t have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within these very brackets I’m promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10
PM
), there is something infuriating about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the start of the ad.

‘Hello, I’m a Mac,’ says Webb.

And I’m a PC,’ adds Mitcheil.

They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a ‘nasty virus’ that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign—the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series
Peep Show-
probably the best sitcom of the past five years—in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, ‘PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.’ In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, ‘I hate Macs’, and then I think, ‘Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?’ Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue ten years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because ‘they are just better’. Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul—that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn’t really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with ‘work stuff’ (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at ‘fun stuff’. How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at ‘fun stuff, my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac.
Myst
, the most pompous and boring video game of all time, a plodding, dismal ‘adventure’ in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year,
Doom
was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac’s relationship with ‘fun’.

Ultimately the campaign’s biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow ‘define themselves’ with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe—but not a personality. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that’s what we PC owners are like—unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you’ll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash comin##f;@

Read it and weep

[26 February 2007]

Y
ou know how sometimes you develop an obsession with a writer’s work, and decide to seek out their entire oeuvre and inhale their every word, even if you don’t really know what an ‘oeuvre’ is or what it looks like? Well, I do that for masochistic reasons. I actively enjoy reading people I can’t stand. When they write something particularly horrid, a wave of nausea surges through me and my pulse quickens. I’m hooked on it, like a BASE jumper compelled to leap off chimney stacks for the adrenaline rush. Consider it a sickness.

Previous obsessions have included Liz Jones of the
Evening Standard
(specialist subjects: new age spa treatments and marital despair) and the Barefoot Doctor, who used to write for the
Observer
.

The latter took over my life for several months. Everything he said incensed me. He gushed a wild river of bullshit, which I swam through open-mouthed, savouring the taste. I even bought one of his books—a ‘guide to urban survival’, an incredible how-to manual apparently designed to help shallow, cosseted airheads become even more self-obsessed, justifying their unhinged narcissism as spiritual development.

It outlined concepts such as ‘people-surfing’—which seemed to involve deliberately developing superficial relationships for personal gain—and ‘visualisation’. If you wanted a new laptop, he said, you should picture yourself throwing a magic lasso around it, and before long it would be yours in
real life
(assuming you walked into a shop and bought it at some point).

I read the book from cover to cover, pausing occasionally to hurl it across the room in disgust. Even the typeface annoyed me. It was brilliant.

And now I’ve got a new obsession, this time with a blogger. Not just any old blogger, mind—this one’s a showbiz journalist with a celebrity girlfriend. He’s called Joe Mott and he writes for the
Daily Star
. His blog, archived at dailystar.co.uk/blog, is the single most dazzling body of work I’ve encountered in years. I urge you to read it yourself. It heaves with demented beauty.

At the top of the page squats a photo of our hero, grinning like a man who’s just found £10,000 up his arse, beside the legend ‘Joe Mott’s HOT’. The word ‘HOT’ appears to be made of gold. Over this, a little textual strap informs us that Joe Mott’s HOT is ‘AWARD-WINNING’. Sadly it’s not clear what sort of award it was. Perhaps he entered a competition to see who could devise the most infuriating byline imaginable. If so, he deserved his prize.

The byline on its own is enough to trigger my coveted puke-surge, but beneath it, thrillingly, Mott has actually written several hundred words about his incredible life. Within seconds he’s describing a rowdy night out with some ‘fellow journos’ and bragging about getting a Lotus Europa (‘it’s small, fast and arousing’). Slightly annoying, but this is Mott Lite. Scroll further down and you strike gold.

Mott recounts his night at the BAFTAs. He starts by ticking off ‘charmless man’ Daniel Craig, who ‘had less charisma than the spotty youth who took my ticket on the way in…come on son, you’re James Bond…you could have larged it at the parties afterwards…sort it out.’

Yeah, Craig. Pull your finger out.

He attended the evening with his current beau, Sarah Harding from Girls Aloud. ‘Fittest one there was my girlfriend. And you know that is an actual fact, which statisticians could validate using their craft.’

He clearly loves Sarah a lot—almost as much as himself, in fact, because he’s recently bought her a ‘well flash gift…it’s a Swarovski crystal-covered bottle in pink and it’s blinger than everything in the world…the only other person who’s got one at the moment is JayZ.’

But his life isn’t all chuckles and flashbulbs and larging it at the parties afterwards’. There’s also beauty. ‘I woke up this morning in the converted church I live in, to find snow settled beautifully on the slate rooftops’, he muses. ‘It’s funny how I’ve started noticing that sort of thing as I’ve got older…my younger self would still have been thinking about garters, g-strings and possibly women’s volleyball.’

Magical. But sadly his joy doesn’t last long.

‘I turned up at Cirque for the launch of a new mobile phone fronted by David Blaine,’ he writes. ‘I just wanted a free phone—simple. But look after me and you’ll get plugs and a decent party write up.’ Instead, outrageously, an ‘Aussie-sounding bloke from God knows what PR company’ holds him up at the door because ‘we thought you were bringing Sarah’.

‘You do not invite national press to cover an event, make them wait at the door, tick them off for not publicising you properly last time…then express disappointment that you haven’t brought your celebrity girlfriend’, Mott fumes. ‘That’s first room stuff…the idiot should…admit defeat and go to his natural home in telesales’.