Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (31 page)

But will this catch on? Won't people be embarrassed to be seen wandering into a high-street weight-loss centre, however
much it adopts the rhetoric of business class? Going there is still an admission that you're worried about your weight, of lack of confidence. In normal-sized people this might betray poor self-esteem; in the skinny, it looks anorexic; and, even in the demonstrably obese, it would be a sign that they're not as proud of “who they are” as we're all supposed to be nowadays. Getting help with weight loss is a brave confession of weakness and need – but few are comfortable displaying those traits publicly. That's why so many dirty-video stores went out of business because of the internet, while Waterstones limps on. There aren't many of us who'd be happy to stride openly from the sex shop to the Lifestyle Centre, proclaiming to the world: “Yeah, I'm a fat guy who wanks – deal with it.”

A survey into women's attitudes to exercise conducted for mental health charity Mind suggests this sort of embarrassment might be a problem for the centres. More than half of those questioned said they were too self-conscious to exercise in public. Fears of unforgiving Lycra, “wobbly bits”, sweating or going red, lead them to try to get fit, if they try at all, very early in the morning or late at night. So that's why everyone you see jogging looks intimidatingly fit! The flabby do their running under cover of darkness.

It's easy to understand their feelings. Watching a fat or unfit person jog evokes two main responses. First, it's funny – in the way a pratfall is funny. It's a physical misfortune that's happening to somebody else. The sweaty, panting discomfort, the glazed-over expression of dread, the pink-and-cerise-pocked face, the hilariously slow rate of progress that has nevertheless proved so exhausting, the thought of the cakes and ale that went before – you want to laugh. And the runner knows you want to laugh.

Worse still is the other simultaneous response: sympathy, empathy, even pity. Most of us have been there or think, if we broke into a run, we'd soon find ourselves there. But those
feelings are seldom welcomed, any more than it is soothing when you bump your head for someone to say: “Ooh, that must have hurt!” On some deep evolutionary level, we reject this pity – maybe we sense that it leads gradually but inevitably to people concluding that we may be surplus to the tribe's requirements.

Our aversion to sympathy for quite trivial misfortunes is laid bare when you watch someone narrowly miss a train or bus. Almost everyone, in the moment it becomes clear they're not going to catch it, tries to make it look like they didn't really want to. “It's fine, I was just kind of jogging anyway – I'd rather get the next one” is what they're desperate to convey, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Even those who go the other way and express annoyance usually do it in a slightly performed way: they are portraying an annoyed person, but concealing their true desire, which, more than to have caught the train or bus, is now for the ground to swallow them up. It's very rare to see annoyance unselfconsciously or unashamedly expressed in those moments – I certainly can't do it myself.

As a species, we seem much more comfortable with implausible shows of empty pride than unremarkable admissions of weakness. This may explain the existence of the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, which offers free meals to anyone weighing over 25 stone and where a woman recently suffered a cardiac arrest while eating one of their “double bypass burgers”. She was also drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette, but was being abstemious compared to the establishment's previous heart-attack victim, a man tucking into a “triple bypass burger” two months earlier. Presumably one of the things such customers are trying to say is: “We know what we're doing – we're going into this with our eyes open. We're unafraid, we're not running away from anything, and that's not just because we'd immediately be drenched in sweat if we tried.”

We humans have a deeply conservative instinct that we should know our place: paupers should stay in hovels and kings on thrones. Gyms should be full of fit people exercising, diners full of fat ones eating. Everyone just being and no one trying. It's the trying, the aspiration, that people find threatening – trying to get a better job, move somewhere nicer, lose weight. And that's why those who are doing it feel vulnerable.

Can Weight Watchers outlets thrive on the high street? I hope so, but I doubt it. More than they're ashamed of overeating or buying pornography or missing a train, people are ashamed of wanting to change themselves. They fear they can't and that others will resent the attempt. That's why fat people exercise by night.

When I wrote this column in April 2012, only one Weight Watchers Lifestyle Centre was open. That's one of the things that's stayed the same.

We’re far too near the end of this book for me to retain an open mind. I think I might feel guilty about expressing hatred for the internet if there were any chance that it would thereby be stopped. I might pause to consider its blessings and possibilities if its fate were genuinely in my hands. But, for some reason, it’s not – so I reckon I can let rip in slagging it off, safe in the knowledge that it won’t make a blind bit of difference.

The truth is that modern technology is amazing. The machines most of us use every day are like magic. If I’d seen an iPad as a child, it would have been like an episode of
The Box of Delights
had come to life.

But the people who sell us those machines are getting rich, so I see no reason for them also to get praised. And let’s not forget all the havoc these advances are wreaking. In this section, I slag off automatic arse-wipers, cameraphones, snazzy weather maps, online comment sections and internet dating. It also contains the secret of eternal life.

Dare you compromise on sphincteral cleanliness? According to Toto, a Japanese sanitaryware company, that’s what most Britons have been doing for years. But that’s all set to change with the opening of Toto’s first UK shop selling, among other luxury bathroom fittings, loos that clean the shit off your arse for you.

The British market has hitherto proved resistant to such products, perhaps because they’re expensive or perhaps because we’re nervous of entrusting a vital orifice to the tender mercies of an array of electric squirters, deodorisers and driers. We imagine such contraptions having a dial of settings that, under cover of ominous music, could be covertly turned up to “Dangerous” by a sinister gloved hand. None of us wants to meet our maker, pants round ankles,
Schott’s Original Miscellany
clutched in agony, the victim of a lethal hygienic bombardment.

Toto’s UK general manager, Jill Player-Bishop, doubts this: “People tend to think Britons don’t want to experiment but they do,” she claims. I agree, but this isn’t about discovering DNA or being open-minded about suburban sex games. Is bottom-wiping really a field of activity where experimentation is helpful?

Who knows why Toto thinks the time is ripe to relieve the British of a grim but levelling chore. Maybe it consulted the Duchess of York, who promised to whisper in a royal ear in exchange for a hot bath and somewhere indoors to sit. A futuristic loo, she might suggest to Prince Andrew, is an excellent way of staying “whiter than white” all over. At the very least, it would save having to employ the most euphemistically job-titled of all his footmen (the one he hopes never shakes hands with the toothpaste guy).

Or maybe it’s the British reputation for being repressed that convinced the company that we’d want to live in denial of a bodily function. On Toto’s American website, the descriptions of its range of “Washlets” (the fixtures that actually deal with the dirty), with their coy references to “comfort” and “cleansing” rather than poo and bottoms, seem aimed at customers who wish to renounce the entire alimentary canal. As soon as medical science permits, they’ll have their anuses sewn up and will subsist on hourly nutrient injections.

This prudery aside, the website seems to have been designed for cultures yet to discover the double entendre: the cheapest washlet is described as “entry-level”, and they also sell a “Guinevere Self-Rimming Lavatory – Single Hole” which, bizarrely enough, is a sink. This is the sort of copy that could attract an intellectual property suit from the writers of
Carry On at Your Convenience.

I’m sure a state-of-the-art washlet works better than Andrex once you get used to the sensation of a machine lapping away from below – although if,
Matrix-
style, the machines subsequently turn on us, we’re going to be seriously short of moral high ground. So why not embrace the future or, rather, sit on its face? After a long lecture on gum health from my dentist, I now use a machine to clean my teeth. Why not banish the loo roll to the social history museum, alongside the fax, the mangle and the reusable French letter?

Because there’s no going back, that’s why. It’s what my ex-flatmate calls “a valve decision” – one you can put off making but cannot reverse, much like egestion. He ably demonstrated the advantages of delaying such choices by refusing to watch the French Open tennis on an HD channel, on the basis that, if he got used to HD, the non-HD coverage would start to look shoddy. Take that, early adopters! I shall not eat your Turkish delight!

If you get used to a new technology, you start to need it. Within weeks, the prospect of wiping my arse with a paper-covered hand would seem like having to spend a day birthing calves. People say of their dishwasher: “I genuinely don’t know how I lived without it.” If that’s true, they need to consult a doctor about the memory lapses they’re suffering. What they mean is: “I have come to despise my former existence and now have an addict’s need of the money that provides the equipment to save me from a return to it.” Although that would be an odd remark to make socially.

“You’ll never look back!” they say to those without dishwashers – or iPhones, satnavs or Sky+ – trying to lure others into their hell of technology-dependence. Resist such valve decisions, I say, for the simple contentment of not knowing what you’re missing is irreplaceable once lost.

If the world plunges into a new dark age on our watch, it’ll be hard enough to keep chipper without electricity, the sensation of a full stomach and a third of the UK above sea level. We don’t want to compound that grief by feeling bereft without the robot that used to ease our bums into freshness with a tepid spritz and a mist of cologne. Any luxurious pleasure it may give now will be dwarfed by the misery of its loss and what that represents, in the event of a penurious future.

Which is why I’ve always been very careful when buying wine. When I was a student, everyone bought the cheapest bottle – the £3 red. But then, at some point, a mixture of shame and a sense of entitlement, or the prospect of a dinner party at which the origin of each brought bottle will be impossible to conceal, makes you spend a bit more, go for the £5. This does not merely equate to an extra cost of £2, but to £2 multiplied by the number of bottles of wine you will buy for the rest of your life. It’s another valve decision – go up a notch in wine price and your palate won’t let you go back. This means that if you get poorer in the future, you will just have to – and I hesitate to use such an offensive phrase – drink less wine.

I’m sounding like a miser – or as if I take a “glass half empty” attitude to a ludicrous conclusion, where the joy of any purchase is pre-emptively counteracted by the fear of future dismay at not being able to repeat it. Maybe I should buy a top-of-the-range washlet to prove I can be optimistic? Or would people just think that was typically anal?

At the high points of my childhood – holidays, birthdays, picnics, Christmas – my father took photographs. This took the shine off many of the high points. Watching my dad take a photo is exquisitely frustrating. Until about 1995, he still had the camera he’d been given for his 21st birthday. This was quite an expensive item in its day. Clearly capable of “proper” photography, it should’ve made light work of capturing my mum, my brother and me in front of a castle or behind a Knickerbocker Glory.

But the ice cream would usually have melted by the time the snap was taken because the camera had dozens of dials and buttons to adjust. My father was uncomfortable doing this unobserved and would make everyone pose with the appropriate grins before he started to grapple with the settings. Just when you thought he was ready and he’d put the camera to his eye – just when you really believed you were about to get your life back and actually enjoy the leisure experience he was attempting to immortalise – he’d remember there was one more knob to fiddle with and start studying the machine again while asking “How far am I?” to which my mother would, in an exhausted monotone, invariably reply: “Ten feet.”

These photos are a bizarre historical document. These were a people, future archaeologists will think, who spent their whole lives in weary celebration. Their dwellings were permanently festooned with greenery and tinsel, their children expected to spend hours digging aimlessly by the sea, using flimsy tools, in a state of near nakedness. And their diet consisted almost entirely of ice cream, turkey and plum pudding. I hadn’t realised, until I looked through a few of the annual pictures of our Christmas pudding being set alight, that my father was engaged in an ambitious time-lapse photography project to illustrate the human ageing process. I can watch myself grow tall, speccy, spotty, then plump, then wrinkled, while the Christmas pudding, for all its engulfing flames, is unchanging.

Photographs happen very differently now. As someone off the telly, I’m acutely conscious that everyone is carrying a phone and every phone has a camera. If there’s any truth in that whole photographs-stealing-your-soul thing, then much of my soul is divided between hundreds of images of me grinning inanely next to strangers. And what most of those soul-shards are thinking is: “This is even slower than my dad! Why does no one know how to work their own cameraphone?” And those are the nice people who ask. There’s always the risk of running into someone who thinks that a shot of me picking my nose on the tube will make a perfect desktop backdrop to share with their Facebook friends.

The England football team learned this to their cost when a snap taken of them a few hours after being knocked out of the 2010 World Cup leaked into the public domain via defender Ledley King’s BlackBerry. In the
Daily Mail
, it was accompanied by the headline: “Cigars, drinks, feet up … you’d think this bunch of flops had won the World Cup.”

Whoever wrote that has an extremely tame idea of what a World Cup winners’ party might be like. There is one cigar on show and one foot on a table. Maybe cigars do conjure up notions of victory – although I doubt Churchill abstained during Gallipoli – but I don’t think a foot on a table and a lager is much of a celebratory binge.

The picture shows some men sitting in chairs chatting, and that’s exactly what I’d imagine the England team would be doing soon after losing a match. Are they supposed to be crying, tearing their hair out or whipping themselves? Grief isn’t usually physically noticeable, still less disappointment – neither precludes smiling. If you took a picture at most wakes, you’d see people laughing at jokes, eating and drinking – and they’ve lost a lot more than a football match. The absence of self-harm and ululation doesn’t mean people are callously unmoved any more than its presence guarantees that they care.

It’s not just a problem for people in the public eye; intrusive images are everywhere. Google Street View had to apologise to a mother when one of its camera cars accidentally photographed her naked child. And the BBC has been criticised for its lingering shots of Wimbledon crowd members canoodling. The corporation says it only uses such pictures to conjure up the atmosphere of a relaxed and romantic setting, but the poor man who was filmed nibbling his girlfriend’s ear is still going to feel stupid. Particularly if he’s also got a wife.

And there are the thousands of people walking trepidatiously into job interviews in the knowledge of all the compromising pictures of them at student parties that, thanks to some overzealous Facebook acquaintance, are freely Googleable. The internet and the cameraphone are fighting a devastating pincer movement against privacy.

I don’t know how scared to be. On the one hand, it all feels like a terrifying advance in surveillance, as if the CCTV cameras, like Triffids, are now moving towards and among us. On the other, if millions and then billions of photos are being taken every day, maybe any individual one will lose its force.

Our attitudes to photography are stuck in the past: instinctively, we assume both that “the camera never lies” and that all photos are imbued with significance and care, just like the ones my dad takes. Tabloid newspapers still make hay out of putting a snap of a celebrity looking tired and wrinkly next to a glossy publicity shot. They wouldn’t do that if it didn’t still shock and fascinate some readers.

But if we maintain our current levels of casual cameraphone photography, maybe a more accurate cumulative truth about humanity will emerge. We won’t fall for the airbrushed glamour shots any more because there’ll be so much evidence showing what these people, what all people, really look like on an average
Tuesday. We’ll realise that the camera can lie, but that 10 million cameras are unlikely to.

And we might also realise that a snap of someone smiling despite having lost a football match, looking tired despite being a millionaire pop star or throwing up at a party despite wanting to be an accountant, doesn’t actually mean that much.

On the occasion of an accurately predicted cold snap in 2010 …

Weather forecasters must be breathing a sigh of relief this weekend and congratulating themselves as they watch it billow out in front of them. They successfully forecast a big weather event. There’ll be no hostile headlines. No one asking what we’re paying these wastrels for and why we don’t go back to consulting chicken gizzards. They could still be in trouble with their long-term predictions – perhaps they’ve promised a humid Christmas or barbecue spring – but they told us we were going to freeze our arses off last week and we did.

Maybe this cold snap was a cinch for them. Maybe the big stuff is easier to spot than fiddly yet crucial details like whether it will start raining in Harrogate before or after it gets dark. It’s been 23 years since they last missed a hurricane and I can almost feel the frustration of any meteorologist stumbling across this article at reading another mention of it. “You miss one hurricane and you never hear the end of it! What about all the drizzle that we got right? If Michael Fish has never self-harmed, it’s no thanks to the media.”