Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  Other examples of hip new barely scented scents are “You”, for “millennials” who, according to its creator, “like scent to be personal”; “Dauphine” – “The concept is extreme cleanliness,” says its designer; and the godfather of the trend, first made back in 2006, “Escentric Molecule 01”, described by the New York Times as “one of the top-selling niche fragrances of all time”, though I suppose you could wear it wherever you like. These products are “the olfactory equivalent of no-makeup makeup, in which people spend hundreds of hours, and dollars, to look effortless”.

  To say this is a bit emperor’s new clothes is an understatement. The emperor’s stylists at least claimed their clothes were detectable by some. These perfumers are marketing substances which they admit are virtually unnoticeable to everyone. They talk of bringing out people’s natural scent but, if that was appealing, minicabs wouldn’t have little Christmas trees hanging from their rear-view mirrors. Perhaps it’s all a ploy to sell more deodorant, to be applied as soon as the perfume kicks in.

  Another cosmetic straddling both types is hair dye. Which type of cosmetic it is seems to depend, broadly and as a generalisation (so don’t say, “That’s a generalisation!” because I’ve admitted it’s a generalisation), on gender. Dyed hair on a woman is seen as type two, and on a man as type one. For women, hair dyeing is culturally accepted as an overt cosmetic choice; in fact, it gets called “colouring”, a word that implies agency and choice. But for men, it’s simply hair dye, suggesting concealment. It’s lying about having gone grey, just as a toupee is lying about having gone bald.

  It’s odd. Lots of men don’t like going bald or grey, ostensibly because of what it looks like. But you can very effectively change what it looks like. Yet, somehow, any attempt to make such a change is associated with shame. We’re a world away from bald men openly saying, “Yes, I went bald and I didn’t like how it looked, so now I wear this terrific wig!”

  There are clearly people who think being bald makes you look like a loser – but there’s a broader agreement, even among those who don’t mind baldness, that you’re an enormous loser if you try to hide it. Unless, of course, you successfully hide it, in which case you look like a winner who never had the misfortune to go bald.

  The type-one cosmetics lie is about luck and vanity – hiding the absence of the former and the presence of the latter – and, as with all issues to do with appearance, it inevitably gets tangled up with sexism. On the surface, it seems unfair on men that there’s shame attached to them dyeing their hair, when women can openly colour theirs. Underlying that, though, is the deeper unfairness that old-looking men are allowed to be newsreaders and old-looking women aren’t.

  So when women try to “reverse the effects of ageing”, it’s a way of coping with the patriarchy. When men do it, they’re just kidding themselves about death.

  * * *

  Let me put my cards on the table: I’m not a fan of the orange KitKat. It’s nothing to do with Nestlé’s marketing of baby milk, before you mistake me for a hand-wringing liberal. No, I’m a snack-eating liberal and, when I’m peckish, I don’t give a shit. I’ll happily eat a normal KitKat and let the world be damned.

  The way globalisation is going, you’d never get anywhere if you started worrying about the moral failings of whoever owns the thing that owns the thing that owns the thing that makes the thing you need. Doubtless most prayer books are now published by subsidiaries of conglomerates with satanist mission statements. I bet the Sultan of Brunei somehow controls the global supply of a dye vital to the manufacture of rainbow flags. And probably all of the world’s, I don’t know, birthday cards are made by corporations partly owned by pension funds managing the retirement savings of, among other people, racists. And racists hate birthdays.

  The car keys of some absolute monsters are in our shared global swingers’ bowl, but we didn’t listen to Lenin, so it’s too late to do anything about it now. That’s just the way the wind blows the pampas grass, so neck your Lambrusco, take your pick and count yourself lucky if you avoid the Citroën – that guy’s bound to be a pervert. Because, at the end of the day, everyone gets screwed.

  So my antipathy towards orange KitKats isn’t about corporate responsibility. It’s because, when eating a normal KitKat, I have never thought, or come close to thinking, “I wish this tasted of orange.” I knew it wouldn’t, and so I was content that it didn’t. And I neither understand nor forgive anyone who actually would think that. It would be like eating a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and wishing it didn’t taste of orange. Or eating an actual orange and wishing it tasted of apple. Or looking at the new Dairy Milk bar with bits of marshmallow in it and thinking, “Ooh, interesting!” rather than “That is literally the worst abomination committed by humankind.” In short, it’s the thought process of someone who likes films to be in 3D.

  “Are you, then, the right person,” you may be asking, “to write about the merits or otherwise of the Natural History Museum and Hasbro’s new twist on Monopoly, Monopoly Dinosaurs?” If you are asking that, full marks for prescience, because that’s exactly what I’m about to do. But absolute minimum marks (which is probably a B or a 2 these days – there’s no point compounding stupidity with low self-esteem) for fair criticism, because the very last person you want passing judgment on Monopoly Dinosaurs is one of those “Ooh, interesting!” juxtaposition junkies munching their peppermint Wotsits, washed down by a can of Cadbury’s Creme Sperm.

  I realise there’s long been more than one Monopoly – and I don’t mean Amazon and Google. I mean more than one version of the game: Star Wars, 007, Virgin Money, Nottingham, and so on. In fact, Amazon and Google don’t actually have Monopolies. Sets of Monopoly for sale, that is. I Googled, I looked on Amazon and found nothing – and how else can you buy anything? Perhaps they fear the implications of its name next to theirs, like when Pavarotti refused to endorse an Italia 90 version of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

  By the 1930s there were already two Monopolies: the American one, based on Atlantic City, and the British one, set in London. The latter was brought out so that the game resonated more with British customers, and I understand the pressure to keep it feeling relevant. But who at Hasbro, in this day and age, thought the best way of doing that, of catching the imagination of the aspirant plutocrat kids of today, was to move it out of the field of property development and into palaeontology? Because buying and selling houses for inflated sums is so last century, while academic research is where it’s at?

  Monopoly is a game that rewards getting rich without making anything. It’s about wealth creation via the aggressive use of ownership. It was ahead of its time. The logical response to our current era would be to take games about dinosaurs, or indeed anything else, and turn them into property trading games like Monopoly, where success or failure depends entirely on luck and circumstances rather than merit. Add an extra Chance card, where you lose the rent from one of your cheaper properties when it burns down because you cut corners refurbishing it, plus a load more Get Out of Jail Free cards, and it’s a game about Britain today.

  I’m not sure that would be appropriate for the Natural History Museum shop, though. Customers will have just seen a lot of dinosaur skeletons and information about dinosaurs, and so retail orthodoxy dictates they’ll want to buy things with dinosaurs on them: mugs, pens, badges, games of Monopoly. And, from the game’s blurb, it’s clear the adapters gave the new version a full five minutes’ thought: “Lay claim to each dinosaur fossil, and leave tents and jeeps on your fascinating discoveries. Then watch the rent come pouring in as you make deals with other palaeontologists.” So I’m guessing a jeep on Tyrannosaurus rex is something a rival palaeontologist really wants to avoid landing on. Much worse than, say, two tents on an iguanodon.

  Unfortunately, I think my cynicism about this game springs from naivety. “Why would they make that?” I’m instinctively asking. When I looked at the full list of Monopoly versions – and there are hundreds – I realised it
was the wrong question. I should have asked, “Why not?”, to which it seems the market supplies no adequate answer. I don’t know why, but the manufacturing costs have obviously sunk so low that they may as well make one.

  A handful will buy it, and that’s enough: some 3D-film buffs, plus those saviours of capitalism, people who are buying a present for someone. They don’t have to think the game’s worth having, just that it’ll look appropriate to whoever unwraps it.

  Together, they’re enough to make Monopoly Dinosaurs pay for itself, just as they were with Dino-opoly in 2004 and Monopoly Dinosaur (singular) in 2010. And indeed Monopoly Harrow School Edition, Dachshund-opoly, Monopoly Corvette 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition and the rest. Like a bastardised chocolate bar, each causes a microscopic synapse of surprise to fire, a sensation we fleetingly mistake for fun.

  * * *

  A small good thing happened the other day, but in a context of such stupidity and unfairness that it only brought home to me more strongly all that stupidity and unfairness, so I’d almost rather it hadn’t happened at all. The good thing was that the train operator “Great Western Railway”, which is owned by FirstGroup plc, was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority from putting up any more posters implying it’s publicly owned. Specifically, posters that read: “The railway belongs to the region it serves”.

  There’s a tiny bit of justice in that decision, but so tiny it insults the very concept. Only a homeopath could believe that such a microscopic quantity of justice could have any beneficial effect. It’s like hearing that, though a serial killer will walk free, the judge has ruled, after a desperate appeal by the prosecution, that he will no longer be given free biscuits at the public expense. Hooray! No more biscuits for the Kensington Ripper! Maybe he’ll leave fewer crumbs around his next eviscerated victim!

  You may be wondering why I’m getting so worked up about this that, in bad temper, I’ve allowed the imagery of violent mutilation to invade my discussion of transport infrastructure. You may be wondering it in exactly those words. If you wonder in words. Perhaps thoughts come to you as shapes or colours; with me, it’s like a typescript in 12-point Courier. Serves me right for not doing art GCSE.

  The root cause of my anger is that the posters’ slogan is factually correct. The railway, on which FirstGroup currently operates services under the name “Great Western Railway”, does indeed belong to the region it serves, if you take “the region” to mean Britain. All of our national railways – the tracks, bridges, cuttings and tunnels – are owned by Network Rail, which is owned by the government.

  In modern times, private investment hasn’t really taken off in the track-maintenance part of the railway business. Investors prefer to confine their liabilities to the trains, ticket machines and refreshment carts – the bits for which passengers pay money – and leave the bits that cost money to the state. It’s an incredibly astute move on the investors’ part, and is doubtless further proof to the likes of George Osborne of the genius of the private sector when compared with the doltish bridge-and-tunnel-maintaining public one, which just burns money on boring infrastructure (in the case of tunnels), but lacks the wit even to extort £3 per extremely unpleasant croissant from the thousands regularly held temporarily but hungrily captive thanks to the failure of its own signals.

  Companies like FirstGroup never take direct responsibility for anything as headachy as maintaining hundreds of miles of undulating track. They’re just tenants: they rent use of the lines from the government, from us. So FirstGroup is our customer, just as much as we’re its. And it’s been quite demanding over the years.

  In 2011, it announced it was pulling out of its 10-year contract three years early. A presciently negotiated “break-clause” allowed this. Unfortunately for us, of the £1.13bn of rent it was contracted to pay over the decade, £826m was due over the last three years – the three years the company adroitly opted out of.

  This left the landlord, which is us, which is the government, in an awkward position. Does it look for a new tenant who might pay the £826m, or something approaching it, instead? That’s what it ought to do. Otherwise, what force does any future government franchise contract have? How can a landlord expect to receive rent if the sanction for refusing to pay it isn’t eviction?

  Unfortunately, the government’s most recent attempt to negotiate a major new rail franchise is universally known as the “West Coast Main Line fiasco”. The Department for Transport, shaken by cuts and new rules, totally screwed it up, and its decision was effectively reversed after a legal challenge by the incumbent franchisee.

  So rather than get into all that again, the government basically told FirstGroup it could stay put. After all, its stuff was everywhere – an eviction would have been an admin nightmare. Or maybe the minister had just seen an upsetting news report about homelessness. Instead of the £826m under the original contract, the company agreed to pay £32.5m for a 23-month extension, a sum which economists have described as “massively less”.

  I’ve been miserably aware for years that this sort of crap went on. The contrast between extortionate and unreliable trains and the jaunty corporate slogans with which private operators daub their dirty carriages and demoralised staff has always made me resentful. The discovery that what the private sector lacks in willingness to maintain a rail network, it makes up for in the ferocity of its bargaining with exhausted and under-resourced civil servants, is not a very surprising one.

  But the rebranding of FirstGroup’s rail services (last autumn, after it had just been granted a further four-year franchise extension) as “Great Western Railway” added insult to ongoing and repetitive injury. For me, that really was the shit the burglars did in your bed. The adoption of the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s famous company, which actually built the railway, by one which merely profits from it is an act of breathtaking cheek. It’s up there with Mussolini appropriating the trappings of the Roman Empire.

  The Advertising Standards Authority has said nothing about that, merely that the firm mustn’t imply public ownership. The company has escaped official censure for another advert, which described Brunel as “our illustrious founder”. He is no such thing. The company Brunel founded was bought in 1948 by the British state, a purchaser that continues to own and maintain the railway he designed.

  Meanwhile, the owner of this reproduction GWR grew out of the merger of some post-privatisation bus companies in the late 80s. FirstGroup plc doesn’t build things – that’s risky and expensive, as Brunel discovered on many occasions. Its mode of business is to profit from state enterprises thrust into private hands by Tories for ideological reasons.

  Were it not for the availability of public assets at a bargain price, and state subsidies when returns disappoint – and if it actually had to build a railway in order to operate one – FirstGroup might find it tricky to give shareholder value. But, like a sewer rat, it’s perfectly evolved for the conditions in which it exists. Which is fine, I suppose. Right up until the rat claims to have designed the sewer himself because his main aim in life has always been cleanliness.

  * * *

  The news that Salad Cream is considering changing its name to Sandwich Cream put me fondly in mind of British Gas. Kraft Heinz, the vast conglomerate that makes the 100-year-old goo, is considering a change because, as its spokesman told trade magazine the Grocer, the name no longer “fairly represents the product’s ingredients or usage occasions”.

  Obviously, this raises as many questions as it answers, and I haven’t even got to why it made me think of gas. In fact, I probably mentioned that too soon, because there’s quite a lot I need to get out of my system first about this quote – a process that coincidentally may make you think of gas as well.

  The name no longer represents its ingredients? What does that mean? No one ever thought the stuff was made of salad, did they? Are they now hoping to imply that it’s made of sandwiches? Sandwiches are a very unusual ingredient – they’re more of an end pr
oduct of a culinary process, like a pie or an omelette or a pavlova. You don’t put sandwiches in things, you put things in sandwiches. Salad Cream, for example.

  So I get the “usage occasions” part. Apparently, these days only 14% of the cream’s usage occasions are saladous, while I imagine considerably more are sandwichsome (I claim first usage occasion of both of those adjectives). And this anomaly has started to irk some of the people at Kraft Heinz – people who are paid to consider tinkering with things, and probably feel their salaries are harder to justify if they always say everything’s fine as it is. The more they think about Salad Cream being used in sandwiches, and not being used on salads, the more it’s like a painting that needs straightening, the more it niggles.

  Speaking of niggles, there’s no cream in it, in case that thought’s been bothering you for a couple of paragraphs. Obviously, it is a sort of cream (as in opaque viscous liquid), but it contains no cream (as in what rises to the top of the milk) at all. So the second part of its name isn’t an ingredient signifier either, and they’re planning to keep it anyway. I hadn’t missed that – I just thought it went without saying. And then my confidence that it went without saying ebbed away until I said it anyway, just as the confidence at Kraft Heinz that calling something Salad Cream will not be taken as prohibiting its use in other contexts has ebbed away until they stand on the brink of an epic cock-up: customers looking for Salad Cream suddenly won’t be able to find it, and there is currently no one in the world, wandering around any supermarket anywhere, looking for a substance called Sandwich Cream. “Disappointed with your current sandwich moistening agent? Why not try something you’ve never heard of from Heinz?”