Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life

by David Mitchell

  Maybe, for such people, a trek that’s chocolatey is preferable to even the briefest normal scrub. And, if you genuinely get bored while cleaning your teeth, the very oddness of doing it with something chocolate-flavoured, even if you find it repulsive, may help you through that purgatorial couple of minutes. If so, it can’t end here. New flavours will be needed to maintain the novelty – “Bacon Cheese Wham”, “Onion Beef Grind”, “Lemongrass Paella Crash”.

  And that’s the least of it. Having created a society in which some of us are so reliant on perpetual diversion that there needs to be something interesting even about our toothpaste, we must set to work on alleviating other boring moments. To do otherwise would be cruel. Modern life still contains dozens of potential tiny pits of mind-numbing despair which must be made more chocolatey …

  Bleach MP4 player

  Pouring bleach down a lavatory is boring. Long seconds alone, looking down a toilet bowl – you can’t watch television and it’s difficult to work an iPod wearing rubber gloves. It’s an unacceptable moment of intense tedium, a massive drop in our quality of life. The solution? A new brand of bleach which has little disposable MP4 players on the bottom of the bottles, activated as you pour. Bacteria die in their millions while, oblivious as a drone pilot, you’re distracted by a YouTube clip.

  Toast chloroform

  Waiting for toast to pop up is like being imprisoned for a mini-eternity – unable to forget about the toast and get on with your life by putting some toast on or something, and unable to eat the toast. It condemns us to an invisible cage around the toaster for what might as well be forever until it ends. In this age of pharmaceutical miracles, couldn’t the toaster be designed to administer a tiny dose of a knockout drug through the lever you press to put the bread down? Just enough to deliver oblivion for the stultifying toasting time, allowing us to wake and pick ourselves up off the kitchen floor at exactly the moment the toast pops.

  Karaoke hoover

  The tuneless drone of a vacuum cleaner could be made entertaining merely by altering that adjective. If your Dyson moaned a melody as it sucked its dust, the bored human hooverer would have something to sing along to. A microphone in the machine’s handle could upload your vocals as an informal new first round of The Voice.

  Waiting-for-someone-to-stop-talking jingles

  Conversations stink. Half the time you’re not even talking while someone you know is slowly saying what you knew they’d say, because you know them, but you have to wait until they stop saying it before you get to speak. It’s tedious, it causes rows, and technology has rendered it unnecessary: a hearing-aid-sized MP3 player can alleviate these moments by playing stirring snatches of music unless you happen to be talking yourself. After you finish a remark, it gives your interlocutor a few seconds to agree with you before fading in some classic beats, very much like the band at the Oscars when some lighting technician starts thanking his wife.

  *

  The name of the new version of Google’s Android operating system has been announced. What an odd sentence that is. How sophisticated our civilisation has become! When one of our ancestors first paused for a moment to select a particularly sharp bit of rock with which to attempt to skin a mammoth, little did he, or she (that’s saved me a letter), know where we’d all end up.

  One day you’re just restricting the roaming options of some goats using a bit of creeper, or working out which little bits of grit to stick in the ground for there to be cabbages in a few months’ time, and then, within a cosmic twinkling of an eye, some people are earning their food and shelter by announcing the new name of the slightly altered version of a totally intangible thing.

  They don’t actually make the totally intangible thing. They don’t even alter the totally intangible thing themselves. Neither do they themselves think of the new name for this updated abstract noun. They just announce that new name. That’s where it was heading, Ancestor Ug, when you first got a fire to light. You started a chain reaction which led inexorably to PR.

  I’m not really a luddite. I haven’t got the commitment or the physical strength to smash anything. I’m just a whinger really, so I know that we sort of do need operating systems. They may be intangible but they’re not purposeless. They’re much closer kin to a hand-axe than they are to a mission statement. Or a poem, for that matter. But I’m fairly sure that they don’t really need names and, if you give them names, it doesn’t really matter what those names are as long as they’re different from one another – as long as you don’t give two different versions of an operating system the same name. I think I just had an idea for the most boring farce ever written.

  What I still haven’t done, I realise, is told you the name of the new version of Google’s Android operating system. I’m slightly tempted not to. After all, if you’re properly interested in that sort of thing, then (a) you probably already know its name, and (b) there’s something wrong with you.

  But I will. It’s called KitKat. That’s not a coincidence. It’s deliberately named after the chocolate bar. Apparently Nestlé is fine with that. It’s not sponsorship – it hasn’t paid for the name of its product to be written on this thing you can’t write on – but the company has allowed it. “This is not a money-changing-hands kind of deal,” explained John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships.

  That’s quite unusual. When A’s label is sported by B, one of A or B is almost always charging to offset the reputational cost. The Premier League must reckon that the money Barclays pays adequately compensates it for being publicly associated with a discredited bank. Conversely, clothes designers wouldn’t consent to their names being plastered all over so many of the world’s most vain and stupid people unless they’d been lavishly remunerated first.

  But for Google and Nestlé, there’s no dowry. This genuinely seems to be a love match. Admittedly, Google’s options were limited: every version of the operating system has been named after some sort of cake or sugary snack (unbranded ones up to now). The company has been moving through the alphabet, starting at “cupcake”, and had got as far as “jelly bean”. So it needed an edible treat beginning with K and went off its first idea: “We realised that very few people actually know the taste of a key lime pie,” lamented Lagerling.

  So KitKat really hit the spot. I’m familiar with the feeling. Sometimes I wonder how dastardly a third world scam Nestlé would need to pull to make me consider buying a Biscuit Boost. Still, Google’s decision is surprising. It aspires to be squeaky clean. As aspirations go, it’s not been looking particularly realistic of late as the corporation’s tax avoidance has become more evident, but it’s still a company that tries to generate a wholesome, quirky, Californian vibe. That’s why it called an operating system Cupcake. That’s why its offices are full of free snacks for employees. There’s still a faint echo of “Don’t Be Evil” in the think spaces and mood rooms, albeit with an irritating interrogative inflection.

  So it’s odd that it would voluntarily couple one of its products with that of a company with a shameful history of wringing money from the poorest people on Earth. To my mind, the risks involved in that association outweigh the fact that more people have heard of a KitKat than a key lime pie. I don’t think the people at Google are doing anything wrong by using KitKat’s name – they’re not the ones peddling powdered milk in the developing world – but I don’t understand why they’ve done it.

  Then again, I don’t understand much about them. These are people who equate a new operating system for a smartphone with a lovely cake. To me, that makes about as much sense as naming cancers after Beatrix Potter characters. Apple’s equivalent system seems to be based on feline predators – Puma, Tiger, Leopard, etc – which makes slightly more sense because of the feelings of hostility and fear that every new stage of corporate tinkering with how a computer works evokes in me.

  But if a simple numbering or lettering system is too unwacky for either corporation to countenance, might not a series of painful chronic
illnesses be more appropriate? That would conjure up the endless spirit-sapping tedium of staring at a screen, and trying to make it do things, much more effectively than a pussy or a bun. Sciatica, Arthritis, Crohn’s disease or – and maybe this is what the list of Android names is building up to – Type 2 diabetes. (But why didn’t they think of a new name when the second type came out?)

  It remains to be seen how the Google–KitKat reputational trade-off will work out. Will association with the tedious smartphone millstones round all of our necks damage the KitKat’s biscuity allure more than its parent company’s immoral African marketing strategy? Will Google’s cosying up to the cold Swiss giant piss the public off more or less than its deft accounting?

  Is this, for Google, a public embrace of moral ambiguity? The world is harsh and complex, it’s saying. Nothing is certain – except possibly death, but certainly not taxes. Evil is in the eye of the beholder. And there aren’t many sweets that begin with K.

  *

  For as long as I can remember, there have been chocolate bars next to the tills at supermarkets. It was my first experience of retail guile. “Never mind that trolley full of boring stuff you need, like bleach and runner beans and bin bags, why not buy something you want?!” the displays seemed to be saying. “Come on, let go a little, relax your bottom on to the comfortable surface of this lovely slippery slope.”

  Those were the terms in which my parents, keen for me to grow up well grounded in cynicism, explained things to me. Sweets, chocolates and crisps were all very well, but to buy them by the checkout, on an impulse, was falling into a trap. Instead, I was taught the pleasure of watching other people fall into it and feeling smug. The fact that the sensation of smugness was more pleasurable to me than that of salt or sugar tells you all you need to know about the kind of monster who comes to prominence in modern Britain.

  So I was alarmed to hear that this pleasure may soon be denied me. Jane Ellison, the public health minister, has identified the placing of delicious crap near tills as “an area for action under the Responsibility Deal” and said: “Parents have indicated that positioning of sweets at checkouts can increase pestering to purchase by their children.” This contrasts strongly with the comments of her predecessor, Anna Soubry, who said: “There’s nothing wrong with sweets,” and “I just said no to my children.” Her confrontational approach caught the prime minister’s eye and she’s since been moved to the Ministry of Defence.

  However, when it comes to tempting checkout areas, David Cameron is in Ellison’s camp. In 2006, still fresh with zeal to change the world, he condemned the disgraceful absence of fresh fruit from newsagents. “Try and buy a newspaper at the train station and, as you queue to pay, you’re surrounded, you’re inundated by cut-price offers for giant chocolate bars,” he said. “As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith’s promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?”

  That was ages ago, so I assume someone will have given him an answer by now. But just in case, I’ll have a go. Well, you see, WH Smith is a newsagents’ chain so it’s really not set up to deal with fresh fruit. I don’t know whether Mr Cameron imagined it diversifying into oranges alone or providing a whole fruit range, but either course presents logistical difficulties and wouldn’t, in my view, provide sufficient revenue to compensate for stopping selling sweets and chocolate or hiding them at the back with the A–Zs and toner cartridges.

  But what about his point regarding obesity? Well, you see, WH Smith is a newsagents’ chain and has no responsibility for public health. Its management answers to shareholders who are unlikely to view a reduction in national fatness as mitigation for a collapse in confectionery sales. That’s what happens with a free market – I’m surprised he’s got a problem with it.

  Suspicious though I am of supermarket chains, I do feel it’s unreasonable of the government to expect shops not to arrange their wares to best advantage. It’s like saying ice-cream vans mustn’t turn up at parks on sunny days because it’s unfairly tempting, and should only be allowed during thunderstorms – and only then selling to those who have thrice refused the offer of some lentil broth.

  Special rules apply to tobacco and alcohol, but do we really want to extend similar exceptions to everything else that might do us harm? In moderation, almost anything is fine and, out of all moderation, absolutely nothing is – you can be crushed under a ton of vitamin tablets, ingest so much water you drown, eat so many sprouts you have to get a Corgi certificate.

  How are we to categorise which are the officially unhealthy foods, the shameful merchandise that needs to be separated out like booze and fags? Carrots are definitely good and Haribo definitely isn’t. Easy. Crisps bad, eggs good (they’ve got the good sort of cholesterol this month). Cheese – bad? But what about all the calcium? And kids don’t tend to ask for some Shropshire Blue in the way they’ll latch on to a Fanta. But what about cheese string?

  Nuts – they’re good, they can go by the tills. Then again, what about salted nuts? Let’s keep them away. Then what about slightly salted nuts? As soon as the category is defined, the search will be on for the most unhealthy food that doesn’t fall into it, which can then be arranged temptingly round the checkouts.

  I’m being naive. It won’t be done like that – this is the “big society”, after all. As a Department of Health spokesman said: “We have been clear that legislation is not necessary and that the voluntary approach through the Responsibility Deal is working.” So there’ll be no new rules and the supermarkets will act of their own accord out of their sincere wish to do good. And by “out of their sincere wish to do good”, I mean “to head off the threat of legislation while their lobbyists get to work on ministers”.

  The only virtue of which public limited companies are capable, in my view, is honesty. We can sometimes make them tell the truth. We can make them publish accurate accounts, use transparent employment practices and hold public shareholder meetings. When corporations cannot lie, the world is a better place. Yet, under this policy, we are requiring them to lie.

  Supermarket employees and management may share Jane Ellison’s concerns about public health, but the institutions themselves – these vast organisations owned by thousands of shareholders and shareholding institutions – are incorporated purely to make a profit. They therefore wish to sell as many sweets, as much of anything, as possible. They do not – they cannot – want customers to restrict their purchases to what is good for them and, by harassing these companies to say they do, we force them to lie.

  The world is not safe and we don’t make it safer by pretending it is. People should expect naked commercialism from retailers – we all need to get used to it and learn to resist it. It’s as honest as any kind of predation. By forcing supermarkets to lie about their aims, we inhibit the development of public cynicism and, like an over-relied-upon satnav, lure people into believing that it is safe to proceed without vigilance.

  4

  Saying You Want to Make a Difference Makes No Difference

  None of the problems discussed above is primarily our politicians’ fault. And that’s a bigger problem. Modern politicians don’t seem to do much – everything happens despite them, not because of them, starting with the credit crunch.

  That crisis happened in spite of what Gordon Brown did – he certainly wanted to avoid it. His political opponents claim that his policies created the conditions for the crash, but few really believe it would have been averted if a Tory or a Lib Dem had been chancellor of the exchequer since 1997 instead. So it didn’t matter who the politicians were or, seemingly, what they did – the disaster was inevitable. Whoever we’d voted for, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  But they command quite a few column inches for such an irrelevant section of the community, probably even more than footballers and royals. In this section, I look at their desperate attempts to say what we want to hear, and at their transparent obsession with how they come across.


  Part 1: Before the Election

  As Gordon Brown’s government meandered towards its lacklustre conclusion, it had plenty of feeble ideas, but I was particularly depressed by one from June 2009, largely because the Tories were so envious of it.

  Sir Alan Sugar, the government’s new “enterprise tsar” (calling him “captain of the enterprise” would have been more fun), could lose his TV show if the Tories get their way. Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, reckons BBC rules would be broken if Sugar continued to front The Apprentice while working for the government.

  Apparently, presenters of BBC shows are supposed to be impartial. I’m not entirely clear what that means. It is sensible that people presenting programmes shouldn’t secretly be in the pay of McDonald’s, Ukip or the Pipe Smoker of the Year organisation. But presenters are allowed to appear in adverts, so it seems that some transparent partiality is OK (thank God). No one’s afraid that Gary Lineker is covertly putting a cheese and oniony spin on the football results.

  So if an openly held bought allegiance wouldn’t stop Sir Alan being a presenter, then surely an equally open set of political opinions should be fine? Not according to Hunt, who said of Sugar: “The idea that he is politically neutral is a bit of a joke; he has written in the Sun, the Mirror, the News of the World criticising David Cameron and the Conservatives in a highly partisan way.”

  Who is “politically neutral”? Do the Tories really expect all BBC presenters, even of programmes as trivial as The Apprentice (we’re not talking about Newsnight here), to hold no opinions at all? Has it not occurred to Hunt that, in expressing his anti-Conservative views, Sugar isn’t revealing himself to be part of an insidious cabal, but merely saying what he thinks? He is demonstrating that he’s someone who, like all of us except a few morons, holds opinions.