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

by David Mitchell

  I was amused by this insight into what a transport minister does: makes speeches. So, if he’s working from home, he’s making speeches at home and then emailing the videos to people. I wonder if he’s bought himself a little lectern? He could get a range of plastic microphones with the logos of international broadcasters stuck on them. Alternatively, he could just grab a shampoo bottle and do it in the shower. I’ve often suspected that endless pontificating was all a politician’s life consisted of, and that the actual business of government was handled by the reviled bureaucrats, but it was surprising to hear that view confirmed by a minister.

  But Michael Gove is a more senior member of the government. He doesn’t just make speeches, he also comes up with “eye-catching initiatives”. Whether it’s sending out Bibles, buying a yacht for the Queen or letting people set up their own schools, he’s got an impresario’s gift for keeping us interested. He holds our attention with the £370,000 he’s spending on gilded scriptures. It distracts from what’s happening with unloved billions elsewhere.

  *

  The age of the weeds is finally dawning. I always knew we’d win. As I stood on the cold playing field, last to be picked for the team, I’d inwardly shake my head at the stronger, sportier boys and mutter: “Dinosaurs.” When they passed me on the athletics track, leaving me wheezing in their wake, I’d cough the word “Dinosaurs” at their retreating plimsolls. As I clattered into the high-jump bar for the umpteenth time, “Dinosaurs” I’d spit at my mocking contemporaries. And when I finally got home in front of the TV, “Dinosaurs!” I’d exclaim at an episode of The Flintstones.

  The latest research has vindicated me. My sedentary, square-eyed childhood was positively futuristic. When I resisted my parents’ and teachers’ efforts to make me acquire puff, I knew which way the wind was blowing – and that if it was blowing at all, I’d better stay indoors playing on my computer. Nowadays, staying indoors playing on computers is what most of us do as a job. You certainly don’t meet many people at parties who earn their living playing rounders or climbing trees.

  This research has been spearheaded (please excuse the atavistic language; I should say “joysticked”) by Dr Grant Tomkinson, who talks about the trends it reveals like they’re a bad thing. But then he is from the University of South Australia, and I reckon Australia will be where the active, outdoorsy T-rexes, who can take a lungful of air without spluttering, will make their final stand – before surrendering to the weeds’ wobbling army of mobility-scootered multiscreeners, on the condition that we show them how to reboot their Wi-Fi.

  “Imagine you are racing over four laps of an Olympic track,” says Tomkinson, unappetisingly. “If you took the average child from 1975, transported them to today, put them against the current average child, they would beat them by almost a lap.” That’s in the unlikely event that the child of today would put his crisps down and agree to the contest. Tomkinson’s analysis of 50 other fitness studies, involving more than 25 million children, concluded that cardiovascular fitness has fallen by 15% in a generation. I like to think I did my bit.

  “If a young person is generally unfit now, then they are more likely to develop conditions like heart disease later in life,” warns Tomkinson. You can tell he’s a sports scientist and not an evolutionary biologist from the meaning he attaches to the word “unfit”. The larger, weaker kids of today could hardly be more fit, more apt, for their crowded, carby, mechanised context. Their cardiovascular capabilities are diminishing appropriately under environmental pressures, like the vestigial wings of a flightless bird.

  And our giant human brains allow us to specialise more quickly than by evolution alone. Most of us may be fatter, slower, wheezier and better at Googling than ever before, but an elite minority of sportspeople are faster and stronger than our most sun-kissed, stone-skimming, rock-climbing, fresh-air-advocating ancestors. So it’s all good.

  But as, over the centuries, full motor function becomes the preserve of a minority of specialist athletes and sex workers, how will all that running around and kicking of projectiles be replaced in the curriculum? We can’t go on with school sport as it currently is – the kids of tomorrow won’t want to look up from their tablets (in either sense) that long. What should the sports day equivalents of tomorrow consist of? Here are some ideas to ensure the metaphorical roundedness of our literally near-spherical descendants.

  Takeaway Day

  The term “takeaway”, the ready-to-eat food which is delivered to your house by an unqualified motorcyclist, is familiar to all of us. But few know the obscure etymology of the phrase. Originally, “takeaways” were meals you had to physically go and get, and then “take away” yourself. On Takeaway Day, the whole school is bussed around to the mysterious places the takeaways come from, to see and learn about the out-of-town biryani vats and chow mein tanks, and the warehouse-sized wood-fired ovens that allow almost as great a surface area of American Hot to be cooked every day as rainforest is cut down to fuel them.

  Phone Tariff Day

  Childhood should be the stage of our lives when we have time for the things that the frantic realities of being an adult deny us: long summer afternoons fishing in a stream, rainy autumn Saturdays curled up with an adventure novel, or, towards the end of the school year, the chance to properly shop around for the right phone tariff. Not only will this save pupils money, the memory of the unbearable boredom of this day will mean that they won’t resent being perpetually fleeced by their mobile phone providers for the rest of their lives – they’ll consider it cheap at the price to avoid enduring the day again.

  Privacy Day

  Privacy was once a common aspiration, before, in 2013, Google futurist Vinton Cerf dismissed it as “an anomaly” and that was that. Under the combined attack of the search engine and the social network, everything about us was laid bare and soulsearching became something you could do through your web browser. But for one day of the year, pupils will be encouraged to stop sharing every aspect of their activities, hopes, dreams, fears and crushes, and keep things private for a few hours. Obviously, the urge to type will be irresistible, but they’ll be given non-Wi-Fi-enabled laptops so that secrecy can be preserved for a few hours. The scheme can pay for itself by then selling this data to marketing firms.

  Ingratiating Yourself With Robots Day

  We can’t do all this super-fast evolving on our own; we’ll need ever more ingenious machinery, which will lead inexorably to the rise of a robot master race. I don’t need to join the dots for you – it’s obvious from TV. So a key skill our young will have to learn is how to get on with our robot masters and, if possible, conjoin with them. An inappropriate subject for a school day, you might think? Well, when the place is crawling with bitter, belligerent and laser-guided Henry hoovers, that’ll be the least of our worries.

  The greatest intellectual specimens of humankind will be chosen to form cyborgs: stripped of their flabby and vestigial outer bodies and installed in a Big Trak or hostess trolley – like the green scrambled egg inside a Dalek that provides the vindictive spirit with which it aims its plunger. But that can only happen after centuries of getting used to no longer being able to climb stairs.

  7

  A Sorry State is Nothing to Apologise For

  Do you think Britain is a great country? I do, basically. It’s embarrassing to admit it. And it feels un-British to admit it, except for the fact that it’s embarrassing, which is a very British sensation. Embarrassment is one of our strongest emotions. Some nationalities wouldn’t even count it as an emotion – it would get lost amid all the joy, hatred, love, ardour and sadness. But, in Britain, it’s one of the big three, alongside scepticism and nostalgia.

  I know there are a lot of things wrong with Britain, but the truth is that I quite like most of them. It’s not what you’d call conventional patriotism but, in this section, I extol the virtues of sexism in the monarchy, self-loathing in the Midlands, taking pride in nuclear weapons, avoiding sunny working conditions
and refusing to dance at parties. These are core British values in my book. And they are literally in my book.

  *

  Who can fail to have been impressed by the spectacle of President Obama’s inauguration? I’ll tell you who – the Queen. I bet she sat there watching it on an unpretentious four-by-three portable, while she sorted dog biscuits into separate Tupperware, muttering: “It’s bullshit, Philip! No carriages, no horses, no crown – it just looks like a bunch of businesspeople getting in and out of cars. It’s as if the Rotary Club’s taken over a whole country. And the new one’s not even the son of one of the previous ones, unlike last time. I thought they were coming round to our way of thinking at last.”

  And she’d have a point. It might have been considerably grander than a new prime minister pulling up outside Number 10 and waving but, compared to the coronation, it looked like someone signing for their security pass and being shown where to hang their mug. And that’s what comes of having an elected head of state. There’s always got to be some fudge between the dignity and status of the office and the politician’s desire to seem humbled by the occasion.

  In fact, it’s one of the most startling examples of politicians’ self-belief that, as they assume positions of massive power for which they have striven, to the exclusion of all other activities, for decades, they’ll still back their chances of coming across as humble. Now there’s an insight into the megalomaniac’s mindset: “Not only can I get to be in charge of everything, I bet I can make people believe that I’m not really enjoying it, so that, thanks to reverse psychology, they’ll want me to stay in power longer!”

  Whereas the Queen didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t enjoying the coronation; from the little bits of grainy footage I’ve seen, it’s hilariously evident. A poor, terrified slip of a girl, the fluttering eye of a storm of pageantry, hesitantly mewing her lines, while thousands of incredibly important people in fancy dress behave as if she’s the Almighty made flesh. That’s what I call a show.

  I don’t envy the Americans their political system. I envy them their success, money, inner belief that everything isn’t doomed to failure, attitude to breakfast, and teeth, but not their constitution. The fact that their figurehead and political leader is the same person gives them a terrible dilemma, especially when it was George W Bush. The man’s clearly a prick (he says he’ll wait for the judgment of history but, if the jury’s out, it’s only because they’re deciding between personable incompetent and evil moron) but even his political enemies were squeamish about calling him one.

  They had to respect the dignity of the office and couldn’t come to terms with the American people having bestowed it on someone who can’t string a sentence together and would only make the world worse if he could. To completely let rip in slagging off Bush would have caused collateral damage to national prestige, not only by undermining the office of president, but more importantly, by openly admitting how far short of its meritocratic self-image America has fallen.

  We in Britain have no illusions about being a classless meritocracy and it’s therefore thoroughly appropriate that our head of state should be chosen by a method dominated by class and utterly and openly devoid of regard for merit. Separated from the nitty-gritty of politics and power, our monarchy can be a focus for both national pride and self-loathing, the latter being much more archetypally British than the former. A harmless little old lady dutifully going about various tasks she finds stressful seems about right for our national figurehead – neither better nor worse than we deserve.

  Don’t mistake me for a republican. I genuinely like this system. It means the most powerful man in the country still has to kowtow to someone (other than the president of the United States). It encourages tourism. The royal family, while nominally our betters, are in fact our captives and an interesting and profitable focus for media attention. It’s as unfair as life: the royals can’t escape and, if you want to become royal, you basically can’t. It’s a more or less functional arrangement that no one would ever have had the wit to devise deliberately.

  Which is why Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris’s attempt to fiddle with it is so enervating. He wants to change the Act of Settlement whereby Catholics can’t marry the sovereign and end the discrimination against female heirs to the throne. He thinks this will make the monarchy more fair. I suppose it will, in the same way that throwing some bread into the Grand Canyon will make it more a sandwich.

  The monarchy is overwhelmingly, gloriously, intentionally unfair – that’s the point. The defining unfairness is that you have to be a member of that family to be king or queen; fringe unfairnesses like their not being able to marry Catholics or men having priority in the line of succession are irrelevant in that context. And what’s so fair about primogeniture, which Harris is not planning to touch, or the sovereign having to be Anglican, which is also apparently fine? He wants to spend parliamentary time, mid-credit crunch, on a law aimed primarily at helping Princesses Anne and Michael of Kent.

  When will people get the message? If you want a fair system, have a republic, elect a president and live with some arsehole like David Cameron giving a speech every Christmas Day afternoon, bitter in the knowledge that you asked for it. Otherwise, we should stick with what we’ve got, rather than trying to tinker. No abdicating, no skipping Charles, no changing weird ancient laws. We get who we get because we’d rather live with the inadequacies of a random ancient structure than the inadequacies of one designed by Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

  The monarchy’s not perfect, but it’s also not harmful, powerful or, and this is the clincher, our fault. The inevitable imperfections of anything we replaced it with would be.

  *

  Birmingham City FC’s next opponent must surely feel that victory is assured – unless, of course, it’s Leicester City or Wolverhampton Wanderers. For not only are these clubs located in an area where, according to a survey, most of the residents want to leave, but they also don’t play in red. And red is the colour of victory, say the Germans.

  This isn’t just sour grapes about losing to reds in 1966, and indeed at Stalingrad, but the result of a study made by sports psychologists at the University of Munster. It found that competitors wearing red scored about 10% more than those dressed in other colours. It seems that the crimson look like they’re winning, which means, more often than not, that they are.

  This explains much: the size and success of the British empire, and its steady decline after the adoption of khaki; the preeminence of Butlins over Pontins; the one-sidedness of so many episodes of Bargain Hunt; why it’s taking so long for communism to give up the ghost. What it doesn’t explain is why a team would ever wear any colour other than red.

  Maybe now they won’t. But I doubt it. I don’t think this study has shown us anything that we haven’t long suspected. Deep down, we all know that red is the best colour – that those who take to the field in the shade of blood, fire and liberty mean business and are likely to sweep aside those emulating grass, the sky, zebras or bees. For the big red teams – Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Aldershot Town – winning is an expectation, and that usually trumps their opponents, for whom it is merely a hope.

  So why don’t they all wear red? “If that happened, how could we tell them apart?” you may say. Well, we’d have long since found a way if most teams weren’t willing to take a 10% performance hit in aid of visual clarity. Sport’s governing bodies would have stepped in and either banned red entirely, inevitably leading to players secretly wearing scarlet underwear, or developed a system of distinguishing between teams by hat shape, smell, the squeaking noise their boots make or some other non-colour-dependent factor.

  Fortunately, that’s not been necessary because so many clubs don’t seem to want to win – or at least are so resigned to defeat that their priority is preparing an excuse rather than striving for victory. “Well, you see, we don’t wear red,” Birmingham City can say to themselves when their relegation is sealed at home to Arsena
l in a few months’ time, “so we never really had a chance.”

  That seems a fittingly resigned approach for a part of the country apparently so despised by its residents. This attitude was revealed in a survey conducted by Orange (I wondered what all their customer services personnel had been doing all this time) which asked people where they would choose to live if the government’s promise of universal broadband access were for some reason honoured.

  The question presupposes that everyone can work anywhere they can get a laptop Googling. I suppose they can, now that every job involves some variation on looking at a screen and clicking. The closest you can get to a manufacturing career nowadays is if you’re the one in a Starbucks who knows how to work the panini machine. There’s no man’s work any more. It’s all done by children in China.

  But 81% of people working in the West Midlands said they’d rather do it anywhere but there, as did 70% of those in the East Midlands. Most were set on relocating to Scotland, London or, most popular of all, the West Country, which would see its population rise by 150% if the Brummies are allowed to get away from it all.

  What are they trying to escape? I don’t know what the Midlands was like before people put things like Wolverhampton there but I don’t suppose it was ugly. It was probably nice countryside. Similarly, there’s no reason to think that Devon and Cornwall, beautiful though they are, would remain so after the installation of a few Spaghetti Junctions and Bullring centres. If you want a taste of what Coventry-on-Sea could be like, take a look at Plymouth.