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

by David Mitchell

  *

  The world needs snakes more than it needs apostrophes. That’s something I never thought I’d see myself type. To be fair, I only saw my hands type it, as I was looking out of my face at the time. But I’m afraid I think my brain might be behind it. My heart certainly isn’t.

  With all my heart, I hate snakes. They’re clearly evil. I’m not the first person to have had that reaction. Whoever wrote Genesis agrees with me, and some people think that’s God. It’s no accident that Adam and Eve were tempted disastrously to test out their free will by a serpent rather than a kitten. Whoever it was, he, He, she or She knew about narrative.

  We tend to find small furry mammals cute and reptiles repulsive, but lay much more significance on the former than the latter. Cruelty to animals is despised largely because of our sense that anyone who could inflict unnecessary pain on something as adorable as a bunny must be perverted. But to follow that logic, anyone who doesn’t spontaneously recoil at a snake, scorpion or spider must have similar problems with their mental wiring.

  It’s not fear of the predator. We’re quite keen on mammalian killers such as lions and bears and it’s experience, rather than repulsion, that dissuades us from petting them. And few would seriously argue that the animals that induce the cute reflex are morally superior to sharks or crocodiles. Cats are clearly psychos. But, for some reason, I’m keener on one of them curled up on my knee than, say, a viper – even one that’s been de-fanged and trained to doze off to the opening credits of The One Show.

  Apostrophes, however, I love with all my heart. I support the correctly used apostrophe with that kind of fierce emotional investment in an irrelevance that most people reserve for football. I know punctuation rules well, derive a lamentably high percentage of my self-esteem from that knowledge and feel, again with my heart, not my brain, that I’m a higher form of life than people who have either forgotten those rules or never been taught them.

  So my heart should be warmed by a week in which (a) steps have been taken to preserve the habitat of the apostrophe by setting up an “Academy of English” to preserve correct linguistic usage, and (b) scientists have warned of a sharp global decline in snake numbers. This is where my brain steps in to ruin its fun.

  Apparently we need snakes. They don’t just hiss, bite and hamper maverick archaeologists. They’re important in all sorts of ecosystems and they predate on rodents in agricultural areas. While I’d much rather come across a mouse than a snake, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer the snake to 2,000 mice, particularly if I’m trying to grow a supper that isn’t mouse.

  Meanwhile, there’s no counterbalancing evidence that correctly applied apostrophes keep comma numbers down, or that the grocer’s ones encourage pesky hyphens. Misuse or omission of the apostrophe seldom confuses meaning and its extinction would do no real harm and is probably inevitable.

  The Queen’s English Society (to which my knee-jerk response is: “No, she isn’t. Doesn’t everyone say she’s mainly German?”) takes a different view. It’s decided that English needs an academy so that it can compete with less successful languages such as French and Italian. “We do desperately need some form of moderating body to set an accepted standard of good English,” it says, while the academy’s founder, Martin Estinel, a 71-year-old who claims still to use the word “gay” to mean “happy”, declares: “At the moment, anything goes … Let’s have a body to sit in judgment.”

  Obviously this is absolute horseshit. By what authority would they sit in judgment? Where is their evidence that manacling our language to past usage is at all helpful or necessary? It would only stand in the way of the all-conquering self-diversification that has made English the global lingua franca, and allowed “lingua franca” to become an English phrase, while the French kick impotently against “le weekend”. Fortunately, people won’t take a blind bit of notice of this self-appointed academy and will continue, quite rightly, to use words exactly as they find convenient.

  But what most annoys about the scheme is that it completely misses the point of linguistic pedantry. It’s no fun prissily adhering to grammatical rules if it’s mandatory. This academy wishes to turn something I have chosen to do – an attitude by which I define myself – into something I’m forced to do, along with everyone else. That’s like making everyone support Manchester United. It’s the blandly didactic product of priggish, literal, two-dimensional thinking. They should be saving snakes, not the fifth syllable of “deteriorate”, which isn’t going to keep vermin under control in any paddy fields.

  As with so many terrifying problems, the challenges of biodiversity are only being addressed with real creativity by the Chinese. Their current craze for dyeing the hair of pet dogs to make them look like other animals has already had some startling results. I’ve seen pictures of a retriever very convincingly got up as a tiger and some small furry dogs who would make uncanny giant pandas for the zoo of a miniature village.

  Suddenly the solution to the snake crisis is obvious: heavily made-up dachshunds. I’m sure, given time, we could breed them even longer and thinner and with shorter, more vestigial legs. Not only would they happily kill rats and mice, but they are also non-venomous, don’t constrict and can be house-trained. For years, the absurdity of the shapes and sizes that dogs can be bred into – little pugs who can only breathe upside down or massive-eared spaniels that wee when anyone sneezes – looked like a cruel Crufts-induced fad, but it turns out it’s an environmental lifeline.

  Many are worried by the crisis induced by falling bee numbers. On the face of it, this seems like too big a challenge for a canine solution, but remember that dogs can be trained. I’m sure it’s not stretching the ingenuity of breeders too far to envisage, within the decade, the emergence of some form of black-and-yellow-dyed miniature scottie–chihuahua cross that can be taught to hang-glide. We may end up with a dog-eat-dog world but, with this kind of lateral thinking, it’s not just death that will lose its sting.

  *

  The first printed Christmas cards, I’m told, were manufactured in 1848 and were the brainchild of Sir Henry Cole. “Brainchild” is an odd word. You hear it a lot in explanatory voiceovers and I suppose I was trying to join in, but I don’t really like it. I’m not keen on the idea that my brain could have a child. Would it be made of brain – a child, made of grey brain, like a squelchy zombie? As metaphors for inspiration go, I prefer the lightbulb.

  Bad, dangerous or evil concepts are never called brainchildren. Our imagined ideas playground doesn’t contain bullies or failures. Nasty little scrotes like Eugenics and Nuclear Weapons aren’t allowed free rein to give sensitive Sliced Bread a wedgie or steal runny-nosed Roll-on Roll-off Ferries’ lunch money. And severely disabled brainchildren, like Aromatherapy and The Amstrad Emailer, are never let out to play or laugh like a healthy little brainboy or girl.

  Calling the product of an organ its “child” is a massive load of steaming bowelchildren. It relegates an actual child to a “wombchild”. And how should I think of my urine and semen? Are they respectively bladder and testicle children, or non-identical penis twins? Anyway inventions don’t spring from the brain fully formed. Just ask Trevor Baylis – it also takes a lot of artery, dermis and eye children.

  So the printed Christmas card is the proud cerebral progeny of Henry Cole, later Sir Henry Cole, later the late Sir Henry Cole, formerly “Who the hell’s he?”, a civil servant, inventor and museum co-founder (the V&A is the brainbastard of Sir Henry and some other eminent Victorians whose minds got knocked up during an ideas orgy). Three surviving multipurpose festive messages from his original print run were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York in the run-up to Christmas 2010. Apparently their Christmas cheer was still discernible, like the bubbles in those bottles of champagne that have spent a century in the rusting hull of a sunken U-boat.

  It’s natural to think of Sir Henry as an admirable fellow for having established this most respectable of Christmas customs. It’s natural, but it’s a mistake.
Bear in mind that, before printed Christmas cards existed, seasonal messages were written individually and in longhand. Before Sir Henry’s brain started to gestate, that was the tradition. His idea was to industrialise it.

  He mechanised the exchange of greetings so that more greetings could be exchanged more quickly between more people. He considered the previous rate of greeting-exchange to be tediously slow and resolved to speed it up. This way, he presumably reasoned, people can show how much they care with much less effort. It’s carefree caring: now your heartfelt solicitude can reach dozens of people at once. The man must have thought he was actually manufacturing love.

  How he would have adored the e-card! In a second, you can deliver seasonal cheer to everyone you know and thousands you don’t. By clicking a mouse, each of us can demonstrate more warmth and concern for our fellow man in an instant than Gandhi could in his whole life.

  It’s not that I hate Christmas cards. I just think Cole’s reasoning is perverse. He’s confronted with a system in which people are accustomed to exchanging small numbers of personal greetings and decides it should be superseded by one in which, while they’re able to send many more messages, each one, as an inevitable consequence, means much less. I don’t see what’s been gained other than another bloody thing for everyone to buy. I suppose I don’t really get commerce.

  I don’t send Christmas cards. My parents do and slavishly keep a record of whom they’ve sent to and received from. They’re mortified if they receive from someone to whom they’ve not sent – desperately rushing to make the last post with their reciprocation – and put black marks against the names of those who don’t return their greetings: two years missed and you’re off the list. The whole process is designed to avoid any net gain or loss of goodwill. This seems strange. For me, every card I get is in the plus column. I have successfully extorted Christmas cheer from a world into which I have injected none. Take that, my accountants and Sky broadband! I’m accepting your best regards of the season and enjoying them alone.

  My only defence for this “Bah! Humbug!” attitude is that a modern-day Scrooge wouldn’t say “Bah! Humbug!” He’d say: “Make this Christmas special with a Scrooge and Marley loan.” Christmas is no longer the interruption in trading that he so resented, it’s the time of year when businesses expect to sell most stuff. That’s a trend that Sir Henry spotted and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come didn’t.

  Santa knows I’m not the first person to say this, but the problem with the mass-produced goodwill of the modern Christmas, where we’re constantly wished happiness by carrier bags, receipts, coffee cups and TV channel idents, is that it can feel like a denial of all the things we’re fed up or angry about. Charities exhort us to “think of those less fortunate than ourselves”, while corporations rub our noses in goodies only affordable by those more fortunate. We’re expected to endure stressful family gatherings and gruelling catering tribulations and count ourselves lucky in the process.

  This involves a lot of rage suppression, which can be dangerous. After all, this is the nation of the Cat Bin Lady, where fury lurks in the most surprising places. As festive decorations were being put up in the quiet Hertfordshire town of Hoddesdon one recent Yuletide, the residents discovered, on viewing the footage from their newly installed CCTV cameras, that the vandalism with which their street had been plagued was committed not by teenage hoodies, but by the 63-year-old co-ordinator of their neighbourhood watch scheme, a Mrs Jennifer Bibby.

  She’d been hurling flour and eggs at people’s cars. One of the neighbours summed the situation up with breathtaking, stultifying exactitude: “She should be stopping behaviour like this happening rather than committing antisocial crimes herself.” Although another way of looking at it is that she was doing both. She’s a one-woman “big society”.

  Mrs Bibby didn’t give much of an explanation for her actions, saying: “I admitted it to the police and put my hands up and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The flour was unprovoked, but it was the build-up of a number of years of provocation.” As apologies go, that’s as bland and nonsensical as a Christmas card from Yo! Sushi.

  *

  In January 2010, Sky football pundits Andy Gray and Richard Keys saw their careers collapse around them when evidence came out of sexist behaviour that would make Henry VIII blush.

  “The game’s gone mad,” says Richard Keys.

  “I know. Women just don’t understand the offside rule.”

  “Course they don’t, Andy.”

  “Napoleon.”

  “Napoleon, sorry.”

  “It’s to do with wombs, probably.”

  “The offside rule?”

  “No, not understanding it.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “A female linesman – it’s lunacy. But nobody seems to realise, Rich– I mean, Napoleon.”

  “Apart from us, mon empereur. It’s madness.”

  “OK, we’re on air in 30 seconds. Are you going to take the hat off?”

  “The general’s hat? Don’t see why.”

  “I won’t either then. Why should I? It’s PC gone mad. Twenty seconds.”

  “Have you ever met one who understood it?”

  “No, they just wave the flag at random, like a cheerleader. Ten seconds.”

  “I think I will take the hat off, actually.”

  “Me too.”

  Let’s leave aside the avalanche of subsequent revelations and go back to the initial leaked recording, because nothing more clearly reveals the bizarre mental world that football commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys have been inhabiting. They’re Napoleon, and the rest of us are too insane to realise. They knew they had to keep this knowledge a secret or the lunatics would turn on them, and so it has proved.

  A few apologists defended their first remarks as merely humorous. Former England women’s cricket captain Rachael Heyhoe Flint said: “These were tongue-in-cheek comments and we are blowing something enormously out of proportion here.” But when you listen to that recording, it’s not tongue in cheek at all. Their criticisms of female assistant referee Sian Massey are marked, as Gabby Logan wrote in The Times, with a “total lack of laughter”.

  I find that fascinating. These men weren’t making sexist jokes or taking the piss. They seem genuinely to believe that women can’t understand the offside rule. Not just women who don’t like football or only watch the occasional match; not just scatterbrained sculptresses or isolated Pacific island tribeswomen; not just Katie Price or the Queen; but women who have worked their entire careers to get a job in football, been fully trained as referees and officiated in hundreds of matches. They think even those women can’t understand the offside rule.

  It seems reasonable to conclude that these broadcasters are implying that women are, at the very least, slightly less intelligent than men. But possibly only slightly: maybe they reckon that the offside rule is the most complex and difficult concept known to, well, man. They may think women can do anything else men can do – right up to rocket science, brain surgery and transubstantiation – but that female intelligence cuts off just before that most elusive and nuanced of human ideas, the offside rule. If that’s the case, Keys and Gray are a bit sexist, but their main mental health problem is believing a slightly tricky rule from an incredibly straightforward game – a notion on the level of buying hotels in Monopoly – is like existentialism, string theory, the double helix, long division and backing-up-Nokia-phone-contacts-on-an-Apple-computer all rolled into one.

  But it may be that they’ve got a better sense of proportion about the trickiness of offside, yet still consider it to be beyond any woman’s intellectual grasp. If that’s the case, they must spend most of their lives looking around in horrified bewilderment. They think women are imbeciles and yet there women are, walking around, wearing clothes, holding down jobs, being allowed to vote – driving around in cars, for God’s sake! Gray and Keys must be terrified.

  Could chimps be taught the offside rule? Or dolphins? That
octopus seemed to know a lot about football. How basic an organism do Andy and Richard consider the female of their species to be? And why has Andy had sex with so many of them? Sarah Palin must be even more horrifying to them than she is to the rest of us: they’re not worried that, if she became president, she’d destroy the world out of evil, inflexible rightwing rage, but just because the red button looked like a Smartie.

  Is that why they’ve forged careers in football, the last bastion of male dominance? The moron women – the shaggable zombies, the lipstick-wearing Borg – hadn’t yet broken into that citadel. It was safe. But now, with the sight of a woman on the touchline, randomly waving a flag or not waving a flag (and occasionally doing it at the right time by pure luck, the jammy bitch), they know that the Matrix’s machines have entered Zion.

  These men have so completely misapprehended the nature of humanity that they should be pitied. Poor, stupid Richard Keys – he probably doesn’t even understand how funny it is that he said: “Did you hear charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Yeah, do me a favour, love.” But it’s hard to pity people who have built massively successful careers in spite of mirthless arrogance, a towering sense of entitlement and disdain for a world they’re convinced has got everything wrong. So I don’t.

  And these guys aren’t alone. Football is full of Napoleons. Croatian FA president Vlatko Markovic is a good example. In 2010, he said: “While I’m a president of the Croatian Football Federation, there will be no homosexuals playing in the national team”, adding: “Luckily, only normal people play football.” Yeah, normal people like Paul Gascoigne, Wayne Rooney, Gordon Ramsay, George Best and Craig Bellamy. What normal people.

  It’s certainly true that very few professional footballers admit to the “abnormality” of being gay. Maybe it’s fancying men that messes with the brain’s offside-understanding lobe? But surely that would make lesbian refs OK?