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

by David Mitchell

  The worst thing about the footballing Napoleon complex is that it’s so possessive of a game that shouldn’t, and ultimately can’t, be possessed. The human urge to kick a ball around and attempt to get it into a goal, and the urge to watch other people doing that, are innocent and harmless pleasures. How come they’re so often marred by tedious bastards – from Andy Gray to Roman Abramovich to Sepp Blatter – trying to own the fun? They want to be able to take their balls away if we don’t play with them in the way they like. When they can’t, they start whining.

  So, yes, Andy and Richard, the game’s gone mad. Enjoy St Helena. I hope it’s St Helena, not Elba.

  *

  “Do you want to tell that to Her Majesty Queen Noor?” thundered the estate manager to the head gardener. Or at least she did according to the now ex-head gardener, Amanda Hill, who has brought a constructive dismissal case against her former employers. Allegedly this remark was the response to Mrs Hill explaining that, for compelling climatic reasons, she was unable to accede to her boss Queen Noor of Jordan’s demand that she grow mangoes and avocados in the Berkshire countryside.

  “Can’t is not a word for princes,” as Elizabeth I said (or at least did in Blackadder). If this story is true, then it’s inspiring that Queen Noor, an educated woman who must surely have a reasonable grasp of the flora of the home counties, has sufficient belief in the power of royalty to ask for the impossible. That’s what command is all about – exhorting people to superhuman efforts, making them believe that, with royal favour, anything can be done. This is the spirit of Agincourt, the bravado of Canute, the self-belief that allowed Henry VIII to cock a snook at the Pope. Alternatively, she may have thought there was a greenhouse.

  Queen Noor’s regal hauteur compares favourably with our own royal family’s beleaguered self-esteem. When the Duke of York went to India to represent his mother on the occasion of the diamond jubilee, he was criticised for flying first class. This made me feel sorry for him. Maybe we just shouldn’t have princes at all – it’s not exactly the most modern of systems. Personally, I’m fine with it but I can see the arguments against. But if we’re going to have them, we can’t really make them fly economy, can we? If we’re having a constitutional monarchy, we’ve got to accept that the royals will be on one side of the barrier accepting flowers and smiling while the rest of us are on the other, presenting them and waving flags. That system doesn’t really work if these arbitrarily appointed guests of honour have to travel to the event by bus and then queue with everyone else to meet themselves.

  Even the Queen (EIIR, not Noor) faces problems. Her diamond jubilee pageant underwent a funding crisis, with the organiser Lord Salisbury complaining that “the lack of generosity from British firms has given me a huge amount of unnecessary work”. Do you want to tell that to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth? Come on, man, stop moaning! Pull your finger out before she chops your head off! You’ve only got to organise a boat show, not make the Aberdeenshire loam bring forth pineapples. Sadly though, he clearly has no fear of his sovereign’s wrath.

  Maybe she should take a leaf out of Ray O’Rourke’s book. He’s the multimillionaire construction boss who wants to demolish his Essex mansion and build an identical one in its place. Or more or less identical, anyway. Obviously it’ll be a lot more horrible and have a home cinema. The council won’t let him – it seems “can’t” is still a word for captains of industry. For now. But he’s appealing. Which is deeply unappealing.

  But that’s only because he’s a businessman. What seems unpleasantly vulgar in a tycoon is appropriately headstrong in a king. Getting massive portraits painted of yourself, wearing enormous gold accessories, employing staff in funny uniforms, being driven around in horse-drawn carriages – these are the preserves of the most and least pukka: of Charles II and Mr T, of Louis XIV and Richard Branson, of the Queen of Jordan and Jordan. When Henry IV of France built the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre in 1607, it was the longest corridor in the world and he reputedly used it to hold indoor fox hunts. People thought that was classy as hell but, in modern terms, it might as well have been a revolving rooftop bowling alley lined with tropical fish tanks.

  When commoners do these things it seems pretentious and presumptuous. But what does being royal really mean? It just refers to families who have kept up the pretence and continued to presume for centuries. William the Conqueror took England by force and most of his descendants have subsequently held their nerve: royalty is a confidence trick, and that requires confidence. You can’t keep that show on the road with humility; you do it by claiming to be anointed by the Almighty, by asserting that you can cure scrofula, by branding rivals as traitors and usurpers when in truth they’re just competitors, by demanding loyalty with the intensity of an organised criminal, by expecting home-grown mangoes in Berkshire.

  The Queen needs to get back to basics. She’s talked the talk of service so long that she’s started to believe it. Most of her ancestors would not approve. “I serve” may be what the Prince of Wales’s motto means but the monarch’s translates as “God and my right”. If she wants to keep her right, she may have to assert it more forcefully. Napoleon Bonaparte knew a thing or two about claiming royal status, having styled himself an emperor. He was amazed that, on the night the Tuileries palace was finally stormed, Louis XVI taken into custody and his guards slaughtered, the king didn’t make more of a show of resistance: “If Louis XVI had mounted his horse, the victory would have been his,” he said.

  For our monarch, though, the answer may lie in dogs rather than horses. I was heartened to read of an occasion in 2011 when, according to “a royal insider”, the Queen “quite simply … went bonkers”. This was when she discovered that the food that her beloved corgis were being given wasn’t fresh but had been frozen and reheated. “That’s more like it, ma’am,” I thought. “Going mental because the dogs have been given, not dog food – that would be unimaginable – but normal human-quality food that’s been in the freezer.” That’s exactly the sort of thing you can imagine George V or Mariah Carey doing.

  Royal protocol is nothing but a massive rider, dignified by centuries. Bowing and curtsying is only a historical version of a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed. Both rock stars and royals are treated with the sort of weird reverence that, if not rigidly maintained, will quickly turn to contempt. Stop demanding impossible mangoes for one second, and you’ll end up shopping in Iceland with everyone else – and it won’t just be for the dog.

  *

  There are lean times ahead for Britain’s high streets: Weight Watchers is opening a chain of shops. And, if you hated that joke, take comfort from the fact that its days are numbered. As obesity rather than thinness becomes established as the west’s poverty signifier, lean-equals-broke will have no resonance in the shiny, sweaty, globulous and wheezing future.

  The rich thincats of the decades to come will pay good money to remain skinny, and the aspirant plump to become so, which is presumably why Weight Watchers thinks it’s on to a winner with these new “Lifestyle Centres”, which will provide one-to-one weight-loss consultations and “express weigh-ins” and in general will, as spokesman Chris Stirk puts it, “offer a more personalised and flexible service for busy people like working mums and office workers who can pop in when they have time”.

  You can see the way they’re styling themselves: it’s weight loss for today’s busy, connected, results-orientated fat person. It’s for the fatty on the move, wobbling dynamically from one meeting to the next: they’ve only got time to hop on those scales and get a pep talk from a dietician before whizzing off to their next appointment, executive muumuu billowing in their wake. If they haven’t had time for lunch (unlikely but possible), they might get one of the centres’ “grab and go” meals, such as their 243-calorie prawn mayonnaise sandwich, which would probably leave you hungry, but that’s OK because, on a British high street, there’s bound to be a KFC next door.

  But will this catch on? Won’t people be embar
rassed 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.

  9

  Horrible, Horrible Progress

  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 Hol
e” 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.