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

by David Mitchell

  If the world plunges into a new dark age on our watch, it’ll be hard enough to keep chipper without electricity, the sensation of a full stomach and a third of the UK above sea level. We don’t want to compound that grief by feeling bereft without the robot that used to ease our bums into freshness with a tepid spritz and a mist of cologne. Any luxurious pleasure it may give now will be dwarfed by the misery of its loss and what that represents, in the event of a penurious future.

  Which is why I’ve always been very careful when buying wine. When I was a student, everyone bought the cheapest bottle – the £3 red. But then, at some point, a mixture of shame and a sense of entitlement, or the prospect of a dinner party at which the origin of each brought bottle will be impossible to conceal, makes you spend a bit more, go for the £5. This does not merely equate to an extra cost of £2, but to £2 multiplied by the number of bottles of wine you will buy for the rest of your life. It’s another valve decision – go up a notch in wine price and your palate won’t let you go back. This means that if you get poorer in the future, you will just have to – and I hesitate to use such an offensive phrase – drink less wine.

  I’m sounding like a miser – or as if I take a “glass half empty” attitude to a ludicrous conclusion, where the joy of any purchase is pre-emptively counteracted by the fear of future dismay at not being able to repeat it. Maybe I should buy a top-of-the-range washlet to prove I can be optimistic? Or would people just think that was typically anal?

  *

  At the high points of my childhood – holidays, birthdays, picnics, Christmas – my father took photographs. This took the shine off many of the high points. Watching my dad take a photo is exquisitely frustrating. Until about 1995, he still had the camera he’d been given for his 21st birthday. This was quite an expensive item in its day. Clearly capable of “proper” photography, it should’ve made light work of capturing my mum, my brother and me in front of a castle or behind a Knickerbocker Glory.

  But the ice cream would usually have melted by the time the snap was taken because the camera had dozens of dials and buttons to adjust. My father was uncomfortable doing this unobserved and would make everyone pose with the appropriate grins before he started to grapple with the settings. Just when you thought he was ready and he’d put the camera to his eye – just when you really believed you were about to get your life back and actually enjoy the leisure experience he was attempting to immortalise – he’d remember there was one more knob to fiddle with and start studying the machine again while asking “How far am I?” to which my mother would, in an exhausted monotone, invariably reply: “Ten feet.”

  These photos are a bizarre historical document. These were a people, future archaeologists will think, who spent their whole lives in weary celebration. Their dwellings were permanently festooned with greenery and tinsel, their children expected to spend hours digging aimlessly by the sea, using flimsy tools, in a state of near nakedness. And their diet consisted almost entirely of ice cream, turkey and plum pudding. I hadn’t realised, until I looked through a few of the annual pictures of our Christmas pudding being set alight, that my father was engaged in an ambitious time-lapse photography project to illustrate the human ageing process. I can watch myself grow tall, speccy, spotty, then plump, then wrinkled, while the Christmas pudding, for all its engulfing flames, is unchanging.

  Photographs happen very differently now. As someone off the telly, I’m acutely conscious that everyone is carrying a phone and every phone has a camera. If there’s any truth in that whole photographs-stealing-your-soul thing, then much of my soul is divided between hundreds of images of me grinning inanely next to strangers. And what most of those soul-shards are thinking is: “This is even slower than my dad! Why does no one know how to work their own cameraphone?” And those are the nice people who ask. There’s always the risk of running into someone who thinks that a shot of me picking my nose on the tube will make a perfect desktop backdrop to share with their Facebook friends.

  The England football team learned this to their cost when a snap taken of them a few hours after being knocked out of the 2010 World Cup leaked into the public domain via defender Ledley King’s BlackBerry. In the Daily Mail, it was accompanied by the headline: “Cigars, drinks, feet up … you’d think this bunch of flops had won the World Cup.”

  Whoever wrote that has an extremely tame idea of what a World Cup winners’ party might be like. There is one cigar on show and one foot on a table. Maybe cigars do conjure up notions of victory – although I doubt Churchill abstained during Gallipoli – but I don’t think a foot on a table and a lager is much of a celebratory binge.

  The picture shows some men sitting in chairs chatting, and that’s exactly what I’d imagine the England team would be doing soon after losing a match. Are they supposed to be crying, tearing their hair out or whipping themselves? Grief isn’t usually physically noticeable, still less disappointment – neither precludes smiling. If you took a picture at most wakes, you’d see people laughing at jokes, eating and drinking – and they’ve lost a lot more than a football match. The absence of self-harm and ululation doesn’t mean people are callously unmoved any more than its presence guarantees that they care.

  It’s not just a problem for people in the public eye; intrusive images are everywhere. Google Street View had to apologise to a mother when one of its camera cars accidentally photographed her naked child. And the BBC has been criticised for its lingering shots of Wimbledon crowd members canoodling. The corporation says it only uses such pictures to conjure up the atmosphere of a relaxed and romantic setting, but the poor man who was filmed nibbling his girlfriend’s ear is still going to feel stupid. Particularly if he’s also got a wife.

  And there are the thousands of people walking trepidatiously into job interviews in the knowledge of all the compromising pictures of them at student parties that, thanks to some overzealous Facebook acquaintance, are freely Googleable. The internet and the cameraphone are fighting a devastating pincer movement against privacy.

  I don’t know how scared to be. On the one hand, it all feels like a terrifying advance in surveillance, as if the CCTV cameras, like Triffids, are now moving towards and among us. On the other, if millions and then billions of photos are being taken every day, maybe any individual one will lose its force.

  Our attitudes to photography are stuck in the past: instinctively, we assume both that “the camera never lies” and that all photos are imbued with significance and care, just like the ones my dad takes. Tabloid newspapers still make hay out of putting a snap of a celebrity looking tired and wrinkly next to a glossy publicity shot. They wouldn’t do that if it didn’t still shock and fascinate some readers.

  But if we maintain our current levels of casual cameraphone photography, maybe a more accurate cumulative truth about humanity will emerge. We won’t fall for the airbrushed glamour shots any more because there’ll be so much evidence showing what these people, what all people, really look like on an average Tuesday. We’ll realise that the camera can lie, but that 10 million cameras are unlikely to.

  And we might also realise that a snap of someone smiling despite having lost a football match, looking tired despite being a millionaire pop star or throwing up at a party despite wanting to be an accountant, doesn’t actually mean that much.

  *

  On the occasion of an accurately predicted cold snap in 2010 …

  Weather forecasters must be breathing a sigh of relief this weekend and congratulating themselves as they watch it billow out in front of them. They successfully forecast a big weather event. There’ll be no hostile headlines. No one asking what we’re paying these wastrels for and why we don’t go back to consulting chicken gizzards. They could still be in trouble with their long-term predictions – perhaps they’ve promised a humid Christmas or barbecue spring – but they told us we were going to freeze our arses off last week and we did.

  Maybe this cold snap was a cinch for them. Maybe the big stuff is
easier to spot than fiddly yet crucial details like whether it will start raining in Harrogate before or after it gets dark. It’s been 23 years since they last missed a hurricane and I can almost feel the frustration of any meteorologist stumbling across this article at reading another mention of it. “You miss one hurricane and you never hear the end of it! What about all the drizzle that we got right? If Michael Fish has never self-harmed, it’s no thanks to the media.”

  The media are pretty tough on the Met Office. It isn’t helped by its association with the BBC. The thought of being able, even tangentially, to blame bad weather on the BBC is enough to make some tabloid editors have an erotic accident. When it rains in August, but the Met Office has said there was a 70% chance it would be a dry month, or we have an icy February when it’s said a mild winter is more likely than not, the press denounces it as incompetent with the vehemence of a boy who has rolled a one in Snakes & Ladders and is screaming at his mother: “YOU told me it probably WOULDN’T be a one!”

  Newspapers seem to imply that they don’t think the Met Office is trying its best to work out what the weather’s going to be like; that this organisation, established and funded with the sole aim of working out what the weather’s going to be like, might have let working out what the weather’s going to be like slip down its “Things to Do” list, below such items as “Have huge boozy lunch at taxpayers’ expense”; “Book summer holiday a long way from Britain (where it’s going to piss down despite our assurances to the contrary)”; and “Meet BBC execs in champagne bar for lots of cocaine and a giggle at some child porn.”

  Contrastingly, I’m convinced that weather forecasters are genuinely trying their hardest to forecast the weather but quite often get it wrong for the simple reason that it’s impossible to know for sure. Letting that fact slip from the public’s consciousness is where they’re at fault. I think they should start every bulletin with it: “Good evening. Please remember that it is impossible to know for sure what the weather’s going to be like. Nevertheless …”

  Maybe they thought that, like the rules of Countdown, it went without saying these days. They decided they could save time by dispensing with all the coulds and mays. It was a mistake and their George Lucas-like enthusiasm for snazzy computer graphics has made the situation worse.

  When I was a child, TV forecasters stood in front of solid, non-virtual maps on to which they stuck little symbols denoting the type of weather they considered most likely to occur in that region. But at one point in the bulletin, they’d cut away from the man and his maps to “the satellite picture”. This was a grainy photograph of the UK and its environs, taken from space, showing the cloud cover at a particular time. This was fact. The stickers were speculation but the satellite picture showed weather that had definitely happened.

  The snazzy graphics have destroyed this demarcation. Satellite-style footage of what the weather has definitively been like slides seamlessly into projections of what the forecasters reckon it’s going to be like. Well, a seam is needed – or a lighting change or a klaxon – something to herald the point at which we enter the realm of educated guessing.

  Instead, they present what they think will probably happen as fact and do little to differentiate forecasts where they estimate the likelihood of the predicted events coming true at 90% from those where it’s much lower.

  Forecast and reality look the same; and this comes straight after the news, in which viewers rightly expect the distinction between truth and speculation to be rigorously drawn. It’s no wonder that we sometimes feel, when weather forecasts turn out to be inaccurate, that we’ve been lied to.

  Forecasters would do well to adopt Peter Snow’s phrase about election night swingometer extrapolations: “Remember, this is just a bit of fun.” No one ever watched that and thought it was the result. Not in Britain anyway; after the US election of 2000, Fox News’s bit of prediction fun got horribly out of hand. That organisation had the influence to make its forecast come true. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Michael Fish.

  *

  On Valentine’s Day, as usual, I received several heartfelt anonymous messages. “You’re not funny, you cock,” “Why are you such a smug shit?”, “Just seen you on a repeat of Mock the Week, I wish you would die.” That sort of thing.

  But then I get that every day – all comedians do (apart from the funny non-smug ones who are already dead). In fact, everybody does; that’s one of the joys of the internet age. On 14 February everyone used to look forward to the possibility that someone would share their passionate feelings incognito, and now it happens all the time. As soon as you have a Facebook wall, a Twitter feed or simply a name that someone can type, Anonymous Missives Inc is open for business. And it’s not only people who are the targets of strangers’ ardour – restaurants, bars, hotels, books, movies and DVDs are all the objects of feelings so strong that those holding them are embarrassed to reveal their identity.

  I’m sure embarrassment is what it is. Like love, hate is something that makes us go red in the face. It’s safer expressed covertly lest it be rejected. If the local cafe knew it was you who found the service unfriendly or the muffins overpriced, it would make you feel vulnerable. This way, you get to call the manageress a wart-faced crone without it getting personal. Anonymity, like a secret ballot, is a guarantee of sincerity.

  There was certainly nothing insincere about the 30 negative reviews of The Good Life restaurant in Shrewsbury that were posted online in autumn 2011. They came from the heart. In fact, they came from the same heart: all 30 were written, under different names, by Ms Helen Griffiths, a marketing manager from Salford. But she wasn’t managing the marketing for The Good Life – this wasn’t an elaborate exercise in reverse psychology. Ostensible offence at “cold and unattentive” staff and “hairs in my quiche” hid Ms Griffiths’s real dislike: the vegetarian restaurant’s owner, Joanna Langfield. Griffiths was angrier than even tofu can make you, because Langfield is the ex-partner of Griffiths’s husband and, last August, became involved in some legal dispute with him.

  The online review dispute, in contrast, was deemed illegal. Ms Griffiths, after being given a police caution for harassment, had to publish an apology for the aspersions she’d cast, carefully picking them out of the house hummus and admitting that she’d “never actually visited or eaten at the restaurant”. This was the end of a long battle for Joanna Langfield to restore The Good Life’s good name in the face of a hate barrage that had caused a 25% slump in the restaurant’s profits.

  One can readily see Langfield’s problem. When a restaurant owner approaches a website to ask for some negative reviews to be removed, saying they’re biased, the claim is going to be viewed with scepticism – in the unlikely event that the website has any staff to view it at all. Online reviews, either anonymous or with no verifiable name, customarily go up unchallenged. We assume that the wisdom of crowds will ensure that a fair impression is given overall – that the uncensored self-expression of hundreds of millions will tend towards the truth. Half the time it just regresses to the mean.

  And the rest of the time it goes the other way: overeffusive, hysterical praise. So often you’ll read a review that couldn’t be bettered if the hotelier, restaurateur, musician, bar owner or author had written it themselves. In the notorious case of the description on Amazon of Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers – Private Life in Stalin’s Russia as “Beautifully written … leaves the reader awed, humbled yet uplifted … a gift to us all,” it’s because he had. But he was even-handed enough to cast his eye over rival works of Russian history, anonymously describing Molotov’s Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky as “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published” and Robert Service’s history of communism as “an awful book”; and, while sucking on the sourest grapes of all, to write of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which beat The Whisperers to the Samuel Johnson Prize: “Oh dear, what on earth were the judges thinking when they gave this book the Samuel Johnson P
rize?”

  Figes was unmasked in 2010 and apologised unreservedly for having been caught. But let’s imagine for a moment that Figes isn’t just a foolish man whose sense of proportion and decency got lost in a research trip to the interminable steppe and give him the benefit of that imagined doubt: perhaps he was trying to teach the internet a valuable historiographical lesson about the limited value of unattributed sources. If you don’t know who’s written something, you can’t know why it was written and so you can’t trust it. It might genuinely be a fan of Russian history rightly panning some sloppy research, or a quiche expert correctly informing potential customers that, if there’s human hair in it, it isn’t vegetarian any more. But, if so, why won’t they give their names? If they remain anonymous, there’s a decent chance it’s an envious historian or the wife of the owner’s ex.

  When you read a bit of graffiti that says something like “Blair is a liar”, you don’t take it as fact. You may, independently, have concluded that it is fact. But you don’t think that the graffiti has provided that information. It is merely evidence that someone, when in possession of a spray can, wished to assert their belief in the millionaire former premier’s mendacity. It is unsubstantiated, anonymous opinion. We understand that instinctively. We need to start routinely applying those instincts to the web.

  Some argue that anonymous online commenting should be restricted, that websites shouldn’t allow it – they should make you put your name to your words. But that would lead to annoying cries of “Censorship!” and would inhibit the web traffic by which news agencies hope to increase their imperceptible online advertising revenues to a noticeable pittance.

  Instead, we should merely heed Figes’s warning. If you read a review, an opinion, a description or a fact and you don’t know who wrote it, then it’s no more reliable than if it were sprayed on a railway bridge. We should always assume the worst so that all those who wish to convince – whether vegetarian gastronomes or lovelorn suitors – have an incentive to identify themselves.