Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse

by David Mitchell

  Basically, if any remark you make doesn’t already contain a “please” or a “thank you”, shove a “sorry” in for good measure. In my ideal world, whenever two people met they would both say sorry. Just to clear the air.

  And I’m not just an advocate of sorry as a conversational grace note – I also believe in the rhetorical power of the apology. When I was a bad student, this was one of the few things I learned. If I could apologise in the most abject terms for failing to hand in work or not turning up to something, there was very little the nice, well-meaning academic I was serially disappointing could say other than “All right – don’t do it again.” If I could express exactly what was most annoying, ungrateful and unreasonable about my own behaviour before the person I’d angered, then the situation would be defused. You can’t have an argument with someone who’s saying exactly what you’re thinking.

  I remember, at some point in my childhood, my father berating my mother for saying sorry to a stranger during the insurance-details-exchanging epilogue to some minor prang she was involved in. He took the received view that saying sorry in that context was admitting liability and could have a detrimental effect on his no-claims bonus. If that’s true, it’s very uncivilised. In Britain, of all cultures, we surely cannot take the apology to mean anything more than a general wish that awkward moments should be avoided. Apologies should be encouraged and, in order to do so, we must divest them as far as possible of any long-term meaning.

  The one thing that most discourages an apology, and is a growing phenomenon in the modern world, is calling for one. Once someone has publicly called for an apology, then it is robbed of all the disarming eloquence it has if given voluntarily. The apologiser gets no credit but instead undergoes the humiliation of being forced to submit. But that, of course, is what the people calling for such apologies very often want.

  So I offer this advice to any children with irritating siblings: if you get accidentally hit by a ball, or tripped up, or otherwise injured by your brother or sister, don’t say “Ow!” and leave room for a quick “sorry!” Instead, immediately shout “I demand an apology!” as a reflex. Do that, and you can be sure that, if a sorry is ever forthcoming, it’ll be the sort that hurts, not the sort that makes things better.

  *

  As I write this, I can see the sun shining on the Mediterranean. Live. I’m not just looking at hotel websites, clicking from a seashell with an azure backdrop to one of those extreme close-ups of a wine glass and a napkin which all hoteliers’ web designers seem inexplicably convinced will clinch custom. No, I can actually see the sea and it is a very sunny day. In short, the place where I am currently sitting is extremely nice.

  Yet I am not cheerful. And you’re reading the reason why: this article. I have to write this article. I have to work. I can’t do holiday things. If I sit in the sun, I can’t read the screen of my laptop. If I’m looking at the view, I can’t be typing. I can enjoy the fact that it’s pleasantly warm but – shameful fat-cat admission coming up – I’m accustomed to working in an environment maintained at a comfortable temperature whatever the prevailing weather. My working conditions are basically unaltered by the proximity of the glittering sea – and that realisation has poisoned my mood.

  So when I read that a University of Leicester survey has found that those who emigrate to southern European climes tend to be less happy than those who don’t, I was as unsurprised as a Mancunian seeing there’s rain forecast for tomorrow. Unless he’s relocated to Ibiza and opened a bar. Dr David Bartram, who led the research, found that those who’d made the sunseeking move rated their happiness, on average, at 7.3 out of 10, compared to 7.5 for those who stuck it out in drizzlier latitudes.

  This makes perfect sense to me as I stare across sun-dappled olive trees and then wrench my eyes back to Microsoft Word. It was easier to concentrate when my screen was only competing with the wallpaper for my attention. Working here is more annoying than working at work, and I imagine that’s what most sunseeking British emigrants immediately find. Added to which, these were already people discontented enough with their lot to change countries in the first place. And, in rich areas like western Europe at least, discontent has as much to do with who you are as what’s happening to you.

  People who relocate to sunnier places than Britain, who aspire to live the poolside dream, remind me of that guy who has Christmas every day. Have you heard of him? There may be more than one such person, but I remember seeing a particular bloke profiled on the local news. I think he was a dustman – his daily work was certainly over by lunchtime – so he could return home to his festively decorated house by 1pm sharp and eat a full Christmas dinner to the accompaniment of carols and Cliff Richard No 1s. Every afternoon he had a snooze in a cracker hat.

  This lifestyle seemed to make him happy – but then he was, to put the most positive spin on it, an extremely odd man. Most people would know that, however much fun Christmas can be, that sort of jollity can’t be sustained and any attempt to do so would drive you mad.

  A more seductive illusion is that, if you enjoy spending time in the pub, you might also enjoy owning and running one. It is remarkable the number of people who believe that drinking alcohol involves skills which are transferable to selling it – that, if a crossword or a quiz makes a few pints even more fun, then doing the books of a marginal business and changing the fuse on a glass washer must be an absolute scream.

  This is the mindset of the sunseeking emigrant – they’ve realised that they derive immense pleasure from their annual fortnight of basking and so have reasoned that, by living where that happened, they’ll multiply their joy 26-fold. Just like me this morning when I smugly set up my laptop on the balcony, they’ve massively overestimated the importance of where they are, and ignored that of what they’re doing. The main joy of a holiday – certainly the sunseeker’s holiday – is relaxing, snoozing, eating and drinking somewhere comfortable. You don’t need a passport to access those activities – just ask Mr Seven-Christmases-a-Week.

  So it’s inevitable that, once permanently settled in holidayland and getting on with selling insurance, doing data entry, microwaving 50 frozen paellas, dealing with an oligarch’s septic tank or web-designing with a view of strangers guzzling ice cream, a certain glumness can set in. You’d start to think about the things you miss.

  Top of the list, for this group, must be looking forward to a holiday. That was surely a favourite pastime before they permanently moved poolside and tried to get a phone contract. What’s going to replace that sanity-giving ray of hope? Are they to look forward to coming back to Britain to visit relatives? Or to joining the National Trust and joyously tramping round castles in low cloud? Or to going somewhere even hotter? Or on a refreshing polar expedition, away from the accursed smell of sun cream?

  Suddenly, a nice day is no excuse to knock off early and go to the pub – this is when business is conducted. And it’s no cause for self-satisfiedly looking at the weather in Spain to see if it’s worse – you’re already in Spain, so you’d better hope it’s raining in Cornwall or you won’t sell enough Carling this season to pay the lawyer who’s trying to retrospectively legalise the existence of your villa.

  Excuse me if I sound like John Major, but what about drinkable tea, John Lewis, terrible Radio 4 plays, decent pavements, cats that don’t look like they’re at death’s door, sarcasm, immanent social awkwardness, seeing your breath in winter, that grey look leafless trees get at dusk, and frost? Maybe if you’re the type to be drawn permanently to the Med, most of that list was always lost on you – but then, if you were brought up in Britain and none of that strikes even a faint chord, you must find it hard to appreciate things for what they are. You’d probably hate pasta if you were Italian, long lunches if you were French and bovine victimisation if you were Spanish.

  Some of us are fundamentally dissatisfied. If you move abroad to address that, you risk shattering the comforting illusion that you’d be happy if only you lived somewhere sunn
y.

  8

  Some Things Change and Some Things Stay the Same – and That’s One of the Things That Stays the Same

  This is the “Baby or bathwater?” section. The key thing in judging change is working out which is being thrown away. And I’m probably not the best judge. One of the first things I ever wrote in a newspaper – in the Guardian in the spring of 2006, long before I was given a regular column anywhere – included this:

  It’s very difficult to argue against the rhetoric of change. Change is so often presented either as progress or as inevitable (though not very often as both) and the implication is that people who don’t like something that’s changing are losers, lacking the flexibility of mind to cope with the next stage of human evolution. It’s very difficult to say: “I don’t like this change and, even if you’re right that it’s inevitable, you’re not going to get me to pretend I do.”

  I must admit I find it reassuring to note that, even when I was only 31, I was already a massive curmudgeon. But, if I was right and it is difficult to say “I don’t like this change …”, then the following section is a feast of such difficulties overcome. I say it about the name of Staines, the consequences of the first world war, the use of language, fashion and snakes. Having said that, I’m not entirely reactionary when it comes to apostrophes, sharing weapons with the French, Christmas cards, sexism in football and nocturnal jogging. So I haven’t quite dressed up a bucket of bathwater in a sailor suit and named it David Junior.

  *

  The key to conservatism is knowing what to conserve: what we’re rightly treasuring and what’s turning us into Gollum; what’s an antique tapestry and what’s a snot-streaked security blanket. Some would fight for the three-pin plug; others say that we lost everything that mattered when KitKats changed their wrappers. Some feel a tradition of public service broadcasting is worth hanging on to; others that being an attractive environment for rapacious financial practices is crucial to our way of life. Personally, I don’t think things have been the same since Consignia changed its name to Royal Mail.

  Many take pride in our martial traditions. We don’t see ourselves as a violent people, going around the world kicking the crap out of everyone. So much so that, when we have, instead of pissing off gracefully like the Vikings with a tip of a horned helmet and a “Thank you for the rape, ma’am”, we’ve hung around, setting up schools and churches in which to teach people how much better off they are without all that crap we kicked out of them. Our self-image is of a strong but gentle people who, when violence regrettably breaks out, do what is necessary: contact the Americans.

  Consequently, many conservatives, whether Tory or not, dislike our new military agreements with France. We’re going to be sharing nuclear research, aircraft carriers and air-to-air refuelling. And this with a country which is famously – and I know I’ll get some stick for saying this but, let’s face it, it’s a fact – riddled with clap. It’s called “the French disease” – is that a coincidence? Are you going to tell me that “French bread” is a coincidence? Because I’ve been there and baguettes are EVERYWHERE. And they call it la maladie anglaise, which means they’re insulting as well as syphilitic.

  But David Cameron isn’t that sort of conservative. He’s delighted with the deal because, by sharing services with France, we can conserve both our military capability and more of our money. Not all of his backbenchers agree: Bernard Jenkin MP said the Americans would “cut us off” from their technology if they felt we were sharing intelligence “too freely” with a country that has “a long track record of duplicity”.

  Like all opponents of the deal, he’s hedging round his real concern. He hates that it’ll mean we won’t be able to invade France any more. That’s what our armed forces were basically set up to do, isn’t it? True, we’ve found other uses for them – peacekeeping, colonial expansion, defending ourselves against Germany – but that’s not what they’re primarily for.

  I don’t really think lots of Eurosceptic Tories actually want to attack France, but they want to be able to. It gets them out of bed in the morning – the thought that, if all else fails, we could fling ourselves at the Normandy coast, get it out of our system, like a 48-year-old man screwing his secretary and joining a band. They’ll miss that sense of possibility and, indeed, of mercy – of restraint demonstrated every day that, once again, this great nation chooses not to nuke France.

  It’s like Manchester United and Chelsea, in some dystopian future when they’ve become footballing irrelevancies, sharing a goalie. “Would Sir Alex Ferguson have stood for this?” their supporters will say, just as military conservatives now ask: “Would Sir Winston Churchill?”

  The answer is: “Yes, he would.” In June 1940, Churchill proposed not just a military accord but a complete merger of the French and British states. The official offer from the British coalition government read as follows: “France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies.” There’s a coalition that’s thinking about a big society.

  The French turned us down, though, with one minister saying that it’s “better to be a Nazi province” than a British dominion. I hope Canada and Australia don’t feel like that. To me, the episode shows that Churchill, who was no radical, better prioritised what to conserve than the Petainist-dominated French cabinet, than appeasers like Baldwin and Halifax, than the Daily Mail at the time, than Spelthorne Business Forum today.

  I should clarify that Spelthorne Business Forum aren’t apologists for Hitler. They’re the group who are proposing that Staines should change its name to Staines-on-Thames to distance itself from Ali G. You might question why they care. Well, Staines comes under the aegis of Spelthorne borough council – it’s basically in Spelthorne, which makes me wonder whether a quicker solution to their problem might be to refer to their home as Spelthorne, not Staines.

  There are several things wrong with this campaign. First, it’s unnecessary. As a comic phenomenon, Ali G peaked several years ago. Staines is surely through the worst that those associations can bring.

  Second, they’ve missed the joke that Sacha Baron Cohen was making by locating Ali G in Staines. He’s not saying that it’s “an urban wasteland off the end of the M25”, as Alex Tribick, chair of the forum, laments with apparent ignorance of the shape of the M25. Baron Cohen is saying it’s precisely the unremarkable satellite town it is. Ali G’s citing of “Da West Staines Massiv” perfectly encapsulates how his clumsy “gangsta” image belies his middle-class suburban background. He is making the character ridiculous, not the place.

  Third, it smacks of snobbery. It reminds me of the petition by some residents to change the name of the tube station near me, Kilburn, to Mapesbury. They just wanted it to sound posher. That’s not an admirable desire. By all means, aspire to a pleasant, safe, leafy area, but it’s not going to become one by calling it Darlingford or stop being one because its name’s Grottibotts.

  Property prices form an unofficial tax on this vanity: if you want to live somewhere that sounds swanky, do so in the knowledge that you’ve been overcharged for your dwelling. And it should be an honour for Staines to be associated with a classic comic creation – it puts it up there with Neasden, Peckham and Torquay.

  This is badly prioritised conservatism, a willingness to jeopardise a place’s identity to conserve its reputation or a few locals’ view of its reputation. Incidentally, Churchill had no truck with these experiments in civic cosmetics, impishly writing to the Foreign Office: “You should note, by the way, the bad luck which always pursues peoples who change the names of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of the past.”

  *

  I find myself in the unprecedented position of agreeing with a French designer. Philippe Starck, who invented that fancy juicer which looks like it’s been regarding this earth with envious
eyes only to discover on arrival that we’re much bigger than it thought, has brought out a range of clothes that he insists are “not fashion”.

  An anti-fashion French designer! “It produces energy, material, waste and gives birth to a system of consumption and over-consumption that has no future,” he says. Bravo! It’s a strange thing to hear from a man who’s made a fortune designing faddish and weird-looking furniture, but that’s fine – I’d still welcome an anti-drugs quote from a junkie. Starck describes his new clothes as “non-photogenic” and has designed them to be long-lasting.

  As someone who hates fashion, and resents all the money, fun and attention people get out of it, I find this tremendously promising. Starck may just be the right man to make rejection of fashion fashionable. I look forward to an eco-friendly future where everyone wears drab and similar clothes until they wear out, just like I do. Obviously I don’t do it out of environmental conscience; it’s laziness and the fear that, if I try to demonstrate taste, I’ll be exposed as a twat.

  But however puny my motives, I am basically right not to buy expensive yet flimsy new togs all the time. Replacing things that aren’t broken causes a lot of environmental damage. I, for one, am keen to find a way of stopping the planet flooding, boiling, freezing, baking or imploding for some reason to do with leaving things on standby, without having to sacrifice electric light, TV or beer. If everything from London Fashion Week to Claire’s Accessories has to go, I say it’s a price worth paying.