supperware.net » writings » with hugs and lots of kisses, love Ben xx

Major Charles Ingram’s wife coughed on Who Wants to be a Millionaire to help him win some money, and the couple were branded as cheats. But when the raison d’être of a television quiz show is greed, can you really blame a contestant for being greedy? After all, it’s a prerequisite for an entertaining game! Conspiring to cheat a television company out of about fifty seconds of advertising revenue is petty by anybody’s standards, and ITV have undoubtedly made millions more by trumpeting the scandal as news.

I’ve done something worse. For the last few months I’ve been writing this occasional column, looking at life from the point of view that not only is your glass half empty; it’s half empty because the person who you thought was your best friend deliberately emptied the first half of it onto your trousers to distract you and, in the ensuing confusion, stole your wallet and spiked the remaining half-beverage with a nasty tranquiliser intended for use on cattle.

In my vainest moments, I might have kept this up by deluding myself that such an outlook is both soothing and instructive. Wasn’t I, after all, bringing new recruits to a growing body of cynics who realise exactly what the last five thousand years of civilisation have done for us? That almost everything we have strived to improve since the invention of the wheel — be it money, religion, politics, schooling, entertainment, employment, or protracted and humiliating mating rituals in sweating rooms with big loudspeakers — seems to have been engineered for idiots?

Just in case I’ve lost you, here’s today’s example. Over the last hundred years, our population has been transformed by a communications revolution. The telegraph, phonograph, thermionic valve, television, transistor, communications satellite, computer network: there are too many separate inventions to list, but the speed with which this emerging technology has redefined the whole sphere of human knowledge has been awesome. High-speed domestic Internet connections, mobile video telephony, one thousand television stations beamed from a single geostationary satellite: none of this was conceivable even a dozen years ago.

In the 1960s, our parents prophesied that something a bit milder than this would happen. They got about as far as the computerised switchboard, and promised some other things for a joke, such as Maglev trains, the colonisation of Mars, robot servants, and an efficient National Health Service. Come the dawn of the new Century, they promised, we would all be citizens of leisure, with more electricity and petrol around than we could use. Without human intervention, curvaceous metal-and-plastic machines would perform all of our drudgery for us. Meanwhile, we would sit around all day in Philippe Starck chairs eating grapes, smoking bad weed, and writing execrable poetry.

That future never materialised for most of us. Instead, the fruit of our information revolution is more shopping channels, adverts, interactive Iraqi war, porn, gambling and football. Rather than standing as a colossal totem to the supremacy of the human race, every technological innovation we’ve been served in the past two decades has demonstrated that we haven’t progressed a hair’s breadth from hypocrisy and barbarism.

Anyway, with the power of the printed word, I have endeavoured to tap all of the guilt, fear, inadequacy, humiliation and disappointment which underlie our fragile society. These truly are Mankind’s most powerful and enduring weapons. In fact, I was busy trying to fuse them into a force strong enough to take over the world, when George Bush came along and ruined my plans by doing the same thing with military force instead of a small student newspaper.

Something, though, has happened in the last few days which has torn through this paper-thin veneer, and has made me realise what utter rubbish I’ve been talking. More sensitive readers, who will already have worked out exactly what’s going on in my head, may want to look away now to preserve their stomach linings.

I’ve fallen in love.

I’m very sorry. This isn’t easy. My model of how life works was developing perfectly well on its own, notwithstanding the fact that any such model is usually self-perpetuating even if it’s crap. My first and only other relationship ended in mid-air two years ago when my girlfriend jumped ship for someone with a bit more je ne sais quoi. In spite of this, we managed to remain friends: a feat requiring such Herculean effort on both of our parts that I am, to this day, bewildered and utterly grateful that it all worked out. Around this time, I invented the rule, ‘Never hang out with people more beautiful or more gifted than you.’ Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

If I bothered to look carefully, I could find a hundred more reasons why things are worse this week than they were last week. About sixty of these would involve downloadable ringtones and public transport. But I’m not looking any more. My brain has begun to release some chemicals into my bloodstream to tell me that everything’s going to be all right, and who am I to disagree? True, they’re the same chemicals which have transformed many an ambitious, hard-nosed bastard I once knew into a contented, watery-eyed slave, but progress always has its price.

All the inspiration I found in solitude is evaporating faster than amyl nitrate at one of Barrymore’s parties. So why am I still here? Well, even amid the fluffy cupids and oleaginous comforting voices orbiting my head, something is still raining on my parade. You see, it’s not easy to write about this stuff. It’s almost impossible to say anything about love that’s original, honest or funny, because it’s everywhere. Different flavours of it are emblazoned witlessly across fourteen year old schoolgirls’ T-shirts in text message slang. It’s aped on every cinema screen in hermetically-sealed, genetically perfect parodies, and everyone’s bored and fatigued of love by the time they reach twenty, because it’s as cheap as dirt and just as inescapable.

To add to the confusion, I’m being brainwashed from both sides. Channel Four, for example, tells me that it’s fine to have the sexual morals of a tomcat and to shout about it semi-articulately on evening television. But in Channel Four Land, everyone lives in a penthouse apartment in New York, has a six-figure salary, and does absolutely nothing all day but hang about with their friends, shopping, arguing, and drinking frothy adjective-adjective-latte, before going out at night to explore the dark side of their sexual psyches and their tolerances to exotic alcohol.

All of this appears to be very well, until I accidentally glance at an open copy of the Daily Mail. It reminds me that real love has never been experienced by anybody except recently dead servicemen, and that physical contact of any kind between men and women is a scientifically provable abinomation — unless both partners are over the age of thirty-five, properly dressed, clean-shaven, insufferably dull, and vote Conservative. Ridiculous and loathsome as it is, there’s something comforting about this degree of certainty.

That’s because one kind of stupidity provides a relief from the other. If petty religious bigotry doesn’t get to me, the other side will, and it will whimper, ‘But you might be a genetic polygamist! Are you sure you’re still not gay? Why don’t you spend another five years really getting to know yourself? Scientists have proved that love’s a reflex of the immune system, and you’re just deluding yourself.’

In the midst of this contradictory turmoil, the English are frequently accused of being unromantic. This is a groundless accusation: our authors have a propensity for writing beautifully about love. But here’s the snag: they only ever write about it going wrong. There is no shortage of excellent English literature about all kinds of love ending horribly. The most famous love story in this language, Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy. If television adaptations are to be believed, vast swathes of Nineteenth-century romantic fiction exist only to chronicle the evil machinations of charming, coiffed bastards in tight trousers. At the other end of the cultural scale, EastEnders refuses to run a love-related plot line that ends without an actress screaming in a dark, rain-soaked square while car headlights hurtle towards her. All of which is terribly romantic.

Oh, I know I’m a traitor. It’s been a difficult week, and it’s very tricky to write about this without coming across as anything but a boastful and self-indulgent prick. But if this goes well, you may never hear from me again. If it goes badly, there’s every chance that I’ll end up with a fantastic screenplay. The only thing I’m afraid of is mediocrity.

Wish me luck.

Published in barefacts 1057 • 8 May 2003