Dawn of the Dumb (10 page)

As I gazed down at the idle thoughts, wondering which to toy with, I became aware of the fuzzy, trance-like state I was in, and realised that although I’d entered this reverie out of boredom, the experience of boredom itself was proving pretty interesting.

In fact, I don’t think ‘boredom’ itself actually exists. There’s no such thing as boredom, just varying degrees of fascination.

For example, when I was thirteen I was off school for weeks, literally bedridden. I couldn’t walk or run. A recipe for boredom, especially since back then there was no internet or satellite TV. Furthermore, I couldn’t move my right arm without experiencing blinding pain, which meant most existing forms of entertainment, from reading to self-appreciation, were off the menu. All I could do was watch terrestrial TV Unfortunately, it seemed my illness was taking place in the middle of a non-stop televised bowls tournament.

So there I was, forced by God to lie still and watch bowls for hours. Did I lose my mind with boredom? No. I got into it, without even trying. Easy when there’s nothing else to do. First, you choose a favourite player—not consciously, it just happens. Perhaps one of them’s a bit slick, or you don’t like his glasses. Instantly, you root for the other guy. Then there’s the game itself, which largely consists of tantalising footage of bowls gently swerving to a halt as close to the jack as possible. This struck me as twice as exciting as the climax of
Die Hard
(which was prescient of me, since
Die Hard
didn’t come out for another four years).

What I’m saying is the mind entertains itself no matter what.

Which makes me wonder what we mean by the phrase ‘bored to death’. It can’t happen: even if it were possible to be literally bored to death, the actual process of dying is intriguing enough to wipe any traces of boredom out.

Imagine it. You’ve been locked in a cupboard for six years, with nothing but some string and an old cork to amuse you. Eventually, you get so utterly fed up your subconscious decides to shut you down. You start dying without noticing, when out of the blue, a startling thought strikes you—something like ‘Jesus, my heart’s not beating’—and suddenly life’s exciting again.

You’re doomed to enjoy life, in other words. You can’t win.

Anyway, back to my little balloon ride. I cruised internal skies for the best part of an hour before being rudely awoken by a loud sob: in my absence, my face had erroneously smirked at a tragic anecdote. And now apparently I’m a bastard.

Well, come on. That’s not fair. I wasn’t even bloody listening.

Sir Yes Sir

[14 October 2005]

W
hat’s the most offensive thing you could possibly do in public? Squat down and crap on the pavement, or eat a bag of Wotsits? Pretty soon, it’ll be the latter, because eating healthily is now the law, and anyone who disobeys is a demented suicidal pig.

Just last night, for instance, a TV commercial from the Food Standards Agency commanded me to eat no more than 6g of salt a day. It wasn’t a suggestion, or a bit of friendly advice. It was an order, plain and simple. EAT NO MORE THAN 6g OF SALT A DAY, it said.

At first I stood and saluted. And then I thought, hang on, it’s
my
bloody throat—1 can stuff as much salt down it as I like. At which point the Thought Police kicked the door down and arrested me for impudent reasoning.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disputing whether these Anti-Pie, Pro-Skipping campaigns have the potential to save lives. I’m sure they do. But come on—are human lives really worth saving in the first place? I mean really?

Take a look around: there’s far too many of us, and we’re not much to write home about. We spend more time picking our noses and wondering what famous peoples’ kitchens look like than we spend doing anything worthwhile or interesting.

The average citizen is a cretin in sore need of a good hard culling. If we can slowly reduce our numbers by gently guzzling snacks till our hearts burst—thereby saving the government the hassle of herding us into a stadium and blowing our heads off, one by one—then that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Well?

Besides, all these health promotions really do is make you neurotic and miserable, thereby ruining what’s left of your lifespan anyway. What would you rather do—spend every waking moment joylessly assessing your diet, and live to be a wizened soo-year-old mantis? Or die fat, young and merry, with caramel smeared round your mouth?

It’s time they launched a campaign actively encouraging the population to gorge its way to an early grave. We need gigantic billboards with big colour photos of chocolate Eclairs and beer, accompanied by slogans like ‘Tuck in and Get It Over With!’, or, ‘Hey, Bollocks to Everything, Right? Enjoy!’

Actually, sod the billboards. Let’s just erect shelves all over the place. Shelves heaving with pork pies and marshmallows and chocolate biscuits and piping-hot ready meals. Cut out the middleman and pass them round for free. The streets’ll be full of cheery, wobbly, blobby people, munching their way to oblivion. It’ll be one big life-affirming, population-reducing party!

Come to think of it, let’s hand out wine, cocaine and heroin as well! And handguns! Free loaded handguns, on a shelf, on every street corner! Life would become markedly more dangerous, sure—but imagine the buzz you’d get each time you simply made it home alive (and besides, your chances of survival would be higher than you think: there’d always be loads of fatsos puffing about between you and the bullets).

They should do that. Our quality of life would improve.

Till it does, I’m going to eat precisely 6.1g of salt a day. In protest.

Rage with the machine

[21 October 2005]

P
lanet Earth is an angry place, a searing bauble of rage. Wherever you swivel your eye, someone’s losing their rag like a rag-losing machine. There’s a worldful of furious people. Look. In the street—a man thrashing a traffic warden. On the telly—two guests on a daytime talkshow trying to bellow each other to death. And in the newspaper—some tooth-gnashing maniac demanding the public execution of anyone who breaks wind.

(Actually that last one was me, and I stand by every word—hey, it’s particles of
their
excrement going directly up
your
nose. It’s an ASSAULT, for God’s sake.)

All this fury, roaring round the ether—and where does it go? The answer is it simply dissipates; flitters up toward the clouds, where it hangs around making pigeons sick and causing thunderstorms.

Not good enough. The planet sorely needs clean, sustainable energy sources; this waste can’t be allowed to continue. We’ve got to work out a way of harnessing all this spare rage and using it to power our kettles and our mopeds and our iPod Bassetts (or whatever the bumming heck Apple have decided to call the latest incarnation).

For example, imagine a car powered by raw anger. If you pulled into a lay-by for a mean-spirited argument with your partner over their inability to read a bloody map and announce the bloody turning in time, you wouldn’t be dismantling what meagre love still existed between you, you’d be gathering fuel for the rest of the journey. Brilliant.

Trouble is, you’d have to find ways to maintain your irritation. If you’re driving between the hours of 7 and 10
AM
, that’s simple—just tune into Chris Moyles on Radio 1 and the car will hurtle along (but be sure to restrict your listening to 2o-minute bursts or both the engine and your heart will explode).

But for those barren moments when the nation’s airwaves are less cluttered with mindless, foghorning warthogs, you need to plan ahead. You might, for example, scatter a few uncomfortable objects across the seat before you sit down. A couple of three-pronged plugs and a live cat should do it.

Or you could simply replace the windscreen with a sheet of frosted glass, thereby forcing you to squint at the road ahead, sustaining a constant level of mild irritation. And to make it slightly more annoying, scratch the phrase ‘THIS IS PROGRESS’ into the glass before setting out, leaving you gazing directly into some deadpan sarcasm for the duration of your trip.

Or the government could rebuild all the roads in infuriating squiggles, with huge sections that loop back on themselves so it takes an extra five hours to go anywhere, leaving everybody perpetually angry and late. Well, more than they are already.

And rage wouldn’t just power cars! You could generate enough wattage to light up a skyscraper simply by introducing random bumps on the carpets so the residents continually stub their toes. The possibilities are endless. The world of science should investigate immediately.

Immediately, I said. Come on, science. Hurry up. You wouldn’t like us when we’re angry.

Dead famous

[28 October 2005]

T
he police have charged a man with committing murder in an Oxfordshire village occasionally used as a location for the TV series
Midsomer Murders
. I know this because I read it in the paper, in a single-paragraph story with the heading ’

‘Midsomer’ Murder: Suspect Charged’.

Surely it’s bad enough being murdered, without the news of your death being reported solely in relation to a TV phenomenon that’s nothing to do with you. Imagine the coverage if you were run over and killed by the bloke who played the Honey Monster. I’d rather not make the papers at all.

I live in fear of this sort of thing. Earlier this year, I was in Edinburgh at festival time, and at one point found myself standing in a hot, cramped bar with a group of people that included Ricky Gervais. This bar was a couple of floors up; it had low ceilings, was heaving with smokers, and felt like a tinderbox.

All the while, I was acutely aware that should a fire break out, my death—and the death of virtually everyone around me—would go unmentioned in the resulting news story, which would be headed: ‘TV RICKY IN BLAZE HORROR—Joy as
Office
star battles past scum to reach exit’. Of course, Ricky Gervais is so famous that even your closest relatives would forgive him for kicking you down a blazing stairwell as he fought his way to freedom. But how insignificant does a celeb have to be before you’d receive equal coverage in the event of you both dying in the same incident?

I suspect there’s no bottom limit. Even if you were involved in a fatal coach crash with, say, ex-Children’s BBC presenter Andy Crane, the headlines would likely read, ‘FORMER BEEB MAN KILLED—Someone else dies also’ rather than ‘TWO DEAD IN BUS MESS’. It’s a sobering thought, but in terms of raw news, you are worth less than a dead Andy Crane.

It’s less clear how this grim hierarchy might work among celebrities themselves. If the Iranians launched a rocket at the Baftas, killing everyone, how would the tabloids respond? Would they print ‘100 CELEBS DEAD’? Or would they lead with the most famous victims first—‘ANT & DEC: THE DAYTHE GRINNING STOPPED’—and work all the way through to the guy who plays Martin Fowler somewhere around page 247?

Actually, given the seismic impact a mass celeb wipe-out of this kind would have on the mindset and sales prospects of the tabloids, it’s likely they’d simply go nuts and print no headlines whatsoever—just a load of violent, abstract scribbles, accompanied by a library snapshot of a monkey on a trike.

It’d take them a good six weeks to stop hyperventilating and actually explain what happened. And even then, you can bet all the dead waiters, doormen and catering staff wouldn’t get a mention, unless one of them had been hit in the eye by a chunk of Cat Deeley’s shinbone or something.

The only way to guarantee yourself fair coverage is to travel somewhere European and get killed at an awards ceremony there. Since British readers wouldn’t have a clue who all those foreign TV stars were, your nationality would instantly elevate you to a starring role.

Yes! ‘BRITISH WAITER DIES IN GERMAN OSCARS HORROR’—and at last the tables are turned!

The National Excuse Hotline

[4 November 2005]

Q: When is a lie not a lie?

A: When it’s an excuse.

I love excuses. They represent the human imagination at its finest. A good excuse hovers somewhere between plausible and absurd—credible enough to be thoroughly believable, daft enough to sound like it couldn’t possibly have been invented.

It’s important to choose your excuse carefully. Once, a few months into a relationship, I told a girlfriend I was deaf in one ear, in an attempt to explain why I hadn’t been listening to her. It worked in the short term. But we stayed together for another six years. During that time I kept forgetting which ear it was, or the level of deafness, or that I’d said it at all. I lived in constant danger of exposure. Got away with it, mind. And if you’re reading this now, Roz—sorry about that.

A good excuse won’t backfire like that. Here’s one of the best I’ve heard:

Let’s say you’re meant to be at work by 9
AM
, but you’ve woken up at 10. By the time you get dressed and travel there, you’re going to be two hours late. Well sod that—you might as well stroll in wearing a dunce’s cap, clanging a bell, bellowing what a failure you are. The only sane course of action is to throw a sickie. So you phone the office. But rather than trying to pull off an ‘ill’ voice, use the following brilliant excuse. Your opening line, bold as brass, is: ‘Sorry I’m late—1 shat myself on the tube.’ (Or on the bus. Or in your car—delete as applicable.)

You then go on to sheepishly explain just how embarrassing it was; how you think it might’ve been something you ate last night; how you had to waddle home to change your clothes—make it as vivid as possible. Don’t forget to chuck in a bizarre, unrelated, detail for good measure—claim the actress Pauline Quirke was on the bus at the time, for instance. A mild surrealist dash will, paradoxically, make the entire story more credible.

Then you offer to travel in again. At which point they’ll suggest you stay home and recuperate. And after you’ve hung up, they’ll share a collective chortle at your expense. But you have the last laugh, because you get to spend the rest of the day lolling on the sofa, eating crisps in your (unsoiled) pants.