The Hell of It All (32 page)

Great. I go on holiday, turn my back for a few weeks, come back and what’s happened? The banks are on fire and we’re at war with Iceland. As I type these words (on a Friday morning, fact fans), Sky News is zooming in on a screen full of red flashing numbers, apparently willing them to fall yet lower. The problem is a lack of confidence, they keep saying, cutting away every so often to show a big plunging downward arrow or a shot of a City trader holding his head in despair.

I’m a bit sick of that whole holding-his-head-in-despair schtick, to be honest. It’s about time they tried something more spectacular. Surely it’s time for a revival of that great cliché of the 1930s, the ruined City whizzkid hurling himself out of the window? The credit crunch high dive. Extra points if you manage to pull a backflip on the way down, or crack your jaw on a window cleaner’s cradle somewhere around floor 35. The ultimate high score goes to the first one who manages to successfully update his Facebook status using an iPhone seconds before slamming into the pavement. ‘Danny is plummeting to his doom.’ Click here to tag him in a photo. Look, there he is. That sort of gritty pink puddle with a few teeth and bits of hair sticking out of it? Next to the bin? Beside the horrified, vomiting pedestrians? That’s Danny, your mate who got a career in the city. That’s what the FTSE did to him. And you thought your job was bad. Who’s laughing now? Not him. He can’t. His windpipe’s in the gutter.

Is this the end of the world? If so, it’s a bit more boring than I’d imagined. So far, it’s been an invisible apocalypse. Poke your head out the window and there’s little evidence of charred debris. Perhaps that’s yet to come. Like I say, I’m writing this on Friday morning. By the time you read it, it’ll be Monday. Maybe we’re already bartering with coloured pebbles or fighting over water or something.

Still, there’s no point in worrying. If we’re going to be plunged into some kind of barbaric medieval dark age, I might as well be philosophical about it, because there’s no way I’ll survive more
than a month. I’d be hopeless at fighting over basic resources and don’t have any essential manual skills, such as the ability to hunt and skin rats. Perhaps I can learn the lute and become a minstrel, or perform bawdy jigs in exchange for pennies. Assuming there are any pennies. Hey, maybe just before all currency is finally declared worthless we’ll get to experience the whole wheelbarrows-full-of-worthless-banknotes thing, like they did in Germany just before the war. That’d be a blast.

It all seems particularly bizarre, because just over a week ago I was in Las Vegas, as part of a US road trip I’m writing up for the Travel section. The casino put me up in an outrageous suite the size of a millionaire’s bachelor pad. It had a pool table, a butler, and a shower in the lounge with a lapdancing pole in the middle of it. The windows looked out over the Las Vegas strip; specifically over the multimillion-dollar fountain show at the front of Bellagio. I visited a nightclub full of pricks who danced around tossing banknotes in the air, then returned to the suite, which alongside a pool table and a butler, also came equipped with about six gigantic, wall-mounted HD plasma TVs, every single one of which was screaming bad news about the economy. I felt like I was trapped inside a terrifying satirical sci-fi flick.

And it had to happen, obviously. For years, money was just appearing from nowhere, or so we were told. People bought houses and bragged about how the value kept zooming up, and up, and up. In fact they didn’t seem to be houses at all, but magic coin-shitting machines. It was all a dream, a dream in which you bought a box and lived in it, and all the time it generated money like a cow generates farts. Great big stinking clouds of money. And none of it was real. And now it’s gone. Your house is worth less than your shoes, and your shoes are now, in turn, worth less than your mouth and your arse. Yes, your most valuable possessions are now your mouth and your arse, and you’re going to have to use both of them in all manner of previously unthinkable ways to make ends meet, to pay for that box, the box you live in, the one you mistook for an enchanted, unstoppable cash engine. I hope you’ve got a nice kitchen. Maybe that’ll take your mind off things. And sell that
Alessi smoothie maker while you’re about it. You can’t afford fruit any more. It’s tap water at best from now on. It’s good for you! Really, it is.

All of it was a dream. All that crap we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years – none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living.

Like virtually no one else in the country, I stayed up to watch the final US presidential debate the other night, which started at the user-friendly time of 2 a.m. and lasted 350 hours, if you count all the post-match analysis. All the rolling news channels were covering it live, of course, so my choice of network was largely based on aesthetics. Sky News had the colour turned up to cartoon levels, so that was out. The BBC had a more sober palette, and was showing it in widescreen, but there weren’t enough distracting tickers and graphics to maintain my attention – I know they’re bad, but I just can’t help myself – so before long I started channel-surfing. The moment I alighted on CNN, I knew I was going to stay there. Why? Because they had an animated graph.

It looked like a heart monitor. For a moment, I thought it was displaying the opponents’ pulses. Or maybe it was hooked up to a pad in their seats, and was scrupulously monitoring the amount of arse sweat they’d generate if a tricky question reared its head. But no. Instead it was supposed to be a visual representation of the ever-shifting mind-set of a group of uncommitted Ohio voters.

Rather than shoving electrodes into said voters’ brains, so they looked like miserable cats in an anti-vivisection poster, CNN had taken the humane route and given them some sort of approval-rating widget. So if you were holding one, and Obama said something you didn’t like, you turned the dial down, and if McCain said
something you did like, you turned it up. And vice versa. There was one line for women and another for men, so you could see how the different sexes had different reactions. Sadly, that was the full extent of demographic separation. They could’ve broken it down a little further. It would’ve been fascinating to see how, say, overweight ginger-haired postmen felt about the possibility of a new free trade agreement with Colombia, but the lazy bastards at CNN couldn’t be arsed to tell us.

This shocking oversight aside, watching the wobbly line snake up and down as the candidates spoke was mesmerising. So mesmerising you couldn’t really hear what they were saying. In fact, it turned the debate into a video game – like SingStar, the PlayStation karaoke thing where you get drunk and try to belt your way through ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ without hitting too many bum notes.

When the delicate subject of abortion came up, the line became yet more fiddly, and turned into one of those infuriating puzzles where you have to move a metal loop along a twisty-turny electrified wire without touching the sides.

Since it’s impossible not to root for one candidate or another, this meant that you found yourself egging your favourite on in craven and bizarre ways. ‘Shit, the line’s dropping – quick, make a rash promise to the American people! Say you’ll eliminate taxes! Claim to be Christ! Offer free hand-jobs! Anything!’

At one point I found myself thinking it’d be useful if people had those approval-monitor graphs on their faces in real life, so when you were talking to them at parties you could tell, at a glance, just how interested or bored they were. Then I remembered that’s what basic facial expressions are for. Nature always gets there first.

Speaking of facial expressions, during the eight or nine nanoseconds I wasn’t focused intently on the animated line, the lingering reaction shots provided much entertainment. The screen was split in two so you could see their faces while the other was talking. Obama smiled a lot, so much in fact that he started resembling a reality show contestant watching a compilation of his ‘best bits’. McCain’s face didn’t know quite what to do with itself. It kept trying
to look furious. Then you’d see him remember that looking furious doesn’t play well, so he’d arrange his face into a tight, eerie grin, while appearing to grow increasingly furious with himself for failing to hide his earlier fury, thereby creating an unfortunate anger-based feedback loop. He should’ve worn a mask. Is the world ready for a masked president? Hell, yeah. How about one in a Sarah Palin mask? Or Chico Marx? Or Jason Voorhees from
Friday the 13th?
That’d really have thrown Obama off his stride, and given the networks something else to debate ad nauseam, thereby putting McCain back at the top of the news agenda. Is this a new maverick strategy, or a mental breakdown? The pundits would be at it for hours.

Despite the visual distractions, a few words and noises did register in my brain. Obama’s voice is so soothing, I kept thinking he was about to start advertising coffee. ‘I want to say to the American people: this is the finest, mellowest blend your money can buy.’ McCain, meanwhile, was narrating a children’s story about Joe the Plumber. Maybe it’s a back-up plan: if he doesn’t win the presidency, he’s going to launch a stop-motion animation series on Nickelodeon. There’s probably a warehouse full of Joe the Plumber action figures out there somewhere in the Arizona desert just waiting for the say-so.

I kept waiting for Obama to counter McCain’s talk of Joe the Plumber by bringing up Boris the Spider or Dennis the Menace or something, but no. He started addressing Joe too. Before long they were both at it, appealing to Joe straight down the lens, which meant I had to keep looking behind me in case he was standing there, fixing a pipe.

Then it was over and I went to bed. At least I think I did. Perhaps it was all a dream. Certainly felt that way. An election in Narnia. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.

There’s a lot of bleak and distressing news around at the moment. In fact, I’ve become so conditioned to expect bad news that if I
turned on CNN tomorrow morning and saw a report saying every kitten in the world had died of leukaemia during the night, accompanied by footage of sobbing workmen bulldozing their bodies into a mass grave, I’d probably just shrug and think: ‘Yeah, that figures.’ But grim though the news is, nothing of late has haunted me quite as much as a story I read some time ago – this time last year as it happens – about a man who was jailed for urinating on a woman who’d collapsed in the street, shouting ‘This is YouTube material!’ as she lay dying.

A reader reminded me of this last week. But only indirectly. I get a lot of emails from people asking me to read through stuff they’ve written to see if I think it’s funny, or can give them advice and so on. And I rarely do, because (a) some of the stuff they send is even worse than my own (in which case they must be really straining), and (b) my inbox is perpetually over its size limit thanks to an endless swarm of whopping great PR emails containing 10MB JPEG invites to things I’m never, ever going to go to – so half the time I can’t reply anyway.