The Hell of It All (37 page)

Welcome to 2009.

So what do we do? Well, as with any scary situation, we could try scrunching up our eyes and wishing it all away, but that rarely works, unless you’re driving a bus across a busy junction and couldn’t give a fig for convention. Instead, we’re going to have to co-operate with one another if we’re going to get through this. I know, I know: ugh. The concept of sharing has been knocked out of us. For years it’s been all about you, your nice things, your signature dish and your plasma screen, and everyone else can go swing. Now we’ll have to knock on doors and swap cups of sugar. But maybe it won’t be so bad. Picture yourself sharing a meal with a neighbour. Or maybe a bath. A bubble bath. Look, there are little tealight candles round the edge of the tub. And you’re having a glass of red wine together! It’s lovely! Assuming you have attractive neighbours. If not, sorry. Just close your eyes and wish it away, especially when they stand up, turn round and bend over to search for the soap.

Actually that whole bath scenario might represent the way forward. It sounds quite romantic, and authentic romance has been in short supply of late. Authentic romance makes life more enjoyable, but more importantly it costs nothing. Buying flowers and baubles and Parisian city breaks – that’s not authentic romance. That’s lazy showboating. Authentic romance could flourish in a
skip. Prove this to yourself. Invite someone on a date and spend the evening sitting in a skip making each other laugh with limericks or something. Get through that and you’ve bonded for life. Or maybe a week. It’s hard to tell when you embark on a new relationship. Still, if you split up: time for more romance with someone else. Everybody wins.

Mark my words, you’d be wise to practise your romancing skills now, because when, circa October, we’re huddled together in shelters sharing body heat to survive, the ability to whisper sweet nothings could prove useful. Come the dawn, you’ll need to pair up with someone to go hunting for supplies with, and it’ll help if you’ve been cuddling all night. The world outside will be dangerous, so there’ll have to be two of you. One to root through the abandoned Woolworth’s stockrooms and another to stand outside warding off fellow scavengers with a flaming rag on a stick.

Obviously if two is better than one, it follows that three is better than two, especially in the thick of a food riot. Rather than forming boring old duos as per tradition, polygamous unions involving up to 30 or 40 participants will emerge victorious, roving the landscape in packs by day, writhing around in obscene configurations in their papier-mache huts by night – strictly for the purposes of generating heat, of course. We can all do our bit. I, for one, am fully prepared to take on 50 wives if it’ll help make the world more manageable, provided I don’t have to talk to them and I get to wear a crown and issue decrees and everything. We’ll create a kingdom in a cave somewhere and kill and eat unfortunate passers-by, like Sawney Bean and his family. Now they had vision. First potential wife to contact me with full Ordnance Survey reference numbers for a suitable location (warm cave, close to major thoroughfare) gets to be Minister of Skinning Trespassers Alive and Sticking Their Heads On Poles as a Warning to Others of Their Kind.

All things considered, this may be a bleak year but at least it’ll be more interesting than, say, 2006, during which nothing happened. So grit your teeth and meet 2009 head-on, because it’s not going anywhere until 2010 at the very earliest.

In summary: happy new year.

Sigh. Yeah, that’s right: sigh. Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a piece about the world’s bizarre insistence on marrying me off, prompted by three separate incidents in which strangers chuckled at my shambling incompetence and suggested that what I needed was a proper sorting out, which could only arrive in the form of a wife. Cue much indignant spluttering on my part. For one thing, how did these strangers instinctively know I wasn’t already married? Even gargoyles get hitched, sometimes. And for another, I didn’t actually want a wife, thanks for asking.

Nothing beats living alone. Why shackle yourself to a fellow human being for the rest of your days? Because you’re in love? Don’t be a wuss. That’ll fade after a few years and all you’ll be left with is a walking catalogue of tiny, grating quirks gleefully pointing out your shortcomings. To avoid murdering each other, you’ll have to keep yourselves anaesthetised with DVD box sets and the occasional holiday. Life partner? Joy thief, more like.

But maybe that’s a lie, the kind of lie you live by in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. There are a billion valid reasons to avoid settling down, but the root cause of most commitment-phobia is something else entirely. Namely terror. Raw terror. The terrifying prospect of falling in love in the first place.

Love can be genuinely awful. Worse than the norovirus on a coach trip. When it goes wrong – and it usually does – it kicks a hole in your ribcage and voids its bowels in your soul. Get burned badly and from that point on, falling in love is like inviting a werewolf into your home: you sit there fascinated, watching it eat at the table and admiring your curtains. You make conversation and share private jokes. But try as you might, you’re not quite relaxed and you’re not quite yourself; you’re on tenterhooks, aware that any moment now it’s going to turn round and bite your throat out.

In the face of love’s potential destructive fury, you’re left with three options. (1) Pull down the emotional shutters and try to avoid it. (2) Find someone you admire or like, rather than love, and try to make do, rendering both of you miserable in the process. Or (3)
Throw caution to the wind and gingerly place your fragile, beating heart in the hands of another human being and hope they don’t crush it in their fist for giggles. On paper, the first option seems like the only sensible choice.

But gah and damn and blast and argh: it isn’t. Not really. To carry it off with any degree of success involves suppressing all vestige of romance, which ultimately atrophies your insides and turns you into either a loner or a bastard, or some maddening, alternating combination of the two. And you can’t entirely kill off the romantic impulse. When you’re queuing in the supermarket on your lonesome, clutching a basket full of meat and veg, all of which has been carefully weighed and packaged into portions big enough for two apparently just to underline the folly of your isolationist policy, it’s hard not to gaze enviously at the couples in front of you, even if they’re bickering over a cheap jar of pasta sauce. They might be unhappy, but at least they’re united by misery. The rest of us have to pick holes in ourselves. They get to share.

So maybe a wife isn’t such a bad idea, I figured, as 2009 started to dawn. The problem is finding one. I’ve fantasised before about a society in which single people are assigned partners arbitrarily by the government.

But that’s not going to work, because my checklist of desired attributes is impossibly lofty: I refuse to be satisfied with anything less than a clever, funny, misanthropic supermodel who spends 98% of her time ignoring my existence (because basic psychology dictates that nothing’s going to maintain your interest quite like being dangled on a string for eternity), and the remaining 2% offering sickening reassurance. Thus far the universe has stubbornly refused to offer this up, and since no one on earth can possibly match up to this deluded ideal, which I don’t deserve anyway, perhaps it’s time to widen the net by aiming low. By which I mean below the realms of the human. Animals are out: they don’t live long enough to make the social revulsion your union would provoke worth bearing. Unless you count tortoises, but they’re too hard and aloof and ultimately unknowable to seriously consider settling down with.

No. A robot wife will do just fine. It wouldn’t have to be terribly advanced: a crudely animated face on a stick offering relentless criticism and the occasional rude limerick would probably keep me sufficiently entertained to the grave. I’m aware even that might be aiming a bit too high. I’m not getting any younger, so give it a few years and I’ll be content with a bag of gravel in a hat. Although just to keep things spicy, it’d be an open relationship: I’d let other men have sex with my gravel-bag wife, provided I could point and laugh as they did so.

Pour all your romance into a bagful of gravel? Yeah, I can see that. And it is, I suspect, the only conceivable future in which true and lasting happiness lies.

Here’s another few millimetres shaved from the national joy quotient: the Food Standards Agency is launching a scheme to get restaurants to print calorie information on their menus alongside the name of each dish.

What used to happen was this: at the end of the meal, the waiter arrived clutching a dessert menu to ask if you wanted pudding, and you and your companion shared a quick jokey conversation along the lines of ‘I’ll have one if you have one’ or ‘if you order the Chocolate Guernica, I’ll have one mouthful … just the one, mind’, until the waiter smiled and said, ‘I’ll get two spoons,’ and a few minutes later you enjoyed guiltily tucking into a velvety mass of warm brown mush together, then went home and had sex to underline what a decadent pair of naughty revolutionaries you’d been.

Now that same dessert menu will become a dossier of sobering statistics. It’ll still be accompanied by descriptions of moist sponge enrobed in an oozing burqa of dark chocolate sauce, but no amount of unctuous wordplay can distract from those cold, hard numbers. Five hundred calories? The waiter might as well tip a jug of freezing water directly into your laps. Perhaps if it was also accompanied by a list of physical activities you’d have to undertake
in order to burn off all that fat and sugar, the balance would be redressed. A scoop of vanilla ice cream? Ten minutes of kissing in a shop doorway. Caramel cookie surprise? That’ll be accompanied by a pornographic instructional line-drawing complete with arrows pointing out precisely what you’ll have to put where, and how firmly and repeatedly you’ll have to repeat the action. And so on.

The one drawback: business lunches with the boss would be rendered awkward and excruciating. But that’s a small price to pay. Another upside: parents wouldn’t bring their children to restaurants.

Unless they do that, all the scheme will achieve is a rise in the national level of food-related neuroticism, which is surely peaking in conjunction with obesity statistics. A similar system in New York restaurants apparently reduced the average diner’s intake by around 100 calories. A success, on the face of it, although the figures don’t show how many of them went home and tucked into a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s because they wanted dessert but also didn’t want to be judged an indolent slob by the waiting staff.

The whole calorie-counting business is far too anal anyway. It encourages fat people to waddle around with a headful of damning numbers, perpetually totting up their score like a failing bookmaker carrying out an internal audit. It’s the same with alcohol and units. Literally no one understands the units system.

Around Christmas the NHS ran a campaign called Know Your Units which looked a bit like the periodic table: rows of different-shaped glasses full of different drinks, each with the relevant unit number finger-painted in condensation on the side. Not only did it underline how baffling the units system is, but because the forbidden beverages were all lovingly shot, cool and inviting under studio lights, it actually made you want to try drinks you wouldn’t normally contemplate. Hey, that vodka and tonic I saw this morning looked refreshing. How many units was it again? I can’t remember. God, I’m useless. I hate me. Think I’ll have 10. That should blot out the failure.

Rather than bashing us over the head with numbers, the healthy-living Reich needs to employ more creative means to make the
indolent, slobbering populace bend to their will. For starters, how about hooking every chair in every restaurant up to a weighing machine? Having instantly gauged how disgusting you are, a computer prints out a menu with the most gluttonous items removed. Or you could do away with the waiters entirely, and replace them with a food pipe. You sit down on the weighing chair and shove the pipe down your gullet, and a nutritionally balanced river of mulch is pumped directly into your stomach from a giant processing unit in the kitchen which hums ominously and has lights that blink on and off and a giant rotating swastika on top just to spook the underlings gingerly filling it with low-fat chicken stock.

That might prove expensive. Wing mirrors on the cutlery, however, would be cheap: distorting funhouse mirrors specifically angled to reflect your own wobbling, bloated face from the most unflattering angle as you shovel hunks of lamb casserole into your despicable gaping mouth. To make the experience more unpleasant, they could train a dog fed exclusively on onions and beer to run in from a back room and quietly blow off under the table each time you raise the fork to your mouth.

Actually, why not just ban food? Step one: make owning a kitchen illegal. Step two: replace all supermarkets and cafes with trucks that rove the streets three times a day dispensing bite-sized meal-pellets. Make sure the trucks are controlled by a computer, so they adjust their pace each time a crowd approaches, forcing them to break into a run and gain essential exercise.

Alternatively, they could carry on patronising and nagging and prodding and hectoring until everyone in the country gets so utterly sick of it all they take up arms and start a violent revolution. Beating your way through a flank of riot police to smash down a government building with a sledgehammer burns off thousands of calories. And afterwards you can sit down in the rubble and skeletons eating mouthfuls of pie, secure in the knowledge that you’ve earned yourself a treat.

Last week I watched the most frightening horror movie I’ve ever seen. It was about three hours long, and, incredibly, it all unfolded live. I’m talking, of course, about the inauguration of Barack Obama. Yes it was inspiring, yes it was uplifting … but it was also genuinely terrifying on a very human level, because just like you I was watching it with the terrible nagging suspicion that he might get shot at any moment.