The Hell of It All (44 page)

Anyway, the people of Twitter had helped me out once before by explaining how to cook a haggis, which I needed to know in a hurry for reasons too dull to explain. This time I asked them to suggest subjects for this column – and limited them to one word, thinking that might make the selection process easier. In reality, it was like sticking your head out of the window of a moving car and finding the atmosphere was made of words instead of air. Still, having asked for suggestions, it would be churlish not to use some of them. So here’s a selection of micro-columns on the
most popular suggestions, in order of frequency:

Snow:
Every other suggestion, predictably, was ‘snow’ – thereby giving me an excuse to write about it after all. I’m not a snow fan. It’s cold, white mould and nothing more. Still, the worst thing about the snow is all the TV news reports filled with ‘Your Pictures’ of tittering cretins building snowmen. One after the other, all of them rubbish. Having wasted airtime displaying 10,000 dull family snaps, the anchors still weren’t satiated – ‘Do keep sending your snow photos to our email address,’ they repeatedly pleaded. Jesus Christ, why not abuse your position and ask the audience to send in something genuinely interesting, like close-ups of intimate body parts?

Bale:
Another popular suggestion: Christian Bale’s shoutburst. It wasn’t actually that unreasonable: a director of photography adjusting lights in an actor’s eyeline during a take is a huge no-no, especially if they do it repeatedly. Also, if the makers of the film are canny, they’ll leave his tantrum in the finished cut and work round it. Might break the fourth wall for a bit, but it’s guaranteed box office.

Golliwogs:
Should Carol Thatcher have been sacked from
The
One Show
on the basis of a private, unaired conversation? No, but then she didn’t apologise or clarify what she meant afterwards, so yes. That’s that cleared up.

Sex/ Felching/ Nipples etc:
A fair proportion of the requests were for ‘naughty’ subjects, either body parts or unconventional sexual practices, which suggests a public thirst for unnecessary smut which the
Guardian
is spectacularly failing to address. The editors don’t like me writing about this sort of thing, but the people have spoken, goddamit – so, for the record, my favourite unconventional sexual practice (to read about, not actually partake in, you understand) is ‘docking’, which refers to two men facing each other with their penises out; one extends his foreskin and tucks it over the head of the other one’s member, thereby ‘docking’ them together. There. You’ll never see that mentioned in the
Daily Telegraph
, which is why this is the greatest newspaper in the world.

Wotsits/ Dirigibles/ Teacakes/ Songsmith etc:
See, the problem with asking thousands of people for one-word suggestions is that
you’re quickly swamped with so many disparate and random entries the exercise becomes less useful than flipping through a dictionary at random. This tallies with my how-to-cook-a-haggis query experience, incidentally: I got so many contradictory responses I was left unsure whether to steam it for 45 minutes or bake it in foil for an hour and a half – which wouldn’t matter really, except I was also warned that to cook it incorrectly would result in terrible food poisoning.

To glance back through this list, it would seem that asking Twitter for advice on what to write about isn’t a great gambit, full stop. The top three suggestions were either too obvious or have been covered at length elsewhere, and the rest were either too dirty to go into in detail (a shame, in my view), or blended into white noise by dint of sheer volume.

In summary, I’ve learned nothing and neither have you. But it’s passed some time. And that’s Twitter all over. Anyway, next week: Israel v Palestine – who’s right?

In these health-conscious times, potato crisps have a bad reputation. Gone are the days when you could walk down the street cheerfully snuffling through a pack of Smoky Bacon. Try that now and people will stare at you like you’re shooting heroin directly into a genital vein.

The standard tuckshop brands of crisps are shameful things, to be eaten in secret on a car journey. Of course, the fey ‘gourmet’ varieties – thicker, hand-cooked ‘artisan’ crisps with flavours such as Aged Stilton and Ambassador’s Port – are still considered acceptable by the food Nazis, provided they’re served in a bowl at a cocktail party, surrounded by organic vol-au-vents and snobs. That’s because our food neurosis is actually snootiness in disguise.

Consequently, the cheap end of the crisp market has to pull stunts to distract you from the crushing social disgrace involved in actually purchasing a bag. Walkers’ latest wheeze is a fun competition. Stage one: they ran adverts inviting the public to suggest
exotic new taste sensations. Stage two: they chose six finalists, released them into the wild, and asked the public to vote for their favourite. Stage three: the votes are counted and the top flavour becomes a permanent member of the Walkers line-up. We’re currently in stage two.

To lend the enterprise some gravitas, on the Walkers website you can watch kitchen surrealist Heston Blumenthal discussing the new flavours as though he genuinely believes they’re edible. But are they? As the nation’s foremost investigative journalist, I decided to find out, by buying a packet of each and sampling them. It was a mission that would take me to the very heart of a newsagent’s and back. Here are my capsule reviews of the six competing varieties:

Builder’s Breakfast:
There’s some confusion over the exact contents of the Builder’s Breakfast. On the website, Heston claims they taste of ‘sausages, bacon, eggs and beans’, whereas the packet itself lists ‘bacon, buttered toast, eggs and tomato sauce’. This would imply that even Walkers don’t know what they’ve got on their hands, possibly because the crisps themselves taste of stale fried egg and little else. It captures the feeling of sitting in a greasy spoon, being dumped via text while your food repeats on you. Depressing.

Crispy Duck and Hoisin:
A fairly accurate rendition, although if you close your eyes they taste like the standard Roast Chicken flavour might if the ‘chicken’ in them had been killed with a hammer made of compacted sugar. This is probably something Heston actually does in his restaurant.

Fish and Chips:
Sounds like a good idea, but think about it: FISH CRISPS. Consequently they smell vaguely infected. Actually eat one and it’s like kissing someone who’s just eaten a plateful of scampi. Halfway through they belch in your mouth.

Onion Bhaji:
The most convincing flavour, but they taste watered-down; as though Heston boiled one tiny bhaji in a swimming pool full of Evian, and then dipped some potatoes in it. It’s like a lame TV movie about onion bhajis, starring Adam Woodyatt, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of library music, broadcast directly on to your tastebuds.

Cajun Squirrel:
Self-consciously ‘wacky’ and attention-grabbing entry. Walkers are keen to point out that ‘no squirrels were harmed in the making of this crisp’, which is a pity because I had chuckle-some visions of thousands of live, screaming squirrels being bull-dozered into an immense bubbling cauldron in front of a party of horrified schoolchildren. The flavour itself is truly vile: if they’d called it Squirrel’s Blood, everyone would’ve believed them. They taste precisely like a tiny cat piping hot farts through a pot-pourri pouch into your mouth.

Chilli and Chocolate:
Excreted Battery Acid, more like. A boring lunatic with halitosis explains the smell of charred wood to your tastebuds. It’s vaguely like the smell you get when you bleed a radiator, but sharper, more disgusting, and worryingly ‘human’. They should’ve called it ‘Dirty Protest’ instead.

So there you have it. They’re uniformly horrible. Worst of all, none are a patch on, say, standard Salt and Vinegar, which has been around since the Cro-Magnon era. Obviously, they should’ve chosen more ambitiously. Since the squirrel flavour doesn’t actually contain any squirrel, they could unleash other tastes you’re vaguely curious about, but would never actually eat, like Cyanide and Lemon, or The Late Marilyn Monroe. If they’d bitten the bullet and genuinely released a flavour called Dirty Protest, people would queue round the block to try it, provided the packet carried a prominent guarantee that it was merely a simulation, not the genuine article. (For the record, according to
The Encyclopedia of
Unusual Sex Practices
by Brenda Love [ISBN 0 349 10676 2], ‘faeces supposedly has a charred or sour flavour but otherwise tastes similar to whatever was consumed.’ So now you know.)

Or maybe they could’ve worked on flavours that evoked a time and mood instead of mimicking an existing substance. Who could resist Wartime Romance (cigarettes, lipstick, and railway station)? Or Studio 54 (cocaine, sweat, and Bianca Jagger)? Even Medieval Times (mud, gibbet and wet tunic) would be worth trying.

But no. They didn’t dare to dream. So in summary: don’t vote for any of them. Spoil your ballot paper instead. Because that’s
what they’ve done to these innocent potatoes. The bastards. The absolute unconscionable bastards.

– Builder’s Breakfast eventually won, proving once again that there
is no god
.

Feeling helpless? Hollow? Futile and joyless? Crushed? Downtrodden? Just plain lousy? I could go on, but the list would only depress you. Depressed? Of course you are. There’s an eerie calm in the air as we glide through what feels like a brief ‘phoney war’ period before the CREDIT CRUNCH (which from now on, according to official guidelines, must be capitalised each time it appears in print, just to make it even more frightening) … before the CREDIT CRUNCH starts to bite for real and your local park becomes a shantytown filled with dog-faced people in rags prostituting themselves for a thimbleful of water.

Still, there’s no point in despairing. You may feel scared and vulnerable right now, but all that can be turned around in an instant. You have the power within you! Or rather, slightly outside you! I’m talking about your skin. Your skin isn’t simply a handy pliable coating that stops your liver plopping on to the floor like a fat red salmon: it’s a magic cloak of empowerment. I’ve learned this from television: all you have to do is whip your clothes off, show everyone your bum for a few minutes and, bingo, you’re empowered. Trinny and Susannah pioneered the idea, encouraging members of the public to pose in front of full-length mirrors in their underwear as part of the makeover process, but it wasn’t until Gok Wan began saving women from certain death each week, by making them strip completely naked before projecting their photo up the side of a building, that the idea really took off.

Since then we’ve had a BBC3 show called, simply,
Naked
, in which each week people from various professions – beauticians one week, nurses the next – are picked apart by psychologists and ‘image consultants’ for several days, as though they’re being
inducted into a cult. The show consists of ‘a series of challenges designed to help their self-esteem at work and at home’ – smashing things up with sledgehammers, primal screaming, bungee jumping and so on – culminating in a full-frontal strip show. It’s terribly moving, of course. Plenty of tears and inspiring music. And genitals. Because let’s face it, there’s no better way to bolster someone’s confidence than taking a good long stare at their genitals.

Now Sky have gone one better by announcing a show called
Credit Crunch Monty
(sorry, CREDIT CRUNCH Monty) in which a group of jobless men will be ‘laid bare in every sense as they reveal their background stories and their emotional journeys are captured – from overcoming the setback of unemployment to building up the confidence to perform a striptease’, i.e. a grand televised performance where you’ll presumably get to see their dicks and balls jiggling about, all empowered and that. Excitingly, it’s also being broadcast in HD, so if you’re still rich enough to afford a sparkly top-of-the-range TV you might just be able to make out the individual hairs bristling on their cringing scrota, thereby empowering them further.

It’s a refreshing measure of just how far our society has come. If, during the Great Depression, your great-grandfather had scraped together a living by running a stall at the local docks where he pulled down his trousers and manipulated his testicles in amusing ways while passersby laughed and tossed pennies at him, he’d probably have come away feeling too ashamed to talk about it, let alone give his consent to have the performance filmed for posterity. Whereas now public nudity is feelgood, confidence-boosting fun for all concerned. Provided it’s caught on tape. And backed with uplifting indie rock. And prominently displayed in the onscreen listings with a hooky word in the title, like NUDE or NAKED or STRIP or CLICK HERE FOR BUMS.

I don’t mean to imply, incidentally, that absolutely everyone who takes their clothes off for a living is desperate, miserable or exploited. That’s the cliché, but really – can you name a profession in which there aren’t people who are desperate, miserable or exploited? Which would you rather do? Strip for a camera now and then, or
work full-time in an office sitting beside a perspiring Coldplay fan who spends each lunchtime getting bits of moist cheese-and-onion crisp in his goatee and chortling over his Facebook messages?

Anyway, these hapless one-night-only TV strippers aren’t even making a career out of burlesque performance – they’ve merely been cajoled into doing it in the name of spiritual fulfilment. There’s presumably no substantial or protracted financial reward involved, so unless they get a kick out of sheer physical exhibitionism, they’d be well advised to keep their pants on until they’re offered a share of the proceeds.

Actually, I tell you what would be empowering: they could sell advertising space on their genitals. Get ‘CONFUSED. COM’ painted down the length of their dickers and the Iceland logo shaved into their pubes. I, for one, would stand and applaud.