I can make you hate (22 page)

To get to the Cordoba Centre from Ground Zero, you’d have to walk in the opposite direction for two blocks, before turning a corner and walking a bit more. The journey should take roughly two minutes, or possibly slightly longer if you’re heading an angry mob who can’t hear your directions over the sound of their own enraged bellowing.

Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is ‘two minutes’ walk and round a corner’ from something else isn’t actually ‘in’ the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with crapping directly onto the Queen’s pillow. That’s how ‘distance’ works in Britain. It’s also how distance works in America, of course, but some people are currently pretending it doesn’t, for daft political ends.

New York being a densely populated city, there are lots of other buildings and businesses within two blocks of Ground Zero, including a McDonald’s and a Burger King, neither of which has yet been accused of serving milkshakes and fries on hallowed ground. Regardless, for the opponents of Cordoba House, two blocks is too close, period. Frustratingly, they haven’t produced a map pinpointing precisely how close is OK.

That’s literally all I’d ask them in an interview. I’d stand there pointing at a map of the city. Would it be offensive here? What about here? Or how about way over there? And when they finally picked a suitable spot, I’d ask them to draw it on the map, sketching out roughly how big it should be, and how many windows it’s allowed to have. Then I’d hand them a colour swatch and ask them to decide on a colour for the lobby carpet. And the conversation would continue in this vein until everyone in the room was in tears. Myself included.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, 70 per cent of Americans are opposed to the ‘Ground Zero mosque’, doubtless in many cases because they’ve been led to believe it literally is a mosque at Ground Zero. And if not … well, it must be something
significant
. Otherwise why would all these pundits be so angry about it? And why would anyone in the media listen to them with a straight face?

According to a recent poll, one in five Americans believes Barack Obama is a Muslim, even though he isn’t. A quarter of those who believe he’s a Muslim also claimed he talks about his faith too much. Americans aren’t dumb. Clearly these particular Americans have either gone insane or been seriously misled. Where are they getting their information?

Sixty per cent said they learned it from the media. Which means it’s time for the media to give up.

Seriously, broadcasters, journalists: just give up now. Because either you’re making things worse, or no one’s paying attention anyway. May as well knock back a few Jagermeisters, unplug the autocue, and just sit there dumbly repeating whichever
reality-warping
meme the far right wants to go viral this week. What’s that? Obama is Gargamel and he’s killing all the Smurfs? Sod it. Whatever. Roll titles.

Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band.

I entered the room at 10.30 a.m. Because I was interested in the phone-hacking story, I’d set up an automatic Twitter search for the term ‘Coulson’ (eavesdropping, essentially: he’d hate it). Whenever someone mentioned his name, a window would pop up in the corner of my screen to alert me. Often their messages included a link to a webpage, which I’d end up skim-reading. This was on top of the other usual web distractions: emails, messageboards, self-deluding ‘research’ on Wikipedia, and so on.

By 1 p.m. I’d written precisely three lines of script. Yet my fingers had scarcely left the keyboard. My brain felt like a loose, whirring wheel that span with an audible buzz yet never quite touched the ground.

At around 2 p.m., Google announced the final straw.

I’m starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.

That afternoon, it unveiled a new feature called Google Instant. It delivers search results before you’ve finished typing them. So now, if I visit Google and start typing my own name, it shows me links to Craigslist the moment I hit ‘C’. When I add the ‘H’, up pops the homepage for Chase online banking. By the time I’ve spelt out ‘Charlie’, I’m presented with a synopsis and review score for
Charlie St Cloud
, a film starring Zac Efron. Add a ‘Br’ and Charlie Brown gazes back at me.

As the name suggests, this all happens instantly. It’s the internet on fast-forward, and it’s aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can’t even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.

Naturally, Google is trumpeting it as the best thing since sliced time. In a promotional video, a likable codger gives it a spin and exclaims, ‘I didn’t even have to press enter!’ This from a man old enough to remember drying his clothes with a mangle. Google may have released him from the physical misery of pressing enter, but it’s destroyed his sense of perspective in the process.

But this isn’t just about ease of use: it’s about productivity too. Google proudly claims it reduces the average search time by two to five seconds. ‘That may not seem like a lot at first’, it says, ‘but it adds up.’

Cool. Maybe now I’ll get round to completing that symphony.

What with phone calls, texts, emails and Coulson tweets, that two-to-five-second period spent typing search terms into a soothing white screen was one of the only relaxing lulls in my day. I didn’t realise it at the time but, compared to Google Instant, it feels like a slow walk through a calm meadow.

My attention span was never great, but modern technology has halved it, and halved it again, and again and again, down to an atomic level, and now there’s nothing discernible left. Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100 per cent physically present. I wasn’t using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm. (Apart from ‘enter’, obviously. I didn’t even have to press that.)

By 5.30 p.m. I’d written half a paragraph. I went home in disgust.

In desperation that evening, I used Google Instant to hunt for solutions, and stumbled across something called the Pomodoro Technique. Put simply, it’s a method for retraining your attention span. You set a kitchen timer, and try to work without interruption for twenty-five minutes. Then you take a five-minute break. Then you work for another twenty-five minutes. And so on. It sounded easy, so I disconnected my net connection and gave it a try. By the time I went to bed I’d gone through three ‘Pomodoro cycles’ and written 1,856 words of script.

I’d heard of repentant slobs using a similar regime to ease
themselves
into the habit of exercise: run for ninety seconds, walk for ninety seconds, then repeat the cycle until your fitness increases and you can run to Gwent and back in time for
Emmerdale
. I never thought I’d have to do something similar for my attention span simply to maintain my own sanity.

Just as muscles ache the morning after your first exercise in months, so I can feel my brain ache between each twenty-
five-minute
bout of concentration. But there’s something else there too: a flickering sense of control.

So, from now on, I’m rationing my internet usage and training my mind muscles for the future. Because I can see where it’s heading: a service called Google Assault that doesn’t even bother to guess what you want, and simply hurls random words and sounds and images at you until you dribble all the fluid out of your body. And I know it’ll kill me, unless I train my brain to withstand and ignore it. For me, the war against the machines has started in earnest.

What with all the hoo-hah surrounding the Pope’s recent British holiday, the news that Nando’s has bought the Gourmet Burger Kitchen chain for £30m may have escaped your attention.

In many ways it’s the twenty-first-century equivalent of Little Chef absorbing Wimpy, albeit markedly more middle-class than that. Both chains specialise in upmarket fast food: the kind of place you don’t feel thoroughly ashamed to be seen in, unlike their more established and reviled mass-market competitors.

One cold morning about two years ago, I sat in the window of a McDonald’s tucking into a sausage-and-egg McMuffin. It was a bit like sinking my teeth into a small, soft woodland creature with a light dusting of flour; one which thoroughly enjoyed being eaten and responded to each bite by gently urinating warm oil down my chin.

It was a strangely comforting experience, until I realised that some – not all, but a reasonable percentage – of the passersby outside the window were regarding me with a combination of pity and contempt as they scurried past. Sitting in the window of a McDonald’s, I realised, is a bit like self-harming in a glass booth. People judge you for it.

Not so the Gourmet Burger Kitchen. It has about fifty branches around the UK, but since most of them are in London, chances are you haven’t visited one. It’s a posher, ostensibly healthier Burger King: fresh, chargrilled, 100 per cent Aberdeen Angus patties served inside buns ‘made to a secret recipe by our artisan baker’. But that much you could probably guess from the name. What’s truly shocking, the first time you’re confronted with a Gourmet Burger, is the sheer quantity of food involved. Eating one is a bit like attempting to cram a fortnight’s worth of clothing into a child-size suitcase, or falling face-first into a meat sofa.

You’ve got two options: tackle it with a knife and fork (the coward’s way out), or dislocate your jaw in the manner of a boa constrictor swallowing a foal, and heave it into your gullet, driving it home like a Victorian taskmaster pushing a buttered eight-year-old into a narrow chimney flue, taking care not to let the top half of the snooty artisan bap smother your nostrils on the way in.

Order chips, incidentally, and your burger will be accompanied by a generous helping of deep-fried slabs the size and weight of piano keys. Eat there at lunchtime and you’ll spend the rest of the day feeling as if you’re incubating an immense, spherical beef-baby. And caesarean delivery sadly isn’t an option. Before bedtime, you’ll understand how it might feel to give birth to a banister.

Even though a posh cheeseburger contains roughly 805 calories, compared with 490 calories in a Big Mac, there’s no shame attached to the public enguzzlement of Gourmet Burgers, partly because of the emphasis on fresh ingredients, but mainly because it’s a thoroughly middle-class form of indulgence. (Don’t get me wrong, I like a Gourmet gutbuster now and then – but I couldn’t honestly say I enjoy it more than a Burger King Whopper. Both are definitely superior to the Big Mac, however; to my mind, Big Macs taste a bit like a burger that’s just been sick down its own front on a long car journey.)

Nando’s, while not as posh as GBK, serves up spicy
flame-grilled
chicken, which makes eating there feel decidedly less shameful than a trip to KFC (fair enough, since eating KFC is like squeezing a sponge full of poultry-flavoured oil into your gob). But the health benefit of Nando’s flame-grilling technique is perhaps slightly offset by the endless free drink refills; while gnawing at their chicken, your diet-conscious kiddywinks can guzzle as much cola as their guts can withstand.

So, then. It seems the key to nurturing a successful chain of fast-food restaurants in modern Britain is to provide a less reprehensible version of something popular (burgers for GBK; chicken’n’chips for Nando’s), while still enabling your customers to indulge in potentially ruinous gluttony.

It’s a simple formula, and I think I’ve spotted a gap in the market: fry-ups. Everyone loves a full English breakfast, but the traditional greasy spoon has an image problem. I propose a chain of health-conscious caffs where the eggs are free-range, the tea
and coffee are Fairtrade, and the sausages and bacon are cooked on George Foreman grills, right there at the table.

Oh, and the meat in the sausages and bacon comes from the customers themselves. Your first cup of tea contains a local anaesthetic; while you read your paper, simply slice a thin rasher of thigh off your leg and pop it on the grill. Two rashers if you want to lose weight. It’s the ultimate in locally sourced produce: 100 per cent organic, extremely environmentally friendly, and, if taken up by large numbers of people, it will go some way to solving the global food crisis.

The only downside I can think of is the blood leakage, although I’m sure, given time, I’ll think of a solution. Probably involving vinyl seats and black pudding.

I only need a couple of million to get going. Who’s in?

Ministers are concerned that Britain’s schoolkids aren’t doing enough team sports. Good for them. The kids, that is. Not the ministers. I’ll dumbly and instinctively side with anyone trying to bunk off games. Apart from preventing obesity and heart attacks and diabetes and high blood pressure and premature death, what exactly is school sport good for?

The benefits aren’t merely physical, grunt the experts, through their thick, sport-liking mouths. Team games build character. I can’t argue with that. They certainly helped strengthen the more cunning and resentful elements of my personality.