I can make you hate (26 page)

The more these devices are capable of, the greater potential for embarrassment. What’s on your handset? Intimate texts?
Embarrassing photos? Raunchy emails? An eye-opening internet history? I just hope you trust the staff down the Orange store next time you’re upgrading your phone.

Actually, if you’re anything like me, you don’t have anything lurid on your handset at all – partly out of sheer paranoia – but still can’t help feeling anxious whenever someone asks to borrow it. It’s the same uneasy frisson you feel when a policeman looks you in the eye while stopped at the lights – a vague sense of guilt, like you’re hiding something.

And phone-borrowers don’t even have to be deliberately nosy to stumble across your personal details. Even if they only want to make a call, simply by accessing the dial option they’ll be treated to a list of who rang you last and how long you spoke for. On the phone to the doctor for an hour were you? That’s interesting. Here, have it back. Just going to wash my hands.

Another example of inadvertent intrusion: I once used a
computer
belonging to someone I knew, and logged on to Amazon to look up the release date for a DVD.

That’s how I roll. I’m crazy.

Anyway, the moment I arrived at the home page, it assumed I was her, and presented me with a list of suggested purchases, all of which were self-help books for people trapped in terrible relationships, with titles like
Stop Crying, Start Loving
and
When Sex Is Harrowing.
It was an uncomfortable and rather sad glimpse into someone else’s life, I thought, once I’d stopped pointing and laughing.

Still, at least that was nothing more harmful than someone’s innermost thoughts being laid bare. But it’s not just our personal information that’s increasingly insecure. It’s our personal persons.

Not so long ago, a tourist couple stopped me in the street and asked me to take a snap of them grinning in front of something vaguely picturesque (this being London, probably an especially colourful pavement puke-puddle or a tramp with a funny neck tumour). But unfamiliar as I was with the workings of their
phone, instead of taking their picture, I inadvertently brought up the gallery of previous photographs, and was treated to a view of one of them in the shower, followed by a series of close-up views of various biological and overwhelmingly intimate occurrences involving the pair of them.

As I fumbled with menus, trying not to betray my
embarrassment
, I glimpsed at the man and something in his eyes told me that he
knew
, somehow – he
knew
what had happened, but couldn’t snatch the phone off me for fear of embarrassing his girlfriend, who remained oblivious.

Eventually I took the photo. His smile was fixed and
unconvincing
. I handed the device back. She thanked me. He stared at the ground. We went our separate ways in silence. Somehow, it was as if we’d all taken part in a terrible threesome.

This kind of acute personal embarrassment simply wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago. But with our every folly entered into an electronic ledger somewhere, it’s becoming commonplace. Scarcely a week goes by without a leaked nudey phone photo of some hapless celebrity doing the online rounds. Paris, Britney, Rihanna, Miley … eventually we’ll be treated to raunchy snaps of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Vince Cable. Don’t pretend you’ll turn away. You’ll stand and stare like the rest of us.

And those are just the famous people. By the year 2022, there’ll be a naked photo of everyone on the planet lurking somewhere in the interverse. You might as well take a really good one this afternoon, while you’re young and pliable, and upload it yourself before some future peeping-tom equivalent of WikiLeaks does it for you.

Face it: there’s a 45 per cent chance that Julian Assange is rooting through an exhaustive collection of photographs of your bum right this very minute. And you know he’ll release the least flattering ones first.

So you might as well beat him to it.

You can’t put a price on a good education. Except, actually, you can – and it turns out that price is just over £9,000 a year.

Unsurprisingly many students are furious at the hike in tuition fees; but apart from shouting about it or trying to smash the Treasury to bits with sticks, what practical steps can we take to make education more affordable?

Nine thousand pounds a year sounds like a lot – but actually, it’s shitloads. Yet it turns out that if you divide shitloads by
fifty-two
, it comes out at around £173 a week, which sounds more achievable. Especially if your course only lasts seven days. So let’s only provide week-long courses.

Obviously, to compress a three-year course into one week, the field of study will have to be streamlined a bit. Whittled down. Reduced to a series of bullet points. But in many cases, that’s an advantage.

Take history. There’s already far too much of it. In fact, mankind is generating a ‘past mountain’, which grows twenty-four hours in size every single day. No one can be expected to keep all of that in their head. There simply isn’t room. Even award-winning historians will be lost for words if you unexpectedly leap out in front of them and demand they list everything that happened on, say, 6 July 1919, before the special quiz music ends, especially if they thought they were alone in the house.

So instead of studying the whole of human history, why not focus on a concentrated period, such as the most exciting five minutes of the Second World War? That way you just get the fun bits with the machine guns and everything, and there’s none of that boring exploration of the ‘consequences’ or the ‘causes’ or ‘how we can stop it happening again’. The philosopher George Santayana famously remarked that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. But if you have forgotten history, you
won’t know you’re repeating it – so it won’t matter. And you won’t have heard of George Santayana, either. Which is just as well because he sounds like a smart arse.

Likewise, when it comes to studying politics, let’s not waste time examining both sides of an argument – that’s just confusing. Instead of learning the pros and cons of say, slavery, why not just learn the pros? Not only is it far quicker, but you actually stand more chance of getting a job when you graduate, perhaps as a feisty TV news pundit or
Daily Express
columnist. Or as the owner of a cotton plantation.

Speaking of careers, there are far too many courses with no clear vocational goal. If you’re not studying with a view to ensuring your future prosperity, why, precisely, are you bothering to read the
Decameron
? For the cultural benefit of all mankind? Look around you. Culture’s doing just fine without your help. We’ve got everything we need – from cage-fighting at the lowbrow end of the spectrum through to the dizzy heights of James Cameron’s
Avatar
right up at the top. There’s something for everyone.

Rather than providing frivolous courses in artsy-fartsy-
thinky-winky
subjects with no obvious revenue stream, our educational institutions could save a lot of time and unnecessary expense by only providing courses that train students for jobs we’re definitely going to need in the brilliant future we’re steadily carving for ourselves. What’s the point in learning botany? We all know there won’t be plantlife. Apart from maybe the odd triffid, or whatever sort of moss can withstand a dirty bomb. So why bother learning about it? There’s no money to be made.

Instead, let’s focus on giving young people the skills society will be crying out for in the years or months to come. Practical vocations such as water-cannon operator, wasteland scavenger, penguin coffin logger, Thunderdome umpire, dissident strangler, henchperson and pie ingredient.

Come to think of it, even those courses are going to be costly, and the eventual wages so insultingly low it’ll take them three
lifetimes to repay the loans. They can make up some of the
shortfall
by taking part in medical experiments, fellating ministers or breeding offspring for food, but the chances are that the big society will never recoup the funds it lent to these little people.

Which leaves us one final option. Let’s simply give up. You know, as a species. Put an end to this weird ‘progress’ experiment we’ve all been taking part in and actively revert to the level of farmyard animals. They look happy, don’t they, with their tails and their mud? Let’s join them.

Starting tomorrow, let’s stop bothering to learn or teach
anything
. Within months the whole world will be far simpler for all concerned. We can issue the next generation with a few basic instructions, some warm clothes and toilet paper, and leave them to it.

Eventually society will regress to the point where there are only two words – ‘boh’ (meaning good) and ‘bah’ (meaning bad). Everything will be either bah or boh; we’ll shuffle around
bahing
or boh-ing, chewing the cud or eating the vitamin rusks they occasionally fire in our direction from the turrets on their trucks. And everyone will be happy. Or ignorant. Or both.

Merry Christmas. 

In which
EastEnders
is revealed to be a work of fiction, Nick Clegg worries about human beings with feet, and a teenager incurs the wrath of the internet for singing a bad song badly.

I’m not entirely certain I can pinpoint the moment I first realised
EastEnders
isn’t a documentary. Maybe it was when Den Watts was assassinated by a bunch of daffodils. Or when he came back from the dead and then got killed again. Or when Steve Owen’s mother tried to French-kiss him on her deathbed.

Or when Ricky Butcher became a speedway champion for one week. Or when Melanie Healy slept with Phil Mitchell on Christmas Day.

Or when Max Branning got buried alive.

Or when Janine pushed Barry off a cliff. Or when Janine got so agoraphobic she sat indoors eating dog food. Or when Janine ran over Danielle in a car. Or when Janine framed Stacey by stabbing herself on Christmas Day. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his third wife, Laura. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his fourth wife, Jane.

Or when, while Googling a list of Janine’s crimes, I realised Ian Beale had managed to convince four whole women to marry him.

Somewhere along the way I must have twigged that none of these people were real, possibly during the bit at the end where the names of the actors who play them floated up the screen accompanied by theme music.

Contrary to popular opinion,
EastEnders
isn’t set in London, or even Britain, or even the world – it’s situated in an absurd alternate universe overseen by a malicious, tinkering God with a hilarious sense of timing. Each wedding, anniversary, national holiday or mid-sized social gathering is visited by major tragedy. The most familiar noise in Albert Square is the sound of party
poppers being drowned out by sobbing. Quickly followed by some pulsing electronic drums.

Over the last few weeks God was at it again. Having given both Kat Slater and Ronnie Branning newborn offspring to enjoy, God capriciously decided to kill Ronnie’s baby on New Year’s Eve.

As midnight neared, Ronnie wandered the square in a stunned daze, unnoticed by revellers and clutching the body of her deceased child – until, alerted by the sound of Kat’s baby crying from an open window, she snuck into the Queen Vic and swapped the two infants, in a scene that looked more like a
Tramadol Nights
sketch than the heartbreaking drama it was presumably intended to be.

And now there’s an entirely predictable storm of protest;
predictable
, apparently, to everyone except the
EastEnders
production
team, who seem to have failed to anticipate the sheer size of the furore – which is odd, since their job largely consists of hypothesising about all the different ways in which people can unwittingly stumble their way to an acrimonious row.

The usual excuse for any soap opera planning a
headline-grabbing
plotline is that they’re ‘helping to build awareness’ of some social ill, as though the average citizen can only truly come to terms with drug abuse after seeing Phil Mitchell smoke crack.

Of course, you only ‘build awareness’ by depicting events with some degree of accuracy, which is why the soaps often proudly announce that they collaborated closely with charities to ensure that Steve McFadden’s portrayal of the dark spiral of addiction would be as harrowingly authentic as possible, especially the bit where he smashed through a door like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
and burned the Queen Vic to the ground.

EastEnders
would never screen an episode in which Ian Beale has a breakdown and decides to walk around the Square with a dead baby balanced on his head like a hat, although that would ‘explore the issue’ of bereavement and mental health just as
effectively as the current child-swap storyline, which is equally unrealistic, yet has to be presented as a hard-hitting study of bereavement because the alternative is to admit that
EastEnders
is mindless entertainment – with the occasional dead infant thrown in for your amusement.

There’s a basic rule in drama that the audience can suspend disbelief only long enough to accommodate one extreme event at a time. A cot death is one extreme. A baby-swap is another. Combining the two events at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve was the scriptwriters’ first big mistake. Trying to pull all of this off within the context of a populist soap was the second. A self-consciously weighty one-off ITV drama-of-the-week with an A-list cast and lots of sombre camerawork would probably have got away with it, unless they did something totally crazy, like casting Jedward as the swapped babies.