I can make you hate (3 page)

I’d have to be crazy to do that, obviously. But once the thought was in there, I couldn’t rub it out. Even if I didn’t actually snap
and start twitching and flapping around, surely I’d be lying there fighting the urge, or at the very least fighting to suppress the urge from showing up in the first place? The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced I was going to do something appalling. It was like a mind virus.

Then I had another, even more terrible thought: what if I was lying there, desperately battling this loopy self-destructive
brainstorm
, when something altogether simpler yet equally destructive happened? Specifically: what if I sneezed? What if I sneezed just as the needle pierced my spine, and the doctors screamed and the nurses wept and I spent the rest of my life paralysed in bed, like the guy in
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
, minus the consolation of having two pretty French women squabbling for my affections?

I’d have to spend years staring at the ceiling. I don’t mind ceilings, but I’ve never glanced up at one and thought, ‘Oooh, I could stare at you for the rest of my life.’ Surely in this day and age, they could at least project films on the ceiling for me to watch? But that might be torture: what if they showed me nothing but Adam Sandler movies, and I couldn’t fast-forward or hit stop, just sit there, blinking angrily, only the nurse hasn’t noticed; no, she’s busy looking up and laughing, laughing at the bit where Adam Sandler trips over the bench, or Adam Sandler gets hit on the nose with the basketball, she’s laughing and I’m blinking and she hasn’t noticed, and the blinks grow wetter and I realise I’m weeping, and Adam Sandler tumbles face-first into some dogshit and she laughs again, and I grit my mind and stare past the ceiling, stare past the sky, into deep space, and I focus a mental tractor beam composed of pure magnetic rage on a chunk of rock silently gliding through the blackness, and I stop it in its tracks and draw it towards the Earth, a 100-mile-wide asteroid swooping down to meet us, dragged down by me, until it collides with London, obliterating everything, an
extinction-level
event, billions of lives worldwide wiped out in the blink of
an eye: my eye. My wrathful blinking eye. But don’t blame me. Blame Sandler.

Anyway, in the event, I didn’t have to worry about sneezing, or quadriplegia, or my
Medusa Touch
doomsday scenario, because the injection itself turned out to be fun. Yes, fun. Not because I’m into needles, but because they sedated me – and whatever drug they used was brilliant. So brilliant I don’t want to know what it was, because I’d gladly kick a hospital to death for half a teaspoon of it. In an instant, I understood in my bones why people become heroin addicts.

I went light-headed, then more light-headed, and then I can’t remember what happened. I was dimly aware of being moved back down a corridor. Before I knew it I was back in a cubicle, wondering whether they’d even been near my neck at all. The doctor came in to check on me, and I asked him if I’d been unconscious.

‘No, no,’ he said cheerfully, ‘you were talking a fair bit.’

Talking? I was talking?

‘Yes; we held a conversation with you throughout. You get a bit of amnesia, but that’s it. It’s good stuff.’

I’ve never had a blackout; never been knocked unconscious; never drunk so much I can’t remember the night before. This wholesale deletion of recent memories is entirely new to me. And it’s kind of creepy. During the blank phase, was I still me? If not, who was doing the talking on my behalf? Roger De Courcey? And where was I while this was happening? Delivering milk on the moon? Window-shopping in the afterlife? Hovering over Plymouth? Was I dead? Dead-ish? Or merely very obedient? Did they make me do terrible things with vegetables and film it and put it on the internet? Time will tell.

Whatever happened, whoever took over thankfully hadn’t felt the need to flail like a salmon when the spike went in. Clearly they’re more responsible and less neurotic than I am: they can have the job permanently if they like.

That evening, as I left the hospital, I realised I’d caught a cold. I spent the night sneezing and staring at the ceiling, keeping myself entertained by working out how to swear by blinking alone.

Finally, vegetables have a TV show of their very own. Not human vegetables. Don’t be daft. This is way beneath them. I’m talking about actual vegetables: carrots, potatoes, turnips, cauliflowers … such is the target audience for
Live From Studio Five
.

Clearly too stupid for human consumption, it is instead aimed squarely at cold, unfeeling lumps of organic matter with no discernible minds of their own. And it succeeds brilliantly at keeping them entertained. I watched last Monday’s episode in the company of a clump of broccoli, and it was held in a rapt silence throughout. Well, most of the time. To be honest, I think it drifted off a bit during a Backstreet Boys report. And I had to slap it awake at the start of each ad break. Apart from that, it was spellbound.

Yes, here is a TV show that makes any and all previous
accusations
of ‘dumbing down’ seem like misplaced phoney-war hysteria. A show providing less mental nourishment than a baby’s rattle. A show with a running order
Heat
magazine would consider frighteningly lightweight. A show that boasts Melinda Messenger as its intellectual touchstone. A show dumber than a blank screen and a low hum. Anyone who willingly tunes in to watch this really ought to be forced to work in the middle of a field for the rest of their life, well away from any technological devices (such as motor vehicles or microwave ovens) with which they might inadvertently cause harm to others.

In short: this is quite a stupid programme. It’s hosted by
Messenger
, Ian Wright and Kate ‘The Apprentice’ Walsh. Inoffensive in isolation, once combined they demonstrate the sort of chemistry
that could close a public swimming pool for twenty-five years. For one thing, they all stare and smile down the lens throughout, as though they’ve been asked to imagine the viewer is a backward child at a birthday party. Kate in particular grins like a woman being paid per square metre of dentistry.

According to the official website the show is ‘a mix of celebrity interviews, gossip and banter wrapped around a popular news agenda that everyone’s talking about’. In other words, it’s a torrent of flavourless showbiz porridge interspersed with occasional VTs about Ronnie Biggs or twelve-year-old sex change patients or whatever else the tabloids are moaning about.

Last week they managed to wring twelve punishing minutes out of the ‘Alesha Dixon on
Strictly
’ debate, a story of interest only to people too dim to wipe themselves after a bowel movement without referring to an illustrated step-by-step instruction sheet at least six times during the process. First we were treated to a report summing up what the tabloids thought, including some vox pops in which random imbeciles shared their views. Then it cut back to the studio, where the hosts summarised what we’d just seen (for the benefit of the more forgetful carrots in the audience), before reading out emails in which some different random imbeciles shared their views. This was followed by a commercial break that included an advert desperately encouraging people to read books.

When the hosts aren’t smiling or introducing VTs, they’re sharing their opinions. For instance, last week Ian Wright read out a story about David Hasselhoff’s alleged drink problem, and summed it up by saying, ‘Wossee playing at? I mean, sort it out!’ Then he did a sort of open-palmed ‘It’s-common-sense-innit’ shrugging manoeuvre. Thus the issue was settled in time for the Bananarama interview.

Still, knocking the hosts is pointless. They’re hardly trying to present
Newsnight
. But the VTs – astoundingly – are, in fact, created by actual news journalists.
Live From Studio Five
is a product of Sky News. Which makes it part of Five’s news quota.
This – in case I haven’t yet repeated the word ‘news’ often enough to hammer it home – is a news programme.

THIS IS THE NEWS
. Melinda Messenger, Ian Wright and Kate Walsh are
PRESENTING THE NEWS
. In other words: welcome to the end of the world.

I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your MacBook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped with a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminium. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute
MONSTER
.

Of course, it’s safe to assume Mac products are indeed as brilliant as their owners make out. Why else would they spend so much time trying to convert non-believers? They’re not getting paid. They simply want to spread their happiness, like religious crusaders.

Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. It validates their spiritual choice. Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to
do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical
implications
of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table.

This drew the attention of two nearby Mac owners. They hovered over and stood beside me, like placid monks.

‘Ah: the delights of Vista,’ said one.

‘It really is time you got a Mac,’ said the other.

‘They’re just better,’ sang monk number one.

‘You won’t regret it,’ whispered the second.

I scowled and returned to my infernal machine, like a dishevelled park-bench boozer shrugging away two pious AA recruiters by pulling a grubby, dented hip flask from his pocket and pointedly taking an extra deep swig. Leave me alone, I thought. I don’t care if you’re right. I just want you to die.

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep.

I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject fucking idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly
everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, ‘Hey, have you considered Windows?’ Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host ‘Windows 7 launch parties’ to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials. So you show them how to burn a CD, how to make a little video, how to change the wallpaper, and how to, oh no, hang on it’s not supposed to do that, oh, I think it’s frozen, um, er, let me just, um, no that’s not it, um, er, um, er, so how’s it going with you and Kathy anyway, um, er, OK we’ll see you around I guess.

To assist the party-hosting massive, they’ve also uploaded a series of spectacularly cringeworthy videos to YouTube, in which the four most desperate actors in the world stand around in a kitchen sharing tips on how best to indoctrinate guests in the wonder of Windows. If they were staring straight down the lens reading hints off a card it might be acceptable; instead they have been instructed to pretend to be friends. The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos ‘Friendchips’ TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).

It’s so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment that I like to call ‘
shitasmia
’. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history.

Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft’s bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement
at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they’re better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard.