I can make you hate (4 page)

Snow Leopard.
SNOW LEOPARD
.

I don’t care if you’re right. I just want you to die.

When we look back at the ‘noughties’ – pausing briefly to gently vomit in protest at the hideous made-up word ‘noughties’ – we’ll realise this was a golden age for absolute bollocks. Fun bollocks, maybe… but bollocks all the same.

Every new US show these days is fun bollocks. We’ve had the one where it’s in real time (
24
), the one where they’re stranded on a weird island (
Lost
), the one where they break out of prison (
Prison Break
), the one where the killer kills killers (
Dexter
) and the one where unfettered capitalism creates and destroys an entire underclass (
The Wire
).

Everything needs a hook, the hookier the better. Before long, we’ll end up with the hookiest show possible:
The Hookening
– where everyone in the world suddenly passes out and wakes up 137 seconds later with a hook for a hand. Irritating for most of us; devastating for the jar industry.

We’re not there yet, but who knows what could happen in six months’ time? For now, we’ll have to be content with
FlashForward
. It stars Joseph Fiennes as Mr Nice Cop with a Drink Problem, and it’s a show in which everyone in the world passes out for 137 seconds and has a vision of the future six months from now. Weirder still, it’s not strictly a vision: their consciousness has somehow raced forward in time, so they’ve experienced precisely what they’ll be doing for around two minutes on 29 April 2010. Some are performing mundane actions, like reading the paper on the bog; others are doing exciting things, like being shot at. It’s the world’s biggest spoiler.

Having wandered off into futureworld for roughly half the length of an ad break, they’re sucked back into the present, where naturally everyone’s now a bit confused. And in some cases, dead. Because absolutely everyone blacked out simultaneously, there were countless car crashes, air disasters, chip-pan fires and so on, vividly depicted in scenes in which Joseph Fiennes wanders around a semi-destroyed LA gawping at various bits of CGI devastation. Helicopter crashes account for some of the worst damage, although several buildings appear to have burst into flames out of sheer confusion during the blackout. In one scene we get a glimpse of London; Big Ben is on fire. Presumably the bells overheated during the timequake.

(Incidentally I call it a ‘timequake’ because it seems vaguely
similar
to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel
Timequake
, although apparently it’s based on a different book, called, unsurprisingly,
FlashForward
.)

The rest of the story revolves around solving what caused the Great Leap Forward in the first instance. That’s Fiennes’s job. He saw himself in a big room full of clues, halfway towards solving the mystery, evading some bad guys. Oh, and drinking from a hip flask, so he knows he’s going to fall off the wagon. Or does he? Yes! No! It rather depends on whether man truly has free will or not. Philosophers have wrestled with that one for centuries; this show promises to clear it up once and for all, and find room for a romantic subplot. Perhaps it was originally pitched with the working title
Adventures in Compatibilism: A Determinist Thought Experiment
.

Anyway, it’s not bad: enjoyable bunkum in the manner of early
Lost
, although the paradox-heavy storyline easily overshadows the characters, who thus far could all be replaced by cardboard boxes with Character #1, Character #2 and so on scrawled on the front.

The fun comes in spotting flaws in the narrative. Such as: if everyone experienced the same bit of ‘future’, how come their future selves didn’t seem aware the flash forward was going to happen? They were sitting in meetings, or running around, or
watching TV. Nobody saw themselves saying ‘Ooooh, this is the bit I saw six months ago.’

It’s not a show, it’s a puzzle. There are 10 billion other paradoxes in the storyline. How many can you find? (Answers on page 894, six months from now).

FlashForward
flopped, having painted itself into a billion logistical corners
.

I’m fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain. I can’t possibly read all these pages or watch all these movies before the grim reaper comes knocking. The bastard things are going to outlive me. It’s not fair. They can’t even breathe.

The other day I bought a DVD box set of Carl Sagan’s astronomy epic
Cosmos
: by all accounts, one of the best documentary series ever made. On my way home, I made the mistake of carefully reading the back of the box, where I discovered it has a running time of 780 minutes. Thirteen hours. It’s against my religion to only watch part of it – it’s all or nothing. But thirteen hours? That’s almost a marriage. The sheer weight of commitment is daunting. So it sits on the shelf, beside similarly unwrapped and unwatched obelisks. I’m not buying these things for myself any more. I’m preserving them for future generations.

DVD and book purchases fall into two main categories: the ones you buy because you really want to watch them, and the ones you buy because you vaguely think you should. Two years ago I bought Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, partly because I’d heard it was a good book and an easy read, but mainly because I figured reading it would make me cleverer – or at the very least,
make me seem a bit cleverer to anyone sitting opposite me on the tube. I never read it. A few months ago, having forgotten I already owned a copy, I bought it again. This means I haven’t read it twice.

And I haven’t read it (twice) because it’s got too much
competition
from all the other books I’ve bought but never read. Popular science books. Biographies. Classic works of fiction. Cult sci-fi and horror stories. Reference works. How-to guides. Graphic novels. I can’t buy one book at a time: I have to buy at least four. Which makes it exponentially trickier to single out one to actually read. When I buy books, all I’m really doing is buying wall insulation, like a blackbird gathering twigs to make a nest.

Ditto DVDs.
Scenes From a Marriage
and
The Seventh Seal
– two well-regarded Ingmar Bergman films I bought during a short-lived fit of self-improvement. I should have thrown them in a bin on my way home from the shop. It’s hard enough to choose between the two: am I in the mood for a lyrical
ninety-two
-minute meditation on death, or an unflinching three-hour portrayal of a dysfunctional relationship? Neither, as it turns out. They’d only be interrupted by emails and texts anyway.

Perhaps something more lightweight? They’re sitting on the shelf in-between
JCVD
(a post-modern Jean-Claude Van Damme film) and season two of
Entourage
. I’ve never seen those either – partly because I feel guilty about not having watched the Bergman films first. Somehow I’ve purchased my way into a no-win situation.

Clearly, some sort of cull is in order. It’s me or them. I pick them. My options need limiting. Last week I watched the first part of
Electric Dreams
, the 1900s house-style TV show where a family lives with old technology for several weeks. For episode one, they were stranded in the 1970s, with no internet, no DVDs or videos, and only three channels on the TV. It’s fair to say the kids weren’t massively impressed. It was all a bit Guantanamo for their liking. But to me the limited options looked blissful.
You couldn’t lose yourself online, so if you didn’t want to watch
Summertime Special
or
World in Action
, you had to read a book, go for a walk, or in extreme circumstances, strike up a conversation with a fellow human being.

But it wasn’t just the limitations of the media themselves that appealed. This was thirty years ago. Fewer things had been created for them. Every day we humans gleefully churn out yet more books and films and TV shows and videogames and websites and magazine articles and blog posts and emails and text messages, all of it hanging around, competing for attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it.

It’s too much. I’ve had it with choice. It makes my head spin.

Here’s what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet. I want a government employee to turn up on my doorstep once a month, carrying a single book for me to read. I want all my TV channels removed and replaced by a single electro-pipe delivering one
programme
or movie a day. If I don’t watch it, it gets replaced by the following day’s selection. I want all my MP3s deleted and replaced with one unskippable radio station playing one song after the other.

And every time I think about complaining, I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before.

In short: I’ve tried more. It’s awful. I want less, and I want it now.

I eventually watched
Scenes From a Marriage.
It was good. Still haven’t got round to
The Seventh Seal
though.

George Osborne’s Tory conference speech last week left me in a state of shredded despair. Not because of anything he said, but because I’d just discovered he’s younger than me. Only by two months, but still: younger.

In a correctly functioning universe, my advanced age would make me his superior. If I deliberately knocked a glass of milk on to the floor, he’d have to clean it up. He’d be on all fours, scrubbing desperately at the floorboards while I reclined in my chair, resting my feet on his back, reading the
Financial Times
, occasionally glancing over the top to harrumph at his efforts, grinding my heel into his spine to underline each criticism. You missed a bit, boy. For pity’s sake, show some gumption. Tongue, Osborne! Use your bloody tongue!

Wild fantasy, of course: there’s no way Osborne would prostrate himself before me, lapping up my mess like a prison cell Betty. He’s of grander stock than I. He’s worth ten thousand hundred billion pounds, wipes his arse on back issues of
Tatler
, attended a public school so swish that even its coat of arms looks down its nose at you, and spends his weekends running around his estate, dressed like the Planters ‘Mr Peanut’ mascot, wildly thrashing at the backs of chimney sweeps’ legs with a cane. I went to a
comprehensive
and have the social standing of a plughole.

But I’m resigned to the class difference. It’s the age difference that rankles. In my head, senior politicians are supposed to be older than I am – forever. No matter how much I age, part of their job is to be older and drier than me. At 38, Osborne feels too young for the world of politics. At 38, I feel too old for the world in general.

Age has been a lingering obsession of mine since I left my teens. However old I’ve been is too old.

At 26, I felt totally washed up.

At 32, I regretted wasting time worrying about my age as a 26-year-old, because now I was convinced I really was totally washed up.

At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time with those regrets about wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I’m doing. That’s the sole advantage of ageing: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I’d need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I’m regretting at once.

Age is an odd thing. As well as fretting about it, at every point in my life I’ve regarded those both above and below me on the age ladder with unwarranted contempt. Anyone younger was a barking idiot; anyone older, an outmoded embarrassment.

But rather than mellowing into acceptance as I ascend the ladder, my distaste for both groups sharpens into bitter focus. The young ones are even more idiotic because they don’t appreciate how short-lived their youth will be, dammit – while the old ones are now a horrifying vision of a steadily approaching future. I’m not talking about OAPs, incidentally, but people just a few years older than I am now. To my eyes, they’re walking victims of the Great Inescapable Time Disaster.

On a rational level, I know there’s nothing wrong with ageing. If anything, it should be taken as a sign of continued success. Congratulations! You haven’t dropped dead yet. But that doesn’t stop me seeing each individual grey hair as a tiny shoot of failure. Like millions of us, I’ve been indoctrinated into believing the ageing process somehow reeks of indignity. I’ve been conditioned to view everything from the POV of a conceited
twenty-something
. My brain’s lodged near the bottom of the ladder while my body clambers creakingly towards the top. Look at those silver flecks; that foul, rotting carcass: you stink of shame, you disgusting loser.

When you’re young, anyone a decade older or more can seem like a gauche joke, tragically unaware of their own crashing irrelevance. They’re either hopelessly out-of-touch (LOL! He’s never heard of Lady Gaga!), embarrassingly immature (Ugh! He listens to Lady Gaga!) or hovering awkwardly in-between (Pff! He uses Lady Gaga as a catch-all reference for youth!). At the same time, you somehow believe that when – if – you ever grow to be so impossibly ancient yourself, you’ll be wiser and less embarrassing. How could you not be? These people are just pathetic.

The good news is that when you get there, you
are
wiser – albeit only slightly. Chances are you’re still flailing around, just as clueless about What Happens Next. Slightly more terrified at what the world might have in store, but slightly more confident in your ability to pilot a way through.