I can make you hate (40 page)

It started innocuously, not to mention geekily. I stumbled across an app. An app designed to encourage couch potatoes to ‘get into’ running by easing them in at a pace so non-threatening you’d have to be physically glued to the sofa to be daunted by it.

Here’s how it works: you pop a pair of headphones in and put some music on. Then you start the app. It fades the music down for a moment and tells you to stroll around for about ninety seconds. Once that time limit’s up, it interrupts again and politely asks you to run for sixty seconds. Sixty seconds, no longer. Then you walk for ninety seconds again. And so on. It’s literally a walk in the park. And before you know it, the app’s voice – a slightly patronising female whose accent hovers somewhere between Devon and Melbourne – is saying well done, that’s enough for today, you can go home now, and incidentally you’re wonderful.

You repeat this three times a week; each time, it incrementally lengthens the run and shortens the walk. After nine weeks, to your own astonishment, you’re running uninterrupted for thirty minutes.

I always hated healthy outgoing types. Really despised them. And when they smugged on about how physical exercise gave them an endorphin rush, I felt like coughing blood in their eyes. Now, to my dismay, to my disgust, I discover they were right. If I don’t get to run, I become irritable, like a constipated bear that can’t find the woods. I have to get out there. And I run for longer: I’m up to an hour at a time now, sometimes more.

I remember the psychological barrier I had to pass through when I bought my first pack of cigarettes. I’d cadged here, dabbled there, mainly at night, over a drink, until finally one day, I had to face facts: it was the middle of the afternoon, and I was gasping. I popped into a newsagent’s and bought my inaugural pack of Marlboros with a burning sense of shame.

I don’t smoke any more, but I felt that shame again a few months ago, when I finally snapped and bought a decent pair of running shoes to replace the crappy trainers I’d been using. Once that dam was broken, I bought some wanky running shorts. Not one pair – but several. I even bought a preposterous sports top made of some kind of cybernetic superskin designed to slurp sweat off your back and email it to a parched section of the developing world. It’s a fabric with its own trademarked name and diagram, squarely designed to appeal to the kind of person I hate, and I own it. I can scarcely bear to look at myself in the mirror.

This is how low I’ve sunk: I went on holiday recently, all the way to Australia, and on the way there we stopped in Singapore for a night and I … I can scarcely type this … I used the hotel gym. At 6.30 a.m. God help me I ran on a treadmill at
6.30 a.m.
With other people in the room. And then I went on a
cross-trainer
. In full view of everyone. It feels good to admit it. It feels cleansing, somehow. And that was the first day of the holiday. I ran as often as I could after that. And then flew home and ran some more.

Running, exercising, using gymnasiums … it’s a betrayal of everything I stand for. I hope it’s some kind of temporary life crisis. Or a complete mental breakdown from which I’ll eventually recover. Otherwise I’m going to have to start physically beating myself up. And even then, even as my own fists swoop towards my self-hating face, I’ll be secretly anticipating the endorphin rush of all that extra exercise.

Doomed. Doomed.

The app was called Get Running.

A curious thing happened to me the other day while I was playing
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
, which, if you’re not familiar with such things, is a video game in which you participate in a bloody big war. It’s a very popular franchise; devoted fans camp out on pavements for a launch copy, which makes it the royal wedding of violent video games.

Anyway, I’d got about a quarter of the way into it and was ‘doing’ a level based in Sierra Leone that required a bit of stealth and sneaking around. You spend most of the game accompanied by various computer-controlled characters, and I was walking behind one of these, a crotchety moustachioed soldier who’s supposed to be my friend, when he suddenly goes ‘shhhh’ because he’s heard a guard coming.

So we both stop in our tracks, and moustache man snatches the guard, pins him against the wall, and stabs him right through the throat with a hunting knife, killing him instantly. Then the body hits the floor, moustache man says ‘OK, come on’, and we continue sneaking into the compound.

Or rather, we were supposed to. But I stopped after a few steps and walked back to where he’d killed the guard.

I just stared at the blood on the wall. Stared and stared at it. And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be friends with the man who did that.’

Obviously there was no means of expressing a thought like that within the game engine, so I had to keep it to myself.

Moments later, moustache man orders me to climb a
watchtower
and dispatch a guard myself. I climb the ladder to find a man asleep in a chair. Just dozing with his back to me. And as I walk near him it says ‘Press X to take out the guard’, so I press X, and rather than bonking him on the head, or maybe just persuading him to leave, my character also grabs the guard and stabs him right in the throat.

And I thought, ‘I’m no better than moustache man: that was an appalling thing I just did.’

Again, there was no way to explore these feelings in the game, so I forgot about it in favour of taking out mercenaries with my massive sniper rifle while moustache man and his pal shouted ‘slot the bastards’ and similarly inelegant encouragements.

I don’t particularly mind the level of violence in computer games, partly because it’s absurd, and partly because I’m hopelessly desensitised. What I do object to is the dick-swinging machismo that infests games like this. If I had a penny for every time I’ve spent the opening moments of a game sitting in the back of a transport vehicle listening to a soldier called Vasquez repeatedly use the word ‘motherfucker’, I’d have enough money to buy the
Sesame Street
game instead. And even that probably starts with Sergeant Grover warning Private Elmo that, ‘shit is about to get real’.

Every soldier in every game I’ve ever played is a dick. A dick that sounds like a fourteen-year-old boy reading dialogue discarded from an old-school Schwarzenegger action movie for displaying too much swagger. They seem like a bunch of try-hard bell-ends, desperate to highlight their gruff masculinity. What, exactly, are they overcompensating for?

Well, for one thing, games are inherently wussy. The stereotype of the bespectacled dweeby gamer is an inaccurate cliché, but there’s no denying games are far from a beefy pursuit. Which is why shooty-fighty games go out of their way to disguise that.

Every pixel of
Modern Warfare 3
oozes machismo. It’s all chunky gunmetal, booming explosions and stubbly men blasting each other’s legs off. Yet consider what genteel skills the game itself requires. To succeed, you need to be adept at aiming a notional cursor and timing a series of button-pushes. It’s about precision and nimble fingers. Just like darning a sock in a hurry. Or creating tapestry against the clock.

In other words,
Modern Warfare 3
would be nothing but a gigantic needlework simulation were it not for the storyline,
which is the most homoerotic tale ever created in any medium, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos. Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off
friendships
and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it’s like a soap opera set in a ballet school.

Many of the missions require you to adopt the guise of Yuri, an impressionable young Russian lad hanging around with a pair of impossibly butch men, one of whom, Captain Price, is the aforementioned guy with a moustache – not just any moustache, mind, but a full-blown leatherman’s handlebar number. I think Captain Price’s ‘look’ was designed by Tom of Finland.

Your other companion is a Scottish lad called Soap. I’m not sure why he’s called Soap, although I think it’s because Captain Price once picked him up in a bathhouse.

Price is definitely the ‘top’ in the relationship, and before long both you and Soap appear to be vying for his affections. Often when you look at Price, the word ‘Follow’ literally appears over his head – a sincere instruction presumably beamed directly from your heart – as you walk behind him, tracing his footsteps while gazing forlornly at his back like a pining lover.

When Price commands you to ‘get down’, you literally crawl behind him on your hands and knees. Sometimes you’ll be crawling so close, your viewpoint goes right up between Price’s legs until his crawling, pumping backside takes up the entire screen, which is precisely the sort of cinematography that failed to occur in
Delta
Force
starring Chuck Norris.

Perhaps that’s why
Modern Warfare 3
will make more money than
Delta Force
did. Because presumably they’ve done market research and discovered that that’s what their consumers want.

I just wish they’d be honest about it and let the lead characters kiss. And press X to use tongues.

Nothing merely ‘happens’ any more: every occurrence is now an ‘event’, which leaps up and down pointing excitedly at itself.

Once, the end of a school term would be marked with a shabby disco down the village hall; you’d turn up wearing the one pair of jeans you owned and circumnavigate the dancefloor nodding your head to the sound of ‘Wake Me Up Before You
Go-Go
’. Now, in 2011, teenagers don outfits chosen by their personal stylist weeks in advance and arrive at their school ‘prom’ in a stretch Hummer. Come, friendly asteroids, and fall on Earth.

Christmas adverts are the retail industry’s end-of-term disco, and they have undergone a similar transformation. Not so long ago they were bald sales pitches with a bit of tinsel Sellotaped to the edges. Today the law dictates that any high street chain worth its salt has to bombard the populace with some unctuous cross between a feelgood movie and a
Children in Need
special.

Take the John Lewis commercial. I heard it coming before I saw it: reports reached me of people blubbing in front of their televisions, so moved were they by this simple tale of a fictional boy counting the hours until he can give his parents a gift for Christmas. Given the fuss they were making, the tears they shed, you’d think they were watching footage of shoeless orphans being kicked face-first into a propeller. But no. They were looking at an advert for a shop.

Failing to cry at an advert for a shop does not make me cold, incidentally. I have cried at films from
ET
to
Waltz with Bashir
, at news coverage of disasters, at sad songs, and at the final paragraph of Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair
.

I cried at these things because they were heartbreaking. And because none of them was an advert for a shop.

An advert for a shop. That’s all the John Lewis thing is, and as such it’s no more moving than the ‘So Near, So Spar’ campaign of
the mid-1980s. Anyone who cries at this creepy bullshit is literally sobbing IQ points out of their body.

Is this really what we’ve become – a species that weeps at adverts for shops? A commercial has only made me feel genuinely sad on one occasion – 25 January 1990, when a falling billboard nearly killed ’
Allo ’Allo
star Gorden Kaye.

Fortunately Kaye recovered. Unlike the family dog in the John Lewis advert. Yes, it’s clear to me that the box at the end of the John Lewis ad actually contains the severed head of the family dog, and that this advert is actually a chillingly accurate short film about the yuletide awakening of a psychopath-in-training. In July the dog was butchered with a breadknife: the deranged young assailant has been waiting since then to present his ‘trophy’ to his parents.

Those are the facts. And anyone who thinks I’m lying, bear this in mind: I have asked John Lewis directly (over Twitter) to confirm or deny whether there’s a dog’s head in that box, and so far it has maintained a stony silence on the issue. Which speaks for itself. So don’t sob for the syrupy Christmas story – sob for the slaughtered hound, you selfish and terrible idiots.

Anyway, while John Lewis thinks it’s just
ace
to depict a boy celebrating the sacrificial murder of a dog for Christmas, it has been outdone by Littlewoods, which has annihilated the entire concept of Santa with its offering.

For generations, parents have pretended Father Christmas supplies their offspring’s gifts: now Littlewoods trains a choir of kiddywinks to warble about how Mum buys all the presents with her credit card.

Yeah, fuck off Santa: you’re dead to us.

The rest of the lyrics are worse still. It’s a terribly sad song. So sad Leonard Cohen should be singing it. ‘Mum’ appears to have purchased an entire nervous breakdown’s worth of cold branded goods in a pathetic bid to win the affections of her own family.

Her desperate offerings include a top-of-the-range MacBook for Grandad, ‘an HTC for Uncle Ken’, a ‘Fuji camera for Jen’, and a ‘D&G’ for Dad. In case you’re wondering what a ‘D&G’ is, the advert makes clear it’s a truly disgusting designer watch even Jordan might balk at. In the mad Littlewoods universe ‘Dad’ seems inexplicably delighted by the sudden appearance of this ghastly bling tumour on his wrist, instead of screaming and trying to kill it with a shoe, like any sensible human would.

Worrying in a different sense is the Morrisons Christmas ad, which depicts Freddie Flintoff, whoever he is, building a
supermarket
and claiming that when they see the range of goods he’s got on offer ‘people will come – people will definitely come’. That’s an alarmingly low sexual threshold right there. I’ve been impressed by an aubergine in Morrisons, but not once have I felt like coming.