I can make you hate (45 page)

There was something slightly wonky about the hand-rubbing relish with which some predicted the death of the
Sun
. Call me an organic hessian-chewing, hummus-eating Guardianista, but I believe in reform, not capital punishment.

It’s hard to cheer when a newspaper closes. Even one you’re slightly scared of, like the
Daily Mail
. Even though the
Mail
isn’t technically a newspaper, more a serialised Necronomicon. In fact it’s not even printed, but scorched on to parchment by a whispering cacodemon.

The
Mail
can never close. It can only choose to vacate our realm and return to the dominion in which it was forged; a place somewhere between shadow and dusk, beyond time and space, at the dark, howling apex of infinity. London
W
8 5
TT
.

Yet despite being a malevolent ink-and-paper succubus that will devour your firstborn – seriously, chuck a baby at a copy of the
Mail
, and watch as the paper rolls its eyes back and swallows it whole – the
Mail
deserves its voice. At the Leveson inquiry, when seething
Daily Mail
orchestrator Paul Dacre was quizzed about Jan Moir’s notorious column on the death of Stephen Gately, he acknowledged that she’d possibly gone too far, but added that he ‘would die in a ditch’ to defend a columnist’s freedom of speech.

Whatever you think of Dacre, that’s a brave and noble thing to say, although disappointingly he failed to indicate precisely when he was planning on doing it.

(That’s a joke, so please don’t be offended on his behalf, especially because it’s precisely the kind of robust commentary on death he’s dying in that ditch to defend.)

Regular readers may have noticed that the previous three paragraphs consisted of overheated
Mail
-bashing, something I indulge in so often in this column, it’s become a tiresome cliché. In fact my own smug fingers fell asleep while typing it. No wonder the
Sun
told me off last week for lecturing everyone about press standards. It also called me a ‘shouty third-rate TV presenter’, which seems firm but fair.

I tend to ignore both criticism and praise, because I encounter so many dissenting assessments of my own value as a writer, or even simply as a collection of atoms, it all becomes meaningless noise. At any given moment, I’ve jumped the shark, returned to form, lost it, nailed it, provoked laughter or silence, impressed or bored the reader. After years of carefully skim-reading the comments under my own articles, I can only conclude that none of you have the faintest bloody idea what you’re on about.

Still, my mini-bollocking in the
Sun
cut through, probably because I encountered it in ink-and-paper form, which meant it was a bit like stumbling across an ancient scroll. Reading its criticism was roughly as much fun as banging my knee on a table, but it made me think a bit. Who wants to be a finger-wagging human frown? Not me.

When it comes down to it, I’d rather entertain: to be a
tail-wagging
human frown. Might require surgery, but that’s my dream. Lighten up a bit, I told myself. And then I wrote a
two-minute
poem attacking the
Sun
and shouted it all out on live
television
. Which is a long-winded and solipsistic way of saying that opposing voices are a good thing, even if you reject what they’re saying. Only a monopolist wants to shut the other side up.

Of course there’s a distinction between an opposing voice and a bullying one, bullying being what the ‘poem’ (a list of people and things the
Sun
has targeted over the decades) was about. The
Sun
has always tried to make things fun. At its best that’s a catchy punning headline (‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?’), at its worst it’s ‘Gotcha’: the difference between clever class clown and ugly playground taunting. If, as some believe, the
Sun
needs to rehabilitate itself in what I will now preposterously label the post-hacking era, it’ll have to learn to avoid the latter.

It’ll probably have to learn new tricks, too, in the face of the competition. Not the
Guardian,
silly: that only sells three copies. Never mind Twitter being a liberal coffeehouse; it also fulfils many of the
Sun
’s traditional roles. It’s brimming with news, celebrity gossip, zany trivia, jokes, opinion, hysteria, campaigns,
witch-hunts
, sanctimony and self-congratulation – and it’s written in the brisk, compact language of today, not the slightly alien
ROMP
/
TOT
/
HORROR
/
SMASH
language of yester-year. Twitter’s footballers even write their own columns, and make a good fist of it, too.

The one thing Twitter doesn’t have is a pointless helping of naked breasts, unless you type (.) (.) – and even that isn’t too big a hindrance since, as I understand it, nudity is available elsewhere on the internet. On pages three to three billion and three.

When the following piece was written, the NHS reform bill was about to be voted into law, and horrible warlord Joseph Kony had become internationally famous thanks to a dubious internet campaign.

Who’d want to be Andrew Lansley right about now? He’s less popular than Joseph Kony. Wherever he goes people immediately start shouting at him. Old ladies scream the word ‘codswallop!’ in his face as he walks down the street. When he visits a hospital,
doctors follow him around bellowing: ‘Your bill is rubbish.’

Last week I flipped on the TV just in time to catch footage of his official car speeding away from a bunch of booing protesters, and for a moment I naturally assumed I was watching a news report about a despised killer being whisked away from a court appearance.

If these things were happening to you or me, we’d probably cry, or at least look slightly troubled. Yet no matter how many people are bellowing at him, Lansley perpetually wears the nonchalant expression of a man killing time by humming cheerfully in a lift.

Presumably he’s become so accustomed to the sound of loudly heckled abuse, he doesn’t even hear it any more. I guess to him it’s like a noise made by some weird machine in his workplace, a background soundtrack he tunes out subconsciously. The protesters’ plaintive ape wails of despair simply bounce off him like rice grains flicked at a rock. For a man who recently conducted a high-profile ‘listening exercise’, he’s got a shitty set of ears.

What is it about Lansley that makes human beings hate him so much? It might have something to do with the suspicion that he’s hell-bent on turning the NHS into a commercial
free-for-all
, which for some reason isn’t going down well at a time when terrifying nightly warnings about the worst excesses of capitalism are broadcast in the guise of news bulletins.

The theory is that introducing an element of competition will improve the level of quality and range of choice for patients. And it doubtless would, if businesses behaved like selfless nuns, which they don’t. Any business that wants to succeed has to cut corners somewhere to turn a profit. It also has to juggle a strange set of priorities, which means if you entrust your health to a corporation, the cost of your kidneys could end up being weighed against the spiralling cost of the CGI budgerigar voiced by Joan Collins they want for their new TV commercial.

Can you think of a single company you’d trust to slice you open and fiddle with the squishy components? Apple, maybe? After all,
its products are brilliantly designed – but more importantly for a medical procedure, they’re sterile.

But consider the length of the cable on your iPhone charger. Annoyingly short, isn’t it? Almost as short as the battery life. That’s two savings right there that have been passed on to you, the consumer, in the form of minor inconveniences. In medical terms, it’s like being left with a slight limp because the surgeon needed to finish at five on the dot.

And let’s not dwell too much on allegations about the factory where the iPhone is actually made. If these are true, and Foxconn were running the hospital kitchen, everything would taste slightly of tears. You’d be lying in bed, eating food that had been wept in, vainly waiting for that limp to heal while feverishly inserting coins into a slot to stop the bed automatically tipping you on to the floor to make way for the next customer.

I spent a fair bit of time last week visiting someone laid up in hospital. Every bed on the ward had a flat-screen TV beside it – a commercial entertainment system upon which you can watch TV or endure movies such as
Captain America
or
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
. There was a constant looping advert for these and other delights, interspersed by the now-notorious talking head shot of Lansley dribbling on about how your health is really important to him. He says he hopes this entertainment system will make your stay more enjoyable. And it will, if you pay for it.

If you pick up the remote and select good old vanilla BBC1, you only get to glimpse a few seconds of BBC1 before it displays a screen telling you to cough up. If the company responsible for the system genuinely wanted to make everyone’s stay more comfortable, they’d let you have the BBC for nothing.

Chances are you pay your licence fee. They could give you the Beeb and then charge extra for the movie channels. Seems reasonable. But no. Cough up, fleshbag.

On the back of the screen is a sticker telling you to switch your mobile phone off. But fear not: the screen has a phone attached
to it, which your distressed relatives can use to get in touch with you. It’s a premium rate number. So cough up again, fleshbag.

The screens are switched on by default, so I assume, incidentally, that the company responsible covers the cost of all that electricity. Otherwise, you’re indirectly coughing up for it already, fleshbag.

Lansley claims he’s not out to privatise the NHS of course, but no one believes him, partly because all the talk about clinical commissioning groups is impenetrable jargon, but mainly because the nation’s doctors start running around setting off klaxons and screaming whenever he appears.

As a general rule of thumb, when a doctor starts yelping with alarm, I worry. So would anyone. Yet the government expects us to ignore medical advice.

Because that’s what
they’re
doing.

In which Sonic the Hedgehog’s sexual orientation goes under the microscope, a man in a penguin suit proves surprisingly popular, and idiots salivate over an arse that isn’t there.

Last week, I became a parent.

Can I tell you what I’m not going to do? I’m not going to turn this column into a series of wry observations on fatherhood, and/or lengthy descriptions of just how brilliant my son is. A few weeks of that and you’d vomit yourself inside out, and if I wasn’t writing it myself I’d be right beside you, holding your hair out of the way and rubbing your back in sympathy with each volcanic heave.

There’s quite enough deification of kiddywinks in the media already, thanks. The way people burble on about the joy of infants, you’d have thought babies were being beamed down from heaven to save us. A cursory glance at human history suggests otherwise.

Having said all that, I
am
going to burble on about babies, for one week only – and you’re going to sit there and take it. And when I’m finished, you’ll leave in silence. Those are the rules.

Right. So it turns out the birth of your first child is perhaps the most emotionally charged experience you’ll ever have. I even put down the new
Angry Birds
game for ten minutes so I could concentrate fully, and that’s set in space.

You’re buffeted by a range of feelings so intense, your face doesn’t know how to deal with them, and keeps leaking fluid from somewhere round the eyeholes.

Obviously, I can only speak for the men here. Women find childbirth far easier. Many hardly even notice it’s happening, which is why they tend to break into absent-minded howls of agony instead of concentrating on the task at hand.

(Incidentally, this is hardly my area of expertise, but I fail to comprehend why any sane twenty-first-century human would
refuse an epidural. OK, you might view the full, unvarnished experience as some kind of precious rite, but come on: I heard the screams from the natural birth centre. It sounded like a werewolf exorcising a roomful of crucified sopranos.)

Labour takes ages. In the end, after hours of not-
much-happening
, there was a moment of drama. The entire cast of
Holby City
quickly filled the room and I found myself changing into a set of scrubs, in the toilet, in tears. I also held on to a sink for support. By the time I came out the crisis had passed, and my wife was smiling. We then had a further four hours of waiting, during which we both slept, after which the doctors decided to perform a caesarean.

And ‘perform’ is right. It’s the most astounding magic trick I’ve ever witnessed. I didn’t hover round the business end. I’m not a fan of innards. What if you go mad and lean forward and dunk a biscuit in them or something? Instead I sat up ‘the face end’, where a blue sheet was erected to protect our eyes from the
Fangoria
convention taking place below. Then, after some furtive rustling, they lowered the drape just enough to let you clap eyes on a squealing, squirming creature which your brain doesn’t quite believe is actually there in the room.

And in this moment, your universe momentarily pauses while a fundamental shift in perspective takes place.

Apologies for swearing in the presence of a child, but the first thing I thought was ‘Fuck me’. Not just as an expression of
surprise
, but as a mission statement, as in: ‘Fuck me and what I want – from now on, my task is to protect you, whatever or whoever you are.’