I can make you hate (46 page)

Prior to the birth, other dads had warned me that ‘bonding’ might not happen for weeks, even months. Also, I was worried I might simply feel nothing. Instead I felt reprogrammed, head-
to-toe
, in an instant. That was a shock.

Just as gap-year students like to brag about the stomach bug they caught in India, so parents like to brag about how tired and
hectic their life has become since the new arrival. During the pregnancy, whenever a parent spotted me so much as eating a biscuit, they’d chortle and say: ‘Ho ho: enjoy eating biscuits while you can! Your biscuit-eating days are over, my friend! There’ll be no time for biscuits once the baby arrives!’

All of which can make a dad-to-be somewhat apprehensive. I was worried I might simply resent the baby for disrupting my lazy, self-centred lifestyle. But the truth is this: when it actually happens, it’s surprising how little you mind. Also, you eat
loads
of biscuits because there’s no time to eat anything else.

Still, that’s enough baby talk from me. I’m aware this is an uncharacteristically upbeat column by my standards, for which I apologise, as smiles sit wonkily on the collection of serviceable flesh apps I collectively call my face. I look sinister when I grin, like I’m secretly defecating in my trousers and enjoying the warm glow more than is strictly necessary.

But only a cardboard man could fail to acknowledge that some things simply leave you feeling deeply, deeply happy. Call me dense or cold or both, but I wasn’t anticipating the wave of euphoria I’ve been experiencing. It’ll wear off, I’m sure, and these pages aren’t the place for it anyway, but yes: I understand why people have kids. Right now, at the moment, I ‘get’ babies.

Now let us never speak of this again.

I didn’t stick to that promise.

It must be awful, being a homophobe. Having to spend all that time obsessing about what gay people might be doing with their genitals. Seeing it in your mind, over and over again, in high-definition close-up. Bravely you masturbate, to make the pictures go away, but to no avail. They’re seared onto your mental
membranes. Every time you close your eyes, an imaginary gay man’s imaginary penis rises from the murk, bowing ominously in your direction, sensing your discomfort. Laughing. Mocking. Possibly even winking. How dare they, this man and his penis? How dare they do this to you?

Obviously you can’t fight the big gay penis in your head. It has no physical form, so you can’t get a grip on it, much as you’d like to. You’d love to grab it and throttle it until it splutters its last all over your face and neck.

That might bring you closure. But no. So you do the next best thing. You condemn homosexuals in the real world. Maybe if they could just stop all this ‘being gay’ business for ten minutes, you’d get some respite from that scary headcock. It might shrivel away completely, leaving nothing behind. Except maybe a nice bit of bum.

No, dammit! Forget I said that! No bum either!

Of course sometimes the act of condemning homosexuals in the real world overlaps with the imaginary realm. Over the past few weeks,
games
company Electronic Arts has been subjected to a letter-writing campaign from idiots outraged by its decision to allow players to define their characters as gay in a
Star Wars
game.

The Florida Family Association says, ‘children and teens, who never thought any way but heterosexual, are now given a choice to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender’ – adding that even if they chose to be straight, they would still ‘be forced to deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters chosen by other players’. Personal choice and co-operation: two appalling threats to our youth.

They also claim ‘there were no LGBT characters in any of the
Star Wars
movies’. I don’t know which wacky re-cut version of
Star Wars
they’ve been watching, but I saw the original when I was about six years old and even then I was struck by how
outrageously
camp C3PO is. He was a gilded John Inman in space.

And what about Luke Skywalker? Apart from briefly kissing
his own sister, he shows no interest in women whatsoever. The first film is a tender gay parable in which Luke falls in love with Alec Guinness and gradually ‘comes out’ as a Jedi. The final scene oozes symbolism: having penetrated the Death Star’s trench in his phallic spacecraft, he closes his eyes, submits to his true inner instinct and triumphantly blasts his X-Wing’s seed into an
anus-like
aperture, causing an orgasmic eruption that changes his universe for ever.

It’s hard to see how they could make
Star Wars
any gayer, unless they gave the Millennium Falcon a handlebar moustache.

But hang on, some of you are saying, this is a video game we’re talking about. Isn’t this gay content a bit ‘shoehorned in’? Sonic the Hedgehog never agonised over his sexual identity. He was too busy sprinting through a rainbow-coloured landscape leaping at rings.

True, but that was in 1991 – which in ‘technology years’ was about nine millennia ago. It’s like comparing a cave painting with a surround-sound 3D movie. EA’s
Star Wars
title in question is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) with more than a million subscribers: real people playing and interacting with each other in real-time, and hey, statistically, at least three of those people are going to be gay. The least you can do is let them reflect that in the characters they pick.

But wait: there’s even more gay content in another EA space epic,
Mass Effect 3
, which to the uninitiated is a bit like playing through an entire
Star Trek
box set. It’s bold space hokum and it’s great fun – and just like
Star Trek,
it includes a range of potential love interests for the main character.

Previous
Mass Effect
titles have let you play as a woman and – gasp – seduce other women: this final instalment is the first to give players the option of playing a man who woos men. Play your cards right (or play your dialogue tree options right) throughout hours of gameplay and you’ll be rewarded with a short, chaste love scene in which two bare-chested men kiss and cuddle in bed.

Players have complained bitterly about the ending of
Mass Effect 3
– not because of the potential for homosexual love, but because they found the narrative underwhelming. The game has a variety of different endings, depending on your decisions: some have moaned that none of the possible endings are happy or satisfying enough. In fact, they’ve moaned so much, EA has hastily released an additional ending free-of-charge, so these players can experience ‘further closure’.

I can’t work out if that’s depressing or sweet. On the one hand, they’re spoiled little emperors with a mind-boggling sense of entitlement: it’s one thing to be disappointed by the end of a story, but another to demand the author sits down and writes you a new one
RIGHT NOW
. You need ‘further closure’? What’s wrong with you?

But on the other hand, it’s a sign that players sometimes invest so much of themselves into the characters they play, they care about them to a degree that should make any author jealous. Sneerers will doubtless leave comments about ‘saddoes’ and ‘
shut-ins
’, oblivious that by doing so, they too are playing a character in an immense MMORPG called the internet. Face it: you’ve even chosen a nickname and an avatar just to join in.

Allowing players to identify their characters as homosexual isn’t, as the anti-gay campaigners claim, a tokenistic novelty, but an unavoidable consequence of the fascinating evolution of video games. Not that there’s much point explaining that to them. They don’t believe in evolution either.

And they wouldn’t hear you anyway over the thunderous roar of dicks screaming forever in their frightened mind’s ear.

The Olympic Games trundle ever closer, and already you can smell the excitement in the air, because it’s being wafted in by
gigantic corporate excitement blowers. Try as they might to engage us, we’re not on tenterhooks yet. On paper it’s virtually illegal to be anything other than thrilled to self-pissing point at the prospect of hours of running, jumping, swimming etc. filling our minds and airwaves for several weeks, but in reality, the majority of Britons appear to be acknowledging the forthcoming Games with little more than an offhand shrug. We’re just not that arsed – not right now, anyway. That’ll change the moment any of our athletes gets within sniffing distance of any kind of medal – then it’ll be all cheering and jubilant BBC montages – but until then we’re being very British about the whole thing by largely ignoring it, aside from the odd quiet moan about the negative effect it’ll have on the traffic.

It’d be worrisome if this low-level grumpiness extended into the Games themselves: if the crowd audibly tutted whenever anyone other than Britain won, and the medals were handed over by an official displaying the same vaguely begrudging air as a checkout assistant passing you a replacement carrier bag when the first one splits. That’s definitely how we would behave if we didn’t have guests. Hopefully instead we’ll plaster on a fake smile for our overseas visitors, and after ten minutes forget we were faking and start actively to enjoy the whole thing. But what if that doesn’t happen? How else can we get into the spirit of the Games?

Well, for starters we could make that fake smile frosty-white by brushing our teeth with an Oral-B electric toothbrush. ‘Oral-B is getting behind the London 2012 Olympics,’ cheers the Boots website. ‘Share the excitement with their Professional Care 500 floss action electric toothbrush.’ Yes: the exhilaration, the agony, the sheer elation experienced by athletes operating at the peak of their physical aptitude – all this can be yours in the form of a vibrating twig you stick in your mouth.

In case you think the mere notion of an official Olympic electric toothbrush is absurd, remember: athletes need clean teeth to attain peak performance. Steve Ovett was the favourite
to win the 1,500 m at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but was hopelessly weighed down by a heavy build-up of plaque that had accumulated in his mouth in the months leading up to the contest, allowing Sebastian Coe to snatch the gold.

Oral-B’s official Olympic toothbrush exists because its parent company, Procter & Gamble, has a sponsorship deal enabling it to associate all its products with the Games. That’s why if you look up Viakal limescale remover on a supermarket website, the famous five interlocking rings pop up alongside it. This in no way cheapens the Olympic emblem, which traditionally symbolises global unity, peaceful competition and gleaming stainless steel shower baskets.

When you’re done sprucing up your teeth and your bathroom, you could further embrace the Olympic spirit by slurping a
Coca-Cola
(official Olympic drink) followed by a Twirl from Cadbury’s (official Olympic snack provider). Or really go the whole hog and polish off a couple of sausage-and-egg McMuffins at your local McDonald’s (official Olympic restaurant), after which you should be ready to represent Britain in the 400-litre diarrhoea.

I’ve never understood why firms are prepared to shell out a fortune simply to refer to the Olympics in their advertising, but then I’ve always been mildly baffled by the popularity of sport full-stop. I also never understood why Gillette paid Tiger Woods, a man famous for hitting balls with a stick, a huge amount of money to promote scraping a bit of sharp metal across your face – only to sideline him when it became apparent that as well as hitting balls with a stick, he had been inserting his penis into as many different women as possible, an aspiration he presumably shared with the vast majority of Gillette’s customers.

My natural inclination is to find the wave of ‘official’ branding vaguely sinister, but on reflection it’s actually rather touching the way these companies seem to earnestly believe their consumers give a toss. Will anyone in the country choose a Dairy Milk over a Yorkie just because the former has the Olympic rings printed on
the wrapper? After all, now that it appears alongside everything from toothbrushes to Viakal, the official Olympic iconography has become just another bit of background visual noise – like the Keep Britain Tidy icon, or a barcode. Your brain filters it out before your mind even notices it was there in the first place. If I was Adidas (official Team GB Olympic outfitters), I’d be furious. At least sportswear has some connection to the traditional Olympic ideal of people from far-flung corners of the Earth engaging in hard physical graft for little financial reward, especially if it turns out it was made in an Indonesian sweatshop.

Instead, the Olympic rings have been whored around so much they’ve become valueless: a status symbol for a few corporations to tote like a badge for several weeks, impressing almost no one except themselves. It’s bizarre, and it’s increasingly far removed from the event itself, which, last time I checked, chiefly involves running around and jumping over things. And, if you’re British, moaning about the traffic.

So huge swaths of the electorate seem to have finally decided that peevish gump David Cameron isn’t the convincing statesman they never quite thought he was in the first place.

Still, he had a good innings. People often criticise Cameron’s judgement, but no matter what you think of his policies, his ability to surround himself with decoy pillocks was a strategy that, until recently, paid dividends. Since coming to power in 2010, voters have been so busy hating Nick Clegg, Andrew Lansley, Liam Fox, George Osborne, Francis Maude and now Jeremy Hunt, there’s been very little rage left over for Dave.

Getting round to properly abhorring him has seemed like too much bother, like an unwelcome, nagging chore. You see his face on the news and perform a 1,000-year-long internal sigh.