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  Into the eighth dimension

  06/09/2009

  The sheer breadth of human knowledge is a wonderful thing. But sometimes it’s scary. This morning I was aimlessly clicking my way around the BBC news site – which has become one of my favourite things in the world since I discovered just how much its very existence annoys James Murdoch – reading about the burial of Michael Jackson and the like, when my eye was drawn to an alarming headline.

  ‘Galaxy’s “cannibalism” revealed,’ it read. This led to a story in the science section that calmly explained how a group of astronomers has decided that the Andromeda galaxy is expanding by ‘eating’ stars from neighbouring galaxies. Having studied Andromeda’s outskirts in great detail, they discovered the fringes contained ‘remnants of dwarf galaxies’.

  It took me a couple of reads to establish that Andromeda wasn’t literally chewing its way through the universe like an intergalactic Pac-Man, and that the ‘remnants of dwarf galaxies’ were living stars, not the immense galactic stools I’d envisaged. That was what had really frightened me: the notion that our entire solar system might be nothing more than a chunk of undigested sweetcorn in some turgid celestial bowel movement; that maybe black holes are actually almighty cosmological sphincters, squeezing solid waste into our dimension. What if the entire universe as we know it is essentially one big festival toilet?

  That’d be a pretty good social leveller, come to think of it. So there, James Murdoch. You might well walk around thinking, ‘Ooh, hooray for me, I’m the chairman and CEO of News Corporation Europe and Asia, not to mention chairman of SKY Italia and STAR TV, the non-executive chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, and a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline,’ but at the end of the day you’re just one of 900 trillion insignificant molecules in an all-encompassing turdiverse. And your glasses are rubbish.

  Anyway, the astronomers who made the discovery about Andromeda deserve our awe and respect, because their everyday job consists of dealing with concepts so intense and overwhelming that it’s a wonder their skulls don’t implode through sheer vertigo. Generally speaking, it’s best not to contemplate the full scope of the universe on a day-to-day basis because it makes a mockery of basic chores. It’s Tuesday night and the rubbish van comes first thing Wednesday morning, so you really ought to put the bin bags out, but hey – if our sun were the size of a grain of sand, the stars in our galaxy would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and if our entire galaxy were a grain of sand, the galaxies in our universe would fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools. So fuck the bin bags.

  The human brain isn’t equipped to house thoughts of this humbling enormity. Whenever I read a science article that nonchalantly describes the Big Bang, or some similarly dizzying reference to the staggering size and age and unknowable magnitude of everything, I feel like a sprite in an outdated platform game desperately straining to comprehend the machine code that put me there, even though that isn’t my job: my job is to jump between two moving clouds and land feet-first on a mushroom without ever questioning why.

  Perhaps astrophysics stories should come with a little warning. Just as graphically violent news reports tend to be preceded by a quick disclaimer advising squeamish viewers that the following footage contains shots of protesters hurling their own severed kneecaps at riot police – or whatever – maybe brain-mangling science reports likely to leave you nursing an unpleasant existential bruise for several hours should be flagged as equally hazardous. How can I flip channels and enjoy Midsomer Murders once I’ve been reminded of the crushing futility of everything? I can’t get worked up about the murders in that kind of mood. Yeah, kill him. And her. And them. Fuck it. It’s all just atoms in a vortex.

  Not that the few scientists I know seem to suffer. In fact, they’re unrelentingly calm and upbeat, like they’ve stumbled across a cosmic secret but aren’t telling. One of my friends is married to a quantum physicist who, sickeningly, manages to combine an immense brain with a relaxed, down-to-earth, amused attitude to everything. He once tried to explain the characteristics of different theoretical dimensions to me.

  Dimensions one to four I could just about cope with. The fifth made vague sense at a push. But the rest collapsed into terrifying babble. There was no foothold.

  I swear, at one point he casually claimed the seventh dimension measured about half a metre in diameter and was shaped like a doughnut. That can’t be right: either I’ve misremembered it because my brain deleted the explanation as it was going in, chewing it up and spitting it out before it could do damage, or – and this is just a wild theory – I’m too stupid to understand much in the realm of science beyond the difference between up and down, and the seventh dimension is beyond me. It might’ve been part of string theory (I like string theory, because I can at least hazily picture the strings). But this seventh dimension stuff was just gibberish.

  God knows what the eighth dimension consists of. Probably two chalk moths and a puddle. Whatever it is, and wherever it lives, don’t tell me. The binman’s due and I don’t want to know.

  Live from St. Elsewhere

  20/09/2009

  Apologies if I sound a tad woozy, but yesterday I left planet Earth for some time and apparently enjoyed exploring some other reality while medical professionals did something fancy with my neck. It was a minor procedure. Minor by modern standards, that is.

  The doctors casually performed the sort of everyday miracle that would’ve seen them worshipped as gods or drowned in the village pond if they’d done it in medieval times. But then, medieval peasants would run screaming from anything more complex than a turnip. Show them, say, a Nintendo Wii, and their minds would pop inside their skulls. Pop, pop, pop and down they fall, stupid green smocks and all.

  Anyway, the fact I’m sitting here typing this proves nothing went wrong. Nothing was going to go wrong anyway, but that didn’t stop me worrying. All I knew was this: they were going to stick a needle into my neck, right into the spine. Not too scary by surgical standards: it would only require a local anaesthetic. But it was precisely that fact which started my brain whirring.

  I figured it was essential to remain still during this kind of procedure if I didn’t want to wind up quadriplegic, which I didn’t. What if, just at the crucial moment they stuck the needle in, I was seized by some awful Tourettes-like urge to suddenly jerk around on the slab, cackling like a madman in a rainstorm, deliberately severing my spinal cord against the cold, hard spike?

  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 blink
s 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.

  This is the news

  25/09/2009

  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.

  Like the faint smell of piss in a subway

  27/09/2009

  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 spen
t 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.