Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  Definitely not? At the risk of sounding crass and pathetic, I reckon that might be quite an effective way of encouraging children to visit, and indeed of encouraging me to visit. But let’s put the mercenary considerations of visitor numbers aside and talk about the art – that’s what really matters. Making Michelangelo’s David fart every time someone walks past is a brilliant idea. In Michelangelo’s day, they lacked the technology, but any suggestion that this sublime genius would not have installed a fart sound effect had he been able to is, to my mind, a disgraceful slur on his creative vision.

  It is not by accident that Michelangelo’s David is already quite a funny statue. After all, you can see the subject’s penis and testicles. They are not mentioned in the Bible and must have been fiddly to carve. It is then made even funnier by the fact that, if you walk round the back of the statue, you can see its bottom. But, as Michelangelo surely understood, comedy has a rule of three and, ultimately, it is only a fart noise that can resolve this masterful comic triptych. We have been waiting more than half a millennium for that bum to fart, and we are privileged to live in an age when it’s finally possible.

  It is to be hoped that a range of fart noises will be available. A sculptor of Michelangelo’s technical genius, who can get nipples just right, would not be satisfied with a standard sound-effects-library fart. We’re not talking about a mere raspberry here. A range of different guffs should be sampled and played on shuffle so that, even though a passer-by might be expecting a fart, they won’t be ready for the kind of fart they hear: loud and fulsome, short and wet, or mosquito-like and meandering, the specificity of the trump can add so much to the realisation of what art historians must surely accept was the great man’s original concept.

  For me, this joke can never get tired, simply because people who dislike it will never stop disliking it. That’s what will ensure the rest of us keep finding it funny. And it raises the question: why don’t we fit every public statue with the capability to make a fart noise whenever anyone walks past? Statues of people on horseback could be made to issue two farts, which is even funnier. Would that not be a wonderful thing?

  It’s divisive in a way – but it would be a new division and so, paradoxically, a unifying one. There’s no way the pro- and anti-fart factions would correlate with the pro- and anti-Brexit groupings, meaning that Leavers and Remainers can find common ground over liking or hating the humour of flatulence.

  It also might help resolve controversies over whether to take down statues of discredited figures like Cecil Rhodes. A farting statue won’t seem to carry the same implication of veneration by the society it stands in. It just says: “Here was some guy, full of gas like the rest of us. He’s dead now.”

  If the government really wants to tackle Britain’s current crisis of confidence and identity, this is what it must do. This is its last chance, after all the recent accidents, mistakes and humiliations, to take a great British idea, commit to it and, in the full gaze of the world’s media, really follow through.

  * * *

  In April 2016, I was struck by a weird anomaly in the British property market …

  East Barsham Manor in Norfolk doesn’t seem to be selling. Its owner has just dropped the asking price from £4m to just under £3m. That’s 25% off. It’s reduced to clear.

  Let me start by saying that £3m is still a lot of money. Though not as much as when the manor was built in 1520. At that point, £3m would probably have bought you the whole of England, which in those days came with a fair bit of Ireland thrown in, as a sort of granny flat.

  But I want to make sure I clearly say that, even today, £3m really is a lot of money. I want to do so mainly in order not to be hated. If you start saying millions of pounds isn’t much money – even in contexts like “It isn’t much money to renew a nation’s nuclear deterrent” – you’re immediately basking in other people’s dislike. Just the phrase “not much” in close proximity to the word “million” raises the hackles of those for whom hackle-raising is a major form of exercise.

  In fact, there’s really nothing to be gained from asserting that any sum isn’t “still a lot of money”. No one makes friends by denigrating any amount of money greater than a pound. And I reckon there’ll be those who’d seize on the slightest disregard for 90p. “It’s all very well for you, happily leaving 90p in coppers down the back of your sofa – 1.2 billion people live on less than that a day!” “Sorry, I just thought it was quite cheap for a tea.”

  So I’m sincerely of the opinion that absolutely any quantity of money, no matter how small, is in fact a huge and ridiculous fortune. I totally don’t want you to go away with the idea that I’m one of those TV lefties, so massively enriched by institutions perversely constituted for the sole purpose of turning a blind eye to paedophilia that they think £3m is roughly what you tip a pizza delivery man. I don’t want anyone thinking that about me. Because that, my management team tells me, is no way to sell DVDs.

  Nevertheless, in the context of Britain’s current absurd property market, £3m doesn’t always buy you much: a flat in central London, a small house in not-quite-central London, a large house in outer London. It certainly wouldn’t purchase central London’s equivalent of East Barsham Manor, because that’s St James’s Palace.

  But I’m being naive. It’s “location, location, location”, isn’t it? Rural Norfolk’s rubbish for the tube. The surprisingly large number of people fortunate enough to earn enough to raise a mortgage big enough to buy somewhere that costs £3m couldn’t still earn that in the Norfolk countryside. They need to service those vast debts, and the immense political pressure keeping interest rates tiny is only half the battle. They’ve got to keep trousering the kind of salary you get by working in the City or practising law, rather than farming or running an antiques shop.

  What’s more, if you bought East Barsham Manor, you wouldn’t just have the mortgage to worry about. It’s a Grade I-listed 16th-century mansion set in ornamental gardens. It costs nearly two grand a week to stop it falling down. So it’s not a viable option for most of those who could just about afford the price tag.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it totally made sense that this unique jewel of Tudor architecture – where Henry VIII reputedly stayed on his pilgrimage to Walsingham, with seven reception rooms, eight bedrooms, a great hall with minstrels’ gallery and five acres of grounds, on which there’s also a three-bedroom cottage – is roughly equated under our modern value system with a three-bedroom flat in a modern block in Pimlico.

  Then suddenly it stopped making sense again. Hang on, I thought. High earners servicing seven-figure debts to sustain modest accommodation aren’t the main force inflating the property bubble. It’s the billionaires who have chosen London as a place to shop, and its property market as a money laundry. They don’t have to worry about mortgages and the tube. They’re looking to buy palaces to hang out in for brief periods between superyacht rides. A Norfolk manor house would be fine for them – they could helicopter to Harrods in under an hour. The yacht could drop them off at King’s Lynn or Cromer.

  But that lot don’t want houses like East Barsham Manor, I concluded bitterly. They want Belgravia townhouses, stripped back, knocked through and ruined with onyx and granite and marble. They want screening rooms and gyms, they want cavernous dugout basements for swimming pools and spa treatment suites and windowless bedrooms for servants. They want glass and steel and air-conditioning and panic rooms.

  They don’t see the beauty and history, the irreplaceable preciousness of a building like East Barsham Manor, they’re just looking for a large dehumidified garage in which to keep their diamante-studded Humvees and leopard-print Bentleys. The comparatively modest price tag on this amazing Tudor mansion is, I realised, a direct consequence of the vulgarity of the rich – of the shocking fact that 99% of the world’s money is in the hands of people possessing 0.0001% of the world’s taste.

  “How odd that that bothers me so much,” I reflecte
d as I wrung the snobbish spittle out of my beard. It’s not the world’s growing inequalities of wealth that rile me, just that our new global economic overlords spend their ill-gotten gains so tackily – and that’s not a moral failing. Still, the feeling that these people are vulgar as well as rich makes them, to my British sensibilities, hugely more contemptible.

  I think that feeling is pretty common (ironically). As a society, we’re more comfortable with our former masters, with “old money”. Few of us resent the fact that the dukes of Devonshire still live at Chatsworth – they’re just some nice old posh people. It doesn’t make us brim with rage, unlike an oligarch’s planning application to install a second car lift.

  This imbalance of anger makes no logical sense. Whether it’s the old aristocracy or the new plutocracy, it’s still people who’ve ended up with unimaginable wealth for reasons that are seldom particularly fair. But the harsh edges of unfairness are softened by time; moss tempers its frowning gables into a smile. After all, when Henry VIII stayed at East Barsham Manor, it was brand new – as gleaming and modern as an internet billionaire’s penthouse.

  * * *

  In January 2018, another very British housing crisis loomed large …

  The residents of Bell End, like many of us, hope that 2018 will bring a fresh start. To be clear, I mean the residents of Bell End, the street in Rowley Regis, not Bell End, the village in Worcestershire. The latter Bell Enders probably hope it’ll be a fresh start too, but not in the same way as the Rowley Regis ones.

  The English grammatical convention that names of places seldom take a definite or indefinite article is what prevents me from humorously clarifying that I also don’t mean the residents of a bell end – the microbes presaging a venereal disease, perhaps. But let’s face facts: there’s no way that’s what anyone would really think the phrase “the residents of Bell End” could possibly mean. That double entendre simply will not hold together. Not even in a desperate last-minute script gagging-up session for a Carry On film would they get away with that.

  The new beginning the residents of Bell End, Rowley Regis, are hoping for is the renaming of their street. They’re hoping for Twat Close. Of course they’re not. They want a normal name that isn’t slang for either a section of human genitalia or a person so contemptible as to be likened to one. Some of the residents do anyway: there’s a petition, currently signed by 61 people, so they’re a long way short of qualifying for a Commons debate (the BBC Parliament channel will be sorry to hear).

  I’m afraid I can’t tell you what percentage of the people who live there 61 names represent. To do that, I’d have to go there and see how big Bell End is. Once again, if only I could have said “how big the Bell End is”, that would have been amusing. But, to reiterate, it’s suspiciously unusual to use definite articles with street names. You’d spot the trick and hate me.

  I wouldn’t say, “Let’s go shopping on the Oxford Street,” would I? “These days, there are no newspapers still based in the Fleet Street”? No. Though, oddly, I might say, “The traffic is often terrible on the Edgware Road.” I don’t know why, and it seems a waste as “Edgware Road” doesn’t mean penis or vagina. Or anus, for that matter. “Taking someone up the Edgware Road” has yet to catch on as an expression, probably because, as I say, the traffic is terrible. You’re much better off trying your luck in Lisson Grove.

  Anyway, I’m not going to Bell End to see how many people live there because, from the name of the place, I can only assume they’re all total bell ends.

  That’s not what I assume. The name of their street reflects on them neither positively nor negatively, and only a bell end would think it does. Even whoever named the street is blameless, as the name long pre-dates bell end’s use as an insult, which only really started in the 1990s. The road was named after the Bell End Colliery to which it used to lead. The namer wasn’t to know the British were shortly going to stop mining coal and start calling each other bell ends.

  So why does it matter? Why change it? Why reduce the country’s quirky texture and spoil the fun of all those who travel to Bell End purely to take pictures of themselves next to the sign? I mean, what are those guys going to do without it? It really doesn’t sound like they’ve got much else in their lives.

  That’s certainly the view of some of the residents of Upton-upon-Severn’s Minge Lane. “There has been no plan to change the name of our road,” explained Stephen Young, a 72-year-old resident. “We have had a problem with people nicking the sign, but nobody is that fussed about the name. It’s a bit silly really to start a petition.”

  A stinging rebuke coming from a resident of another of Britain’s most rude-sounding streets. But, in the reluctant Bell Enders’ defence, the Minge Lane case is subtly different. Stephen Young does not live on a road simply called “Minge”, and he might not be so sanguine if he did. That’s what gives Bell End its unrelenting suggestive power: the fact that there are no other words involved. No “Road”, “Avenue” or “Street”. Bell End’s name is 100% bell end, while Minge Lane is less than 56% minge.

  But there are still Bell End fans among its residents. Roland Burrows, a curator at the Christian Heritage Centre, located on Bell End, said: “I think it’s a great name. I’ve never thought of any rude connotations at all.” And Labour councillor and Bell End householder Chris Tranter also likes it: “I was born here and lived here for 40 years and it doesn’t bother me. You get the odd giggle on the phone; it is quite amusing really.”

  Two odd views. It’s unusually innocent not to realise Bell End sounds rude, but it’s perhaps even odder to live there for 40 years and still find it amusing. Chris Tranter must get a lot of value out of his fridge magnets. Surely, few long-term residents, even if they don’t mind the name, would have the sheer force of impish will to continue to find it funny.

  Meanwhile, the name’s downsides are more tangible. The petition cites “children being bullied and teased at school”, and residents also claim that it has a negative impact on property prices: a Bell End semi would apparently fetch £60,000 less than its equivalent on nearby Uplands Avenue. That’s quite an expensive joke. I don’t blame them for wanting the council to change it.

  But it gives me an idea as to how councils can use their naming powers to alleviate the current housing crisis – in particular, the ridiculous prices in London, which mean that, for most people, the housing ladder is dangling hundreds of feet above their heads from the bottom of an oligarch’s money-laundering Zeppelin.

  Any political pressure on developers to build affordable housing is outweighed by the economic incentive to flog more luxury flats to the super-rich. But, if councils can name the streets, suddenly they have some power: “If you won’t build affordable housing, we have a way of making it affordable. Welcome to Nob-cheese Avenue, adjoining Hitler Lane. Go straight up Jimmy Savile’s Passage and you’re there.”

  * * *

  The Olympics is a puzzling phenomenon. I came to this conclusion reading a news report about the legacy of the 2012 London games. It said there basically wasn’t one. The family gathered nervously to hear the reading of the will, only to learn that the bejewelled old dowager had pissed everything away ante mortem. No urban regeneration for Great Nephew the Lee Valley, no sustained increase in trade for dodgy Uncle Tourism and nothing of any real value for kindly Cousin Shortage of Affordable Housing. No inheritance but debts and a drawer full of useless trinkets (stadiums).

  I realise this metaphor is screaming like an Elizabethan Catholic under interrogation, but it wasn’t me who coined the phrase “Olympic legacy”. I just copied it to try and sound modern. That’s what we media types have to do when we enter middle age, as well as pretending we can work our phones and buying fashionable spectacles.

  Speaking of fashionable spectacles, the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics did actually have perceptible legacies, or positive consequences, according to the article I read. They caused happiness spikes in the London population –
so, in bequest terms, more a round of drinks at the wake than the deeds to a Kensington townhouse, but still worth having.

  And with that, I declare the legacy metaphor to have died on the rack without betraying the whereabouts of any fellow Jesuits. And with that, I also announce the passing of the metaphor I’ve been using to refer to the legacy metaphor. It’s been a difficult time, and we need to move on.

  These happiness spikes were apparently part of a broader elevation of Londoners’ moods caused by the Olympics. This fact has been established by a team of “happiness researchers” led by Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural sciences at the London School of Economics, and Georgios Kavetsos of Queen Mary University of London. They interviewed 9,000 people in London, Berlin and Paris over a three-year period around the London games in an attempt to measure their sense of well-being with and without the Olympian fillip. They found that Londoners became significantly happier from summer/autumn 2012 onwards, though their happiness fell back to normal levels within a year.

  The way the researchers quantified this was interesting. They said the rise in people’s level of satisfaction was equivalent to the mood improvement caused by an £8,000 pay rise. If that’s genuinely true of all 8 million Londoners, then the £8.9bn the games cost is quite an inexpensive way of making the city feel like it’s received a £64bn windfall. But the effect is temporary. As Kavetsos put it: “Like any party, you have a great time but the following day you wake up with a hangover.”

  Which brings us to the billion-dollar question, or rather the £8.9bn question: is hosting the Olympics worth it? “If you want to host a party, host a party and do that. It’s fine,” says Kavetsos. “The problem with events such as the Olympics is they come with all these claims that they are going to boost jobs and the economy. If you look at the literature, that isn’t true.”