Governments around the world must be studying the coalition and working out how to get their own Clegg. He’s the coalition’s very own Pudsey Bear: a cuddly-but-tragic mascot representing the acceptable face of abuse. But unlike Pudsey, he actually speaks.
Immediately following each unpleasant new announcement, Cleggsy Bear shuffles on stage to defend it, working his sad eyes and boyish face as he morosely explains why the decision was inevitable – and not just inevitable, but fair; in fact possibly the fairest, most reasonable decision to have been taken in our lifetimes, no matter how loudly people scream to the contrary.
It’s hard not to detect an air of crushed self-delusion about all this. At times Clegg sounds like a once-respected stage actor who’s taken the Hollywood dollar and now finds himself sitting at a press junket, patiently telling a reporter that while, yes, on the face of it, his role as the Fartmonster in Guff Ditch III: Fartmonster’s Revenge may look like a cultural step down from his previous work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, if you look beyond all the scenes of topless women being dissolved by clouds of acrid methane, the Guff Ditch trilogy actually contains more intellectual sustenance than King Lear, and that all the critics who’ve seen the film and are loudly claiming otherwise are misguided, partisan naysayers hell-bent on cynically misleading the public – which is ethically wrong.
It’s only a matter of time before the word ‘Clegg’ enters the dictionary as a noun meaning ‘agonised, doe-eyed apologist’. Or maybe it’ll become a verb. Years from now, teachers will ask their pupils to stop ‘clegging on’ about how the dog ate their homework and just bloody hand it in on time.
Clegg’s most recent act of clegging was to explain to this newspaper that the Institute of Fiscal Studies was wrong to brand the spending review ‘unfair’.
‘I think you have to call a spade a spade’, he clegged, immediately before demonstrating his commitment to straightforward language by querying the definition of the word ‘fair’.
The previous administration’s simplistic ‘culture of how you measure fairness’ was partly to blame for the Institute’s foolishness, clegged Clegg in a cleggish tone of voice. In previous years, ‘fairness was seen through one prism and one prism only’.
It turns out fairness is actually more complex and slightly less fair than that. According to Clegg it’s important to call a spade a spade, unless you’ve mistaken the spade for a digging implement, which it isn’t. A spade is a kind of towel.
Point a camera in his direction, and Clegg can construct an earnest argument in favour of virtually any unappealing concept you can throw at him. Such as the following:
On drink-driving
‘No one likes car crashes. But to imply that drinking somehow impairs one’s ability to control a vehicle is just scaremongering – and it’s precisely this sort of jittery overreaction that causes most accidents in the first place. The simple fact is that only by calming our minds with alcohol can we keep a steady hand on the tiller.’
On the coalition’s decision to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on Berwick-upon-Tweed
‘Yes it’s extreme, but something has to be done. Berwick-upon-Tweed simply can’t be allowed to continue as it is. But the blast won’t be as far-reaching as the opposition and the scientists and the UN are saying. If you live in, say, Truro, it probably won’t make much difference to your day-to-day life, provided you’re reasonably self-sufficient and don’t mind the odd hand-to-hand skirmish with mutants.’
On being the middle segment of a ‘human centipede’
‘I’ve heard a lot of people say, “urgh, Nick, have you seen that film The Human Centipede, where the mad scientist joins three people together by stitching them rectum-to-mouth? Can you imagine how disgusting that’d be in real life?” And I can see how they might leap to that conclusion. But real life is about compromise – sometimes we simply have to swallow a few unpleasant things in the name of pragmatism. In many ways, the coalition is a human centipede – a group of united individuals, all pulling together in one direction – and let me tell you, from the inside, it’s surprisingly cosy.’
On cutting off his nose to spite his face
‘Before the election, I made a solemn pledge to leave my nose intact. I even printed that pledge out, signed it, and posed for photos while holding it up and smiling like I meant it. So I can understand people’s disquiet over this. It’s something I’ve wrestled with personally. But nonetheless, off it goes. Cutty cutty nose time! Tee hee! Hoo hoo! Chop, chop, chop!’
Next week: Clegg defends his decision to force the Chilean miners back underground, claims 2 Unlimited were better than the Beatles, and explains why the coalition’s proposed oxygen-rationing scheme will usher in an age of peace and prosperity for all.
Perchance to dream
01/11/2010
Dreams. Everyone knows two things about dreams, namely 1) other people’s dreams are dull and 2) they’re going to tell you about them anyway.
And as they burble on about how they dreamed they were trying to build a windmill with Eamonn Holmes but his hands were made of candles, or how they dreamed their little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character, it’s hard not to fall asleep and start dreaming yourself: dreaming of a future in which the anecdote has finished and their face has stopped talking and their body’s gone away.
But maybe in future they won’t have to tell you about it at all. They’ll just play it to you on their iPhone. A researcher at New York University called Moran Cerf (an anagram of ‘Man Forcer’, but that’s not important right now) has produced an article for the science journal Nature in which he claims it may soon be possible to create a device that records our dreams and plays them back later.
Obviously, the reality is 99 per cent less exciting than it initially appears. It won’t be a magic pipe you stick in your ear that etches your wildest imaginings directly onto a Blu-Ray disc for you to enjoy boring your friends with later.
What Cerf is actually proposing is a way to make other people’s dreams seem even more boring. But first: the business of capturing them, which all boils down to neurons.
After studying the brains of people with electronic implants buried deep in their noggins, Cerf discovered that certain groups of neurons ‘lit up’ when he asked his subjects to think about specific things, such as Marilyn Monroe or the Eiffel Tower. Therefore, he postulates, by recording these subjects’ sleeping brain activity, then studying the patterns generated, it should be possible to work out whether they were dreaming about starlets or landmarks.
In other words, he’s isolated the stuff that dreams are made of. And it turns out to be a few blips on a chart.
So the ‘dream recordings’ will probably come in the form of an underwhelming visual transcript – a graph with the odd squiggly line on it. Brilliant if, like Vince Cable, you dream about nothing but graphs – but hardly Fantasia II.
Not that real dreams would make great movies anyway. For one thing, the continuity is all over the place. One minute you’re helping the cast of Robin’s Nest crucify Santa Claus in a space station, the next you’re trying to impress Andy Murray by climbing Everest with your teeth. Even Greek television makes more sense than that.
And most dreams aren’t that interesting. The majority of mine are unbelievably pedestrian. I once dreamed I was watching a cat food commercial with a surprisingly good jingle. The world doesn’t need a back-up copy of that.
Samuel Coleridge once famously dreamed the epic poem ‘Kubla Khan’ in its entirety, and upon awakening, immediately began scribbling it down line by line, only to be interrupted by a man from the nearby village of Porlock, who detained him with some petty chore for an hour, after which he could no longer remember the words. That one might have been worth recording.
But Coleridge has been dead for years. Right now the best we’d get is a Sky pay-per-view channel on which Peter Andre dreams about his fa
vourite sandwich toppings, or Jedward take turns to sneeze inside a terrifying hairy cave.
Perhaps more promisingly, it would only be a matter of time until some enterprising psychopath hooked up the dream recorder to Twitter, making it possible to enjoy live dream-tweets from Kanye West in which he makes approximately 50 per cent more sense than he does while awake.
Putting aside the entertainment value, what practical use is there for a recorded dream, anyway? It’d only encourage the ‘science’ of dream analysis – the psychological equivalent of Gillian McKeith prodding a turd with a stick. And six months after the invention of a reliable dream recorder, you can guarantee we’d find ourselves in a nightmare scenario, in which dream transcripts are pored over in divorce hearings and terrorism trials.
From there, it’s surely only a short step to some kind of reverse-engineering system via which ideas and suggestions can be planted inside your dreams, Inception-style, while you’re still asleep. Which probably means in-dream product placement – so next time you climb Everest with your teeth, you’ll have the great taste of Colgate in your mouth as you do so. Or maybe the advertising won’t be that subtle. Maybe all your future dreams will simply consist of a gigantic mouth shouting the words ‘DIET COKE’ over and over until you wake up in tears, and immediately reach for a Diet Coke, hands quivering, without really understanding why.
In fact, yes. That’s precisely what’s going to happen.
The last words you will ever read
15/11/2010
The moment I’ve finished typing this, I’m going to walk out the door and set about strangling every single person on the planet. Starting with you, dear reader. I’m sorry, but it has to be done, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.
And for the sake of transparency, in case the powers-that-be are reading: this is categorically not a joke. I am 100 per cent serious. Even though I don’t know who you are or where you live, I am going to strangle you, your family, your pets, your friends, your imaginary friends, and any lifelike human dummies with haunted stares and wipe-clean vinyl orifices you’ve got knocking around, perhaps in a secret compartment under the stairs.
The only people who might escape my wrath are the staff and passengers at Sheffield’s Robin Hood Airport, because they’ve been granted immunity by the state.
Last week 27-year-old accountant Paul Chambers lost an appeal against his conviction for comments he made back in January via the social networking hoojamflip Twitter, venting his frustration when heavy snow closed the airport, leaving him unable to visit his girlfriend.
‘Crap!’ he wrote. ‘Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’
Anti-terror experts intercepted this message and spent hours deciphering it, eventually uncovering a stark coded warning within, cunningly disguised as a series of flippant words.
Chambers’s use of multiple exclamation marks is particularly chilling. He almost seems to find the whole thing rather funny. The violent destruction of an entire airport – hundreds of passengers and staff being blasted to shrieking ribbons by tonnes of explosive, all because one man’s dirty weekend has been postponed – yet all this senseless carnage is little more than an absurdist joke in the warped mind of Paul Chambers.
Funny is it, Mr Chambers? A big old laugh? Tell that to the theoretical victims of your hypothetical atrocity. Go on. Dig them out of the imaginary rubble. Listen to their anguished, notional screams. Ask how loudly they laughed as you hit the make-believe detonator. Go on. Ask them.
If you dare.
At least when Osama bin Laden broadcasts a warning to the West, his intentions form part of an extremist ideology informed by decades of resentment. Chambers issues bloodcurdling threats at the drop of a snowflake. This makes him the very worst kind of terrorist there is – the kind prepared to slaughter thousands in the name of inclement weather conditions.
Mercifully, in this case, before any innocent blood could be shed, Chambers was arrested, held in a police cell, and convicted of sending a ‘menacing electronic communication’. His appeal was rejected last week by Judge Jacqueline Davies, who described his original tweet as ‘menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.’
Quite right too. In fact, throughout this case, the authorities have behaved impeccably – which is why it’s such a crying shame I’m going to have to strangle all of them too. But strangle them I must.
Why? Because many of his fellow tweeters, outraged by Judge Davies’s ruling, have retweeted Chambers’s original message in a misguided show of solidarity. Thousands of people, all threatening to blow Robin Hood Airport ‘sky high’. Clearly they have to be stopped – but infuriatingly, many of them hide behind anonymous usernames. The only way to ensure they all taste justice is to punish everyone equally, just to be sure. Hence the strangling, which doesn’t feel like too much of an overreaction under the circumstances. I’m just following the authorities’ lead.
They ought to give me a medal. From beyond the grave. After I’ve strangled them.
Still, loath as I am to strangle every man, woman, and child on the planet, it won’t be an entirely thankless task. Clearly I will feel no remorse while strangling Chambers. He is a dangerous madman, and I look forward to sliding my hands around his neck and slowly choking the life out of him.
I also relish the prospect of strangling another tweeter-in-crime: Gareth Compton, the Tory councillor who ran afoul of the authorities last week for tweeting the words ‘can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.’
He later apologised for what he claimed – outlandishly – was ‘an ill-conceived attempt at humour’, even though I’m sure Judge Jacqueline Davies would agree that it was menacing in its content and obviously so, and in fact could not be more clear, and that any ordinary person reading it would see it in that way and be alarmed.
Reassuringly, the bloodthirsty maniac Compton was arrested hours later, presumably after being cornered in his lair by a SWAT team. I’d like to shake every member of that team by the hand, which sadly won’t be possible while I’m strangling them.
Anyway, I’m writing this on Friday, so by the time you read this on Monday my strangling rampage will have begun – unless the authorities have intercepted these words and arrested me in the interim, in which case I’d like to make it absolutely clear that I intend to strangle everyone in the prison before turning my hands on myself. Attention Home Secretary: you’ve got three days and a bit to get your shit together. Otherwise I’m strangling this planet sky-high.
Stop crying, start loving
06/12/2010
Only someone with the heart of a concrete robot could fail to feel faintly – just faintly – sorry for the American diplomats whose cables were leaked, what with all that private unguarded chit-chat being made public. If the world had an annual end-of-year office party (which, come to think of it, is a brilliant idea), 2010’s would be an awkward affair.
Still, what’s most surprising about the mass leak isn’t the content – it’d have been more astonishing if they’d said Berlusconi was actually rather charming and North Korea is great in bed – but the fact that this kind of thing isn’t happening every day. Because in our terrible modern hell, it’s possible for absolutely anyone to leave a comprehensive dossier of ultra-sensitive private information about themselves on the back seat of a bus just by misplacing their phone.
The more these devices are capable of, the greater potential for embarrassment. What’s on your handset? Intimate texts? Embarrassing photos? Raunchy emails? An eye-opening internet history? I just hope you trust the staff down the Orange store next time you’re upgrading your phone.
Actually, if you’re anything like me, you don’t have anything lurid on your handset at all – partly out of sheer paranoia
– but still can’t help feeling anxious whenever someone asks to borrow it. It’s the same uneasy frisson you feel when a policeman looks you in the eye while stopped at the lights – a vague sense of guilt, like you’re hiding something.
And phone-borrowers don’t even have to be deliberately nosy to stumble across your personal details. Even if they only want to make a call, simply by accessing the dial option they’ll be treated to a list of who rang you last and how long you spoke for. On the phone to the doctor for an hour were you? That’s interesting. Here, have it back. Just going to wash my hands.
Another example of inadvertent intrusion: I once used a computer belonging to someone I knew, and logged on to Amazon to look up the release date for a DVD.
That’s how I roll. I’m crazy.
Anyway, the moment I arrived at the home page, it assumed I was her, and presented me with a list of suggested purchases, all of which were self-help books for people trapped in terrible relationships, with titles like Stop Crying, Start Loving and When Sex Is Harrowing. It was an uncomfortable and rather sad glimpse into someone else’s life, I thought, once I’d stopped pointing and laughing.
Still, at least that was nothing more harmful than someone’s innermost thoughts being laid bare. But it’s not just our personal information that’s increasingly insecure. It’s our personal persons.
Not so long ago, a tourist couple stopped me in the street and asked me to take a snap of them grinning in front of something vaguely picturesque (this being London, probably an especially colourful pavement puke-puddle or a tramp with a funny neck tumour). But unfamiliar as I was with the workings of their phone, instead of taking their picture, I inadvertently brought up the gallery of previous photographs, and was treated to a view of one of them in the shower, followed by a series of close-up views of various biological and overwhelmingly intimate occurrences involving the pair of them.
I can make you hate Page 19
