Annabel vs the Internet

by Annabel Port

  This is disastrous. Not only do I not look teenage, I clearly look old enough to have teenage children. Which, actually, I am. Easily. But I’m not giving up.

  “Oh no, it’s for me,” I say.

  “Oh, how old are you?” he asks.

  “Seventeen.”

  I probably should’ve said nineteen. I have no idea why I didn’t. I could’ve been two teenage years older. I suspect some kind of pathetic defiance was involved here. But he just looks a bit surprised and then responds with, “Okay, no problem.”

  He’s probably thinking, quite rightly, Why would anyone lie about their age to go in a room and sit and watch a handful of teenagers play table-based ball sports?

  I go back into the main room and sit and watch a handful of teenagers play table-based ball sports. I can’t see any violence or transference of pelvic inflammatory disease, but maybe they’re being discreet. I need to interact.

  The sole other girl is also sitting down and I overhear her call her mum and ask her to come and pick her up.

  At this stage, I too want to call my mum and ask her to come and pick me up.

  This is a girl I’d normally be too scared even to speak to. She has blonde hair in a very strange ponytail that forms a fan shape on top of her head. She’s wearing a lot of gold jewellery. Less than Mr T but more than your average rapper. Obviously, I don’t mention this, mainly as there’s no way she’ll know who Mr T is.

  Instead, I force myself to ask her if she wants to play table tennis with me. She mumbles something about not knowing how and I must look really dejected because she says, “Oh, okay then.”

  We’re playing table tennis. I’m a bit distracted at first. I start to worry that the youth-club leader will come over and ask for my date of birth. I’m trying to work it out but I keep coming up with 1994, which can’t be right as 1994 was yesterday.

  When I finally come to terms with it, I start trying to make some conversation. It doesn’t go very well.

  Firstly, I find out her age. She’s eighteen. This is older than I thought and it also means that I’m pretending to be younger than her.

  Then I delve further by asking, “Do you live round here?” and she replies, “Just moved here.”

  The table tennis is going well, though. We laugh when I really miss the ball, which happens quite a lot. She’s better than me, which makes me realise she’d lied a bit about not knowing how to play. Maybe lying a bit is the start of a slippery slope into gonorrhoea. What if she’s about to offer me Class A drugs?

  She doesn’t. She’s just polite and as friendly to a mid-thirty-something pretending to be a seventeen-year-old in a youth club as you could possibly hope anyone to be.

  I eventually decide to leave before the youth-club leader asks me for my birth certificate. I say goodbye to my new friend. I walk out of that youth club alive, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t catch any STDs.

  Part two: Ladettes

  It’s time for the ladettes to come under my scrutiny now.

  These ladettes, or women behaving badly, are most commonly depicted as rolling around drunk, and I have noticed a big increase in this recently. Not in real life, but in pictures in the paper. Even though I tend to think that if something is news, it’s because it’s unusual and not an everyday occurrence.

  I check the latest figures for women and drinking at the Official National Statistics website and learn that the peak of women binge drinking was between 1998–2002 but it dropped after that. And women are still drinking substantially less than men.

  I decide to see how many ladies I can spot behaving badly on the way to work. In the thirty minutes it takes me to go on my journey from east to central London, I see nothing. Maybe it’s a quiet day for the ladette, maybe something to do with the weather. But I’m sure I could persuade some girls to behave badly and then deny it’s entrapment.

  I’m on the escalator coming out of the Tube station. There’s a girl in front of me. I tap her on the shoulder and she turns round. She’s a pretty blonde and she smiles at me.

  I say, “Excuse me, do you want to flash your boobs with me at the people on the other escalator?”

  She looks stunned. And then starts laughing.

  “Are you serious?” she asks.

  I tell her I am.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “It’ll be fun,” I say.

  “No! We’ll both be sent to jail.”

  I’m not sure about jail, unless we do it in Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t the plan. I move on. I’m outside on the street walking through London’s seedy Soho.

  I go up to another lady and say, “Excuse me but would you like to happy slap me?”

  She doesn’t understand “happy slapping”, so I explain that she beats me up, films it on her mobile and she can upload it onto the Internet.

  “Oh,” the lady says. “No, I don’t want to.”

  I ask another woman. She, too, has never heard of it. I explain again. She also doesn’t want to, but adds, “Cheers anyway.” This is very polite. I don’t understand it. Why isn’t she screaming at me then smashing a bottle of Diamond White in my face?

  I try something different. I approach a couple of girls together and say, “Excuse me, do you want to come binge drinking with me and then pass out on the pavement with our bits on display?”

  The answer is, “Not especially,” which is not a definite no. This is progress.

  I think back to all the sensationalist pictures of drunk women in the papers. One I immediately think of is that lady in Cardiff city centre with knickers round her ankles. Even though it turned out they weren’t actually her knickers. And that she wasn’t drunk.

  I Google Image search “women drunk” and I find an article from the Sun called “New Year’s Heaven” and there are seven photos of people lying about drunk, five of whom are women. Every single one of these women have amazing legs and all are in really short skirts.

  I start wondering if binge drinking among women really is a problem, or just an excuse to print pictures of girls with their skirts riding up.

  I have an idea. I call up the Sun news desk. A stressed-sounding man answers.

  “Hello. I’ve got a story for you. I’m looking out of the window in central London and there is a lady, in broad daylight, rolling around drunk. She’s in jeans and a jumper and is just lolling all over the pavement. Will you send a photographer down?”

  “Well, we’re in Wapping so they might be gone by the time someone gets there. Can you video it yourself?”

  He doesn’t seem particularly interested, so I add, “Oh! I can see another girl now rolling around. She’s in a really short skirt and has got bare legs in this weather. Really nice legs.”

  I might be wrong but I feel he definitely perks up. “Can you get someone to video it and then call me back?”

  “Will you put it in the paper?” I ask.

  He tells me it depends on the quality, so I should film it, call him back and then we’ll discuss remuneration.

  I’m liking “remuneration”. I beg him to tell me how much I’ll get. It’s around £200, depending on the quality and what they do with it.

  I am now so tempted to go outside and do some serious lolling about in a short skirt while someone films it. Two hundred pounds! Is this the cause of the ladette culture? Then I remember my unshaven, bandy legs. And feminist principles. The temptation fades. Two hundred pounds is a lot, but it’s still £50 less than you’d get for a You’ve Been Framed video.

  Part three: Anti-social behaviour

  Are the streets really heaving with anti-social behaviour? What even is anti-social behaviour? I find a Home Office report from 2004 that identified sixteen areas, including littering, noisy neighbours, fireworks, graffiti and insulting, pestering or intimidating behaviour.

  They found that three-quarters of people asked had experienced a problem in one or more of these sixteen areas.

  This is astonishing! Only three-quarters have experienced anti-social behavi
our? Are one in four people hermits?

  I’ve experienced seven out of sixteen. But not on a daily basis and it’s surely not a new thing. In medieval times, people threw toilet waste out of the window. Things must be better now.

  I need to see for myself how much of a problem anti-social behaviour is, and go out in search of it. I see a bit of litter on the ground on the way to the Tube. I’m not exactly wading through it, though. On the Tube map, above the station Shepherd’s Bush, somebody has written in pen “The” before it. I think this person is just enriching society. But maybe I’m puerile.

  Everybody is well behaved on my carriage. It wasn’t like a few weeks ago when a man sat down and the lady next to him said, “No. Your legs are too wide open. You’ve got to close them.”

  Once in central London, I have a good long walk around the streets. I don’t witness even one tiny bit of anti-social behaviour. Not even one litter drop. But I know it exists. We’re told it exists. I’ll just have to try and lure it in.

  First thing I do is go and stand by a bin. I wait until someone approaches with some litter. The first person that does has a small paper cup to throw away. I stop her and say, “I dare you to throw that on the floor and not in the bin.”

  “Why would I do that?” she asks.

  “It’s a dare.”

  “No, I’m not going to do that dare,” she says firmly and entirely reasonably.

  Four more people said no. One added, “It’s a good idea, though,” which is one of the politest things I’ve ever heard.

  I’m not having any success, so I say to the next person, “I’ll give you 50p if you throw that plastic bottle on the floor.”

  He’s quite keen. “Really? 50p?”

  I start getting my purse out but his conscience gets the better of him. “Sorry, I can’t do it. I can’t take your money,” he says and puts the bottle in the bin.

  I can’t even pay people to litter the streets.

  I try another anti-social behaviour. Graffiti. I stand by a wall with a biro and stop passers-by, saying, “Hey, do you want to do some graffiti with me on this wall? We could write our names.”

  The first person says, “No thank you,” adding as he walks off, “You’re a weird one.”

  Two more politely say they don’t fancy it. The fourth seems interested, in that he says, “Will it work?”

  He has a point. I’ve picked a brick wall of an office building. I do an experimental mark with my biro on the cement bit. I just kind of scratch it. He’s lost interest by now though and says he is late for something.

  I try one more person, who says, “No, but only because I work in that building.”

  I still haven’t lured anyone into anti-social behaviour. Surely I’ll be able to find some insulting, pestering or intimidating behaviour, though. This one should be easy.

  A man is sitting down outside a cafe.

  I ask him, “Would you like to insult or intimidate me?”

  “No, why would I do that?”

  “Let off a bit of steam?” I suggest.

  “No, thank you.”

  I ask two men standing together. They also don’t want to. One of them adds, “But thanks for the opportunity.”

  Another two people don’t want to say anything bad to me.

  Outside a pub, I see three men. I approach them. As I do, they smile. I say, “Excuse me but would any of you like to insult or intimidate me?”

  One of them says straight away, “Yes, bitch.”

  His two friends look horrified. It’s like they’ve seen a side to him previously hidden. The bad man is laughing now. I don’t think he meant it. But I’m worried that the other two will stop meeting him for a drink at lunchtime and start ignoring his calls.

  I think I might have broken his Britain, but as for the rest of it, it appears very much intact. To the extent I’m starting to think we’re actually a bunch of goody two shoes and we should start smashing it up and breaking society into bits. Then I remember the kind of clothes that anarchists wear and decide I prefer it this way. Living in an Unbroken Britain.

  3

  The Challenge:

  To tackle the problems of the world economy

  Experts are predicting that the world is on the brink of another global recession. Fortunately, Geoff has the answer.

  Geoff: “I think a good thing for you to do would be to save the world economy.”

  Me: “Me?”

  Geoff: “Yeah! Why not?”

  There are many reasons why not. I’m briefly buoyed by the memory of my economics GCSE. Then I remember it was home economics. And, actually, just textiles. And I only got a C, even though my mum did all my sewing coursework for me.

  I’m no expert, but off the top of my head, the best solution I can come up with is to get rid of money entirely.

  Money is just fiction anyway. Most of it is just numbers being passed around by computers. The inhabitants of Yap, an island in South Pacific, use huge stone discs as money. The biggest ones were made on an island 250 miles away and transported by boat. One day, the boat capsized and a really big disc fell to the bottom of the ocean. However, they still continued to use it as currency. They just kept transferring ownership of this disc at the bottom of the sea.

  It seems like madness. But it’s actually no different to how we use our money. Maybe we should be looking at alternatives.

  My first idea is the barter system. There’s a book about a man who started with a red paperclip and traded up over the course of a year to a house. I could try it out. It wouldn’t really help the world economy but I’d be mortgage-free, so who cares!

  I collect up a few things from around my flat that I don’t want or need any more. By the end I have:

  • A shower radio

  • Two books. Room by Emma Donoghue and Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves

  • A DVD game of Deal or No Deal

  • A risotto ai funghi sauce that I got free with an Ocado order

  • The Rare Tea company’s White Silver Tip Tea

  • A corkscrew

  • A pocket-size book called The Life and Times of Hitler

  • A bottle of Dubonnet (A favourite of the Queen Mum. She loved gin and Dubonnet)

  • A Clinique lipstick in Extreme Pink

  I pack it all into a bag. Then come across my first problem. It’s very heavy. I take out the bottle of Dubonnet. It’s unlikely that I’m going be doing any swapping with the Queen Mum.

  The bag is more manageable now. I’m ready to get bartering.

  The best place to start is where something like £8 in every £10 is spent on the high street: Tesco. If I can persuade them to barter with me, I’ve practically changed the world economy in one step.

  I need to buy some chillies so I take some to the till and put them down. I let the cashier know that I don’t have any money and want to do a swap instead. I start pulling my barter goods out of the bag.

  Once she ascertains that I didn’t buy any of them at Tesco, she says she can’t do anything but suggests I try customer services. I’m not massively surprised. I haven’t ever seen any advertising indicating that they do swaps so I’m not hopeful that customer services will see this situation any differently.

  There are two staff members there. One is serving, the other is pretending to be very busy with a calculator. I interrupt him by saying, “Shall I show you how to write the word boobless upside down on the calculator?”

  He’s keen to find out. I show him and he seems really pleased with this, despite the fact he’s a man in his thirties.

  I’ve really broken the ice, so I now go in with the swapping request, but he’s not having any of it. It’s a very firm no. He doesn’t even seem to need to think about it. I can’t persuade him. Not even with an offer to show him how to write “shoesole” on his calculator.

  I give up and go to a newsagent to try and barter for some chewing gum. The lady waits until I’ve got everything out of my bag then says slowly, “I don’t wa
nt any of it.”

  I move on and try and swap my stuff for a Twirl in another newsagent. I’m told the boss doesn’t allow it. Like this happens a lot.

  I’m in a small cafe and cake shop now and I’m really fed up. I say to the lady at the counter, “Can I swap some of this stuff in my bag for a cake?”

  “Oh. What have you got?” she asks.

  I let her have a good look. She checks the colour of the lipstick. She asks her colleague if she wants anything. She seems very interested in the Deal or No Deal game DVD. She takes one of the books as well, then asks, “How many cakes do you want?”

  I say just one would be great.

  “You can’t just have one!”

  I leave with two, feeling very cheered. The barter system is possible. Even though carrying around this big bag of stuff is pretty annoying. And one swap probably won’t save the world economy. To make some more progress I need to turn to some other economic theories for inspiration.

  I start looking on Wikipedia. Then I switch to Simple English Wikipedia. The basic version for people just starting to learn English and the simple-minded. I’m still struggling a bit. But I come across the Labour theory of value. Simplified, if it takes twice as long to make a table than a chair, you should pay twice as much for a table than a chair.

  Great. I’ll only pay for what goods are worth in terms of hours of labour. I decide that one hour will be worth £10, as it’s a nice round number. It works out at about 16p per minute.

  I go to a shop that just sells cookies and say to the man serving, “How long did it take to make that white chocolate chunk cookie?”

  “Four days,” he tells me.

  I’m horrified. I’m never going to be able to afford it. It’ll cost nearly a grand.

  “Four days?” I say. “To make one cookie?”

  He’d thought I’d asked how long I could keep it for. He has a better answer for how long it takes to prepare: thirteen minutes.

  I get my calculator out and input the numbers, while trying to ignore the queue building behind me.

  “Okay,” I say once I’ve finished, “I’ll pay you £2.08 for it.”