Cocktails and Records

Regular readers will know that I like a good gripe about the state of the world’s manners. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I have come across a new, impressive level of disrespect to share with you.

Picture this:

It’s Wednesday morning. I am in Paris. For some bizarre reason I decide to go into Notre Dame Cathedral, rather just walking past it as usual. I am surprised to see that 1. it is free entry, 2. there isn’t much of a queue and 3. that there is a short service going on.

I slip into one of the empty back rows, let the sound of the priest’s voice lull over me and actually enjoy the opportunity to look around the massive nave and soak up the historic ambiance. Tourists still continue to amble in and wander around. It’s a bit distracting, but most people are quiet and behave themselves.

I say most, because at least five people during the 10 minutes I lasted walked straight down the front and took photos of the priest reading at the altar. Another two turned around and took a few action shots of the congregation at prayer.

The priest didn’t bat an eyelid. He’s probably used to it. But I’m an anti-religion, severely agnostic cynic and I’m appalled. What were these people thinking? Did they mistake religion for theatre? Did they not care at all about other people’s beliefs? Or couldn’t they resist a good photo opportunity?

Late, late Friday night, I found myself in a poncey pub with an architect, a civil servant, the marketing manager for a particularly evil-bastard multinational and a councillor for a local authority. The cynicism about our respective professions was palpable, with endless complaints ensuing throughout the night about building regulations, various lobby groups, NGOs and quangos, the media, local councils,  politicians generally, voters, the general public, everyone in the world ever etc. etc.

To an extent this is par for the course with late night drunken, disillusioned and stress-relieving conversation, but I think we were almost all most shocked by the vitriol that came from the mouth of the local councillor. Cynicism about the political system, disillusionment with the party, scorn for national politicians and disdain for the disinterested voters in his constituency – all poured out with the provocation of a few drinks. And because of his day-job and because of our general resentment towards expense-claiming politicians (local or otherwise) we took him to task in a way that we didn’t each other. ‘How can you possibly say that? You’re a politician – show some respect!’ we shouted across the table, confident in our self-righteousness.

But since then, I’ve been wondering why. Why were we surprised by his attitude? Why don’t we expect our elected representatives to feel the same negativity, cynicism and despair that we do about our own jobs, and indeed, the political system? Why would we  expect them to keep up the pretence when we don’t?

I think that part of the answer to this lays in the question I wish I’d asked him: ‘Why exactly are you doing this job and if you really feel that way, why are you still doing it?’ Sometimes we all probably need to ask ourselves this.

As much as I don’t delight in work, sometimes the office is a welcome refuge from the outside world, or at least the outside world of the pavements surrounding it.

I have worked in some of the busiest parts of central London and Glasgow over the past decade and have become used to the constant flow of heavy traffic, madcap cyclists, dawdling pedestrians shouting into mobile phones, noise pollution from lousy buskers and the inevitable lost tourists. This doesn’t bother me (much). What has been grinding me down over the years though is the ongoing assault on my ability to walk unharassed down the street.

I know that ‘the street’ is public space, but over the past few weeks for example, I have been interrupted by:

1. gung-ho types trying to sign me up for a chain of gyms I particularly dislike
2. even more gung-ho types trying to get me to play Paintball
3. street teams pushing free samples of vile Orangina in a manner that wouldn’t shame Mrs Doyle from Father Ted
4. a miserable lone student on a bike trying to promote a Farmer’s Market
5. noisy and whistling Climate Camp protesters
6. TV crews filming the Climate Camp protesters
7. desperately enthusiastic chuggers trying to sign me up to Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Red Cross, Barnados and the NSPCC
8. sulky teenagers collecting for a local project for young people
9. bored sods aggressively thrusting copies of London Lite, The London Paper, City AM, Epoch Times, Sport magazine and the Hotcourses newspaper at me
10. enthusiastic sods handing out leaflets for dating agencies
11. shiny young men flogging miracle hair products
12. the usual assortment of panhandlers and Big Issue sellers

All this within the five minutes it takes to walk between the station platform and my office. Sometimes, particularly around the station, it’s like that scene in Repulsion where all the hands are coming out of the walls grabbing at Catherine Deneuve as she collapses down the corridor – only on this occasion its worse because they’re also waving copies of London Lite and photocopied flyers for the local pawnbrokers.

Usually I just smile, say a polite but firm ‘no thanks’ and scurry onwards with my head down, but I fear that overload is killing my politeness. I have been feeling increasingly tetchy about this constant assault on my privacy over the past year and in last month I’ve snapped – I’ve already had two arguments with chuggers and yesterday I gave the paintballing man what must have been a much darker look than intended, as he looked instantly guilty and backed away apologising. And today I’m fantasising about getting a t-shirt printed up saying  ’Don’t waste your time’ that I can just scowlingly point at when people approach.

What’s happening to me? London is turning me into the kind of person I hate.

Do you ever get tired of blogging? I don’t mean the actual writing, but having to use the same old dreary standard keyboard all the time?

Well, I have the solution for you. It’s the Luxeed Rainbow Computer Keyboard.

This keyboard, with its 430 LEDs, will put the pep back into your blogging. The illuminated keyboard changes colour with each keystroke – a bit like the dancefloor in Saturday Night Fever. It can also do some ‘amazing’ tricks, like flashing a mini animated rainbow across the keys as you write. Giving yourself a headache has never been so much fun.

This little beauty will only set you back around £100 so you’ll be devastated to know that it’s not yet available outside of Korea.

NB: Works best when blogging in the dark. May not be suitable for office use.

I overheard an interesting snippet from a meteorologist on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He was attempting to explain why Britain is not basking in the ‘barbeque summer’ that the Met Office predicted back in April.

Seasonal forecasting is difficult, he said, and in any case, it’s the fault of those people in the Met Office’s press office who always put a ridiculously positive spin on these things and who came up with the stupid concept of the ‘barbeque summer’ in the first place.*

Now having spent my summer holidays reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News and its expose on the state of world journalism (or ‘churnalism’ as he describes it), I really shouldn’t be suprised by this. In his book, Nick Davies devotes several chapters to how PR has provided a valuable lifeline to overworked, under-resourced, budget-cut journalists around the world – the PR’s supply of easy oven-ready press release filler is perfect for an ever-hungry 24-hour news world. The downside of this of course, is that without time for proper truth checking from journalists, we are all made more vulnerable to spin, deceit and lies from everyone from celebrities, the government and the CIA to corporates, lobby groups and er… the Met Office.

I know that we all like a good weather story and I would fully expect the Met Office to have a busy communications department shooting out exciting weather news across the country, but embellishing the actual weather forecast? Come on. We’re not that stupid – we all know that it’s going to be rubbish anyway.

* yes, I am paraphrasing here.

Place: a suburban London train
Time: a sunny Saturday afternoon
Key characters: shaved headed, large man in filthy white sweater and jeans and a semi-full carriage of increasingly nervous people.

The man gets on the train deeply immersed in a loud conversation on his mobile phone. It goes something like this:

- ‘Yeah, I’m coming over now. But £*%$, I’ll have to be back by 9pm.’
- ‘Because I’m on a stupid £*%$’ing curfew that’s why. That’s what the £*%$ers did, put me back on a curfew.’
- ‘Yes, you £*%$ing  idiot. I have to be back by 9pm otherwise they’ll put me away again.’
- ‘Oh, it was £*%$ing £*%$ed. The handcuffs were on really tight this time, they dug right in. I’ve still got the marks. I’ll show you them later.’
- ‘Well, this time the £*%$er  said that I’d nicked his radio. They’ve got to be £*%$ing joking. It’s a crap radio. If I wanted a decent radio, I’d go and get one from that other £*%$er down the road.’
- ‘I should have £*%$ing kicked their heads in, especially the £*%$ing coloured guy, but I wanted to get off so I could come and see you sweetheart.’

There is a lot of negativity around at the moment. The media, blogs, politicians, people in everyday conversations – we’ve all been beating ourselves up about the economic crisis, global warming, the death of Jade Goody, bad mannered children, fat people, knife crime, housing slumps, binge drinking, the sectarian versus the secular, the end of civilisation as we know it. If you think too much about it, you feel like throwing yourself off a cliff, or at the very least going and watching a few hours of I love Lucy repeats.

I often wonder if things are really that bad. Human life has always been miserable, there has long been a divide between rich and poor, the people in power have always abused it, lazy and selfish people are not a new phenomenon. There was no golden age. Yes, industrialisation and late capitalism have changed our society, but has human nature itself really changed? Probably not.

What has definitely changed us though is communication. We have access to more information than we could ever possibly want and that I for one, could ever possibly process. It might well be this information saturation that is making us so much unhappier than we think we were in the past. The more instant information channels that there are, the more black and white the world grows – there is no room for nuance on quick and easy current affairs programmes, news sites that are designed to maximise comments and eyeballs, and 24 hour rolling news. Sometimes I suspect that it is this that feeds our seemingly innate desire for black and white, for wrong and right, for easy solutions.

We have just been warned about expected protests across the City next week where I work (see here). I’ve spent the morning re-arranging our planned events. And quite frankly, it all scares me.

There is a difference between pathetic shouting at the TV about Germaine Greer working for the man and wanting to ‘burn a banker’. The global economy is in crisis (again – we have been here before) but deliberately targeting someone because they’re wearing a suit jacket isn’t going to ease the situation. It’s just a black and white animal response that in the end is going to make us even more depressed about the state of our society and what we’ve become.

What might have helped would have been us all taking an interest in the economy and its current excesses five years ago. But the times were good then, weren’t they, and we couldn’t be bothered.

We went to see Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business Editor, speak at the London School of Economics on Monday night.

Lets look at the good things first. Robert Peston is an excellent speaker who clearly, precisely and humorously detailed exactly why he thinks we are in the current economic predicament that we are.

Unfortunately, what he had to say was pretty depressing. To sum up his analysis of the causes of the world financial crisis in 3 over-simplified points:

1. Greed – we all wanted too much and borrowed too much. 125% unsecured mortgages indeed.
2. Ignorance – nobody, from bankers and hedgefund managers to politicians and journalists, ever really understood what the hell was going on. This is the ‘Grandma Test’, Robert Peston says, where if you can’t explain what a collateralised debt obligation is to your Grandma and how many you’ve got, then don’t do it.
3. Naivity – our illustrious leaders stuck their heads in the sand for too long, never believing that it could all go pear-shaped. i.e. they really, really did believe that Alan Greenspan was right, the City was great and that there would be no more boom and bust cycles.

Like how you learn the textbook causes of World War I and II at school, Robert Peston had no problems outlining step-by-step how we got into this recession. Yes, it’s all clear now. So why wasn’t it at the time? Economics always works best in hindsight, doesn’t it?

Do you remember when banks used to be quiet, conservative places in traditional looking buildings? Designed to both make you feel safe and secure and to inspire confidence in their products, they were the one place that you could rely on to be much the same each visit. The queues might have grown longer over the years and the cash machines more numerous, but essentially banks remained the same havens of quiet predictability.

Today, however, I experienced what a certain high street chain clearly think is ‘the bank of the future’.

I knew something was wrong when I first entered. Since my last visit, they had decided to dispense with the ratty carpet and row of sulky, stressed bank tellers. Instead lines of ATMs circled around fake wooden floors, music blared out blandly and people milled around, lost without a queuing system to tell them where to stand. A young man bounded up to me and asked how he could help me today. His plastic smile confirmed that something was indeed, wrong.

He took my details and explained that there was a 20-minute wait to speak to someone. However in the meantime, he reassured me, I could relax with a cup of coffee in the bank’s ‘lounge area’. It transpired that said lounge area was a couple of uncomfortable looking seats clustered around a table of brochures about insurance policies. Some other customers were struggling with the coffee machine, so I sat down to the tiresome sounds of Alanis Morrisette and cursed not having brought my book.

Eventually my ‘customer service assistant for the afternoon’ arrived, introduced herself and escorted me to a groovy plastic cubicle which was covered with loud ads for mortgages. Although she was very nice, I found myself distracted by the sounds of Mick Jagger singing ‘Lets spend the night together’ in the background. ‘spend’, ‘spend’, ‘spend’ – was this a subliminal message I wondered?

After I’d escaped from the bank, I realised how tense I’d felt in there. The sensual overload of ads, music and cheap finishings seemed purposely designed to wind me up.

Is it a co-incidence that the banks new funky image has happened at the same time as the credit crunch/recession/world global meltdown? And more importantly, since we now ‘own’ most of the UK high street banks can we put a stop to this kind of thing before it goes any further?

I know that living in a city can be a pretty efficient way of removing any semblance of civility from your life, but even this recent exchange on the morning tube managed to surprise me.

As usual I am sitting engrossed in my book pretending to ignore everything going on around me, including in this case, a minor scuffle taking place by the tube doors. From the mêlée a male voice suddenly pipes up saying ‘Please don’t push me.’

‘You’re too slow’ is the curt response he receives from a woman striding my way.

‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got a bad leg’ he replies apologetically, collapsing into a seat near the door.

I discreetly lower my book and take a peep. The woman is a middle-aged, well dressed and clearly off to work in some kind of office. In other circumstances, I might describe her as kindly looking. But not now. Definitely not now.

‘So?’ she snaps ‘You’re too slow. I had to actually get on you know.’

‘I have a bad leg…’ he protests quietly. He looks as though he is around my age and not the sort of person who usually enjoys getting into scraps with middle-aged women on public transport. He also has a bad leg.

Is she going to recognise this and apologise? Like hell she is. ‘Well, you shouldn’t be on the tube then. People like you shouldn’t be allowed on.’

He, like the rest of quietly listening carriage, is clearly flabbergasted by this. But he just sighs and says matter-of-factly ‘Please have some compassion.’

This is a mistake.

She yells across the carriage at him ‘I have no compassion!‘

There is no answer to this. He goes silent and pulls out a book. The rest of us rustle our papers, shuffle our feet and avoid looking at the woman with no compassion.