The Hell of It All (12 page)

Come to think of it, Bush is so vehemently fact-phobic, he might as well expand the war on terror into an outright war on reality, in which anything palpably authentic is the enemy. There’ll be an ‘Axis of Real Stuff’, encompassing everyone and everything from hairbands to dustmen, all of which Must Be Eliminated. ‘If it’s provable, we can kill it.’ That’s our new motto. God’s on our side, because he can’t be proved or disproved. He’s one of our most valuable allies – the others being Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, ghosts, the bogeyman, and Bigfoot. Not to mention a vast fleet of UFOs,
which the enemy won’t have a chance of defeating because it never existed in the first place. Our armies won’t be constrained by the laws of physics, and even if we lose, we’ll simply say we won, even if we have to say it from an afterlife which doesn’t exist either. That’s the power of unwavering denial. It makes deities of us all.

Of course, by rejecting anything he doesn’t want to hear, Bush is simply proving he’s human. Humans hate the truth. Once someone’s made up their mind, they rarely change it, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you show them. Changing your mind or admitting you were wrong is seen as weak, as though life itself were an almighty pub quiz where incorrect answers are penalised. The only option left is to interpret the facts in a new and interesting way that supports your overall position. This is what Bush has done. He says that since the report indicates that Iran halted its weapons programme in 2003, there’s a clear possibility it could start it up again. The very fact that the Iranians don’t have a nuclear bomb proves they might still develop one. Therefore, Iran is dangerous.

That’s a clever thing to say, because (a) the future is unknowable, so it’s impossible to tell him he’s wrong, and (b) the more he says it, the more likely it is to come true. Since Bush has shown that he’ll view Iran as a nuclear threat regardless of whether it’s got the bomb or not, the Iranians might as well build one. What have they got to lose?

Also, the report doesn’t say whether the Iranians are developing a giant laser beam capable of sawing the sun in two, but that’s no reason to assume they won’t be starting work on it next week. Picture a world in which Ahmadinejad holds us to ransom by threatening to plunge one sawn-off half of the sun into the Atlantic, sending 900-foot waves of boiling water rushing toward our shores. We can’t let that happen. We’ve got to get in first: drive a space shuttle into the sun and blow the damn thing up before the enemy get their hands on it. It might solve global warming too. Let’s hope the Pentagon is across this. Don’t let us down, guys. Knock that baby out.

Another benefit of ignoring the report and piling in regardless is
that at least this time round we’ll know for sure that the invasion and subsequent war is based on a false premise in advance, which beats finding out later and feeling a bit disgusted with ourselves. Forewarned is forearmed. It’s a narrative tweak which keeps things fresh and interesting. The TV series
Columbo
used a similar device: instead of being served a common-or-garden whodunnit, you’d see the murderer committing the crime at the start, so the fun came from watching his plan slowly unravel. There’s no danger of that happening to Bush though, because he doesn’t believe in plans either. So nothing unravels. It’s a win-win situation. He should unleash the hounds tomorrow. Go ahead, George. We’ll be fine, out here, outside the bunker. Don’t you worry about us.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Well, on TV it is anyway. At this time of year, every ad break turns into an extended brainwashing exercise as one campaign after another hammers its way into your head by dint of sheer repetition alone.

‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’ is, of course, the theme song of this year’s offering from Argos, which affects solidarity with the average hard-shopping prole by depicting the high street as a hellish dog-eat-dog war zone straight out of
Saving
Private Ryan
, the only thing missing being the occasional eye-popping shot of a young soldier getting his leg blown off – which, to be fair, wouldn’t really be in keeping with the Yuletide spirit.

Stephen Fry’s voiceover complains that Christmas should be ‘more … well, Christmassy’, at which point it cuts to a shot of an Argos delivery van pulling up outside a suburban home, as though that’s the very essence of all things ‘Christmassy’, which it isn’t. The birth of Christ, a crowded train, a party-hatted boss drunkenly molesting a co-worker – that’s Christmassy, you idiots.

Apart from Boots, whose ‘Here Come the Girls’ celebration-of-vapidity is at least entertaining, all the high street stores seem to have got it a bit wrong this year. Iceland’s ads are the most lurid, as they continue to hawk an increasingly terrifying range of oven-ready
vol-au-vents (Loaded Prawns, Filo Parcels, Squirrel-and-Onion Swastikas and so on) using the dream-team combo of Kerry Katona and a Nolan sister. These ads precisely evoke the queasy sensation of drifting off in front of a bloated 90-minute festive edition of
Birds of a Feather
following an over-rich pudding and three Baileys too many. And maybe that’s the point.

Celebrities feature heavily in supermarket ads. Asda continues its intensely patronising ‘stars in the aisles’ campaign, in which well-loved faces slum it among the downtrodden workforce. Sainsbury’s dumps Jamie Oliver into a sort of Dickensian pop-up book filled with miniature slaves. Morrisons has really dropped the ball, with an excruciating advert called ‘Lulu’s Christmas Dream’, in which Lulu wanders through a cosy, snow-caked market town peopled exclusively by a baffling combination of minor celebrities. There’s Gabby Logan carving her turkey, Nick Hancock having a snowball fight, Denise van Outen giggling on a balcony, Diarmuid Gavin winking at Lulu as though recalling a particularly grubby one-night stand, and Alan Hansen filling his trolley with 500 tins of Miniature Heroes, all of it backed by Take That’s ‘Shine’. It’s like a low-rent Ocean’s Thirteen. If it had used Alan Partridge instead of Lulu, and (‘I Believe in Miracles’) ‘You Sexy Thing’ by Hot Chocolate instead of Take That, it could have been the best Christmas commercial ever. As it is, it’s just embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassments, the Spice Girls have managed to imbue their long-awaited comeback with all the glamour and class of a hurried crap in a service station toilet by whoring themselves out to Tesco. The first instalment, in which the Girl Power quartet try to hide from each other while shopping for presents, represents a important landmark for the performing arts: Posh Spice becomes the first human being in history to be out-acted by a shopping trolley.

Marks & Sparks win a nerd rosette from me for managing to authentically replicate the style and tone of late-50s/early-60s movie trailers, although the undertone of its commercial is a tad suspect: it took me three or four viewings to realise it, but Twiggy and co are desperately showing off in a bid to impress Antonio
Banderas, who looks a bit like a CEO in a brothel trying to decide which prostitute he fancies using. I keep expecting him to point out two of them at the end, and for the advert to cut suddenly to a grotesque scene where both of them pleasure him at once in a velvet boudoir, filmed in the same style as the slow-mo food porn it uses for its other commercials. All of which isn’t very Christmassy either. But maybe that’s just me.

Said ad is accompanied by yet another vintage song: ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’. Presumably the ad agencies hold some sort of summit each year in the run-up to Christmas, where they negotiate who has the right to use each track, just so there’s no duplication. ‘You can have Winter Wonderland provided we get to keep Wizzard.’ That kind of thing. Old-fashioned crooning is in vogue this year. I’m expecting the Bing Crosby/David Bowie take on ‘Little Drummer Boy’ to make an appearance next time round – in a Currys ad, accompanying a shot of a wireless inkjet printer or something. You know. In keeping with the original sentiment of the song.

As I type these words, I’m sitting in New York, failing to enjoy myself. Not because I’m a miserable curmudgeon (I’m not – I’m a sparkling sunbeam) but because I neglected to tell the Halifax that I was going abroad, and it has punished me by putting a security block on my card. It’s like a parent-child relationship. I went out to play without asking permission and subsequently I’ve been grounded. Sorry mummy. Sorry daddy.

I was trying to buy a coat and some earmuffs – it’s minus 10 million degrees out here and like an idiot I arrived woefully unprepared – when the block kicked in. It’s pretty embarrassing when a shop assistant hands your card back, smiles weakly and says it’s been rejected. If you’re like me, you ask them to try again, and they reluctantly do so while a queue builds up behind you. And if you’re really like me, the card’s rejected again, this time in front of an impatient crowd, so to save face you apologetically huff something about ‘calling your bank to bollock them’ and demonstratively
whip out your mobile, only to discover you can’t get a signal until you walk all the way out of the shop, which makes you look precisely like you’re trying to sneak away.

Standing on the pavement, with the phone almost fused to my ear with the cold, I’m told I won’t be able to withdraw any money until tomorrow, because it’s night-time in England and the Halifax security team have all gone home. Still, it’s thoughtful of them to employ someone to sit at the end of the phone 24 hours a day just to empathise.

Since I have only $22 on me, my options for New York fun are suddenly extremely limited: specifically, they’re limited to returning to the hotel to sit indoors ordering room service. I’m under house arrest.

Still, at least there’s a TV. I sigh and switch it on, immediately plunging headlong into a high-octane showbiz news atrocity called
The Insider
. It’s like being hit in the face with a pan. The hosts simultaneously smile and shout, and it’s edited so quickly you feel like you’re glimpsing events through the side window of a speeding car. The big news is that Lindsay Lohan was spotted swigging champagne from a bottle on New Year’s Eve. They have a two-second clip of this which they loop and repeat about 600 times, sometimes zooming in, sometimes zooming out, sometimes accompanying it with spinning CGI lettering and sparkles and whoosh noises. Then a man with more teeth than sense whooshes in to replace her, loudly pledging to bring us ‘all the latest Lohan updates on this developing story’ throughout the remainder of the show. Then he’s replaced by an advert for an anti-constipation pill.

I look out of the window. Outside, New York sparkles and bustles. But without a coat, I can barely even step out of the door. I grit my teeth and return to the box.

Time passes. The all-new celebrity edition of the US version of
The Apprentice
begins. It’s fronted by Donald Trump and his optical-illusion hairstyle, who’s rubbish compared with Alan Sugar. Among the cast is simpering human perineum Piers Morgan, furthering his showbiz career with another deliberately smug turn. Half the others are unrecognisable to me, partly because they’re
American celebs, partly because they’ve had a bit too much plastic surgery, which always gives people a strangely generic, faintly cromagnon look, as though they’re part of a new species descended from, but not directly related to, us regular human beings. Morgan is sneering at one of them when my attention is drawn to a ticker-tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen announcing that Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucus. Then the whole thing’s replaced by an advert for lasagna rollatini with sausage, something that looks so utterly ghastly that even Iceland wouldn’t consider it.

At some point I fall asleep, only to wake up a few hours later midway through a speech by Mike Huckabee, the Republican candidate who’s also won in Iowa. He’s worrying for several reasons: (1) he’s an ultra-religious Baptist minister who doesn’t believe in evolution, (2) he looks a bit like Charles Logan, the corrupt president from season 5 of
24
, and (3) he’s quoting G. K. Chesterton: ‘A true soldier fights not because he hates those who are in front of him, but because he loves those who are behind him.’ Standing directly behind him as he says this: Chuck Norris. Then there’s a commercial for Advil. New York, meanwhile, continues to twinkle through the window, infuriatingly out-of-reach.

By now I’m out of my mind with despair, so I call the bank again simply to vent some frustration, and end up being horrible to the man on the other end, who’s only doing his job. This makes me feel so low that I call back a few minutes later to try to apologise, but get put through to someone else, and they just think I’m weird. Now it’s the next morning and I’m still waiting to discover if the bank’s going to let me go outside. I’ve learned my lesson, OK? It’s protecting my money by stopping me getting my hands on it, just in case I’m not me. And right now I’m not me. The real me would be out seeing the sights. Muggins me is locked indoors drinking Pepsi for entertainment. I clearly deserve everything I get.

Fear stalks the land; stalks my land at any rate. I’ve landed a starring role in my own personal horror movie: Day of the Norovirus.
Gastric flu, the winter vomiting bug, spewmonia: whatever you want to call it, it’s out there, somewhere, festering on every surface, waiting to infect me. Britain is diseased: a septic isle bobbing on an ocean of warm sick.

The media have had a field day, and to an emetophobe like me (someone with an uncontrollable, inbuilt fear of puking), this merely amplifies the terror. A headline such as ‘Vomiting bug spreads across nation’ sets my pulse racing twice as effectively as ‘Mad axeman on loose’.

Even worse are the war stories: vivid blog postings from survivors, gleefully describing the full extent of their biological meltdown. They’re trying to outdo each other.

‘I had to lie naked on the bathroom floor for three days, blasting hot fluid from both ends, spinning around like a Catherine wheel.’