No Man is an iLand

Not being a crotchety old naysayer, it’s not often that I find myself warning others to be careful what they wish for. Unsurprisingly, it’s even less infrequent that I warn myself – after all, unless what I’m wishing for is a poke in the eye or some sort of debilitating brain disease that makes me soil myself sporadically and without warning, what harm could come from a little wishful thinking? My wishes tend to be small, obtainable, pocket-sized wishes; a gold card, for instance, or world peace, and yet, when I am confronted with exactly what I think I want, it often comes as a surprise just how bloody unsatisfying satisfaction can be.

I was having a whinge the other day, over some fridge-chilled Corona in an air-conditioned Soho bar, how our lives were becoming increasingly dependant on technology. Having some time earlier received a text message informing me that my friend would be late, (seven minutes, to be exact) I thought it prudent to ponder how the mobile phone had taken the place of good timekeeping and, more importantly, good manners. Before mobile phones made almost every social faux pas bar adultery and murder acceptable, when you made a plan you stuck to it; meeting at eight thirty did not mean meeting at nine and bringing Pablo from the post room with you, it meant arriving at eight twenty-five and liking it. Nowadays, lateness doesn’t even enter the equation; the mobile phone has become the electronic get-out-of-jail-free card, and the text message the king’s pardon du jour. Don’t fancy turning up? Sod it, send a text. After all, at least you’ve let them know, right?

Being something of an old romantic, I waxed lyrical about a time gone by when preparing to leave the house meant not forgetting your keys and your bus fare: The halcyon days when cash wasn’t viewed as a relic and not every phone box was a makeshift urinal seemed somehow blissful in the comfortable neon half-light of my temperate London boozery. Growingly increasingly indignant about society’s dependence on technology to excuse good old fashioned rudeness, I reminisced, ignoring for a minute the fact that were it not for my laptop, my mobile phone and my oyster card my little Soho soiree would not actually have happened, of a time before inter-personal contact was so immediate, relentless and detached. And then I told a great big fat stinker of a lie: I could live happily without it all – no mobile, no laptop, no internet. Nothing.

Imagine my surprise then, when, deprived of my broadband connection for a mere eight hours, I was plunged into, not only total social isolation, but also something resembling blind panic.

Dependency is a frightening enough concept when we apply it to people. We all like to convince ourselves that we are strong, independent and driven; standing on our own two feet, after all, is one of the pivotal moments of our early development. It’s even more terrifying when we apply it to things. While I, like most people, am essentially a creature of habit, it came as something of a shock to realise how isolated and, more worryingly, how deprived I felt for the simple fact that I could not access my email. Not having been denied food, water or fresh air, my indignation is retrospectively embarrassing and petty; all I’d really been denied was the ability to sit on my arse having my brain assaulted by a limitless wave of easily accessible nonsense. And yet indignant, to my abject horror, I remained.

No one likes realising what a hypocrite they actually are, or, indeed, what a mindless drone they have allowed themselves to become. Despite my earlier protestation that such technology had made us lazy, isolated and rude, without it I felt quite astonishingly ineffective, isolated and rude. Emails went unanswered, plans went unmade and gossip when unspread. And perhaps worst of all was the fact that I felt the need to justify my withdrawal; claiming that a lack of internet was preventing my from working from home (work which had neither arrived, nor had I any intention of actually doing) was my only means of legitimising what is, essentially, a rather worrying internet addiction.

Three hours and four phone calls to an automated recorded voice telling me that the problem ‘would be sorted later today’, I decided to pull myself together and reacquaint myself with the real world. Sipping a lukewarm hazelnut Americano in an artificially-lit jazz-pumping Starbucks with an old friend might not have been exactly the return to a simpler time I’d been pining for, but it was a distinct improvement on trying to connect with an inanimate, unresponsive grey box.

Going through the seven stages of grief for what is essentially a gateway to donkey porn and videos of women falling off of ladders is something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry. We may live in an increasingly secular and distant society, and emails, text messages and Facebook pokes may be the only way we communicate with people we’d otherwise drift apart from, but at what cost does this maintained electronic contact come? The realisation that my social life still existed beyond a rickety broadband connection was hardly a eureka moment, but it was necessary nonetheless; it reminded me that every second spent exchanging electronic vodka shots with vague acquaintances was a second that could be far more valuably spent cultivating and maintaining real, tangible relationships with real, tangible people. And so I closed the lid, flicked off the switch, and went outside to play.

Technology is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but a little disentanglement was just the thing to blow the World Wide cobWebs away…

The Name Game

Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously
for nobody's toeses are posies of roses
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.

When it comes to the naming of things, there seems to be something of a literary pre-occupation with the rose. If it’s not Moses supposing his toeses are roses (supposing, of course, erroneously), it’s Shakespeare’s Juliet pondering ‘What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.’ But whether we’re talking about roses, toeses or posies, names continue to be problematic; while they are little more than labels for things that are exactly the same without them, without them we are left in something of an existential identity crisis. Without names, all that distinguishes roses from toeses is the very fact of them being distinct, their physical, tangible difference. Without them, things are just that, things. Perhaps this is why we are thrown into such a quandary when names get changed.

I can still remember the nationwide sense of unease when Marathon bars became Snickers, when Jif became Cif and when Opal Fruits suddenly became Starburst. There was sufficient outcry when Coco Pops were inexplicably re-branded as Choco Crispies that Kellogg’s were forced to make a u-turn (perhaps Coup-Coup Pops may have been an appropriate rename in this instance). If Gertrude Stein is right, and a rose really is just a rose, then why do we get so worked up over what things are called?

I ask this in the light of a recent lobbying campaign taking place in East London that seeks to rename the soon-to-be-reopened Shoreditch High Street station ‘Banglatown’, in honour of the Bangladeshi cultural influence in the area. Despite a similar aborted campaign to have Aldgate East station renamed Brick Lane in 2006, supporters of the proposed change are arguing that such a change will make the area more accessible to tourists and serve to cement the cultural identity of the area. It’s a campaign with noble and understandable intentions, and one that poses the question of how important a name is to the cultural identity, or indeed the social relevance of the location it describes. If the clothes make the man, does the name really make the place?

You’d be rightly quick to point out that Chinatown in Soho does just that – labels a place unequivocally with the cultural background that it serves to represent – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a trend that ought to be unquestionably followed. Sure, renaming Shoreditch High Street station Banglatown would make it easier for tourists to locate Brick Lane and everything that comes hand in hand with this particular area in East London, but aside from setting an uncomfortable precedent for labelling locations with such definitive racial and cultural boundaries, doesn’t it also smack slightly of dumbing down? Are we in danger of turning London into one big theme park – a huge reproduction of the ‘it’s a small world’ ride at Disneyland? And if we are, why stop with Banglatown? Oxford Street is confusing enough, so why don’t we just call it Shopland? Soho might literally be dripping with connotative implication, but it could be clearer – Gaytopia, perhaps, or Shagsville?

The labelling of places might be problematic, but the labelling of people is, unsurprisingly, even more so. Somewhat further away, the Greek gay rights organisation The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece has come under fire from campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos for their use of the term ‘lesbian’. The campaign, spearheaded by Lesbos publisher Dimitris Lambrou argues that the ‘international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.’ Lambrou insists that the worldwide sexualising of the term causes daily problems to the social lives of Lesbos’s inhabitants. Now, far be it for me to trivialise the embarrassment of 100,000 people, but with all the problems currently facing the world today, is that really the biggest thing they have to worry about?

The term lesbian entered the English vocabulary at the start of the 20th Century, and originates from the poet Sappho, who expressed her love for other women in her 7th Century BC poetry. This in mind – and all fatuousness aside – doesn’t it seem that the Lesbians have taken rather a long time to be offended about the lesbians? I mean, a really, really long time. I’d try to defer my offence next time someone calls me a dickhead for a hundred years, except I’d probably be dead, and that would be really, really quite petty.

Perhaps the most ludicrous part of the entire campaign is the reported intention to combat the use of the term worldwide if their campaign is successful. Talk about keeping your eyes on the bigger picture - Mary Whitehouse must be positively spinning in her grave that she never held such ambition.

It takes some stretch of the imagination to believe that insurmountable confusion arises from the duality of the term, even more so to believe that this duality brings the people of Lesbos disgrace. Are the Lesbian people really so soft-shelled? And if a capital letter isn’t enough to distinguish the terms (Lesbian referring to someone from Lesbos, lesbian referring to someone from Channel 4), shouldn’t some degree of maturity, acceptance and the common sense to rise above what is, frankly, puerile schoolboy humour provide sufficient defence against this perceived embarrassment? Frankly, if the Lesbians think they’ve got it bad, they should probably give some thought to the people of Fucking, Austria. They may find that the grass is actually greener on their side of the fence.

There is a fine line between using names as a means of identification and using them as a means of implication; I’ll concede that Shakespeare and Stein had something of a point, but I’ll venture that were roses in fact called shitblossom, we wouldn’t be in so much of a hurry to shove our schnozzes into them. But the responsibility must be placed firmly at our own doors – words only have as much power as we let them; the continued taboo surrounding the word c*nt is evidence enough of this, so perhaps if we just remember that a word is a word is a word, just as a name is a name is a name, we’ll be better defended against the damage the labels we create can do.

After all, sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.

From Rush Hour, with Love

I’ll start by admitting a personal weakness of mine: I have a pathological, nut-shrinking phobia of lateness.

Some might say that I’m a pessimist, but I am a firm believer in the old adage that anything that can go wrong, will. It’s not that I’m a glass-half-empty kind of man, it’s just that I am convinced that life, society, shoelaces and embarrassing splashes on your crotch from over-zealous taps are all lurking in the wings, waiting to strike me down and delay me in my mission to arrive at any given destination at any given time. It’s sod’s law – you’re running slightly behind time, and bang, you can’t find your keys. Oversleep and the Jubilee Line is almost guaranteed to be out of service due to an exploding rat or some selfish loon throwing themselves in front of the 7.59 to Stanmore.

I’m not even sure where this fear comes from, since I am in the unenviable position of being in a social circle with people whose idea of punctuality is remembering to turn up at all. My closest friends are all habitually late to everything, and despite being aware of this fact, I am utterly, unbreakably obsessed with arriving exactly on time.

So it will come as no surprise to you that I am no good when it comes to travelling. Actually, more accurately, I am probably the world’s worst traveller. When it comes to wandering, I am a pro; I can meander with the best of them, and strolling, well, what I don’t know about strolling doesn’t need knowing. But travelling, actually journeying to a given destination and, more worryingly, a given time, transmogrifies me from a reasonably level headed man to Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit on speed.

My obsession with tardiness frequently puts me in a negative, neurotic light. I remember a particularly awful, blue-faced screaming row I had in Central Park, terrified of missing a flight that wasn’t leaving for eight hours with the same discomfort that comes with recalling my six hour ‘power nap’ on the floor of Birmingham station, thanks to my conviction I’d miss my connecting train, and thus a job interview that was so chronologically distant that it had a different zodiac sign. Lateness brings me out in a cold, panicked sweat, and the fact that so frequently my arriving on time is placed outside my own control is something of a bone of contention for me. Not to put to fine a point on it, boys and girls, but I’m a terrible, terrible traveller.

So as a Londoner, and a commuter, ‘rush hour’ is some kind of Kafka-esque nightmare; some kind of perverse torture, geared entirely to my personal terror of lateness; the sort of sick game Jigsaw might think up for one of his victims in Saw. But it’s a necessary evil; as much as I hate getting from A to B via some as-yet-unnamed circle of hell, I happen to love money, and the myriad joys it can bring. So if all that stands between me and a margarita or a spangly new top is the relentless indignity of a London rush hour, then so be it. What really, really troubles me about rush hour is that no one appears to be in anything even resembling a rush.

The poster for Simon Pegg’s critically acclaimed Shaun of the Dead depicts loveable anti-hero Shaun on a tube, surrounded by the teeming undead. Beyond the obvious nod to the relentless mindless shambling of the commuting masses, I think Pegg has something of a point. There’s plenty of shambling to be seen; there’s even a great deal of shuffling, creeping and trundling, but rushing? Don’t bet your life on it.

Most of us have had the misfortune of taking a packed bus or tube to work, so it would be self-indulgent of me to describe it… actually, sod it, I’m going to. It’s just one soul-crushing indignity after another: if you’re not spending the journey avoiding the eye of some old soak screaming at his own sleeve and stinking of vomit, you’re crushed, crotch to sweaty crotch and face to armpit with someone whose idea of personal hygiene is to turn their pants inside out and clean their teeth with a dead rat. In short, it’s grim. So very, very grim. The daily commute is madness, and I, for one, don't want to go among mad people.

So why aren’t we in more of a hurry to get away? Why are we constantly stopping? Why can’t we stand to the right on escalators? Why can’t we walk in a bloody straight line? Why, London, why? Why are you all always in my bloody way?

I could continue to rant forever, but because I like to think I’m something of a well-rounded individual, I’ll put it into perspective: removing the need to work, to earn money, to survive and to shop – were we faced with the offence-to-all-five-senses that is rush hour outside of the daily grind, wouldn’t we be in some sort of hurry to escape it? Of course we would. So take that logic, and apply it to rush hour; stop pausing and looking around as if the scenery is suddenly going to stop being a beige seventies nightmare and somehow transform into that scene from end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit when the wall collapses and all the cartoon animals run in – it’s not going to. Stop standing to chat on the escalators; there are dozens of beautiful parks and a hundred million Starbucks, go to one, and chat beyond the smell of stale air and hostile aggression.

What we need to do is stop stopping, and start bloody rushing. Get your skates on, Londoners, and discover your inner White Rabbit. Trust me, you’ll get to Wonderland far quicker that way.