The Wiki Man

Some time in the mid-1990s I spent a day in a windowless room watching endless presentations of European television commercials. In the style of the times, most were filmed in exotic tropical locations with lavish production values, sumptuous photography and a pulsating soundtrack. As the day drew to an end, the creative director of an Oslo advertising agency stood up to present his own work. He gave a self-deprecating cough. ‘Back in Norway we have no advertising money at all… so unfortunately we have to have an idea.’ He went on to show charming and imaginative advertisements, typically shot on video cameras. One series simply featured two people talking on a tram. As he proved, imagination can be a good substitute for a big budget.

Fifteen years ago, when I lived in W2, I was sent a leaflet from something called (I think) the Bayswater Residents Association. As is common with anything produced by self-appointed volunteers, the leaflet proposed an exclusively geriatric vision for the postal district in which we lived, one completely at odds with its population. The organisation boasted it had ‘successfully campaigned to prevent the area becoming a centre for nightlife second only to the West End’, a claim that incensed the 29-year-old me, who had moved to the area in the hope of that very contingency. Its membership seemed implacably opposed to any human activity which involved being awake after 6 p.m.

At first glance the climate change debate is simple: you either believe the doom-mongers or you don’t. Soon, however, other questions arise. Is the world warming up or not? If so, is this warming anthropogenic or the result of a natural cycle? If greenhouse gases are indeed to blame, do we reduce emissions now or leave our children to deal with the consequences? Do we trust more to legislation or technological progress? And is the whole thing a whopping great lie? The Delingpolian view that the whole thing is one great big con might still be right. There are plenty of people who have an ulterior motive in spreading fear. Governments love citing market failures as an excuse to intervene.

To Amy******@************.org: I have a LG microwave that I want to sell for $30. I am aware your ad said whites only, but I am an African American. I sincerely hope that we can put race issues aside and just do business. From Amy ****** to Me: I am so sorry that you misread my ad. I meant the microwave should be white, because it would match my kitchen. From Me to Amy ******: Oh, so because I am black, you think that I can’t read… I don’t think I can sell my microwave to a bigot. Subsequent masters of the art have included William Donaldson (as Henry Root), Ted L. Nancy (American author of Letters from a Nut) and Robert Popper (author, under the name Robin Cooper, of The Timewaster Letters).

In the end I ignored my own advice and bought an Apple iPad, purely, as I explained to my wife, ‘for the purposes of research’. The very same ‘research’ that has by now filled two or three desk drawers with a ridiculous assortment of electrical chargers, the devices they once charged mostly lost, burnt out or forgotten. Weeks later, my verdict on the thing is curiously complicated. What I mean by this is that the Apple iPad is a magnificent, life-enhancing device, which in many ways lights a future path for technology… and I really do like it: but I’m just not quite sure that you should buy one.

I am, it’s true, optimistic about the role of technology in making life more pleasant and interesting, but in some areas I am sceptical, even fogeyish. Ask me to design a perfect world and it will have electronics (and medicine) from the present day but engineering and architecture from the 1930s. My answer to any volcanic ash cloud would be to reintroduce a transatlantic Zeppelin service. As for Heathrow’s third runway, let Short Brothers’ Empire flying boats land on the Thames. It is all too easy to fantasise about a golden age of travel while forgetting that it was golden only for the few who could afford it. But something has been lost.

A few years ago a leisure centre advertised ‘Keep-fit classes for the over-60s’. Nobody turned up. To broaden the appeal, they advertised ‘Keep-fit classes for the over-50s’. The sessions sold out. Not one of those joining was under 65 years of age. How many 65-year-olds want to attend anything aimed at the over-60s? And how many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners (the people who actually buy them) rather than elfin 27-year-olds in capri pants? ‘User imagery’ it’s called, and it is a more powerful force than any of us would like to admit. Not only in what it makes us do, but in what it stops us doing.

With the single exception of the in- flight live map with its wonderfully eccentric ideas about the relative importance of towns and cities (what’s so special about Chartwell?), I don’t often use the in-flight entertainment systems on planes. I’m not sure I want to watch Avatar on a nine-inch screen — or on any screen, come to think of it. In fact I think it would be better if, a week before the flight, your airline just sent you a £10 Amazon voucher along with a few book recommendations. In a way, the best improvement to in-flight entertainment has been the BBC’s and Sky’s creation of desktop software which means you can download television programmes to a PC.

I haven’t watched Triumph of the Will all the way through, but I am fairly confident that at no point in the film does Hess suddenly turn to the crowd and say: ‘Yes, sir, your question. Row 689, the blond gentleman in black with the skull insignia? No, not you, sir — the slightly more Aryan-looking gentleman to the right — just behind the eagle.’ (Maiden with coiled plaits wearing dirndlkleid strides over with a boom microphone.) Man: ‘Does the Führer have any idea how difficult it is to bring up two children on an Unterscharführer’s salary, what with hyperinflation and that?’ Fuhrer: ‘Well, Horst — it is Horst, isn’t it?

I don’t know if you have ever been to Paris, but it’s basically a kind of London for girls. I generally try to avoid the place, as you can’t get a decent curry and there’s nothing in the shops unless you are an anorexic dwarf. But a couple of times a year I used to find myself on a breakneck taxi ride between the (pretty crummy) Gare de Lyon and the (crummier still) Gare Montparnasse, trying to catch a train to Bordeaux. Only after my sixth visit did I learn that there was no need for this ludicrous trip. Instead of changing trains in Paris, you could simply hop off the Eurostar at Lille, have some chips and a pint at the bar, then jump on an almost empty TGV train which runs all the way from Lille to Bordeaux. Simples. Why did it take me years to find this out?

If you have used Oxford railway station recently, you may have noticed a strange electronic sign on the up platform displaying a ‘parking code’, a seemingly random three-digit number. I wondered about this and asked around. It seems that, when parking next to the station, you can either ‘pay and display’, in which case you pay a kind of rip-off-the-clueless-tourists hourly rate, or else you can pay by mobile phone. By including the ‘parking code’ when you call (it can only be seen from the platform, and hence is known only to those with train tickets) you pay much less. It’s a system of discrimination where there’s one price for rail travellers and another for everyone else — you could call it aparkheid.

It takes a more ruthless person than me to walk past any of the defunct branches of Borders without feeling some pangs of conscience. I am sure the chain made some mistakes (it had a strange habit of opening vast, hangar-like stores in out-of-town retail parks such as Lakeside, places not generally known for their wide-ranging literary tastes), but its shops were usually well stocked and staffed. No, it is people like me who are responsible for this bankruptcy, our every Amazon visit a further nail in the coffin of the traditional bookseller. How long before the proper bookshop becomes as rare on our streets as the traditional tobacconist?

Much as it pains me to use the Spectator’s pages to plug another publication, I can’t help being impressed by the Economist’s invention of a new kind of subscription service. Much as it pains me to use the Spectator’s pages to plug another publication, I can’t help being impressed by the Economist’s invention of a new kind of subscription service. Like many people, you probably enjoy the Economist, but just not quite enough to read it every week. Perhaps you simply can’t make time in your busy schedule to learn more about the prospects for electoral reform in Turkmenistan.

I’m not frightened of flying. Or spiders. Nor, like one friend of mine, do I have a crippling fear of tomatoes. But I do suffer from mild koumpounophobia — the fear of buttons. I should add that, in my case, it is more a mild distaste than a full-blown phobia. While I wouldn’t care to be ravished by a pearly queen, I am really only bothered by loose buttons, not those attached to clothing — so I can wear shirts happily enough. Recently, though, on the ‘takes one to know one’ principle, I have begun to wonder whether Apple’s Steve Jobs might suffer from a more extreme form of this condition. Photos of Jobs suggest he has a remarkable distaste for visible fastenings, seams or other attachments on his clothing.

You know how it is. You’re driving down some remote B road in rural Britain and your petrol tank is running low. At last you stumble on some tiny petrol station selling some fabulously obscure brand of petrol such as Anglo or Burmah. When you pull in, the weirdest thing happens — a live human being walks over to your car and offers to fill your tank. Theoretically, we should be delighted by this. But most of us under 60 probably find it faintly disquieting. Filling a petrol tank is now something we prefer to do for ourselves. Of course there may be a Freudian explanation for the male urge to fill up.

At an airport recently I saw a sign for the public telephones; it was a symbol showing a round telephone dial with a receiver across the top. Nothing odd about this, you may think — that is if, like me, you are over 40. If you are under 20, on the other hand, it may be incomprehensible, for at no time in your life has your telephone looked even remotely like this. At the very least, the symbol must seem absurdly anachronistic, like those twee signs you get on loo doors where the man and woman are wearing Edwardian costume. The change is not confined to the phone’s shape, either. The whole meaning of the word ‘phone’ is different among the under 20s, as shown by a friend’s teenage daughter when petitioning her parents to buy her some gadget for Christmas.

I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. Even in my most right-wing moments, I don’t want to open my Spectator to find articles proposing a selective breeding programme (though, come to think of it, this may have been the idea behind the Spectator Editors’ Dinner — I left around 11, so never got the chance to find out). All the same, his attack on eugenics, as with many anti-Darwin assaults, seems to focus on the evil done in the name of eugenics rather than the science itself.

Most debate about modern architecture revolves around aesthetics. This misses the point. I quite like the way many modern buildings look — what I hate is the way they work. Say what you like about traditional architecture, no one has ever approached the portico of the British Museum and asked, ‘Any idea where the entrance might be?’ By contrast, until recently (when a design team installed some intelligent signage), you could circle the Barbican for hours and still have no idea how to get in. Once inside, you were faced by a baffling array of stairways all heading in random directions. One requirement of good public architecture — like good software — is that people should navigate it instinctively.

Judging by my fellow passengers on trains or planes, I am in a minority in being more addicted to words than music. While perfectly fond of music, on long journeys I am slightly unnerved by the many people in headphones who can sit for three hours at a stretch staring vacantly into space. I could easily survive that long without an iPod, but would start foaming at the mouth if I had to last 20 minutes without anything to read. I also admire wordsmiths more than tunesmiths. Until his verbal assault on his brother (‘He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup’), I never had much time for Noel Gallagher; now I think he’s a genius.