The Wiki Man

Last summer we picked up a hire car at Inverness. As I was dumping the rental paperwork inside the glove compartment I unearthed a forgotten pair of sunglasses so hideous in design it suggested that the previous renter had been either a porn star or a German, perhaps even both. That he was at least German became clear when I turned the ignition key, and the on-board computer began to display words like ‘Wankschaft’, ‘Bumreisen’ and ‘Fahrtzwiegel’. Worse was to come — the Hun had fiendishly retuned the radio and changed all the distance and speed settings to metric.

As you probably know (to your cost), Amazon purchases above a certain value incur no delivery charge. This offer works because so many people buy extra books to lift their order above the free-postage threshold. Predictably, in every country in which the retailer has launched the scheme, there has been an immediate and sustained uplift in sales. Except France. There the introduction of the offer had almost no effect. Yet this isn’t another case of l’exception française: in France, it emerged, the scheme was minutely different. Rather than offering free postage, as elsewhere, the company charged a trivial amount (around 10p). This seemingly irrelevant detail was the problem: once amazon.

There was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent... a fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered him thus, ‘Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.’ It’s said that the internet promises to usher in a new age of altruism and selflessness but let’s not forget there’s a good side to it as well. Free porn, video piracy, and above all the chance to insult new people. Like the riverboats of Dr Johnson’s London, the online world provides the two things essential to irreverent abuse — anonymity and safety from physical retaliation.

Local newspapaers usually have a slightly dotty reverence for the area they serve. My own local paper recently described Winston Churchill as 'the former Westerham resident and wartime prime-minister'. The Evening Standard has the opposite problem in that it is a London paper which really doesn’t much like London. In fact it wants its readers to leave. Articles along the lines of Why I’m Buying a Big House in France with the Money I Earn Writing this Rubbish appear alongside news of desperate couples driven away by ‘rush-hour chaos’, ‘crumbling infrastructure’ or ‘soaring crime’.

Following last week’s article, someone wrote asking me to dissuade them from buying the new ultra-thin Apple Air laptop, to which they had become curiously attracted. Delighted to help. In fact anything I can do to deprogramme you from the Apple cult will be time well spent. With luck you may end up devoting yourself to something more purposeful and constructive, such as Scientology. It’s not that I don’t like Macs. My problem is with what we marketing chaps call user-imagery. Your typical Mac-owner belongs to that class of people which believe the greatest pleasure to be derived from life is to spend it feeling quietly superior to everyone else.