Daniel Seifert

When I first moved to Britain to study at university as a gangly, nervous Swede who had lived in Asia most of my life, my mother gave me a primer to prepare. It was a book called Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox. Its pages unveiled a strange world of ironic garden gnome ownership, Byzantine pub-based etiquette and a clinical-level national mania for weather commentary. With each page, the text made me fall even deeper in love with Blighty.  Two decades on, I adore you chaps more than ever — and yes, I know such overt declarations of love make Brits deeply uncomfortable. You are, after all, a nation who shuns Mother’s Day cards that say ‘I treasure you’ in favour of ‘Cheers for being my mum and all that’.

In the halcyon, innocent year of our lord 2004, there was a minor political scandal, if you can imagine such a thing. Then-US Vice President Dick Cheney was questioned by a Democratic senator about his financial ties to a government contractor during a photo op. Cheney’s response was short but far from sweet: the inquisitive senator was told to go ‘fuck yourself’. A few years later, reminiscing happily about the moment during a radio interview, Cheney doubled down on his mot juste, saying ‘You’d be surprised by how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.’  A sad state of affairs indeed, and I’m not talking about the long decline of inter-party discourse. I mean the decline of swearing, in its quality, if not quantity.

I don’t exercise much, except my self-control. To wit: ten times a week, I bite back the urge to grab someone by the lapels and holler my guiding life philosophy, and favourite line from Friends: ‘By the way: y-o-u-apostrophe-r-e means ‘you are’. Y-O-U-R means YOUR!’ Like most of my opinions, this one is trivial, curmudgeonly and no doubt doomed to failure. Top of my list of grumbles, penned in italics and painted scarlet red: people should be able to spell. Is that too much to ask?  I say, no. And the fact that we’ve reached such lows is baffling. Pundits like to decry the death of book reading, but in many ways, we’re the most literate society to ever exist.

Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine Allow me to totter onto my rickety soapbox for a second, and say: business jargon has gone too far. Buzzwords have become so entrenched into working life that they have, in effect, become a second language. One that, like a much-needed laxative, we are forced to digest to keep daily operations running smoothly. If you don’t use (or at least nod energetically along with) phrases like ‘low-hanging fruit’ or suggest that someone ‘circle back’ so that you can ‘create synergy’, and instead choose to communicate like an unlobotomised person, you’ll find yourself a virtual pariah.

I am in the 70th minute of my two-hour Balinese rubdown when that John Milton line swims into my head. You know: ‘Man can make a heaven of hell, and totes the opposite too’ (I may be misquoting slightly). More than three centuries on, the Paradise Lost epigram remains apt. I’m in a sun-drenched, five-star, tropical resort – and I’m miserable. It’s my own fault; I always forget how much I hate body massages. The hole in the table is too small for my muppet-sized head. It locks my jaw fiercely open, forcing the muppet to discreetly suck in his drool every half-minute. I’ve desperately needed to pee for the past half-hour, and the masseuse is prodding my taut bladder with the insistence of a Gestapo Oberleutnant whipping a prisoner for information.

As if there wasn’t enough apocalyptic news to keep abreast of, studies show that forgetfulness is on the rise. A cocktail of causes is to blame: microplastics clogging the brain, post-Covid symptoms, Dickensian air quality… whatever the culprit, our memories are taking a pummelling. Call me an inveterate optimist, but I’m glad to have the company. I had name amnesia before it was cool, as the kids say. Place me in front of a new neighbour or colleague, and I can glad-hand, smile and make friends with the best of them. What I can’t for the life of me do is recall that person’s name. (Too busy being paranoid about leaving specks of spit on their tie, or hiding the Mark Rothko installations of my armpit stains.

Epic figures leave epic gaps when they retire. The generations that follow are doomed to be compared to past heroes by nostalgic fans. So it is with Roger Federer. Novak Djokovic might be the GOAT (greatest of all time, to use the phrase du jour) in terms of sheer numerical achievement. But tennis is art, not science. Ballet, not bookkeeping. For the aesthetes among us who drink in the sight of on-court grace like champagne, Federer will always be number one.  To answer why, you don’t need words, though heaven knows enough have been written about the grace of Rog. (David Foster Wallace famously called watching the Swiss savant ‘a religious experience’). Click on any clip and watch Fed glide on the court, near-supernatural in his poise.

There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation.   Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.