There’s a certain point in a Saturday evening when you realise that you have no plans. Once you’ve got the football results and had something to eat, and your housemates start to get themselves ready to meet their significant others, it dawns on you that you’re not doing anything. You’re twenty-three years old, it’s a Saturday night in one of the biggest cities in the world, and you’re going to stay at home and complain to yourself about how bad the TV is? I had to do something. Big cities are like black holes. They pull you in, absorb your energy, feed on you, and they just get bigger and bigger, ever more dense. They have an irresistible power about them, a magnetic allure. They show you what they’ve got, and you fall for it. You come to imagine that the big city is where the action is. You convince yourself that you’d be missing out on something if you lived anywhere else. But then you move there, and you realise that you’re missing out anyway, because you’ve got no money and no energy after slogging your way through a week of work and underground and all the other bullshit you can’t escape from. Besides, you’re always missing out on something. You just have to decide which things not to miss. I went through the memory of my phone, wondering who I could call. Old friends, people I’d met in some pub, girls I’d never dared to call, people I wanted to avoid, useful numbers I knew I’d never call. The names stared at me from the display, but I realised that I didn’t actually want to see any of them. They would probably be busy anyway. Meeting somebody I knew would have forced me to realise how bad things were. I couldn’t bear to answer the question they would inevitably ask. What had I been up to? I went to the corner shop and bought some vodka. I was going to have a night of sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, drinking myself into oblivion. Nobody would be there to tell me how stupid I was being, how I would never find the answer at the bottom of the bottle. I didn’t want to find the answer. I wanted to forget about the question. But even I knew that was impossible. Drinking alone just focuses your attention on the thing that is making you miserable. You get more and more frustrated, and you want to break things. Eventually you fall asleep. In that situation, you need something to distract you from yourself, and booze can’t do that on its own. Thankfully Lisa’s boyfriend cancels their date, and so I’m not the only one sitting in feeling bad. We sit in and watch TV. A smarmy tosser in an expensive suit is interviewing some minor celebrity or other, one of these people who’s famous for no discernible reason. She’s thrust her way into the public eye without actually having done anything worthwhile. She doesn’t appear to have any great talent, beyond the ability to persuade someone to pay for her breast enlargement and her coke habit, but she’s in the papers on a pretty regular basis. She’s prattling away about herself, and I begin to glaze over. She answers a few sycophantic questions in a semi-coherent manner, the host makes some jokes that claim to be risqué, and then everyone applauds. The advert break is upon us. Lisa goes out to put the kettle on. Patronising voiceovers extol the virtues of various revolutionary new products, while computer graphics show some scientific-looking stuff, and actors give gloriously wooden performances demonstrating how any imbecile can use them. Lisa comes back into the lounge just as the show starts again, the audience clapping and whooping like demented seals on helium while the director goes through his book of camera angles that people thought were arty in the 80s. The host tells a few more bad jokes, and introduces a new guest. He’s one of the new breed of celebrities: an ordinary person who has been revealed by a docu-soap to be a character. He’s wearing a startlingly bad waistcoat, and laughs at his own jokes as he reveals his plans for world domination. Well, he’s on TV a bit, and he’s putting out a single, which hopefully he won’t be allowed to perform on the show. I can feel a rant coming on. It doesn’t take long to arrive. “How can people be so crap? Why are their lives so pathetically uninteresting that they care about these useless cunts? I could almost understand it if they were singers or actors or footballers or something, but who are these people? Just some fuckwits who’ve sucked the right cocks and kissed the right arses. The newspapers are so desperate to talk about them that they’re looking through their dustbins and talking to people that they didn’t sleep with twenty years ago, and every cunt is talking about it. It’s all bullshit.” “It’s just escapism. People want a bit of glamour in their lives.” “Glamour? What the fuck is glamorous about this fat tosser? Look at him! He’s only famous because he’s so fucking irritating. He was on some bloody docu-soap, where everyone thought he was a twat, and now he’s making a career out of being an even bigger twat! And the BBC are giving him some ridiculous amount of our money to arse about on a beach in the Caribbean!” I’m enjoying my anger, trying to work myself up as much as possible about it, becoming a parody of myself. I mean every word I say, though. Lisa, as ever, sees straight through me, and deflates my bubble. “If television is so shit, why don’t you do something else? And if you really don’t care about these celebrities, why are you always sneaking a look at my magazines?” She’s got a point. I’m a closet celebrity-watcher. I’m in denial. I rail about the crapness of it all, but I can’t help but take a guilty fascination in the various goings-on reported in the glossy rags that she buys. As hard as I might try to claim some moral high ground of aloof intellectual superiority, I am furtively in thrall to the pornography of the paparazzi. I’m as bad as the broadsheet journalists who write pseudo-intellectual treatises on the cultural phenomenon of people watching cheap and tacky TV programmes. The fact that I spent three years spending other people’s money on drinking subsidised beer and smoking dope while occasionally turning up to sleep through a lecture on some esoteric nonsense has given me the impression that I’m some kind of intellectual colossus, and the base entertainments enjoyed by the common herd are somehow beneath me. “Besides, you’re just jealous. You’d love to be at all these celebrity parties, hob-nobbing with models, and hoovering up charlie. You’d love to be famous.” Again, she’s right. How does she do that? How is it possible that she knows everything? For all my professions that these people aren’t special, that they don’t deserve special treatment, I remember the peculiar frisson I got when I saw that bloke out of EastEnders walking through Hyde Park. I curse her for her perceptiveness, and go back to scowling at the injustices of the world.
A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman