Carl Bennett – Page 27 – Writer-insighter

Words mean anything I want them to

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Or Tony Blair, with his pretendy WMDs, or Donald Rumsfeld with his oh-so-funny knockabout sketch that slayed them in the Beltway. (and yes, I have actually been there, thanks. Worked there for a short time too. Sorry. You were saying.)

This is what Donald Rumsfeld said. In case you don’t know or forgot, he was US Secretary of State for Defence. For Defence, obviously you need to remember the US Navy’s brief ten years back and presumably still the same now to pursue a strategy of littoral warfare. Littoral means ‘on the shores of.’ Given we’re talking about the sea, that means the US Navy might want a fight anywhere in the world. This is the problem when people start saying words mean anything they want them to mean. They don’t. They have very specific meanings. And the people who forget that tend to end up disadvantaged or dead.

Try this.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.[1]

Are you laughing yet?

After those words something like half a million Iraqi civilians died. I have to say “something like” because as responsible bringers of McFreedom and democracy, neither we nor the Americans nor frankly anybody else knows. Dead Iraqis? They literally didn’t count.

Didn’t matter. The old white guys had said 911=Iraq=Al Q’uaeda and almost every mainstream media outlet lapped it up.

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Not every time people try to pretend words mean anything you want them to mean hundreds of thousands of people get killed. But when they do, it matters. Even if it’s only one person.

I was talking to a young bride once. Not for long, admittedly. She’d had two children, both with her husband, just one with him before they got married and the other after. I asked her why she got married. If I’d slapped her she would have looked more friendly.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a word.”

Maybe, with hindsight, I shouldn’t have asked her why she did it then, but as I had I thought I might as well also ask her if she’d written a proper will. She hadn’t. Which if she and her husband die, say in a car crash, could definitely prove it’s not just a word at all. And that words matter.

"Then Sammy said 'if your Majesty hadn't spoken I'd have thought it was the horse!' Top hole, eh Mary? Oh I'm so sorry, I didn't mean er..." — “Then Sammy said ‘if your Majesty hadn’t spoken I’d have thought it was the horse!’ Top hole, eh Mary? Oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean er…”

My cousin died when he went through a car windscreen aged one and a half. People do. Car crashes can happen to anyone. And it matters like this. If you die without a will the state decides who gets your stuff. Your house, for example. If you don’t have any dependents then the state might decide it’s having everything. If you do, the state will decide who gets what. The son born after the marriage might well get the lot. If he doesn’t get on with the son born before the marriage, the older boy could find he has some inheritance issues. Like not getting any.

Saying ‘it’s only a word’ is total bullshit. It isn’t.

So I was more than a bit annoyed, not for the first time, with Mary Portas. Mary made her career making sure big stores made every High Street look exactly the same, so when it got fashionable to wonder why she was David Cameron’s obvious choice to write a report about how that could un-happen. Six towns were chosen to become Portas towns and each one got a whole £100,000, or a couple of car park spaces and some new signs to make 1970-2010 go away.

Accompanied, obviously, by lots of photo ops for Dave and Mary and a battle bus on TV and much marching down High Streets with a megaphone and a camera to the overdubbed tune: Here Come The Girls, which for a while was a legal requirement for any TV programme or it certainly seemed to be.

I know. It’s a different song. I just couldn’t bear it. Any more than Mary Portas has born a son. Obviously that hasn’t stopped her gurning all over the front pages and another TV series can’t be far away.

Apparently she got her brother’s sperm and had it stuck in her civil partner. She now pretends to be able to see herself and her partner in the boy she calls her son. Which obviously, he isn’t, According to Mary, this is the biggest blow for gay rights ever in the world, which might be news to anyone who remembers Mary Tudor axing the 1533 Buggery Act or Nero marrying Pythagoras and Sporus in 54AD. Which my Maths teacher signally failed to do and probably yours did as well.

If Mary Portas wants to call the boy whose father is her brother and whose mother is her civil partner her son, good luck. Just don’t die Mary, or at least not without a will. Because your son will find words actually do mean things after all. And you won’t be there to do anything about it.

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’

‘Would you tell me please,’ said Alice, ‘what that means?’

Wonder of the ages

I was driving towards Aspen off the prairie, looking for the cutoff turn at Limon. I still had 400 miles to go.

There. That’s not a bad first line, is it? True, as well.

I’d spent the evening in Colby, home of Miss Kansas according to the big signs I could see from the Interstate, but wherever she was now, coked out and face down in the Playboy Mansion or just home with Mom, washing her hair, she wasn’t at the Rusty Bucket, the most god-awful airplane hanger of a bar I ever want to go to in this life. If your idea of fun is stealing your older sibling’s driving licence and glueing your photo onto it so you can get a drink, that’s the place to go.

Except it’s not really, because they shove every ID under a fluoroscope to see if it’s been cut and they card just about everybody. And that ain’t no lie. This is a place where all the Deputies try to look like Burt Reynolds with pistol grip shotguns behind the front seats in the police cruisers and all the bar staff wear Mace in neat little holsters on their belts. Cosy. Like Rick’s Bar in a parallel and wrong universe.

I got out of there before my cute English accent had a chance to get me somewhere to sleep or dead and went to find a place to crash out in my car. I turned the big old Chevrolet off the highway down some dirt roads and slept to the sound of some kind of engine somewhere.

It had gone by the time the sun woke me around half past five. I got the car back on the highway and headed west looking for some breakfast.

You could probably get breakfast there, right? Maybe?

All I found, mile on mile of prairie grassland was a sign for Six States Tower. I didn’t know that’s what it was called then. It was a wooden Victorian English seaside lighthouse stuck out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere at all. As I drove down the track I passed old cars full of empty bottles and a reassuring sign.

See the Two-Headed Calf. Wonder of the Ages.

What could be nicer? Maybe the people I could see at the top of the lighthouse tower could tell me while they were bringing me some food, I thought, except as I got closer I could see they were dressed in Victorian clothes, the women in crinolines. And none of them were moving.

I stopped the car in bright sunshine in front of the tower. From here I could see the people were never going to move, because mannequins never do except in films. Nobody around at all. I opened the car door in the silence of a Colorado summer morning and stepped out into a pool of glistening black stuff that crunched as I walked across it. Then it started shimmering and parts of it rose into the air. It was about then I realised I was walking through a patch of locusts.

I got back in the car, drove straight out onto the Interstate and almost immediately got in a discussion with the Colorado State Patrol about what intersecting the median means and how you can’t just drive onto the motorway in countries where things are properly organised. We got on fine. It was that kind of day.

The Tower and everything about it was real. It was built in 1926. It shut in 2013, when the old guy running it died. The insane collection of tourist stuff jammed into the tower was all sent to auction at the end of 2014. It wasn’t a David Lynch film. It was all real and I was there, even though it isn’t there now.

That’s one thing about getting older. You can. And you can say ‘Yeah, I was there. I know about that stuff, you know?’ Whatever happened afterwards. I was there.

Whatever happened afterwards. I was there.

It wasn’t me.

About ten years ago I stayed at a hotel in Hamburg, within sight of the railway station. I knew Hamburg had been ‘badly bombed,’ in The War, ‘badly bombed’ being a polite, English way of saying it was almost removed from the map by the RAF and USAAF who dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on civilians.

Mustang pilot J.C. Howell, USAAF, Leiston.

Like you, I saw the film Memphis Belle. And the noble scene where the pilot refuses to just toggle the bombs away and go home but takes the airplane through the bomb run again, in case his bombs hit a school next to a factory. Because he was noble. Because he was American. Because it was a stupid film.

I had an American pilot from the war stay at my house for 10 days, a couple of times. By the end of the Swing music and recollections my significant other and I had the start of a drinking problem we had to deal with but we were pretty sure we’d qualify on the P51. Early one morning the pilot was describing a manoeuvre I couldn’t understand, something about how flying in flights of four aircraft and having to swing back and forth over the stream of bombers they were escorting, but having to fly much faster than the bombers because that was the way the planes were built, when they turned the inside plane would have to throttle right back and turn tight in, while the outside plane in the four would have to speed up in a much wider turn. Then a couple of minutes or so later they’d have to do it again, but the other way around. Then again a minute or so later again, back the way they’d started. For three or four hours. When I said I didn’t really know what he meant the first time around the old pilot was suddenly in my face, angry.

“What do you mean? You were there!”

It disturbed me. I didn’t know who he was remembering and confusing with me. I didn’t know and suddenly didn’t want to know what happened next.

The bombs went pretty much anywhere, most of the time. I don’t think anyone could tell where in a circle of 500 yards anything was going to go, assuming they could see anything in the first place. And in Hamburg, and Berlin and Hildesheim – at the end, pretty much anywhere, it didn’t matter. Nobody was really aiming at anything. They just wanted those places gone.

I used to use the stairs in the hotel. I didn’t understand then or now how the railway station looked the same as when it was built, except blacker. I thought that would have made a handy thing to aim at, but it was clearly very much still there. So was the hotel. It had a huge Hanseatic ship model hanging in reception.

At the top of the stairs there was a little window that looked wrong. When I had a good look at it I could see why. The glass was much thicker at the bottom of the pane than at the top.

I think the glass had started to melt when the firestorm came. My ancestors did that. My father was in the RAF. He wasn’t the pilot he lied and said he was; he didn’t fly the aircraft. But he helped.

And for all of that I am ashamed.

You can feel it

I was supposed to go swimming this morning. We were. Except although someone had assumed the moral high ground when someone else decided they weren’t going to the gym, somehow when 06:45 came this morning they were still fast asleep with a pile of dogs on their bed and bleary when they came to the door.

Swimming was off. I took the dogs out for an hour instead, without even pausing to wonder why I’d woken at five fifteen, why I’d only half finished my tea, why I was even up at this time.

We went down the alley and into the football field, then down through the woods and along the lane. Then at the end of the track we turned down towards the river and back along the bullrushes path before we headed back up into the trees that have grown over the gravel pits, or quarries, or whatever these holes in the ground actually were, once. Somewhere to walk dogs. Somewhere for children to play, but not at this time of the morning.

The bigger dog made friends with one dog, then tried to eat another one, so pretty much the same as normal. Yesterday when we were out he had to defend himself when another dog leaped at him. Its owner said ‘I thought he was going to do that.’ Nice of him to stop it happening, or it would have been if he had.

And for all that, the missed swimming, the half-drunk tea, the dog episode which is going to need a whistle and some biscuits to sort out sooner rather than later, I could smell the Spring.

Someone was still asleep when I dropped the dogs off home. Or just about awake enough to murmur and smile. Another day starting. Another journey begun.

Somewhere it’s still summer

I last saw my friend over twenty-five years ago. It was a sunny Sunday summer afternoon in Clissold Park, on the tennis courts, where he was teamed up with his girlfriend and I was teamed with his sister who I’d been at university with.

Clissold Park cafe. It looks much more lke the kind of place you'd find Sebastian Flyte than it really is. — CLISSOLD PARK CAFE. It looks much more like the kind of place you’d find Sebastian Flyte than it really is.

In case that sounds altogether too Brideshead remember it was Clissold Park. We weren’t that posh. We weren’t that good at tennis either, but somehow we had our own bats, the sun was shining and we were young and the leaves were green and everyone was laughing. Mostly because David was funny. Happily, non-maliciously funny.

He got a degree in a thing that he was interested in but nobody wanted to pay him to do that. For a while he got a job as a cycle courier, then he worked for a London council, scrimping by to pay the mortgage on a flat he shared with his sister, round the corner from me. He sold his share to pay to go back to school and qualified as a lawyer.

He had a view on life formed by the things he’d done. I never heard him unhappy or cruel. His girlfriend was really nice, too. But anyway. And his sister. We used to go running together. When she got arsy with me and I asked him what I should do about it he told me, ‘don’t listen to it.’

I lost touch with all of them, for reasons that don’t make any sense now. I got back in touch with his sister and drove down to the West Country to see her. I got back in touch with his ex, by accident, talking to his sister on Facebook.

I was always going to get in touch with him but I didn’t. Because he wasn’t on Facebook, because he wasn’t very public for reasons I wasn’t told and don’t know about, because I didn’t make the effort.

In my head when I think of him we’re all on that tennis court, him clowning around so I couldn’t serve properly, his girlfriend smiling, his sister saying, when I said I had to go soon because I had a date with a perfectly nice girl a couple of miles away that I’d get AIDS, which was fashionable at the time. In my head the sun is shining and the future is ahead of us.

I cycled through Highbury Park to the Island Queen, then on to spend hours on someone’s sofa getting my hand trapped in one of those one-piece 1980’s lace body things that gave everyone thrush.

He died yesterday.

Womens’ stuff

Just to give half my friends, or at least people I sort of know the opportunity to jump up and down screaming indignantly, I’m owning up.

I mis-read things sometimes. I’d like to be able to say with hilarious consequences, but they aren’t always. Like this time, really.

"I remember driving in my brother's car, her body tanned and wet down by the reservoir. Each night on those banks I'd lie awake and hold her close just to feel each breath she'd take." I really loved that car. — “I remember driving in my brother’s car, her body tanned and wet down by the reservoir. Each night on those banks I’d lie awake and hold her close just to feel each breath she’d take.” I really loved that car.

It was an open tab about something I’d read but not very well and it just didn’t go in, fnarr fnarr. It was supposed to be about votes. It said timeline of womens‘ suffrage. It’s important stuff, showing how women quite often had a vote hundreds of years ago, sometimes by accident when a law was sloppily drafted, sometimes because they just were, or some of them anyway. But generally they didn’t have a vote because the whole issue was about the same as how I read the open tab at the top of my laptop screen:

Timeline of Women’s Stuff

1589 – Invention of the handbag.

1627 – Widespread adoption of the idea that wearing underwear is slutty.

1846 – Women allowed on trains.

1847 – First performance of Two Ronnies joke with punchline ‘he’s only done it twice; the first time he was sick, the second time his hat blew off.’

1889 – Woman drives a car.

1890 – Two Ronnies perform first woman parking joke.

1918 – Women allowed to vote.

1979 – Women elect champion of womens’ rights, Margaret Thatcher.

Any date in twentieth century: blond jokes, Essex girl jokes, handbag jokes, ditziness jokes, et c., et c..

The not wearing underwear thing is true, by the way. Only girls who were thought no better than they ought to be used to wear knickers. The date is wrong, but the idea was widespread, at least in Europe. As for elsewhere, much like women’s things, nobody knows or seems to really care much, most of the time.

Customer service

According to the papers, TFL or Transport for London (quite spectacularly a better, different, more millenial, utterly happening name than London Transport, with all it’s Ian Drury/Reg Varney gertcha ChipsnChippies associations, and that’ll be ooh, what, call it £150,000 in consultancy, no, no, not at all, but into the offshore account if you don’t mind. No VAT for cash, obviously) started closing ticket offices in London’s Tube stations.

It doesn’t matter that Boris Johnson has categorically said no Tube stations will lose their staff. Until the people who could do something about it can be bothered to get off their arses and go and vote then there’s no reason for a politician to keep to his word.

That Boris, eeza larf, innee? Back of my cab last week, very clever man. Sorry guv, I'm not going south of the river this time of night.... — That Boris, eeza larf, innee? Back of my cab last week, very clever man….

If the people it directly affects can’t be bothered, why should he? It doesn’t matter for so many reasons, like nobody expects a politician to keep to their word, or nobody expects many newspapers or TV or interviewers to remember the lie, or if you bring it up in press conference you’re ‘aggressive’ or ‘difficult’ or ‘confrontational’ and as we all know now, that’s about half a step away from being a terrorist, going round contradicting your betters like that, with stuff they’ve actually said. It’s not big, nor clever, and they know where you live. And your credit card number, along with your passport details.

So there won’t be anybody at the Tube to sell you a ticket. The machines will always work. If they don’t, nobody will get a penalty fare. Nobody will get mugged or fall ill on a train. And nobody will ever, ever, ever, become a victim of crime in a totally unmanned station. This is the new London. The one you can’t afford to live in. Rich people buying portfolio properties don’t go on the Tube anyway, so who cares what happens down there?

But I remember a different London, not a very, very long time ago. One where Angel Tube had a wooden lift shuttered with a steel lattice of doors and like something out of a film you can’t quite remember, or maybe it was a dream or something, it didn’t just have a lift. It had a lift man as well.

Wooden booths for the GPO's telephonic apparatus at Angel Tube. Not in an episode of Doctor Who, but in 1988. My Ray-Bans are just out of shot. — Wooden booths for the GPO’s telephonic apparatus at Angel Tube. Not in an episode of Doctor Who, but in 1988. My Ray-Bans are just out of shot. Along with Jack Reagan, Kaz, that girl with the armpit hair, Miguette (just OMG, Miguette, in so many ways….) and all of my other ghosts. Yes, I know it looks like something out of Passport To Pimlico. London used to.

He had a voice quite like mine and he sounded as if he’d drunk a lot in his time. I’m not sure that had stopped. He gave a running commentary of the passengers, the weather, the news, pretty female customers and anything else he thought of as he ran the lift up and down between the surface and the platforms.

Back in those days the platforms at Angel were something to be sensibly wary about. Nowadays it looks like any other Tube station platform; back then it had just one platform and tracks either side of it. Down at the far end they seemed to tail off and gave the impression it would be easy to find yourself on the tracks. I think someone did once, down there. It wasn’t a happy place at the far end of the platform.

It wasn’t a dream. I don’t like the new Angel Tube, but the past is another country and all that. And besides, London Transport got rid of the manned lift at Angel and probably got rid of the man as well over twenty-five years ago. He’s probably dead now, I think. I can remember his words as the steel doors screeched shut each night on my way home.

“Customer service, we’re supposed to provide. Customer disservice, I call it. Goodnight ladies and gentlemen. Goodnight.”

The level of threat

The police, or at least some of them, want tasers, according to Radio 4 today. Tasers are CEWS. Conducted Electrical Weapons. Oh alright, think of them as electric ray guns if it helps.

Still ouchy, but not dead ouchy. — You’re still going to be ouchy, but not dead.

Two hooks on wires shoot out of the Tasar into the target and about 500,000 volts gets rammed through them. It makes you convulse. It makes you fall over. It very, very rarely kills you, unlike any gun that could stop you as quickly. As a humane alternative to being shot by a 12-bore, which across a normal living room unlike on TV is something that is going to take your arm off, I’d choose being shot by a taser every single time. So far, so well, not good, but reacting to the level of threat, as the police spokesman said.

“When I joined in 1998, all we had was handcuffs and a truncheon. Now we go out in stab vests, with asps and CS gas. We’ve got to respond to the level of threat. That’s all this is. ‘Course, we’ve always had the long flight of concrete steps and the legal obligation to tell lies during the interview. And in court if we really have to, obviously. Don’t mind me asking but your car’s got an MoT, hasn’t it? Mind if I see the certificate?”

It may come as a surprise but the last bit’s not actually strictly true. He didn’t say that. Not on Radio 4 while it was on air, anyway.
But tooling up like this isn’t ‘responding to the level of threat.’ It wouldn’t have helped Lee Rigby, the all-too predictable mascot the police are wheeling out to support their militarisation. Lee Rigby was dead long before the police got there, but once the TERROR word has been used all discussion has to stop. By law very soon, I suspect.

If anything, the police are responding to a fear of being sued. By their own officers. The same logic applied to issuing stab vests. Are more policemen getting stabbed? You can be pretty sure the Daily Mail would tell you all about it if they were.

But is there a threat? Yes. There always has been. And as an employer, you have to make sure your employees don’t get hurt going to work if you know there’s a risk. You even have to make sure they don’t hurt themselves if they ignore what you told them to do to keep themselves safe.

Once upon a time a Mr Thornton worked for Qualcast, who made lawnmowers, pouring molten steel to make the heavy rollers to make people’s lawns nice. As a foundry worker, Mr Thornton was a bit rufty-tufty. In fact more than that. He was a bit of an arse. Qualcast knew what happened when you pour molten metal on your feet and if you’re lucky you’ll still have a leg to stand on. As Mr Thornton found out in court. He refused point blank to wear the safety gear Qualcast had bought him. Predictably enough, one day he poured molten metal in the wrong place and injured himself hideously. So he sued Qualcast. And won. Duty of care. Known risk. Negligent to let him continue with dangerous practices. Should have sacked him. Pay up.

Which is exactly the situation the Police Federation, ACPO, the various constabularies and the Home Office find themselves in. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be able to use the ‘terrorism’ magic wand to justify what you’re doing. What really does hurt is the total inability of the BBC to do anything except parrot the Party line, without even a question. That’s a much bigger threat to everyone than the remote possibility of getting Tasered.

The Norwegian Jumper Switch

This happened to two different people I know, about a decade back. Yes, I know how old that makes me sound. Thank-you. I’d quite forgotten. But hey, there’s plenty of better people than me already dead, so what does that prove?

Anyway, back in Oslo and environs. This is how it goes. You go to Norway on business. You know they’re modest people not given to open displays of show and in-yer-face-lookit-moi-wedge flash, like Porsches and divers watches and all the rest of that Thatcherite leftover stuff. So you go to their offices in a quiet suit, with a tie.

When you get there you find, somewhat to your surprise, that everyone, but everyone is dressed in jumpers and boots. Because they’re also practical folk, who don’t get scared by a bit of snow. “Join us for dinner, please. We would like to see you” they say, because they’re also nice folk. Courteous.

You have a couple of hours before dinner so you go back to your hotel. There’s a tourist place just around the corner so you go there and get the most touristy, snow-flaky, reindeery jumper you can find, stopping just short of it having a huge red nose on the front of it.

Not quite the thing for dinner in Oslo. Trust me. — Not quite the thing for dinner in Oslo. Really. Trust me.

You go to the restaurant. And you get the feeling you have on some dates, that something is going to go disastrously wrong for no reason you can put your finger on, but you know you’re not likely to be doing that now anyway.

The restaurant has a level of formality your grandparents would appreciate. They might be eating Bambi with a side-order of berries, but they still want silver service while they’re doing it. Ok. When in Oslo. And then your hosts arrive. And a part of you dies.

And then your hosts arrive. And a part of you dies.

Because they’ve all changed into business suits. Because they take dinner seriously. Because you’re their guest.

Hi, guys. What are cloudberries like then, anyway?

The Complicity of Vice

Years ago, when the world and I was young, Iain Banks wrote a book called Complicity. It was about a man who wrote a bit, and a woman he fancied who became an accountant, his half-hearted pursuit of her and his how shall we say, his taste for alternative avenues of enjoyment. I have nothing in common with him. Honest.

Anyway, good book. It was really about the 1980s and how everything changed and even though while it was changing you had the feeling everything was turning into something not very nice at all, damn but it felt good. A lot of people sold their souls for a pair of fake tortoiseshell Ray-bans and thought they’d come out ahead on the deal.

It was about how bankruptcy accounting was a growth area and how good the 4×4 and the boat that bought you felt. It was about stupid schedules that meant you had to be off your face to meet them and how that was just supposed to be part of the job, in that whole ‘lunch is for wimps’ BS mantra. It was about a man who after the Falklands and the stupid venture-capital rubbish shop he opened going mega decided he’d extract a personal revenge on the people who’d annoyed him, now that he could afford to. And it was about how journalism and castles in the air, or in the book a computer game, turned to crap.

I just about remember how a team of journalists brought down Richard Nixon. These days editorial resource is devoted to ‘reporting’ the latest eternal truths from reality TV shows that aren’t even vaguely real. Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends was supposed to be a spoof when it was written about in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, not an accurate meta-analysis. To save you the bother, just in case you’re a journalist, book that was turned into Bladerunner. (Character in book but not in film watches TV all day long. Chat show. Called Buster F & his F Fs, obvs.)

At breakfast time Buster interviews an actress about the film she’s about to make. At lunchtime Buster interviews her about the film she’s making. At what we used to call teatime Buster interviews her about the film she’s just made. There isn’t any film. There never was and never will be and nobody minds. Just try not to think of the actress as Kenny Everett’s Cupid Stunt though. It doesn’t help at all.

As an accurate summary of news gathering now and how it relates to what’s going on, that seems a fair enough analogy to me, after ‘beheading videos’ that categorically didn’t show anything of the sort. And if you think they do, watch them again. Then tell me at what point you see the beheading, at what point the guy it’s being done to even flinches, and exactly where eight pints of blood fountaining into the air is supposed to have gone, because it certainly isn’t in the video.

Vice magazine looked as if it was going to be different. Until today when it didn’t print this, where John Ronson chats to Adam Curtis. Obviously, you’re supposed to be hipNhappenin™ enough to know exactly who these two are, or why their coffee time drolleries are worth publishing to the universe and yours aren’t. They tell you at the end, if you get to the end.

At least they didn’t do those twee little face shots that every newspaper feels they have to have now, feigning amazement, indignation or trying to look beautiful-when-they-take-their-glasses-off-and-nobody-ever-told-them-but-they-knew-it-anyway/quirky-kooky-smart in the way most female newspaper writers go for.

Why do you believe journalism changed?

Cooed John. Or Adam. It doesn’t really matter which. Trust me. Well, we like writing about interesting people. Not dull old guys who wear ties and iron their shirts and have meetings. So not people like well, JFK then. He was quite interesting. Or Churchill. Fat drunk though he was, anyone who wears the same clothes for five years, lives in a house with more bedrooms than lots of streets and eats steak and kidney pudding by mashing it up in the bowl and pouring it into his mouth because

Graphic enough for journalists, apparently.

So not people like well, JFK then. He was quite interesting. Or Churchill. Fat drunk though he was, anyone who wears the same clothes for five years, lives in a house with more bedrooms than lots of streets and eats steak and kidney pudding by mashing it up in the bowl and pouring it into his mouth because he’s off his face counts as quite interesting in my book.

Except of course, journalists didn’t write about that at all. We’re expected to believe that we got here because George Bush senior and his son look a bit dull, even if Junior bears a disturbing physical similarity to Alfred E. Neuman.

The Adam and John show took a little time out from ‘as I was saying in my latest book dude, just like that great film you just did…” to come out with this:

It’s intimately related to what has happened to politics, because journalism and politics are so inextricably linked. Politicians…handed power to other institutions…..to finance, but also to computer and managerial systems.

They reinvented other parts of the world they thought they could control into incredibly simplistic fables of good versus evil. I think Tony Blair is the clearest example of this – a man who handed power in domestic policy making over to focus groups, and then decided to go and invade Iraq.

Well, bollocks. We’re supposed to beleive that for the first time ever, finance dictated politics. I mean, what a preposterous idea! That could never happen. And even more ludicrously, we’re being asked to accept with a straight face that focus groups called for the Iraq war.

Tony Blair was a spineless liar driven by expediency. He crawled around George Bush to bask in the reflected glory of a man whose own election was clouded with doubt. He lied, lied and lied again. And the media lapped it up and gave it to people as the truth. Weapons of mass destruction. 911. Al Q’uada in the Middle East. Missiles from Iraq in 30 minutes. Our Brave Boys. All of it total bullshit. All of it churned out as ‘journalism.’

But it doesn’t stop there.

And I think this process led journalism to face the same problem. They discovered that the new motors of power – finance and the technical systems that run it, algorithms that try and read the past to manage the future, managerial systems based on risk and “measured outcomes” – are not just obscure and boring. They are almost impossible to turn into gripping narratives. I mean, I find them a nightmare to make films about, because there is nothing visual, just people in modern offices doing keystrokes on computers.

I wonder how much ‘gripping narrative’ there was about hundreds of clarks sitting on high stools under gaslights, copying longhand before type-writers were invented, the people who underpinned Empire, global domination, the Industrial Revolution, the Golden Age of railways, or any and all of that. Or how visually appealing the Corn Laws were, or the endless committe meetings that preceded passing the Act that gave women the vote. About the same as visualising a modern office, I’d guess.

Even more fatuouosly, we’re supposed to believe that the failure of modern journalism in the sense of it finding things out and telling people about them isn’t just because it’s easier to repeat government press releases than go and do something that an MP might not like, nor even that you’re paid the same whether you do or not, no, none of that. The failure isn’t that journalism as say, represented by the BBC, the thing that used to be the lodestone of impartial, accurate reporting, went the way of highly visual frock coats years ago. That would be too simplistic for Adam and John. The failure is one of imagination, apparently. Because let’s face it, giving people boring old facts, like say, that there weren’t any WMDs or if there were it was because we sold them in the first place, what would be the point of that? It’s just no imaginative enough. Unlike Adam and John. Who managed to get through the entire mutual admiration piece without once saying that the problem with modern journalism is it isn’t about finding things out any more. And they certainly don’t use any phrases about it losing any balls it might once have had.