Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy Read online

  Despite all this, I have sympathy for the obsessive photographers. Existing as we do in a maelstrom of documentation, it’s easy to feel that a memory isn’t evidence enough that something happened. It’s too dreamlike. I try to walk for an hour every day as exercise, and my phone automatically logs a distance and step count. As a result, I have come to feel, if not quite believe, that if I go for a walk without my phone, it hasn’t really happened. I won’t see it in the app, so how can I get the benefit? It would be like trying to claim money back without a receipt.

  I agree that the best way to enjoy a holiday is to unselfconsciously “be in the moment”. But the trouble is, once it’s occurred to you to take a picture, whatever you then do is already self-conscious. Taking it or not taking it. In fact, you could argue that, by that point, it’s more unselfconscious to take the photo, rather than to deliberately suppress the urge and stand there, phone hand twitching, telling yourself it’s mindfulness.

  I generally find that tourists who relentlessly photograph their experiences, instead of just living them, nevertheless seem quite content with their choice. Meanwhile, the just-remember-it brigade spend a lot of time crossly muttering about other people’s cameraphones – partly because their view of the waterfall/fireworks/temple/car crash is being obstructed, but largely because the rest of the human race is just incredibly annoying. Neither group is “in the moment”, but at least the former gets some nice photos.

  Both are placing too much emphasis on memories. Is it better to have a comprehensive photographic record to look at or a memory unsullied by artificial preservatives? But I don’t think memories are the point of a holiday. Remembering something fun that’s finished is sad. What’s nice about a holiday, apart from actually going on it, is looking forward to it. It’s the anticipation of next weekend, not memories or photographs of last, that gets you through the working week.

  * * *

  In the immediate aftermath of 2016’s Brexit referendum, I was feeling sorry for a travel agent …

  Mark Tanzer, chief executive of the Association of British Travel Agents, has my sympathy. For the last few days, he will have been deafened by cries of “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?!” Probably not literally deafened. He may already be deaf for all I know. I certainly haven’t checked – but it’s statistically unlikely.

  Maybe I should have said “swamped”. But then you can’t be swamped by cries, even in a metaphor. I suppose you could be swamped by tears. Theoretically. Though I doubt it’s ever happened to a human. Some of those tiny hopping flies have probably come a cropper to a tsunami of grief or sadness that coincided with a meal they were attempting to share. Mealtimes can be stressful. Particularly at Christmas. But then there aren’t many of those hopping flies around at Christmas.

  Except I was forgetting about the southern hemisphere, as usual – hi guys, hope this hasn’t woken you. Yes, the tears and spluttering of fractious, sun-drenched (not literally – it’s heat and light, not liquid) Australian family Christmases must be a deathtrap for the antipodean equivalent of those little hopping flies. Which are venomous and have pouches, for all I know. I certainly haven’t checked.

  So why will Mark Tanzer be drowning in the blinding light of this heart-stopping chorus of “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?!” The main reason is that, last week, he said something publicly. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?!” is the knee-jerk response to anyone saying anything in public.

  Not always specifically that phrase, I should add for the benefit of those currently suffering from a pedantic itch (try a corn plaster and lots of talc), but responses that basically mean that. At last the effects of the GCSE history syllabus of the late 1980s are kicking in. Increasingly, people are asking themselves why a certain person has said a certain thing, and are no longer as easily convinced that the answer is “Because it’s true.” This is good news – everyone’s questioning their sources. The only irritant is that they’re often questioning them directly on social media.

  Julius Caesar never had to deal with thousands of personal messages complaining that his accounts of victories in Gaul were unconfirmed by the Gauls, and seemed designed more to advance his own career than exhaustively document a complex conflict. “Oh yeah, you would say that, Julius! But I heard the Gauls were a pushover and you got lucky with the weather!” never popped up on the great man’s phone when he was trying to look up the price of slaves. He may not even have had a phone – I certainly haven’t checked. So Caesar went to his stabbing (I checked) blissfully unaware of the cynical clamour of posterity.

  That’s not how it works these days, as Mark Tanzer will have discovered. Anyone who says anything loud enough to be heard above the hashtags is immediately and repeatedly informed that they only said that because they’re them. It’s a difficult point to refute. We are all who we are. Getting an objective view on things outside our own selves is impossible, except for those people who claim they remember looking down on their own bodies soon after being given an anaesthetic and could see objects on the top of cupboards. Though I’ve never heard such a person say they felt a greater political objectivity in those moments – even as they stared down at their unconscious forms they remained just as likely to vote to minimise their tax burden.

  “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?!” is as diminishing and unanswerable as “Look what you’ve done now!” “Bloody you, with that youness of yours, which, as you’ve long suspected, everyone else hates. You. You would say that.” What can you say in response? Only something else that you would say. And you can’t deny that you would say the first thing. Because not only would you say it, you actually have said it. Of all the almost infinite variety of phrases that, given the right circumstances, you would say, this offending one belongs to the minority that you already have.

  You may have guessed that this tirade is inspired by the fact that I stated online which way I was going to vote in last week’s referendum. In quite mild terms, I thought. I didn’t, except by implication, even advocate voting that way. I won’t restate here which way it was because, as I was told seconds later, I would vote that way, so there was no point mentioning it. Mentioning it was just annoying to all those who didn’t need reminding of all the shitty things which I, being me, would do. It was not an opinion, it didn’t come from reason or conviction, it was simply an inescapable and lamentable consequence of the creature I am, like a skunk’s stink. That was the view of a fair proportion of respondents who planned to vote the other way. So, you know … they would say that.

  I was expecting this response, so I didn’t much mind – but it wasn’t what you’d call uplifting. So when I read that the chief executive of the Association of British Travel Agents had told a conference that he was worried about the impact on Barcelona and Florence of increased visitor numbers caused by websites such as Airbnb, I managed to cut off my instinctive response at the “Well …”. Because maybe he is worried. Maybe, when he says, “You can see the strain not just on the tourist experience but on the actual fabric of the city and on the residents there,” he’s being completely sincere.

  Obviously, he’s also worried about the loss of market share that travel agents are suffering, and is keen for more regulation of how properties are informally sublet. But maybe his view is not just a protectionist desire to shore up his own association, but also a genuine fear for the tourist experience and a warning that, if Airbnb remains unchecked, the world’s beauty spots will be wrecked and tourism will, as he put it, “kill tourism”.

  So he has my sympathy as he tries to cope, like so many people at the moment, with the impact of an online juggernaut on his way of life. What he said may indeed have just been what a man in his position inevitably would say. But that doesn’t make it any more dishonest than someone shouting “Help!”

  5

  Changing Tastes in Taste

  Some in-depth analysis of the various substances we put in our mouths and destroy, excluding pen lids. />
  The time has come to loosen our grip on reality. All the signs are there. Millennia of booze and drug abuse, hundreds of conflicting religions and cults and superstitions and alternative medicines and conspiracy theories, the premise of the Matrix franchise, the internet, sunglasses, video games and the powerfully convincing anti-intellectualism of Michael Gove. They’re all saying the same thing: ignore what’s really happening and you’ll feel a lot better. It’s been staring us in the face: we need to close our eyes to what’s staring us in the face.

  And there’s been a huge breakthrough in this direction. They’re calling it the Taste Buddy, but that’s because they’re awful and cheesy, and the less we have to perceive their existence, the happier we’ll be. And the Taste Buddy will help separate our perceptions from that sour reality. Particularly our perception of cheesiness, which we should soon be able to regulate precisely using a computer.

  The Taste Buddy is a new invention, still in its prototype stage, that changes our sense of what things taste like by emitting thermal and electrical signals that stimulate, or rather delude, the taste buds. Currently, it can only make things seem saltier or sweeter than they are, but the team behind it, led by Adrian Cheok of London University, believes that, with development, it could go much further. If built into pieces of cutlery, it “could allow children to eat vegetables that taste like chocolate”; it could make tofu taste like steak; basically, it could make healthy things taste like delicious things.

  “But healthy things are delicious!” you may be saying. And therein lies the problem. Not that healthy things actually are delicious – that’s patently not true. Sometimes it might seem like they are – nuts, for example, often give this impression – and then you discover the deliciousness is all because of some salt or sugar or duck fat that’s been added in cardiovascularly hazardous quantities. Healthy things are delicious if either (a) they’re deep fried or (b) there’s nothing else to eat. Couscous salad is much better than no food at all but, on the modern culinary battlefield, it’s a mere flint-headed arrow to the state-of-the-art cruise missile that is a fried-egg sandwich.

  No, the challenge for the Taste Buddy is not that lentils actually are tastier than chips, but that some people say they are and, in some cases, come to believe it. Their own mental powers of self-delusion rival Taste Buddy’s thermal and electronic trickery. And that’s because many people define their identities by their eating choices.

  Whether consciously or not, some healthy eaters’ healthy eating is primarily an expression of control, cleanliness and virtue. It doesn’t just make them feel better, it makes them feel better than other people. If eating steamed broccoli is suddenly no hardship, because it can be made to taste like baked Alaska, they’re going to be deeply offended. It would be like offering a devout order of self-flagellating monks an inexhaustible supply of local anaesthetic.

  Frankly, Taste Buddy will be seen as cheating. These penitents won’t like it that those of us with coarse, lifespan-reducing palates will get the benefit of nutrients we haven’t earned, now that gruel is no longer gruelling. A market will immediately open up for some scientists to discover that it’s actually tasting the lettuce rather than swallowing it that matters most.

  The most rabid salad-eaters and the haute cuisine sector will combine to incentivise anyone who’ll claim “there are still no shortcuts” when it comes to eating well, that the brain needs the taste of roughage, or just that Taste Buddy might give you tongue cancer. Which, I suppose, it might. As might a sexist joke on a lolly stick.

  And maybe they’d have a point. A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but it probably screws up the placebo effect. Who knows how crucial those feelings of sacrifice, self-denial and moral superiority (lost for ever if Taste Buddy turned everything delicious) actually are to the health-enhancing powers of a balanced diet. In a carefully conducted study, it could probably be measured. But that sounds rather elitist, doesn’t it? Measuring things with cold objectivity – as if that can ever matter as much as a sincere conviction of the heart.

  If you think that’s all a bit touchy-feely, or tasty-thinky, you may be surprised to learn it’s an approach Theresa May is very keen on. The Times recently reported that the Home Office was concealing a report it had commissioned into the number of foreign students who break the terms of their visas and remain in Britain illicitly after their courses have finished. The number the report had come up with was about 1,500 annually, rather than the tens of thousands that had previously been estimated and generally bandied about. That was not what the Home Office, or the prime minister, wanted to hear.

  Why not? It’s good news, isn’t it? Well, not if you’ve just cracked down on the admission of foreigners to British universities, with potentially disastrous consequences for the latter’s funding. The notion that this drastic policy might have almost no effect on reducing net immigration was extremely unwelcome and, the government clearly felt, best kept quiet.

  Particularly as, among likely Tory voters, there’s a broad perception that foreign students stay here and scrounge. Many people feel that feckless young foreigners are dragging us down, and so the government has come up with a harsh little policy to address that. Why let the fact that it’s not true get in the way?

  Surely, Theresa May must think, it’s not the business of government to start telling the public it’s wrong. In an increasingly virtual world, feelings are as valid as facts. Let’s focus on what people perceive to be the case and concentrate on adding to that a perception that something is being done about it. That’s efficient democratic accountability for post-truth Britain.

  No need to contradict people about what they reckon is going on, denying problems they believe exist and citing others they were previously untroubled by. Policy doesn’t need to reflect reality any more than the currency needs to be backed by gold. Just listen to their fears, confirm them and then use them to make the government seem vital. People will swallow anything if you control how it tastes.

  * * *

  A phrase really jumped out at me from a newspaper the other day. The Times said a recent survey into Spanish attitudes to Britain, conducted by the tourism agency Visit Britain, “found that only 12% of Spaniards considered the UK to be the best place for food and drink”. That, I thought to myself, may be the most extraordinary use of the word “only” I have ever seen.

  Has its meaning recently flipped? Has it been warped by an internet hashtag or ironic usage by rappers? Is it like how “bad” or “wicked” can mean good, and how actors receiving awards use the word “humbled” to mean “incredibly impressed with myself”? Because, if “only” still means what I think it means, the paper is implying it expected more than 12% of the people of Spain to think Britain was “the best place for food and drink”.

  That’s quite a slur on the Spanish. How delusional did it expect them to be? What percentage of them would it expect to think the world was flat? I know we’re moving into a post-truth age, but 12% of a culinarily renowned nation considering Britain, the land of the Pot Noodle and the garage sandwich, to be the world’s No 1 destination for food and drink is already a worrying enough finding for the Spanish education system to address. It would be vindictive to hope for more.

  But it seems that’s what Visit Britain and the Foreign Office are going for. The British ambassador to Spain, Simon Manley, recently donned a union jack apron and went on the hit Spanish cookery programme El Comidista to advocate British cuisine and try to change the perceptions of the 88% of the Spanish population still currently in their right minds. It was his second appearance on the programme: the first was when he was “summoned” to explain Jamie Oliver’s heretical addition of chorizo to paella. He responded with a recipe for roast chicken with mustard.

  This is all very jocular and a welcome distraction from Gibraltar, but I hope Visit Britain doesn’t get carried away with this food push. I really don’t think the 12% figure is one it should be disappointed with, even if, on clo
ser examination of the survey, the respondents didn’t actually say they thought Britain was “the best place for food and drink”, just that sampling the food and drink would be a motivation for choosing the UK for a holiday.

  Maybe some of the 12% are enthusiastic food anthropologists whose motivation for going anywhere is to try the food and drink. They’ve consumed everything from yak testicles to locust wee, so fascinated are they by humankind’s huge range of nourishment techniques. A bit of academic interest, and the memory of a disappointing white-ant-egg soup or crispy tarantula, might really help soften the blow of a first baffled visit to the salad cart at a Harvester.

  You may say I’m talking Britain down, and I’m certainly not talking it up. I would argue, though, that I’m talking it along. Food here is OK. Or rather it’s sometimes terrible and sometimes delicious, but usually neither and it averages out as fine. Lots of us are really fat now – that’s got to be a good sign.

  I think the host of El Comidista, Mikel López Iturriaga, got it about right when he said: “For many Spaniards, British food is the ultimate example of bad international cuisine …” – and there are many outlets on the Costa del Sol that work tirelessly to recreate that flavour for British visitors – “… but I think that everything has improved substantially in recent years, and today it is much easier to find decent food.” So decent food is now available. That’s not a reason to pick Britain as a holiday destination – but it’s a reason not to be afraid to.