BECAUSE IT’s THERE

Oh dearie me, how the world has changed in my lifetime. When I was no’but a lad, a line you heard in the playground every few minutes or so was “mind your beeswax”. This was universally considered to be an unanswerable rebuke. Those thus apostrophized would back off at once, almost certainly displaying a degree of shamefacedness. To be a “nosey parker” (possibly an allusion to a 16th century Archbishop of Canterbury who kept stringent tabs on the clergy toiling under his auspices, according to Brewer) was to be as much a pariah then as being a paedophile is now (being a paedophile then was considered little more than a harmless joke).

Nowadays, everybody is employed fulltime minding everyone else’s business. It is already established as a Fact known to us all that Britain has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other nation on earth. Relatively large audiences – including among their number some otherwise evidently intelligent individuals – apparently watch dry-mouthed as people they do not know interact artificially in an artificially created and manipulated television environment for hours on end. And necessarily sedentary and hence overweight journalists – or their outsourced delegates -– listen jadedly to hour upon hour of mobile phone traffic between inarticulate “celebrities” gossiping about others without benefit of the protection afforded by being conscious of any need to observe the laws of libel.

Data-collection, surveillance, eavesdropping, flies on the wall – it’s the polar opposite to the world in which I grew up, where privacy and confidentially were sacrosanct, where what adults did behind closed doors was only of interest to anyone else if the law of the land was being egregiously broken and where there were certain things one just didn’t talk about in public: sex, money, mental problems, insecurity, the failings of relatives and the workings of the human body in particular.

Now the Murdoch press has been “exposed” – there’s a resonant term – as having paid a king’s ransom to hush up the evidently multitudinous occasions on which it broke the law by hacking into the private phone calls of public individuals. I fall to wondering how much salary I would require to be paid for the task of listening to the off-duty conversations of, say, Vanessa Feltz or Alan Shearer. I don’t choose to listen to such people when what they have to say is planned, edited, scripted and (theoretically, at least) to some point. How bearable could it be to take on an indefinite listening brief as they bitch about Arsène Wenger (Feltz) or decide what to eat at Pizza Hut (Shearer; I think I have that the right way round)?

This indeed raises one of the most perplexing aspects of all this surveillance: it’s so expensive. The capital investment is minimal. What it must be really heavy on is that most costly of ingredients, man power. Some mutt has to trawl through all that closed circuit footage trying to find the car that might match the car that might be in another camera’s collection. Some other mutt has to wade through all the empty but serrated-edged bean tins and the swine flu-infected tissues in the celebrity’s rubbish bin to find that clinching receipt that confirms that the celebrity recently paid the Priory. It’s a dirty job and … um … nobody actually has to do it.

Here’s another aspect of this depressed, depressing and depressive culture that addles the brain. The British are uniquely useless at maintenance. We install things with a flourish and then disappear five minutes before they cease to function (Terminal 5, anyone?). You only have to clock the public clocks that stopped or became unreliable years ago and never got corrected to see how lackadaisical we are in this area. Or listen to the “music” – almost impenetrable pop or synthesised baroque – that telephone systems inflict upon you while you’re on hold. You listen but nobody from the enterprise on whose system you are held has bothered to listen to the “music” loop since it was installed, so they have no idea how distorted the sound has become. The chances are that when you walk past a CCTV camera, the image of you that it harvests will reveal only a fuzzy shape who could be you or equally could be the Incredible Hulk.

So, put together the ingredients of the hacking of a phone call by The News of the Screws. The celebrity – relaxed, unguarded and believing the only pair of ears into which the chatter goes belongs to a trusted friend – talks (shall we say?) loosely. The hacker is exhausted and bored and, being a journalist, almost certainly the worse for drink. The equipment on which he listens is unreliable, the signal distorted and fitful. The editorial pressure is on him to deliver something in some way juicy. Who imagines this to be a worthwhile, dependable, authoritative, let along a legitimate exercise?

And even if the whole shebang were not festooned with incompetence, how dare, how bloody dare these low-lives watch and listen as we go about our innocent – and even our not so innocent – business. It’s not as if much of this nosing is for any particular purpose. They do it on the off chance and because they can. We have let this happen because we have lazily collaborated in our own subjugation, by not protesting vigorously and continuously against the growth of databases and electronic checks, spying devices and so-called security sweeps. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil” Burke should have observed, though never quite did, “is that good men do nothing”.

We can get back at them if we bend our minds to it. Rupert Murdoch – I say nothing here that is not already in the public domain – has a fondness for a drink. Any journalist will tell you that the quickest way to get under a quarry’s guard is to give him a drink. To hack into Murdoch’s inner sanctum of communications ought to be a relatively simple matter. Go to it, boys. But don’t ask me to come too.

PIGS WILL FLY

We have received our government leaflet Important Information About Swine Flu. So that’s all right, then. I am finding that I can resist the temptation – it might be irresistible were I a few decades younger – to order extra copies (to a permitted maximum of five) in, say, Braille, Welsh, Gujarati, something called “simplified form Chinese” and “Farsi/Dari”.

I am not sure, however, whether I swallow an important part of the premise of this leaflet. That is indeed the word “important”. I have sought the “important” information supposedly contained therein in vain. A rather “important” question – you might surmise – is only posed (rhetorically, for immediate answering like an FAQ) on page 9 of the 10-page leaflet. This is “What Are the Symptoms?”

Given the customary hysteria generated by the media, this question might properly be posed, I would suggest, at the outset of the leaflet. But we toil through until the penultimate page and then read that the symptoms are these: “sudden onset of fever, cough or shortness of breath. Other symptoms can include headache, sore throat, tiredness, aching muscles, chills, sneezing, runny nose or loss of appetite” [the leaflet’s own bold]. It seems to me that people suffering from regular ’flu, asthma, period pain, hay fever, bronchitis, myocardial infarction, post traumatic stress disorder, tonsillitis, ME, the common cold, malaria, HIV, pregnancy or a panic attack could present some or all of these symptoms without having been within sneezing distance of anyone who’d ever been to Mexico. In sum, I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable seeing my doctor in the expectation that he would diagnose swine flu. The declared symptoms are way too symptomatic of fifty other conditions.

So what about pre-emptive action? Here the leaflet betrays evidence of having been penned by an academic or equally remote dweller within an ivory tower. Page 6 asks “What can I do to protect myself and others against flu?” Actually, nothing in the responses beneath directly addresses the first part of that question. Obviously, the most effective method of protecting oneself against swine fever is to give the widest possible berth to anyone who has been to Mexico or consorted with its pig-farming population in the last year or so. But I guess it would be ideologically unsound to print that.

The leaflet has a catch-all remedy for protecting oneself – “follow good hygiene practices” – but the said practices then listed all pertain to “prevent[ing] the spread of germs”; in other words, to protecting others rather than oneself: “Always carry tissues. Use clean tissues to cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze. Bin the tissues after one use. Wash your hands with soap and hot water or a sanitiser gel often”.

The author of this advice has a bright and simple picture of each of us as we go about our lives. We are bowling along the street, hands free of impedimenta. We recognise with plenty of warning that a cough or sneeze is imminent. We reach into our pocket or purse to extract a tissue in good time to entrap the trauma’s effluvia. By happy chance, we are just passing a corporation bin into which we cast the now offending tissue, smiling benignly around us the while.

Oh, would it were thus. I have just begun the third week of my second cold in two months, the first having lasted three weeks, this second being worse. Both colds have been the severest I have suffered in forty years. Had I employed a fresh tissue very time I coughed, sneezed or blew my nose, I would have run through two large boxes of them each day. If we all did that, the world’s rain forests would be gone by the middle of October.

If I am out for the day, I am not going to lug two large boxes of tissues everywhere I go. What’s more, I am not going to be in a position to dispose of a soiled tissue every time I use one. If I am in the middle of a meal, a play, a bath, a round of golf, a concert, a shop, a dog walk across fields, a football match, sex, it just ain’t practical to bin a tissue straight after use. What’s more, many places – train and tube stations, shopping malls – long ago disposed of their rubbish bins for security reasons. Because it’s an almost invisible means of saving money, many councils have reduced the number of bins on streets and cut the frequency of garbage collection. It’s easy to advise “bin the tissues” if you don’t appreciate the reality of the scarcity of binning receptacles.


Your country needs you to use a tissue

Then comes the matter of washing one’s hands. Again, this is not a practical proposition if one is out and about. Public conveniences are many fewer in number than they were twenty years ago. Those that are available frequently do not provide the requisite hot water and maintenance is not so diligent that there is always some kind of soap dispenser filled and ready to dispense. The people who compile these leaflets simply have no idea what the real world is like.

The suspicion remains that the authorities are determined to demonstrate regularly that they are on top of this “crisis” because they can. That’s because they know that a pandemic of swine flu is really a very unlikely outcome. By behaving in a manner that seems diligent and comprehensive, they hope to gain credit when the concern blows over. Other crises that have materialised in the past and may do again in the future – floods, prison unrest, knife crime, a run on the banks, leaks about parliamentarians’ expenses – were not and will not be so containable. The government wants to be seen to be in control even though the forces it is pretending to manage are really rather overstated by the media.

I don’t think my friend who refers to the threatened plague as “whine flu” is very far off the mark.