Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (4 page)

Of course, anyone might get rattled by a semi-paralysed blind man slowly tapping his way with a stick towards you. Apart from anything else, it’s so spooky. Those are the high-pressure moments when you need the training to kick in. According to guidelines, officers are permitted to use Tasers when they “would be facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they would need to use force to protect the public, themselves and/or the subject”, and this moment is surely eerie enough to qualify. The whole event would barely be worthy of note if it weren’t for the fact that they shot him in the back. But then the gentleman is quite old and has suffered two strokes in the last few years – so the comparatively slow rate at which he was fleeing was probably taken as provocation.

Incidentally, if you do get Tasered by the police, it’s advisable to watch your language. As Boris Johnson has pointed out, it’s now an offence to swear at a police officer. So should you incur a public-spirited 50,000-volt warning shot – perhaps
for brandishing your pension book in an aggressive manner or because a young PC has mistaken your tartan shopping trolley for a piece of field artillery – don’t accidentally shout “Oh fuck!” or you might get sent to prison. Keep it to a “Dash it all, that smarts, constable!” and be on your way. As soon as you can stand.

In the case of Colin Farmer, the suspected samurai, the police have apologised and Chief Superintendent Stuart Williams said: “We have launched an urgent investigation to understand what lessons can be learned.” That response demonstrates everything that’s wrong with large organisations. In terms of dereliction of duty, I think it’s worse than Tasering a blind pensioner. What possible good can this “investigation” do? We know what happened. A police officer, who Colin Farmer described as “an absolute thug with a licence to carry a dangerous weapon”, made a brutal and stupid mistake. How can an investigation illuminate the situation further? Will DNA analysis of the stick reveal that it’s a sword after all?

All of which means it feels like an inopportune moment for Keith Bristow, the director general of the new National Crime Agency, to request more police powers. He’s trying to influence the new communications data bill so that he’ll be able to scour Skype and social media networks for wrongdoers. But he’s quick to allay the fears of those who call the bill a “snoopers’ charter”: “I value my privacy, I don’t want to be snooped upon,” he explains. “That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about criminals who run organised crime gangs that import drugs … We’re talking about predatory paedophiles, we’re talking about dangerous people.”

Oh, well that’s OK then! He’s only going to be snooping on criminals. Personally I don’t think that’s enough – I think criminals should be arrested and charged, not just snooped on. But just as long as the NCA won’t accidentally be snooping on anyone who’s not definitely a criminal, I can’t see the harm in it.

In an ideal world, Keith Bristow would be wasting his breath. When a state law enforcement agency says “We need more powers”, it should carry as little weight as when I say “I want you to read my book”. Not because either statement is insincere: all writers genuinely want people to read their books and all law enforcement agencies really believe they need more powers. But when they say that, they should be completely ignored. Not criticised, not accommodated, just disregarded.

The sincerity is beguiling but it’s meaningless. “Help us to do our jobs better,” the police implore. “We can see the good we could do if you let us.” They almost certainly can. But they can’t see what it would cost society in lost freedoms. They can’t know the consequences of potentially irreversible authoritarian steps.

It’s a frightening state of affairs. Those who know most about law enforcement – those who actually do it – are the least qualified to advise on what its rights, powers and funding should be. We have to ignore their cries and trust our instincts. We have to balance our fears of the indefinable, nebulous worlds of crime and terrorism with the fact that, if we put Tasers in our public servants’ hands, at some point they’ll use them on us.

Since I wrote this in October 2012, the police and Police Federation’s public image has deteriorated further. In May 2014, the home secretary rebuked the Federation’s conference, calling on them to “Show the public that you get it”, and issuing a threat: “The Federation was created by an act of parliament and it can be reformed by an act of parliament. If you do not change of your own accord, we will impose change on you.” Meanwhile, the communications data bill, having lost Nick Clegg’s support in April 2013, looks unlikely to become law.

As someone who enjoys food, I’m surprised by how irritable chefs make me. Whenever I read about a chef or chefs campaigning for, complaining about or promoting something, I can feel myself metaphorically folding my arms. And sometimes I literally fold my arms at the same time – which, if you count both real and metaphorical limbs, briefly makes me an insect. A disdainful beetle, gearing up to get cross with a chef.

“Oh, what is it now, chefs?” I sneer to myself – not out loud because chefs are famously handy: I’m thinking of Gordon Ramsay, or John Cleese in that sketch where he bursts out of the kitchen waving a cleaver. “You moaning chefs get my goat, which left to you would presumably be locally sourced, turned into a jus or a foam and piped all over a perfectly harmless starter! Why don’t you shut up, you bloody chefs?”

You may be uncertain of what I’m talking about. What are all these occasions when chefs say, want or bemoan something? you may wonder. Maybe my chef-irritability is making me delusional, but to my mind it’s constant. Some chef is always saying something, and it’s never just: “Can you make sure that doesn’t boil over? I’m popping out for a fag.”

It’s probably the fault of the media – most things are. When you’ve retyped all the news agency stuff about Syria and Ukraine, and reprinted today’s cameraphone snap of a goose swimming past someone’s upstairs window, what are you going to put on page two? Probably best just to ring up some chefs and find out what’s bugging them.

My view of chefs as a vocal part of the community is reinforced by the fact that most television programmes are now about cookery – about 52%, according to a survey I just conducted into what would bolster my argument. I quite like cookery programmes – something I have in common with every other viewer. That’s why there are so many. The future of television, according to haircuts and focus groups, is stuff that everyone
quite likes, rather than stuff that anyone particularly likes. It’s best just to make cookery programmes, because dramas are expensive, nature documentaries are fake and those horrible panel shows are brash and rude and have more chefs on them than women. But no one ever got annoyed by shots of a casserole.

So I already had more metaphorically folded arms than a metaphorical millipede exchanging insurance details with some chefs who’d just crashed into his car when I heard the latest from the chefs: they’re annoyed by shots of a casserole. Or probably not actually a casserole – that sounds a bit 70s – more likely a reduction or a daube or a posset or a phucking pho. They’re cross that customers often photograph (or pho-tograph) their food and put those images online.

These particular chefs are French, which, I must admit, doesn’t allay my suspicions that they may not have quite got over themselves. So I’d completely prejudged Alexandre Gauthier (of La Grenouillère in La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil) before I heard what he had to say – which, as it turns out, was an efficient use of time.

“They used to come and take pictures of themselves and their family, their grandmother, whoever, as a souvenir,” he said of his customers. “Now they take pictures of the food, they put it on Facebook or Twitter, they comment. And then the food is cold … I would like people to be living in the present. Tweet about the meal beforehand, tweet about it afterwards, but in between stop and eat.” To this end, he printed pictures of cameras with lines through them on all the menus.

You may think he’s got a point. People’s urge to photograph every aspect of their lives is pretty wearing – I wish they wouldn’t do it too. But my sympathy for him melts like sorbet under a flashbulb when he progresses from wishing they wouldn’t to trying to stop them. They’ve bought the food: if they want to take a picture of it, that’s their choice. Just as it’s his choice to be irritated rather than flattered.

The implication that these plates of grub should be treated with reverence makes me bridle. And it’s even worse because they already
are
being treated with reverence, but he’s objecting to the nature of that reverence. It’s too disrespectful a form of respect: he doesn’t want people cooing and snapping with joy as if his masterpieces were merely a birthday Knickerbocker Glory with sparklers in it – he wants the murmured acclamation of an art gallery.

Nevertheless, Gauthier claims that he’s “not banned photographs at all” (which doesn’t make much sense as I don’t see what else could be inferred from the signs on the menus). And neither has his fellow complainant, Gilles Goujon (inventor of the goujon?) of the Auberge du Vieux Puits – but that’s only because he hasn’t “yet found the right words that won’t be too shocking”. He hates his food to be photographed because “it takes away the surprise”, “it takes away a little bit of my intellectual property” and “a photo taken on an average smartphone … doesn’t give the best impression of our work”.

I understand his feelings, but basically he needs to suck it up. If his customers have trawled strangers’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for inexpertly photographed gourmet meal spoilers, they only have themselves to blame if their expensive dinner’s appearance fails to exhilarate. And Goujon’s still got whatever the food tastes like to wow them with – you can’t put that on Tumblr (at time of writing). As far as the intellectual property is concerned, I feel his pain, but he should take comfort from the fact that whoever first arranged a fry-up into the shape of a smiley face almost certainly never earned a penny from it.

But what irritates me most about these chefs is that they’re being so clever. They may come across as precious, but it won’t make anyone think less of their cooking. On the contrary, by heavily implying that their food is beset by the greedy lenses of photographers – that it looks so good it gets papped and is forced
to shun the limelight like Garbo – its deliciousness is taken as read. This is a problem, we all assume, suffered only by the best restaurants, the big chefs. At a Little Chef, it’s not an issue – largely because they already provide photographs of the meals on the menus.

Have you noticed those special sparkly poppies that some people on television have taken to wearing instead of the normal ones? I don’t know when they first cropped up – it feels like about two years ago, which usually means it’s roughly 10. It took them a while to get on my nerves, but now they have.

I don’t know why I was initially fine with them. That’s not like me. Maybe it’s because of the context.
The X Factor
, where I first noticed them, is such a hellish environment, such a horrendous, screaming, Klingon parliament of a space, that even those glittery whored-up symbols of remembrance seemed to have an incongruous innocent simplicity about them, rather like the original poppies which grew out of the cordite-wrecked soil of the western front.

But then Louis Walsh changed my mind. I was flicking through the channels when, like a moth drawn to the flame, like an addict returning to the needle, like an early 20th-century emperor lured into a conflict he will be able neither to control nor comprehend, I paused to watch some hopeless hopefuls forgettably finish singing a song and then line up to hear it described as unforgettable.

Walsh, his very presence a more devastating refutation of the principle of the sanctity of human life than Verdun, was repeating a platitude that had been expressed seconds earlier by someone else – only altering the word order slightly so that it didn’t quite make sense. His mouth was opening and closing, his ears were waggling, his voice was straining to be heard over the screeches
of audience approval which his empty praise was generating, and my eyes, drawn to the screen yet repelled by his face, lighted on the blinged-up poppy on his fucking shirt. I saw it clearly for the first time.

How dare television designers adapt this token of remembrance to blend in with their trashy aesthetic? How dare they make it twinkly? The poppy is an incredibly moving symbol. This flower somehow flourished on battlefields smashed by the world’s first experience of industrialised war – a war of unprecedented carnage which became almost as terrifying to the statesmen who had let it start as it was to the millions of soldiers who were killed or wounded by it.

Such was the international shock that, even after our side had won, no one could bring themselves to remember it with anything other than unalloyed sorrow. Not with victory arches or triumphal parades, but with the plain, mournful Cenotaph and a tradition of wearing paper versions of the flowers that had grown among the dead, the petals with which nature had rebuked the murderousness of men. That’s why, while I understand the point they’re trying to make, I disagree with those who eschew the red poppy but wear a white one for peace. To me, the poppy is already a pacifist rather than a martial symbol – a sign that war should be rejected at almost all costs.

The poppy represents the consensus that existed after the armistice – not a military or political consensus, but an emotional one: an overwhelming sense that the indiscriminate bloodletting of total war was too terrible ever to be forgotten, that only in solemn remembrance can any sense be made of those millions of deaths. On that simple point, almost everyone was, and continues to be, agreed. And for the symbol to be powerful and meaningful, I think it needs to be uniform – as uniform as the franchise. We should all wear the same type of poppy or it’s like some of us saying “I’m Spartacus” in a funny voice. By encouraging the
sparkly poppy, TV producers almost literally gild the lily. And literally glamorise war.