Browsing the bookshelves in Waterstones in search of a Christmas gift, I could not help noticing the preponderance of books bearing one word titles. Kelly Holmes’ bio is Unique, Tim Peake’s Limitless, and of course Prince Harry’s Spare. I always felt the choice of Spare was unfortunate. Of course there is the heir and the spare, but “spare” for the most part has a pejorative connotation: a redundant Priapus at nuptials; that sort of thing. I would have preferred Remaindered. Then there are titles like Eve, and Ovum, or perhaps Ova, and Unbreakable. The one word title has become a cliché. I’m certain this trend is editor-driven. I could imagine Marcel Proust submitting Remembrance of Things Past and being advised, that will never do. How about Flashback? Or Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Too unwieldy. How about Gutted? Or, perhaps, Gutted!
But all of modern “culture” is ridden with cliché. On Radio 2 you will hear any number of songs of a diatonic nature, sung by a breathless chanteuse – the inhalation prior to each line is part of the soundscape – songs annotated by the composer (if Artificial Intelligence can be so denoted) as semplice, the last verse sung without accompaniment and coming to an abrupt end. Cinema is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre of all. I tried to watch Oppenheimer, a figure about whom as it happens I know a little, but I found the endless cut and paste techniques of modern cinematography absolutely unbearable, and quit after an hour. If a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end seems unduly prosaic, cut the celluloid into little pieces, cascade them on to the cutting-room floor, pick them up and reattach them ad lib, and see whether the resulting montage hides all the production’s creative faults.
Come to think of it, Oppenheimer is another one-word title. It’s as if our attention span has become so truncated that we need to be hooked by a single word, or we are lost. The implication is that the book trade actually thinks rather badly of the public it purports to serve. Apparently we need to be spoon-fed. So if a writer comes along and completely overturns all the accepted conventions, not only of the book trade, but of people’s common understanding of life, then that writer will struggle to get into print. The bottom line is not originality, but the dollar.
Talking of commercialism, this is the time of year when, retail-wise, we are all inclined to push the boat out, at least if we can afford so to do. It’s a kind of panic-buying, not unlike that of the lockdown, when there was a run on toilet rolls; now it’s mince pies. I can’t be snooty and pretend I’m above the battle. I too was adding exotic delicatessen to my basket in Morrison’s. The aisles were crowded. Trolley-rage lurked around the cheese counter. I tried to diffuse the situation with a disarming smile. I remarked, “Madness!” And the lady behind her stacked trolley smiled back and replied, “Why do we do it?” Why indeed. It’s a kind of obverse of retail therapy; retail neurosis.
Christmas is the temporal manifestation of retail neurosis. There is also a spatial manifestation. It occurs in airports, when people are similarly gripped by a mad impulse to spend spend spend, and acquire stuff they don’t really need. Vendors, conscious of the fact that people about to board an aircraft are possessed by the compulsion to empty their pockets of currency shortly to become useless, hike the prices. Everything in an airport is expensive. Even getting there is expensive. Take the Edinburgh tram. You can make the half hour journey from Edinburgh City Centre to Edinburgh Park & Ride, abutting the airport, for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Stay on the tram for one more stop to the terminal building, and the price is hiked by nearly a factor of four. Similarly, you can park your car at Park & Ride for free, but venture into airport-land and you will pay an exorbitant tariff just to park for five minutes.
Duty free is the biggest rip-off. You might imagine goods divested of tariffs might constitute a bargain. But I can buy a bottle of single malt Scotch whisky in my local supermarket at a far better price than in airport duty-free. Everything is exorbitant, clothing especially. But people will snap up designer labels as gifts for loved ones, wielding a credit card without a qualm, as if taken over by the premonition that their ship is about to go down, and that the bank balance is not going to matter. People transiting airports are possessed. They are in a trance, just as people in the supermarket trolley aisles on Christmas Eve are in a trance.
But Bethlehem has cancelled Christmas. At least, Commercial Christmas. There will be no Christmas tree in Manger Square. Yet parturition can be neither postponed nor cancelled. Therefore there remains the image of a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a heap of rubble. Just as it was two thousand odd years ago, it remains necessary to attempt the Rafah Crossing into Egypt, in order to avoid the massacre of the innocents. The reality of a real Christmas rather puts our festive excesses into perspective. And yet I don’t resent the endless renditions of Christmas songs on the radio. I didn’t even mind being ambushed by Wham’s Last Christmas, and I’m rather sorry to say that thus far I have not heard Chris Rea driving home for Christmas, stuck in a traffic jam. I abjure the Bah Humbug Constituency. I heard a reading on the radio of a part of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and was completely transfixed. The reformed, perhaps even redeemed, Scrooge observes Bob Cratchit coming in nearly half an hour late for work, and rather winds him up, doing an impersonation of the intimidating persona he has so recently sloughed off. Then he festoons his employee with benisons, and all is well.
Brings a tear to the eye.
jamescalumcampbell 