News of this year’s must-have novelty Christmas gift idea triggered in me a fanatical yearning, a saliva-gland tsunami, an urgent novelty-gift desire. For the selfie stick!
Oh. My. God. You only put your smartphone on the end of this stick to get a better selfie, that’s all! It uses Bluetooth technology to press “click” remotely! Whoa! No longer need we, as humans, be bounded by the length of our arms. This is the kind of obstacle-surmounting ingenuity that took us to the flipping moon!
Soon every famous place, from Buckingham Palace to the Taj Mahal, will be a bristling forest of long, thin stalks whipping this way and that as people line up the best “wide shot” of themselves. And if a celebrity should show up – say, Benedict Cumberbatch – then the pavement will turn into a giant selfie-stick porcupine. Exciting.
I decided I had to have one. But when I mentioned this glorious innovation to my wife, she replied: “What’s wrong with asking someone else to take your picture?” Oh. Oh yeah. Asking someone to take your picture. It’s sort of a nice, shy way of interacting with your fellow human beings. I’d forgotten about that.
Fifteen years ago, a book called Bowling Alone by Robert D Putnam analysed the breakdown in community in America, based on the chilling phenomenon of going bowling on your own. Maybe Putnam will write a sequel: Selfie Stick Society.
Vermintrusion
A very unwelcome visitor has appeared in our house. A mouse. And you would be amazed at how very unlike any episode of Tom and Jerry this situation is. The mouse itself is not an adorable little character, but a tiny, shifty, nasty, objectionable little figure to be seen scuttling across the kitchen floor.
You have to make an effort of will to treat its presence with ironically bemused hilarity – rather than the hysterical fear and disgust that comes naturally. At a local shop I bought four mousetraps: two of the “compassionate” kind which (supposedly) capture the mice without harming them; and two of the old-fashioned nasty snapping kind, which might actually get the job done. We have also got a specialist to lay down poison.
Like Captain Ahab, I am brooding about my prey. Perhaps it will just leave of its own accord. Meanwhile, we have to amuse ourselves by singing along to modified lyrics of Windmill in Old Amsterdam: “I saw a mouse! Where? There by the fridge. Where by the fridge? Right there. A little mouse with germs on, well I declare, going poop-poopity-poop by the food.”
A bulletproof bowler hat
Just when I thought, in my jaded and worldly way, that there was no physical sensation left to experience, along comes coffee with butter. That’s right: coffee with butter in it. Milk in coffee is apparently passe. The coming thing is sticking a baby-fist-sized gob of Yeo Valley butter in your coffee, along with a generous dollop of something called MCT oil. Or possibly coconut oil will do.
Tragically eager to be up with all the latest things, I tried it in a specialist hipster coffee shop in London: it’s called “bulletproof” coffee, which is ironic because drinking it felt like being shot. Sipping my buttery drink I sort of felt like one of the people in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies wearing black suede shoes with tuxedos, the bogus fashion mischievously proclaimed in the Mr Chatterbox gossip column.
Or rather one of the very few people wearing bottle-green bowler hats – the subsequent hoax trend in Waugh’s satire that fails to convince and earns its author the sack.
I’m not sure about coffee with butter. I’ll try slipping some Philadelphia into an americano and see how that goes.
