Christina Patterson: Dream on: we are just a nation of useless voyeurs
Friday, 2 March 2007
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Last weekend, I had some friends for dinner. As always, loving food, but hating cooking, I decided to keep it simple: soup, fish baked in foil and some fresh berries. As always, it all went wrong. The onions did their usual trick of instant metamorphosis from golden chunks to charred embers. I had to dash out for more and start again - but I had to anyway because half the ingredients had, apparently, done a runner.
It wasn't as bad as the time when I tried to make Swedish meatballs and ended up with a pan of fried mince and plastic. I had dug out a food processor that someone gave me years ago - and failed to remove the plastic guard. Or the time when, after The Independent sent me on a cookery course, I spent hours nurturing a bouillabaisse only to be told that it tasted "like rubber".
On Saturday, I was tired. I had undertaken a task I hate even more than cooking. I had vacuumed. My enthusiasm for this legal torture is probably best illustrated by my trip to the local electrical shop brandishing my bright blue Henry vacuum cleaner. After a brief inspection, the electrician asked me if I had ever considered changing the bag. I had had it for seven years.
At least, by last weekend, I had mended the leaking loo. Well, not me, obviously, but at least I had finally picked up the phone and called in a plumber. Half the bathroom floor was, by then, completely rotten and so was the wood surrounding the leaking tap at the sink. The plumber suggested that we hide the rot with some tiles. I chose some lovely stone ones in different shades of brown. Juxtaposed with the lovely blue ones I had had put up a couple of years ago to conceal the rotting plaster around the sink, they look like the visual equivalent of a migraine.
When my parents were my age, they had full-time jobs and three children at secondary school. My mother cooked proper meals (without turning the house into a crematorium) every day. My father put up shelves and tiles. Quite how they managed to produce a daughter so spectacularly lacking as a domestic goddess is anyone's guess - but in this they are not alone.
According to a new survey conducted by the Ideal Home Show, three quarters of the British population doesn't know how to put up wallpaper. Two thirds can't put up a shelf or change a fuse. We may spend our evenings watching Jamie marinading calves' livers on a bed of basil-infused polenta, but we'll do it while wolfing down a ready meal. We love How Clean is Your House?, but we hate cleaning. We love Grand Designs, but we live in Barrett homes.
In a new book, Welcome to Everytown, the philosopher Julian Baggini writes about his six months living near Rotherham, an area selected by a demographic profiling organisation as the most "typically" English he could find. He lived in a "modern, clean" house "with a fitted kitchen and fitted carpets" - the kind of house I grew up in. Top choice for a meal out was, he discovered, the eat-all-you-can carvery. Top choice for reading was not, as in yesterday's World Book Day polls, Pride and Prejudice, but Dan Brown and Harry Potter. Not sharp social commentary, in other words, but fantasy.
Fantasy can be a harmless pleasure, but it does seem to fuel a growing gap between our aspirations and the reality of our lives. We are a nation of voyeurs. The more we salivate over squid-ink risotto, the less likely we are to muster up even meat and veg. The more we gaze at size 0 models, the fatter we get. The more we dream, in fact, the worse we get at everything. Clashing bathroom tiles won't kill us, of course, but obesity, sadly, might.
Blair must be green with envy...As Tony Blair struggles to cement his legacy with a stream of desperate announcements, Ken Livingstone continues to hog the headlines. First, Venezuela's anti-Semitic Marxist president, Hugo Chavez, above, promises to subsidise London bus fairs. Next, we're forging links with Rio de Janeiro. And now we are, in spite of hefty visible evidence to the contrary, set to be the greenest city in the world.
If anything's green, it's probably Blair. As the erstwhile darling of Middle England stumbles out of power his bete noir (or rather rouge) gets more popular every day. Here are two men, both ambitious, consummate politicians and visionary to the point of bonkers. Both had the gift of the popular touch, but one lost it. Because a million mad alliances will never match the hubristic folly of one war.
Excellent news for the lazy. A Japanese professor has developed a humanoid robot, which can do the dishes, pour drinks and make a nice cup of tea. "A human being may be faster, but you'd have to say thank you," said Professor Tomomasa Sato. "You don't have to feel bad about asking it to do things."
Well, quite. None of that exhausting gratitude or shame. If only you could pack it off to the office, or the shops, you'd have a permanent licence to lie on the sofa.
Prof Sato believes that the robots could play a key part in caring for the old and the sick. More than a fifth of the Japanese population is over 65, but things here aren't too hot either. For those of us without legions of children to look after us, and pensions which might stretch to a Mars Bar, a robot might be (literally) just what the doctor ordered.
