Spoilt for Choice

The forgotten art of minding one's own business.

Højbro Plads, København by Paul Fischer (1921)

Often, I wonder what the late Christoper Hitchens would think of our desperate little rebellion against reality. The liberal lion of the nineties and noughties defended reason and sanity with a machete dipped in ink. In 2011, his death from oesophageal cancer robbed us of his rare insight and unmatched eloquence. With style and sabre, he skewered the first act of our tragicomedy.

To admit one has heroes is decidedly un-British. By its very nature, the mother of all parliaments spares precious seconds for adolescent pangs. We permit characters such as Hitchens. British English—English free of mistakes—defines a ‘character’ as an eccentric or outsider. From rarefied eyries, characters observe the mainstream. They pull off the wings of received opinion and pluck bare the fashionable and the false. Amongst modern sensibilities, satirists, comedians, and characters earn meagre affection. Our time is too serious and too fragile for too much truth. The living, breathing institution —the irreverent British character—is dying on its arse.

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Over the weekend, I smashed a new personal best. Twenty-nine minutes! No, I didn’t blitz a 10k nor plunge into an ice bath. In under half an hour, I sunk a bottle of wine. Why? The recklessness of an ebbing youth, I suppose.

In this adulterated version of the truth, I had to baptise three extra-large wine glasses. A Christmas gift worthy of Dionysus himself. They’re colossal. So colossal, in fact, in one of these beauties, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a card-carrying member of the vertically modest community, would drown. I admit no yen for superstition, but unbaptised wine glasses give me bad vibes.  

Jim Harrison, the American poet, novelist, and militant bon vivant, squeezed sensual pleasure from his every second. The well-worn sage advised the budding pleasure-seeker to knock back a bottle of red in forty-five minutes.

Not to confess too much. Since my infant days, I’ve had obsessive-compulsive tendencies. My current therapist implored me: Put your powers to good, productive use. She’ll be pleased to hear I took her advice. I skinned the 750ml bottle in three civilised glasses without rushing, downing, or spilling a drop. No loutish, Brits-abroad, chest-thumping wankery, just an adult of fairly sound mind exercising his right to do with his body what he so wishes. I’m not a savage, after all.

But that’s not an achievement, Christopher, you nutter. Your poor liver! Perhaps everyone else is right. But they’re often wrong. The liver is an infantry veteran—a highly-trained warrior content and vital only when slaying the enemy. An idle liver succumbs to boredom and radicalisation.

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Not to brag. My immortal feat has an intrinsic, spiritual purpose. We must resist this naïve spin into illiberalism. The Enlightenment was a good thing, actually. But those heady values must repel daily, corroding assaults from those who know best.

Cambridge University researchers have nothing better to do. Last week, they announced the results of a groundbreaking study. (Like ‘luxury’ apartments, studies must always break ground.)

First, they discovered a bottomless source of clean energy. Secondly and more importantly, they unshrouded our time's greatest philosophical yearning: Tony's fate in the final scene of The Sopranos. (I don’t care what the director may claim. Tony didn’t die. Fight me.)

Pardon me. The wine’s wending its mischief. I’m telling porkies. They did nothing of the sort. Researchers found they could ‘nudge’ people into drinking less wine when they denied the unsuspecting blighters a large 250ml measure.

Last summer, these wholly well-adjusted people convinced 21 Cambridgeshire pubs and restaurants to offer only small or medium glasses of wine. The result left the boffins breathless. But sadly, not in the medical sense of the word.

When denied a large, vivifying glass of wine, the subjects drank eight percent less than usual, and the pubs didn’t lose any money—smaller measures cost more. Puritans: two. Oenophiles: nil.

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The usual suspects cooked up this obscene waste of time and money. Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge University, boasts lurid form in control freakery.

Her previous studies read like an almanac of neurotic impulses. The mad mullah dreams of shrinking plates and sinking sodas. This finger-wagger-in-chief obsesses with the vinous, porcine masses and what they may slip into their faces when she’s not looking. Marteau chillingly laments that large wine glasses ‘increase the pleasure of drinking wine.’

The fundamentally nosey swear these are the first murmurs of Utopia. Next, they’ll bend boozing regulations into a truncheon to batter the gastronomic swine over its head. They don’t stop. First, they shrink the large glass. Then, the medium glass affects as the large. What happens next? Take a wild guess.

This is not the work of some rogue Colonel Kurtz. One Daily Telegraph writer seized on the study. Employing the presumptuous ‘we’ beloved of oppressive minds, they offered tips to help us drink less, assuming we drink large wines only because we are weak-willed effigies desperate for professional helpers to show us what’s best for us.

Advocates of ‘nudging’ drive themselves senseless over this psychological thimblerig. The potential to correct ‘undesirable’ behaviour proves too great to resist.  They are a species of featherless biped with which I share nothing but the right to a trial before a jury of my peers.

As I write, I’ve just returned from a five-mile jaunt with 33 pounds strapped to my back. Loading a bag with weights burns double the calories. Therefore, whatever I do after that trek is my business alone. On my desk is a large glass of Portuguese red blend. Beside that soul-tingling measure sits a smouldering, hand-rolled, menthol-tipped cigarette.

Why strangers stake their mental well-being on what others put into their bodies, I will never know. Why they wish I’d sit here choking on sparkling water and its vegetable equivalent—celery—I’ve not the foggiest of insights. All I do know, friends, is that I am not the one in dire need of a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. My professional advice: Seven letters. Vulgar slang. A phrasal verb rhyming with ‘duck cough.’

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Not long ago, such glorified curtain-twitching dissolved on contact with normal people. Today, our culture seethes with self-appointed life coaches, motivation-mongers, and amateur and professional soothsayers.

The cult of you gabs incessantly: Empowerment! Self-care! Grind! Perfect! You! Ironically, such predatory wellness drowns the individual in the soup of conformity. On lame and diseased legs, they trot out diseased and lame sermons: We just want you to make better choices.

Reader, notice the presumptuous ‘we’. Consider they’ve decided what’s ‘better’ for you. Scoff, too, at the choiceless choice.

On the menu, we have steamed kale or kale cooked in steam. Once you surrender, they invert the linguistic Ponzi scheme: ‘Oh, the steamed kale. Good choice! We are so glad you made the right decision. Crack open the Puritan mind. You’ll find both obsession and fear.

Perhaps I obsess over this insidious nonsense because I fear the well-documented result. Nothing is more corrosive to progress than those convinced they know best. As T.S. Eliot put it, half of the world’s problems stem from those locked in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. Ask the twentieth century how that panned out.

And yet, almost every major cultural, artistic, and scientific advancement flowed through the brains and fingers of eccentrics, oddballs, outsiders, and characters. Those difficult people whom the know-betters failed to tame. Thank heavens. We need more outsiders. On their shoulders, all progress depends.

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Last time at Oxford Sour…