Celia Walden

O n why being well informed doesn’t necessarily make you i ntere st ing

You don’t turn up at a dinner party without a smile, a slightly inferior chablis you’re rather hoping your hosts won’t open there and then, and a shopping bag full of views on Things That Matter

Of course the terrible twos are purely a British creation. In Asia and other parts of Europe, people simply refuse to accept tantrums as some sort of rite of passage, and neither should we… ’ I’m at one of those ostentatiously humble Notting Hill ‘kitchen suppers’ – complete with catering team and place cards – trying to steer the conversation away from child-rearing. It’s not that I don’t enjoy going over my litany of parenting bloopers with the highlighter pen (and who wouldn’t want to spend a happy half hour trying to predict exactly how all those misjudgments will affect their child’s life prospects?). But now that I’ve identified my neighbour and proselytiser as a ‘cut-and-paster’, I’ve lost interest in anything she has to say.

I met my first cut-and-paster at an LA brunch. We’d both read the same New York

Times op-ed on Syria that morning, which is how I recognised the plagiarised chunks of thought she served up alongside the spelt granola. We’re all influenced by what we read and hear, but unlike the rest of us, cut-and-pasters don’t cherry-pick ideas, quotes and wisdoms – or indeed reject any parts of the ideas, quotes and wisdoms they will cheerfully recycle as their own – preferring to bulk-buy a whole stance on Brexit, Putin, feminism, child-rearing, HRT and beetroot from the publication and/or expert du jour. And they’re as ubiquitous in the UK as they are stateside.

Nervous of independent thought and unsure of their ideologies, they’re nevertheless aware that you don’t turn up at a dinner party without a smile, a slightly inferior chablis you’re rather hoping your hosts won’t open there and then, and a shopping bag full of views on Things That Matter. And perhaps I wouldn’t mind if those views weren’t always straight from the high street of ideas: because much as I love

Today on Radio 4, The Huffington Post, the Drudge Report and the same three columnists everyone else does, much as I appreciate the usefulness of Mumsnet, Twitter and Facebook – I’d rather find myself seated next to someone with a view I haven’t heard before (I’d settle for one that was even infinitesimally customised) than the kind of person who has actually bought the ‘suggested accessories’ shown on the Net-a-Porter model. Seriously: who does that?

It stands to reason that we should have started using technological gizmos and gimmickry IRL (in real life), ‘liking’ and ‘disliking’ friends on a whim, ‘one-clicking’ on whatever takes our fancy, and rebooting when the cognitive wheels start twirling round and round in an otherwise frozen mind. And of course, thanks to our endless news outlets and opinion platforms, we’re better informed than ever. But far from causing us to be more discriminating, this surplus of information has made us lazy. There isn’t time to take it all in, so you chose a stance – a socially accepted stance – and you make it your own. Because any circumspection, or worse still, admission that you’re not knowledgeable enough on a subject to weigh in, may just prompt your dinner party neighbour to narrow their eyes and swipe left.