When Thandie met Posh ... and other great uses for gossip
At a swanky gym in Los Angeles, Victoria Beckham is chatting to the actress, Thandie Newton: “It’s so great that you are here when you are pregnant,” says Posh. “I actually had my baby a couple of months ago,” says Thandie, a trifle stiffly. It soon becomes agonizingly clear that Posh is labouring under a misapprehension. At last, Thandie puts her out of her misery. “Do you think I am [American actress] Zoe Saldana,” she asks.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Newton waited for several years for the chance to air this anecdote, finally finding a perfect opportunity on Friday’s Graham Norton Show. Posh, meanwhile, has presumably spent those years squirming in hot shame, haunted by flashbacks.
Most of us have felt the sinking realisation that we can’t put a name to the vaguely familiar person who has cheerily accosted us. Such lapses are unintentional, yet both parties tend to experience them as a lasting slight. We can be pretty sure Newton won’t be wearing Victoria Beckham on the red carpet any time soon.
Some emollient stratagem is required to allow those involved to emerge from their bruising encounter without lasting injury – and here that curious modern phenomenon, the medicalisation of disinclination, comes to the rescue. Just as gluten intolerance offers a guilt-free excuse to decline our mother’s dreadful macaroni cheese, the impressively unpronounceable cognitive disorder of prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, offers instant absolution to the socially inept. “Ever so sorry, Thands,” Victoria Beckham might have said, if she’d had her wits about her. “It’s not me. It’s my prosopagnosia.”
A couple from Portland, Oregon were startled to learn that their Alexa virtual assistant had sent audio files of their conversations to an acquaintance. The chit-chat was blamelessly dull: they were discussing hardwood flooring. Still, who among us would care for our private thoughts on sustainable teak to be made public?
Gossip has been the stuff of human drama for centuries, and it was inevitable that some virtual equivalent of The Archers’ rumour-mongering Susan Carter would eventually evolve. It might even have its uses, if the latest wheeze of Andrew Griffiths, minister for small business, consumer and corporate responsibility, catches on. He has urged companies to allow aggrieved customers to complain via Alexa, arguing that “products like this make [complaining] a much more enjoyable experience”.
It takes a sophisticated political intelligence to conceive of complaining as enjoyable. Then again, if all the Alexas went rogue and sent the complaint files directly to CEOS of errant companies, that might be fun.
The Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, wants lamb sandwiches to join the chicken confections that currently dominate the supermarket shelves. Both lamb and chicken, I suppose, will be on the menu at Britain’s newest concept in farm attractions: a “heritage” farm at the Cheshire stately home, Tatton Park, with a display that “sympathetically but honestly reveals fascinating facts about the slaughter of animals”.
I imagine charabanc-loads of weeping tinies, refusing to countenance a chicken nugget ever again. But if even a few are introduced to the idea that their nugget once had a face, and that in life and death, it was entitled to humane husbandry, it could be a worthwhile experiment.
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