A chilling catastrophe punctuated my week
Use of the apostrophe is declining. That’s according to research from Lancaster University backed up by what anyone would guess was happening. I reckon it was all over as soon as you couldn’t put them in web addresses. The future will only need one sort of dot, the techies decided. The comma is putting up decent resistance, but it’s just a matter of time before we see the last of its hovering colleague. Please enjoy the correct punctuation of the itses in that sentence.
Reduction in apostrophe usage isn’t all bad news, even for sticklers, because it is often used wrongly. Abandoning it may actually reduce punctuation errors. At last, the grocers will have to stop sticking things in where they’re not wanted, even if it will become harder to know whether or not any splendid metaphorical bollocks you may be enjoying all belong to one dog.
But it fills me with dread. That’s because I can apply all the apostrophe rules correctly and I can’t do much else. I feel like a monk in a scriptorium who’s had a vision of a photocopier. The Virgin Mary was copying her bum and laughing at him. It makes me a bit panicky. I still don’t really know what TikTok is.
I’ve got a wine fridge though, so that’s a comfort. And not primarily because, should I suddenly feel the need to ingest vast, existence-numbing quantities of wine, which I recommend from time to time, it’ll be at the correct temperature. No, the fridge itself provides the comfort because, as research published last week has confirmed, being materialistic, acquiring things, assuages fear. This was a study involving 2,200 people from Britain, the US and China. It found that those who had recently experienced fear sought security in new stuff. “In man’s ancestral past there is often an advantage to owning goods,” says the report. “The more goods one possesses, the more likely they are to withstand adverse conditions and protect themselves.”
This discovery has terrifying implications, which is great news for the retail sector. But any resultant economic upturn might make us less fearful, undermining the new prosperity, thus leading to recession, leading to want and fear, leading to spending and prosperity, leading to happiness and collapse. We could be locked into a psychological boom-and-bust sine wave with an economic one closely tracking it. At least those most dedicated purveyors of alarm, the news media, can pat themselves on the back that their peace-of-mind-wrecking business model marginally helps Argos.
It is little wonder that in this era of pandemic, climate emergency and apostrophe irrelevance, I lean heavily on my wine fridge for emotional support. And then it stopped working. This was a bitter blow. The very object from which I had been deriving solace turned into a blunt instrument of rebuke. I had no idea what to do. As discussed above, I know how to use an apostrophe and that is not quite, but nearly, it. I can talk and write. I had learned both of those skills by the age of five. It turns out that when I then learned to ride a bike, I had already become overqualified for my future profession.
I haven’t learned to do much else. Mending a wine fridge is way beyond me. So is working out what’s wrong with a wine fridge. And so, I miserably realised, is moving a wine fridge. It’s all built in to the kitchen. You turn it off at a switch on the wall with no visible interconnecting wire. There is wood and granite impeding its movement. It felt like I was doomed to look at it, standing there incomprehensible and obsolete, for ever, like a bewildered Anglo-Saxon staring in wonder at a Roman bath.
I didn’t know how to begin trying to move it. If I bought a replacement, I had no idea where I’d put it. If I did manage to move the broken one, how
would I infiltrate the new one into the hole? It was bound to be a different size. I had no confidence in my powers of measurement. Who would take away the old one? Would I just use it as a cupboard for the rest of my life? I was faced with an unconquerable mountain of practical challenges and admin hassle.
It all reminded me of a line in a sketch I wrote with Robert Webb in which a confused and lonely man, having just moved into a new flat, tremblingly asks: “Do you know anything about how to make a new washing machine have water in it?” My instinct to acquire things in order to feel safe had lured me into a slough of self-loathing. None of my main skills – talking and punctuation – has any power over fridges.
Most MPs must feel this vulnerability. Their second jobs all seem to involve the same thing as their main one: talking in rooms. I don’t think we’d mind them neglecting their constituents nearly so much if they were off mending fridges. But they’re just bullshitting for different masters and, we suspect, saving their best bullshit for when they’re getting the higher hourly rate.
It’s hard to imagine that Theresa May, who has made nearly £2m from giving speeches since leaving office, would command that magnitude of money for saying Brexit means Brexit and claiming to be “a bloody difficult woman”. She must have some cracking secret material that she wouldn’t share for a ministerial salary alone.
Still, it’s closer to fridge-mending than it is to lobbying. It’s taking money for doing something, not for thinking something or advocating something. And perhaps the executives paying those ludicrous sums for whatever it is ex-prime ministers say at corporate events assuaged their own existential fears with the spending spree.
A man came to mend the fridge in the end. I didn’t think that was possible any more but, in my desperation, I phoned the manufacturer who gave me another number and I phoned that and someone came round. He knew how wine fridges worked and fixed it in 10 minutes. It was like an idealised version of the 1950s. I was deeply comforted. Maybe the apostrophe still has some life in it after all.
My instinct to acquire things in order to feel safe had lured me into a slough of selfloathing