I’d be kippered without Ukip to entertain me – and you
The press hasn’t always been kind to Ukip. But I believe I speak for most journalists when I say: Dear Ukip, please don’t die. At least for our sake. Members are deserting, councillors are defecting, and the money’s almost run out. But I’ll be sad if Ukip folds. For a sketch writer, the Kippers were a joy. At times, I suspected they were doing this stuff on purpose, just to give me material.
Take, for example, the time they decided to prove they weren’t racist by holding a carnival in south London, which quickly descended into a near-riot between supporters and immigrants. The Jamaican steel band refused to play, having been unaware, until informed by journalists, that it was Ukip who’d booked them.
I’ll never forget that glorious day. Nor the Ukip party conference of 2015, where I met a woman who had Nigel Farage’s face tattooed on her right arm (and, in a curious juxtaposition, the face of Robert Smith from The Cure tattooed on her left). I’ll never forget the stalls selling Ukip condoms, Ukip necklaces and, of course, Ukip fruitcake. And I’ll never forget the press conference at which Steven Woolfe, a Ukip MEP at the time, tearfully recited a poem he’d written about the horrors of the EU (“Freeborn men and women cry/ ‘Why, oh why, oh why, oh why?’”).
Then there was the time I watched Godfrey Bloom tell a gathering of female Ukip members they were “sluts”; hours after I reported this, he’d had the party whip removed, and the following month he quit the party altogether (Ukip, in his view, having become too “politically correct”). And then, best of all, there was the time Nigel Farage and I were chased down the Thames by Bob Geldof on a pleasure cruiser while 100 people on Blackfriars Bridge sang Rule Britannia.
Don’t go, Ukip. It will be a colder, duller world without you.
To tie in with the Brit Awards, I was asked to write an article about the pieces of music that “changed my life”. Immediately I did something that I suspect most of us would. Instead of trying to think of the songs I loved best, I tried to think of the songs that would reflect best on me. I bet guests on Desert Island Discs go through the same torment. Should I include some classical? I never actually listen to any, but perhaps it would make me look more intelligent. How about some hip-hop? Don’t listen to much of that, either, but perhaps I should pretend I do. Was my list too white? Too male? Too clichéd? Should I include something from the past couple of years – or at least the last 10 years – to make people think I’m still in touch with the new? In the end, I swallowed my pride, stopped attempting to impress people I’ll never meet, and made a list of songs that, if not necessarily the finest ever written, at least held a particular emotional significance for me. It wasn’t easy, though. Being honest about your cultural tastes is hard. We so often lie about them. We want to convince our friends and colleagues that we’re clever, sophisticated, fashionable, open-minded; and we want to convince ourselves that we’re all those things, too. So we train ourselves to like, or at least “appreciate”, things that instinctively we find dull. We force ourselves to sit through boring but worthy films, to finish impenetrable but acclaimed novels. Hours and hours of our lives we squander, out of sheer, pitiful insecurity.
I envy children. Children never lie about their tastes. They’re joyfully, guiltlessly honest. My son’s three favourite songs of all time are Agadoo by Black Lace, Yellow Submarine by The Beatles, and Mr Blobby’s Christmas No 1 from 1993. Three of the least cool songs in the world, but he loves them freely, without shame, because he has no concept of cool; no such pathetic neurosis governs his choices. If he says he likes something, it’s because he likes it, and that’s that. He’s three years old, yet his attitude to art is far more mature than mine.
I secretly quite like Agadoo. And, come to that, the Mr Blobby song. I hope one day I’m mature enough to admit it.
My English grandfather died in 2005; my English grandmother in 2008. My Northern Irish grandmother died in 2011; my Northern Irish grandfather last year.
Yet, stored in my mobile phone, I still have their landline numbers. I don’t need them. I’ll never dial them. Yet I can’t bring myself to delete them. Weirdly, I feel as if to delete these numbers would somehow be disrespectful. An insult to my grandparents’ memory. As bad as, say, throwing their photographs in the bin.
It’s the same with houses. My phone still stores the landline number for the house I grew up in. It’s over two years since my parents moved away, but even so, I can’t bring myself to delete the number. I would feel as if I were deleting my childhood: wiping my memory clean. A ridiculous thought, but there it is. In all likelihood, I’ll never delete any of these numbers. I’ll still be holding pointlessly on to them till the day I die, decades after they were last of use.
It’s a uniquely modern superstition. I too will die, but my own number will live on in my son’s phone. Just as, presumably, my social media accounts will live on, an eerie digital shrine to my memory, preserving for all eternity the opinions I decided to share with the world after two drinks too many. That, in the end, will be my legacy, and the legacies of my friends, and the legacies of millions: the jokes we tweeted about series eight of The X Factor, the rows we had with total strangers about Ed Miliband and the photos we Instagrammed of our knees on sun loungers. In the meantime, we shall watch our friends and family die – and occasionally, in remembrance, we’ll reread their old status updates, silently mourning, the online equivalent of visiting their grave.
As my generation grows older, our phones will become mausoleums.