Bourgeois life is too easy a target for satire. There’s nothing better than the dual carriageway and a job in extra-wet tissues
Some years ago my father came home from an academic conference with a picture book he’d been given by his visitors, Oulu, the Fifth Biggest Town in Finland.
It was crammed with photographs of the highlights of this jewel of Northern Ostrobothnia. The town hall, the sawmill museum, a bicycle stand, a deserted shopping street covered in snow. There was also plenty of useful information. Since 1996 Oulu has hosted the Air Guitar World Championship. And at the end of the book was a picture of a dual carriageway accompanied by the suggestion that we might like to visit Oulu. ‘Or better still, go round it.’
At first I thought this meant that the whole book had been a joke. Slowly, however, I realised that they were simply proud of the Oulu ring road and were advising us not to miss the chance of travelling on it once we’d had our fill of sawmills.
You might think of this column as: In Defence of Oulu.
It is prompted by the death of that great genius David Nobbs, the author of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the man who appreciated the comedy in describing a train arriving eleven minutes late at Waterloo station owing to staff difficulties at Hampton Wick.
Nobbs chronicles the monotony of daily suburban life brilliantly. Walking down Coleridge Close and turning right into Tennyson Avenue, filling in the crossword on the journey into work at Sunshine Desserts, the three pictures on his boss’s wall: ‘A Francis Bacon, a John Bratby and a photograph of CJ holding the lemon mousse which had won second prize in the convenience foods category at the 1963 Paris Concours Des Desserts.’
Nobbs said that one of his inspirations was the thought that people have such strange jobs: ‘You can’t grow up wanting to become an executive for extra-wet strength tissues.’ A life trying to think of ways to market products like Kumquat Surprise (‘What about something like, off the top of my head, I like to stroke my nipple with a strawberry and lychee ripple’) drives Reggie to a breakdown.
Though Nobbs was an uncommon talent, his was not an uncommon target. The futility of suburban or small-town life, the banality of commerce and management, the hypocrisy of respectable lives behind net curtains, the despair as youth trickles away into middle age.
And every time I watch Richard Briers quit for a life of self-sufficiency in Surbiton, or Kevin Spacey’s character Lester Burnham melt down in American Beauty, or Reggie Perrin fake his suicide, I am struck by the same thought inspired by the guide to Oulu.
Sunshine Desserts is the height of civilisation. Lester Burnham was better off when he went to work in an office and looked after his family. Oulu is right to boast of its ring road, which is quite an achievement.
When we look at history we regard as heroes those who fought and those who conquered, those who were martyrs for their point of view, those who set out on great adventures, those who built great cathedrals and pyramids.
Yet I think it is a fine ambition to have been an executive for extra-wet strength tissues. In the history of mankind how many better jobs have there been? How many have been better paid? More comfortable? Less dangerous? More inoffensively useful to their fellow man?
The HR department of a children’s shoe brand has never launched a war. Nobody dies in the creation of advertisements for Kumquat Surprise. Surely the reason our ancestors struggled so hard and even fought wars is so that we, their children, could live happily on the commuter line to King’s Cross, heading into work on the 8.17.
I always sigh when I hear people attack consumerism. All that hunger, and war and pestilence, all that dictatorship and torture and tragedy and they want to attack shopping?
I was brought up in Hendon Central and when I was thirteen years old they opened Brent Cross Shopping Centre. I could walk there without crossing the road. My father was a cultured man, a highly sophisticated intellectual, but he regarded the shopping centre as among the great beneficial developments of mankind.
He had almost starved as a young boy in a Soviet-imposed exile. When my father was thirteen years old he couldn’t walk to the shopping centre because there wasn’t one in Siberia. He couldn’t drive there either, because Stalin had the car.
For him, the ability to buy a prepared sandwich in Marks & Spencer or meet my mother for a crusty roll and butter in the Tesco coffee shop represented a great advance in the condition of man. And isn’t it wonderful to live in a country in which we worry seriously about becoming too fat?
People talk about the death of big ideas. The great thing about Britain is our small ideas and our pragmatism, our suburbs and our bourgeois stability. This thing – this apparent banality – that we so easily satirise is what people at the Channel Tunnel are desperate to have. They are fighting their way to be able to work in the Alpine Dry Cleaners in Hatch End. The right to purchase Good Housekeeping in the WHSmith on Bridge Street is as attractive a right as all those contained in the Declaration of Independence.
The Metropolitan Line from Pinner, change across the platform to the Jubilee Line at Finchley Road, is not quiet despair, it is salvation. Oh for delays caused by leaves on the line! Come bring me your apologies for inconvenience!
The heroes of history are those who do not fight wars; those who instead create a world fit for people to market non-stick frying pans and sell to each other oven-ready chips. Yvette Cooper. Jeremy Hunt. Not Julius Caesar. Or Fidel Castro.
Give me any day a politician who has been special adviser to the agriculture minister over a man on a white charger come to purify the nation and sweep away its corruption. For I well know who will be doing the sweeping and who will be the swept.
Give me special advisers and special offers. When people are trying things on in the changing rooms of Top Shop they are too busy to start transporting the Jews to the East.
We have toiled hard over centuries to create places like Oulu and Pinner, where we can live in peace and work in offices with desk chairs that swivel. Let the sun shine on Sunshine Desserts.