I played so much Battlefield 3 today that I developed post traumatic stress disorder. 6/2/2012 - 12:14am
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I am sat in a pathetically tiny office somewhere in West London. There are three desks in it, but there's only really room for two. It is dark and dingy, in spite of the ceiling high window opening out onto the street. The atmosphere is claustrophobic; the air still and lifeless. At the rear desk, a clinically depressed man is slouched at an outdated computer, presumably scouring Amazon for cheap toasters to take into his bath. Across from me, a humanoid creature is talking. She can pronounce words, and even form coherent sentences, quite adeptly. She even tries emoting, contorting her countenance, with some difficulty, into a smile. But she is not a human. She is a letting agent.
It's not just what she's telling me and my flatmate - that we have to pay five days rent for time when we weren't in the property - that's led me to this conclusion. I am looking into her eyes. They are empty, vacant. There is no soul in there. Her words smash against me like waves in a violent storm, every conniving sentence threatening to knock me from my feet and drown me in the swell. Eventually, she succeeds. We capitulate to her unreasonable demands, because if we don't, we'll be homeless in a week. She knows this and mercilessly exploits it. If she feels any remorse, her face does not betray it.
"This one's on the market for five hundred a week... also I have absolutely no moral qualms about eating your fucking face."
This is the behaviour of a psychopath. Now, Hollywood has taught us that a psychopath is a maniac in the mould of Hannibal Lecter, running around exotic locales avoiding FBI agents whilst indulging a streak of culinary creativity which would put Heston Blumenthal to shame. But from a clinical point of view, a psychopath is a person who completely lacks empathy, freeing them up to treat others as horribly as they want, without any pangs of that cumbersome emotion we call guilt. They are also vain, narcissistic and arrogant, which makes me wonder how Simon Cowell has escaped being sectioned under the Mental Health Act for so long.
Psychopathy is the only realistic way to explain how a letting agent behaves. For many people, flat hunting is a stressful experience at the best of times. The first obstacle to overcome is the disparity between expectations and reality. For instance, to some landlords and letting agents, mould is merely organic wallpaper, and a hole in the ceiling is a charmingly esoteric design quirk. An area where you're likely to get stabbed after dark has 'exciting nightlife'. A 'short distance' to a tube station may involve a hike worthy of a Duke of Edinburgh award. A letting agent will happily bombard you with a stream of disappointing, horrible properties which are nonetheless within your budget, then dangle ridiculously overpriced but opulent flats in front of you, like a withholding bastard Santa Claus. This process continues until you acquiesce, sacrificing either your dreams or your bank balance in the process.
To make matters worse, these soul-destroying searches are usually conducted against the clock, a ticking time bomb of looming homelessness which always seems closer than it actually is. That's because of Mazlow's hierarchy of needs, which states that before you can pursue your loftier ambitions, you must fulfil some basic requirements first:
I'm stuck on the Love/Belonging stage, in case you were wondering.
Property is right there on level two, just above excretion and breathing. The point is that it's important to find somewhere to live. The thought of not having somewhere is an upsetting one - not many philosophical treatises on the nature of existence have been penned in a piss-soaked alleyway, after all. Letting agents know this and exploit it. They'll hike up prices and invent ridiculous lies, and they'll do it all without a second's thought for your psychological wellbeing.
Pictured: an event which could not possibly have happened.
Sometimes I wonder if by making these assertions I'm flouting the maxim that you should never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. And there's no denying that the vast majority of letting agents are fucking idiots. Their lies are blatant and transparent - the one I just dealt with informed me with a straight face that all of Birmingham had been disconnected from the phone network for four days (not that I disapprove of the idea). Another (in Australia, perhaps unsurprisingly) forgot to bring a set of keys to the viewing, and patiently explained to me that she couldn't open the door without the key, as if I were the fucking simpleton. Frank Spencer would have winced.
So it's probably a bit of both, a letting agent's built-in malice fuelling their stupidity in a symbiotic circlejerk of screw-ups and disappointments. They're also greedy, driven by generous commissions and the prospect of company cars and presumably first dibs on the prostitutes at the Christmas party. A letting agent can earn a good amount of money, so the fact that the profession is largely staffed by boorish, semi-literate retards seems to indicate that there's better money to be made elsewhere for psychopaths with a shred of common sense or better acting abilities. Probably investment banking.
Back in the office, I retract my gaze from the farcically oversized map adorning the entirety of the largest wall, and bring it to bear on the letting agent. I cross my arms, passive-aggressively, and struggle to imagine how I could possibly have more contempt for her, and her ilk, than I do for anyone else in this horrible world. Even if she were a genocidal maniac, Hitler's ghost incarnate, I'd probably find something to respect about her. At least Hitler never charged extortionate agency fees. After what I hope to be a final round of convoluted faffing about, she hands us the keys and wishes good luck in the new flat.
Finally out of the office and safely around the corner, I splutter out a tirade of expletives, and vividly imagine the gruesome consequences of more permissive gun control laws. But the overarching feeling is not one of anger, but relief. We've signed the tenancy agreement. We have the keys to the flat. I have not lost my footing on the hierarchy of needs. The annual battle against incompetence, bureaucracy and meaningless credit checks has been won.
I look down at the palms of my hands. My fists were clenched so tightly, my nails have made imprints in the flesh. Five more minutes in there and I'd have probably been castrating myself with a stapler. I'm not alone - whenever I talk to anyone who's ever rented, we seem to be instantly united by the shared trauma of dealing with a letting agent, as if we were all at some point hostages of the same depraved captor. But there's no trace of Stockholm syndrome here - only the grim foreboding that, in twelve months, this hellish toil will play out all over again.
Stiff upper lip and all that.
Two weeks ago, the eyes of the world fell on our dainty island and watched, tearful, as a pair of over-privileged socialites tied the knot in an exorbitantly expensive and somewhat incestuous marital ceremony. Many flags were waved and much alcohol consumed (at least it was in my case, mostly as a coping mechanism). The Union Jack was displayed in such force that it began to shed some of its nationalistic overtones. A bizarre patriotic mania gripped the country, and for one day, our streets were full of parties instead of stabbings. Despite my cynical assessment, the Royal Wedding stood tall as an example of absolute, undiluted Britishness.
One week later, and another more alarming British trait could be observed: the recent tendency to make shockingly poor decisions in elections. In retrospect, the warning signs were apparent on the wedding day. The proletariat masses, the same people whooping and guffawing as them there pretty people got married, were about to be asked if they'd like to make a relatively simple change to the electoral system to make our democracy fairer. They were asked, and they answered incorrectly.
Obviously, like any sane person whose skull contains a brain and isn't just an empty cavity full of spider webs and badger farts, I wanted AV to win. I am angry that it didn't. I have calmed down a bit since Friday night, when I returned home, pissed, and binge-ate a whole tub of olives in frustration at the result (although mostly because I like olives). Furthermore, I take a fairly dim view of anyone who voted No. Whilst I would stop short at calling EVERYONE who voted no an idiot, I would quite happily tar the majority with that brush. The remainder, those who possessed enough nous to form a coherent opinion, yet still inexplicably voted to condemn our democratic process to the dark ages for another generation, are guilty of no less than intellectual treason.
It may sound unreasonable to label the majority of the British electorate as either mentally destitute or treacherous scum, but I struggle to find an explanation which is equally compelling and succinct. The No campaign shamelessly exploited this stupidity, decrying the system as 'too complicated' and offering up all sorts of contorted bullshit metaphors to prove their asinine point. "Under AV the loser can win," was a common catchphrase you'd hear dribbled from the gaping gob of a No campaign dullard. Well yes, you could conclude that if you interpreted the results from one set of rules in the context of another, like winning a game of Monopoly with a royal flush, or triumphing in Guess Who by being the first person to ejaculate.
A coherent argument which made perfect sense.
None of the other ridiculous arguments from the No camp should have stood up to even a second's scrutiny from anyone with more critical thinking skills than an illiterate horse rapist. "It gives people more than one vote" was the argument championed by those who either didn't understand the system or stumbled at the point in the process when votes are actually tallied to decide the winner (hint: it only happens once). "It's too expensive" was a bare-faced and cynical lie, exposed by a modicum of fact-checking. "It's not used anywhere else" was a shameless appeal to collectivist groupthink, the sort of attitude whereby you refrain from unblocking the toilet because none of your housemates have done it either. This happened to me once in university halls and it was unpleasant.
But the "it's too complicated" argument was by far the most disingenuous. AV is not a complicated system, but the way the No campaign portrayed it made it sound like the fucking Voyager space programme. Even if we generously conceded that the process of ranking candidates was significantly more complex than simply picking your favourite, my response would still be: so what? Life is complicated, the democratic system more so. How do people who struggle with AV cope with the trains? Imagine the scene at the ticket office. "I require a single train, which departs at any time, and takes me to any destination. Change at Basingstoke you say? Change at Basingstoke! That's far too complicated to be BRITISH. My grandfather didn't fight the Germans so I'd have to change at Basingstoke!"
The Yes campaign was far from blameless for its own demise. They failed to tackle any of the No campaign's bollocks head-on, instead puking up lukewarm, unconvincing tosh in lieu of actual arguments. This left it to noble mercenaries like me to go around threatening anyone who didn't vote Yes with horrific physical repercussions, including my own mother. I should have been in charge of the Yes campaign. It's very easy to make AV apply to everyday real-life situations, like purchasing a murder weapon from a hardware store (maybe they're out of your first choice, hacksaws, but there's a solid deal on claw hammers), or deciding which orifice to penetrate during sex ("The votes are in honey - I'm afraid it's the nostril again. The vagina narrowly lost out in the second round."). And so on.
The Yes campaign may have been ineffectual, but just as the truism tells us that you can't polish a turd, so too can you not persuade a group of turds to vote for you, no matter how polished you are. It's an unavoidable fact that human beings naturally fear change and tend to gravitate towards small-c conservatism, which I am willing to accept as a piss-weak reason for voting No. But some pundits hypothesised that a lot of No voters were casting their votes purely as an act of sabotage against Nick Clegg and his not-so-merry men. This sort of infantile 'fuck-you' voting was definitely apparent in the local election results, in which the Lib Dems took a pounding for their numerous imagined parliamentary transgressions. Like that MP who proposed an extra bank holiday just for paedophiles, or the one who wanted to criminalise Sunny Delight. Probably. I don't remember the details.
The thought that people actually vote like that, with such myopic ignorance, genuinely sickens me. I am burdened with that thought as I walk to work; the thought that anyone I pass may have voted No to AV because they reckon Nick Clegg is a sexual deviant who gets aroused by sewerage, or because he's got a face like a clinically depressed llama, or because they thought AV was some sort of disease the gays have. One day, when it all gets too much, I will be walking along and will suddenly wretch, violently ejecting my stomach contents over pavement and pedestrians both, my digestive system succumbing to a physical impulse which has been manifesting emotionally for years. I will collapse to the floor, onto my hands and knees, mucus and bile dripping from my face, and I will stare at the earth and feebly proclaim, "you people make me sick!" This will probably result in me being subjected to some sort of mental health assessment, during which I will do nothing but shout, "BUT WHO IS TRULY INSANE?" repeatedly, with the same intonation. Hopefully after that I'll make a full recovery.
So, the British public are, overall, cretins. That is neither an original nor a particularly insightful conclusion, but it is a simple one, which I believe lends it a poetic air given the tone of the debate which surrounded the AV referendum. I have honestly tried to reconcile this pithy conclusion with the thought that the vote on AV was merely an invitation to express an opinion, and surely everyone is entitled to an opinion. Am I narrow-minded for castigating those whose opinion differs from mine? Perhaps. I am also narrow-minded for a variety of other reasons. But ultimately, this referendum was about more than opinions, privy as they are to retrograde partisanship and inane prejudices. It was about how we move forward as a democracy, in an increasingly diverse and despondent society. Whilst not perfect, I sincerely hold that AV was what we needed, and we fucked up, collectively. We won't get this chance again. We blew it.
Thanks a lot, Nick.
Permalink || Posted 8/5/2011 - 7:00pm by Pete
Ken Bigley - 8/5/2011 - 7:53pm
If I'd of been alive I would have voted yes Peter. Unfortunately my head gt chopped off :(
Fat_Kev - 8/5/2011 - 11:45pm
I couldn't agree more with this.
Today I found out my mother and father voted no :(
Elliott - 9/5/2011 - 11:44am
Our politics in a nutshell: http://goo.gl/jQIZT
Heston Blumenthal - 9/5/2011 - 9:35pm
The penultimate paragraph right put me off my meal.
But then I realised I was eating vomit, mucus and bile and I chuckled to myself and gobbled the whole thing up.
danny - 9/5/2011 - 10:32pm
I could not have wordes it better. Best written article i have read in a long time.
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