The Times - UK (2021-11-25)

34 Thursday November 25 2021 | the times

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want to eat French food and see

Paris. Not eat burgers in ersatz

western saloons, queue for hours,

then watch a parade of drama school

rejects dressed as cartoons. Besides,

when my kids were small, Disney

didn’t even sell booze. (I note that in

2016 the Peppa Pig World loos were

found coated in cocaine.)

I served my years of kids’ movies,

pantos, zoos, even those inner circles

of hell, soft play centres. But a whole

day feeding a corporate franchise?

Just say no. Give your kids

something to talk about in

therapy one day.

Euro bakers

I

n a fractious world

there’s always Bake

Off to gently bain-

marie your troubled

brain. This was a

particularly pleasing series,

with a delightful final four

people who all genuinely

seemed to get along. It

also speaks well of us

that one was German,

two were British Asians

and the eventual

winner was Italian, yet

all enjoyed

overwhelming public

goodwill.

Whatever our Brexit

jingoism, we are

self-deprecating, even

humble, about our food. I remember

Jamie Oliver visiting Italy and

proposing his own “twists” on classic

dishes, only to be told by indignant

Italians there was only one right way

to cook them. But we loved that

Crystelle infused British recipes with

Goan flavours. Jaggery? How

interesting, might give it a go.

In culinary matters

maybe Brits are better

Europeans than the

remaining EU nations.

In Italy a British (or

indeed any non-native)

contestant winning a

national TV baking

contest would cause

uproar; in France it

would be a public

disgrace.

Holding on

T

he actor Mark

Gatiss, who recently

lost several close

family members, says he

cannot bring himself to

delete their numbers

from his phone.

Informing everyone

about my new email

address, I noted how

many on my contact

list were gone. When

someone dies, I find

you must delete their

number right away or

T

he prime minister
announced he’d spent
Sunday in Peppa Pig
World, “as we all must”. But
must we? I confess I raised
two children and never once took
them to a theme park. They entered
neither a Disney Corporation facility
nor Thorpe Park, Legoland, Lapland,
not even a crap winter wonderland
with cotton-wool snow and a sad dog
in antlers.
We worry children are susceptible
to advertising but parents are an
easier mark. Theme parks twang our
guilt strings. Do you work long
hours, slyly scroll your phone during
long school assemblies, stick
CBeebies on to sneak a Sunday
lie-in? Well, immerse your kids in
their favourite fantasy and all is
forgiven. You’ll “build memories”,
one-up their classmates and bank a
gazillion Daddy points.
Maybe I’m a hard woman but if
I’m paying a fortune to visit Paris, I

The internet has turned our past into a curse

Forgetting is one of the means by which society heals itself but there is no chance of that online

themselves out. Too much memory

is paralysing. Only by forgetting is it

possible to advance. The culture war

is the characteristic war of the

internet age because it is a war of

endless remembering: the same

battles over race and gender fought

year after year, the same scandals

interminably revived, the same

villains somehow always at the

centre of it all.

Incidentally, I have sometimes

wondered: does the iconoclasm of

statue topplers come at least partly

from this new internet-derived idea

that there should be no forgetting,

that the past exists simultaneously

with the present and is there to be

trawled for evidence of moral wrong

with just the same fervour?

Our modern chaos is the chaos of

never forgetting. “My memory, sir, is

like a garbage heap,” Funes says. The

story’s narrator observes that Funes

has almost lost the power of thought,

for “to think is to... forget

differences, to generalise, to abstract”

and “in the teeming world of Ireneo

Funes there was nothing but

particulars, virtually immediate

particulars”. The internet is an

anarchy of immediate particulars.

One ancient stupid tweet defines a

person more than any considered

and abstracted notion of their whole

personality.

Funes was merely condemned

never to forget. We are doubly

condemned, for we are also

condemned never to be forgotten. As

Mayer-Schönberger points out, “To

be preserved forever” was the legend

the KGB stamped on the files of its

political prisoners. It was meant as a

kind of curse.

pressure of an inexhaustible reality.

A journalist I know remarked to me

recently that every time you get into

serious trouble on Twitter, all the

stupid and embarrassing things you

have ever done resurface and the

site’s users become as angry and

horrified by those stupid and

embarrassing things as if they had

happened yesterday, not ten years

ago.

No online enemy offends you in

this moment only. A scroll through

an antagonist’s profile will inevitably

reveal an almost inexhaustible

history of contemptuous ideas and

views to hate — and to return to

regularly. I occasionally (more often

than I should) look up cruel things

people have said about me on

Twitter. And every time I look, I feel

hurt, as if the cruel thing was said

today, not months in the past.

Features like Facebook’s “on this

day” contribute to the atmosphere of

chaotic simultaneity. Memories of

parties, of funerals, of old lovers

arrive without invitation and without

reason. The past lurches

meaninglessly towards us, as real and

vivid as the present.

As the academic Viktor Mayer-

Schönberger writes in Delete: The

Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,

his interesting book about the

internet and memory: “For

millennia, human beings have lived

in a world of forgetting. Behaviour,

societal mechanisms and processes

and values have incorporated and

reflected that fact.” Forgetting is a

blunt moral instrument but for

centuries it has afforded an

invaluable kind of justice.

Reputations heal, old fights burn

I

t is a terrible thing never to
forget. In the great Argentine
writer Jorge Luis Borges’s story
Funes the Memorious, a young
man named Ireneo Funes is
condemned to remember every
moment he has ever lived. His
present, his past, his most trivial
memories are constantly “so rich and
so clear” to him that his life has
become unbearable.
Not in any of the most dazzling,
most fiercely splendid cities in the
history of the world, Borges writes —
not in Babylon, or London or New
York — has anyone ever been
assailed by “the heat and pressure
of a reality as inexhaustible
as that which battered Funes day
and night”.
I no longer find it possible to read
Borges’s story without thinking of
the internet. Our words and gestures
fade in memory. Old photographs
are lost. But online every dumb
picture, every unfinished
conversation and every idle feud is
preserved as perfectly as one of
Funes’s memories. These things go
on existing, as vividly, as angrily and
as pointlessly as they did when you
hit the enter key and closed the
Twitter tab in righteous disgust.
There is no forgetting, no mercy of
slow disappearance. Like Funes, we
are condemned to live in the

appalling glare of an eternal present.

I think this has changed us

profoundly.

I read last week of the rediscovery

of antisemitic messages sent by the

cricketer Azeem Rafiq as a teenager.

Without the internet those messages

could never have been found. That

nasty fragment of the past would

have been lost irrevocably. But the

internet did not just preserve those

messages, I think it changed them

too. The immediacy of the internet

— the way it preserves stuff, keeps it

instantly available, ties it to the same

“profile” you still use now — makes

even the distant past belong to the

present in a way that would have

once seemed incomprehensible. For

many of Rafiq’s severer critics, there

was no difference between the

teenager and the man. Online

everything exists equally and at

once.

In this land of no forgetting you do

not exist moment to moment, in

possession of that liquid and mutable

thing, a human personality. You are

instead a kind of archival aggregate

of every clever and every fatuous

thing you have ever said. Online, we

are not so much people as vast,

unwieldy filing cabinets waiting to be

browsed by our friends or raided by

our enemies.

It is from here that so much of the

fury of the internet derives. Like

Funes, we suffer the heat and

We are condemned

never to forget and

never to be forgotten

you never will. A friend used to text

her late brother, the modern

equivalent of a seance: it seemed

feasible there was a phone signal in

the afterlife. I keep a small email

folder of final messages from the

dead, including Nora Ephron, who I’d

recently interviewed. If you still have

their hasty, chatty, everyday scree,

someone can’t truly be lost.

On Facebook ghostly birthdays

flash by, Twitter accounts of the

deceased are “recommended” to me.

Then my iPhone throws up a

“memory”, a picture of a late friend,

my dad, my mum when she was well.

I am furious at the unwanted

intrusion, an algorithmic stirring of

my emotions. Yet I can’t look away.

Morale booster

A

t my booster jab appointment

I was delighted to be offered

another sticker. “I’ve boosted

my immunity,” it says, in a cheery

font. Those who mutter that such

things are a waste of NHS resources

don’t understand human beings, our

pathetic desire for approval when we

do the right thing. This won’t be our

last booster shot. And when I woke

this morning, my arm was throbbing

and I felt queasily hungover though I

didn’t drink a thing. I deserved my

damn sticker.

Janice Turner Notebook

Boris should

have said a

flat no to

Peppa Pig

@victoriapeckham

Britain can gain

by giving back the

Elgin Marbles

Hugo Dixon

H

ere’s a win-win solution

that might just resolve the

dispute between Britain

and Greece over the Elgin

Marbles. Greece could let

the British Museum make a high-

quality marble copy not just of the

sculptures it has, but of the Parthenon

sculptures that are in the Acropolis

Museum in Athens. London would

give back the originals. That way

Greece would have all the originals

but the British Museum would have

an identical copy.

The largest section of the

Parthenon sculptures is in the British

Museum. The next largest is in the

Acropolis Museum. There are also

much smaller sections in other

museums, such as the Louvre. The

rest have been destroyed. Although

there are lots of excellent plaster casts

of the sculptures, the British Museum

is not aware of any marble copies. The

copies that it would receive in such a

deal would therefore be special.

Greece could further sweeten the

deal by saying it would authorise only

one copy of the sculptures, which

could be made of Pentelic marble, the

same as the originals. Sculptors often

create limited editions of their works.

Nobody is too worried about whether

they have the first or second in an

edition, though admittedly Henry

Moore didn’t wait 2,500 years to make

second copies of his nudes.

The British Museum argues that the

marbles are a much-valued part of its

collection and that it can set them in

the context of world history, whereas

the Acropolis sets them in the context

of Athenian history. This proposal

would side-step that objection.

London would end up with more, not

fewer, sculptures.

A further concern is that handing

back the Elgin Marbles could set a

precedent and soon many British

museums would be emptied of their

treasures. Even if such a deal did set

a precedent, would it be a bad one? If

other countries wanted their cultural

jewels back, we would get to keep the

only authorised copies and receive a

copy of something else precious in

return.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek

prime minister, was in Britain last

week drumming up support for the

Elgin Marbles to be returned to

Athens. He seems to be winning the

public relations war. Boris Johnson

should embrace such a deal. Quite

apart from ending a running sore, he

would cement good relations with

Greece at a time when we need

friends. He could even think of it as

using our soft power to advance the

Global Britain agenda.

Hugo Dixon is a journalist and campaigner

Nobody is too worried

about whether it’s the

first or second edition

James

Marriott

@j_amesmarriott