not having seen The Sopranos beyond season two. I watched the first season, then fell behind and never caught up. The other week, as luck would have it, a PR company promoting the box sets sent me all six seasons in their entirety. Hark at me. Now they’re sitting on my shelf, making me feel bad for not having watched them yet. And what about all those books I haven’t read, meals I haven’t eaten, countries I’ve never visited? How am I going to have time to fit all this stuff in? I can scarcely get it together long enough to perform the simplest of household chores, never mind all this extracurricular homework set by our cultural arbiters.
Besides, the more someone tells you how incredible something is, the more disappointing the reality turns out to be, largely because of the drum roll that preceded it.
Take the Grand Canyon. I visited the Grand Canyon in my mid20s. Hark at me (again). I stood on a ridge and gazed out and waited to have my mind blown. All I experienced was yet more guilt. I’d heard that it was breathtaking. I’d read florid descriptions of its life-altering majesty. But it was these descriptions, not the canyon itself, that were at the forefront of my mind as I stared at it.
‘Come on, you shallow idiot,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re supposed to be feeling something here. What’s the matter with you?’
Then I went back to the car, ate crisps and fiddled with the air-con, feeling box-empty inside. Call me shallow, but I’ve had more impressive trips to the toilet.
March of the Pods [26 November 2007]
Not long ago, I bought a coffee machine. You pop in a cute little metallic coffee pod, push a button and hey presto: you’ve made an espresso without having to faff around spooning coffee powder into a receptacle and banging it about and getting grit all over the sideboard and shouting like a sailor in a thunderstorm, which is what baristas do. It’s made by Nestlé. I’m dimly aware they’re supposed to be monstrously evil … but look, I hadn’t made the connection at the time, and besides, I need my coffee, OK? I’m a heartless monster.
Annoyingly, you can’t just walk into a shop and buy the special pods. You have to order them online, via an impossibly snooty website full of blah about the ‘subtle alchemy’ of coffee and so on. On handing over your details, you’re inducted into a mysterious ‘club’, the consequences of which were lost on me until this week, when a glossy magazine plopped through my door. Turns out that by buying a coffee machine, I’d inadvertently subscribed to a ‘lifestyle’, and this magazine would regularly arrive to congratulate me.
I like free magazines because they’re hilariously desperate, and the classier they purport to be, the more desperate they are. Nespresso magazine is the most acute example I’ve ever seen. It’s as hateful as Tatler , but with an overbearing and whorish emphasis on coffee pods bunged in for good measure. Let’s take a walk through the latest issue. The cover is a black-and-white photo of official ‘Nespresso ambassador’ George Clooney sitting at a table with a couple of coffee pods on it. They’re tastefully out of focus, so you don’t notice them at first. But they’re still there. Inside, there’s another huge photo of George balancing four coffee pods on top of each other.
The contents page is broken up with little colour photos of coffee pods, and snapshots of the contributors, including ‘legendary star photographer Michel Comte’ (posing pretentiously with his hands on his chin). Best known for snapping superstars, Comte has recently ‘taken a humanitarian bent’ by covering ‘war-tornlocations such as Iraq, Chechnya and Afghanistan’. But this week he ‘joined George Clooney for a coffee and the latest Nespresso campaign’. Beneath Comte’s photo is a bright blue coffee pod. Next, several pages showcasing the latest Nespresso coffee machines, which are intensely coloured because
Besides, the more someone tells you how incredible something is, the more disappointing the reality turns out to be, largely because of the drum roll that preceded it.
Take the Grand Canyon. I visited the Grand Canyon in my mid20s. Hark at me (again). I stood on a ridge and gazed out and waited to have my mind blown. All I experienced was yet more guilt. I’d heard that it was breathtaking. I’d read florid descriptions of its life-altering majesty. But it was these descriptions, not the canyon itself, that were at the forefront of my mind as I stared at it.
‘Come on, you shallow idiot,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re supposed to be feeling something here. What’s the matter with you?’
Then I went back to the car, ate crisps and fiddled with the air-con, feeling box-empty inside. Call me shallow, but I’ve had more impressive trips to the toilet.
March of the Pods [26 November 2007]
Not long ago, I bought a coffee machine. You pop in a cute little metallic coffee pod, push a button and hey presto: you’ve made an espresso without having to faff around spooning coffee powder into a receptacle and banging it about and getting grit all over the sideboard and shouting like a sailor in a thunderstorm, which is what baristas do. It’s made by Nestlé. I’m dimly aware they’re supposed to be monstrously evil … but look, I hadn’t made the connection at the time, and besides, I need my coffee, OK? I’m a heartless monster.
Annoyingly, you can’t just walk into a shop and buy the special pods. You have to order them online, via an impossibly snooty website full of blah about the ‘subtle alchemy’ of coffee and so on. On handing over your details, you’re inducted into a mysterious ‘club’, the consequences of which were lost on me until this week, when a glossy magazine plopped through my door. Turns out that by buying a coffee machine, I’d inadvertently subscribed to a ‘lifestyle’, and this magazine would regularly arrive to congratulate me.
I like free magazines because they’re hilariously desperate, and the classier they purport to be, the more desperate they are. Nespresso magazine is the most acute example I’ve ever seen. It’s as hateful as Tatler , but with an overbearing and whorish emphasis on coffee pods bunged in for good measure. Let’s take a walk through the latest issue. The cover is a black-and-white photo of official ‘Nespresso ambassador’ George Clooney sitting at a table with a couple of coffee pods on it. They’re tastefully out of focus, so you don’t notice them at first. But they’re still there. Inside, there’s another huge photo of George balancing four coffee pods on top of each other.
The contents page is broken up with little colour photos of coffee pods, and snapshots of the contributors, including ‘legendary star photographer Michel Comte’ (posing pretentiously with his hands on his chin). Best known for snapping superstars, Comte has recently ‘taken a humanitarian bent’ by covering ‘war-tornlocations such as Iraq, Chechnya and Afghanistan’. But this week he ‘joined George Clooney for a coffee and the latest Nespresso campaign’. Beneath Comte’s photo is a bright blue coffee pod. Next, several pages showcasing the latest Nespresso coffee machines, which are intensely coloured because
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