DIARY
PETER PRESTON Ameeting to discuss a bit of anodyne, extraneous business with a Tory life peer and ex-Cabinet minister. 'We've known each other for a long time,' he says sooth- ingly. 'In spite of our politics, I'm sure we can work together.' In spite of politics? Where do politics get into this act? I gave up politics when I first went into journalism (turning down, as it happens, a rather bizarre constituency request to stand as a Tory candidate). I quite deliberately have only acquaintances, never friends, in all three parties. I beamed when Prime Minis- ter Callaghan once exploded that 'with "friends" like the Guardian, who needs enemies?' But now, apparently, I'm some kind of rabid attack dog, to be skirted like a nervous milkman. It feels exceedingly odd.
What, I always used to wonder, do very senior newspaper executives do? The current answer, on four months' experi- ence, is painfully simple. They either attend expensive media conferences on the future of Internet and the Worldwide Web, or they spend their days turning down invitations to such events. I perforce had to say no twice over to Sir David Frost and the Chinese government this morning. This doesn't, you understand, betoken any lack of zeal for the technological future pulsating around us or indifference to the Challenging Questions the circuit of lecturers habitually asks. Will newspapers as we know them die? Will advertising as we know it die? Will chaps as we know them who nod off after lunch at the back of the hall face commercial extinc- tion? But repetition breeds just a sliver of scepticism. If Nicholas Negroponte wasn't so excitingly controversial, would anyone still pay him $25,000 a throw? More slitty- eyed still, is the weal of the Web what you make it? Two agency gurus were doing the Death of Advertising act at separate ses- sions the other day and the message was uncannily similar. The new, Internetted consumer will soon be king and must be served individually in mind-boggling ways which speak directly to his or her own per- sonal interests. Flash to pitch for new car and four glossy commercials about leather seats or camshafts, summoned according to taste. Does that mean, though, that general brand advertising is doomed? No, you still need that in order to attract the empowered consumer's interactive interest in the first place. Five separate film commercials where only one will presently do. Perhaps they're really talking about the death of the advertiser's bank manager.
Newspaper special offers come and go, but in summer they come thick and fast: from £1 off four cans of lager to cheap trips to Dieppe. Fair enough. It isn't the offers that curdle the brain but the prose they come swaddled in. Consider, for example, the following paragraph, launching the Independent's Wicked Weekends. 'Put a twinlde in your eye and travel back to the Naughty Nineties, a time when champagne was the drink of choice, joie de vivre the watchword and liaisons were, as often as not, just a little dangereuses'. Who writes this stuff? Some integrated toiler from Mir- ror marketing instructed to strike an ABC1 note for the Indie? Or does the editor, Mr Ian Hargreaves, save cash by tossing off the turge between Demos pamphlets? We are, it transpires, being offered 'forbidden fruit' amid the 'sumptuous upholstery' of the 17th-century Quorn Country House Hotel, where 'an entire rainforest seems to have been sacrificed to provide a majestic mahogany staircase'. Is this really circula- tion salvation for the heirs of the saintly Andreas? I lived most of my childhood in Quorn. It is a large, Pevsner-repellent com- muter village strung along the A6 two miles south of Loughborough, now somewhat redeemed by a majestic bypass. On wicked weekends long ago you could walk round to the Baptist chapel youth club to play table tennis or watch Quorn FC play Barrow Old Boys. The eponymous hunt lies three miles away, where the Wolds begin and the scenery gets better. Quom's main excite- ment was the occasional flooding of the Soar, which made it difficult to reach Mountsorrel where my severely puritan grandmother lived. Those truly seeking a little ooh-la-la might be better advised to try the Holiday Intl, Leicester, which at least has a number of reasonable curry houses within easy reach.
I. t's a warm enough evening to sit out at a local restaurant, and we are on to the cof- fee when a couple of Americans take the next table. He's puffy and balding and fortysomething plus; she, all scraped blonde pigtail and candy-striped shirt, could be his delicious daughter, but isn't. There is a great fuss about low-fat sauce for his fish, and then Candy emits a rasping snort as my wife reaches for her handbag. 'Oh, Gawd, now she's gonna smoke.' She isn't. She never has. She turns round and says so, a touch acidly. Candy snarls uncertain defiance for a while and returns to tell Fortyplus why she damn well doesn't want to go to Corsica with him. She intends to sit on a beach and he'll be bored, bored, bored. Why do non-smokers, especially American non-smokers, make me feel like Auberon Waugh on a bad day? I smoked a pipe for 30 years, the Wilson of the newsroom. I couldn't begin to write or think without it. And I loved America. But the two becagie an impossible combination. One of my dearest, puffing English friends from university, the man whose college door used to release a grey fog of fumes when he opened it, turned into an unpassive ayatol- lah when he moved to Washington. 'Pete,' he said the last time I stayed, 'would you mind going out onto the porch if you want to smoke?' Banished with the cats. So I have stopped, completely, despairingly — since 10.35 a.m. on 28 August 1994, as a matter of record. Now I chew too much gum. Does that mean it's safe to cross the Atlantic again? Probably, for a while, but a traveller from Singapore brings the dire tidings that Lee Kwan Yew's manicured mini-dictator- ship has recently made the sale or consump- tion of gum illegal. Oh, Gawd, now he's gonna start chewing.
Very little, as a matter of curious obser- vation, is written about chewing-gum. It fills billions of mouths around the world but receives neither the Malcolm Glugg fruity nose wine treatment nor even occasional consumer testing in the posh Sundays. You may get the odd paragraph or two on the impact of Sorbitol on the fluidity of the lower bowel — but never taste or texture: which allows me to offer this unique advice to Spectator readers. The best, the densest, the stickiest, the chewiest gum around isn't globalised Wrigley. It is called Stimorol (a name too much like a lavatory cleaner), and it is made in Vejlo, Denmark, by the Sti- morol Chewing Gum Association. Avail- able, increasingly, from newsagents of vary- ing quality at prices between 20 and 30 pence a packet. Start on the fruit flavour if you must, but the real stuff is Stimorol Orig- inal with a liquorice kick. Perhaps Bron might organise a special offer.
7. Peter Preston is editor in chief of the Guardian and the Observer.
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