ANOTHER VOICE
The night Arthur nearly caught me in Boobtropolis
BORIS JOHNSON
0 h flip. The door was open. The door to my office was open and Arthur the care- taker was still there, whistling as he came up the stairs. Oh jeepers, I thought. This gave me several options. I could either leap up and shut the door, which Arthur would find puzzling and possibly rude. Or else I could try to butch it out, or try to turn the hellish gizmo off. Alternatively, I could try to cover up the incriminating evidence on my screen.
Have you ever been in this position? Has any other human being ever known this predicament? Just look at the statistics. According to the newspaper, the Internet boffins say that 70 per cent of the world's surfers at any given moment are looking at pornography. Yup. That's right. It's the engine of Onan. It's a glorified interconti- nental wankerama, and any second now Arthur the cigar-smoking cleaner was going to catch me with my screen frozen and up to my eyeballs in ahem . . . Cough.
Perhaps I should explain. About six years ago I suggested a column for the Daily Tele- graph on this sensational new wheeze, which Tory ministers at the time were call- ing the 'electronic superhighway'. The piece we were looking for was a spooky, shivers- up-your spine effort on the lines of 'The Vile Images Which Abound In Cyberspace'. So, in the company of Kate the Telegraph librarian, we footled around for a while. And I am ashamed to say we drew a more or less total blank. Everything seemed to take for ever. We finally came across something that sounded faintly saucy, but it turned out to be a Chinese takeaway in San Diego.
As a result, the article was perhaps not as bloodcurdling as it ought to have been; I'll never forget the scorn on the lovely lips of the features editor as I was treated to the kind of reception that the Mail might give a star reporter who returns to the office with the news that the widow didn't want to talk. And so I hope you will accept it when I say that it was partly through a desire to avenge that searing episode that I was in my current fix; and partly, of course, through sheer what do you call it? Curiosity. That's right. It was an honest journalistic desire to get to grips with a modern phenomenon. No. Wait.
We can do better than that; it wasn't a desire. It was a duty. It was my duty as an editor to evaluate — there's a good word the type of material that was, um, corrupt- ing, er, polluting. . . . Oh, you know what I mean. There I was, innocently looking at skiing holidays, in my first go on the Inter- net, when I thought I'd just tap in the word `girls' on the search engine, just to see, for heaven's sake.
And pow. Before you could say 'Double you double you double you dot corn' I was being welcomed to something called 'Boob- tropolis'. In fact, I was being given an exceedingly frank and cordial welcome by a girl with no clothes on whose name I am ashamed to admit I can't remember. Oh boy. I think the charms of Boobtropolis must have absorbed me for a minute or so, after which two things occurred to me more or less at once. The first was that Arthur was approaching and the second was that Boobtropolis was not an easy place to escape from.
Every time I clicked the little cross in the top left-hand corner, in the hope of getting back to the fresh, clean world of skiing holi- days, some new gorgeous creature would appear, with yet greater enticements to get out my credit card and. . . .
`You still here then?' said a friendly voice at the door, rustling his bin-liner and, for a split-second, it was a toss-up between hurl- ing myself at the screen, or perhaps pulling all the plugs out. Oh cripes, I thought. What were the rules? Was there not some recent case of people being fired for 'down- loading' images? On the other hand, what was downloading? Had I accidentally downloaded the entire red-light district of Boobtropolis, or had I merely 'called it up'? Was there any difference?
'I'm sorry I had to call you, Mr and Mrs Hitler, but, as you can see, little Adolf has whipped the children into quite a frenzy.' The girls of the Internet stared back, tl eyes locked on mine. They jolly well w locked, frozen, in fact; and any second Arthur was going to come in and clear the waste-paper basket, and the damn c sor had picked a fine time to leave me. I another couple of nanoseconds I rehear: the possibility of just switching it off, MI ting it down. But what if someone turned it on and found all these fanta: nude chicks still there, a-pouting and a-b ging? It wouldn't look good. No, it woulc look plausible to blame the Millennium b or sunspots, or someone else in the offi Arthur must have coughed outside door, because I leapt like a gaffed salty. and jabbed again at the mouse.
For no reason that I could see, 1 machine suddenly started to play thuddi stripper-type music. Shut up, I hissed, t ing to calculate how far the noise was cat ing and then, to my amazement, it bellow in an American accent. 'You are in Bo, tropolis! Welcome to Titty City!' and ft proceeded to list some of the attractions the town, whose centro storico could reached by feeding your credit-card det; into the ravening maw of Cyberspace.
After a long, stunned interval, the cur unfroze, and so did I; and was rewarded the blissful sound of the vacuum-cleat starting up downstairs. Somehow I made escape from Titty City, like Odysseus esc ing from Circe, and staggered through high alpine passes of the online brochures to freedom. Phew-ee. And I c dude with the happy thought that the Int net will not be an unparalleled corrupter morals — a charge that has been laid agai every big advance in information technoli since Adam ate the fruit of the Tree Knowledge — for the following reason.
Not only is there the risk that y( screen will freeze at the wrong moment am also told, by a friend who specialises the Internet for a major newspaper, t] your every foray into Boobtropolis recorded somewhere in the innards of 1 beastly machine. In fact, the only way covering it up is to take an axe to 1 gizmo, extract something called the 'hi drive', and melt it down, like the climax Terminator 2. And therefore it seems lik that society will be protected from deg( eration by the eternal guardian of species, namely sheer funk at the thou! of being caught.
Previous page
