Events | 2010.03.13
Teabag in? Don't ask me | Andrew Martin
From roadside cafes to schools to Oscars, the choices multiply. I prefer life with fewer options
At the Oscars ceremony on Sunday, the Best Picture will be chosen from an expanded short-list. It\'s consisted of five films since 1944, but this year there are 10. I wonder if the judges, confronted with this prospect, feel as I do when I walk into the living room and see the complicated television, and the strewn listings magazines proffering the hundreds of channels theoretically available. I would describe this feeling as a surge of vertiginous panic, giving way to a migraine.
I have never listened to 6 Music , but I am inclined to favour its closure, since I would then not have to listen to it. The migraine that comes on, as I idly twiddle the dial on my radio wondering how bored I would have to be before I tuned into ABC1 Rock (to take the first one that comes up), would be marginally lessened. As the great broadcasting revolution began, Stephen Fry wrote a sketch in which a man was offered a cup of tea. He then requested a teaspoon to stir it with, at which a sackful of plastic stirrers was upended in front of him. "I only want a single teaspoon," he forlornly reiterated. "But look at the choice you have!" he was told.
I had my first inkling of all this in the mid-seventies, when I went to stay with my prosperous and rather racy aunt and uncle. I recall my aunt leaning over the breakfast bar and asking: "Do you want your chips crinkled or straight?" – a question I found completely stultifying. I didn\'t want to put my aunt to any extra work – but would I, by refusing the crinkled option, come across as a bit of a killjoy?
It was the beginning of our market-ised society – an era of questions that, for all the social good they have done, appear completely unnecessary. Do I want to travel north with East Coast or Grand Central? Who do I want to supply my electricity? Which school, out of all of them in the country, do I want my child to attend? (The neurotic making result of which neurotic question came through for thousands of parents this week ).
The best moments in my life are now the simplest ones. I shop at the smallest supermarket within reach (a Metro store), and I buy my takeaway teas from a vendor who confines his questioning to: "Milk and sugar, chief?" Large, medium or small ... he doesn\'t get into that. Herbal tea? He\'s never even heard of it. But he has lately, and disturbingly, added a new question: "Teabag in or out?", and I hope that I put down a marker by the vehemence with which I answered: "You decide."
Last summer, I regularly drove between Suffolk and London, and there was a deli on one of the country roads. The first time I went there, I was after a sandwich, but the proprietor was about to close, and was stowing away the blackboard on which he listed dozens of sandwiches. Hearing my request, he said flatly, "I can do you ham and tomato." Now, as a rule, I wouldn\'t go for ham and tomato. Ham and cheese? Yes. Ham and salad? Possibly. But I was hungry, and I had no choice. "All right!", I said, gamely.
It was, of course, one of the best sandwiches I\'ve ever eaten. It was not preceded by the migraine, and no recriminations could follow. I went back several times afterwards and always had the ham and tomato, but it was never quite the same because on the subsequent occasions I had always in effect chosen it, thus being haunted in the aftermath by the ghosts of all the choices not made. But I believe we are becoming wise to the hollowness of "choice". Who, when the automated voice on the telephone says, "You now have six options", thinks, "Oh, good"? Two options would be better than six. None at all might be better still.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]arketisation-tyranny-of-choice
