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David Wilson: his hero George is Everyman expressing the concerns of us all |
Warning: contains nuts
Peter Gruner introduces George, the hilarious fiftysomething hero of David Wilson’s new novel, who rages against modern life
This Age We’re Living In.
By David Wilson. Black Swan, an imprint of Transworld £6.99
POOR old fiftysomething Highgate newspaper columnist George Worth. He’s got an opinion on everything but he really does go on. You feel like you want to shake him, and exclaim: “For goodness sake George – get over it!”
All right, he’s lost his wife in a tragic motorcar accident and he was driving. But it wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t blame himself or indeed society at large.
George, the hero of David Wilson’s quirky new book, This Age We’re Living In, is so irritable and taciturn he manages to make Victor Meldew look positively easy going.
George hates everything from fashion, computers and mobile phones to TV remote controls and Young People. Oh, he definitely doesn’t like the young.
Of course, the more he rants about the gross stupidity of modern life – with a particular hatred for new technology – the more his readers like him.
He hates TV with an obsessional distaste. Programme makers, he says, have just 90 seconds to grab and keep the viewer’s attention before they switch over: “No wonder they [the programmes] are all so endlessly loud and lurid and stupid and full of people arguing and even the best stuff is so quick-fire and slick that real life is bound to seem dull by comparison.”
He admits that he can’t stand change. But with good reason – because one change can lead to another. “In your home life,” he says, “you just know that if you give a fresh coat of paint to that scratched skirting board it will make all the other skirting boards seem dull by comparison.
“So you have to paint them too, which makes the walls look faded, and before you know it you are having to decorate the whole room, and then the room next to it, and eventually the whole damn house.”
His tirades against the mundanities of life occasionally make for hilarious reading. Among his 25 rules for shopping is one that begins “the simpler the product, the more ridiculous the safety warnings”. A bag of peanuts has a warning: “Contains nuts.” A can of paint has a warning: “Not to be taken internally.”
His call for an end to change for the sake of change will find much sympathy in the hearts of many over-50s.
He blames meddling bureaucrats, commercial sponsors and PR consultants for altering everything and making the familiar seem unfamiliar: “I lost track of football somewhere around the time that the good old League Cup became, in rapid succession, the Milk Cup, the Littlewoods Cup, the Rumbelows Cup, the Coca-Cola Cup and, for all I know, the Tampax Cup.”
Familiar shops, businesses and utilities rebrand themselves for no apparent reason except to be “modern”.
“Even sensible organisations change their names to things such as Liberty and Relate – as if we can no longer remember more than a single word.
“Then they find that the new name is so unmemorable that many years later, newspapers refer to Relate followed by the words ‘formerly the Marriage Guidance Council,’ so that its ultimate title has become even longer and less snappy.”
Towards the end of the book, George writes a long letter to his late wife and finally realises that it is no good just being grumpy and moaning about life – he must do something about it.
David Wilson, 53, a journalist on national newspapers including The Times and Daily Mail, lived in Swains Lane in Highgate for 15 years before moving recently to Wanstead.
He was inspired to write this, his first book, by the imminent birth of his daughter, now six.
He said: “Like a lot of first-time parents I was mulling over what sort of a world I was bringing her into,” he said, “and also what I could possibly teach her about life.”
He added that in many ways George is Everyman expressing the concerns of us all.
“I have always had a jaded view of so called lifestyle columnists and their endlessly facile opinions. But George at least is writing about the normal things in British life which can be so irritating.”
This is a book for people going through a mid-life crisis – but also for everyone wanting a warm, humorous take on the modern world’s minor irritations.
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