LEAVE ME ALONE

NO!

A brief ejaculation of irritation, for free…

High on the list of reasons to loathe the internet are the presumptions of intimacy it facilitates - ‘Hi. Howard, hope this finds you well’ - followed by solicitations for an online review of a service of such small significance you have forgotten it by the time the solicitation for the review arrives.

‘Hi, Howard, hope this finds you well. How was your taxi ride? Hi, Howard, your opinion matters to us, tell us about the delivery of your parcel. Hi, Howard, our records show that you bought a second-class stamp from us. How is that working out for you?’

I was recently asked to review my experience of buying socks from a sock shop.

‘I bought a fucking sock,’ I wrote back.

‘You sound angry,’ they replied. ‘Are you making a complaint? PS - We don’t sell individual socks.’

PS?! See? Now we’re in amicable correspondence. Soon they’ll be inviting me to sock parties.

I’ve encountered similar intrusions and discourtesies from travel agents, taxi companies, florists, booksellers, a shirt company, an ophthalmologist, a hotel with a spa of whose services I didn’t avail myself (‘Why?’), a jeweller, a mortician (I was making enquiries for someone else), a sex club (ditto), and a physiotherapist from whom I received largely investigative therapy for an injury to my typing finger, the causes of which I’d rather not discuss but which, left uninvestigated, would have rendered me incapable of writing a review of the experience.

Experience! The new buzz word. We no longer eat out, we have a culinary experience. We no longer go on holiday, we have an elsewhere experience.

A friend was recently asked to review his experience of open-heart surgery. ‘Hi, Justin, hope this finds you well,’ the letter of request began. Then it asked him the following questions.

a) Will you recommend us to your friends?

b) Did you enjoy our choice of background music during the operation? If you’d rather not have had Black Sabbath’s cover of Verdi’s Requiem, which band would you have chosen?

c) Did you find our after-care tea-and biscuit service to your satisfaction?

d) Assuming we kept you alive, are you satisfied with the procedure you underwent? (Respondents who are no longer alive need not tick this box.)

PS - Might you consider using us again?

You think I’ve made that up. Maybe I have. Go with it. Think of it as a mendacity experience.

So what’s happening? Why this rage for reviews from reviewers whose bona fides we have no way of checking? When I accept a commission to write a review of someone’s play or novel I do so on the shared understanding that my judgement will be schooled and so of value. But who cares what I think of the shirt I have just bought online and indeed have just returned?

‘Since you ask, it was not fresh and tasted not so much like a blini as a cardboard box,’ I wrote, mistakenly sending the review of a restaurant I’d recently been to. The Shirt Extravaganza couldn’t have been nicer about it. They thanked me and suggested that if I ever bought a shirt from them again I shouldn’t eat it.

In this they were unlike the restaurant which opined that the collar was too tight because, as the Maitre d’ and several of the waitresses noted on the night I’d dined there, I snuffled at my food like a pig. ‘PS - how did I find the chewy brownies?’

PS - A neat way of concluding this short expression of vexation would be to ask you to review the experience of reading it. But I am not going to do that. Next thing we’ll be hoping it finds us well. And I don’t want to encourage unthinking chumminess. The simple knowledge that you’re reading me is enough. . .

PPS . . . and of course learning that your generosity has extended to a subscription.

and polished off three deserts while complaining to the desert waitress that I liked none of them.

But that aside, would I care to rate the meal, its presentation and the service, from zero to ten. I gave them three zeros.

So what’s driving this mania for good reviews is not business but isolation. It must be

A friend was recently asked to review his experience of open-heart surgery. ‘Hi, hope this finds you well,’ the letter of request began.

‘Tell them it doesn’t,’ was my advice. ‘Tell them it finds you feeling terrible.’

They sent him ten boxes to tick by return.

‘You’re still alive, tell them,’ was my advice.

What do they all want of me?

When I accept a commission to write a review of someone else’s novel I do so on the mutual understanding that my judgement will be schooled and so of value. But who cares what I think of the shirt I have just bought online and indeed have just returned? ‘If you want to know it was not fresh and tasted no so much like a blini as a cardboard box,’ which was a review I wrote of a restaurant I’d just been to and sent to the Shirt Extravaganza by mistake. They at least thanked me and suggested that if I ever bought a shirt from them again I shouldn’t eat it.

The restaurant was less polite, advising that if the collar was too tight that was because, as they noted on the night I dined there, I snuffled at my food like a pig and polished off three deserts while complaining to the desert waitress that I liked none of them. But that aside, would I care to rate the meal, its presentation and the service, from zero to ten. I gave them three zeros.

But I’m grateful; a reply is a reply.

reviewing my experience

If one more organisation or institution, one more hotel or restaurant, one more florist or bookseller, one more travel agent or taxi company,

restaurants, hotels, an ophthalmologist,

heart surgeon or mortician, reader if one more absolutely anyone writes, phones, texts or emails to request my opinion of the service they’ve provided, I will - yes, I will, without ceremony or euphemism or concern for their feelings - tell them. And it won’t be pretty.

High on the list of reasons to hate the internet are those pestiferous solicitations for online reviews from which no one who has received a service, no matter how basic, is safe. How was your taxi ride? Tell us about the delivery of your parcel? Our records show you have recently undergone open-heart surgery - please rate the experience from one to ten and then answer the following questions:

a) Will you recommend us to your friends?

b) Did you enjoy our choice of background music during the operation? If you’d rather not have had The Sex Pistols, which band would you have chosen?

c) Did you find our after-care tea-and biscuit service to your satisfaction?

d) Assuming we kept you alive, are you satisfied with the procedure you underwent?

e) Might you consider using us again?

REVIEW YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH SOCK SHOP - I bought a pair of socks

If one more organisation or institution, one more hotel or restaurant, one more florist or bookseller, one more travel agent or taxi company, one more ophthalmologist, heart surgeon or mortician, reader if one more absolutely anyone writes, phones, texts or emails to request my opinion of the service they’ve provided, I will - yes, I will, without ceremony or euphemism or concern for their feelings - tell them. And it won’t be pretty.

I had no sooner returned to my room in a hotel by the sea in Dorset or somewhere like, last weekend, than I found a form on my pillow, beseeching my opinion of the meal I’d just eaten, or would have eaten had it been within the capacity of a person with an eye to see or a tongue to taste with to get beyond the first sight or forkful of.

You opinion matters to us, the form assured, before offering me a list of boxes to tick and a score from zero to ten to award. Had I not been feeling ill I’d have sprinted down to the kitchen and told them they had a nerve supposing they’d made it all the way to zero.

This is what else I’d have said: -

Did you really think that burning the ends and charring the middle of the focaccia would fool us into thinking it was, or ever had been, fresh?

To my wife you served a blini with smoked salmon and creme fraiche. Anything in the whole of creation less like a blini neither of us had ever before encountered. Could it have been, we wondered, that the blinis you had bought in from the wholesaler came frozen in fours and your chef thought he should serve them like that? Or had you run out of blinis or the wherewithal to make them altogether and gambled on inattentive south-coast diners not noticing that you served the smoked salmon and creme fraiche on cork coasters?

About the fishcakes I have nothing to say except that they weren’t. Had you called them croquettes you’d have been nearer the mark, but not near enough in that they were not very nice croquettes. There’s bound to be a Thai restaurant near you. Take a look at what they can do with a fish cake, and if they’re a little too spicy for your ambitions try the local fish and chip shop, as we intend to do the next time we are in these parts.

To the utter abomination which was the aubergine parmigiana I cannot find language adequate. But here are a few apposite words, tossed randomly together though not so randomly as your aubergine parmigiana (which you might just have confused with courgette and primula consomme) - unpalatable,

not to projectile vomit every morsel back into the kitchen that had produced it

because i as to believe, my opinion matter

Pestiferous, I will say.