“Where you been for the past couple of weeks, Tel?” says Nige. He’s come straight from working late, for a few last minute beers in the Tavern. His hair is lightly powdered with white plaster and his hands are spattered with paint that’s probably called ‘aubergine’ if he’s been working in Blackheath or ‘purple’ if it’s Catford. He looks a bit like an untidy dandy.
“We decided to go on an adventure,” I say, “without a safety net; do something highly risky and unpredictable; recapture the pioneering spirit of great British explorers like Scott of the Antarctic.”
“You went to the South Pole?”
“No, to Austria. But without a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide and with no access to Tripadvisor.”
“You don’t mean – ?”
“Yup. We’d drive into a town and actually go into a hotel and book it without first finding out what several dozen other previous travellers thought of the place. Scary.”
He takes a half-pint swallow of lager, puts down the glass, nods appreciatively. “I suppose Scott probably wouldn’t have bothered dragging his arse across miles of frozen waste if he’d checked Tripadvisor first and found out about the cramped conditions in that hut.”
“What’s weird,” I say, “is that we found some great hotels but since coming back home we’ve had to resist the urge to still check them out on Tripadvisor, to confirm that they really are any good.”
“That’s because,” he says, “we live in an age of over-expectation and sense of entitlement. You watch young people come in this place for the first time, for instance: they expect everything to fit exactly with every need they have. But I remember a time when you’d walk into a pub and have to fit your expectations exactly around the manager’s or you were out on your ear. I once saw a couple of middle-class tossers thrown out of this place, before it was gentrified, just for asking if it did food. Quite right, too. Pubs are for boozing, not fine bleedin’ dining.”
“Exactly . . . you can probably sense a writerly analogy on the way here, can’t you?”
He snorts. “Let me see if I can do it for you. Your group has problems coming up with stories that bite you in the bum because they’re Tripadvising their plots to death beforehand.”
“Yes, it’s another kind of displacement activity, which writers are experts at; but this one not only prevents you writing at all, it stops you getting into the unsafe places where the real stories lie.”
Nige stares at some past and distant place, just over my left shoulder. “Do you know,” he says, “for me summer holidays, I used to just pack a bag and go hitch-hike at the start of the M1 or the M4 – and go wherever the lifts took me.”
“You think my writers should hitch-hike to a story?”
He frowns, reluctantly re-focusing on the here and now, and on me. “Why not? All this Tripadvisor/Lonely Planet crap has got them believing the story’s already there, kind of fully-formed and ready to grab. Which it is, I suppose, but it’s also tame and predictable.”
We’re silent for a couple of minutes. Nige finishes his beer and orders two more, even though my glass is still two-thirds full.
I think about expectation. The problem with Tripadvisor is you can only ever be either just about satisfied or disappointed. Without Tripadvisor, you can’t be disappointed – because you aren’t expecting anything – and you might be brilliantly surprised. But for that, you have to take a chance.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “there weren’t any reviews of books, at least not where I’d find them. So I used to go in the local library and just take out a book at random. Give it a go. Sometimes I’d hate the story but occasionally I’d be amazed and delighted – more so, because it was my discovery, not just someone else’s tip.”
“And if the writer can’t amaze himself when he’s writing a story, what chance has the punter?”
“I honestly think the book and movie industry doesn’t want readers to be surprised any more. It wants to tell them what to expect and then deliver it. That’s where the economics lie: in producing a predictable product that never surprises but always delivers.”
“What: mediocrity?”
A group of young people enter the Tavern. They look healthy, well-fed; they’re dressed in clothes that . . . well, that accentuate their image. Everything about them looks comfortable. They go to the bar with the confidence of knowing they will be served what they ask for. Nothing jars between them or their surroundings.
“Writers should always jar,” I say, “and not fit in. Their stories should lie about their destination: pick up the reader on the pretence of giving him a lift to Disneyland then take him to Dungeness instead.”
“Seaside pebbled wasteland, nuclear power station, oddly appropriate narrow gauge railway train, black ex-fishermen’s huts full of wacko artists and the occasional BNP loner? They wouldn’t like it, Tel.”
I sigh. “They would if they hadn’t been expecting giant foam Donald Ducks, Coke on tap and sexless family entertainment instead.”