STRANGER IN THE MIRROR

Have you ever wondered how ‘they’ know that so many millions watched a television programme? I’d never thought about it much myself; I suppose if I thought anything I imagined some earnest student with a clipboard, knocking on a few doors here and there and asking the direct question. But it’s all a lot more sophisticated than that.

I can’t remember now how the invitation came - maybe someone with a clipboard came knocking on our door - anyway a couple of years ago we joined BARB’s Viewing Panel. BARB (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) have constructed an elaborate checkerboard of homes where you will find represented every social and demographic condition, all carefully weighted so that from the actions of the few one can deduce the viewing patterns of the many. Apparently we were just the people they were looking for, they said, despite neither of us being television addicts.

A friendly soul called Jason came to install equipment which records what we have viewed and then telephones, via some hidden wireless apparatus, what we have watched. When we turn on the television a little box flashes telling us to record - by pressing buttons on an extra handset - who is there and, should there be guests, their age and gender.

In return for this intrusion on our viewing habits we receive points, which can be cashed in for vouchers. This week, not having claimed anything for at least eighteen months, they sent me £50 in book tokens.

Eschewing the desire to buy an Amazon Kindle - the novelty of which, I have a feeling, might soon wear off - I ordered three books from our local bookshop: Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling, Any Human Heart by William Boyd and Reach for the Ground by Jeffrey Bernard, and am still comfortably in credit for a new season of reading later in the year. Any Human Heart is a recommended Book Club read. The others are both idiosyncratic and slightly depressing choices.

Jane Shilling’s book is described as a narrative of middle age (oh dear!), while Jeffrey Bernard’s columns have been described as the longest suicide note in history. Around both authors' lives hangs Eeyore’s universal lament, “We can’t all and some of us don’t.” Yet out of the damp fireworks come verbal pyrotechnics.

Jane Shilling is horribly introspective, but then so am I. Yet she does describe her introspections beautifully. “I have no confidence in my ability to seize an opportunity. I imagine them as hard, glittering objects; golden apples that hurtle unexpectedly towards you, like the ball in school rounders games that looms out of the air and inflicts a sharp, insulting blow when you are standing in the outfield thinking about something else.”

I thought this morning how accurately this description applied to me, particularly the insulting blow of reality when you are thinking of something else. Having purchased newspaper and milk I was half way home before realising I'd left the milk on the shop counter.

Had I been a contemporary of Jane’s and at school with her I suspect we might have become friends, isolated in the outfield and comforting each other’s absent-mindedness. Though now I come to think of it I was always contemptuous of people who were timid and shy like myself and so I lived in a delusional world in which I imagined myself very differently.

Had I been at school with him I would undoubtedly have sought out Jeffrey Bernard who in his early years was also sensitive and shy, but who compensated by a racy addiction to drinking, gambling and sex. I would have been rebuffed of course, as usually happens when one follows one's delusions.

Interestingly enough the question ‘who am I?’ came into sharp relief this week when renewing my car insurance. I used to be a ‘consultant’ - indeed still do occasional bits of unpaid consultancy. I write, too, but in a desultory and equally unpaid fashion. And then I run a labels business which I thought I should mention to the broker, thereby unleashing a Pandora’s box of trouble.

“Did I carry labels in the car? Well, occasionally, like shopping,” I said. But this was commercial ‘Carriage of Goods’ and I was therefore, said my insurer, a ‘sales executive.’ The premium shot up by £160. It took three days to convince them that I was not a sales executive calling on businesses with my car loaded with samples. But thanks to dear Rachel, the broker, I have now been reassigned. Today I am a company director of an office supplies company and the premium has gone down by £25.

It is not only the opportunities, Jane, that hurtle unexpectedly towards you when you are thinking of something else.