Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: cast your mind back thirty or so years

Cast your mind back thirty or so years, if you can, to a time when instant communication was a thing of sci-fi, when student newspapers had to actually be printed and therefore had much higher standards. Imagine that you had gone on what we affectionately know as a “large one” the night before, and that now, as you struggle free of the champagne haze (c’mon, it’s the 80s), you see, to your shock horror, that you wrote a missive to your ex last night, and the evidence of it is lying there, right in front of you. So you pick up the unsent envelope, burn it, and carry on with your life. No problems. No fights with the current lover, no fights with the old one. Everything is dandy.

You then get into your Porsche, wearing your heavily pinstriped suit, (okay, so maybe not everyone was this much of a dick in the 80s, just let me indulge myself here) and you drive off to work/lunch/golf/a polo match/to see your model girlfriend (when I said indulge, I meant it). When you get there, your friends all begin to laugh. You don’t get the joke. Then you realise, you are the joke. You ask them what is so funny. They tell you that the night before, after leaving the hotel bar at 5am, you began shouting out to the world that you really really love Margaret Thatcher (no, you Freudian analysts out there, this is merely a topical reference, not transference). You cringe, you blush, you shy away, but you know it is true. Then you ask the fateful question, ‘How many people saw me?’ and they respond with, “maybe 5 or 6”. Oh the horror. Oh the shame. 5 people you will probably never see again heard about your secret crush.

Now, imagine that you have been ducking a friend of yours for a week or so, because, well, he is really boring actually. I mean, seriously, mind-numbingly shockingly boring, and you bump into him in the street. He reprimands you and says, “I phoned you like eight times”, to which you respond that you weren’t home and are really sorry, but we haven’t got an answerphone yet. Problem solved, potential embarrassment avoided. You then assure him that you will be at home that evening – when you’ll ignore his call yet again.

Doesn’t life sound less fraught, more idyllic? When social errors had to be committed in person, apologies were immediate. When writing the wrong thing was saved for only one person, and wouldn’t necessarily be shown to a giggling gaggle of girlfriends before a wholesale discussion about an accurate response. More importantly however, imagine a time when any social mistake was not preserved for posterity, in the archives of some giant corporate behemoth. When that time you were drunk and mistakenly applied some makeup in an insensitive way could be erased just by getting the negative off a friend, and not just left on the internet for any meddling journalist to find later on in your life, when you are just about to become vaguely successful. Or indeed, a time when an undergraduate newspaper’s competition to find the biggest idiot on campus was just kept on paper, and would definitely have not been read by your father. Wouldn’t that be nice?