The Shape of Stories

 Kurt Vonnegut

The Tinkerbell theory: I wish politicians would stop blaming their failures on my lack of belief

Who knew Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century?

Jonn Elledge in The New Statesman

The moment you doubt whether you can fly,” J M Barrie once wrote, "You cease for ever to be able to do it.” Elsewhere in the same book he was blunter, still: “Whenever a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, there’s a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.”
I would never have expected that Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century, if I’m honest. But predictions are not my strongpoint, and over the last few years, what one might term the Tinkerbell Theory of Politics has played an increasingly prominent role in national debate. The doubters’ lack of faith, we are told, is one of the biggest barriers to flight for everything from Jeremy Corbyn’s poll ratings to Brexit. Because we don’t believe, they can’t achieve.

It was in run up to the Scottish referendum that I first spotted Tinkerbell in the wild. Reports suggesting that RBS would consider relocating from Edinburgh, should independence lead to a significant rise in business costs – a statement of the bloody obvious, I’d have thought – were dismissed by then-First Minister Alex Salmond as merely “talking down Scotland”. Over the next few months, the same phrase was deployed by the SNP and its outriders whenever anyone questioned the Yes campaign’s optimistic estimates of future North Sea oil revenues.

The implications of all this were pretty clear: any practical problems apparently arising from independence were mere phantasms. The real threat to Scotland was the erosion of animal spirits caused by the faithlessness of unpatriotic unionists, who’d happily slaughter every fairy in the land before they risked an independent Scotland.

All this seemed pretty obnoxious to me, but at the time of the referendum it also all seemed to be a reassuringly long way away. Little did I realise that Salmond and co were just ahead of their time, because today, Tinkerbell-ism is bloody inescapable.

On Monday, Sir John Major made a wonkish speech laying out his concerns about Brexit. He talked about the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the way it would isolate Britain diplomatically, the difficulty of negotiating highly complicated trade deals on the timetable imposed by Article 50. He wanted, he said, to “warn against an over-optimism that – if unachieved – will sow further distrust between politics and the public, at a time when trust needs to be re-built”.

And how did Britain’s foreign secretary respond? “I think it’s very important that as we set out in this journey we are positive about the outcome for the very good reason the outcome will be fantastic for this country,” Boris said, probably imagining himself to be a bit like Cicero.

The problem, in other words, is not the government’s lack of a plan; the problem is its critics’ lack of faith. In a familiar phrase, the Telegraph headlined its report: “Boris Johnson criticises John Major for talking down UK’s post-Brexit prospects”.

The left is no better. In any discussion of the failings of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, it won’t be long before someone blames the polls, or the by-election results, on either the lack of support from the parliamentary Labour party, or the hostility of a media that never liked him in the first place. “Of course he’s struggling,” the implication runs. “Your lack of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dead fairies, everywhere you turn.

It’s easy to see why the Tinkerbell strategy would be such an attractive line of argument for those who deploy it - one that places responsibility for their own f*ck-ups squarely on their critics, thus rendering them impervious to attack. Corbyn’s failure becomes the fault of the Blairites. A bad Brexit becomes the fault of Remoaners, and not those who were dim enough to believe it would easy to begin with. Best of all, the more right your critics turn out to be, the more you have to blame them for.

But being impervious to criticism is not the same as being right, and to think this strategy is a recipe for good government is to mistake a closed loop of true believers for objective reality. Jeremy Corbyn is unlikely to start winning elections, no matter how hard the faithful believe. However much you talk up Scotland, that oil is still going to run out

And whatever the right-wing press do to convince themselves that Boris Johnson is right, and John Major is wrong, it is unlikely to affect the negotiating position of the 27 other states in the slightest. At the end of the day, our faith matters a lot less than the facts on the ground. There is no such things as fairies.

The trouble with fairy-tales

 

Like most girls of her age, Ariane Sherine believed in romance. She thought she had only to find the right person to find perfect passion and happiness. Then, slowly and painfully, she discovered the truth...

Friday, 19 September 2008

I was 15, he was 16, and our romance began with a lie about a jumper. It was the shapeless beige jumper he was wearing on a trip out with friends, and I didn't like it at all. "I like your jumper," I told him. "Can I try it on?"

It came down to my knees, but as I had hoped, he forgot to ask me to return it before he left. I rang him for the first time the next day. "I accidentally went home in your jumper," I lied again. "But I don't mind meeting up if you want it back?"

"I'd like to meet up," he replied earnestly. I wondered if he really missed the jumper. Maybe I'd give it back, and never see him again.

But when we met, he suggested that we go to the cinema. After the film, we held hands, our fingers sticky from the sweet popcorn. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asked.

"No," I answered, trying to sound as though this were unusual, when in fact I'd never had a boyfriend.

We kissed for the first time. "Then will you be my girlfriend?" he replied, and I wondered if there had been a better moment than this for anyone, anywhere, ever.

To start with, it was easy. We were in love, and it felt like everything I'd ever seen or read about romance: like being coloured in brightly after years of living in greyscale. I was floating in a hot air balloon full of misspelt poems, mix tapes and inept kisses, which took me away from my bleak home life, and I hoped it would never come down.

He was everything I imagined a boyfriend would be. He would walk me home though it took him round the long way, bring me flowers he'd picked, wrap his arms tight around me when I was cold, and wait for me patiently whenever I was late to meet him. He even insisted on giving me the ugly jumper. "You like it – you should keep it," he explained when I protested. I began to sleep while holding it, because it smelt of him.

I forgot the emptiness of both home and school whenever I was with him. Even as I failed in every other area of my life, our romance seemed all the more luminous for it. I began to meet him instead of going to lessons in the afternoons, sliding like a school-uniformed fugitive through the back gate and running down the tunnel into his arms.

I remember the day we slept together for the first time, clean and fresh and new, and the way we weren't quite sure what to do. We were certain, though, that our last time would also be with each other.

"I love you," he told me that day. "I've never said that before, and I never want to say it to anyone else."

"I love you too, so you'll never have to," I replied.

I truly thought those heady, illusory butterfly feelings would never fade. That we would always kiss until we could barely breathe, and that my heart would forever dance and skip when he rang me up, even if it was only to say "The trains aren't running today." Just 17 and More! magazine ran stories of perfect relationships, and couples who had been in love for decades, even if they had yet to publish the article "Snare him by stealing his jumper".

When things first began to slow down, two years later, I didn't understand what was happening. I decided I was just imagining that he and I were talking and laughing less; that sometimes, he would forget to call me, and that when we did speak, we seemed to have little to say.

"You're not bored of me, are you?" I asked a number of times. Eventually he replied, "I'm a bit bored of you asking if I'm bored."

I was certain this lull in romance was temporary, caused merely by a change in our lives. I had been expelled from school for throwing a Coke can in somebody's face (they had spat in my lunch first, but apparently that "wasn't an excuse") while he was now going to university. Things would return to the way they'd been before, I told myself, and in years to come we would probably laugh and ask: "Do you remember that time when we forgot how to talk to each other?"

I tried not to worry. But to my confusion, our relationship seemed to slide even further downhill. We slept together less often, and in the mornings he would be irritable because I had unknowingly stolen the duvet all night. We seemed to be less in love with each other, and these days he rarely said "I love you" first. It felt as though something had shifted between us, and I was scared that it wouldn't shift back.

Nobody had told me this was normal: I had never heard of relationships settling down, becoming calm and still, and losing their giddy, breathless spark. Somehow, my life had slid back into greyscale, and I didn't know how or why.

"Something's wrong," I persisted. "Things are different to how they were when we met."
"Of course they're different," he replied. "We know each other now. Every moment isn't going to be new."

But I desperately wanted it to be.

I wish now that someone had explained to me that love is like a beautiful spinning top: that it whirls gaily and exhilaratingly fast at the beginning, mesmerising everyone with its loud melody and pretty, gaudy blur. But that it is only when it begins to slow down that you can see exactly which shapes and hues are there, and whether it will tumble and fall, or keep on spinning gently and steadily forever. I'm certain that, for us, it could have been the latter.

Instead, I decided that I could draw things back to the start. I bought a book, one of many which promised that if I followed its instructions "he will feel crazy about you, forever!" It told me that, if I pretended to ignore him, he would be more interested in me. I wasn't quite sure how that would work or why, but when I tried to ignore him he didn't seem to notice, and I didn't think I was allowed to wave at him and say: "Hey – by the way, I'm ignoring you!"

The book said he hadn't noticed because he didn't care. Afraid it was right, I began to argue with him, and said for the first time: "I think we should split up."

"Is that what you want?" he asked.

"No," I replied truthfully. "I want things to be back as they were at the beginning."

"They're not going to be," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because we're not at the beginning," he explained.

That "wasn't an excuse", I told him, and broke up with him.

It was the first in a long string of break-ups where I would leave, crying and confused, then return, asking him to forgive me. He would, and we would try again, but I still wouldn't be able to accept that things had changed. I didn't want a stale, empty and useless relationship, I insisted: I wanted love, the kind of impossible, senseless love that could never be cajoled or coerced. Sometimes I tried to hurt him so that he would say something, anything, but he would just seem disappointed in me.

"You know," he once said, "maybe I can't give you what you want any more, but I'd never leave you."

That, I think now, should have been romance enough.

I was 22, he was 23, and our relationship ended with a lie about a fairy tale. I threw the poems, mix tapes and shapeless beige jumper away, rather than inflict them on an unsuspecting and unfortunate charity shop, and went in search of the glorious spinning top that whirled endlessly, and the hot air balloon that always floated over the clouds in the sunlight and never came down.

I failed hopelessly. I missed him more than ever, but told myself I had to forget him or I'd never move on. I flitted from one meaningless relationship to the next, deciding that each was broken whenever the joy and pain and wonder settled into anything more grown-up. I tried several times, but every romance burned out exactly like the last, leaving me even more disillusioned.

Slowly, I began to wonder if it was possible that all relationships ended up like my first. Maybe romance never lasted beyond a few years, and all the magazines and books that promised it could if you only tried hard enough were destroying relationships everywhere. I knew that half of all relationships fell through, and that women ended marriages twice as often as men. Maybe it wasn't love that failed us these days, but our expectations.

I wondered if the world was littered with couples who broke up because they were told, as I was, that "being in love forever" was possible, and felt inadequate and disconsolate when their relationships became less poetic and more absentminded. Perhaps they refused to believe that true love could forget to call, have little to say, or snap at you over a lack of duvet, not understanding that love is about acceptance, and that a relationship is only ever perfect when you barely know the other person.

If this were true, I decided, it wasn't entirely their fault. Romance is almost impossible to escape from these days, however hard you try to avoid it: it seems to spill from nearly every song, story and film, filling our radios and televisions. Its ubiquity leads us to believe that we must fall in love and stay in love, or drown in depression forever. And unless we can separate our lives from fiction, and accept that the most we can hope for is quiet contentment, we'll be forever searching for happy endings – yet will only ever be left with endings.

I hadn't spoken to my childhood sweetheart since we broke up, but while writing this, I started to wonder where he was now, and who he was with, if anyone. I had heard that he'd met someone else, but that was years ago. People split up all the time, I knew. He could still be single.

I had no number for him, but still knew his childhood telephone number off by heart, and wondered if his parents had moved house. Unthinkingly, I dialled the number, my fingers shaking and my heart beating faster, just as it had the first time I had called him about the jumper. Maybe, I thought blindly, all wasn't lost.

His mother answered on the third ring, and her voice changed when I explained who I was.
"Hello love!" she exclaimed. "I haven't heard from you in forever. It's been... how long has it been?"

"A very long time," I replied.

And after talking about nothing much for a while, I told her: "I was just wondering how he was?"

"It's funny you should ask," she replied. "He's getting married this weekend. To the girl he met after you."