What's the use?

This was one of my first reviews on Ciao, and on reflection I don’t think it was as useful as it might have been. Even more regrettable, from my point of view at least, many of my fellow-Ciaoists didn’t seem to find it much use either. If you clicked on the “Sort by Usefulness” button at the top of my review list, you would find it loitering shiftily around the foot of the table, obviously up to no good.

For a start, the topic itself a tough one. Few things are wholly useless and those classically considered useless seldom withstand searching scrutiny. A chocolate teapot, for example, may be of limited use for making tea but is highly functional for eating. An inflatable dartboard might be just what one needs in the event of the pub sinking. Fish mittens? Obviously thought up by someone who had never heard of fish fingers. The Useless Parliament (June 18th-August 12th 1625) went down in history for “having done nothing but offend the king”, so it must have done a pretty useful job considering how little time it had in which to do it. And even slugs, those seemingly useless ugly little garden pests, have a role in pollinating aspidistras, or so I’m told.

The more one typifies anything as useless the clearer its potential functionality becomes. Trawling the web for inspiration I found at www.chamownersweb.com a list of list of allegedly useless lists, which includes such gems as the following list of unusual place names:

What a useful list this is. I know that I shall quote it endlessly as an example of American ingenuity in nomenclature, even if it does omit Useful, Missouri. So, sorry, www.chamownersweb.com, but if you really aspire to uselessness, you’ll have to try harder than that.

“Note: not all facts may be accurate.”

*

And, talking of trying harder, so must I. When I first wrote this review I aimed to identify things that are neither use nor ornament, and came up with the ten below, listed in descending order of usefulness, most of which I now feel the need to reconsider: -

Silly me. Its use should have been obvious, really, shouldn’t it? To prevent the Labour Party enjoying a monopoly of self-serving self-righteousness. Not that anyone can truly compete with the Blairites in the matter of self-righteousness, or self-servingness for that matter, but no one should be allowed to get away with a monopoly.

Silly me, again. As a lover of fantasy fiction I should have grasped the timetable’s true use immediately – for reading on the platform while waiting for the late or nonexistent trains. Now that Connex have lost their franchise, their successors in the role have done their best to keep up the good work by publishing their own booklet of imaginative humour, quite as efficacious as the Connex version in keeping commuters chuckling by the trackside through the chilly winter months.

Even sillier me. Again, clearly useful for the amusement of those enduring extended waits at bus-stops, assuming they can find any that have not been vandalised. London buses, as is well-known to anyone who has tried to use them to travel round the capital, hunt in packs and are loath to give warning of their arrival by adhering to timetables. Generally, the pack hides just out of sight around the turning in the road until prospective passengers have given up and started to walk before swooping down on the unmanned bus-stop.

What can I have been thinking of? Far from being useless, here’s an ideal present for George Bush, especially if unaccompanied by an exit visa.

Bingo! I find it hard to fault this one, but my confidence is shaken, and I am open to dissuasion. Please, can anyone tell me a use for the instructions? I have spent long hours squinting at them and trying to reconcile their impenetrable wording with the device, components or ingredients in front of me without discerning any connection between the two, but maybe I am dense. Maybe someone out there less dense than I am has discovered a use for them, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Ditto the bingo (Dingo?). But ditto also the invitation to put me straight. Perhaps, just possibly, vanishingly improbable though it may seem, you have at some time been helped by a Help button. If you have experienced, or simply heard rumour of, such a phenomenon, please let me know.

You can see where I was going with this one, or at least I can, but I now also see that it falls down on the use of the word ‘replica’. The real thing is surely more useless.

You’ll appreciate that the point of this – which I was deluded enough to think subtle at the time – hinged on the list being ranked in descending order of usefulness, but I suspect that that got lost along the way. Useless to rely on such things being noticed. Anyway, I subsequently discovered that at least two of the most attractive and amiable women on Ciao were Arsenal supporters – strange, I know, but as one gets older one learns to accept that the world is full of mind-boggling oddities. Neither is currently active on the site, but they might return and I’ve no wish to fall out with them over so trivial a matter as the utility of a piece of clothing. If there’s one thing that my many years of life have taught me, it’s never to fall out with women over matters of clothing.

A sound judgement, I believe, where the uselessness of the roadway itself was concerned, but I now see that my proposed solution was equally useless. As soon as it was enacted another layer of stationary vehicles would pile themselves on top of the newly paved carriageway, and so on like a circular tarmac layer cake.

As observations go, it’s hard to fault this one, but does it accurately characterise the offending piece of legislation as useless? On reflection I think not, believing it to be a useful reminder that we are not as far as we would like to imagine from Orwell’s world of doublethink, newspeak and a Ministry of Truth that deals in spin, or lying as it used to be known back the good old naïve days of 1984, before the word was spun from the political vocabulary.

So here I am, trying harder, searching for new examples of uselessness to replace the discredited ones above and, do you know, I cannot find them. In some ways this is enormously reassuring. Perhaps it means there is more purpose in the world than I gave it credit for.

I would go on, but what’s the use?