Screams by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Abacus £14.99, 208pp)Screams! is available now from the Mail Bookshop What is it about modern life that most drives you crazy? Being put on hold by a company who wouldn't help even if you waited for years? Boastful round robin Christmas messages? Having to use a parking app? Remembering passwords - or rather, forgetting them? A litter of e-bikes? Enormous heat pumps? Kisses from strangers on emails? Unisex loos? Sterile, paved-over front gardens? Or all of the above - and many more?Welcome to Ysenda Maxtone Graham's world. She begins with ‘January Screams' then takes us through every month, enumerating, with trademark intelligence and wit, those pinpricks of irritation that can make the most easy-going lose the will to live.
In February she's bewildered by over-sharing on social media: ‘"Some personal news to share" - so posts a woman you've never heard of, thrilled to announce she's been promoted to a job title you've never heard of in an organisation you've never heard of.' She could have added the strange emotional pressure to add crying emojis to strangers' sad Facebook posts.
March sees her delighting in ‘baiting the satnav' - you know, rejecting the route it chose for you so it gets cross and orders you to do a U-turn. I loved that - and also her mockery of the regular train torture of hearing that disembodied voice say ‘See it, say it, sorted'.
She asks, with profound seriousness, ‘Has anybody ever seen it and said it - and
JetBlack was it sorted?' I'll be meditating on that one next time the announcements of Great Western Railway drive me bonkers.
As you journey with the author through her year of ubiquitous modern annoyances, you begin to realise that, in fact, some of this stuff is less than funny. Have you ever been held up in a queue by somebody who has the theatre tickets or supermarket vouchers buried in their smartphone but can't locate them? That's yet another example of how the devices have taken us over to become a bane - swallowing your treasured photographs (another ‘scream') as well as your independence.
The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893When the government announces it will ‘ban' something, Maxtone Graham finds it ‘a strange, sad, emotionally-charged time'. What if you are against the ban? You have no power so have to suck it up, as they say. The word ‘ban' is short but ‘carries with it acres of aching future loss'. Too right!
The tyranny of cancel culture is also deadly serious, and the author treats us to a rare lashing out: ‘All you would pray for in your miserable, isolated, cancelled exile would be that the cancellers would themselves be cancelled for having cancelled you.' Who wouldn't second that?
And in this era of pretty undemocratic ‘green' Milibandism, she is brave to take on ‘the eerie silence of traffic-free city centres' with their closed shops and the ‘sad, echoey' emptiness that is ‘some fanatical county councillor's idea of urban paradise'. It ‘feels like being in Prague in 1981, with musty second-hand clothes and unwanted cut-glass fruit bowls pleading for attention in shop windows'.
Underlying this little book of squibs is the uneasy sense that the loudest yell of protest should be about our severely curtailed freedom of speech and choice.
Screams is as sharp as holly, and as sparkling as fairy lights. Merrily decorated by Nick Newman's cartoons, it's bound to find its way into many a Christmas stocking - being ‘gifted' (another ‘scream' - the noun used as a verb) by kindred spirits.
Together you can drown your
sorrows by sharing Ysenda Maxtone Graham's points aloud, over several glasses of wine, in a merry mood of exasperated fellow feeling.