From Free Life, Issue 33, August 1999 2000
ISSN: 0260 5112
Final Jottings
Brian Micklethwait


One
Over the course of the last few issues a pattern seems to have established itself with regard to my jottings. I write a piece that's about half as much again too long, containing a piece about "politics", a piece about things (you know, the things that free market capitalism churns out, which are nice, and fun, and sometimes even downright liberating), and then a third piece about politics, again. And Our Editor, who decides that the ever greater capacity of tradesmen to do good and spread delight by making stuff isn't as important as the politics, so out goes the stuff. No more. This piece will be too short. (Our Editor will have to add a picture, preferably of a thing, although knowing him, it will probably be an eighteenth century thing.) And this time I will write entirely of things.

Zip drives for example. Twice I've written recently about this mighty product, and twice it's been cut. Certainly at least once. Several years ago (FL26, December 1996), in the good old days when I decided what went into my jottings rather than Our Editor, I wrote of my decision to purchase a Zip drive (which is a 100mb disc drive for personal computers, in case you were wondering). The clincher was an advertisement in the Evening Standard, and the fact that the Zip has a catchy name. That Zip's makers were thus displaying their determination to sell their product to humans as well as to techno-nerds persuaded me that it would be a useful disc drive to have, a disc drive that many others besides me would be using. So it has proved. There are many morals to the Zip story, which has only just begun of course. First: advertising is a good thing. It makes life better. Second: capitalism in general is a good thing. It makes things like Zip drives, which are good things.
 

Two
Having just, between finishing the above jotting and embarking on this jotting, been to the toilet, I have just recently experienced yet again one of the twentieth century's greatest Things: nice toilet paper. No puppies are needed to sell Andrex to me. In, I think, 1984, I made a trip to Warsaw, supposedly to advise some Poles about personal computers (a subject about which they already, even then, knew far more than I will ever know). The whole thing was surreal in the extreme. I like to think that my presence in Warsaw was a diversion. Micklethwait is an unusual name, and my late father had a middling sort of job in MI something-or-other during the war, and, so my brother Peter tells me, he occasionally pops up in conspiracy theories concerning spookery. So obviously my arrival in Warsaw put the KGB into a state of extreme excitement. Having drawn the Evil Empire's attention towards me and my absurd fumblings and wanderings, my London tour sponsors were able to arrange for someone entirely different, called something like Smith or Jones or Phibbs or some such lower class thing, to do whatever was the real business.

Well, almost certainly not. But one piece of real good I did do, while staying in Warsaw. At the end of my stay, I was saying goodbye to my hosts, and was thinking of what I could do for them that they might like. Plan A consisted of emptying my wallet of local money. Would they like that? They brushed aside this offer with contempt. Then I had a brainwave. Having been warned about bolshevik bog paper, I had brought two rolls of Andrex with me, but owing to a succession of happy accidents had not touched either of them. Would my hosts perhaps like them? Yes they would!!! I will never forget the reverence with which they opened one of the rolls and fondled the softly exquisite paper. It was as if I had presented them with two recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. They would use one now, they said, and would keep the other for (big point at materfamilias' swelling belly) ... the baby!!! Never again will I describe a bad currency as "toilet paper". Toilet paper, especially good toilet paper like Andrex, is vastly better than bad currency. Now, I suppose, Warsaw is bursting with Andrex, or with satisfactory local copies thereof. And I say: that alone justifies the winning the Cold War by whoever or whatever won it.
 

Three
Talking of the Cold War and of Things, as I have been, the best Cold War speech I ever heard was given by Lady Olga Maitland. It started as a standard issue Cold War speech to a standard issue Cold War audience, of standard issue Cold Warriors like me. She wittered on in that silly voice of hers about the Repression of Dissidents and Human Rights Violations and other approved Cold War themes. And then suddenly she cast aside her prepared text and started really talking, about Soviet ladies' underwear. Have you ANY IDEA, she said, what it's like to have horrible industrial sandpaper next to the most intimate parts of your skin, instead of soft sweet gentle ladies' underwear?

That's all. If I put any more, I'll lapse back into politics, and all mention of Zips and Andrex will be lost. The New World Order may be forbidding us to launder money or to own firearms. Politicians may all be fools and tyrants. Pounds, ounces, pounds, shillings, pence, miles, yards, feet and inches may all soon go the way of rods, poles and perches. (What are rods, poles and perches? Exactly my point.) Smoking cigarettes may soon be utterly prohibited. But at least another half billion or so of us are now allowed to have nice things.

(Brian Micklethwait is the Editorial Director of the Libertarian Alliance. )