When Shania Twain sang “That don’t impress me much,” I could see where she was coming from – mainly that it rhymed with “So you got the looks but have you got the touch?” – but I couldn’t come from a more diametrically opposed angle. Everything do impress me, much. I’m the opposite of cynical. I’m constantly amazed at the things humans can do.
Obviously, there’s the big stuff – space stations; laser eye surgery; beagles; Gandhi. I get “Blimey!” about that five times a day. Instance: in the 19 years I’ve lived in London, I’ve never yet failed to burst into tears every time I see St Paul’s Cathedral – partly because it looms up like the last chord in A Day in the Life and partly because if I’m that far east, it’s going to be ages before I get home and means I’m definitely going to miss Newsnight Review.
But, more often than not, it’s small things that impress me the most. I’m ridiculously easy to impress. I have an “impressibility resistance” of 0.001 or something. Take as an example ice skating. In my heart, I don’t really believe that anyone has ever ice-skated. Ever. I point-blank don’t think it’s possible. To be honest, it’s stretching my credulity to breaking point to believe that anyone could attempt motility in a boot with a sole made of a knife. It already seems silly at that point. But when you try to tell me that, on top of that, people have taken this already unfeasible set-up and then taken it out on the ice? Please. I’m not a woman of science, but I know roughly what’s possible. And that, sister, ain’t possible.
And yet every time I see ice-skaters – on Dancing on Ice, or at Alexandra Palace ice rink – I still can’t work out how they’re faking it. I know the whole thing is, obviously, a hoax – Torvill and Dean’s Bolero is up there with the Cottingley Fairies as one of the greatest confidence tricks of all time – but I can’t figure out how they’re pulling it off. It’s awesome.
Of course, it doesn’t take some nationwide conspiracy – inexplicably played out for the sole benefit of me – to impress. Far simpler things are equally amazing. People who can wear a hat at a jaunty angle without it a) falling off, or b) making them look like a div. Those who can sing harmonies. People who possess power tools. People who can do accurate impressions of people, with the voice and everything. Riding a bike with no hands (although not doing a wheelie; that tips over into “ostentatious and possibly dangerous” behaviour, which makes me anxious).
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People who can do smoke rings blow my mind every time I see it. Just to recap: you are sculpting a substance as tricksy as smoke with something as ostensibly impractical and unpromising as a mouth – and using no aid more unearthly than a fag. This is, truly, on a par with witchcraft. And, let us not forget, people habitually blow smoke rings while drunk, in beer gardens, wearing anoraks. Humanity is so casual with its genius. I can’t believe “Smoke Ring Incident!” doesn’t make the local news every time it happens.
However, alongside being able to do that fingers-in-your-mouth whistle – so loud! So brash! So unexpected from my pregnant sister in that photo booth that time! – my most impressingness occurs with people who can remember things. Anything, really. Both my short and long-term memories are shot, so when I converse with people who remember things like when Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat came out (1984), or dialogue from films (“What do you do for recreation?” “The usual. Bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback” – The Big Lebowski), I feel a little as if I am talking to someone who has unfairly evolved much faster than I, and is figuratively flying around with a jet pack, while I trudge beneath them, wearing clogs, in the mud.
How do people retain this kind of information? “Good years” for wines; poems; battle dates? The names and faces of people they’ve only met a few times? Frankly, I can’t believe anyone knows this stuff. I know most people don’t – that’s why Google is worth £69 billion. Its success is entirely predicated on people not remembering anything at all, and falling upon an invention that will always know what year the Labour Party was formed (1900), or what the capital of Peru is (Lima. Actually, I knew that one).
Facebook’s worth of £31 billion is a similar index of everyone having terrible memories: I can’t be the only person who, in the toilet at a party, looks through the event’s Facebook guest list on their iPhone, staring at profile pictures and whispering, “Lucas. His name is Lucas. He didn’t like that joke about the jaguar, because his mother was killed by a jaguar. Remember. REMEMBER.” So yes. The three people in the country who are able to remember who Lucas is without Facebook: you impress me. You impress me much.