The Comfort of Stories

Ben Wildsmith 

Don’t get me wrong; I like stories. If you’ve got a good anecdote, I’ll buy you a pint to hear it. Stories transport us away from mundanity, opening up our worlds to each other.

Within them, the terrifyingly random experience of life is put into an order we can understand.

The fathomless ache of mortality echoes through eternity in our stories. They lend weight and permanence to the gossamer levity of our lonely flights through existence. Stories rock.

They are, however, powerful tools of manipulation. If someone wants you to believe something, the surest way is to draw you in to a satisfying narrative designed to prove their point.

The classic detergent advert features a kitchen with sun streaming through the windows and a child playing happily. Then there is a spillage and the lighting darkens; cellos play in a minor key. The voiceover preaches the dangers of germs as a worried mother looks anxiously at the child she has endangered by spilling the bolognaise. What is she to do?

A close-up of the product punctures the tension. A quick wipe over with Supergunk 2000 (now with added science) and sunshine returns to the kitchen; cellos become flutes. The child laughs and is scooped up by a mum made carefree by the miracle of capitalism. Available now in all good supermarkets.

That, there, is the exact narrative arc employed to line us up behind all recent wars. Our children’s future is in peril from something foreign and dangerous so it must be wiped out by expensive and hi-tech products sold by American corporations.

Exchange botulism for terrorism and the stories are interchangeable. It’s ironic that the rictus grins of White House press secretaries are created by injecting live botulism into their faces, but nobody’s aiming for literary nuance here. Buy the gunk, bomb the brown people.

The psychological mechanics of marketing have pervaded every facet of our lives. Watching Masterchef last night, the fetishising of food as a totem of personal authenticity has eclipsed its function as sustenance.

It’s no good simply to cook something that tastes great and offer it to other humans. The food must have originated in a personal memory or, better still, a connection to the dead.

My granny was an appalling cook, she’d have told you that herself, but tearily serving up her grenade-like rock cakes roots me in a blood tradition (it doesn’t, I’m adopted, but bear with it) that dignifies the food with her memory.

Every food business must have an origin story, ‘Our Journey’, about how Tarquin gave up his previous life as an arms dealer because he remembered a single broad bean he’d had on holiday in Tuscany as a child.

That simple dream and £1.5 million in seed capital was all it took to create the festival food truck you see before you today.

Redemption arc

The cause-and-effect redemption arc of these stories is a long way from the messy, disjointed reality of life as we live it. Whilst we know that bombing people tends to make more of them into terrorists, and that eradicating germs weakens our immune systems, we are addicted to the version that turns out right in the end.

Work hard, pay your taxes, buy Supergunk 2000, believe in the war, and we’ll all return to a state of prelapsarian bliss, handing round cawl at the family table Grandad made from Welsh oak with the axe he used on Fritz during the real war.

The insulation of time spent online, consuming the visceral horrors being visited upon others half a world away is warping.

In the comfort of our confected little narratives, packaged up for likes and dating profiles, we betray our yearning for the bone and dirt realities of human lives that we are no longer allowed nor capable of living.

Our true fear is that like the refugees who arrive on our shores, one day, we’ll have a real story to tell.

 Whose Song to Sing? A Memoir by Ben Wildsmith is published by Calon, the University of Wales non-fiction imprint, and is available to purchase here.