There is a film out called Barbie, which I went to see with my friend Susie on a warm evening last week. The weather had been odd that day, a dense hot rain fell in the afternoon adding to the feeling that society, or the world, or the suburbs from which I emerged around 5pm with an umbrella but no jacket, was perhaps an idea whose time had gone. Which is why I did not blink when an eccentric neighbour, riding into town at the other end of the tube carriage, started telling his seatmates that the world was ending. “Get plastered tonight, because,” he sang, over and over, in a fairly jolly tone considering, “The world ends tomorrow!”
It was quite good advice, actually, I thought, reminiscent of mindfulness and all the other modern self-helps. Live in the moment! Seek pleasure! Death comes for us all! “Do you guys ever think about dying?” said Barbie, in one of the many trailers I watched in the months leading up to the screening, a thrilling line from anybody’s mouth, and even if I hadn’t been completely tenderised by the blunt force of the movie’s marketing campaign, that alone would have been enough to drag me to the cinema. “Get plastered tonight, the world ends tomorrow!” sang the man. I recognised him from the time my daughter was selling her old toys and books for charity from a table outside our house, and he’d got angry with her for not providing a card reader. On the tube he usually avoided my eye.
