Will you be wilfing today? This is the hot new term for aimlessly surfing the internet, coined in a new survey (from moneysupermarket.com) which has revealed that the average Brit wastes up to two days a month browsing idly online.
'Wilf' is an acronym (created with the usual regard for accurate spelling that characterises the online generation) for 'What was I looking for?' I don't know what happened to the other w; maybe the key wore out after someone was in too violent a hurry to reach wetandwild.com.
As an important journalist, I never waste time online. I use the net purely for crucial research, to inform my world-changing opinion pieces.
Right now, for example, I am going to use it in order to find out who holds the world record for the longest single stretch of web-surfing. Hang on a minute ...
Hmm. The longest single stretch of wind-surfing lasted just over a year. Diogo Guerreiro and Flavio Jardim of Brazil covered 5,000 miles between May 2004 and July 2005. Is that good? I'm not sure how long wind-surfing is supposed to take. I may have to watch some on YouTube.
Oh. That doesn't look very difficult. It's not even listed under 'difficult' in the YouTube search engine. I have just enjoyed a video about weight loss (which is, quite rightly, the top search result for 'difficult') and an extract from an American talk show called A Difficult Reunion, in which a woman called Erica meets her father again, 20 years after he murdered her mother. I also enjoyed watching that. Erica has a very nice manicure. While the show was being planned, when Erica was considering the ramifications of being reunited with her murderous parent, I wonder when she first thought: 'Ooh, I'd have to get my nails done.'
'Murderous' is quite a vague word, isn't it? There must be a specific one which means 'wife-killing' ... but how strange. If you type 'wife-killing' into Google, the first listing is a reference to 'Henry VIII, of wife-killing notoriety'. Oh, that Henry VIII.
The Americans seem to be making a new TV series about the Tudors. If you google 'Henry VIII', you will eventually find an amazing interview with the actor who's playing the ... hang on, hang on ... the uxoricidal king. But Jonathan Rhys Meyers doesn't look anything like Henry VIII. He's far too thin. In the interview, Rhys Meyers says: 'You're trying to sell a historical period drama to a country like America - you do not want a big, fat, red-haired guy with a beard. It doesn't let people embrace the fantastic monarch he was, because they're not attracted to the package. Heroes do not look like Henry VIII. That's just the world we live in.'
Goodness me, what a moron.
Anyway, the point is, I now know at least six things that I didn't know an hour ago. If you invited me to dinner tonight, I would be able to entertain you with facts about windsurfing and Latin-derived language; we could debate the relative difficulties of losing weight and forgiving a murder; and we could thrash out the crucial question of whether heroes can be fat with red hair, or whether Jonathan Rhys Meyers is, in fact, a very perceptive man who just looks like a wazzock to the naked eye.
I am not claiming that I have gained any deep understanding from today's little surf on the net. By the moral system of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, I am a worse person for increasing the width of my knowledge without paying heed to its depth. And The History Boys is simply being nostalgic for an era when education was less exam-focused than it is now; it doesn't even deal with Googling.
Those were the days when my father was at university. Having gained his information the hard way, through your actual library reading, he can both understand and remember it. Mine comes and goes as quickly as ... well, as Rod Liddle's, I should imagine.
Last week, in what one newspaper called 'a blatant attack on Coren', columnist Rod Liddle claimed that my old man must have cheated on Call My Bluff. To call someone a cheat is an appalling thing to do, but I am not going to attack Rod Liddle just because he attacked my family. Not at all; I am sympathetic to the jowly, pea-brained, sexually incontinent former radio producer. My heart goes out to the tubby, slanderous fool. Many of us, in the surfing generation, find it impossible to believe that another person might have serious knowledge of anything. Our own wisdom, gained glibly at the touch of a button, tossed out over cocktails and forgotten, has neither complexity nor point.
Nevertheless, it's better than nothing. Who are moneysupermarket.com to say that idle web-surfing is 'wasted time'? Quite the reverse. If it didn't happen, Rod Liddle and I would have nothing to discuss but the weather.
Home prices still potty
Speaking of the Tudors, I was delighted to see that a teapot which once belonged to Elizabeth I was sold last week for £1,079,000. When Her Majesty gave it to the Bishop of Worcester, on her deathbed in 1603, it was apparently worth 'enough to buy a small house'. And, given the insanity of the current housing market, it still is.
· Armando Iannucci is away
