There are certain little everyday things that make life special to me, things that I have taken for granted all my life and that now seem to be in danger of extinction. What is more, I myself have taken part in their destruction. For example, take the morning coffee while reading a newspaper. It was not just a daily routine but also something to look forward to, particularly on Sundays with those wonderful British Sunday papers with all their sections. We could spend a whole morning reading them, sharing out the different sections of the paper between us as a family, commenting on this and that, arguing, talking, making more coffee or tea with the papers gradually becoming more and more crumpled until finally they were done with for the day. Nowadays, I read my papers online. It saves trees for one thing, and it gives me the choice of reading from a vast array of publications at the click of a button. Every now and then, I find myself sitting in a cafe reading a real newspaper and I think: Wow, this is so nice, I must do this more often, but I don't. The bottom line is that it is the content that matters not the way it is delivered, and for my daily news needs, digital beats paper. And yet the consequences of making that choice on both an individual and a global level are that newspapers as we know them are gradually dying out. The café is another one of those things. When I travel I like to spend time in cafés watching the world go by. It's not about coffee, it's about getting a taste for local life. I don't want Starbucks or any other global brand; I want something that is original and specific to that place. Ditto for restaurants. I like to eat food that is representative of that time and place, and I always feel cheated when I find myself eating in a restaurant, even a fancy restaurant, that was so good that they decided to have another one exactly the same somewhere else, same décor, same menu, just a different language. A friend of mine told me she was waiting for a bus in London when she saw a poster of Lana Del Rey advertising Zara. She took a flight to Moscow and found a poster of Rey advertising Zara, and a week later in Mumbai, same poster, same picture, just different lettering. We are being blinded by uniformity. In general I make a point of avoiding global brands, be they cafes, restaurants or shops, but sometimes they are just too convenient and I give in. There is nothing wrong with global brands. They sell stuff that people want to buy at a price that people are willing to pay. It's supply and demand, coupled with economies of scale - a no-brainer. The only problem is that global brands almost always end up killing off the little guys. Take bookshops. Once upon a time in London, small independent bookshops existed where you could spend hours browsing, ask the owner for advice, and breathe that special scent of paper and ink, a world within a world. Each bookshop bore the personality of the owners. The books sold reflected a personal choice; yes, a choice based on what they thought would sell, but a choice nonetheless. Few of them still exist; most were bought out by a handful of chains. Is it any different buying a book in Barnes & Noble or in a small bookshop? It's the same book after all. And surely the big stores offer more choice? Except that they don't. They offer uniformity; the lists of books they sell are similar to the lines of clothing Zara will sell you: They are tweaked to suit local markets, but essentially the same products are sold all over. There are places that seem to hold on to their originality a little better. Italy, for instance. I love that in Italy, anywhere in Italy, you can walk into a restaurant and eat food prepared by a family to a recipe that is specific not just to that region but to that locality. Food that is prepared with fresh ingredients bought that day and served with pride and that is not a formula. Formulas are successful because they work. McDonald's works because a Big Mac is a Big Mac wherever you go. You know what you're getting. The recipe is the same anywhere in the world; the cooking process from the temperature of the griddle to the cooking time is replicated with clockwork precision, but it's just replication, it's not cooking. However, we like it; we like the comfort of knowing what we're getting, of replicating an experience we know we like. The problem is the more we satisfy our craving for convenience, the more we kill off creativity, originality, individuality, and all those little things that actually make life interesting. — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
