The British press have a number of tried and tested stories they like to fall back on when there are column inches to fill. One popular genre is the reworked-press-release-plug-for-a-company-pseudo-scientific-study-reveals-shocka.
This week’s specimen was the news that a survey carried out by the home energy management service AlertMe (see what I did there?) had pinpointed the characteristics of the Average British Family. The ABF has 1.5 cars, has paid off 32% of the mortgage on their semi, watches nine hours of television a day, holidays twice a year, spends £12 a week on booze (is that all?), goes to bed before 11pm, and has two arguments a week.
You can see quite easily how they worked out the figures – they added up all the numbers and divided them by the appropriate amount to get the mean – but the statistics on the ABF’s average meal (it’s spag bol on Monday, for example) are a little more mystifying. The papers don’t specify, but presumably they’re talking about the mode rather than the mean here. Either that or there’s some special AlertMe mathematics that says that three chicken pies, two full englishes, seven cod and chips and a bangers and mash averages out to make a pasta bake, (Tuesday).
I heard about the ABF study from my friend N when I was round her parents’ house on Monday. I haven’t seen her since Christmas (she studies in New York now), but everything is as it always is at her parents’ house on one of the roads that slope down to the Mersey in south Manchester. It’s comfortable and chaotic in equal measure, the chaos coming partly because her parents run their businesses (a lingerie company and a scrap metal dealer) from an office in the front room, and partly because her dad is gradually filling it with paintings he buys online.
N has to get ready to go and model for a life drawing class in Littleborough and N’s mum is going to visit her Italian mother where she grew up in Rochdale. As N potters about the kitchen making a salad of tuna and chick peas they discuss the ABF study. “70% of people describe themselves as normal”, N tells her mum. “Would you describe us as normal mama?” “Definitely not,” she says. “We’re foreign.”
"The ABF has 1.5 cars, has paid off 32% of the mortgage on their semi, watches nine hours of television a day, holidays twice a year, spends £12 a week on booze (is that all?), goes to bed before 11pm, and has two arguments a week." Hmmm. I like this post. I would like to write some sort of aggregate fiction that captures ABF statistics like this...
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