The fetishisation of failure

Awhile back, I followed the career of the writer Elizabeth Day, but not in a good way; rather, I followed it much as a fly must have followed a muck-cart in the olden days. Her column for the Mail on Sunday, from 2018 to 2021, was quite probably the worst column ever to appear in a newspaper up to that point. I dubbed her The World’s Worst Columnist (and it wasn’t envy, as I had a cushy billet at the Sunday Telegraph at the time) and took great delight in sharing the choice cherries of triteness atop her weekly Sunday sundae of banality with my mates on social media. She was actually paid to write a whole column about her dishwasher;

Perhaps we dislike the act of putting things away because it reminds us of the endless cycle of life: the investment of hopes and dreams (loading dirty plates), the hope of renewal (the washing) and then the realisation that we have to go through the whole thing again (the unloading) until we break down… or the dishwasher does.