A Horseradish
Thursday 9th January 2020 4:57pm [Edited]
8,475 posts
Can't believe how childish it is all getting - royalty, politics, identity politics, sport. celebrity, non celebrity media twerps, relationship people, people not in relationships, parents, partners, grandparents, siblings, modern kids, my own parents. It is like everything has turned into a fourth rate soap opera. Obviously it means that the past looks different or possibly just clearer. I'm seeing my few mates and the wider range of kids at school I was with in the 1970s as the real adults - in almost every case victim adults - and most of the adults who were around them - parents, teachers, doctors, older siblings - as having been generally spiteful and total tripe. The only huge exception to the rule was when I was at independent school and 11 and 12 year olds there were already chips off the old future looking block. Blair, Cameron. That sort of arsehole.
I still don't get this every bit as much as others don't get me. When people who don't know me are allowed into my house they pretend away all of the crabs with smiley faces, the fluffy snowmen in summertime and a lot of laddish leaning football and music memorabilia as if they never saw it and look at the books declaring I must be intellectual. Which I am not. Many too note my total lack of status in work and professional life and assume I am simultaneously immature. They can't get their heads around it. Yesterday I watched six episodes of The Furchester Hotel and it suited me far better than most of the rubbish that is on purely because it was reassuringly nice. I find it more normal than almost anything else I encounter. Then I looked at my old photos of mates and me in our 30s on holiday having a laugh. Lovely countryside. Grins with no need for an enforced shrieky "aren't we having fun - not". We walked a lot, laughed a lot, beered a lot.
There are pictures of me tying the shoe laces of my one armed mate who spent all of his time laughing and playing the guitar and never spoke about his disability. There is another of him in the bridal bed of our shared room with his thumb up looking ridiculous. And while they always fell out with each other at certain points none fell out with me. Ironically it was me who was the most nervous in others' company and while thoroughly enjoying it then had a need for retreating for three months. Not them. It's all so weird. I suppose the biggest challenge I find is that I had a strong preference for young middle aged heterosexual male company in young middle age. I have never really known why. Maybe deep down I am a woman or something but it doesn't feel like it. Thank God no one said to me at two "you need a sex change" because it would have promoted the physical above normal communication and the physical in anyone is death waiting to happen. I can't understand how when people like the Inbetweeners crave sex they don't see it is route one to their own graves.
Sometimes I beat myself over it to try to understand it. I am aware that I was often accused of being "too nice". Yet I think now it has something to do with the fact that when they did get spiteful or petulant I saw it as emerging from a childish spite in their family, personal and professional relationships which at least when with me they did escape from so that it was dulled down. Whereas those who never escaped those things - and I'm in that position now with no one of that sort around - were in the main just bloody atrocious like three year olds who are driven by money and hate the Muppets. Anyhow good luck to Harry in his trench with Meghan. I hope she grows up soon or by 60 when their "kid" is an "adult".
