pretty vacant...

There's an episode in the most recent series of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is introduced to the fiancee of his manager's daughter. This guy, we're told, has served in the US army in Afghanistan. As everyone before Larry is introduced to this guy, they each make a point of saying how nice it is to meet him and thanking him for his service. When it's Larry's turn, he just says "Hi, how are you doing?". Everyone stares at him in horror, and the ex-serviceman has to leave because he is so upset. Larry, of course, cannot and will not accept that he's done anything wrong. He's already been thanked for his service by all of you, why do I need to thank him too?

As the episode aired here in November, it was impossible not to draw the comparison with the increasing fuss people make about the poppy and making an ever-more-ostentatious show of "respect". Not wearing a poppy doesn't mean you don't care about the sacrifices others have made in time of war; not thanking someone for their service doesn't mean you aren't thankful for it, only that you don't feel the need to parrot out an automatic response... so automatic that it is stripped of any real feeling. Are you saying you're grateful because you are grateful or because that's just what you say.

I have a real bug bear about this in the office. Most of the people I work with are in their twenties. We knock along pretty well, in the main, but whenever I ask the simple question: "You okay?", I almost always get the response, "Yeah, you?"... except it comes out as "yeahyou", all one word.

I think it's a millennial thing.

What annoys me about this is not so much that they're asking me if I'm okay, but that their tone of voice and speech cadence changes slightly as they reply to indicate that they're neither really answering my question nor giving me a real answer. It's a totally automated response, and I'm none the wiser at the end as to whether they really are okay or if they're genuinely interested in knowing if I'm okay too.

Or perhaps it's just me and there's nothing at all wrong or unusual about that and maybe I'm just turning into Larry David.

papa, don't preach...

I was slightly mortified last week to be referred to as someone's "work dad".

We were chatting away over the desks about a mutual colleague's new(-ish) boyfriend.  They've been going out for a few months now and seem very happy together, which is clearly very nice.  I was first introduced to this chap at a Twenty:20 game at Trent Bridge in the summer and I was saying to my colleague how nervous he seemed.

"Well, of course he seemed nervous.  It's quite a big deal meeting someone's work dad".

I'm sorry, what?

I'm about fifteen years older than these girls, who both used to be in my team a couple of years ago. To be honest, I don't tend to think all that deeply about our friendship: they're colleagues that I used to manage and with whom I get on pretty well. I certainly don't try and define our relationship in familial terms....Work dad, though?  REALLY?

...If I have to be a part of someone's work family, wouldn't I more naturally suggest the roles of cool older brother or groovy uncle?  Work dad?  COME ON!

I quickly changed the subject to conceal my outrage.

"I still haven't forgiven your boyfriend for standing you up before your first date"
"That was three years ago"
"I know."

Work dad.  I ask you!

make me wanna scream....

Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent, maybe it’s because I’m a miserable bastard…. But I find that the noise of a crying baby cuts right through me. I look around, and pretty much everybody else seems to be looking over at the wailing infant with happy, indulgent smiles, but for me it’s like fingernails down a blackboard. Only much, much more grating.

Am I weird? Am I perhaps missing some important nurturing part of my genetic makeup?

Or maybe – just maybe - it’s bang out of order to bring your screaming child into an open-plan office environment and then sit around chatting with your mates for nearly an hour.

Yeah. I reckon it’s that.

Take it away and don’t bring it back until it has learnt how to keep its unhappiness at being in that building locked away inside.

 We all feel like that, but the rest of us have learned to internalise our pain and to suffer more quietly.

bad apple....

No.

I went to the gym this evening for a swim.  I arrived feeling smug already after cycling past enormous queues of people stuck in traffic on their way out of the office.  I find cycling therapeutic at the best of times, but it's been fairly mild this week, and it's definitely getting lighter in the mornings and staying lighter for longer in the evenings.  This makes me feel pretty good, and the ride along the canal to the gym this evening was excellent.  I was feeling pretty tired, but my mood was good and I was slightly surprised to find that the gym was quiet as apparently most of the New Year's Resolution crowd have now given it up for another year.  Excellent.

The swim was okay too, but my sense of karmic wellbeing was soon to be totally shattered.  I've grown  sadly accustomed over the years to seeing young men preening in front of the floor length mirrors; I don't like it, but there it is.  Apparently some people need to style their hair both before and after exercising.  It's not something I've ever felt the need to do, even when I had hair, but there you go.  Each to their own.  O tempora, O mores and all that.

Look, I use moisturiser; I wear fragrance from time to time, I trim my beard.... although that's clearly not going the full Beckham, I think that makes me sensibly metrosexual.  I don't have my eyebrows plucked or shaped because I have no desire to look (more) like a Vulcan, but I won't deny that I have occasionally attended to hairs located elsewhere on my body.  Not in public, mind.

There are limits.

So when I walked past the mirrors in the gym this evening, I was somewhat perturbed to see a young man hunched right up against the mirror, meticulously setting about his - not very long - fringe with a set of straightening tongs.  His portable set, obviously.  Small enough to pack into his gym bag, but powerful enough to get the job done.  As he worked at his hair, the rest of the world seemed to have disappeared, so rapt was he in his task.  Somehow, it seemed, he had forgotten that he was standing in the middle of a public changing room at the gym in full sight of everyone else there... and that it was a Wednesday night, that he didn't really have all that much hair in the first place AND THAT HE WAS A MAN.

What has happened to us?  I'm hardly nostalgic for a time when men were men and never spoke of their feelings.....well, not too much..... but how did it become essential for a man to remember to put his straightening tongs into his gym bag with his towel, padlock and trainers?  I might be talking out of turn here, but that's not essential packing for most women, is it?

a normal man, yesterday.

I'm saddened this evening, friends.  Saddened and disappointed in my sex*.  I've had to come home and shower using a bar of Imperial Leather, splash my cheeks with Brut aftershave, pour myself a pint of mild and settle down in front of One Man and his Dog, but I just can't rid myself of that shocking image.  One bad apple, it seems, can spoil the whole darn bunch.

It's just one bad apple, right?  No other man does that, right?  Not in public, anyway....

* Sex, that is, rather than gender.... gender is a construct, innit.

cold...

For someone with a chronic condition, I am absolutely appalling at being ill.  Oh, I can cope with the slings and arrows that MS throws at me well enough, but the first sign of a sniffle and I turn into a horrendous grouch.  Yeah.  Even worse than usual, if you can imagine that.

I first noticed that tell-tale tickle at the top of my lungs around this time last week.  I was still well enough to go running on Wednesday, but by Thursday I was sliding fast into a full-on coughing, snuffling, snorting bundle of fun.  I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed and, although I think I'm now on the mend, I'm in the middle of developing an unpleasant hacking cough and I also have even more of a Johnny Cash singing voice than normal.

The thing is that I don't really get colds.

Occasionally I'll get a bit of a scratchy throat, but that quickly passes on without developing into anything else.  I used to think that this was because I am supremely fit and eat an almost industrial quantity of fruit and vegetables every single day.  And perhaps it is....after my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis though, the smart money would be that I simply have a hyperactive immune system that squashes anything before it gets a chance to gain a foothold.  Whatever.  There had to be an up-side, right?

My goodness, did I catch this cold though.  I haven't been walloped by something like this in YEARS.  It is a touch unfortunate that it coincided with the exam I needed to sit on Friday and managed to ruin my weekend, but as long as it buggers off before I leave for Canada this coming Saturday, then I think I can overlook all that.

Obviously, because I'm a man and it's what men do, I've been pumping myself full of massive quantities of analgesics, painkillers and decongestant.  Unfortunately for my poor, long-suffering wife, I've also been transformed into an grumpy, uncommunicative pain in the arse.  Yup.  More than normal.  I don't do ill very gracefully, I'm afraid.  I don't like being ill.  I'm grumpy that I feel under-the-weather and I'm grumpy that I can't go out running and I'm rather afraid that I externalise that grumpiness at the people around me.  It probably wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't also epically unsympathetic when anyone else is ill around me.

I'm quite the catch, huh?

Still.  I'm on the mend now and I may even be stupid enough to attempt to go running with running club tomorrow night.... after I've injected myself with my usual dose of immuno-supressants tonight.  They're probably not going to speed up my recovery, right?  Unfortunately one of the things about MS is that being sick like this causes a spike in your white blood cell count, and that can sometimes trigger a relapse when my stupid body doesn't know what it's supposed to be attacking and goes for my nervous system rather than the cold virus.  Hence I still need to inject and risk that I may well wake up feeling awful all over again in the morning.

Also, I'm doing a little experiment.  I've been drinking hot water or green tea all day to soothe my cough.  I've been interviewing all day today, and one of the candidates suggested that I should try a little jamaican rum to help the healing process.  Yeah.  This evening I'm all over that idea.  Diluted, of course..... but still.  I feel better already.

chewing on life's gristle....

Maybe the Olympics were the exception that proved the rule: after 7 years of moaning that lasted from the moment that London were announced as the host for the 2012 games, to the moment that the opening ceremony came along and shut most people up (and certainly when the gold rush started), we British were able to sit back and actually be positive about something; to just enjoy the moment for what it was. Finally. For the period of the Olympics, for 16 whole days, we were like a nation transformed, genuinely revelling in the Games and allowing our traditional reserve to relax just a little bit. The carping started again even before the closing ceremony was over, but it was nice while it lasted.

We like a good moan, on the whole. I’m no different to anyone else, but we also seem to take an unhealthy pleasure in reading about the misfortunes of the rich and famous and we seemingly take no greater pleasure than seeing tall poppies cut down to size. I don’t know if the interest came before our tabloid press or vice-versa, but as a nation we seem to be very much from the glass-half-empty school of thought. Happy go lucky we most definitely are not (even if I saw it suggested after Erik Idle’s performance at the closing ceremony that “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” was the alternative national anthem.)

Today, the England cricket team lost its status as the number one ranked test match side in the world. We’ve not had a great 2012, to be honest, and we’ve been beaten fair and square by an excellent South African side that is now replacing us at the top of the tree. We haven’t become a bad side overnight, by any means, but all of a sudden the focus is on the captain, the coach, the personality issues in the dressing room…. For a brief window of a few hours before the last test match started on Thursday last week, we were the number one side in all three formats of the game – test matches, twenty:20 and one dayers. Did we take a moment to revel in that achievement? To reflect on the fact that this is the most successful an England cricket team has been in my lifetime? Nah… instead we relentlessly focus on the negative. We think about what’s wrong rather than pause to enjoy what’s gone right. Yes, I realise that you can’t dwell on the past too much or you risk standing still, but surely it’s possible to at least enjoy a quiet satisfaction in what you’ve achieved? If you can't look and enjoy it now, then when can you?  Doubly true if you’re a fan and not one of the players or coaches who has to worry about the future.

It was the same with my football team last season. Yes, we were relegated from the Premier League after three years in the top flight. Disappointing, for sure…. But did we pause to reflect that this was our most successful spell in decades; and that as recently as 1988 we were languishing in the bottom division and in danger of going out of business entirely? Did we recognise for a moment that the fans of almost every other club in the country – those below the Premier League - would love to have the chance at a season as disappointing as that? Did we reflect that the club was one of the very few to be entirely in the black and with wages well under control; that relegation wasn’t likely to see the club disappear into administration? Of course we didn’t. Perspective and football do not often go hand-in-hand. (See also: Arsenal fans moaning about a defeat in the last 16 of the Champions League against Milan at the San Siro. You people don’t know you’re born!)

Maybe the Paralympics will change the national mood again. I find them to be, if anything, even more inspirational than the Olympics…. But then again, Celebrity Big Brother is on now too. And the X-Factor has started again. You have to say that it’s not looking good and that the Olympic mood might be the exception rather than the rule. Or am I just conforming to national stereotype by being glass-half-empty about this? Maybe, just maybe the national psyche has been changed for the better – and I don’t mean in a mawkish, minute’s silence and flowers for everything kind of way that followed the death of Princess Diana. Ugh. No thanks.

They say that pessimists are never disappointed, but couldn’t you equally say that they’re always disappointed?

Mind you, what do I know?  Who am I to talk?  I’m pretty sure that no one has ever described me as an optimist… I reckon it will probably rain later too.  I know, but I just can't help it.  Maybe we're just born this way.

culture of consumption....

We went to the cinema on Saturday afternoon to watch "The Hunger Games".  I thought it was pretty good, but I'm not going to bore you with an in-depth review that makes comparisons with a Japanese film that I've never seen.  You can find plenty of them for yourself.  Instead, I'm going to have a moan about the people sitting just behind us.  Sound reasonable?  Ok. Good.

There were about five or six of them, a mixture of boys and girls.  They were young; perhaps in their early twenties or a little younger, but they didn't look like mouth-breathers to me.  They were dressed okay - neither in shellsuits or filled-nappy harem pants - and looked as though they might be students.  They were carrying a couple of huge bags of popcorn when they came in to sit down, but I didn't see anything to be alarmed about.

In fact, initially I was amused by them:
"Ohmigod.  I saw his Facebook status, and within thirty seconds I had text messages from both the other two..."

I think it's fair to say that my experience of being nineteen was a little different.  I still went to the cinema with my friends, but when I wanted to talk to one of them, I used to have to use the telephone in my parents' front hall to ring the telephone in their parents' front hall to set things up.  It was that or send them a letter.  I was watching a documentary on Britain in the 1970s last night, and I thought that it looked like a different world.  Never mind 1973.... 1993 seems like a different world to these kids.

It was when the lights went down that my problems really started.  For the first thirty minutes or so - and it was nearer 45 minutes in all - I was largely oblivious to what was going on around me as the advertising and previews on the screen were blasting out at deafening volume.  ("Battleship"?  They've seriously made a film based upon the board game?  Starring Rihanna? WTF? Also, have we really reached a point where the advertising makes up 25% of the length of the entire screening?).

Once the main feature started though, the volume dropped somewhat, and as I settled into the film, I began to be aware of noises around me: specifically the noise of a bunch of kids stuffing their hands into large paper bags, rummaging around for a handful of low quality, overpriced popcorn and then the sounds...the endless sounds...of mindless chewing.  It was like listening to a herd of cows chewing contentedly on the cud.  What made it worse, so much worse, was they way they passed these bags around so that someone sitting a little further away could make even more noise as they rummaged around for their handful.  They were entirely oblivious, too of the noise they were making in quiet bits of the film, and apparently immune to the hate lasers my wife trained on them every few minutes.  I don't think it even occurred to them for a moment that they were maybe being a little inconsiderate.  Those bags of popcorn lasted for the whole film.  I saw them in the foyer afterwards and they were still dipping in a hand and chewing.  Do those bags access another dimension or something?

After an hour or so of this, one of the girls stood up and announced -- to each of the others in turn, as she passed them in the line of seats -- that she was going to the loo.  Literally one minute later, she was back, telling each of them in turn as she passed them on the way back to her seat that she couldn't find the toilet.

Then a phone rang.... and was answered.

It didn't ruin the film for me, but it did make me pause to think that these kids - university students, remember, hardly pond life - seem to have the shortest of attention spans.  They've grown up in a world of instant gratification and consumption.  I don't think they're used to sitting still and silently for more than a few minutes at a time and perhaps simply don't know how it's done.  Or why it might be necessary.  They've had mobile phones for most of their lives and can't imagine why they might sometimes need to be turned off, or why their email or Facebook doesn't need checking every few minutes.  I overheard them in the foyer talking about what they were going to see next: Battleship.  It's got Rihanna in it.

Couldn't we put these people into an arena and make them fight to the death or something, like, totally for my entertainment?  They could fight Simon Cowell or something.  I'd totally watch that.

srsly.

Good grief.  When did I get so old?

It's a good film though.  I enjoyed it.  Well worth seeing, if only for Wes Bentley's epic facial hair.

Looks pretty high maintenance to me, but something to think about perhaps?

cry me a river...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but I cried in the cinema when I went to go and watch “Cool Runnings”. I’m not especially ashamed of this fact, but I do have an explanation: it was the end of a long run of heart-wrenching films that I went to see at the cinema over a number of weeks. Schindler’s List, Philadelphia, The Remains of the Day, Shadowlands…. By the end of that lot, I think I would have cried at pretty much anything. I used to cry at the drop of a hat as a child - real tears too, not the crocodile sort - but somewhere along the line, my emotions dried up. Nothing to do with being sent to attend largely single-sex boarding schools between the ages of seven and eighteen, I’m sure…..

Perhaps it’s because I’m older, but I seem to be turning into something of a sap and my eyes seem to fill with tears pretty much at the drop of a hat, no matter how obviously my emotions are being manipulated. This is easy enough to conceal in the dark of the matinee, and I think I got away with it at the end of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” the other night, but harder when it’s broad daylight and we’re watching the telly.

The most recent culprit was when the Keira Knightley version of “Pride and Prejudice” was on the telly before New Year. Now, I’ve not been much of a fan of Matthew Macfadyen since his days on Spooks, a show that I loathed, but I found myself quite affected by his performance as Darcy and the way that he and Elizabeth slowly come to terms with the way they feel about each other. I can take or leave Austen, in the main, and find her relentlessly over-analysed by people trying to project readings onto her work that I just don’t think they can support, but you can’t argue with P&P (and Keira Knightley made a much better, far less smug and knowing Elizabeth than Jennifer Ehle in the celebrated BBC adaptation too).

Getting a bit of a lump in my throat watching Macfayden as Darcy was bad enough, but what really had me wiping my eyes was Donald Sutherland’s Mr. Bennett. I firmly believe that Austen’s Mr. Bennett is one of the greatest creations in literature, and Sutherland played him beautifully, particularly at the end when he realises that his Lizzy really does love that man that she apparently professed to dislike. He says at one point, with his eyes filling with tears, “We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him”, and that was it, I was in pieces.

This emergence of a soft, sentimental old fool is somewhat at odds with the image I like to portray of myself as a cold, logical iceman.

[ahem].

Another reason to never watch ET, anyway.

you can knit a sweater by the fireside....

I was in Oxford at the weekend.

As usual, on Saturday morning, I went for a run with my friend Rich.  Rich is a touch older than me, and usually runs at a slightly slower pace than I would normally do.  This is never a problem, but as it was the morning after the night before, I was more than usually happy to tootle along gently for five miles, enjoying the beautiful morning and slowly blowing the cobwebs away.

Oxford is a nice place to go for a run, with the University Parks providing a lovely setting for a saunter around some beautiful lakes and playing fields.

It is, of course, also filled with students exercising.

This wouldn't normally be a problem, except that they are usually all at least half our age, and as they fly past us like gazelles as we huff and puff around the grounds, it's hard not to feel slightly resentful of them.  There is some consolation to be had in the lycra clad bodies as they zoom past, I suppose... but not that much.

Apart from anything else, these students aren't very friendly.  There's an unwritten rule amongst runners that we're all in this together: it doesn't matter what shape you're in or how fast you're running, it is your responsibility to acknowledge your fellow runners.  It doesn't have to be much: a smile, a cheery hello, or even a look of shared pain.... but it should be done.  The students don't follow this rule, and it's very dispiriting to give someone a friendly smile only to be completely ignored*

* Rich tells me that one young blonde thing we ran past was very quick to give me a quick warm smile - both times we ran past her as we each completed a circuit of the Parks running in opposite directions - but if that's true, I was oblivious to her attentions.  Honestly.

The last mile or so back to Rich's house consists of the long drag back up Headington Hill.  This is one of those hills that is steep enough that buses and lorries can't climb it when it snows, and after four miles and a skin full of wine the night before, it was a bit of a struggle for us too.  As we hauled our way uphill, we were passed by a young lady powering her way downhill.  She was probably only in her early 20s, if that, but she looked like she meant business and had a very focused look about her.  She managed to break her concentration for just long enough to give the pair of us a withering, appraising sideways glance as she swept past us, freezing our warm smiles even as they left our lips.

We turned to each other as we continued our pitifully slow progress towards the distant summit of the hill:

"Pah.  Anyone can look good running DOWN the hill.  She should wait until she's got another twenty years on the clock...."
"Yeah, and she should try it on your knees...."

etc.

We're so old.

As WB Yeats almost said:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
You try running up that bloody hill with a hangover. 

Envying the young for their youth is an especially futile exercise, no?