Tears For Fears

The recent series of The Great British Bake Off has stirred up a lot of online debate and astoundingly none of it has been about buns, baps or crusty cobs. It has instead been about crying. About tears. About the expression of emotion.

I’ve read a number of blogs recently that have given Ruby, this year’s youngest Bake Off contestant, a hard time. She has come under fire for crying too much, for crying at the slightest little thing, for ‘crying to gain sympathy’. In short she has been accused of utilizing her tears as some kind of Machiavellian tactic to gain advantage over the other contestants.

Now, aside from the fact that she has gained no advantage at all and indeed I fail to see what actual advantage there is to gain, I find the accusations deeply disturbing, repugnant and unfair. Some of the comments I have seen directed Ruby’s way included the old gem, “oh she’s just putting it on; I knew girls like her at school – very pretty and they turn on the tears just to get their own way; they know exactly what they are doing.”

It took me a while to work out why that statement angered me so much – because there are a number of reasons.

The first (and major) is that the initial gut reaction of both my wife and I when we first saw Ruby was along the lines of: this person has had something happen to her which has left her a little bit damaged. We didn’t see someone who was deliberately manipulative or turning on the tears just for effect; we saw someone who was plainly fragile, had major self-esteem problems despite her looks (because, let’s acknowledge something here: just because you’re perceived as good looking by other people doesn’t mean you believe it yourself) and was severely lacking in confidence and a sense of self-worth.

I’m sure it will be argued that I am merely transferring my own experiences and (mis)conceptions onto Ruby. I would argue that people accusing her of being manipulative are doing the same. To dismiss her with the phrase “I have known girls like her…” is offensive, lazy, callous and reductive. Have you really known girls like Ruby? Isn’t everyone an individual? How can you judge someone who appears on a highly edited TV programme – someone you have never seen before – and decide you know them well enough to critique their entire personality? And as for these girls that you “knew”… how well did you really know them? Enough to judge their behaviour and condemn them for it out of hand? What if there were issues at home? What if there were traumas? Or did you really know everything about them to be able to say they had no reason at all for their behaviour except an inherent and apparently unjustifiable nastiness?

The other thing that bugged me was the implication that other people’s tears and ‘confidence wobbles’ on the show were genuine while Ruby’s were not. How the hell can anybody make a judgement call like that? As far as I could discern this judgement was based solely on Ruby’s looks. Ruby is very attractive therefore she must be supremely confident, must have an easy life with no trauma ever taking place and is not allowed to be attributed with any nervousness, lack of confidence or feelings of self-doubt and emotional negativity. People who are more plain looking, however, well when they cry and go through a confidence crisis that must be genuine because everyone knows that attractiveness = manipulativeness while plainness = honesty and integrity.

What simplistic, reductive rot.

You cannot allow that one person is genuinely upset and not another. There is a basic human right issue here that has nothing to do with looks, gut instinct or whether or not you find someone’s personality appealing or not. Human emotional responses are impossibly complex. Nobody can read them well enough to say exactly what someone is feeling let alone instantly dismiss them as being OTT or inappropriate. For Christ’s sake, if you feel something you feel it. It is not for others to deny you the rights to your own emotions or charge you with fraudulent behaviour. Imagine how crippling that is: you feel something strongly enough to make you cry but those around you shrug and say, “Nah, you’re faking it.” How do you feel now?

The last thing that piqued a response from me was the debate about whether there were too many crying people on TV per se. Whether there was an emerging crying culture generally that was, if not fake, then at least over-done and distasteful to those of us who battle on with stiff upper lips. Is all this free-wheeling emotion a good thing or a bad thing? Part of the argument again was based on the idea that people use tears as a means to an end; a moral gambit to win (or even just avoid) an argument.

I’m not sure what the answer is here except that I would rather a world where people were open and honest about their feelings than a world where people bottled things up, battled on until they either popped and took out half the street in a killing spree or popped internally and fell to the big C or heart disease. Surely the real issue here lies with how people deal with the tears and upset of other people? Isn’t a sighing, dismissive, disgruntled response (“Oh God, they’re not crying, are they?”) also an emotional response that is just as open to criticism?

Surely there is an analogy here to dealing with crying children? Certainly you don’t want to give in and give them whatever it is they want just to stop / avoid the tears… but you do need to talk to them because there is plainly an issue. They might not get what they want but, in the words of Mick Jagger, they might get what they need. At the end of the day we are all emotional beings to one degree or another – our place on the spectrum isn’t the benchmark. I don’t believe there is a norm and I don’t think a norm should be proscribed.

But we do all need to be better about how we deal with our emotions and how we deal with the emotions of other people.

Dismissing, castigating, denigrating and vilifying someone just because of how they express their feelings is not the way forward.

And that is something I feel most sincerely.

Releasing Your Inner Vile

Just as parents in olden times warned their children not so stray from the forest path or to accept sweets from strangers or to go into a strange man’s house to look at some puppies so the modern parent must burden its offspring with some more up-to-date caveats. Cautionary notes based around imminent celebrity – because there are so many 15 minutes of fame flying around these days a kid has to be pretty abnormal not to have an agent or a regular day time interview slot on some plebeian television “magazine” show.

These celeb rules can be condensed into:

Never get involved with Radio One DJ’s, especially those that do a lot of charity fun runs.

Never be part of a kiddie band if you harbour any pretension of being taken at all seriously as a musician when you are grown up.

And lastly but not least, do not ever sign yourself up to be Alan Sugar’s next young apprentice.

I quite enjoy the adult version of The Apprentice. Mainly because the contestants are akin to the painted wooden ducks on a fairground shoot ‘em up. They are dislikeable in the extreme. They are hate fodder. Pretentious, loudmouthed, arrogant, over-reaching, self-deluded arseholes to a man and to a woman. It is OK to hate them. Hell, they don’t even care. Their goal is earn so much money the negative opinions of us lesser mortals becomes merely a source of amusement to them.

But I don’t feel comfortable hating the kids on Young Apprentice. And yet I do. I do truly, truly hate them. For all the same reasons listed above in their adult counterparts. How shocking to realize that the traits of arseholedom can be seen to flourish at such young and tender ages.

All the arrogance, bile and contempt for every human being around you except for the one who’s got something you want is there, written large in their mannerisms and the way they conduct themselves... combined and augmented by the patronizing, callowness of those too young to fully grasp the way the world works but old enough to grasp the mistaken belief that they do in fact understand everything and understand it better than anybody else on the entire planet, so get out of my way and let me do what I want to do, you nobcheese, all you are required to do is to tell me that I am eternally, megalomaniacally right... now buy me a new Angry Bird themed iPad and shut the fuck up.

What kind of parent allows their kid to be a combatant on a show that makes the boys in Lord Of The Flies look like Rupert The Bear and Friends?

These kids are fearfully adept in their vileness. I sometimes wonder if they are kids at all. Surely they are adults masquerading as kids? No kid can surely be that callous and Machiavellian in their manoeuvring?

I certainly wasn’t at their age.

But I figure it all comes down to this: self belief.

To be truly vile, to be truly poisonous to your fellow man you need an above average sense of self belief. To be a King Bastard or a Queen Bitch you gotta believe in yourself worse than the kids from Fame. Because if you have any sense of self doubt, any inkling that actually, maybe you’re not half so great as you tell people you are, you just cannot stamp all over other people and walk away from it unscathed. Self belief cancels out conscience. Conviction tramples the little voice of reason in your head into oblivion.

Self doubt makes you a better person. It might make you a crap businessman but it makes you a decent member of the human race.

And for that reason alone I hope my kids never have enough self belief that they’ll ever want to be Alan Sugar’s next investment monkey.

And as for Jim’ll Fix It, well, that’s been off the cards for a long while.

Nasal Bungee

I have never in my life waited tables or worked in a cafe.

Not even as a Saturday job.

It’s not that I ever thought such a job was too beneath me. Honestly. The truth was I was just too shy to contemplate having to deal with people on such an intimate level. I.E. Actually speaking to them and bringing them food items which they will then ingest in front of me. Add to this dealing with money and till receipts and the odd complaint about cold sausage meat and, as a late teen / early twenty something, it was just a career move that I felt myself far too inadequate to contemplate.

So I stuck to office cleaning and the odd spot of lawn mowing for old ladies. No. There is no euphemism there. Don’t even think it.

But I often wonder about people who do wait tables. I marvel at their self-confidence and stamina. I often wonder if, had someone pushed me into working in a cafe, it would have done my confidence some good and hardened me up to the hard knocks of the work place sooner rather than later. Who knows where I might have ended up as a consequence?

One waitress I will always remember worked in a proper greasy spoon in Birmingham back in the Eighties. Not a cafe. A caff. Me and my mate, Dave, used to head over on the train every Saturday to visit the guitar shops and the record shops of ‘Brum’. We were both new to full time employment – Dave at the Post Office and me at British Telecom – and, both of us living at home, we had assets so liquid we could piss them up the wall as often and as wantonly as we liked without a care in the world.

One Saturday we decided we were in the mood for a proper fry-up. A proper heart-attack-on-a-plate, long-distance-lorry-driver kind of fry-up. The kind running in so much grease and oil you think David Walliams may have wrung out his swimming trunks all over your plate (‘cos they cover his body in goose fat to insulate him against the cold water – just in case you were wondering what I was referring to).

We found a likely cafe. I can’t remember what it was called but I do recall it was near a butcher’s shop that sported the unlikely name of Big City Meat. That amused our young adult minds no end, I can tell you.

I ordered egg and chips – that hardy British nutritional standby – and I can’t for the life of me remember what Dave ordered. But I can tell you now that it wasn’t a salad. That place did not sell anything green. Though as you will discover it may have offered something for free...

We didn’t take much notice of the waitress at first. Other than she punctuated every word she spoke with a sniff. She was rather gaunt looking and was wearing an apron that was far too big for her and looked like it had been nicked from her granny. Dave and I were far too interested in the acoustic guitar I’d just bought to give her the benefit of a quick male-interest once over and so let her be.

When she brought our food over, however, it was a different matter. She held the plates up so high we had no choice but to look up into her face. To peer upwards into the glistening twin-cavities of her nose. And therein at the same time we both spied the biggest, wettest bogey ever produced hanging by the most precarious of threads, waiting to drop its gagging payload onto our plates.

We both tensed nervously as the plates were lowered down to the table top and she bent her head forwards a little. She may have whispered “bon appétit” but I very much doubt it; she was from Birmingham after all. It was probably something like “get yer chops around that”. And then she disappeared back into the kitchen with a dismissive sniff.

But was it an empty sniff – a sniff that luxuriated in a sudden vacuum? Or a sniff that reconnected and re-housed something warm, wet and personal?

We will never know but I can tell you now, no two plates of greasy fried food were ever so furiously and so dedicatedly examined for unasked for greens.

I have never relished greasy food since that day and cannot abide “snotty” eggs. They have to be easy-over and nicely firm, not an ounce of runny stuff upon them. Overly gooey eggs make me want to retch.

I don’t know if working in a cafe ever improved that girl’s lot in life or did her any good. Whether her bravery over my cowardice meant she was fast-tracked to some dream job years later and now she’s rubbing shoulders with Alan the Lord Sugar and running her own business while I‘m here... er... where I am.

I think of her often and wonder who, out of the two of us, had it the worst that day; who the best.

Her memory stays with me always. Hanging there by a moist thread.

Never quite letting go.

24 Hour Non-Party Person

Up to the age of 14 I was well reconciled with my nerdiness. I was the last to be picked for football teams, the cool kids ignored me and the bullies also ignored me by dint of me not being worth the effort to rough up (doing me over would hardly improve their social standing among their peers).

But when I turned 15 life at school irrevocably changed.

I found myself weighed down by the advent of “the party”.

Not the parties I had been used to... jelly, ice cream, someone who would fail a CRB check stuffed into a purple dinosaur costume... but the full-on, adolescent party with no grown-ups present, real alcohol, and the slight possibility of a snog and copping a feel of someone's tits in the cupboard under the stairs. If you were really lucky they’d belong to a girl.

Great. Something else to be miserable about. Another social situation to fail.

Even back then part of me felt that it would actually be more of a blessed relief to not be invited. Sure it would sting. It would smart. But I could indulge myself in a little self-righteous dudgeon at being left out in the cold. And yet, despite myself, part of me was still unreasonably pleased when I was invited.

I think people felt sorry for me. People felt that out of the nerdy no-hopers I was actually pretty alright. And I had a few friends who were on the fringes of the cool group. So I got included by proxy.

I won’t lie. I’d fool myself every time. Lie to myself.

I’d allow myself to fill with a silly wild hope that (a) I would actually relax enough to enjoy myself, that (b) someone would actually talk to me and include me in what was going on and (c) the miracle might occur whereby a girl revealed that despite my geeky exterior she had seen through to the vibrant, molten, burgeoning bard at my core and wanted to kiss me. A proper kiss with tongues and everything. Gaining access to the inner sanctum of a girl’s bra was beyond my wildest imaginings at that point. It was hallowed ground not meant for trespass by an unworthy like me.

What would actually happen is that I would find myself hopelessly outmatched by my peers. I would not dress cool enough. Would not have the confidence to speak properly. Would not be brave enough to give dancing or the slightly risqué party games a go. And I would hang around the edges of the room – or more notably the kitchen – nibbling at the party food and watching the clock for the official finish time of the party when I could at last slink off home and then be assailed with misery and depression for the following week whilst also fantasizing about all the cool things I could have done if I just happened, by some miracle, to be somebody else entirely.

This routine was so established by the third party I attended it could almost be termed a system. Even a coping strategy.

And since those days I have never particularly liked parties or social occasions. Even though now, more often than not, I do actually have a good time every now and then and, God forbid, actually sometimes acquit myself rather well.

The only difference now is that I have learned not to care one way or the other. I get less worried about it beforehand. Give it less thought afterwards. And during... well, during I refuse to pander to whatever is going on. I am me. Take me or leave me. Either way I don’t mind.

I don’t seek out parties... in fact if I never attend another party that’s fine by me... but neither do I live in fear of them either.

I do sometimes wonder though how different my attitude might have been if I’d been one of the cool kids. If I’d got to play spin the bottle with Debbie Rush or Joanne Clemons (the two sirens of my school years).

Or if, just once, I’d dragged myself out of the kitchen and into the wonderfully humid realm of a girl’s bra.

Remember Me?

I came across the above photo surreptitiously (you can click on it to enlarge it). I say surreptitiously because it was not sent to me; I merely found it on an old school acquaintance’s Facebook page. I doubt they even remember me, let alone would have reason to send me a copy of the photo.

Because you see, despite this being a snapshot of my peers outside my old sixth form college, I am not on it. I don’t even recall this photo being taken. I was totally unaware of it at the time; the fact that somebody gathered this select few together, organized them, took the photo. I was not invited or even told about it.

That sounds bitter – and maybe it is – but that was undeniably my first reaction.

Followed swiftly by a “why the hell would they have invited me anyway?”

You see I doubt if most of the people in this photograph would remember me. I expect that most of them didn’t know who I was even at the time. They would have past me in the corridors, sat behind me in the classrooms and I wouldn’t have impinged on their consciousness in the slightest. Except maybe as “the really uncool kid”, “the nerd”, “the weird looking one”.

I doubt if I had a name to most of these people.

I was a wallflower at school. Complete and utter. And while my sixth form years were the start of me emerging from my awkward shell, I was still a long way off from gaining any kind of confidence or self esteem.

When I look at this photo I feel a painful sense of want. An agony of wanting to fit in and be cool and be popular. Kind of like Kung Fu Panda (before he discovered the secrets of Kung Fu) wanting to hang out with the Furious Five.

Only for me it was never going to happen.

A couple of my friends are on this photo. Tristan Fitzgerald and Steve Fox. It’s telling that they didn’t tell me about this photo being taken at the time. For them it would have been a pleasant but not particularly especial event. If I had been asked to join this group it would have made my entire year.

Well. It plainly wasn’t my year.

It’s weird to see how young everyone looks. So eighties. So dated. Faintly ridiculous. And yet this was the epitome of cool. This was a group of teens who thought they knew it all before University and Life proved to them how wrong they all were.

This was a group of teens who I envied, who I hated, who I adored and in a couple of cases – Sarah Cullen and Emily Sweetman – I would even have gladly drunk your bath water.

But I am not in this photo. I am somewhere else in the building. Probably in a darkened room writing trauma inducing poetry about not fitting in. About not belonging. About desperately wanting to. About how was I ever, ever going to get a girlfriend?

Looking at this photo now I can finally see how all that really didn’t matter. It was only me that made it matter; that hamstrung myself with it. All those useless hang-ups. All those miserable desires and the unfairness of not having them realized.

Looking at this photo now I wish I could go back in time and instil a different kind of world-view into myself. To not have myself care so much. To bother a good deal less about other people’s opinions. To have the scales pulled from my eyes. To pull these people down from the dais that I had placed them on. To stop wanting to be like them.

Because going my own way – as I eventually did – was always the right thing to do.

To not be on this photograph was always the best thing to be.

I just didn’t realize it at the time.

This is a photograph of me before I woke up to myself. Before I became me.

It’s only now that I’m smiling for the camera.

You Lying Cheating Old Bag

I’m not a hard hearted uncharitable person but whenever these things get posted through my letterbox I feel a certain uprising of bile. An upsurge of suspicion and impatience. And then I invariably scoop them up and put them straight into the rubbish bin. I’ve done it for years. I don’t think I have ever filled one up and left it outside for collection.

I am, of course, talking about charity bags.

Pretty much every week some chancer who plainly can’t take a hint insists on shoving one of these tacky plastic bags through my door. They want old clothes, shoes, fetish gear, gimp masks, post amnesty assault rifles, bedsteads and Anderson Shelter manuals – basically anything; anything at all that you don’t want anymore and that you would normally Freebay onto a deserving person; anything that they can then sell on the black market in Europe and make quite a nice tidy sum for themselves thank you very much.

Because this is the disheartening truth.

Most of these so called charity bags collections are not done to alleviate the suffering of the poor but are done to inflate the bank accounts of a few dodgy individuals who believe that charity starts and ends at home. Preferably yours.

Some of the less dodgy ones do send some of the money on to the charities they claim to support but we are talking the tiniest percentage here; the smallest amount they can skim off the top. According to recent research by the British Heart Foundation we are talking as little as 5%.

And this is sad and it is wrong. I mean here I am celebrating my cynicism because it has saved me from being duped but actually that’s an appalling indictment of society. People organize a charity collection and my first reaction is to say, “yeah right, as if” and bin the collecting bag.

The people that truly lose out are, as always, the poor and the needy.

But it is the likes of you and me who are also being cheated. We’re cheated when we donate stuff and imagine that it will be going to a good home; that it will help make someone’s life a little better. That we are doing a good and useful thing. It leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. Especially when we are all tightening out belts at the moment and these ‘charity collectors’ are making a very nice tidy living out of our cast-offs.

Karen and I have never responded to cold callers – not to sellers and not to charity workers. Not ever. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it feels mean. But our ethos has always been when we give to charity we will choose the charity for ourselves and organize the nature of the donation ourselves. It is the only way to be sure that the donation is going to the right people and not into the pockets of some muck-grubbing scheister.

So there you have it. Proof, if any were needed, that the world is as screwy as it’s ever going to get: charity and cynicism go hand-in-hand like love and marriage.

Tough love: it’s the only way.

Do give generously.

The Prefect Ritual

I remember the day they performed the prefect naming ceremony one morning at school assembly, reading out the long list of those lucky souls selected from the 5th year who would have the honour of being glorified Bow Street Runners. Those who would wear the navy blue tie of mock authority.

I was quite frankly shitting myself. The thought of having to walk up onto the stage in front of the entire school and accept one of those blue ties made me feel physically sick. I was a geek. Possibly one of the uncoolest kids in the school. My clothes were unfashionable. My hair was unfashionable. I wore NHS glasses. I was small and ugly. I would get catcalls at worst or, at best, barely concealed sniggers.

I can remember praying, “not me, not me” as they began to go through the names of the chosen ones alphabetically.

They got through the B’s pretty quickly and were well onto the C’s and D’s before it hit me that I had not been selected. I had not been chosen.

There was no relief. Only crushing disappointment. I had just assumed, you see, that I would automatically be one of those chosen. I was one of the good boys. Never in trouble. A constant achiever – even if my grades were mostly average. Always did my homework, was rarely off sick. Never made trouble. An ideal student in every respect.

How could they not choose me? Why would they not?

One by one my mates – all much cooler and more popular than me – were called up onto the stage and were given the tie that would thenceforth differentiate them from me. That’s what it felt like. They were being set apart. I was being left behind. The prefects were automatically a little club unto themselves. They would have responsibilities and experiences that I would never share. I would forever be an outsider to yet another school clique.

Suddenly my relief had turned into searing jealousy and, yes, grief – even if with only a small g.

I was down about it for a week or two afterwards. My prefect mates didn’t see what I was so upset about and didn’t take my moroseness at all seriously. But it bugged me. Why was I not chosen? I mean, they’d deliberately chosen some of the other weaker, less intelligent, more socially deprived boys. Even in those days certain tick boxes had to be ticked for the sake of appearances. So why not me?

Looking back on it now the answer is plain. Academically I had it. In terms of my everyday conduct I had it.

In terms of confidence and self esteem... I didn’t stick a chance. I would never have been able to wield any kind of authority. I did not garner enough respect from my peers.

I was not prefect material.

Would I be prefect material now?

Yes. Without boasting about it, I think yes. But I would turn it down.

I know my place a little better now and am more comfortable with it. Given the choice today, I would always choose to run with the hare rather than hunt with the hound... the hare, you see, is the only one who is free.