In the cafe it’s large or medium for the coffee. I say small. That’ll be medium then, they say. I shrug the shoulders. Do you get my point? Large and small are not indicators of absolute size; they are indicators of relative size. Medium has no place in that binary scale. They are asking me to participate in their hype. In some places it’s large or super large, which warrants a guffaw. These days you are drawn into the nonsense, whether you like it or not. It’s hard to get a tee-shirt without a brand blaring out your unwilling adherence. My adherences are scant. They’re mostly to myself. Even the things I do adhere to are not for blaring out to the world. I like Mahler; I like Proust; I like Man Utd (in theory). But why would I want to sell myself through connection with them. They can do without me. And I must do without them. I know their glory won’t stick to me. What would stick would only be desperation. I probably have enough of that about me as it is.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

It’s a bleeder, said Gareth, my dentist, as he applied another swab to the gap out of which he had just extracted a recalcitrant molar. He was rather excited. Look at that, he’d said, holding up a bloody tooth with some straggles hanging off it. It’s all come out in one go. Normally you have to spend ten minutes scraping and drilling out all the bits. Not with this one. Everything in one yank. That’s very rare. I didn’t know whether to be proud or humbled. £240 later I crossed the road and dropped into the clothes shop Massimo Duti to kill a few minutes. The salesman was I really like your jacket. It was an old corduroy I had bought second hand over twenty years ago. Yes I said. It’s comfortable. He was still admiring. Saville Row? he said. I told him I thought not.

Still. From a bleeder to a leader in ten minutes.

We were in Paris last week and looking for a bench to sit on on the canal. They were all taken but there was just one man on one of them so we squeezed on with him. After a few minutes another man came over. Both men were black. The man who came over said it was good to see that we were not afraid to sit on a bench with a ‘negro’ (his word) and that he noticed that my friend had some Chinese elements in her look and that he liked to eat ‘nems’ (Vietnamese products) from time to time. In brief, we should all live together in harmony. I nodded along. The man on the bench said nothing. When we were about to leave I said ‘bonne continuation’ to the man on the bench who grinned back. He’s right. He just wants to get on with his life without every act being a political one. Sometimes just sharing bench is the best political act you can do.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com