There was an old advert on the telly many years ago where two women shared a complicity about another person’s body odour. In one version of the advert one of them wrote the letters B.O. before rubbing them off when the culprit came over and in another version she mouthed it to her friend. I saw a man today with a tee-shirt that said I never lose. I win or I learn. This is an example of the prevailing modern trend of B.O. or Boastful Optimism, which seems to have swept the board as the model ethical behaviour of our times. It is an ugly, hectoring braggart of a genre and seems to have taken over the world. When I see it now I mouth the letters B.O or write them on the steamed-up window pane.

http://www.peopearerubbish.com

In the cafe Le Central where I went at 10.45 every morning in Golfe Juan three miles east of Cannes and three miles west of Antibes there was a bit of a scuffle for the cafe’s Nice Matin newspaper every morning. If I was lucky it would be lying on a table top and I could pick it up and scour the local gossip and the one page of national and international news. Sometimes a bloke would come over and asked if I’d finished and I’d say just give me a minute to look at the football report and then hand it over. Once he came over when I had finished with it and I said I’d been keeping it for him. We had a kind of cafe relationship.

One day I was reading it and I saw his face appear and I said I’d be five minutes, but as I was finishing, an elderly woman came over and pleaded with me to have it for two minutes to look at the weather forecast. She was so baleful that I handed over the precious script but told her she had to give it to my friend in a couple of minutes because he’d come hunting for the it. I turned my head for a minute and saw her delivering it to another bloke. At the same moment my man came over. It was chaos. It was the battle of Nice Matin. It only costs 1 euro 70. I bought it myself the next day but strangely the pleasures of a bought journal are so much less than those of the free cafe paper.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com