According to Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment was the time for people to take responsibility for themselves. Selbstdenken, he called it; thinking for yourself. By the late eighteenth century humanity had grown up. It no longer needed to have decisions taken for it, by the Church or the State or the King. It was no longer a child. Man just needed to use his own understanding (Verstand) of things. It was as if his brain had evolved to reach the required size. He didn’t need experts to tell him what was what. He didn’t even need special analytical skills (Vernunft) to work stuff out. Humanity had evolved.
What went wrong? Did we de-evolve? We got the European referendum and proved ourselves unable to selbstdenken. In Turkey it was the same thing. The Turkeys voted for Christmas. There was also the Trump thing.
People are free to vote how they want. Maybe Brexit is the best idea. The issue isn’t that. The issue is that society doesn’t help us. It robs us of our ability to achieve decent agency. Is it the Press that makes it impossible for us to think straight? Is it fake news? Is it social media that mixes us all up? Mundigkeit (Maturity) is the key Enlightenment image used by Kant. Mankind emerges from the dark and steps into the light The way we allow the modern world to work us is as if we are being ushered back into the shadows.

peoplarerubbish.com

I buy the newspaper once a week. on Saturdays. I am a Saturday newspaper buyer; not a Sunday one. This makes me a modern newspaper buyer (not a very modern person, as modern people don’t buy newspapers). The Sunday paper was the traditional purchase but in recent years the Saturday paper has tried to encroach on Sunday’s terrain. The Saturday buyer wants previews; the Sunday buyer wants reviews, Saturday afternoon and evening being the slot pre- and re-viewed. The Saturday buyer wants to look forward; the Sunday buyer to look back. Saturday prefers to imagine; Sunday to take stock.
When I am flpping through my copious Saturday paper I sometimes step back to see myself as others might see and judge me. Which articles do I choose to ignore; which to pursue? And why? There is a general rule. I pursue those pieces I know something about and I ignore those pieces that I have in the past decided do not interest me. So, in today’s magazine, I ignore the columnists (except for Clive James, whose piece is short). I ignore human interest stories. They are too long and too constructed. Anything with the name Mark Zuckerberg in it typed in bold and large font to attract the reader into the article. It has the opposite effect on me. In fact, all the snippets pulled out of the main body of the text and enlarged as highlights to pull me in, tend to push me out. That is because I am contrary. Here’s a feature about delivery vans. That’s vehicles. That doesn’t do it for me either. Blind Date. That’s a rubric where two strangers meet for a blind date and judge each other. I would read this but have learnt from past reading that the judgements are too anodyne. Recipes page. Ignore. I have never cooked from a recipe. I am a man who won’t eat vegetables starting with the letter A (Artichokes, Aubergines. Asparagus and company), so I won’t entertain the range of ingredients required on a fancy recipes page. 80g pitted green olives cut in half lengthways; 100 g dried apricots cut in half; 3 tbsp rose harissa. 450 g muscovado sugar. No. It’s not going to happen. Gardening. No. Weirdly, I do the quiz. Don’t read travel section; don’t read family section. Read sport. Read books. All logical, given my preoccupations. In The Guide read TV review. Piece about history of LGBT characters on TV ignore. Oh yes, you get a very good sense of who I must be by my newspaper reading profile. A slightly irrascible, reactionary, car-less, food-pragmatic, uninterested in human interest, low-tec, careful dweller of a zone that has been shrinking for years.

peoplearerubbish.com

I was in the rose garden in Kennington Park reading another Patrick Modiano novel in today’s sunshine. In this Modiano novel two strangers are pressed against each other during a riot and become friends. I don’t know how you meet people. It is mysterious. Maybe I’m not open to it these days. The rose garden was fairly deserted. There are about six benches around the sundial. I was on one of them. Just one of the others was occupied. Suddenly a man in a suit with white shoes and a man bag appeared and sat down next to me. Hiya, he said. I said hiya back. He went to shake my hand. Instinctively, I refused to shake his hand. It was too much rapid intimacy. What deal was he already concluding with me? After a few seconds I felt the need to excuse myself. I told him that my hands were sticky from the sun cream I had put on. It was true, but it was significant that I only said this about thirty seconds after the refusal. I thought he was an Evanglical Christian wanting to engage me in idle conversion (the suit, the white shoes, the open friendliness) and I was busy with the more serious business of keeping myself to myself. After a few minutes he started making phone calls and putting the speaker on his phone. Not very Christian with me reading next to him. He had a silly coversation with a Nigerian man, to whom ke kept saying that he loved him and his family. Then he checked his credit (he had 79 pence left), then he phoned another man and asked him to call him back. He waited for a couple of minutes, then called the man back and angrily told him he had something very important to tell him but had no credit on his phone. He waited for the return call again. It did not come, so he called him again and got an answering machine. Then he started muttering angrily under his breath. After a couple of minutes he moved away to the next bench, knelt down on the gravel and joined his hands together in prayer. He remained like this for a few minutes. My assumptions about his religiosity had proved correct. I nodded smugly as I got on with my reading. Then he took up his man bag and walked off to the other end of the garden. When I looked round I saw that he had engaged someone in conversation.
My conclusion is that it is perhaps a good thing that I do not easily meet new people and that I do not lightly shake hands with strangers.

peoplearerubbish.com

You wonder about the relationships between people who work closely together in the public eye, how they deal with the way they are seen by the public. It strikes most clearly in the relationship between a solo violinist and an orchestra. There she is, the young virtuoso, dressed up in her own designer outfit, performing the Beethoven violin concerto or the Paganini, centre stage, whilst at her back the ranks of violinists of the London or Berlin or New York symphony orchestra, all dressed in black, cast as functionaries, extras, all genius prodigious violinists in their own right, give back up. What does go through their minds? It is almost a public humiliation.
You wonder too about the relationships between the newsreaders or the newsreader and the weatherman or weatherwoman. What is it that the newsreaders say to each other as the studio lights dim and the music comes on to herald the end of the programme. They gather their papers or switch off their laptop and exchange a few saucy words. That’s how I like to imagine it, for the public, performative domain eroticises; it titilates; it leaves us wanting more. When the newscaster offers a final valedictory enquiry at twenty-nine and a half minutes past ten: I’ll be watering my garden this weekend then. And what are you up to Lucy? Lucy chirps back. Oh just enjoying the sunshine. Your curiosity is piqued. Might it not be the case that Lucy is sunbathing in the same garden that Thomas or Evan or Ted is watering? We will never know. I once did see a well-known weatherman (was it Michael Fish?) in his garden in Twickenham one afternoon as I was walking past. What was all that about? The simulacrum off the telly doing the very thing that he claims but surely only emblematically to do in the time when he is off-screen, dead time when he doesn’t really exist, where he should really be in some sealed box somewhere in television centre.
Ignorance or partial ignorance equals sex. This is a truism not lost in the great twentieth century novels where objects of affection tend to be shadows, simulacra, performers in the theatre of the imagination rather than flesh and blood. On that day in Twickenham Michael Fish had clearly escaped from the unit and was living out his cyborg dreams pretending, just for a few melancholy minutes until security picked him up, to be a real human being.

peoplearerubbish.com

The pluperfect is a tense that makes you fear the worst. I had mentioned to you that you needed to write that report but I noted that you had not filed it. It looks back to a earlier time which is now irrecuperable. If you are using the pluperfect someone has missed the boat. When I hear someone piping up with the pluperfect I set my mouth in an attitude of stoic acceptance, I nod gently, my mode is melancholy, for nothing can now be changed.
Tenses have their own ways. Today I saw a girl with a tee-shirt that said This girl can , which is a boast that both empowers and disempowers the wearer. It empowers, I suppose, with its sentiment, but it disempowers with its use of the word ‘girl’. The wearer was no girl. She was a woman. You wonder what the effect of This boy can might be. Or This man can. Or a gender neutral version. This is all a political minefield. and that is without changing the tenses. I see myself as more of a This person might kind of tee-shirt wearer. Or a This person could have, which would be a melancholy boast, lying out there in the distant swamps of the Conditional perfect, the land that time forgot.

peoplearerubbish.com

I have now had two weeks to ponder on the issue of my pipes and the aftermath of the affair, how it has irrevocably changed the relations between inhabitants in the block. For a number of weeks there had been rumblings coming from the pipes in my flat. The trembling would start up at random moments throughout the day and I had to open up the cold water tap in the kitchen for a moment to silence it. Sometimes when I came home in the evening the pipes were resonating freely. Had it been going on all day in my absence? After a couple of weeks I received an email from the block directors. A number of residents were suffering from rumbling pipes; some even referred to them as hammering. It was finally understood that the problematic flats all lay on an axis running from the general position of my ground floor flat and my neighbours up to the top floor on the fifth or sixth floor, about ten or twelve flats. A plumber was sent in to examine the problem. Keys were left to grant him access. When I got home that afternoon, one of the directors came round to see me. It was my flat that was the culprit. I had a leak in a tap and it was causing all the brouhaha. I called my plumber, had the taps changed and the rumbling stopped. I sent out apologies to the stack of affected residents. Mea culpa. It had been my solitary, weeping tap that had caused the chaos, the sleepless nights, the infuriating days. A tiny leak had led to communal impatience. I had noted the leak but thought that the rumblings were causing the leak and not vice versa, fatally confusing cause and consequence. And now, when I pass the residents in the courtyard they know me. I read the reproachful look in their eyes; they note my sorry hangdog expression. I will be forever known as the man who made the pipes tremble. It may well be the first step on the incremental and inevitable route to total exclusion. Invitations to the annual barbecue will no longer flutter through my letter box. I, of course, avoid these functions anyway. I will no longer be expected at the Annual Residents Meeting. I, of course, do not attend these dreary affairs. Neighbours will no longer merrrily drop off their key with me to let in the man reading the metre. I am surely the last man in the world for such gestures of trust and communal appreciation. Come to think of it, I am well down that road to eccentric loner already. No wonder my Amazon packages always get sent back to the depot when a benevolent neighbour could surely find a temporary shelter for them. Now, however, I know how to control the pipes. In neighbour wars, you never know what might come in handy.

peoplearerubbish.com

Derren Brown, the television hypnotist, says that the tranche of the population most easily hypnotised is ‘young men’, especially when they are hypnotised by an older man. Another point he makes is that when hypnotising groups of people on stage a number of the hypnotees actually pretend to be hypnotised. This may be a phenomenon more marked in certain cultures where group participants might be less willing to spoil a show for an audience and so play along, or less willing to stand out from a crowd by not fulfilling the demands of the hypnotist.
All of this throws up interesting issues that may well be relevant to, amongst other things, sports psychology. An older man on the touchline of a football match, a coach or manager, one who is a potent, virulent presence, will have an effect on the young players, motivate them, drive them on to better performances. Antonio Conte storming on the touchline at Chelsea is a real plus for the team. Equally, the presence of an orchestra conductor driving an orchestra on can have a significant effect on the orchestra. This mentor figure, be it a he or she, in football, music or in schooling, is a key performance driver. It is not just children who want to please a mentor, though I suppose it needs to be a respected mentor, one with authority or charisma. So when the coach, as they say, loses the dressing room, performance statistics can plummet. See what happened to Claudio Ranieri at Leicester. Is it happening to Arsene Wenger at Arsenal? Preserving the faith of the players in the coach or manager is vital and collectively a team can sink when that bond of belief is shattered. This is tantamount to a religious experience, but when the faith in the prophet is gone, the whole system implodes.
Insecurities can be expoited. Perhaps the greater the collectivity, the easier the exploitation. A group of spectators in a theatre is easier than an individual. And cultures or masses easier still.

peoplearerubbish.com

My dad, who died last week, was in his last months afflicted by what we might call lateral category confusion. He went round to see the neighbours with a bar of soap and asked them how he was supposed to cook it. He looked at a handful of nuts left in his hand that he was unable to eat from a Cabbury’s Wholenut bar and asked how much they were were worth and how he could spend them. He sat down down in the dentists chair and when asked by the dentist what was the matter told him he had a bad shoulder. His categories had all got mixed up.
It’s actually what happens when we create a metaphor where a mix-up of categories is seen as a creative interpretation of data. It’s also what happened to Jack in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ who swapped his cow for a handful of beans at the the market. Just what Jack was thinking when he bought the beans the fairy tale does not tell us. Was he thinking those beans would be a sound finnacial investment for his mother (this was, i believe, a one-parent family). The shareholders of the company (ie mum) were unimpressed but Jack knew better or was it that he just got lucky? The beans became a beanstalk and a route to a high yield investment, once the threats of the European Union (ie the giant) had been negotiated. Jack had made a lateral category shift from livestock to agriculture and it paid off. Dad was making those shifts all the time in the end. He should have been running the Brexit negotiations. Jean-Claude Juncker would have been stumped by him.

peoplearerubbish.com

So, I am talking to someone who is telling me about parking and about Asda and my mind is wandering because parking and Asda are not on my mind at the moment. The subject of universities comes up and my interlocutor tells me he was at Leicester Poly and its name got changed to De Montford University and I say, Ah Simon de Montford, what was he all about then? And my interlocutor doesn’t know. So I say, well Leicester’s been in the news a lot recently, hasn’t it? But my interlocutor gives me a puzzled look. So I say: Claudio Ranieri? No recognition from my interlocutor. Winning the Premership title? I say. Still nothing. And then there’s Richard III, I say. But he is not very familiar with that story either, so I tell the story of the body discovered in the car park. Ah, the car park! This rings a bell. You see how all stories go back to parking in the end. We had found a point of contact.

peoplearerubbish.com

One of my most ardent proclamations is that the bread at the Tesco is terrible. Never buy bread at Tesco, I say. When you cut it, it disintegrates into sawdust. It lasts about half an hour before it turns hard enough to crack a tooth on. Tesco bread is rubbish. Recently, i have been buying my bread elsewhere. In cafes that stock posh bread. In high-end bread shops frequented by shoppers for whom the difference between a 70p Tesco loaf and a £3.50 sourdough organic loaf is an irrelevance. I even bought one at a so-called farmer’s market once (scant change from a fiver!) Frugal is my middle name, so for me this is radical belief.
This morning I went to Tesco and there was one thing on my mind. A cheap so-called farmhouse white tin loaf (70p). This will go well with my tin of red salmon and cup of tea. How to explain this volte-face of my customer choice? At the supermarket the judgement I face is stark. Follow my belief or follow my appetite? Both, I know, can betray you. Has the python of my frugality suffocated the wolf of my appetite? All these things intersect. Food can taste bad in your mouth because you know how expensive it is. I know how that works with luxury. If you’re paying a lot for a fancy hotel room, you might suddenly start to feel less relaxed. There is also the business of deep routine. Cheap bread I lived off for years. My shift to sourdough organic with no sugar and extra minerals is relatively recent and not yet built on sturdy foundations. Deep routine is reasserting its power over surface routine. I bought the 70p tin-loaf. It’s a case of not denying a deep truth about myself: deep frugality.

peoplearerubbish.com