My dislike of Wimbledon goes back to my childhood when we were on holiday in Blackpool or Colwyn Bay or Llandudno, once in Scarborough, and when I wanted to go out to the sands everybody else wanted to watch the so-called Wimbledon final on a little old telly in our rented flat. These days nobody forces me to watch it but out of a sense of duty to the past I have it on in the background with the sound down but the medium wave radio on. This means that when I pass through the living room in my quotidian perambulations I can preempt the image by hearing the commentary about three seconds ahead of the telly. In this way I triumph over those dull players, who are perhaps the dullest of all sportspeople. You constanly hear that there are no characters left in the game today. In bygone days caracter was, in a jocular moment, handing a racket to a ballboy. The particular brand of mid-atlantic accent that afflicts all players from Croatia to Argentina is a dreadful monotone to the whole event, which we are forced to endure as meaningless interviews with meaningless questions unanswered by PR schooled players reminds you of two heavy juggernaughts trying to get past each other in a narrow cul-de-sac. There is also something deadeningly abstract about the television portrayal of the matches with a screen that depicts the court as a vertical wall, much like the image telly gives of a snooker table, and the disembodied grunts of two insects scuttling around at the north and south poles. It is a kind of elaborate flea circus. Why not turn it off? you tell me. Oh, leave me be and let me exorcize the past in my own way.
peoplearerubbish.com

Ice cream never occurs to me.
I stepped outside today – 32 degrees – and people had ice creams, cornets, lollies popsicles. These were methods of cooling off. They sat around on doorsteps and at bus stops. When the weather is hot you sit anywhere. And I thought: why does ice cream never occur to me? Maybe because I don’t love it. People love ice cream. It’s like fireworks. You say ice cream; you say fireworks. And they go Ahhhh! or Ooooo! I’m indifferent to both of them. Fireworks are a real pain because they entail you standing around in streets late at night But on a hot day… ice cream… why not? So I went to Tesco and looked in their big fridge just along from the oven chips. I bought 8 (eight) choc ices (£1) and 4 (four) cornetto-style ice creams (£1). At that price you can afford to waive your indifference for a day. Anyway, two cornettos and one choc ice later I’m remembering why I don’t love ice creams. I don’t even like them. I think I needed to have just one, a single old fashioned one sitting on a doorstep somewhere. A Choc-top Whizz or something with hundreds and thousands on it. And pay more for it! £3.99! A proper price. Now all those ice creams are sitting in my freezer rubbing shoulders with the kidnies I bought about two months ago.
peoplearerubbish.com

I have no qualms (when did you last have a qualm?) in stealing cherries or grapes or salted almonds from displays in supermarkets. I say stealing; I mean sampling. I feel we have the right to do this with a small piece of fruit. Probbaly not an apple or pear. I also am not averse to flipping up the transparent plastic sheet on a case of pick ‘n’ mix and sampling the odd jelly bean or even a fudge cube. This, for me, is part of the supermarket contract. But there are friends of mine who quickly scurry off when I am doing this, as though they are being associated with theft, shoplifting. I temember my dad used to do this supermarket or market stall sampling and we kids would cringe or blush or scurry. In a way I disapproved but in a way I was proud that he wasn’t afraid of the huge authority of the supermarket or the lesser authority of the market stall holder. When I do my sampling now I am half fulfilling my side of the supermarket contract, half acting in hommage to what my dad used to do.

peoplearerubbish.com

(This is a guest contribution from Boxette)

Leaving a party can be a very tricky business. London etiquette dictates that to leave early you need a valid reason. For members of hard working families this is easy: we’ve only booked the babysitter till 11! and off they pop, floating on a sympathetic chorus of we’ve all been there.

Work is another excuse but you’d better be a big hitter: We’ve got to skidaddle because Jeremy has to get up at an ungodly hour for a meeting with the IMF in Geneva. I know. It’s insane. But he loves it! fares rather better than someone who has low-level anxiety about all the things on their list but can’t be specific about what they will do first in the morning.

When all else fails, we can’t leave the dog for too long will charm animal lovers.

But what if you don’t have a big job, a family or a needy pet? Citing a super early Ocado order will not wash. Saying I forgot to water the plants is a slap in the face.

There is one final trump card that workshy, commitment-phobic, pet-allergic South Londoners can play: I’ve got to catch the last tube home can really open doors, particularly in Islington and Hampstead where the residents are scared to cross the Thames after dark.

But what’s this? London Underground has now decreed that the tube is to run all night. The last barricade has fallen. It will be compulsory to party till early morning, to stay until the shots are all drunk and everyone is seriously beginning to question whether they like each other.

The only possible remedy is to do the unthinkable. Move out further even than zone 6, into the badlands of Bedford or Surrey where the tube doesn’t run. Or get a dog!

peoplearerubblsh.com

Many years after the Battle of Waterloo Geoge IV (was it IV? I think so) used to tell everyone that he had fought in the front line at the battle. Wellington who was now Prime Minister used to say to him when asked for confirmation ‘I have heard your Majesty say this on many occasions’. There is a language to use when asked to complement someone or something that can, if you are skilled enough, leave open the interpretation whilst appearing to praise. The word ‘roller-coaster’ springs to mind. When asked to comment on whether or not you liked someone’s book, say to the author that the reading of the text was a real ‘roller-coaster ride’. They will be flattered. Do not add that you dislike roller-coasters and that for you they induce vomit. You may find other terms that fit this bill. They are words that for many have a positive connotation but for you are negative. Here, as in so many cases, the more different you are from the throng, the more your capacity to retain ironic distance is enhanced.
peoplearerubbish.com

They are having more talks about the Greek debt in Luxemburg today. The Greeks have to pay one and a half billion euros by the end of the month and they say they won’t. The IMF and the EU say they must. So they are having talks. Talks can go on for days. Mostly there is no resolution. They all go home and then, a few days later, come back to another Eurovision song contest city and resume talks (resume is the word they use). Talks have been going on for months. They resume a lot. Just what exactly they are really talking about is never revealed. We are supposed to be satisfied with the word talks. Now, when I have a debt with my friend Jim (let’s say I owe Jim a fiver) and we have talks, Jim says pay us that fiver back you bastard and I say no way Jim and he says go on and I say I can’t and he says I bet you can, you’ve given it to Julie, get it back from her and I say I can’t coz she needs it to buy a new pair of stockings and so Jim says all right I’ll let you off for now. But when the EU and the IMF and the Greeks have talks they must talk about more stuff but, for the life of me, I can’t think what bacause the Greeks have used those billions to pay for Greek pensions and stuff and don’t want to give it back. Julie won’t give her stockings back; she needs them. I sometimes try and imagine the EU and the IMF and the Greeks in some big room in Luxemburg, but when I try and think how they spin the debate out for hours, I just can’t. They must be very clever.
peoplearerubbish.com

There is a buzz around the Royal Festival Hall. Tickets are like gold dust. Every seat is packed. They have set seating up on stage near the piano. People are standing at the back of the balcony behind my seat at the centre of the back row, breathing down my neck. The flora and fauna of the Classical world are out in force. The habitues and the fair-weather public. Daniel Barenboim is in town, doing the Schubert piano sonatas. It’s like David Bowie or Kate Bush for the pop fraternity. The atmosphere is oppressive. The man in front of me has got his score out and will follow the concert with his head down, infuriatingly turning pages in the quietest moments of the andante. The woman next to me has the programme, a book of Barenboim interviews and a Barenboim biography. It is as though she is swatting up for a Barenboim exam. After one movement of the first sonata a man calls across the balcony to some poor fool: “switch that phone off”. A man turns round and rebukes an elderly woman for swallowing too loud. In the interval I hear two teenagers talking. One of theh girls says to the other: “I just love Danny so much. I want to stand close to him.” It Dannymania.
I myself have a history with Barenboim. Years ago I used to queue up for the cheap tickets for the Orchesttre de Paris and sit on the front row of the Barenboim concerts when he was chef d’orchestre there. It got so that he used to recognise my face and when I was in the Salle Pleyel cafe and he walked by in the foyer of the concert hall he’d nod at me through the glass, thinking no doubt that he knew me from somewhere though he couldn’t quite place me where. So I felt we were friends, me and Danny. And when over the years I’ve attended his concerts, it’s been like meeting up with an old friend. The complete Beethoven sonatas about six or seven years ago was our last reunion. When I see him again now it’s always a poignant moment, not so much a rendez-vous with Danny as a rendez-vous with myself, a few years on.
peoplearerubbish.com

People with children (yes, people with children are the majority of the population) are very tiresome when they talk about their kids whom you have never met. They tell you some laborious tale and you have to fix a contented, honorific smile up for its duration. All the while you are thinking but I have never met Oscar or Felicity. Sometimes Oscar or Felicity are now grown up and this is an ancient tale, as ancient as the House of Atreus, and you still have to be imagining them young as when this story was first minted. It is like when you listen to canned laughter from an old sit-com and you know that all that laughter is from dead people. Stale dead laughter from distant galaxies. And when that is the case and the story is from when Felicity was a cute little thing of three and winningly tripped up and fell into a dish of jelly and got a glace cherry on her nose and now Felicity is thirty-two and lives in Milton Keynes with her computer programmer husband with an ugly beard and tatoos and Felicity ain’t no looker herself nowadays, when it is like that even Felicity finds these ritual repetitions of the glace cherry story unbearable too, then you suddenly wonder what the telling of this story is all about and who it’s for. Not Felicity who isn’t here and hates it, not us who don’t care and have never met Felicity young or full grown. It’s for some strange psychodrama of your life. Speaking as an unparent, it is fascinating but tiresome.
peoplearerubbish.com

I remember I would have been about eight and for some inexplicable reason over a few day period a fat boy from my class at school started coming round to my house to play with me. Now I didn’t want to play with this boy, not just because he was fat, but he had nothing to do with me. I didn’t mix with him at school; he didn’t like football; he didn’t like Val Doonican. What could he possible have to do with me? But for some reason there he was at my front door. Now, as I was a nice eight year old (you have probably gathered this) I accepted to be drawn away from Top of the Pops or The Avengers with Diana Rigg and go out with him into our little patch of front garden. But what to do with him? We couldn’t play football, which was my default solution to social visits. And then I remembered some old plastic skittles we had in the shed. I got them out and lined them up and like two four year olds we bowled them down and set them up, bowled them down and set them up. It was deadly. And then a friend of my brother walked by and said “Fatty and Thinny!” over the garden fence. I remember thinking How did I get into this position? My feelings about the fat boy were only reaffirmed when he started asking me if I would ask my mum for biscuits. We got some but then he started wanting me to ask for more and I said no and he went and talked to my mum direct and asked for more biscuits and she shouted at him. In the end, the fat boy went home and I went back to Top of the Pops or The Avengers with Diana Rigg. I probably said to my mum that I wouldn’t be answering the door to that fat boy again and because of the biscuits she probably agreed to go along with any excuses I wanted to make up. It is from that time that I date my present carefulness in the choosing of companionship and my wariness of social committment.
peoplearerubbish.com

Geri Halliwell (or is it Geri… or Gerry… or Jerry… anyway it’s old Ginger Spice) got married to a guy called Christian Horner. Christian Horner I was vaguely familiar with from odd moments of desoeuvrement where I watched Formula 1 on telly and he got interviewed on the start line before the race. He is the head of Red Bull racing team and always seemed to me to be a very nerdy racing car technician with his talk of horse power and tyre options and pitting strategy. In my mind it looks like two incompatible worlds coming together. As though Ed Milliband had an affair with Lady Gaga or David Backham ran away with that grey haired Classicist off the telly, that Mary Beard woman. I perhaps have a faulty understanding of the media profile of Christian Horner and perhaps underestimated Ginger Spice. In fact, it’s nice to have your notions of who will go with whom undermined now and then. Amongst famous people it’s pretty rare. Depressingly, they tend to find love amongst their own. As though anyone other than an A-list celebrity was beneath them or could offer no possible charm. It often rings false, especially when you compare with quotidian life where I am frequently astounded by who gets together with whom and how it had been going on in secret for seven years under my very nose without me suspecting a thing. I fear I am not the only one who somehow feels that if I have not moved the chesspiece that is another person around on the chessboard of my imagination myself, then that rook will have stayed definitively fixed on its square. But no! These chess pieces are shooting around willy-nilly without me raising a finger. Imagine such a thing! Other people have a life of their own!
peoplearerubbish.com