Disgressed

The other day I was standing on the tube platform at Victoria and this youngish bloke in a nice grey suit came up and stood next to me.  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and suddenly I found myself thinking: you know what would do you a lot of good, mate: a really good hard punch in the middle of that face of yours.

Commuting does things to your emotional responses sometimes, but this seemed particularly out of the blue. There was really nothing you could take exception to about this bloke: he hadn’t got a big bag that he was probably going to drop on my feet, he wasn’t listening to an excessively loud stereo, he didn’t stink, he wasn’t trying to push in. He was just standing there waiting in silence, expressionlessly.

Ah! Expressionlessly? Or was there just a little hint of something around those lips, not a sneer, more the calculated, arrogant display of the absence of a full-blooded sneer. Was there just that little suggestion of someone who thinks he’s pretty clever and doing a bit better than you, thanks very much? Someone who would always know just that little bit better, about everything?

Perhaps I need some kind of counselling, or six months in a croft on a Scottish island: but at once there sprang into my mind a book, possibly written by Stephen Potter during a little-known dark period. It would be called The League of Annoying Bastards and it would reveal the existence of a vast secret society of people committed to developing the sophisticated techniques of irritating everyone they came into contact with.

Early chapters would deal with the simple techniques suitable for beginners: Timewasting, with subsections on Incomprehension and Incomprehensibility; Let’s Just Check That Again; and If You’d Just Like To Take A Seat, and so on: Getting In The Way, with subsections on Pausing For No Reason In The Doorway; Rubbernecker’s Sudden Sidestep; and Bags: When To Use Wheels And When An Insanely Large Sports Bag is Better. The subsection on Sneering would pay full tribute to the acknowledged mastery of the French School.

But these and other early chapters would be merely the preliminaries for the more esoteric techniques of the adept, where the core discipline is Facial Expression, and the central doctrine is that anything can be annoying if you just look unbelievably pleased with yourself about it.

One of the important subsections here would certainly deal with the correct use of hats. To be annoying, a hat does not actually have to be a beret, and it certainly need not bear a printed legend such as “You ain’t shit till you’ve ate at Dave’s”, to borrow Julian Barnes’ memorable words. It could just as easily be a battered brown trilby which doesn’t quite fit, and obviously tremendous work has often been done with flat caps which in themselves were perfectly prosaic headgear. The essential point is that the hat can be seen for whatever reason to be bloody stupid; transcendentally so if at all possible.

The orthodox doctrine on this, of course, is that the hat simply provides a focus and means of broadcast for the inanely smug gittery of the facial expression, which is itself the real engine room, as it were: but due attention would have to be given to the deviant theory of (probably) Odoreida, holding that all annoying facial expressions are ultimately about hats, although in many cases the hats are implied, rather than actually worn.

There would be careful warnings about the dangers of hat use in the wrong hands, including the distressing story of the man who spent fifteen minutes discussing his ticket at the only open window on Didcot station, only to find when he turned around that the people behind were staring in genuine amusement at his tartan golfing cap.

The final chapter would touch, speculatively and a little obscurely on the rumoured existence of a class of illuminati who had attained the final ability of being able to summon an implied facial expression, and hence, the capacity to be immensely annoying to people around them without actually doing anything irritating at all. The book would put forward considerable evidence for the existence of these mages, and touch briefly on the alternative theory that some other people just get a bit tetchy at times.

With all the fuss about MPs claiming expenses for their second homes, I wondered whether the solution might be to have official residences, sort of like vicarages. This would be a good time for the Government to buy into property, surely; they could get some nice houses out in the provinces, and in London it might be possible to put all the MPs together in one big block where they could annoy each other.

The real problem with this elegant solution, of course, is that we’d need some sort of name for an MP’s official house. I think myself that ‘Membery’ does not sound quite right, but I sort of like ‘Inconstituency’.

That was about the best I could do, but friends and colleagues have suggested ‘House of Downright Vulgars’, ‘The Bungalot’, and ‘The Dissembly Rooms’. One person suggested ‘The Bin’, not as in Loony, but because that’s where your letters end up if you write to your MP. I must say that having contributed occasionally to responses to letters to MPs which have been forwarded for official treatment, I know this to be quite untrue.

Possibly the most ingenious suggestion was ‘Condominium’, which a colleague explained is ‘what you should put your Member in-ium’ – unfortunately I don’t think I can repeat that one on a blog which is generally suitable for family reading.

Nobody can be bothered with mere epidemics these days. If it’s not Pan, then it’s not even worth talking about.

Apparently those of us who travel on the Tube regularly have a particularly good chance of copping a dose of swine flu if it ever gets going over here.  That’s easy enough to believe, given the unrivalled opportunities Underground for close-up encounters with a range of domestic and tropical diseases. Only the other day I was pondering an interesting question of etiquette – if you happen to spot a particular infection or infestation, is it your duty to inform the host, or should you assume they are aware of it? I could have told a skinny young woman the other day that I had been unable to avoid  identifying six definite nits in her hair between London Bridge and Waterloo, plus three possibles and a couple of definite live lice, one apparently gravid.  Perhaps one could have little cards printed up and just pass them discreetly over. You’d need quite a range though, covering such options as: “Your bullous impetigo is indeed remarkable and I can understand why you want those extraordinary crusts and weeping blisters to have a wider audience; but have you considered simply having it photographed for the textbooks as an alternative to sharing it so freely with your fellow passengers?”

Actually, we’re all looking at this from the wrong angle altogether, as I found out when I listened to one of Radio 4’s many farming programmes (Radio 4 still believes that only farmers are awake before 6.30 in the morning, so there isn’t really much point in non-agricultural programmes at that time of day). The real question about swine flu, the one farmers are asking up and down the land is:  can pigs catch it?

The answer does not appear to be absolutely clear, but it does seem that where pigs are in close contact with human beings, there is a real risk that the species barrier could be crossed (or re-crossed) and that this virulent diease could be transmitted to the nation’s porcine denizens, a thought which makes a farmer’s blood run cold.  The unspoken frustration seething behind the radio discussion clearly arose from the Government’s lamentable inaction in this respect. At present, no restrictions whatever on the movement of human beings in the affected areas have been imposed, and no serious thought has been given to such elementary steps as basic ear-tagging.  Once again, when it comes to the crunch it is all too clear that the Government’s commitment to the welfare of British livestock is paper-thin, and its priorities are all over the place.