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DAVID QUANTICK
GRUMPY OLD MEN
New Year, Same Old Crap
Contents
There used to be a huge piece of graffiti somewhere in London (this was years ago when graffiti was actual words and sentences, not someone’s name spelt wrong in six different colours) that said, in huge wobbly letters, ‘MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH’. Now there are two things here. One is that years later a pop group stole that slogan for an album title, which is just typical. Get your own ideas, poppy boys! And the other is slightly more profound. That graffiti was sprayed up over twenty-five years ago. So if modern life was rubbish then, think how much more rubbish it is now.
Because the times, as Bob Dylan told us much to our huge surprise, are a-changing. They are, in fact, a-getting worse. And all the nice new modern things that are supposed to make our lives easier are almost certainly making it worse. Take work. You may remember a while ago some nonsense about ‘the paperless office’. The idea was that when we all had computers and modems and wireless and so on, we’d no longer be printing documents and sending faxes and we’d manage without paper. And yet there seems to be more paper in offices than ever. Similarly, email. Does it speed up the pace of work life? It might, if we didn’t spend all day deleting spam and replying to idiots who want to know if we went to school with them, and looking at web groups online where someone has sent you an important message and that message turns out to be ‘Andrew is thinking of making himself a cup of tea’.
Modern life is more and more rubbish. And as it gets worse, men become more and more grumpy. The age limit for grumpiness seems to have been lowered, too. Grumpiness is no longer the preserve of the over-forties, or even the over-thirties. There are grumpy old men around who are barely out of their teens. And it’s getting grumpier out there. All teenagers are permanently grumpy anyway; and ninety per cent of primary-school children are officially fed-up. As life gets worse, grumpiness looks more and more like the only sensible option.
There’s never been a better time to be grumpy.
PEOPLE WHO SAY, ‘I JUST EAT WHAT I WANT ALL THE TIME AND I NEVER PUT ON ANY WEIGHT, I DON’T KNOW WHY’
Because after you’ve finished eating, you go to the toilet and throw up, that’s why. You puking liar.
PEOPLE WHO DRESS YOUNG
Time was, you dressed like what you was. If you were a baby, you favoured some swaddling. Toddlers seemed keen to dress as miniature fops. Infants wore uniform until they left school. And then you were a man and you dressed as a man. This lasted you for bloody ages until you went to the clothes shop and said, through clacking false teeth and wispy nicotine-stained moustache, ‘I am now an old man. Can I have my old man clothes, please?’ And they would kit you out in flat cap, weskit, pipe and tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.
No more, alas, no more. These days you can dress up as what you like, when you like, until you drop dead. And what this means in practice is that everyone dresses young. See the octogenarian pop star in his baseball boots and Camden Market T-shirt! Observe the ageing accountant in his chinos and distressed jacket! Look at the Chelsea Pensioner dressed (because he’s a bit behind with the fashions) like a member of All Saints, freshly back from a rave in the Gulf.
Nobody has seen fit to reverse this notion. Apart from the odd prawn who likes to dress up as a fogey just to make sure that they never have sex again, young people do not for the most part want to look like old people. Yet now they do, because the old people are all dressed as them. It’s a paradox! How will we be able to tell the young people from the old people? Oh yeah, that’s right. The old people will be the ones with the wrinkly skin and the back problems. And they’ll also be the ones who can afford the trendy designer clothes, ha ha.
PEOPLE WHO GET ANNOYED WHEN ASKED TO PUT THEIR SHIRTS BACK ON
Look around this pub, café or bar! Is anyone else not wearing a shirt? No! Has anyone said, ‘Hey! Nice back! The acne scars blend in with the unsunscreened flaky skin!’ Again, no! So put your shirt on, monkey boy!
LADS
Thankfully we no longer have ‘ladettes’ (did we ever, really? Were they just made up, those girls drinking pints of lager and pretending to enjoy table football?) but we still have lads. God, do we have lads. The male ability to not grow up is so remarkable and logic-defying that one day Richard Dawkins will hear of it and throw his arms up in the air saying, ‘All right! I give up! This is so mental that surely a higher power is behind it. Wow! There’s a Power Rangers movie!’
Lads as a concept is a broad church (or, as Richard Dawkins would say, a broad brick building with pictures of dead imaginary people in the windows). It developed from your wartime mockers, brave but normal blokes who sank a tin mug of char before having a go at Jerry. The naughtiest thing these lads ever did was go to a bint in Cairo and pretend to have it off to save face.
There are bonny lads and stable lads and jack the lads and all sorts of lads whom nowadays we would just call ‘teenagers’, except teenagers can’t clean a horse or make a fire or spell
