on the shoulder and are secretly in love with each other but not in a gay way.
But generally, when we think of ‘lads’ these days we think as the pensioner coming home late at night does – of white youths (because these days ‘youths’ is a word reserved solely for Asian or Afro Caribbean lads, as though white kids were never really young) heading towards him in hooded tops, carrying cans of Stronge Brew and doing that weird and no-way gay thing where they keep whacking each other and laughing, and they walk with a strange bendy gait so their legs look like brackets with a drink problem, and they’re possibly harmless, but you’d better not stare at them, and while they’re probably quite nice really (although you don’t know it, three of them are at stage school), one of them could well be dangerously mental, so you step aside even though you’ve got the right of way.
Those lads.
LADS 2
And let’s not forget (would that we could) posh lads. It sounds like an oxymoron but there is such a thing as a posh lad. He certainly thinks that he and his mates are lads. You can tell this because whenever a posh lad is walking down the street and he is more than a centimetre behind them, he always shouts, ‘Lads! Wait up!’ in a sort of strangled, where-are-my-balls kind of voice (note also the phrase ‘Wait up!’, which posh lad believes is some sort of cool slang).
Posh lads resemble normal lads in one way only: they are of the male gender. But there is no other kind of lad that wears a blazer to the pub, favours collarless shirts, often in a pastel shade, has either no chin or a chin the size of the Tirpitz, lips like sliced gherkins, the complexion of some brand-new ham, and the voice of a recently neutered earl.
All right, two ways: when they get hammered their manners are disgusting and they break stuff. Oh well. At least we don’t have to till their sodding fields any more.
WAGs
The best example that there be of celebrity culture in action. Millions of years ago there were no famous wives of footballers. There were certainly no well-known girlfriends. History books may record the goal-scoring performance of H.K. Whittle (Woolwich Arsenal, 1931–1936) but of Mrs H.K. Whittle we know nothing. And the notion that Mrs H.K. Whittle would be photographed arriving at Hendon Aerodrome with 45 trunks full of Chanel dresses would have been considered absurd. Not to mention the idea that Mrs H.K. Whittle would be given her own show on the wireless, in which she and some other wives, including Mrs John Hemsley, Mrs G. Brill (Plymouth Argyle) and Mrs A.L.B. Cottersley would be placed in charge of two rival wool shops, the one to be named Hemsley Brill and Cottersley, the other to be named Quality Woollen Products of Neasden, with the aim being to discern which of the two teams were best, would be most common.
And yet such is life nowadays. Merely marrying or even having it off or sometimes just kissing a footballer is enough to make you famous nowadays, as though celebrity could be passed on through DNA (if that was the case, there would be an awful lot of pole-dancers and barmaids who’d become celebrities out there).
There should be an exam for becoming famous. Although, thinking about it, it probably ought not to be a very difficult exam.
PR PEOPLE
Like marketing only even more useless (see ‘MARKETING’). PRs do two jobs. One is phoning people up and begging them to write about some living soupstain who wants to be famous. They live their lives on the brimming edge of despair, hoping and praying that just one hack, somewhere, will be stupid or bribable enough to write about their act who, let’s not forget, wouldn’t need any PR if they were any good in the first place.
Astonishingly, some of their charges do make it and become stars. At this point they tire of fame and weary of success, unless they can get some more money from being famous and successful. So the PR has a new task, one utterly contradictory to their other task. The second job that PRs do is trying to prevent people writing about their acts. They block access, they deny quotes, they spread mystery. This is partly to make their stars look more charismatic and interesting, and partly because their client has just become addicted to valium dissolved in Coke Zero (see COKE ZERO) and has shaved their eyebrows off and gone to live in a seagull colony.
FAMOUS DEAD PEOPLE
The overwhelming weight of the past or what? It’s bad enough we have to deal with all the living celebrities without having to take note of everyone who went before. Scarcely an hour goes by without somebody unveiling a monument or a blue plaque to some minor non-entity of the past. It’s as though every human being who had some tiny claim to fame has been listed like a historic building, and so, like a historic building, cannot be knocked down or removed from the public consciousness.
The internet (see THE INTERNET) contributes to this as well, with websites and nostalgia groups and obsessive research, all devoted to someone who co-hosted a moderately unsuccessful radio show in the late 1990s, or who once played bass guitar on an album by someone who never had a hit, or who wrote a novel that a film which didn’t do very well was based on.
It’s important to note and to pay respects to those who have gone on before us, but please! Does that have to mean everyone? We’ve got enough on our plate reading the complete works of Shakespeare and listening to everything Beethoven did without having to nod approvingly at the excellent work done by the man who drew Captain Soldier in Warface! magazine or the lady who would have introduced orchids to Lancashire only she had a cold.
KNIGHTS
In days of old, when men were bold, and cash for questions wasn’t invented, there was only one qualification for knighthood. You had to be really good at killing people. Oh, and you had to own a horse. But that was about it, really. It made sense.
‘Hello, Alan, where have you been?’
‘Sorry, your Majesty, I’ve been out killing people. Templars and that.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so? Arise, Sir Gimblenore.’
‘Oh! Ta.’
These days, you don’t get a knighthood for killing people (although certain sections of the popular press would beg to differ, ahem, ahem (see POSH TABLOIDS)). You get one for things like helping the government when it’s broke, or for having been on the South Bank Show, or for being good at acting, or for being a rock singer who hasn’t died yet.
Which is a pity. They really ought to turn the clock back on this. Just to see ‘Sir’ Mick Jagger hurtling along on a horse, waving a wobbly lance, trying to spear ‘Sir’ Alan Sugar. They could sell tickets. They’d make a fortune.
PEERS
Rubbish. It’s one thing to see Lord Bugglesbath standing there, 90 years old in his stockinged feet and burbling on about rights of eschovy and mantraison in the voice of a broken budgerigar, because that’s heritage. Lord Bugglesbath and his mates are kept in the House of Lords for their own protection, in case they go for a walk down a busy street and get run over by the twenty-first century.
But your modern peers are no good whatsoever. They sit there, in suits from M&S, wishing they hadn’t been kicked off the board of their companies, wondering how much an ermine robe costs, and every so often going, ‘I’m a lord. How the hell did that happen?’
Not
