can, and when he turns around I scream, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’
Then of course you have to be prepared to roll around in the aisle of a cinema, sticky with popcorn and spilled soda pop. There are twenty movies that I have paid to see that I have no idea how they ended. Because I was waiting to be joined in mortal combat.
But what can I do? I am an angry old man.
So no cinema for me – and countless nights out ruined for my loved ones, because something – cud chewing, mobile gazing, mindless chatter in the darkness – set me off.
But I am not a single-issue angry person. Almost everything makes me angry these days. I am angry at people who litter. Yet I am also angry at people who want to force me to recycle. I am angry at people who have no manners, and I am angry at people who swear around children, and I am angry at people in Smart cars, who inevitably drive in an incredibly stupid fashion. People, really – I am angry at people. Any kind of rudeness, finger wagging or ignorance is liable to light my blue touch paper.
Sometimes I think of Terry in The Likely Lads, who did not like foreigners, or southerners or – now he thought about it-the bloke next door. But the anger that comes to us all with time is not mere misanthropy – this is not anger for anger’s sake.
It is hard-earned, clear-eyed and horribly justified.
You have seen too much. You have lived too long. You know the way things should work, and you are maddened by the yawning chasm between your expectations and the grim reality of the workaday world.
I don’t want to be this way. I want to be happy. I want to be nice. I want to be like the kid I was as a young journalist, who was so happy to be flying to America to go on the road with Thin Lizzy that he truly didn’t care that the plane sat on the runway at Heathrow for six hours, and didn’t care that he was in economy. I didn’t even know that I was in economy. I wasn’t aware that planes had a class system. To me there were only seats on planes, and they were all good ones.
As my legs throbbed merrily with Deep Vein Thrombosis, I didn’t care about anything at all apart from the fact that within twenty-four hours I would be immersed in the fleshpots of Philadelphia. Will I ever be that carefree and giddy with happiness again? Probably not. There is too much anger in me now. If an airline had me sitting on the runway for six hours today, my head would explode. They wouldn’t be able to placate me with some savoury nuts.
My family stayed at the hotel that featured so glamorously in the James Bond film, Casino Royale: the One and Only Ocean Club in the Bahamas. And I say – be thankful there’s only one of them. What a dump. It took us hours to check in and, you’ll never guess, but that really made me angry.
Because I know that if you stay at the Sandy Lane in Barbados, or the Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong, or the Jalousie Plantation in St Lucia, or the Conrad in Tokyo – or any other world-class five-star hotel that is worthy of the name and those five stars – they will check you in up in your room. Not the One and Only in the Bahamas. With our jet-lagged nipper in tow, we waited for literally hours to check in.
‘You’re always angry,’ my wife told me. ‘Why are you always so angry?’
‘Because I know how things should work,’ I replied, through gritted teeth.
And that’s the problem. When you are young, you have no idea how the world should work. For most of my twenties, I thought that a mini-bar was the height of sophistication and luxury. Of course I was never angry – I was too grateful to be on the loose in the world, and I was too stupid. Anger comes with experience, anger comes with wisdom. What’s true is that – righteous and justified though it may be – anger spoils everything.
‘Why can’t we just sit here and enjoy the sunset?’ asked my saintly wife, as she cradled our exhausted daughter, and the staff of the One and Only Hellhole Bahamas gave us some more feeble excuses about why our room wasn’t ready. ‘It’s such a beautiful sunset,’ Yuriko said. ‘Why can’t we just enjoy it?’
Why not indeed? Why not contemplate the lovely sunset and count our blessings? Why bother to burst a blood vessel because of the failings of the international tourist trade?
It is a male thing. This dissatisfaction, this anger, this railing at the sloppy and the stupid and the sub-standard – it comes with your biological hard drive. It is wired into us, this rage to make right the world – or at least get dummies to stop looking at their mobile phones in the cinema.
It is the impulse that helped our species to crawl out of the primordial swamp. It is the reason the human race survived. It is the life-affirming core of everything.
No point in giving yourself a heart attack because some airport security dimwit who couldn’t make it as a traffic warden confiscates your eye drops. No point in having an aneurysm because some gum-chewing simpleton is texting on his mobile during the third act of The Departed. No point in having a brain haemorrhage because you arrive at your hotel and your room doesn’t have a chocolate on the pillow.
But only young men fresh from having their laundry done by Mum have any excuse to tolerate the world in all its venality and stupidity. The grown men know better – they have been around, and seen it all before, and we know that if you save up and splash out for two weeks in the One and Only Ocean Club, Bahamas, and your room is not ready when you arrive, then you have every right to blow a gasket. In fact, you are showing exemplary restraint worthy of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King by not smashing up their lobby. I will never again be that twenty-two-year-old, stunned by the sight of an economy seat and a mini bar, excited by the thought of seeing Thin Lizzy in Philadelphia, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
The trouble is, there’s no end to the anger. You get in your car – and you want to kill someone. You go through airport security – and someone who has never actually made anyone more secure starts bossing you around. You go to the cinema – and then one day you can’t go to the cinema any more.
When does it end? It doesn’t. The rage comes as youth goes and we shall never be free of it. It feels like an ancient emotion, a hereditary anger – something that has been handed down through generations of men, a bug-eyed fury passed down from angry grandfather to angry father to angry son.
I can’t help feeling that the anger is somewhat wasted on the generations born in the second half of the twentieth century. I can’t help believing that this rage was used for more constructive purposes in the past – to fight for survival, to free the world, to build better lives for people with nothing.
Perhaps male rage will die out with time. Perhaps decades of peace and prosperity will make the anger fall away, like a coat of fur on Neanderthal man, or a set of fins that are no longer needed on dry land. Perhaps angry men will disappear into history – like men in hats, and men in uniform. But not yet. And not for you and not for me. For us there can be only one honest response to cruelty and wickedness and stupidity, and people who don’t say please or thank you.
Grumble, old man, grumble.
Until a man has actually made love to a woman with fake breasts, he can never really know what they are like.
Round, juicy and tempting they may be.
But then so is a bowl of plastic fruit.
For
