The Year Without A Summer – The Two Ronnies, Frankenstein And The Sickliness Of Strawberry Bonbons

If somebody you are not clicking with at a social gathering won’t leave you alone and you’re too well brought up to just tell them to fuck off, there are several tactics you can use to shake them off. If you’re my age you can do what I do do, which is to pretend you a lot deafer than you actually are and deliberately misunderstand everything they say until they give up in exasperation and find another victim. It’s a bit like writing yourself into a 1970s “Two Ronnies” sketch, but it does work.

If you are not middle aged though, you are unlikely to have this ace up your sleeve. So you will have to analyze the situation a bit. If you’re not clicking with someone, let’s first assume it is not due to overt sexism, racism, misogyny or any other assorted fuckwittery. On their part I mean, obviously, not yours. If it was on your part then it’s highly unlikely that you would be too polite to tell anyone who was bothering you to fuck off in the first place.

So, assuming these conditions, there is usually one of two reasons why you might be wishing through gritted teeth that someone would leave you the hell alone. Either they are too intense or they are boring. Out of these two, intense is the easiest to deal with. There are two types of “too intense”.

Firstly, there is the Rudolph Valentino, “eyes that burn into your soul” type of too intense. If this who you are dealing with then likelihood is that he is a straight boy and you are a straight girl. In which case, if he can manage to smoulder without making your eyes water or making his look like he has severe astigmatism and provided he doesn’t say anything too stupid then you are probably going to fuck him. Problem solved. At least, initial problem solved. No guarantees there won’t be any problems if you carry on fucking him, but that’s just life, I’m afraid.

Secondly, there is the jabbering “let me tell you about my screenplay” type of too intense. They are just on cocaine, or are one of those people who seem like they’re on cocaine even if they aren’t. Here, you just excuse yourself and say you have to use the bathroom. They won’t be there when you get back. People like this cannot just stand there with their engines running for the length of time it takes for a bathroom visit. Like a kitten on catnip, they will spot another shiny thing and move on, forgetting you even exist. Please note however, that this only works if they are of the opposite sex. If they use the same bathroom as you, they will follow you there, take this communal visit as acceptance and follow you around all night.

So, that’s “too intense” covered. Boring, is far trickier to handle. The problem with boring people is the same problem you have with insane people. Insane people don’t know they’re insane and boring people don’t know they are boring. If you think you are boring, trust me you are not. Paranoid maybe, but not boring. Dealing with boring people requires an oblique approach and I don’t mean in the form of hints. They do not take hints. Neither do they respond to an all out frontal assault.

You could say “Look, I’m sorry but you are boring the arse off me with this attempt at a conversation. Please go away”. They will not be hurt. They will not be offended. They will pause for a second, assume you are joking and laugh heartily. Then they will slap you on the shoulder, say something like “Nice one, you nearly had me there” and press on regardless.

The terminally tedious are bulletproof when it comes to any direct attempt to get them to leave you alone. There’s only one way to fend them off and that’s to be willfully more boring than they are. Not an easy task. They have had years of practise, even if it wasn’t deliberate practise. Thankfully, there are two subjects you could raise which are almost guaranteed to have the desired effect of them making their excuses and going off to bother somebody else.

These subjects are : the most amazing acid trip you’ve ever been on and any freaky dream you may have had. Either of these is usually enough to have anyone running to the hills. It’s usually safest to stick to the dream thing though. You might accidentally make the person laugh with something dumb you did when you were tripping and then you’ll never get rid of them.

Now. I’m aware that all of the above are moot points, what with there being no social gatherings at the moment. Just store them in the old brain box for when whatever passes for normality in your neck of the woods is restored. I’m also aware that acid trips and freaky dreams are both subjects I have covered in past posts on this blog. But I tell stories to hang jokes on them, or possibly even little nuggets of poignancy of I’m feeling wistful, so I’ve found that people often don’t even notice the framework I’ve used.

People who earnestly tell others about their acid trips and freaky dreams are often labouring under the misapprehension that they are being Deep.  The thing is that, despite its name, Deep does not have an awful lot of room in it for anything but itself. And it definitely doesn’t have any room for swearing, sexual innuendo and outright knob gags. So I consider myself an exception and won’t beat myself up too much for having written about acid trips and dreams on a couple of occasions.

I’m not just being arrogant there. Well, okay maybe a little bit, but there are historical precedents to back me up. Hunter S Thompson for the “telling people about your acid trip” obviously. And the dream thing? Well, equally obviously. Mary Shelley. If Mount Tambora hadn’t erupted in 1815, then we wouldn’t have had the famous “Year Without A Summer” in 1816. Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron wouldn’t have been sitting in a villa bored out of their skulls watching the rain lash down on Lake Como when they should have been out enjoying the sunshine. No one would have suggested a ghost story telling competition and Mary would not have dreamed the plot to “Frankenstein”.

Confinement often produces creativity. When The Plague was ravaging Cambridge in 1665 – and everywhere else for that matter – Isaac Newton retreated to the countryside near Grantham and came up with his Laws of Motion, Theory of Gravitation and, as a bonus, invented Calculus. Though he didn’t call it Calculus. Gottfried Liebniz, who came up with the same idea, called it that. Newton called it Fluxions, which is a far sexier name on account of it having an “x” in it.

And this is the situation many of us find ourselves in now. We’re not all Isaac Newton though. For most people, confinement equals boredom.  Unless you already have a creative routine established, it’s actually quite hard to get the ball rolling on that score. And as for all those things you promised yourself you would do to improve yourself if only you had the time? They are all ranged in front of you like jars on the groaning shelves of a heavily stocked sweet shop and a lot of you are finding that a diet of toffees and strawberry bonbons is not as satisfying as you though it would be.

So, like a lot of people, I am just doing what I normally do, only more of it. In my case, this involves a lot of podcasts. This gives me a great deal of enjoyment, partly I think because I grew up listening to Radio 4 on Sundays and it’s kind of in my bones. And reminds me of gravy and Yorkshire pudding.

I was listening to a podcast the other day though that made me feel a little bit sad. It was on of my favourites called “The Allusionist” which is about the meanings and origins of words. And its presenter, Helen Zaltzman, announced that a dictionary has now included in the meanings of the word “literally”, that modern usage which means “not literally”. You know, as in “I literally turned to stone” and that kind of statement. Now, it was an American dictionary, Websters, so not a dictionary with proper spellings in it or anything. But it still made me feel a little sad.

Not because of the inclusion of the definition itself. I’m well aware that dictionaries are not rule books. They are just snapshots of how language is being used at their time of their publication. The use of language changes, the dictionaries change. That’s their job. As I even said myself once “you have to accept the inevitability of  semantic drift”. I found out though, as soon as the words left my lips, that this is not the sort of thing you are expected to say on a stag weekend in Newcastle.  I quickly changed to topics of conversation to tits and football, but I still got a bit of a roasting. Though not to much because it was Sunday morning and there were only three of us left in the running.

People from Newcastle call themselves “Geordies”. But this was not always the case. Back in the day, “Geordie” was a Newcastle slang word for “idiot”. I’m not sure how that particular piece of semantic drift occurred, bit I know that it’s a subject you definitely don’t bring up on a stag night in Newcastle. Not unless you want to finish the evening with a Brown Ale bottle smashed in your face.

No, I felt sad at the “literally” situation because, despite the fact I know what dictionaries are for, it still boiled my piss slightly. A little bit of me realized “Ah, I’m a fucking dinosaur now, aren’t I?” It’s the same bit of me that gets annoyed when yoga teachers say “Namaste”. Especially when they explain that it means something like “the spirit in me recognizes the spirit in you”. It doesn’t. It’s just Hindi for “Hello”. The fact that they say it at the end of their yoga classes is just the doubly annoying cherry on the cake.

It’s not all bad news though. When I was younger, if I’d asked someone what his new girlfriend was like and he replied “She’s fucking thick, mate”, I’d have replied “Well, never mind mate, I’m sure she’s got other qualities to make up for it.” Now saying your girlfriend is thick is just describing a particular sort of desirable body type.  Equally, now when the lady in your life asks that previously dreaded question “Does this outfit make my arse look big?”, your Millennials and your GenZ’ers don’t have to start stammering and sweating cobbles. Thanks to Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner and their ilk, the correct answer is now “Damn right it does, baby!” It’s progress of sorts, I suppose.

The world changes and there is nothing you can do about it. We’re all going to have a Year Without A Summer in 2020. No trips to the beach. No lazy afternoons in the beer gardens. No inviting all your mates around for a barbecue. But there will be parties again. Many people reckon we will all come out of this changed people, and we will. We’ll all be a little friendlier and smile a little more easily. Only for a while though. It’ll be like that feel good factor we had in Britain after the 2012 Olympics. It’ll soon fade like the beautiful glow you see on the clouds during a particularly lovely sunrise. The clouds will just be normal clouds again and we’ll get on with our day as usual. We’ll turn our collars up when they start to rain on us, because that’s just what you do.

Next party I go to though, if somebody I don’t click with corners me, I’m going to indulge them. Just for a little bit. I will be carrying four candles in my pocket though. The Two Ronnies would expect nothing less.

Copyright Michael Grimes 2020