Category: The Occasional Papers

I got called a twat today by a barmaid in Stourbridge. It was one of those unanticipated, out-of-proportion responses that you occasionally get from terminally baffled people or people who are pissed off about something before you even get there.

“YOU TWAT!” she shouted “CAN’T YOU READ, YOU FUCKING TWAT? THERE’S SIGNS UP EVERYWHERE!”

Confused at first, I realised that I’d put my pint down on the wooden part of the pool table and that there was a hand-written sign on the wall asking you not to do this.

“Christ,” I said, “I’m sorry, really. I didn’t see any sign.”

And I hadn’t seen it. My friend and I had literally been in the pub for five minutes. We’d picked up our drinks from the bar and carried them into the next room, in which I spotted a guy I knew and hadn’t seen for a couple of years (He used to be in a band I episodically hung out with, which he informed me today had split up due to their lead guitar guy being poached by a bigger, undoubtedly better band) and so I naturally put my pint down on the nearest surface so that I could shake his hand.

She snatched my pint from the pool table to put it up on a ledge and then gestured to a beery ring mark left by my glass.

I wanted to tell here that there wouldn’t have been a beery ring mark if she had not snatched it up so violently but decided it was best not to go in this direction and instead to just apologise again. If this had been her reaction to a ‘misplaced’ beer glass in a public house, then only Christ knew how she would have reacted to my arguing with her: she’d have probably produced an old Winchester from behind the bar and shot the place up.

“Really, I’m sorry. I only just got in the door and I’ve never even been here before.”

“TWAT!”

The weirdest thing about all of this was that no one so much as battered an eyelid at all the shouting. As soon as she’d gone, my friend just continued in our conversation as though it hadn’t even been interrupted. Perhaps the barmaid going ape-shit is a commonplace thing there, though it made me wonder if the whole thing had even happened at all and it wasn’t just a sort of
Spaced-esq moment of unreality.

Now that my postgraduate course is slowing down for Christmas, I get to spend a greater number of daylight hours doing productive things like working on my book, writing articles, spending time with friends and family and watching terrible, terrible, bad, terrible daytime television.

Particularly of interest is a show I’ve found myself watching on no less than four occasions called Make Me Rich in which a TV Money Guru goes round to people’s houses and shows them how to save literally pence a year (actually, it does usually equate to several thousand pounds) by cutting back in certain areas.

The principal of the show seems quite commendable at first: Mr. TV Guru Man says things like “I want to tackle those big companies who rip you off and put the money back in your hands”. The website says:

“This series isn’t about cutting back – it’s about enabling people to take on companies, find the top deals, and play the system helping them to potentially release thousands of pounds each year.“

I like this. It is good. He’s literally sticking it to the man. He’s like a human version of anarchist fox, Robin Hood. ITV are being quite brave here by airing such radical anti-establishment programming so early in the day: the mums of the nation will soon be forming NIMBY groups against the biggest multinationals.

The money-saving starts with quite sensible things that scrape surprising amounts of money back from The Corporation such as ‘giving up smoking’ so that the evil tobacco people are robbed of up to £10,000 of working-class money per year.

But then it all goes quite mad. They start cutting back on things like food or having haircuts or bathing. They cancel their gym memberships. They have their pets exterminated in order to save on vet bills. All of this is obvious: the key to becoming rich it seems is not to spend or do anything.

In the end they have saved around twenty grand but at what cost? They are now long-haired, seldom-bathed freaks with no friends, shivering from nicotine withdrawal and staying at home every night with all the lights turned off.

It’s great TV.