My stepfather is the type of Boomer who assumes his place at the head of the table as if it were the right hand of God. He quacks away with certainty on every topic, including ones he knows nothing about. Literary agents, wind farms and women’s employment rights – on and on he bulldozes without fear of offence, starting every sentence with, ‘Well, of course,’ before repeating something he has read in the Sunday Times.
Confrontation has defined our relationship since 1986, and while he is always wrong, except on matters to do with taxation and motor cars, he always seems to win our arguments because he doesn’t lose his temper and storm out of the room in a strop like a 14-year-old. I make up for it, though, with frequent belittlings of his miserly taste in wine.
Which is why I’m feeling torn over a luxury purchase. It’s a rarity; no one else I know will have one. Guaranteed, it’ll make me a better person. Unlike most luxury items, which promise to fix everything that’s wrong in your life but then turn out to be just more stuff. It’s £2,500, though, and that’s a lot of cash. Cheaper than a small Gucci handbag, but quite a bit more than a new Tom Ford lipstick.
The stellate ganglion block is a medical procedure used for chronic pain that involves a doctor injecting anaesthetic into a bunch of nerves in the neck, temporarily blocking the fight-or-flight response. The result is emotional Botox and up to six months of a stress response brought to heel
I’m not a doctor, so I won’t mangle the anatomical facts. Having this desirable temporary lobotomy could be life-changing for me. It’s got emerging experimental evidence for PTSD, which I don’t have. I’ve just got no patience – a narrow window of tolerance, as a psychotherapist would have it. It’s a bit of a sledgehammer-to-a-nut approach to mental health, but I can’t resist the temptation.
I don’t know when I started using the words ‘triggering’ and ‘boundaries’ without irony. I’m old, you see, over 50. I’m not sure whether taking offence at other people is habit or biological function. Either way, I seem to have it bad. What’s it called when you find almost everyone intolerable? What are you then? I want to say misanthrope, but for accuracy I’ll settle on just pissed off.
I want to be unruffled. When your parents start dying, and you realise that you’re next, it’s evident life is too short to get upset that the neighbours have raised another of their flags.
Down here, where I live now, they love a St George’s Cross. Well, not everyone. There’s them that fly them, and us, us who will be heading to the Big Brue, an ideas festival where people pay money to hear reasonable debate, for fun.
Last year I relocated to a politely bohemian town in Somerset. It’s the sort of town where the Spar on the high street has Gordal olives and 18 different types of kefir. My home is centrally located, albeit on one of the town’s less salubrious streets where there’s at least one heroin addict, and a fat woman who loves a fight and once threw dog shit in my garden. But at least I have a garden, which is more than I had in London.
It’s so famously nice here in Bruton that when I interviewed the artist Sarah Lucas she repeatedly described it as the Cotswolds. Bruton is in another county, nearly a one-hour drive from those three hallowed celebrity shires (nine hours by public transport on a Sunday). But I saw what she was doing there.
Piss-taking used to be the normal way of things. I was raised in a crucible of rudity. Among my dying Dad’s last words to me was a roasting for my ADHD diagnosis, which he found actually laughable. Perhaps because I loved him, and he is dead, I long for someone who loves me enough to take the piss out of me.
How did I become this intolerant dickhead? And when? Was it always there waiting? Something in me? Or was I triggered by geopolitics? Was it Brexit? Perhaps it was MeToo, when I became so paranoid I dared not open my mouth.
In MeToo times it was mandatory to tell Twitter about the time a man pinched my bum on the Tube or that I felt frightened walking home at night. I tried so hard to remember such times, but the only bad situations I got into didn’t feel too shareable. It probably wasn’t going to end that well jumping in a Bentley with several Arab guys who cruised past me at 2 AM while I was walking down Jermyn Street near Tramp. ‘Hey cookie, you wanna party?’ All I could hear was the verbification of ‘party’.
Me Too? Me Too Stupid, more like. Tweeting, ‘That time a bunch of Arab guys with a big bag of coke invited me back to their flat and it got difficult. #metoo’ was not going to cut it. In fact, it would only offend all the nice Arab guys out there and make me look like a slutty racist. I decided just to keep quiet. It was the best I could do for the cause.
What I really wanted to say throughout that time was, ‘it’s not quite as simple as that #metoo’. But I just nodded along to the music and waited for the launch of the next performative allyship opportunity.
It was Jung, or Freud, or some other even longer dead and now cancelled white man (sexist, it goes without saying), who first pointed out that the things that most annoy us about others are the things we secretly despise in ourselves. ‘Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,’ goes Jung’s easier read on the shadow self.
Now even public school boys and princes have feelings. And I’m not against them, feelings; it’s perfectly healthy to have a lot of them, like bowel movements.
‘Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture,’ wrote Martin Amis in his review of Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. This was 1996, America was ahead of us on the feelings thing. Here, drinking heavily was still a perfectly wholesome British way to deal with a hard day at work.
Did I just mention Martin? I’ve been trying not to since a barely pubescent publisher laughed at me for feeling disappointed I’d never write like that.
‘You don’t like Martin Amis, do you?’ she said, actually shuddering.
‘Yes I do,’ I said, already regretting it. ‘I love Martin Amis, I’ve read The Information three times.’
This was a faux pas, something so gauche that I would never be able to look this girlwoman nor indeed any 21st-century literary professional in the eye again.
‘The arrogant misogynist who writes one-dimensional female characters,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought he wrote such fleshy awful male characters because that’s what he did so well.’
I stood corrected. Judged.
There’s a trend now, though, for being tolerant. It’s a goal really, like losing weight or getting big muscles. Inevitably it comes at us via the new religion of wellness narcissism. You have to calm your nervous system, ‘regulate it’, apparently, by building vagal tone and periods of strategic rest.
Meditation, breathwork, a Russian medicine called phenibut that makes you all two-drinks-chill without the alcohol, I’ve tried it all, and what I’ve found works best is avoiding annoying people. Functionally, I’ve ended up with a life free of the friction that is other people. Now I have barely any friends.
Those friends, the true ride or dies, that I once got hammered with in Soho drinking clubs have divided into two neat piles, the hopeless soon-to-be-dead alcoholics and those that have awards and newspaper cartoons (about them) framed on the wall in their downstairs loo.
Yes. I’ve got some work to do. Before the Big Brue debates, a neuroscientist called Beau is going to do ‘some exercises’ to make people more open and see if engaging in generative conflict makes us feel better than degenerative conflict in his neuroscience jargon
Obviously I found that irritating. But I had the insight to know that was my shadow self talking there, and in fact, I desperately wanted to be up there with the town’s most famous media folk, all Mariella and Catherine’s friends, having our civilised debates, enjoying contrasting points of view and all while looking desirably laconic.
I want to be tolerant, able to coolly hold two truths in each hand. The really famous line about this is from The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Is it OK to like him or is he sexist too?)
‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ It’s not a line about trying to get in with Mariella Frostrup and her glorious network of epic friends in the bouji country town that’s not in the Cotswolds. It’s a line about how to live life. A line on how, simply, to be
