David Quantick - Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap

DAVID QUANTICK

GRUMPY OLD MEN

New Year, Same Old Crap

T here used to be a huge piece of graffiti somewhere in London (this was years ago when graffiti was actual words and sentences, not someones name spelt wrong in six different colours) that said, in huge wobbly letters, MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH. Now there are two things here. One is that years later a pop group stole that slogan for an album title, which is just typical. Get your own ideas, poppy boys! And the other is slightly more profound. That graffiti was sprayed up over twenty-five years ago. So if modern life was rubbish then, think how much more rubbish it is now.

Because the times, as Bob Dylan told us much to our huge surprise, are a-changing. They are, in fact, a-getting worse. And all the nice new modern things that are supposed to make our lives easier are almost certainly making it worse. Take work. You may remember a while ago some nonsense about the paperless office. The idea was that when we all had computers and modems and wireless and so on, wed no longer be printing documents and sending faxes and wed manage without paper. And yet there seems to be more paper in offices than ever. Similarly, email. Does it speed up the pace of work life? It might, if we didnt spend all day deleting spam and replying to idiots who want to know if we went to school with them, and looking at web groups online where someone has sent you an important message and that message turns out to be Andrew is thinking of making himself a cup of tea.

Modern life is more and more rubbish. And as it gets worse, men become more and more grumpy. The age limit for grumpiness seems to have been lowered, too. Grumpiness is no longer the preserve of the over-forties, or even the over-thirties. There are grumpy old men around who are barely out of their teens. And its getting grumpier out there. All teenagers are permanently grumpy anyway; and ninety per cent of primary-school children are officially fed-up. As life gets worse, grumpiness looks more and more like the only sensible option.

Theres never been a better time to be grumpy.

B ecause after youve finished eating, you go to the toilet and throw up, thats why. You puking liar.

T ime was, you dressed like what you was. If you were a baby, you favoured some swaddling. Toddlers seemed keen to dress as miniature fops. Infants wore uniform until they left school. And then you were a man and you dressed as a man. This lasted you for bloody ages until you went to the clothes shop and said, through clacking false teeth and wispy nicotine-stained moustache, I am now an old man. Can I have my old man clothes, please? And they would kit you out in flat cap, weskit, pipe and tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

No more, alas, no more. These days you can dress up as what you like, when you like, until you drop dead. And what this means in practice is that everyone dresses young. See the octogenarian pop star in his baseball boots and Camden Market T-shirt! Observe the ageing accountant in his chinos and distressed jacket! Look at the Chelsea Pensioner dressed (because hes a bit behind with the fashions) like a member of All Saints, freshly back from a rave in the Gulf.

Nobody has seen fit to reverse this notion. Apart from the odd prawn who likes to dress up as a fogey just to make sure that they never have sex again, young people do not for the most part want to look like old people. Yet now they do, because the old people are all dressed as them. Its a paradox! How will we be able to tell the young people from the old people? Oh yeah, thats right. The old people will be the ones with the wrinkly skin and the back problems. And theyll also be the ones who can afford the trendy designer clothes, ha ha.

L ook around this pub, caf or bar! Is anyone else not wearing a shirt? No! Has anyone said, Hey! Nice back! The acne scars blend in with the unsunscreened flaky skin! Again, no! So put your shirt on, monkey boy!

T hankfully we no longer have ladettes (did we ever, really? Were they just made up, those girls drinking pints of lager and pretending to enjoy table football?) but we still have lads. God, do we have lads. The male ability to not grow up is so remarkable and logic-defying that one day Richard Dawkins will hear of it and throw his arms up in the air saying, All right! I give up! This is so mental that surely a higher power is behind it. Wow! Theres a Power Rangers movie!

Lads as a concept is a broad church (or, as Richard Dawkins would say, a broad brick building with pictures of dead imaginary people in the windows). It developed from your wartime mockers, brave but normal blokes who sank a tin mug of char before having a go at Jerry. The naughtiest thing these lads ever did was go to a bint in Cairo and pretend to have it off to save face.

There are bonny lads and stable lads and jack the lads and all sorts of lads whom nowadays we would just call teenagers, except teenagers cant clean a horse or make a fire or spell ant. There are lads who are your mates, like in a beer advert, who sit in pubs and thump one another 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 theyre possibly harmless, but youd better not stare at them, and while theyre probably quite nice really (although you dont know it, three of them are at stage school), one of them could well be dangerously mental, so you step aside even though youve got the right of way.

Those lads.

And lets 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 dont have to till their sodding fields any more.

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, 19311936) 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.