Not everyone's a winner, baby

With the advent, in the late 1990s, of dross that began with Big Brother and culminated in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, it appears that there is a new modus operandi for the youth of today - and it has nothing to do with aiming for an A+ in algebra.
In the 70s, one was happy with a gold star in the exercise book for exceptionally good work, and one also took it on the chin when one got nothing, realising that one had not truly excelled at anything in particular during the year. However, that was then, and this is now.
Having endured a veritable caboodle of School Presentation Days this week, two distinct and palpable themes began to emerge - one that had me back in 1997 dusting off my CD single of Wannabe by the Spice Girls, and the other cranking out Elton's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. The songs, I think, speak volumes about the obsessions of their age. But I waver from my course.
The first of the Presentation Days was a delightful reflection on the rewards of Persistence and Confidence. The two-hour production went off without even the glimmer of a hitch. No duffed lines, no wardrobe malfunctions, no melt-downs. Rather impressive from a hundred or so 5-year-old girls, but somehow rather too precise for my liking. Hmmm...the apologue wasn't clear until I'd partaken of the next two events.
The second Presentation Day was the clincher in the quest to prove my allegorical theory. It too was a deliciously wholesome display, this time of little men fancied up and showing off their various talents. However in this one EVERY SINGLE BOY received a prize. The pointy heads in 2S must have been up all night thinking up some of these hum-dingers. "Best Friend in a Crisis", "Most Enthusiastic Trumpet Playing" - the list went on and on and was only marginally pipped by the hearty applause as each group was ushered off centre stage. The whole plot slightly alarmed me. The school had moved into 1990s mode, and I desperately wanted them to be playing a tune from 1975.
The third Presentation Day, however, restored my faith in human rationality. As I read the Order of Proceedings my heart sank when I saw the reams of awards to be trotted out. But then an unlikely arbiter of reason tottered up to the podium. The headmistress pulled from her bag an iPad, an iPhone and a dog-eared copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. She proceeded to tell her audience how the creators of these pieces of modern iconography had been failures, also-rans, school nobodies.
And later, as she read the names of those winners who pranced jauntily up onto the stage, every loser in the house felt just a little bit better about themselves.

I beg to differ with Hot Chocolate, who entreated us to believe that everyone's a winner, baby. Rather, I'm with old Leo Tolstoy who was far more pragmatic about things. "We lost because we told ourselves we lost."

Hands Off, My Friend

One must endure a number of tedious adult-type gatherings as maturity sets in. But none saps the life out of oneself quite like the Annual Accountant's Dinner. This is the one where your financial advisor (very loose term) gathers together you and the other blind faithful for a celebration of how he (or she) has managed to persuade the taxman, on your behalf, that you are a struggling writer/lawyer/doctor/taxidermist and that all concessions should be called in to assist you in your pursuit of bettering the profession.
Meanwhile, your financial advisor has just placed his order for the new Porsche 911 from the Frankfurt Motor Show, and you are still wondering whether you could hang on to that 13-year-old Toyota RAV4 for one more year before it goes to God.
But I digress. This is not a venue for rancour, this is a venue for sizzling social observation and the Annual Accountant's Dinner provides just such an opportunity.
Like a wedding, a dinner such as this does not simply fall together. Hours of preparation go into details, details, darling. Guest lists, venues, menus, speeches and most importantly (and mostly explosively) the seating plan. Seating Plan and the term laissez faire are not happy bedfellows. Consequently, I am endlessly intrigued by whom I am seated with at such gatherings of the acolytes.
Okay, so it was a predominantly medical crowd this particular evening but, wedged between two psychiatrists who specialise in treating child sex offenders, the alarm bells began ringing. Quietly, in my own private Idaho, I was mulling over Foucault's famous declaration that madness was silenced by reason. Foucault quite clearly was deluded.
As I pressed down my baked celeriac and beetroot with Jerusalem artichoke mousse it dawned on me how freaking bizarre this whole arc of comrades was.
As the night rollicked along, the conversations became increasingly absurd until I was convinced Federico Fellini would leap out from behind a curtain at any moment.
Unhappily, he never appeared, but this didn't stifle the steady stream of weirdness, which culminated in this:
My husband, who I unashamedly class as quite a handsome number, was being chatted up right in front of me by one of these kooky head-shrinkers. The gall! The flirting was wanton, the body language outrageous and the squirm factor (from the husband) rated an eleven. And the most intriguing element of the home-wrecker's gambit was that he was a HE, a dude, a guy, an XY chromosome. The husband was being chatted up by a MAN.
As I said, the Accountant's Dinner is an exercise in social observation, and I was loving every minute of it. However, the silvery beads were appearing on the husband's brow and by the third shin-mauling I succumbed and realised I had to break him out. We bid our adieus, but not before the lush prised a business card from the husband and promised to be in touch.
And he was a man of his word. That night at 11pm, home-wrecker tapped out a little late-night note from his i-Phone just for the husband. "What a great night. I'd really like to get to know you better. Let's keep in touch."
As I left the husband to measure his reply I reminisced on the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland and thought that perhaps he could be my financial advisor. "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be,” said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here."

Don't Rush Me

Nothing attracts a crowd quite like a wailing police siren and the skid of tyres. Couple those two deliciously enticing excuses to rubber-neck, add about 40 schools boys and you've got a party.
Lamentably, on this most recent ocassion, the sirens and skidding tyres were for my own benefit, or lack thereof. The crime, it appears, was not coming to a complete and sustained stop at the Stop sign directly outside the Young Man's school.
The police car, populated by a pair of asinine boofheads, witnessed a hoon (see previous post) making a flagrant and calculated left-hand turn into a cul-de-sac (one could make an excellent, if somewhat tenuous, allusion to this natty French term for dead-end and the constabulary themselves, however one will refrain) with absolutely no traffic in it, near it or around it due mainly to the fact that it was 7.43 A.M.
In the final stages of executing the move, I admit, I did see the police car, but by then the fat lady had done her work, so I continued and did what any good parent would do. Uttered a few expletives, banged the steering wheel into submission and drove off into the cul-de-sac...of death.
That's when the screeching of tyres began. Theirs, not mine. And the sirens, oh, the sirens. They were like a clarion call for every boy in the playground to down tools and get to the front gates tout de suite.
"Ohhhhhh, Mum," cried the Youth from the back seat. "Quickly," I said, "Get out now before they come." Leaping from the car with a certain amount of, as it turned out, misplaced alacrity, I ushered the young man inside with a bum's rush, thus ameliorating the chance of utter shame at the hands of his recalcitrant mother. He knew what was good for him, and took off like a thoroughbred in a knacker's yard.
The other two were not so lucky. "Stay here, Lovelies," I sang as the cop car pulled up behind. Suspecting me of fleeing the scene of the CRIME, the officer was out of his souped up Toyota in a trice.
"Do you know what you've just done?" he drawled.
Now, I could have played dumb, but there was something about having such a large and attentive audience that gave the man a sense of majesty and gravitas. Today was not going to be my lucky day.
I admitted my transgression, decided not to beg leniency or mitigating circumstances (mostly because I couldn't think of any fast enough) and amused myself by entertaining the early morning audience with my repertoire of eye rolls and pursed lips while he took my licence back to his car to check my catalogue of felonies.
However, the fact was, there were still Youth to get to another school three suburbs away. When he returned I asked in my most dulcet of tones, "Could you write me the ticket and I'll go. I have two girls to get to school and they're going to be late."
Well. That was Satan's knell. He gave me the death stare, closed his notepad and whispered these words: "Don't rush me." At which point he strolled to his rice-rocket, sat inside, closed the door and didn't emerge for another 15 minutes, brandishing my licence and a fine for $258.
My only assuagement was that after I cruised away from life's cul-de-sac I was still able to get the ladies to class on time by breaking the land-speed record to the suburbs beyond.
The drug-addled and decrepit, yet infinitely wise Keith Richards, hit the nail on the head when he said, "If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.”

And Who Are You?

Dolled up, mascara'd and perfumed, I hit the town with the husband this week. Now, this primping and preening is not my normal modus operandi, and the posh pub at which we found ourselves is not my natural habitat. However, I tried my darndest to look good and behave myself "for the children". The reason for this aberrant nocturnal outing was our daughter's school drinks party. You know the sort: a get-together of like-minded individuals at a relaxed venue with a comforting sense of mutual conviviality.
Well, the trouble started early. As I sidled into the front bar, trying to look suave and devil-may-care, I was confronted by the infantry - the female variety. It appears that at these types of events one does not wear flat shoes. Despite the invitation assuring a 'casual' gathering, there appeared to be little of it in evidence. Not only were the heels not flat, they were sky-high. The type that any self-respecting chiropodist would have snatched from the offender's hoof and decapitated in one fell swoop.
My angst continued unabated. Taking a straw poll, I selected a few of the female guests and gave them the "Down, Up, Down" (a technique generally favoured by lascivious men who look you in the eye then let their glance move south and then north again to take in the full spectrum of you-ness).
The Down, Up, Down confirmed my suspicions. These women had left no detail to chance. Joh Bailey and his tonsorial team would have been hard-pressed to have pumped out this many blow-dried beauties in a week, let alone a Thursday evening. Brushing my own mane of mange back with alacrity, I made my way into the throng.
Now at close proximity, I was hit by the next in a relentless bank of crushing waves. These women were coutured. Unlike myself, who was sporting some old tat I'd picked up in a hurry from Sportsgirl or the like about five years ago, these women were wearing "names, Darling, NAMES".
The final inglorious assault on my selfhood (which had rapidly turned into Devil-Might-Care-Just-A-Little-Bit) was when some complete tosser, of the male species, approached me (resplendent in the uniform of these types: double-breasted navy jacket with gold buttons, white-collared pinstripe shirt and jeans with loafers) and spoke these words: "Excuse me, this is a private function. Do we know you?"
Three words entered my head, something along the lines of, "You little f***wit" (my quick calculations had him pegged at 5'6"). However, I remained calm, drew myself up to full height, looked down at his beautifully coiffured piece, pulled out my poshest English accent and said, "No you don’t. But who are you, dear boy?" That silenced the nasty weasel who, retreating to his gaggle of similarly height-challenged men friends, turned his back and huddled down into the safety of a scrum of Ralph Lauren polo shirts.
My work done, I retired to the bar for a nice glass of chardonnay with the words of Mark Twain in my head. “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

The Inner Sanctum

There are few places a person can truly be alone. Existentially, of course, one can always retire to the solitude of one's own consciousness, although I always find this induces a wave of panic that prompts me to ask, “Am I good enough company for myself?”
But let's segue from this mildly alarming thought onto the pragmatics of solitude. I'm thinking specifically here of the solitude one gains on hearing the satisfying click of the lock on the bathroom door. This, in theory, secures the inner sanctum and ensures that interlopers are cancelled out regardless of their efforts. Yes, you may be able to hear the mayhem and carnage unfolding outside the door, but that's someone else's problem now. You're 'in the bathroom' and, as such, are incommunicado.
This may be a dereliction of duty, but it's extremely effective at deflecting requests for breaking up fights, changing nappies and answering telephones. You can take your time in this tiled and mirrored alter-world. Why don't you gaze into the mirror to check for crow's feet, test out that new lip gloss, perform a mini pedicure. These were the simple and fleeting joys of the bathroom.
I say 'were' because a disturbing and fundamentally divisive event rocked my belief in Solitude recently. I was happily shampooing my hair (something I only do every third day so as not to squander the scant moments of Sanctuary) when I heard the usual harks from beyond the firmly locked door.
"I need a Band-aid. Can you open the door?" bellowed the eldest Youth. "You'll have to wait, I'm in the shower," I reply.
He tries again, "No, I need it now. The blood's dripping." I retort, "No, just hold a tissue on it."
Silence descends and I feel content that a crisis has been averted. But then I hear it. A little jiggle on the door handle. Then, quite unmistakably, the lock begins to turn until 'click', HE'S IN! "Out, out," harangues The Shrew (as I am fondly known on occasion). He scarpers and isn't seen again until I emerge from the Sanctum, demanding to know how he breached the fortress.
He holds up his weapon - a 20 cent coin - looking all sweetness and light.
One half of me is devastated at the demise of the Sanctum, but the other is quietly proud that the Youth had the ingenious temerity to even try.
However, I'm still with Franz Kafka when it comes to solitude. "Don't you want to join us?" he was asked by an acquaintance who encountered him alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't."