There’s nowt as queer as folk
When I was asked to write the column for Nouse and take the helm from the venerable Mister Robbie Dale, I was full of ideas about what I wanted to talk about. And, if I’m being honest, I hope that I still do or otherwise these are going to get very dull by the time of Easter.
The only problem is, I haven’t thought of any cunning ways to actually start things. I’m the same with essays. I can prattle off anything you like about how one bunch of dead people took great interest in killing another group of similarly dead people; it just might not be any good.
Introductions, however, are things with which take me ages. I could say something about how this represents the first step being the most difficult but I won’t since this sounds too much like the sort of emails you get that ask you to send them onto 14,000 other people within 20 seconds. The thing I always love about those emails, rather than the made up stories and the appaling cartoons, is that they always offer you endless love and happiness if you manage to send them on but curse you with the curse of a thousand cuts if you don’t. Needless to say, I always delete them and therefore you can judge by my picture whether or not I’m horrifically cursed as a result.
Introductions, however, are so difficult because they can so easily go wrong. If I’d started this with ‘As I was walking to town’ or ‘I was talking to an old friend the other day’ then you would have quite rightly turned over and read something more interesting.
This isn’t necessarily a bad way to start a column were it not for the fact that the situations mentioned are often blatant lies. If I’d started with ‘I was talking to my friend about the use of renewable energy in the Colorado Valley’ then this would be so absurdly made-up as to make grown men weep upon beholding it. I may speak only for myself but I have never talked about renewable energy ever to a friend and I’ve never seen anything on the walk to university that made me reflect upon man’s inhumanity towards man.
I will, however, relate an incident that happened to me in JJs that did make me think that it would be a good topic for a column.
When I was chair of Halifax, sometime during the Crimean War, I always used to meet a fellow historian at JCRC events. There’s nothing innately wrong with this other than the fact that he hated them. He didn’t like the bar or the events and would inevitably discuss with me why the whole business was a pile of nonsense. That’s fine. There’s nothing in the College handbook that states we exile people who don’t like what happens but it always struck me that I always saw him AT these events. It wasn’t though the fellow had been to one and didn’t like it but he kept going and continued to not enjoy himself. It begs the question, why?
Another acquaintance of mine from the mid-nineteenth century was a JCRC officer who told me that he could not see the point of the committee in any way, shape or form. He rejoiced at the idea that he would soon never have to attend again, before running again for a different position. He claimed that this was due to the fact that he was going along with a friend, but if I honestly saw a committee as being utterly useless and a complete waste of my time, no friend could make me want to go again.
That, I suppose, is what makes humanity such a very interesting but utterly insane species. In many cases, no matter what the reasoning there may be against it, we still do exactly the same things we’ve always done. To enlarge the example of JJs into a small town, Blackpool recently appeared in the Economist magazine as a demonstration of just how curious people can be. Despite the fact that the town’s facilities were not particularly good, its beaches none too clean and its attractions all rather dated, people still defied the forces of the market and visited. I’d like to point out at this point that the criticisms listed were the Economist’s and that I personally rather like the place. This has nothing at all to do with the fact that my girlfriend’s family lives there and that she’ll read this. But it is odd that humans can be very curious about the decisions we take and how we reason them. It reminds me of the time when my sister identified the greatest womaniser in my year as a homosexual based entirely upon his walk. Maybe this is a perfectly legitimate method, but it seemed to me very odd that she could conclude something like that based entirely upon the way he walked from one side of the car park to the other. I even went so far as to question it but she was as sure as if God Himself had removed the roof of the car in which we were sitting and told her so via tablets of stone brought by choirs of angels. Needless to say, he found it both curious and funny when I told him this many years later.
The sheer strangeness of some of the things we do is often demonstrated in the realm of fiction, especially when the writer takes the persona of someone or something looking at mankind from an alien perspective. Indeed, good old science fiction is ripe with aliens and their philosophical musings upon the curious manner in which the people of Earth do business. It almost makes me feel sorry for Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Stuck in a ship filled with humans, our Vulcan hero must suffer the daily taunts and utter incomprehension that greets him from his fellows. For Spock, living in a world of black-and-white morality, the idea that something should be done ‘because it feels right’ must be utterly insane.
I would go further and say that Spock is almost like a computer, but this would also be a blatant lie. Computers are, in my experience, even more random than their human creators.
Thankfully the North of England used to have a phrase for this that pretty much summed it all up. ‘There’s nowt as queer as folk’, is a proverb that managed to say an awful lot in a small amount of words, which is pretty much what proverbs should do really. The ability to look at ourselves and to laugh at our funny little ways is surely one of the best things we can do, as blunt northern proverbs tell us. I wish I could claim such a bluntness as part of my northern heritage, I was born in Bolton after all, but private school has all but decimated any hint of a regional accent. A man in town the other day asked if I was from Kent. I was half minded to give him a thrashing for his insolence had it none been for the recent news that legislation now prevents this from occurring. A wrong-headed idea if ever I heard one!
