I, like, can’t believe you totes expect me to pay for that
Our world is in the grip of revolution. Conventional wisdom is being upended. Old certainties are crumbling. When radical new ideas are proposed, therefore, we must resist the urge to snort or mock. We must listen.
Sadly, however, it seems some people are determined to remain stuck in the past. People like, for example, the owner of the Charleville Lodge Hotel in Dublin. A few days ago, he received an email from a 22-year-old woman from Bath called Elle Darby. She informed him that she would like a room for the weekend for herself and her boyfriend. She would not, however, pay for it. Instead, she would kindly give his hotel a mention in a video she would publish on her personal Youtube channel. He should look on it as a “collaboration”, and an exciting opportunity to promote his hotel’s brand, thanks to her abilities as a “social media influencer”.
To her consternation, however, the owner did not accept her generous offer. On the contrary, he told her that, if she wished to stay in his hotel, she would have to pay money – in order that he, in turn, could pay his staff. Ms Darby was deeply upset, and complained online that people over the age of 30 simply have “no idea how social media works these days”.
Of course, it would be easy – as, I fear, all too many people have done – to call Ms Darby’s behaviour spoilt, entitled, arrogant, deluded, pathetic, risible and brattish. Personally, though, I think we should give her idea some serious thought. In fact, I’m going to try it myself.
Next time I’m doing the weekly shop, and the employee on the till asks me for £78.63, I will simply smile, shake my head, and offer payment in the form of a smiley emoji on Twitter. A tweet from me, after all, could be the big break Tesco needs.
In car showrooms, I’ll offer a Facebook like. In five-star holiday resorts,
I’ll pledge a photo on Pinterest. Instead of buying my wife birthday presents, I’ll endorse her on Linkedin. And when a beggar asks if I can spare
50p for a cup of tea, I’ll pat him on the head, beam encouragingly, and promise to plug his Instagram page.
People make such a fuss about money, don’t they? It just goes to show how shallow they are.
Faber & Faber is to publish a collection of letters between Philip Larkin and his mother. It should be fascinating, because Larkin’s mother was arguably the most important influence on his poetry. Albeit quite unwittingly.
Most of the time, she drove him up the wall. In letters to his friends he described her as “an obsessive snivelling pest”, “a bloody rambling fool”, and “not a pleasant person to live with by any standards”. She was “irritating and boring”, had “no interests or hobbies”, and “arouses in me strong alarm and hostility”. Her company routinely sent him into “furious rages”. When he rang to wish her a happy 82nd birthday, within 10 minutes he found himself “cursing and screaming at her”. Without her, though, he could never have written the way he did. From her, he inherited the gloomy self-absorption that gave his poems their unflinching clarity, and the provincial unadventurousness that gave them their unique feel for the mundane. Her relationship with his father, meanwhile, inspired the terror of commitment that was a key theme of his work. “I never remember my parents making a single spontaneous gesture of affection towards each other,” he grumbled to one of his various girlfriends. He never married any of them, and never had children.
“People ought to get away from home as chickens get out of eggs: wholly, utterly, immediately, cleanly,” he groaned, at the age of 44, after a particularly grumpy weekend at his mother’s. Yet, for all that he complained about her, he never neglected her: on the contrary, he wrote to her twice a week, visited her twice a month (even though she lived hours away), and often took her on holiday. Although he would surely never have admitted it, I suspect that in truth she was more than his mother. She was his muse.
She died, aged 91, in 1977. He barely wrote another poem.
“England and America,” said George Bernard Shaw, “are two nations separated by a common language.” What prompted that observation, I don’t know. Perhaps he’d just been watching children’s TV.
The other day my three-year-old son and I were watching an episode of his favourite cartoon: Team Umizoomi, a series made in America. On to the screen trotted a poodle. Its coat, for some reason, was bright pink. My son giggled and pointed.
“Dada!” he said. “Look at that poofy poodle!”
There was a short silence, while I wondered whether I’d heard him correctly. “That what?” I said at last. “That poofy poodle,” said my son. “It’s all pink and poofy.”
Well, really. I had a good mind to phone his nursery, and demand to know where he’d picked up such deeply un-pc language. But then I found out. He’d picked it up from the cartoon itself. All the other characters were calling the pink poodle “poofy” too. In fact, one of them – a small green robot shaped like a pedal-bin – was now donning a bright pink wig, in an attempt to look like the poodle.
“Yay!” squealed the robot. “I’m going to look soooooo poofy!”
While my son giggled innocently away, I Googled “poofy”, in the desperate hope that its American definition was different from its English one.
Thankfully, it was. In America, it seems, “poofy” is used simply to describe big, fluffy hair. Nothing else. It was fine. It was all fine.
Even so, maybe it’s best if I don’t let my son watch that show any more. Just in case there’s a boy at nursery with really curly hair.