Backchat With Catboy

Our man on the radio wants to be alone, alright?

Any regular reader of my column will know that I suffer from a number of mental ailments that fall under the category of ‘Issues my father and men of his generation don’t believe in’.

One of these seems to have manifested itself once I reached my thirties: a dawning realisation that socialising and talking to people in most situations was not only best avoided but also an absolute pain in the backside. There are the obvious, frequent pitfalls:

Forgetting someone’s name the very moment it’s said to me.

Having a ‘first time we’ve met’ conversation with someone who then points out we’ve met before.

Drifting away with imaginary elevator music swirling around my head as they talk about facts I’ll later be required to remember.

Supermarket stop and chats with someone I have the same conversation with every time I see them: “Are you still living in the Ranches?” “Yes, you asked me that the last time!”

So for the last *cough* years, I have attempted to live a solitary life which, when you’re married to a social butterfly and work in an industry that is largely built on hot air and waffle, can be quite tricky. But I’m a trooper. Another fun part of my life is that far too often I have sought solace in food, to the point where I am ridiculously overweight. My exercise regime at the moment is walking my stupid (and also morbidly overweight) dog, Charlie, around the lake at sunset.

“That’s hardly exercise,” I hear you gasp, in your yoga pants, as you flip a tractor tyre up a mountain.

Well, compared to the exercise I was doing before, it’s Herculean, so shut your face.

Sadly, I am on the verge of quitting this rigid half-an-hour, man-and-canine daily routine because of what I mentioned previously. People seem to think walking my dog is a sign that I want to be stopped by strangers to chat. What an absolutely ludicrous assumption.

It’s not like I look approachable. I’ve tried everything to avoid it. I wear headphones, dark glasses and more often than not, a policephoto fit scowl. I drop my gaze to the pavement as people approach. I have even tried pretending to be having an in-depth, albeit one-sided conversation with the dog. Nothing works. My only solution is to write to the developers of the community we live in and ask if they wouldn’t mind painting arrows and putting up signs advising that footpaths around the lakes are one-way only – much like skating rinks or go-kart tracks. That way, our paths never cross and I’m free to ‘enjoy’ my ‘exercise’.