Polly Vernon
WHEN I FIRST CAME to live in London in the mid 1990s – a girl, I was! A slip of a girl! – a Liverpudlian with a sandwich board would patrol the pavements around Oxford Circus, spreading the Good Word. ‘Are you a sinner, or are you a winner?’ he’d demand, loud and on repeat, of a milling populace hell-bent on finding not God, but something fab to wear to the Met Bar later cos they had a strong feeling tonight was the night they’d finally get to get drunk near one of Oasis.
Back then, preaching in public was a very niche activity; how strange (I thought, as I read last week’s story about an American cook who’d texted a friend to get their recipe for a tofu dish, only to be denied and denounced as a meat-eating charlatan intent on ‘appropriating’ veganism) that it’s so incredibly popular now. Wherever we are, whatever we do, we run the risk of getting preached at. Part-time preachers loiter at our school gates, on our Twitter feeds, at our dinner parties and in our Whatsapp groups; eternally vigilant to us confusing non-binary pronouns, accidentally using a plastic straw, foolishly asking for plant-based cooking directions when we still eat sausage, or otherwise providing them with an opportunity to do what they do best: denounce, decry, condemn! I call them ‘The Recreationally Righteous’, cos getting on their high horse is what they call a good time. Lordy: are they tiresome!
This is not to say that caring about stuff is tiresome. Obviously it’s not! I’d go as far as to say it’s inevitable, as entrenched in the human condition as feeling hunger and love. But caring about things, then remonstrating with others because they don’t seem to care about the same things, or enough, or properly or thoroughly or convincingly? That is tiresome. It’s tiresome because we all lead morally compromised lives. We skip to coffee shops to purchase three quids’ worth of latte, congratulating ourselves on owning a reusable coffee cup – while strenuously avoiding acknowledging the homeless bloke on the corner. We feel smug about our personal avocado consumption – but we never ask how they’re farmed. To preach in such circumstances makes a raving hypocrite of anyone. But Recreational Righteousness is also tiresome, because it assumes moral superiority on the part of the preachy. The Recreationally Righteous are convinced they’re the only ones in the room – nay, the world! – to have noticed injustice, intolerance and the climate emergency, and are thus obliged to awaken the rest of us from our apathetic slumber, most likely with a public dressing-down because they’ve just realised we’re still using Uber. Or tampons. Or cheese.