Lea in Big Brother:
“These aren’t my friends. They’re just people I know.”
A quote of the year, not least because of MySpace Nation.
(I’ve just come up with that phrase on the spot, though I don’t doubt minds have been thinking alike across the world. I’d lay money that someone somewhere is writing a book called ‘Myspace Nation’. Purely because it’s so absolutely, searingly inevitable.)
I get a kind of cathartic buzz watching Lea on Big Brother. She’s a paranoid, attention-seeking depressive given to regular fits of tears, whose spending of money trying to feel happier and at home in her skin – her plastic surgery – clearly has failed to deliver even an iota of the hoped-for results. By way of excusing my watching of Big Brother at all, I like to think of Ms Lea as doing the side of me that I’d like to have surgically removed myself. She’s my emotional stunt double.
Something currently driving me mad: knowing how to greet people I know. A handshake, a hug, a kiss on one cheek, a kiss on both cheeks, or a kiss on the lips? Which one for which person at which occasion? No one ever tells you this. It’s an absolute minefield of anxiety. People should wear signs. “We should hug.” “A handshake is fine.” “Not on the mouth!”
I can never work out what people want, and am terrified that I’ll do the wrong thing, and they’ll call the police.
A cartoon seen recently, worthy of pre-war Punch, marked ‘Modern London Life’.
Two drawings, each of two women hugging effusively, saying “How ARE you?”. The caption for one says “Best Friends”. The other says “Vague Aquaintances”.
Both drawings are, of course, absolutely identical.
