{"id":529,"date":"2006-06-30T04:07:46","date_gmt":"2006-06-30T03:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dickonedwards.co.uk\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/modern-friends\/"},"modified":"2006-06-30T04:29:06","modified_gmt":"2006-06-30T03:29:06","slug":"modern-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/modern-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lea in Big Brother: <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These aren&#8217;t my friends. They&#8217;re just people I know.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A quote of the year, not least because of MySpace Nation.<\/p>\n<p>(I&#8217;ve just come up with that phrase on the spot, though I don&#8217;t doubt minds have been thinking alike across the world. I&#8217;d lay money that someone somewhere is writing a book called &#8216;Myspace Nation&#8217;. Purely because it&#8217;s so absolutely, searingly inevitable.)<\/p>\n<p>I get a kind of cathartic buzz watching Lea on Big Brother. She&#8217;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 &#8211; her plastic surgery &#8211; 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&#8217;d like to have surgically removed myself. She&#8217;s my emotional stunt double. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s an absolute minefield of anxiety. People should wear signs. &#8220;We should hug.&#8221; &#8220;A handshake is fine.&#8221; &#8220;Not on the mouth!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I can never work out what people want, and am terrified that I&#8217;ll do the wrong thing, and they&#8217;ll call the police. <\/p>\n<p>A cartoon seen recently, worthy of pre-war Punch, marked &#8216;Modern London Life&#8217;. <\/p>\n<p>Two drawings, each of two women hugging effusively, saying &#8220;How ARE you?&#8221;. The caption for one says &#8220;Best Friends&#8221;. The other says &#8220;Vague Aquaintances&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Both drawings are, of course, absolutely identical. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lea in Big Brother: &#8220;These aren&#8217;t my friends. They&#8217;re just people I know.&#8221; A quote of the year, not least because of MySpace Nation. (I&#8217;ve just come up with that phrase on the spot, though I don&#8217;t doubt minds have been thinking alike across the world. I&#8217;d lay money that someone somewhere is writing a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}