I really don’t like you. Honestly, I don’t. It’s not dislike, you understand. Please don’t be offended. It’s not antipathy. It’s just the absence of liking. I nothing you. I [BLANK] you. Let’s get that clear.
If it makes you feel any better, you can blame Facebook for this. And me, in fact. It’s not you, it’s me. There. How’s that? Completely me. And Facebook, actually. I’m not taking all the blame. Yes, I shouldn’t have accepted your friendship request with only the faintest idea of who you were. And I shouldn’t have indulged you by responding to your “hilarious” festive-themed Superpoke back in 2005. But Facebook should, if it had the slightest trace of a social conscience, have taken its cue from our deafening non-correspondence and terminated our digital friendship for us while we slept soundly in our beds. So I’m not entirely at fault.
I am, however, sorry to have to break this to you through a newspaper column. I’m sorry that you have meandered through the six years of our arid courtship merrily unaware of the bud of resentment sprouting inside me. I’m sorry that I allowed that one-off chance encounter to spawn from a polite head nod into the conversational monster that I am now frantically trying to slay. And I’m sorry that I haven’t got the cajunes to tell you to your face. But frankly this charade has gone on long enough.
You know who you are. As responsible adults we can both hold up our hands and concede the inevitability that we were never going to be more than casual acquaintances, and that, all things considered, we had a good innings. And so, for my mental health and your continued physical wellbeing, I am ending this façade of familiarity. This arranged relationship has reached its unnatural end. It has expired.
Effective immediately. We must no longer prolong the pretence that we have a common social bond, and that on each and every chance encounter we simply must stop and nod and smile and have that awkward sort of lean-in where neither of us are quite sure if we should be going for a manly handshake or not, and then proceed to retread verbatim the conversational path of our previous dozen encounters. Life is too short.
Thus, in the likely event that our gazes meet again, please remember the following inalienable facts about our acquaintanceship, and just cross the road. Because the inconvenient truth is:
1. You are very, very dull. You mean well, and I’m very sorry, because in all likelihood you’re probably something of a wit among your close friends, but the banality of the conversation you force upon me on our rare encounters leads me to the irreversible conclusion that you are a dullard. And not someone I wish to spend irreclaimable minutes of my life standing with.
2. You make me feel very, very dull. And I don’t think I am. I’m something of a wit among my close friends, but the banality of the conversation you force upon me on our rare encounters leads me to respond with the same trite clichés, making me sound and feel like a dullard. And not someone I wish to spend irreclaimable minutes of my life being.
3. You have an instantly forgettable name. I didn’t bother to register it when we first met, and ever since that dark day I’ve spent our conversations racking my brains for the unremarkable moniker you go by, and occasionally, out of boredom, fishing for clues by dropping the odd subtle question into conversation. They’re probably not that subtle. And you probably know I’ve forgotten.
4. You’ll stop me at the most inconceivably inconvenient time, like when I’m running for a bus, or walking to get a lovely pasty that I’ve been thinking about all morning. And you won’t take the hints. On a few occasions, you’ve even had the temerity to try and come with me to acquire the pasty. And I’ve had to abandon the idea entirely.
5. At this time of year you insist on asking me how my Easter break was. And I of course have to ask you in return. Neither of us care what the answer is. If you really cared I’d tell you. I’d whip out my funfax and drag you day-by-excruciating-day through the litany of legal textbooks and ingrained familial tensions that supplemented my celebrations of our Lord’s crucifixion. But I don’t think you’d like that. Because you don’t really care. And neither do I.
6. You ask me what I’m doing this weekend, and I have to come up with some pointless lie to avoid admitting how empty my life is, when all I want to do is grab you by the ears of your deerstalker hat and shout, “I’m doing anything that doesn’t involve you, fishface.”
7. You ask me about the welfare of certain mutual ‘friends’, who happen to be the only people I care less about in the world than you.
8. You invite me to some incredibly dull party or social event and force me to make up some implausible excuse we both know is untrue. Later, to extend the awkwardness, you’ll invite me via Facebook. And I’ll hit “May be attending” and spend a good forty seconds feeling an absolute rotter for telling you yet another senseless but socially-mandated falsehood.
9. You linger on the stale, incredibly unfunny anecdotes of the one occasion we previously shared the same airspace. Leave it in the past. If we haven’t shared a moment worth retelling since that time, this relationship’s probably not meant to be.
10. You refuse to end the conversation. You are actually more content to leave the agonising silence hanging in the air like a giant, dead pig than to seize the window of opportunity to end the conversation. So I have to initiate the goodbyes, making me feel bad for seemingly abandoning you every time our paths cross.
I would say it’s been nice knowing you, but that would be a lie. You probably don’t care. You probably don’t even know it’s you. But it’s important that it be on public record that you took a pleasant thing too far, and have left me with no choice. Farewell, acquaintance. Farewell.
Disabling Children
My younger brother Sam achieved all A*s and As at GCSE. He was awarded AAB at A Level, including an A in French. He is now studying to be an environmental engineer at one of the top universities in the country. Which I find quite incredible. Sam, you see, is profoundly deaf. He has been unable to hear since birth, and has worked a thousand times as hard as his peers and overcome the highest hurdles of institutional prejudice and officious bureaucracy to forge a fantastic future for himself. His achievements are, quite simply, stunning. Nevertheless, if you ask him if he wishes he’d been born hearing, the answer is, unsurprisingly, “yes”.
Now, in an absolutely spellbindingly twisted, amoral and shitty piece of politics, the government last week decreed that more children should suffer from Sam’s disability, if their parents see fit. Gordon Brown’s principled administration has caved into protests from a group of crazed deaf activists who wish to inflict their disability on their children, and has agreed to amend the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill so as to permit deaf parents to deliberately select deaf embryos during embryo screening.
The clause previously provided for a sensible blanket ban on parents deliberately selecting embryos with serious medical conditions. Now, in the aim of scoring a few extra votes, the Department of Health has accepted the perverse contention that deafness is a lifestyle choice, rather than a disability, and removed references to deafness from the Bill.
According to one caring parent seeking to handicap their future child, “Being deaf is not about being disabled. It’s about being part of a linguistic minority. We’re proud of the language we use and the community we live in.”
Cornish is a linguistic minority. Being deaf is entirely about being disabled. And to consciously inflict a disability on your child is the most selfish, abominable decision a parent could make. In legally condoning it, this government is facilitating one of the most reprehensible eugenics programmes in history.
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Convicted rapist and self-proclaimed baby-eater Mike Tyson has offered Troubled Soccer Star Paul Gascoigne TM counselling and support following the latter’s protracted mental breakdown.
Yes. I know.
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Sympathise with Dan? Email your thoughts, hopes, dreams and fears to letters@student-direct.co.uk
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