Apathy Sketchpad

The post of village idiot is traditionally not a well disputed one. Traditionally, there is one villager so far ahead of the field that he frequently doesn’t realise he’s the village idiot. This, I have decided, is largely because villages are so pathetically small. We live in Leeds, and in a city this size there are more than enough idiots to go around, and one of the joys of moving house is meeting all the new idiots who pollute the new area. We were mercifully free of idiots at the last house, though we naturally had our fair share of skutters.

sku·tte`r pr. skú-tah, n. Young moron, who has convinced themselves that they are black drug lords who live in the ghetto, when in fact they are demonstrably children, usually white, who live with reasonably well-off suburban families. They like to amuse themselves with vandalism and the absurd notion that fewer than three of them would be required to overpower even the lankiest adult. The term traces its origins to Lizzy.

Around here there seem to be fewer skutters, but a good deal more idiots, particularly drunk ones. Of course, everywhere has some drunk idiots. They mostly do no harm except to annoy their friends (believe me, I know – they always tell me the next morning) but some of them believe in being sociable. I was in the Oak on Monday, with Jen, Helen and Emma, when we were approached by a man so drunk that he will henceforth be referred to simply as Crazy Old Man. He said things to us, most of which we couldn’t understand, we laughed politely until he left. After Michael and Irvine arrived, he came back, with something square in a bag. He took it out, and Jennifer, who had not yet worked out when to quit, asked him what it was. “It’s a bomb,” he said. It turned out to be his and hers matching watches, which Crazy Old Man said he’d bought at Dewsbury market for $200, which is strange because Dewsbury is a short bus ride away, and to our knowledge does not have an independent currency. Eventually he left to pester some other locals. We went outside to the beer garden (or beer car park as it is more accurately known). Crazy Old Man found us after a while, when more of our friends had turned up. Aiden, he decided, was Boris Becker. In his world, I was locked up. Note that he didn’t say I should be locked up; he was quite happy to sit in the unsecured car park claiming I was in prison. Then he decided to try and set me up with Jennifer, as she sat next to me texting her boyfriend. She told him she was my sister, and that seemed to satisfy him. Perhaps I should also mention that all this time he was hitting rather hard on Helen and Rohini and while Helen had the sense to be disgusted, Rohini seemed disturbingly up for it. This may be because Crazy Old Man had told her he was a millionaire, and he did look like he had a fair bit of money. But at least Crazy Old Man talked to people who actually exist, which puts him several steps ahead of the idiots here.

We have two who hang around the house. The first, being the tramp who takes our garbage, got a mention last month, so I won’t credit him with much space here. The other is a man who several times has been seen in front of our house, wearing a short beard, a big, thick, ill fitting coat which manages to look both waterproof and absolutely soaking at once, and a hat of the style popularised by Kyle Broflovski. The whole outfit is in a particularly horrid shade of green, and he has a collection of friends who he like to talk to, who also hang around our house. Unfortunately, I am unable to tell you how they dress, because they are entirely imaginary.

However, it doesn’t end there. While those are the only regular idiots, we live opposite a busy bus stop, so we only have to sit and wait for the idiots to come to us. As we got onto the bus a couple of weeks ago we were joined by a man talking to nobody at all (apparently including imaginary people). Very little of what he said was language, and less still lucid. Among the random mumblings we caught the name of a sea and a football score. It takes a fair dose of contrivance to connect the two.

But those are passive idiots. Forty days and forty nights of peace did seem a bit of a blessing, and true to form, last night we had our first attempted break-in. Now, it wasn’t hard for them to get in, because the window was open, but his explanation, when Adam turned on the light and said “can I help you?” that he “was trying to close [our] window and do [us] a favour. Someone could break in, you know,” was not particularly satisfactory in itself, and coupled with his earlier comment of “shit, we’ll have to come back later,” and the fact his shoulders were inside our house it lacked even a modicum believability.

Now, the pedantic of you will no doubt have shouted by now “well don’t leave the fucking window open then,” but there is a good reason why it was open, which will be explained shortly. Meanwhile Lee, on two occasions this week, has complained that the other members of the house set the shower too cold. Even if he is completely incapable of simply turning it up before using it, it is a thoroughly unreasonable complaint for two important reasons:

1. Lee likes the shower hotter than anyone I have ever met.
2. We are currently in the middle of a record breaking heatwave (hence the open window earlier).

The trouble is, though, that Lee, like a lot of people, actually likes the heat. I will term these people thermophiles, because it means “heat lovers”, and also because a thermophile is a tiny creature that lives by sulphurous sea vents and is thought to be one of the earliest and most primitive forms of life, and I like to associate people with brainless sea slime when I mock them. Thermophiles have strange opinions, such as “hotter is better”. They are the sort of people who will pay money to go to a foreign country with a better (read “oppressively hot”) climate, and then lay around all day because it’s too hot to do anything. And they’ll come back with a reel of photos of them sat in their room, the view from their room, them sat by the pool, and if they’re feeling adventurous, the view from the pool. And they’ll have had the time of their lives. Lee for example said it wasn’t too hot the other day. I held out that it was to hot. It later turned out that “the other day” had been, on average, the hottest day in Britain since records began. If that isn’t too hot for you, then just perhaps Britain is not where you should be living. He countered my argument by telling me you can never have too much sun. This might explain why Lee is currently at university revising to retake his astrophysics exam. The sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace more than a million times the size of Earth, at a temperature hot enough to evaporate metals. It emits deadly rays in all directions from every point on its surface. It is plainly entirely possible to have far too much of this, in much the same way that oxygen is nice to breath and metabolise food with, but would happily kill you were there much more of it around. I am a firm believer that the sort of temperatures we have had lately do nothing but make you sweat, ruin your complexion, stop you wanting to move anywhere, and kill the odd old person. That’s not nice weather; that’s the ‘flu. You thermophiles like to have the ‘flu. You must be mad.