How to Be Normal E-Book

Guy Browning

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Normal people are extremely unusual. Think of all the people you know and ask yourself how many are normal. None of them! In fact you're probably the most normal of the lot and, let's face it, even you're not that normal. All normal people believe they are a little bit different, a little bit unique and a little bit special. On the other hand no one wants to be abnormal, so it's a fine line to tread. Happily, this brilliantly funny book shows everyone exactly how to be uniquely normally normal. Is it normal to: ... hold the banister with both hands? ... find the green man at crossings mildly attractive? ... drive a shopping trolley on the right? ... be afraid of aggressive hand dryers? ... wonder what coconut milk is actually for? Find out the answers to these and a million other perfectly normal questions in another beautifully funny, surprisingly wise and consistently heart-warming book from the best-selling Guy Browning.

Leseprobe

HOWTO BE NORMAL

A Guide for the Perplexed

Published in Great Britain in 2014 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Guy Browning, 2014

The moral right of Guy Browning to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 582 9E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 583 6

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26-27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

This book is dedicated with love to Ceci, Theo and Will.

My warmest thanks go to the professionals behind this book: Margaret Stead, Toby Mundy, Lauren Finger, Bunmi Oke, Richard Evans, James Roxburgh, Ben Dupré, Juliet Mushens, Sarah Manning and the incomparable Janet Brown.

Contents

Rubbing Along

Nice Moves

Loving Feelings

Out and About

Home Help

Argy-Bargy

Natter and Chatter

Doing and Undoing

Functional Bodies

Heart and Soul

RUBBING ALONG

How to be Normal

Normal people are extremely unusual. Think of all the people you know and ask yourself how many are normal. None of them. In fact you’re probably the most normal of the lot. Of course, normality is clearly a relative thing. If you have relatives, they’re unlikely to be normal.

Normal people wear things that aren’t trendy but neither are they uncool. Only when flared trousers hit the high street will normal people be wearing them. Abnormal people will have worn them willy-nilly for the last twenty years.

Normal people don’t have their own taste in anything. They like whatever is good at the moment. Not really good but averagely good. The fashion industry is dedicated to changing what is normal. That’s why models and what they wear never look normal.

Normal people don’t ask you what you do for a living because this only encourages you to ask what they do and what they do is very normal. It’s something so normal that conversations usually falter after they tell you. Normal people do normal things in bed with other normal people. Occasionally they try something a little bit different or they do it with somebody a little bit different. Again, all perfectly normal.

Normal people are distinguished by the fact that they all believe they are a little bit different, a little bit unique and a little bit special. This feeling is shared by all normal people. The only people who don’t share this are wide-eyed staring eccentrics who think that they are perfectly normal.

Being normal is actually a very good disguise for being a barking eccentric. Under many a V-neck sweater there beats a heart of utter bizarreness. When multiple axe-murderers are discovered, the comments of the neighbours always tend to be along the lines of ‘he seemed perfectly normal’.

Most normal people have something about themselves that they consider to be abnormal, like big ears, or no hair, or a funny voice, or pigeon toes. These people would rather that they had normal ears, hair, voice, toes, etc. But there’s only one place on earth where people are perfectly normal and that’s Hollywood. In our own minds we all have star potential if only Hollywood wasn’t obsessed with hyper-normality.

It’s actually very galling to know that everything you do in life is perfectly normal. Trying to do something interesting and different is a real challenge, but millions and millions of people are struggling to do it. There is in fact one thing that makes us all completely different, distinct and excitingly unique individuals, but you’ll have to find that out for yourselves.

How to be Nice

In the fifties people used to aspire to nice things. With inflation, niceness is worth almost nothing and people now want incredible, sensational or awesome things. Enjoyment has been super-sized. There are few remaining things that people want to be nice – everyone wants a nice cup of tea but virtually no one wants nice sex.

Being nice hovers between being a virtue and a vice. Nice can be quite good but saying something is very nice is just a millimetre this side of bad. Not very nice at all is not at all nice. Saying ‘Have a nice day’ has never really caught on in this country. It’s impossible to say it without giving the impression that what you really want that person to have is an absolute stinker of a day.

It’s very difficult to put your finger on exactly what ‘nice’ means and that’s why a biscuit has been specially designed to help. The Nice biscuit has a layer of sugar on the top to make it seem sweet, but essentially it’s very dull. The same can be said of nice people.

Nice biscuits aren’t sexy, which is why churches often serve them with coffee. Nice people aren’t sexy either. In fact there’s an established grade of men in women’s eyes. ‘Sweet’ means I like him but don’t fancy him. ‘Nice’ means I don’t fancy him or particularly like him. ‘I really hate him’ means I am in love with him.

In fact being nice is a lot like being a born-again Christian except without the Christianity or rebirth. What you’re left with is an aggressive pleasantness and a willingness to make coffee at the drop of a hat (with Nice biscuits).

In general there are three vital elements of being nice. The first one is to give lifts to people even though they are going in the opposite direction. The second is to offer people tea and coffee immediately on meeting them. The third is to listen to people and nod. Really nice people can do all three things at once, which is why they always have a thermos in their car and are incredibly dangerous on the roads.

Nasty people often take advantage of nice people. However, it’s the nasty people who end up getting hurt because they are then identified as people in need of niceness and will be harassed by kind people doing nice things for them twenty-four hours a day.

Interestingly, when two nice people get into a relationship, the niceness can suddenly go bad. It’s almost impossible for two people to make tea for each other at once, with the result that you get crowding, confusion and resentment building up around the kettle area.

How to Understand

Understanding is something very few people really understand. Most people do overstanding, which is thinking you know about something without taking the trouble to find out about it. Beware of people who tell you they understand: it generally means they are tired of listening.

Living through something is the best way to understand it, but we can’t live through everything so we have to listen to people who have. Amazingly, humans generally choose to learn the hard way rather than listen the easy way.

There’s a Latin saying, Ars longa, vita brevis, which roughly translates as ‘Life is short but understanding how to live takes a long time.’ There’s another similar phrase, Dies longus, vitabix, which means ‘The day is long, have a good breakfast.’ Both are worth remembering.

Understanding comes in four phases: ignorance, knowledge, experience, understanding. Both first and fourth phases are blissful, while the two intermediate ones are painful. Some people make the mistake of amassing knowledge and experience in spades without ever getting understanding. This has all the disadvantages of ignorance with none of the bliss.

Traditional cultures respect the elderly because of their greater understanding. Modern culture venerates youth and inexperience. Raising the retirement age is therefore a great way of reducing the average ignorance in the workplace.

Understanding is always provisional because it takes time and, more often than not, by the time you’ve understood something it’s probably changed. Philosophers think you can understand things just by thinking about them. This works until you get hungry: no amount of thinking will help you understand a beef and ale pie.

Understanding yourself is hard work and many people prefer to get someone else to do it for them. If you go into therapy, remember that it’s only successful when you come out. Therapy takes place on a couch, but it would be much quicker and cheaper if you had to hang from a bar and the session was over when you let go.

Understanding is not always a good thing; poetry, opera and sausage-making are all better for not being entirely understood. Similarly we wouldn’t fall in love quite so fast if we understood the other person completely before we started. In general people don’t like to be understood: it makes them feel like they’ve been completely consumed and only crumbs of interest are left.

How to be Moderate

Moderation in all things is good but you can overdo it. Often it is the most moderate politicians who are given to sexual and alcoholic excess in their private lives. Similarly, political extremists tend to be very moderate at home.

It’s almost impossible to build a social or religious movement on moderation principally because moderation doesn’t move forward, it budges up to accommodate. You’ll notice that municipal statues are generally of people standing up pointing somewhere. You don’t get statues of moderates sitting in their armchairs, listening intently and weighing up the pros and cons.

Moderation sounds rather genteel but is the hardest road to tread. Extremism has all the easy answers. For example it’s very difficult to hold the position that global warming is happening only slightly and isn’t apocalyptic. Light green is not a colour recognized by environmentalists. Similarly, the Church of England will be torn apart by its militant extremists unless its moderates decide to burn them all at the stake to calm them down.

The British are suspicious of extremists and are instinctively moderate. The fact that the custard cream is the nation’s favourite biscuit tends to bear this out: it’s a bland filling held between two tasteless biscuits. Indeed, that almost perfectly describes our political set-up as well.

Moderators are people who chair Presbyterian meetings or groups on the internet. Group moderators on the net are faceless people of probity, intelligence and great judgement. It’s a shame they can’t wear some sort of medal in public so we might know who these digital Solomons are. But then modesty is the handmaiden of moderation.

Moderation can be very dangerous, especially when you’re trying to do something difficult and extreme. For example, bungee jumping off the kitchen table is likely to be far more dangerous than doing it off the Humber Bridge.

It’s not a good idea to fall moderately in love and is in fact mildly insulting to the object of your lukewarm affection. A moderate lover would sign their Valentine cards ‘Yours sincerely’ and send bunches of watercress instead of red roses. They wouldn’t fall in love either, they would step gingerly into love. Love is an extreme, which is why it’s strangely unnerving watching Liberal Democrats mate.

How to Smile

Humans are the only species that smiles. Other animals may smile but it’s probably behind our backs. A smile is the sunroof of the head (although in a slightly different position). It lets the sunshine in your soul pour through for a moment until you revert to normal overcast conditions.

Smiles come with teeth or without. A smile without teeth is a grin and this is often preferred by people with bad teeth. One of the reasons Americans can seem overly jolly is because they all have good teeth and don’t mind displaying them. British teeth have been rotten for centuries and, as a smile was often like lifting a drain cover, we developed a stiff upper lip instead.

The ability to smile under pressure is hugely valuable: it’s impossible to be intimidated, patronized, insulted or religiously converted when you’re smiling. People like smiles but they’re also suspicious of them. Unless the cause of your merriment is obvious, people will assume you’re smiling at some deficiency on their part.

Smiles are incredibly fragile things. They’re little bubbles of happiness and confidence that have managed to surface through the layers of angst, oppression and general misery. Incredibly, there are people who like nothing better than wiping the smile from people’s faces. These people are the confiscators of life’s footballs.

The ability of two people to smile continuously into each other’s eyes is reserved for lovers and for mothers and their babies. Given this fact, a smile could easily be classified as a reproductive organ. Indeed, some cultures require that an erect smile be covered with the hand or a veil.

Real smiles involve the eyes. Customer-service people can arrange their teeth into a smile but have trouble getting their eyes to co-ordinate. Raised eyebrows are a sure sign of a genuine smile as it’s incredibly difficult to do anything mean-spirited when they’re in this position.

Clever people rarely smile. They know that village idiots smile at the slightest thing and they don’t want to be mistaken for people concerned with slight things. Ironically, a smile can achieve things any amount of cleverness can’t.

Smiles are like coal; using either contributes to global warming. Smiles are sometimes equally difficult to dig up. When you’re feeling glum, you can jump-start happiness by smiling artificially. This reminds you how to do it and also feels so foolish you might smile despite yourself.

How to be Spontaneous

It’s generally accepted that life is not a rehearsal. This may explain why a lot of people seem to be making a total hash of it – because they haven’t rehearsed and they’re just making things up as they go along. Spontaneous reaction to life can be viewed positively or negatively. One man’s glorious devil-may-care spontaneity is another woman’s panicking headless chicken.

Being spontaneous when you’re talking is a matter of always saying the first thing that comes into your head. It’s a technique that’s been perfected in Yorkshire. There it’s called straight talking and is often followed by a straight smack in the mouth.

British culture is based firmly on the suppression of spontaneity. What we do exceedingly well is ceremonial, which is at the other end of the spectrum. You’ll wait a long time before you see a spontaneous Trooping the Colour. There are certain areas where spontaneity is particularly dangerous. Returning a work email with your first furious reaction is one of them and is the office equivalent of Tourette’s syndrome.

Genuine acts of spontaneity need a great deal of planning. For example, if you want to grab a bunch of flowers and run after a woman in the street, you’ll need to have the exact money on you, otherwise you’ll have to spend vital seconds entering your PIN number or you’ll have to steal the flowers and then have a police officer run romantically after you.

Getting through life safely has a lot in common with crossing the road safely in that before you do anything rash, it’s wise to stop, look and listen. You can choose to skip blithely across the dual carriageway of life but don’t be surprised when you’re hit by the oncoming juggernaut of consequences.

Very occasionally in life you feel like giving a spontaneous whoop of joy. Feel free to whoop but be aware that this is the exact moment when a pillar of the community will emerge from behind a tree. Then, for as long as you live, they will have you marked down as a spontaneous whooper and therefore deeply suspect. If you want to do something expansive, exuberant and spontaneous, wait until you’re safely hidden away in the shed, under your duvet or, preferably, both at the same time.

Jazz is spontaneity in musical form. To be good at jazz you have to be a very proficient musician. Similarly, if you want to have a spontaneous, jazz kind of life, you need to be exceptionally well organized underneath. Remember, there’s a fine line in life between going with the flow and being flushed down the pan.

How to be Simple

Saying that someone is simple is a little bit insulting, whereas it should be the highest compliment. It’s very simple to make things difficult and very difficult to make things simple. Things generally start simple, get difficult and then become simple again. The middle bit is where you learn the value of simplicity and try to regain it.

Human beings are complex and we’re drawn to complexity as if to prove just how complex we are. Some people simply wouldn’t feel alive unless they were living a horrifically tangled existence. Wealthy people will occasionally hire a life coach to simplify their lives and then end up sleeping with them just to keep things difficult.

Getting simplicity into your life is the same process as good product design: firstly, reduce the number of moving parts; secondly, make the outside user-friendly; and lastly, do one thing really well.

All the great inventions make things more simple, not more complex. There are fortunes to be made in simpler ways to generate power, find love or change a duvet cover. On the other hand, some things don’t work when they’re too simple: for example, flamenco, whisky and foreign policy.

Cooking often benefits from simplicity. Top chefs sometimes realize this but then make the mistake of thinking simplicity somehow equates to small portions. It’s a simple mistake but an annoying one.

Life is easier when you keep it simple. That’s why cults that offer a simpler way of life are so powerful. They promise to put all your complications into one basket and in return let you have one simple and overwhelming debt to them.

Remember that truly simple things don’t have small print, they don’t have add-ons, they don’t have Part Twos, they don’t have extended warranties and they don’t need anyone to explain them. Technology is rarely simple: when a salesperson claims it is and then takes half an hour to demonstrate, you’ll know it isn’t. Simple things sell themselves.

Getting one part of your life simple often results in increasing complexity in other parts. Monks who seem to be living simple lives often spend a lot of time producing rich polyphonic music and beautifully complex wines. Never confuse minimalism with simplicity. Minimalism is very clever people pretending to be simple. In reality there’s nothing simple about not being able to find somewhere to hang a tea towel.

How to Co-operate

Opinion is divided on whether humans are naturally co-operative or not. The fact that no one seems to be able to agree on this question is a pretty good answer in itself. Because co-operation doesn’t come naturally, it requires incredibly complex rules: these take the form of constitutions for societies, marriage vows for relationships and terms and conditions for skip hire.

People are drawn together because some tasks are too big for one person. They say that too many cooks spoil the broth, but they also say that many hands make light work. The trick is to have one person working on the soup and the rest on the electrics.

The best kind of co-operation is when you work with people who are good at what you’re bad at and bad at what you’re good at. This rarely happens because most jobs require one person being very good at something and the other person holding the ladder.

Mutual self-interest is the real driver of co-operation. Things happen fastest when everyone involved benefits. The model for this is John Lewis, not Cuba, and the big difference is whether people agree to co-operate or are told to co-operate.

The first step towards mutual co-operation is to listen. For this you have to make the huge act of faith that the other person is not a colossal fathead. Don’t forget that the other person is making an equally large allowance for you. Agreeing to disagree is where you understand what the other person thinks but you believe that their ridiculous opinion is based on their fatally flawed character, their weak intellect and their deep-seated selfishness.

An essential part of co-operation therefore is a little give and take. This doesn’t mean they give and you take. Rather, it means everyone making a few compromises. A bad compromise is where everyone feels hard done by and a good compromise is where everyone thinks they got away quite lightly.

Some people don’t like working with other people because they want to do things their own way. Others see co-operation as a blissful escape from being forced to work on their own. Most small businesses are based on one person doing things his way and the rest of the staff also doing things his way. Your wage packet shows how much you’re being paid to co-operate.

How to be Modest

It’s very difficult to claim that you’re brilliant at being modest. People who are genuinely modest constantly struggle with the fact that they are good at being modest. And if someone accuses them of being humble, they’ll protest long and loud that they are in fact monstrously arrogant.

The difference between people with store cards and people who are modest is that the latter refuse to take credit for anything. Having single-handedly done something awesome, they will instinctively say it was basically a team effort. When you point out that there wasn’t actually a team involved, the modest person then insists anybody could have done what they did. If this fails to staunch the flow of praise, the modest person will insist that they just had a lot of luck or they were just in the right place at the right time.

All this is why trying to praise a seriously modest person can get quite irritating. The praiser on their part is showing considerable humility in being pleased for the modest person instead of being bitter at their success. The least the modest person can do is accept a bit of praise. Too much modesty comes across as quietly smug self-righteousness.

These days there aren’t many high-street clothes shops specializing in modest clothing. If you want to dress modestly, then you have to wear work clothing. A woman in a bakery wearing a white coat and hair-net is the closest we get to modesty in appearance. The proof of this is that lingerie shops don’t sell bakery worker outfits.

Victorians took modesty a little too far by covering up disgustingly provocative things like piano legs. Now that piano legs are uncovered no one seems to be too excited by them. In fact the more you cover up something, the more exciting it gets. Naturist beaches are probably the least exciting places on earth.

Any culture that worships celebrity is unlikely to value modesty. Modesty will probably go the same way as seemly behaviour, which you can now only find in the Isle of Wight. Marketing people have a problem with the word ‘modesty’. Instead, they use words such as authentic, minimalist, artisan or fun-sized. What modesty really needs is a pressure group to promote greater modesty in public life. There probably is one somewhere but they don’t want to draw attention to themselves.

How to Cheer People Up

The Grand Old Duke of York was unusual in that he was neither up nor down. Most people often get down and then need a bit of help to cheer up. Doing nice things for people is a way of cheering people up, but be careful: when someone is struggling to hold themselves together, an act of gratuitous niceness can instantly reduce them to tears.