I have terribly pretentious pretentions at times. Deeply ingrained codes of behaviour and viewpoints that I hold dear. They’re what help me get through the day and night and go towards helping me avoid becoming a totally obnoxious arse. Which, ironically, they probably add to me being. Or, in a better written sentence: Ironically, they make me more so. I have no better sentence than that right now.
I like them though. They allow me to sneer at things and point and huff and think, “Yeah, sure I do those things. But I’ve got ironic detachment on my side. I got me copies of…. errr Deleuze and stuff on my shelves. (I have no idea which philosopher deals best with irony, but I can bet my arse it isn’t one the continental ones. The French probably don’t do irony.) It helps to add a bit of swearing in as well, sounds more like you’re not the wishy washy liberal holistic cosmic child you fear you might really be (I also have a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead on my bookshelf, for fucks sake (see what I mean about swearing?))
The point being that, although my first gut reaction to anything is the above, every now and then I’m shocked out of it by someone. There I was today, sitting in a small cafe in Coventry called The Tin Angel. Lovely little place full of arty paintings and posters of small indie bands. Indie bands in the proper sense of the name, not an A&R man’s idea of Indie as a 90s genre to be mass-marketed as ‘real’ music for the kids, but proper bands working the small gig circuit and earning their chops, maaann! So, keep in mind that I was sitting in there ‘working’ on my laptop like some Wired magazine baby-boomer sell out wet dream honky. I couldn’t have been any more of a stereotype myself if I’d been writing a novel about cyberpunks who run the world from their pizza encrusted bedrooms in their mum’s basements. In fact I wasn’t working on my cyberpunk novel cuz, you know, that got rejected and stuff by Faber and Faber and Martin Amis probably wrote it already but it wasn’t classified as Sci-Fi, right? No idea now what I was doing, but it involved a latte (without soya milk, the cheapskates)
Hopefully you’ve an idea of the kind of place I was in? I really like places like this and Coventry doesn’t have enough of them. And just as I’m about to do whatever it is people do on the Internet these days (probably download an app to help them download more apps) this girl sitting several tables away started to sing to the tune on the soundsystem. Ah Christ, I thought, obnoxious and pretentious late-teen brat thinking she’s all like, “I was discovered in a cafe singing away just to myself and didn’t even realise that people were listening.” There’s always one of these knocking about. They follow me wherever I go, you know? And seldom can they actually sing.
So imagine how I felt when I tuned in properly and she had an absolutely lovely voice? I was literally shocked and stunned at how well she could sing. And she really wasn’t trying to attract attention: you could see she was just making a point about something to her friend and had that youthful exuberance and joy at just being in the moment and alive, right now, in the 21st century and everything was going to be great, and she was in a cool cafe and enjoying life.
And that in itself was enough of a reason for me to continue hating her. The angel-voiced bastard!
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