The sound of the 21st Century

I used to be very uncomfortable with the idea that I might harbour prejudices. Then, as I grew older, I became more comfortable as I realised that most of my prejudices are not just knee-jerk irrational dislikes, but actually informed and reasoned feelings that save me a lot of time; if somebody is from a particular social group I’ve developed an opinion of, chances are I won’t like them and frankly, I don’t have the time to find out if I’m right or wrong. These days, I’m so comfortable with my prejudices that I become irritated that they are not shared. Somewhere along the line my prejudices have turned into views. This is dangerous, a prejudice is something you keep to yourself. A view is something you find yourself expressing, often at an inappropriate moment, usually just as everyone else at the party stops talking, occasionally just before everyone stops talking and, although they resume talking to one another, nobody resumes conversation with you.

My prejudices are fairly straightforward and, although I freely admit they are to a greater or lesser extent ugly and poisonous, they form a useful social shorthand. There are over six billion people on this planet and simply not enough time to meet each and every one and form an opinion of their character. That’s why it’s so very convenient that so many of them are foreign, as this immediately excludes them from being the sort of person I’d like to spend time with, unless it’s to order food or drink from, or liberate natural energy resources from.

Some prejudices are still very much in development. Take my dislike of vegetarians for instance. For years I disliked vegetarians because on the whole they are so affected that they are further up their own arse than sage and onion suffing goes up a goose at Christmas. There are two sorts of vegetarians, the sort who don’t eat meat but do eat fish, and cheese, and veal and bacon and pork. Okay, not the last three but for fuck’s sake, if you eat an animal, you’re not a vegetarian. Then there’s the other sort, who don’t even wear leather shoes. Are these people insane? Sweaty feet in plastic shoes and not having immediate access to steak and kidney pie is no way to live life in the 21st century.

But now I’m starting to wonder if it’s more affliction than affectation. I mean it can’t be easy being a vegetarian, certainly not when I back you into a corner and start having a go at you for being immoral on two counts, firstly because the only way to ensure animal welfare in the food business is to buy more free range organic stuff and secondly because anyone who has any kind of special diet bollocks that if not medical, for instance if you won’t eat lamb because your guru once got his dick caught in a sheep or something, is immoral in a world where people are starving. Don’t eat meat? Great, sit in the fucking corner while we FedEx your roast dinner to some poor starving sod in the Congo.

Having developed a rich and diverse suite of prejudices and a side helping of petty resentments at things that irritate me, I’d have thought that I had my full quota of things that make me seeth to a degree quite out of proportion to their actual irritation value; but I’ve acquired a new one. It’s the sound of the 21st Century, the beep. Not the ringtone, which, Christ alive, is irritating enough and let me tell you that as somebody who uses public transport the only bloody use for a fucking novelty ringtone is to allow you to locate the offending phone and then batter it to atoms with a hammer, before doing the same to its owner. The beep is everywhere, it’s the missed call, the text message and then it beeps every few minutes as a reminder. My prejudice? Thinking that the lazy sods who just let it bleep on rather than reach into their bag and get the phone are always either fat, or soon will be.