English eccentricity

If there’s a standard scale for sanity, and there probably is but who wants a search history that can be used against them in court as a result of their looking up ‘am I normal?’ on Google so I’m not going to attempt to find out, then, like metric and imperial, there will be one scale for the rich and another for the rest of them…I mean us.

Let’s call the scale of sanity for the ordinary man in the street, or indeed Jasper Carrott’s nutter on the bus, the Metric scale.  A reading of zero means that you can pass for ordinary, you don’t twitch or drool and you don’t feel the need to perform a cleansing ritual after meeting a gypsy.  At the top end of the scale, 100, are people who are so insane they occupy positions of power, or kill people, or indeed both.  It’s around the 60 to 70 range that things get interesting, that’s where your, let’s face it, more amusing mental health issues are pitched, like believing what you read in the Daily Mail.  Tracking back towards zero we pass through the superstitious range, which encompasses everything from paying actual money for a palm reading ‘you are very gullible’, to wearing your lucky shirt on match day.  Oh, and by the way, one day you will realise that because you always clean and iron your lucky pulling shirt, those actions make it your lucky pulling shirt.

For the rich, the Imperial scale covers three main ranges.  Firstly, there is fucked up, which is what happens to an eighteen year old when they come into a trust fund.  They spend the fund initially on drugs and booze, and thereafter on trying to quit drugs and booze, possible solutions including therapy, The Priory, or a cult.  Secondly, there is inbred.  If you can inherit the family chin, stands to reason you can also inherit the family kinks in the cognitive reasoning, including the firm belief that it is still acceptable to use the term ‘darkie’ if you lower your voice while doing so.

Then at the top of the scale we have eccentricity.

Madness plus money equals eccentricity.  If you wanted to marry a goat you would be, depending on the community you lived in, laughed out of town or stoned to death.  Regrettably, there are also some corners of geography inhabited by people that would probably apportion some of the blame to the goat.  These are the same sort of people who, in conversations about women’s rights, make the sort of comments that give you the distinct sensation that your arse is clenching into your hat.  If you have a title, an estate and, and this is the important bit, some say over who gets to be vicar in the parish you own, the one with a charming Norman church, a rather lovely rectory and no knife crime at all, then it’s pretty likely that the bans will shortly be posted for the forthcoming nuptials of the Earl of Kinkey and Miss Willamina Goat.

Let’s be clear, being eccentric is fabulous, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in, for instance, your scientific experiments largely involving melons, you’re beloved.

Ever had a day, a whole day, when you have not got out of your pyjamas?  You have moved from bed to sofa to fridge to sofa to bed in one glorious relaxed manner, and you’re not even ill?  Fabulous, isn’t it.  Now imagine not getting out of bed for a week because you can’t be arsed.  That’s eccentric.

Working class and in Tesco in your jim jams?  Out, you fucking scum!  Titled and in Fortnum and Mason in a dressing gown?  Of course you are, you don’t need a wallet, you’ve got an account at the place.

The English tolerate eccentricity because, by and large, it’s more entertaining than harmful.  An aristocrat with a thing for trains may indulge his obsession by building his own railway, miniature or, my preference, full sized, on his estate.

Eccentricity is not madness, it is more refined.  It is the state of mind that causes one to be entertaining and harmless, and leads to one being fondly admired.

A matter of scale

Do you want your name to still be known centuries hence?  In a good way?  That’s not used to frighten children?  Do you want to be an answer to a question asked in school?  A question that is not ‘who do we avoid if he’s hanging round the gates?’  Do you want to leave a lasting legacy of your time on the planet? 

If you do, then the solution is not, as you might think, to squeeze into a two-sizes-too-small sequinned costume made by your nan, polish up your sad story and humiliate yourself on a prime-time talent show, but to get yourself into the shed and start inventing a unit of measurement.

And here’s the really great part, it doesn’t even matter if there is already a unit of measurement for the thing you are trying to measure.  Distance and temperature for instance both have two different units of measurement, so surely there’s no bar to preventing you assigning a new unit of measurement for something that already has one.

For example, the heat of chillies is measured using the Scoville scale, which goes from ‘no significant heat’ (supermarket chilli con carne) to 2,000,000 (police pepper spray, any spicy food consumed on a first date).  So an alternative and possibly a more useful scale would be to go Beaufort and assign behaviours to the heat, all the way from ‘adding pepper to the dish to make it more exciting’, through ‘blowing out of cheeks’, ‘sweating’, ‘comically reaching for your neighbour’s beer and downing it in one’ to ‘shitting fire’.

A word of warning however.  Do not be tempted to go down the ‘more is better’ route and assign a third unit of measurement to something that already has two.  Nobody in the pub is going to be impressed that you ran twenty-eight Jamteks in half an Astard the other day, or helped by an instruction that for best results, cook at fifteen Quolons for eighty Parps.  Doing this will either leave people baffled, or thinking you are a twat rather than a guy so clever he looks like he’s smoking a pipe…even when he’s not.

So, basic rule of thumb*, try and avoid anything that sounds like it’s lifted from a crap science fiction novel.

For best results then, you need to quantify something that has yet to be attributed a scale.  By measuring the reaction of a cross section of the public to stimulus – let’s say, a BBC news broadcast - then monitoring the flush reaction to the ears, blood pressure, heart rate, frequency of composing furious letters to the editor and so on, it must be possible to clinically measure levels of indignation.

I propose that indignation be measured in units of Clarkson.  The maximum amount of indignation any one person is capable of is One Clarkson and the great thing about the Clarkson Scale is that it can not only measure specific points of indignity (Daily Mail reader learning that his tax money is spent subsidising opera – one eighth of a Clarkson) but is an effective measure of background indignation (Daily Mail reader alone with their crazy thoughts, one seventieth of a Clarkson).

Naturally, The Clarkson is an imperial measurement.  The metric equivalent is The Farage.  

There is a demand for this.  Society is increasingly demanding that, increasingly, things are increasingly quantified in an increasingly simple way for presentation in the media and, increasingly, on social networking sites.  How increasingly I have no idea, but somebody is, I hope, toiling in their shed right now to quantify that.

*You can, if you so wish, seek to quantify the rule of thumb or anything else that has so far gone unquantified.  For instance, while I would not be at all surprised if the perfume industry has a measurement of pungency of aroma (parts per million or something), this may work well for traditional scents like citrus or whatever but has yet, as far as I am aware, to be applied to celebrity scents.  What exactly is the amount of Beyonce in each bottle of ‘bouncy’ or whatever her celeb fragrance is called?  Lasting fame awaits the person who can nail that one.