Don't Stand So Close To Me

There is this thing about Mitchell and Webb in this week's "Sunday Times". It deals, among other things, with what constitutes an "annoyed" type of person. There are any number of annoyed people, many of whom you are likely to be confronted with in a local bar. More than anything else, the bar is the sanctity-from-home lounge of the annoyed and also of what one might call the betrayed by caveat or conditional type, and of the nauseatingly boastful who doesn't even try not to be sort.

But to explain the Mitchell and Webb angle. A sure sign of an annoyed type is one who starts off: "If there's one thing I can't stand ...". The natural corollary to this is that this type can't stand most things. I know a number of annoyed people in this case. One in particular can't stand Americans, women, Jonathan Ross and of course the Welsh, yet when proclaiming his lack of standing there will always be a "one" inserted. It's a truism. Try it yourself next time you're in a bar, and the chances are that you will strike lucky and find a mutually annoyed fellow drinker who will be unable to stand more things than you can't stand.

There are any number of these conditionals and caveats that should alert all of us who might be tempted to hang around in bars to be extremely wary. Unlikely though it is that Tony Blair would sidle up to you in a bar on Alcúdia's Mile, were he or anyone else to do so and to declare himself a "regular kind of a guy", then be prepared for an avalanche of lies and a dissertation nicked from the internet that would follow. But the caveat is no more apparent than with the "I'm not a (insert as appropriate) but ...". This is the domain of what we should call the "caveat emptier", the one who empties a bar as quickly as you can say "I'm not a racist but". And the list of other possible inserts after the "I'm not a" is long and varied. Holocaust-denier, mass-murderer, member of the local English-speaking association are but three common ones that should make you extremely worried and drink up rapidly and seek safe haven in an alternative bar where you can announce that if there's one thing you can't stand it's having David Irving necking a pint next to you.

Then one comes to the boastful sort. "I used to be" or indeed "I am". As in "I used to be the head of MI5" or "I am Simon Cowell's best mate". The worst thing about this type is that there is no caveat. He is genuinely so far up his rear end that his pint glass has accompanied him. There is a variant on this theme, and one you would be very wise to accept is bollocks, and that is, in a Mallorca context, "no-one cares about what other people have or don't have". It is such transparent bollocks that it is both remarkable that anyone can even come out with it and that the one uttering it does not have two glass egg shapes concealed under his Björn Borg bathers. Be prepared to find it hard to hear over the jangling and to be blinded by the bling around this one's neck and on his wrists. And then make your apologies and effect an escape, just as he produces a laptop in order to show you photos of the Porsche he was running during his time in the City, fleecing millions thanks to dodgy hedge fund activities.

There are other examples. I'll leave you with a simple one. "Trust me." On no accounts, therefore, trust him, as he will be totally untrustworthy, especially if he's trying to sell you his bar.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Jim Morrison, can't petition the Lord. Today's title - if any of you can't get this, then a week of bad bar types is your booby prize.

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