His Music is Better than it Sounds

2.    I’m just diggin’ you now

So then, Mr. Charisma Man, good luck to you, I say. Go forth and dip ye wick whilst ye may, because who wouldn’t? As long as all concerned are consenting adults, what business of mine is it how other people chose to employ their genitals for their own amusement (cf. Gay Marriage. Why the fuck do you care)?

As a self-diagnosed introvert, my social life has tended to progress through saltation – long periods of comfortable inactivity punctuated by the occasional epiphany and subsequent nervous, jerking leap forwards. The first really memorable one of these was when I was nineteen, in a pool bar in Adelaide. Getting slightly (very) drunk with my German housemate, we concluded that the single character trait people respond to most favourably is confidence. More than looks, humour, empathy, anything else.

So far so obvious you might say. Fine, I was young and stupid and hadn’t got that far yet, but the second part of that conversation was about how it was possible to fake it and, crucially, that most people can’t tell the difference between fake confidence and the real thing. It’s a virtuous circle, act confident and people will respond well to you, which increases your confidence for real and it keeps spiraling upwards. Striking while the iron was hot I asked the phenomenally attractive girl behind the bar what she was doing after her shift.

Obviously you can all figure out how this story ends. She shot me down in flames, but somehow I survived the fall and went on to have a pretty good evening. I think. It gets a little hazy after a while. Anyway, that’s not the point. It’s the acceptance of failure as the occasional price of success that’s important. Confident people aren’t confident because they think they’ll always succeed, but because they know that they will be able to recover from any failure.

This is all getting a little Secrets To My Success self-helpy, but bear with me. There’s another knob gag coming up in a bit, I promise.

Not yet.

There are a number of my physical features that are somewhat less than conventionally attractive. I know that revelation may shock you but it’s true. I’m only too aware of this because teenagers being the warmhearted, supportive, tolerant beings that they are these deficiencies were constantly pointed out to me at school. I now take inordinate amounts of pleasure in Facebook stalking these people and laughing at their personal losses, their divorces, the passing of their loved ones and the sad, lonely voids their lives have inevitably become as they cling uselessly to pitiful existences enervated only by a yearnful and implacable crawl towards the cold release of death (knob gag coming up, remember).

There were periods at school when I genuinely despaired of ever getting a girlfriend, what with the demonstrably apparent hideousness of my appearance. I’ve since learned that this is not an uncommon phase to go through, the lucky ones just get it out of the way in short order. Self-obsession is never attractive, except when people mistake it for confidence (see above). More to the point, it blinds you to what’s really going on around you. If I’d been paying attention I’d have noticed that it wasn’t necessarily the good looking guys at school who got the girls, but the ones with the best way with words.

Improbably, one of my closest mates at school fit that description. Whereas I retreated into chippy teenage sarcasm, he really could turn on the charm. A ‘sexy bastard’ in the parlance, I believe. It also helped that he was half Iranian, which leant him a veneer of foreign glamour. You have to understand that I grew up in rural England, and in my entire school of 1,400-odd kids there were maybe a dozen who weren’t wholly white. Just being called ‘Fleur’, was enough to seem impossibly exotic.

On reflection, racism was relatively rare. I think it’s because there were so few kids from minorities that they weren’t ‘from minorities’, they were just themselves. J was just J and wasn’t representative of anything wider because there really wasn’t anything wider for him to be a representative of. Of course it’s equally possible, in fact sadly probable, that I was just unaware of the worst of it.

The only incident I can remember happened when we were maybe fifteen. We were leaving the cloakroom, and one of the younger kids saw my mate, ostentatiously sniffed the air and smirked, “I smell curry.”

Obviously there was no odour other than the reek of piss from the nearby toilets. J kind of laughed it off, but not having his (undoubtedly hard-won) savior faire I grabbed the kid, pinned him up against the wall and yelled,

“You smell curry, eh? Well how about I ram a popadom up your nose and a samosa up your arse and we’ll see what you can smell then, dickface!”

That’s a lie. What I actually said was,

“RACISM! …is not good.”

Which, it’s fair to say, somewhat punctured the air of righteous menace I’d been aiming to cultivate.

Because I’d never had to deal with it before, see? I knew conceptually that racism was undesirable, but it wasn’t something that had ever intruded directly into my world before (that’s not the knob gag, by the way). My mate had obviously had to deal with it far more often. While I held ill-informed jealousies regarding his popularity and put it down largely to his mixed-race exoticism, the fact was he’d clearly had to learn to be charming as something of a defence mechanism, in much the same way that many professional comedians will have had to develop their performance skills to deflect unwanted attention from schoolyard bullies.

Confidence is rarely about expecting the best. It’s about not worrying unnecessarily about the worst. Sometimes it’ll arrive through a personal epiphany, sometimes through hard earned experience. The downside to the epiphany route is that if you’re faking it then sometimes you’ll misjudge, overshoot and just come across as an arrogant prick. All the more reason to develop the real thing quickly then. And the trouble with developing confidence by having to deal with abuse is, well, having to deal with abuse.

The end goal is similar, but one of these routes is clearly better than the other (it’s the first one, the first one is better) and I realize I’m coming perilously close to advocating Personal Growth Through Racism here.

Christ, that’s all kinds of wrong, isn’t it? Lots of work to do in Part Three, then.

Here it comes...

Oh, yes. What’s pink and hard in the morning?

The Financial Times crossword.

Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.

Credit where it's due.