Crying false tears

Nigel and Fred, two scousers, were on their way to a football match. They were sat down in a pub having a beer before hand.

‘You know if there’s one thing that really irks me Nige, it’s the sheer falseness and mawkish sentimentality of women. You see last night I was watching the news. Anyway it’s ten years to the day since what’s her face died, the people’s princes, lady banana brains. Anyway I’m watching this bloody news item and they’ve got clips of people, both men and women mind you, saying all sorts of rubbish about what a saint she was, how much good she did, how she was such a noble person, how she’s now an angel in Heaven playing on a harp and that not even Christ himself was holier. Anyway I’m sitting there thinking what a load of cod this is, how she was in fact England’s most famous slut, an empty headed numbskull, rich, beautiful and completely cut off from the real world, and a tart if ever there was one, committing adultery like a whore, and yet people are speaking with genuine belief that she was a saint. And I’m thinking all this and wondering to myself if I’m the only person on the planet who’s seine, when in walks the wife and her friend Pam. I think you knew her Nige?’

‘Aye, aye.’

‘Well anyway, these two catch the end of the news item, and as soon as it’s over, Pam turns to the wife and says ‘Eeh love, I can’t believe it’s been ten years since she died. There having a memorial service up at Heath Lane tomorrow. I think I might go along. Do you fancy coming?’ ‘Aye’ says the wife, ‘I might just do that. It would be proper to pay my respects and all.’ Well as you can imagine Nige, as I hear all this prattle, I’m overcome with anger and turn on these two.

‘‘What the bloody hell are you two on about? Eh? Are your heads full of cotton wool or something? Why would you two want to pay your respects to that slut?’

‘‘Excuse me Fredrick Hutchings’ says Pam getting worked up, ‘but how dare you speak of the dead like that. She was no slut at all. She was a very decent woman. More so than any of those other royals, the worthless layabouts. She did so much for charity, raised awareness about AIDS, and wasn’t too proud to go and touch little loveless orphans with HIV. She was a very kind and noble woman, who cared for the people, so please Fredrick Hutchings, how dare you call her a slut.’

‘‘What a load of tommy rot’ says I ‘she was a good for nothing waster who dropped her knickers every time her husband was looking the other way. Jesus bloody Christ! What garbage!’

‘Anyway we had a right brouhaha, and I was really exasperated to see how staunchly Pam and the missus defended her, as if she truly was a saint, a holy person. They’re wearing blinkers Nige, they’re wearing blinkers. I mean they just weren’t able to see that she was a worthless whore, and that whore’s never become saints. Crumbs. Thou shalt not commit adultery. It makes it plain in the Bible. So how can a slapper achieve Sainthood? Good God! What cloth heads these women are. And you know I wouldn’t mind Nige, but Pammy and the wife are really decent women, they’re seine, rational, good, honest women. You’d expect better from them. And yet on this subject they seem unable to see the bleedingly obvious reality that this layabout was a good for nothing slut. I says to Pam

‘‘Pam, how long have I known you for now? It must be getting on ten years. And I know that you like us are good working class folk, salt of the earth, never giving yourself airs or pretending to be anything that you’re not. You hate the upper classes just as much as I do, and I’ve heard you say it myself that at the end of the day we’ve all got an arse to wipe, so why go around pretending your something special. You know fine well that rich people are just as common as common people, so why on earth are you going around defending that bimbo, when you know in your heart she was a waster?’

‘‘I know a decent woman when I see one, Fred. She did so much good work. I don’t know why you can’t just accept that. She brought love and happiness into a lot of people’s lives.’

‘And with that I decided to stop wasting my breath. You know I’ve known lots of women Nige, decent, sensible women, yet they’ve all got a soft spot for women like this, for princesses. Even if their proud socialists and of humble birth. You know you’d think they’d only feel bitchiness to such a woman, being richer, younger and much more beautiful than they – and you know that the wife and Pammy are no lookers, Nige, I mean come on. And yet they don’t. They don’t feel any hatred at all. They feel only love and admiration. Well it’s beyond me. I just can’t understand it.’

‘No’ said Nigel, ‘I long ago got used to the irrational ways of women. However alike we may be in some respects, and however sensible and good they can often be, women will always have certain blind spots, they’ll always hold silly little airy fairy views, do mindless things and have senseless, peculiar ways which make them an alien species. The people’s princess – what tosh! Everybody says she was good and the other royals are evil, but all they mean by that, is that she was good-looking and the other royals aren’t. You see people will always respect natural beauty, they’re slaves to it. But they won’t admit that that’s why they liked the princess, or probably they don’t even realise themselves that that’s why they liked her. No what they’ll say instead is that she was a good, kind person, decent, moral, holy and all the rest of it. It’s complete rubbish.

‘But what really gets me’ continued Nigel ‘is that these mawkish women who cry tears over her are always old biddies having neither wealth nor beauty. You see the wife’s part of this group. You know Freddy, down at the church. Well anyway, there’s about ten of them, all regular churchgoers, all decent women mind you, and they’re all doing good works for the princess’s cause. Now I wouldn’t tell any of them to their faces, but none of them are what you’d call attractive, they’re all well over the hill and past it yet they adore this princess, and seem to see themselves in her. You know you’d have thought they would’ve only been jealous of her. But instead they see themselves in her. I mean how deluded is that? It’s contemptible. But that’s women for you Fred. They can be as blind as bats if they want to be.

‘Anyway this little group me wife’s in, well they’d meet sometimes in the Church hall and organise charity events. And you know, I take my hat off to them – that’s great. It’s just why does it have to go hand in glove with mawkish idolatry of a rich slut – that’s surely contrary to the whole Christian ethic. But anyway, they’re a great bunch of girls, be sure of that, but they’re all wearing these brooches on their jumpers, in commemoration of the princess. They sent of for them you see, these worthless, tacky little brooches, and they’re all wearing them with especial grandeur, as though it turns them into royalty itself, as if it somehow transforms these old biddies into young, beautiful princesses. I felt such contempt to see them all sitting there in church with these tacky brooches on.

‘But the worst thing is the tears! The false, sentimental tears, that seem to pour out of these otherwise rational creatures as if there’s no tomorrow. They had loads of memorial services at the time of the princess’s death, bloody loads of them, and they continued afterwards as well. And I tell you, without fail, at every single one of them they’d burst into tears. You see the wife dragged me along to one. And during the service and after, the church hall was full of these women crying their eyes out, crying these pure mournful tears, quite silently like and calmly, but all the same they were false and I just wanted to turn to them and scream ‘this is so false and pathetic! Ugh! Would you women get over it, this is such tripe!’ Needless to say I never went back again.’

Fred shook his head as if to agree that women were a foreign creature altogether. Then he took up his views again.

‘I tell you though, women delude themselves and are almost impossible to understand. I tell you what I just can’t work out. All these bloody celebrity magazines, about rich bitches leading a life of idleness, you know magazines where you get to take a butchers round the house of some rich missus, or all these gossip magazines about imbecile celebrities, pictures of women in their bikinis, glamour girls sporting the latest fashions, and all the bloody talk of slimming and getting fit for summer, of diets and slim shakes and of so-and-so coming back after being pregnant and is she or isn’t she a fat cow now? Well it’s all a real sickner to me. It’s such dross, I mean I want to run a million miles from it. But you’d have thought it would also be a sickner to the average woman out there, who has to work for a living, who isn’t distinguished by beauty, who doesn’t have all day to spend on making herself look good. And yet it’s not like that at all. All women seem to adore this rubbish. And this is what puzzles me and makes me really mad. I’ve seen it myself, seen seventy year old women, who must’ve been on the shelf for years, not in anyway attractive, desperately absorbed in reading all this worthless gossip and looking at pictures of young women in bikinis. Honestly Nige, all women, it doesn’t matter who, take a massive interest in these magazines.’

‘You’re telling me mate, your telling me. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve seen overweight girls pouring endlessly over pictures of skinny little models, a figure they’ll never attain, and wondered why the hell they’re so engrossed? I mean Christ Freddy, all that slimming stuff really does me head in, size zero and all that nonsense. For God’s sake, men like a woman with some meat on her, and someone aught to tell these magazines to stop publishing all these pictures of skeleton women, because it surely doesn’t do the self esteem of most women any good. And yet the thing is, I’ve come to realise, that these thoughts are only mine as a man: it’s not how women think. Women – whatever body shape they’ve got – they are the ones who are addicted to looking at these pictures of skinny women.’

‘Aye, aye’ said Fred. ‘And you know the majority of these magazines, all they’re about is building people up to knock them down. For a few weeks they’ll run a story on how some celebrity is little miss perfect, and wouldn’t you want to be her like, to lead her life, and there’s all these glamorous pictures of her looking really great and as happy as a harlequin; and then a little later down the line they’re saying she’s put on weight, they’ve got photos of her in a bikini, her stomach looks a little podgy, her backside got some flab on it, or there’s a shot showing her looking groggy after a night out on the tiles, and they’re telling you how she’s split up with her boyfriend and is in rehab. No, it’s so revolting and the media’s so two-faced, and yet these women seem to enjoy reading all about it, it cheers them up I guess, but I have to say I’ve only got complete contempt for them. No’ and he paused to drink up ‘women mate are a completely different species in some respects and that’s just the facts of life.’

And they both stood up, left the pub, and went off to the football match.

They both loved football and were season ticket holders. Even though they were both over fifty and out of shape, they both followed football with a passion. They wore the club shirts to matches, and on days when they played for the local pub, they would deck themselves out in replica football strips, taking care to dress themselves smartly in their spanking strips, wearing the full t-shirt, shorts and socks, and imagining that they looked identical to their heroes, even though with regards to body shape it didn’t flatter them at all and they looked nothing like footballers. They constantly absorbed themselves in it, in all the gossip and innuendo, they read all the papers and magazines, talked about it non-stop, and often called into radio phone-ins. When they were at the matches they lived out their dreams, imagining themselves to be the footballers scoring the goals and getting all the glory.

They loved football and loved seeing good football played and would cheer at a good piece of skill. However if a footballer made a mistake they would greet it with ironic cheers and take pleasure in seeing one of their idols reduced down to an everyday human level. And sometimes they would go on radio phone in shows and talk people up and rave about them; but then the next week, if things weren’t quite going so well, they’d slaughter them, talking them down and then start whinging about how footballers were overpaid and out of touch with reality and how the system sucked, even though they supported it by going like slaves every week to the match. As well as this whenever they saw a photo of a grotesquely muscular man, they were spell bound by it, and absorbed themselves in looking at it, dreaming that they had such a body, despite the fact that women often made statements to the effect that they didn’t find such men attractive.

Nigel and Fred reached the stadium and stood in the stands. Before the match was to start however there was to be a moment of remembrance. A young boy in the city had been killed, most heinously, having been shot by a straying bullet. The entire city was in mourning over this tragic death, and it was fitting that the football club should pay homage to this poor boy and his family. However, he wasn’t in fact a supporter of the team Nigel and Fred followed, but rather of their arch enemies across town. Nevertheless, at a time like this, football rivalry meant nothing, and their football club had chosen to play the anthem of their rivals before the match, in honour of the young boy killed.

Both men stood to order as the song played out. It was a moment of heartfelt emotion. Make no mistake about it, the teams were bitter rivals, they hated each other sports wise, but that melted into insignificance as compared with the death of a child, and at the end of the day we’re all humans, and by playing their rival’s song in their very own stadium it was as if everything mortal was transcended and everyone was holding hands together as one.

And the men were so overcome by the moment. It was so uplifting to the human spirit. They were singing the song of their rivals, their sworn enemies, here, in their very own stadium, and all because there is more to life than mere football, and humanity should stand shoulder to shoulder in the face of such iniquitous tragedy. Both men felt this emotion stir them in their hearts and breasts; and in an ecstasy of sensation, goose pimples broke out on their backs, necks and shoulders and shivers ran down their spines. It was so uplifting, they were almost ecstatic with joy, yet at the same time they knew there was something false and mawkish about it. Yet they chose to ignore these facts and gave in to the feeling. They needed to. They needed the release. Tainted though it may be by sentiment, it was a pure and beautiful feeling, and as they stood there and sang, they were flooded with emotion and started crying tears of pure, pure sadness, letting it all come out like big babies, as though they wished to cry for all the endless human misery they’d bottled up over the course of their lives.