...and failing that, give me skills.
Oh the poor ickle under firties who don't know their arses from their elbows.
Can't wire a plug? Can't unblock a drain? Can't hang a picture?
Bet they know r exactly which overpriced rip-off designer handbag is necessary for looking down their coke-lined noses at losers like me.
What kind of moron can't change a lightbulb? Or bleed a bleeding radiator?
Apparently, young people prefer to spend their time going out to leisure activities than changing a lightbulb or unblocking a drain. My bedroom radiator needed bleeding at seven o'clock in the morning the other week. I thought about calling someone out, but figured I probably wouldn't get anybody before lunch and anyway I didn't have £100 in cash on me, so I spent a minute bleeding it myself and returned to bed for another three hours sleep! Now who's the loser, the person who knows the latest 'plot' lines in Eastenders or the one that can put up bookshelves?
A strawpoll in my immediate environment revealed that wiring a plug is still necessary - in order to get the cable neatly threaded through the hole in the cupboard rather than having cables trailing in an unsightly mess all over everywhere!
My contempt isn't is so much about ticking off a list of 'can-dos' but an attitudinal one. It's currently fashionable to decry the Nanny State but there seems to plenty of evidence of people that need Nannying, be it Rhiannon Lennon-Smith who says
I'd usually call my dad. It's not the best thing to do I know, but when things are broken people just throw them out., or people who watch a TV programme because some journalist has been bribed heavily to
It's about how people don't use information, or perhaps do not know how to use information. I'm all for trivia, and for fluff and fun, but I wonder what will happen to Rhiannon Lennon-Smith if Daddy dies or develops Alzheimers or retires to Spain. Hopefully, by then she will have a boyfriend or husband who can take over the Daddying role, but it's very dodgy grounds on which to choose a sexual partner, I think. At least if you know that you can survive and live alone, you also know that you're actually choosing to live with someone, rather than being forced into it by dependency. Meanwhile people are choosing to remain ignorant of the essentials and letting the capitalist machine govern their lives. Makes no sense to me.
Obviously, we all have to start somewhere. When I found I needed to do stuff - this was before the internet - I read books or asked people, friends and colleagues mainly. But if you don't know how to bleed a radiator it probably means that you don't even know radiators need bleeding, and you're already at a disadvantage in life. But at least you can look down your nose at the little stupid people who don't know which hairdresser the winner of Big Brother goes to but is perfectly capable of looking after herself...although I was once told off by my lovely friend Jude when I recounted how I had managed to lock myself out the back of my house and had to smash a (small) window and then get a glazier out (at post-Christmas double rates). Jude's argument was that it was about time I learnt to replace a window...I have to confess that were the incident to recur again* I would still call a glazier out
* this tautological construction would suggest that the incident had already recurred which would be a ludicrous, unthinkable preposterous proposition and I'll shoot anyone who dares to suggest otherwise
