Quizzical

I ran a quiz in the city tonight. I am trying to be a lot more careful with the jokes I crack, as the modern day culture of political correctness has made it very difficult to generate humour about, well almost anything. Broadly speaking, if you so much as mention a minority group in the present climate, someone will misinterpret what you say as some sort of dig and leap to offence (on someone else’s part.) My favourite ever response to one of my quizzes was when the client accused me of homophobia and antisemitism. The former has happened on more than one occasion. I think I’ve written about it before. The only thing worse than genuine homophobia is accusing a gay man of homophobia. Particularly when you’re straight. And a woman. So be careful you have all the facts before pulling those sorts of words out of your lexicon.

Comedy, and genuinely not taking life too seriously, were some of the only tools LGBT people had in the bad old days. We didn’t have rights. We didn’t have the law on our side. We didn’t get to complain. So we cracked jokes - the more politically incorrect the better. You see the last vestiges of this approach to life on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I was talking to my mate Matt the other day who thinks that we’re going to look back on that particular show in twenty years with our hands over our mouths in deep shock - just like we do with some of those misogynistic comedy shows from the 1970s. I hope he’s not right, but the world is so humourless at the moment that I think it could be the way we’re heading.

I’m pretty sure that gender specific pronouns will be dead in twenty years. Even tonight I found myself choking back the phrase “good evening ladies and gentlemen.” My worry is that there’s nothing polite to replace the phrase with. “Hello, good people,” perhaps? It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I am certainly beginning to know how my Granny felt when I tried to explain to her that Dana International, winner of Eurovision, had been born into the body of another gender. She just nodded a lot, smiled and obviously decided that she hadn’t heard me properly!

I’m with her on the escalating cost of things as well. Just as Grannie used to thrust a few coppers into my palm and say “buy yourself something nice,” because she genuinely didn’t know how much things she didn’t regularly buy cost, I have started to be shocked at the price of almost everything. Train travel is particularly ludicrous as is, as we discovered to our chagrin in the last few months, the cost of rent.

We move out of our beautiful flat in Highgate after fourteen years in June. In order to find a flat of comparable size, our rent has gone up by a quarter and we are two stops further up the Northern Line. It feels a little ludicrous and we’re genuinely not sure we can afford it, but needs must and money has a habit of coming when it’s most needed.

Nathan and I are looking forward to a new home, however. After the continuous flooding, the building work, the thick layer of dust, and our landlord being somewhat cavalier about our suffering, the house has been quite the toxic home of late. We had a gas leak recently, which came as a result of a non-gas-safe registered odd-job man being sent round to fix our hob. The emergency man from British Gas said the leak was 100 times larger than any he’d expect to find in a domestic property and that we were in immediate risk of catastrophic explosion. He also told us if we decided to tell the authorities about the odd-job man, he would immediately go to jail with no questions asked.

It was a chilling and sobering moment!