I WANT TO HEAR EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU…

“Hello, Blogfordshire!”

“No, I can’t hear you… Hello Blogfordshire!!!”

“Okay, let’s see if you remember this one…”

I’m fairly sure that this particular slice of what I still obliquely refer to as my “life” will lose you.

I mentioned this idea at work a few weeks ago and it certainly perplexed and bamboozled them so I’m pretty confident that it’s not the most widely held point of view. Heck, if you want to absolutely guarantee to make the rest of your working day go with an absolute… well, whatever the opposite of  “swing” is, and instead spend the rest of the day getting peculiar looks from people (or rather looks that seem to imply you are peculiar…), I suggest that you try putting forward this point of view. It will certainly open up some debate over the coffee cups.

And, as ideas go, it might even, if I can hazard such a confident thesis, be somewhat unique.

Fundamentally, of course, it’s really about my discomfort about repetition by rote and the activities of the mob, or maybe it’s about communal thinking and the lack of the voice of the individual, or perhaps it’s just about being uncomfortable in a world where everyone else feels comfortable. Certainly it’s also about finding things that other people consider the most normal to be completely abnormal.

Let me try to explain.

You, I assume, have some kind of a name by which you are known. This is a perfectly natural thing and nothing at all to be surprised about. In fact, it would probably be a lot stranger – and infinitely more inconvenient - if you didn’t have one in this day and age. It might very well be a name you’ve made up, or just something you are known by or something you’ve officially changed your old one to, but, in the end, we all have a label by which we are known and, if I know people like I so obviously don’t, it probably gets used quite a lot. In fact, you probably hear it quite a lot. It is the sort of thing that bears repetition, gets repeated and you’ve undoubtedly heard it quite a lot.

So…

Doesn’t it sometimes strike you as sounding rather silly…?

I mean there you are, and infinite complexity of possibilities and improbabilities, one of the universes greatest mysteries, a living, breathing, thinking human being, and someone decided to give you a name, a collection of almost random and meaningless letters that tell everyone everything about you and yet which initially at least was arbitrarily given to you by people who didn’t even know who you were yet…

And all of these names, from John Smith through to Moon Unit and beyond, when repeated often enough tell you nothing at all about the person they are attached to and, in the end, just start to sound slightly ridiculous to me. Even the famous names just sound rather stupid if you dissect and analyse the actual words making up that name, so the silly little labels that we give ourselves as ordinary human beings just start to sound positively weird to me when I think about it. If I say a name like, for example “Bob”, I always feel rather silly just saying it, so I can’t imagine how “Bob” feels about living with it.

Perhaps we just don’t really think about it. I’ve certainly learned to distrust anyone who keeps on dropping my name into their statements, despite the fact that it’s one of the ways they are told to use in sales training to form some kind of a “rapport” with me (whatever one of those is).

“So you see Mr (Insert name here), you can’t possibly afford to live without (Insert product name here), can you Mr (Insert name here), or may I call you (Insert First name here)?”

Martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin martin. Six of the bloody stupidly ordered letters in the history of the world, in my opinion, and I should know. Granted, it could have been much worse. My parents could have had a literary bent and labelled me a Sherlock or a Mycroft (actually, I rather like the sound of that…) and my schooldays could very well have been even worse than they already were.

If you are called “Bond” would it be too tempting to name a son James…?

But that’s not really all that I’m talking about here because (and this is where I really lost my previous audience and I never explain this very well) I also feel much the same about the so-called three-minute “pop” song…

Well I say three minute, but pop songs in general. Anything with a repeated lyric. After a while they all just start to sound just a bit, you know, silly to me… All of them. Every last one and this is truly why I cannot understand the appeal of live music.

The pop concert.

The festival.

The gig.

It bewilders me why anyone finds them anything other than totally preposterous. I know that people talk about being terribly moved by the experience of ten thousand voices or more united as one, chanting something that, in any other context, would just sound a little strange, but it just befuddles me.

Instead I find that I just don’t understand why people aren’t standing around, looking a bit shifty and feeling slightly embarrassed by it all as they stand there chanting a “meaningful” lyric ad nauseum until it ceases to have any real meaning.

The music that I do listen to and, although I am rather embarrassed to admit it, know the lyrics to, still manages to feel slightly daft to me, and that is despite the fact that I have even been known to provide unofficial back up vocals to it on occasion. However it is always of the highest studio quality, performed as intended and listened to in the privacy and comfort of my own armchair or car and with the benefit of proper food, drink and toilets mere footsteps away, and without the company of strangers kicking me in the back of my head or drowning out the music or trying to set fire to me by holding their lighters aloft.

Oh right, it’s holding their mobile phones aloft now, is it? Great, so now they want to microwave my brain. Fan-bloody-tastic!

Nope… I really don’t see the appeal of being in crowds very much at all, to be perfectly honest, because it really is not my idea of a good time but, if that’s what you want to do, well that’s up to you. You certainly won’t have to worry that I’ll be clamouring for a ticket, so  that’s one more chance for you and also one less person in the queue for the chemical toilets to worry about.

You’re welcome. Enjoy!