chaplin

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Are all middle-aged men know-alls?

An old colleague of mine used to say that the reason there were so few magazines for middle-aged men was that they weren't interested in finding out new things so much as boring you senseless with things they already knew. He reckoned that in most social situations men would carefully move the conversation to something that they knew a lot about and would then seek to dominate the exchanges. I argued he was rather overstating his case but I do recognise the syndrome. Maybe blogging is an outlet for the same impulse.

I was reminded of this when I finally got round to watching The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Tired of the fact that Brydon won't listen to his lectures about Malham Cove, Coogan strides off along the limestone pavement to admire the view. As he does so he's joined by another walker who is determined to pass on his superior knowledge of the geology that formed the feature. Coogan isn't merely bored. He's also desperate to demonstrate that he knows almost as much. In the end he simply has to walk off. You can see the scene here.

6 comments:

  1. Maybe blogging is an outlet for the same impulse.

    There's no maybe about it. How many times do you see somebody (invariably a middle-aged male) shoehorn, nay crowbar, something they want to offload into your comments? No matter how tenuous. Hell, I'm doing it now.

    word veri: forcin

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  2. Your use of the word "shoe horn" reminds me of the really tight boots I was wearing as a young man when I went to watch John Martyn playing phenomenal acoustic stuff from "The Tumbler" at our college folk club.

    (wv= berkos - cue more footwear related HORA's)

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  3. If they were boots, you wouldn't have used a shoehorn.

    (Say these middle-aged knowalls...)

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  4. "so few magazines for middle-aged men"
    Really? You're in that business and I'm not, but who else is buying all those glossies about carp and railways?

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  5. True - but on the plus side, I'll buzz about the blogs for recommendations from other bloggers. I've picked up a stack of books, albums and allsorts from virtual nods and nose-tapping.

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  6. That reminds me of something really interesting I wrote on my blog the other week... wait, where are you going? Come back!

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