Pfffffffffffffft

I was chatting to a French architect at a party last night. He has studied in the States, has an American girlfriend from Hastings, Nebraska* and is thoroughly pleasant. We were talking about (control yourselves, ladies) the European Parliament.

“They show it live on TV in France once a week,” he said. “It’s terrible. They show close-ups of these guys we’re all paying €20,000 a month just falling asleep. No wonder my country voted no.”

We got talking about the job of simultaneous translation. “Oh, that’s a terrible job,” he said. “It’s real donkey work. The people who do it—in France we call them ‘niggers’.”

I didn’t have enough drink in my mouth to make a really spectacular spray, but I was still glad we were stood out on the balcony—I would have made a real mess of the carpet. “What?” I eventually managed.

“They’re always on the go, they work really long hours, and they’re badly paid,” he explained, sympathetically. “So we call them ‘niggers’.”

This is, it turns out, just a cultural thing. He’s no fevered racist, nor even an Imnotaracistbut—he was just using the slang French term for people who are overworked and undervalued. Bit of a surprise, I’ll admit.


* I seem to keep running into people from Hastings, Nebraska. They all extol the virtues of the place, but the fact that I keep meeting them here suggests that they’re quite keen to stay the hell away from Hastings, Nebraska.

“I am a total genius”

Schizotypal afflictions are awful for the people who have to live through them, but from the outside they’re fascinating. The mechanics of paranoia intrigue me, for example—if they're always the same (and they seem to be), does that mean that aspect of the condition could be cured with a simple hit of the right chemical in the right synapse? This man is British but of Indian/Asian descent, which hasn’t made any appreciable difference to the way his persecution mania manifests itself. But if his great-great-grandfather had gone through the same process in India, who would have been “making attempts on his life” then? Indian Intelligence? The Persians? The British?

They can also, of course, be quite entertaining, as long as you’re prepared to take on a “love the sinner, hate the sin” mentality, separate out the poor bastard from the horrible nonsense their brain is making them live through, and marvel at what our minds can do to us.

His fourth allegation here is my favourite (MI5 do this all the time, you know):

I am a total genius - the type that you only find in fiction - and just like in fiction, the State wants me dead. I want 50M compensation for:

1. Over a dozen serious attempts on my life, and dozens more hopeful attempts (e.g. a varied fleet of dangerous heavy vehicles swarming round me every time I get into my car, awaiting ahead of me to suddenly pull out, swerve, fatally collide etc);

2. A year of crazy surveillance, which when coupled with assassination attempts, was meant to intimidate and mentally torture;

3. Twenty years ago, during the seventies and eighties, examiners being verbally instructed to downmark all Asian candidates; and

4. The secret service blackballing my career in painting when I left college because I was “a security threat”—wasn’t white and could draw and paint better than everyone else.