One of the things I dread about growing old alone (well, growing even older alone I suppose), is that kind of delusional thing that happens to people’s mind from the lack of interactional stimulate. There is a neighbor of ours who comes to the pub on a Saturday night. He has been divorced and living alone as long as I have been alive. His attitude and behavior continue to become progressively idiosyncratic the older he gets. For instance, although he has a great base of general knowledge, every now and then he will try to tell you something in that very ‘bloke in the pub’ type of way, that is complete and utter bollocks. The strange thing is, he tells these lies with the same complete conviction. I suspect he has had too much time and now honed his own world-view to a point where it has become total and solid, because he has lived alone for so long with no-one to question his opinions. Or maybe he is actually well aware of the falsehood of his statements but when in social situations he takes great pleasure in the novelty of messing with people’s heads. I remember him in the pub once, as bold as brass, trying to proclaim that the English invented the curry. At first, I assumed he was earnestly just getting his trivia a little jumbled, and had read or heard about the Balti dish having recent origins in Great Britain. I tried to tactfully correct his faux pas, but he was still insistent that all curried dished originated from English hands. The people around us expressed their surprise at this ‘fact’, but nevertheless seemed to completely believe him. There was only me who did not seem so willing to accept the statement at face value. I decided to dig a little deeper into his historical sources. I felt confident from the reaction I’d witnessed that he was rarely questioned his knowledge, so I could topple his logic quite easily. Yet to my surprise, and to his great credit, there was a deeper argument ready-prepared.
He informed me the dish was conceived when English Army were fighting in India. “Well it’s obvious when you think about it really. It was necessity” he argued with sincerity, “You can’t feed an army on rice alone, can you?”
As flawed as this justification seems, due to the confident sincerity of his argument, the people around us astonishingly took this ‘evidence’ as fact. They all had enlightened, ‘well-I-never-thought-about-it-like-that’ faces on them. Presumably they are willing to believe that up until that point in history, swathes of Indians had been dying off through malnutrition then? Maybe they even gave themselves and their ancestors a collective pat on the back. Thank God for the English.
So there you have it - the blinkered world view of the lonely, previewed in all its glory. I give it 3 months until this whole blog is just a tissue of untruths. Like I say, I am yet to find out whether these lies are going to be for self-amusement or self-delusion. But at least I know I’ll get away with them, so long as I can back it up with the most anemic of justifications.
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