Avoid The Crowd

One of the secrets of a pleasant life is to be where the Crowd are not. You don't always have to be where the In-Crowd go, but you can't ever be where the Crass congregate. It will do your equanimity no good and strain your tolerance muscles beyond their natural load. A lot of people don't always make a Crowd: once inside the stand at Twickenham, all those people are just a crowd: let them out and they become a Crowd. Any Hen party is a Crowd, and so are even two Dreadful Parents dragging tired tetchy children around a shopping centre. The teenagers in a skatepark aren't a Crowd, but the drunks on the High Street are.

The rule of never being in town on a Friday or Saturday night is still a good one. I leave the whole of Saturday to the Crowd these days, venturing only as far as a local supermarket, cinema or one of the royal parks within half-an-hour's drive of my house. During the week, the return commute takes some timing to avoid the later-evening drunks and fast-food scoffers, as well as the general air of wired exhaustion from people who should have left the office hours earlier than they did. I'd rather watch my films without the sound of popcorn and chatter, so I have to choose earlier rather than later performances and not see well-publicised films at the start of the run.

Avoiding where the Crowd go is one thing, avoiding what they do and consume is just as important. Very little of what is made for the Crowd is anything more than candy-floss and cheap hamburger, whether it's a TV programme (Big Brother), film (Funny People), book (Harry Potter) or music (The Saturdays). Avoiding the cultural equivalent of junk food is obvious enough, avoiding ostentation and crank-hood is not quite so. Test any purchase with this question: do other people buy it to make a point, display their wealth, because they are early adopters or they think it's cool / stylish / whatever? If the answer is yes, put it back on the shelf. Now. Unless you have a genuine business-related reason for using it. iPhones are still a little suspect: okay if you're a young blonde graphic designer, not so good if you're starting to lose your hair already. It's impossible to state all the don'ts – it's easier to state the do's: restrained, understated, classic, quality and, not to put too fine a point on it, European.