What's Normal?

There are two schools of thought about the existence of “normal”. The first is that there's no such thing, and the second is that there is, but you have to be a fuck-up or excellent to know it. I subscribe to the second school.

Normal isn't about what you are, what you do or what's happened to you, it's about how it affects you, how you handle it and how you carry yourself in this world. To keep it simple: normal people don't go in for any extreme behaviour, and don't have extreme and lasting reactions to the indignities, insolences and incompetencies of life. If you're a normal person, all but the most dramatic events in life roll off your back like water off a duck's back, leaves you pretty much unchanged. The world as seen by normal people is an impersonal place and much of what happens in it is not the result of human agency, so they don't take anything personally and don't get upset when things don't work. Normal people accept that when they and other normal people go to work, they are bound by the rules of the institution for which they work and are therefore not responsible for doing bad things to people during working hours. They didn't, after all, make the rules.

Not-normal people see a world made by people, in which most events happen because someone decided that or not, did or didn't do, thought of or ignored something that made whatever it was happen. Someone made the rules. Someone decided to spend the money on the roof not the medicines, the computer systems not the number of social workers. Someone left the train full of discarded newspapers from last night, and those parents definitely decided to bring their child on this eleven-hour flight, where it is keeping us all awake with its crying and squalling.

Normal doesn't mean ordinary, dull or conventional. It doesn't mean well-behaved, it doesn't even mean particularly moral. Normal people can be into BDSM or missionary sex once a month, or just have given up. They can like spicy food and flamenco or white food and Big Brother. They can be graphic artists, plumbers, driving instructors and bus drivers – but mostly they work in central and local government, the NHS, education, banks and other large institutions. They can be spiteful, kind, honest, boot-lickers, creeps or stand-up guys. They drive at thirty-five in a thirty-zone and occasionally park really badly.

What they don't do is steal from the supermarket or drive at sixty past a school at tipping-out time. They don't sell drugs to schoolchildren and they don't get into fights because they like it. Normal people aren't alcoholics, junkies, degenerate gamblers and people who sleep with anyone they pick up just so they don't have to be alone. They don't have a DSM-IV personality disorder (you have to be seriously messed-up to have one of those). They don't grieve too long, hold grudges too long and get upset when you downsize them.

That's the good news. On the other hand, they aren't on the Olympic squad, don't know any chess opening more than about four moves deep and they don't even get to the heats of a major music competition. The highs and lows of human achievement and failure are not theirs. No-one in a Western professional Armed Service is normal: the standards and risks are way too high.

This may seem a little unfair on normal people: can't they achieve excellence as well? Bluntly, no. Being good is one thing, being excellent takes another one or two orders of magnitude of practice, dedication and single-mindedness, which means far more time than most people will have after they pay proper attention to their everyday lives. John Coltrane was a finer man than many of us, but even the other jazz musicians noticed he practiced a lot. CEO's who do nothing but work aren't normal either, nor are creative mathematicians (who will tell you that you have to work six days a week just to stay in the game). They may be having fun and could not think of anything better to do, but they are not “normal” - and thank God for it.

After you're twenty or so, you're either normal or not. Whatever it is that turns people not-normal has happened – and maybe it was the genes – and cannot be undone. Nor can being normal. You can change the details of your behaviour, your style and manner, but not the fundamental emotional reactions, and you can hope that whatever it is that will reveal you as a not-normal will never actually happen. A friend of mine back in the day once said: “inside all of us is a normal person screaming to get out”. The more I see, the more I think this is not true. Everyone goes off the rails, the only question is when and for how long. Normal people get back on fairly quickly, while the rest of us are de-railed for life. Some of us were never on the damn rails in the first place.

The Movie List: Part 3

The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecorvo
If the French army ever had a colonel as lucid and objective as Colonel Mathieu, sent in to quash the OAS after its first bombing campaign, then it was a lucky army. When he dismisses the border controls at the edge of the Kasbah with the remark “If anyone's papers are going to be in order, it will be a terrorist's” you know the guy is smarter than you average flic. The French army were not angels, but neither were the OAS – Pontecorvo makes you realise just how shattering bombing civilians is. Made with the assistance of the people in the Algiers Kasbah and many amateur actors, the film is tight, balanced, cool and manages to get you feeling for both sides. It's still the finest political film ever made.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – Jean-Luc Godard
This is the movie where a lump of sugar dissolving in a cup of coffee becomes the entire universe, each bubble a galaxy against the blackness of space. You have to see it to believe it. The opening has a 360-degree pan round a suburban housing estate: before it's half-way through you don't know if you're going right-to-left or vice-versa or where on earth you are. That's why Godard is a genius. “Her” is Paris, and Juliette Janson, a housewife who has to turn tricks in Paris to earn extra cash to pay the bills in her family's new and more expensive apartment in the suburbs. It's based on an article about such housewives – called “shooting stars”. The film is Godard at his poetic best.

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend – Eric Rohmer
This was the film that converted me to Rohmer: it bore a reasonable resemblance to my own love life at the time. The fact that it was set in an Eighties suburban development of Paris also helped, as did the wonderful performance of the central character by Emmanuelle Chaulet and the fact that the two male leads, Eric Viellard and François-Eric Gendron, had a lot of characteristics in common with me as well. The structure is neat, the story moves along, the moments are real and it feels real, as all Rohmer's movies do.

Grand Prix – John Frankenheimer
This remains the best film about motor racing ever made. It's set in the Golden Age of semi-pro Formula One, before the huge budgets, wind-tunnel testing and non-stop circus. There are real motor racing drivers in the background (look out for Graham Hill's moustache), while the climactic ending was to be done for real in the 1967 Monza Grand Prix when Honda won its only race with John Surtees at the wheel. The cars are Formula Three dressed up as Formula One, and the tracks are for real. The on-car filmed racing sequences are still more exciting than the live broadcasts. The scene you will remember for ever is Antonio Sabato picking up Francois Hardy and I'm not going to spoil it for you.

Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse) – BBC
How this Season Two, Episode Two tale got by the BBC censors I will never know: it drips the same insight and contempt for the influential upper-middle classes that comes off the pages of Raymond Chandler. A depressed and morose Morse crosses his own boss, an influential businessman whose daughter has gone missing, exasperates Lewis with his insistence that the girl is dead, gazes at a field of teenage girls in sports kit and interviews a young but buxom Elizabeth Hurley. It's the 1980's and there's an air of money, power and intrusive change – that mechanical digger outside Morse's house is a metaphor. It's the standout episode from a standout series.

The Long Goodbye – Robert Altman
Chandler purists were outraged by this adaption. Elliott Gould shambles through the story the hippest Marlowe there ever was. Today it's a classic and regarded as one of the best Chandler adaptations ever.

Catch Us If You Can – John Boorman
The best Swinging Sixties movie made: it's as sour and refreshing as a lemon, sharply written, the photography is luminous and it doesn't matter that the acting creaks a little.

Duck Soup – Marx Brothers
You haven't seen this? Get the boxed set of the early Marx Brothers from Amazon and do so now. It contains the funniest scene in the history of cinema.

Imagine This

I'm going to ask you to try to imagine something. Imagine that everything you ever did, however high as a kite it might have sent you at the time, always felt hollow because there was only ever you doing it, because you had to plan it, get there, get back and always do it on your own. Imagine that you never had any active encouragement to do anything you wanted to do and did. No-one stopped you, but no-one helped you either. Imagine whenever you did things with other people, you never quite knew why. Imagine half the sex you had was faked (oh yes, men can have fake sex too). Imagine looking at the world and wondering why people did what they do, and when you tried it, wondering what you must be missing out on because otherwise what's the fuss? Imagine that no matter where you are and who you're with, at the back of your mind, you don't want to be there. Not because you don't like wherever and whoever it is, but because you just went there faux de meiux. Tricky, isn't it? Keep trying. What you'll have problems with is getting the exact feeling of emptiness, the exact sound of a hollow steel drum from your insides, the exact way the feeling of pain sweeps through you when you heard the sounds of laughter in the next room. Now imagine that nothing seems to be able to make you feel better – not even drugs and booze and movies and chocolate and sex, not even all of them together. Except maybe for a moment. Which fades.

Why Soaps Aren't Drama

There is a fascinating series to be written about a real hospital: how people lie around in casualty for hours because there is only one decision-making doctor and he's in an emergency surgery for the rest of his shift, how people with cancers are turned away as being pregnant or suffering from indigestion, how doctors don't dare call consultants at the weekend and one consultant would rather leave a patient suffering than deal with another consultant's case – Private Eye's On The Rounds or any of the medical blogs will give a writer and producer endless material. A few dozen hours spent with nurses and disenchanted NHS managers will give them the inside stories and the touches of realism you need.

That series is not Casualty, Holby City or any of the others currently on British television. None of those hospitals is recognisable as any I have ever been in. Where are the groups of nursing assistants gossiping at the admin desk but doing nothing? Why is a consultant wandering around the ward waiting for something to happen? Why are the staff talking in English voices? How did any patient get treatment within three hours? How on earth did they find a nurse who knew the patient's name? And where did they dig up the awful chavs who have family rows by the hospital bedside? If there's one thing that impresses me about hospitals, it's how quiet, considerate and well-mannered the visitors are – and my local hospital is the West Middlesex. What are doctors doing having affairs with nurses or each other? Have you seen real doctors and nurses? Would you have an affair with them? Anyway, that myth grew up in the time when a fair number of nurses came from the same strata of society as the doctors – rather as airline stewardesses came from a similar strata as their passengers in the Fifties and Sixties, when airline travel was for an elite, not you and me.

You have to like your characters to tell stories about them – even the bad guys, in fact, especially the bad guys. You can't like them unless you let them into your head. And who would want to let the endless parade of chavs, dysfunctionals, mediocrities, uglies and nobodies who make usual people in The Bill? It's as if there is a guideline that attractive, intelligent, well-balanced and communicative people must not be portrayed.

You also have to understand the world of your characters, and by the nature of the job of writing, what most writers understand is the world of the freelance and the edges of the State arts bureaucracy and the BBC. They have never worked in a public- or private-sector management role and don't know what happens there. They haven't worked on the railways, in a hospital, a local council, a bank, a retailer or anywhere else. They have no idea how modern corporations and institutions work. I'm not expecting every writer to be Neil Simon, but they ought to do better than the utterly unrealistic portrayal of journalism and politics that is State of Play. Any journalist who behaved as the Kelly MacDonald character did would never keep a job on a national newspaper.

The major employers of writers in the UK are the Big Soaps. Soap operas have strict conventions, the most important for our purposes is that the characters cannot develop, only suffer random setbacks that result from the clash of circumstance and their static character (in tragedy, the setback arises from the character, not a car crash). Hence no-one can learn, there is no development: slimy Nick Cotton is down but will return, as nasty as ever, in a few episodes' time. In a Soap, these defined and stable characters meet life's insults, challenges, whips and scorns and fight back, break down or run away and cry, as they might. But never change – even when they are written out. (Okay, the best cop show ever made – The Shield – has the structure of a soap opera, as does The West Wing. Sometimes it can work. )

Soap characters live in the most heavily-populated town in England: Denial. They cannot believe this could happen, nor that you could have done it to them. What were you thinking? You're in trouble now, this could ruin everything. I can't believe this has happened. It can't be true. Not only are English soaps are set in Denial, they are set in the lower-income end at that, Denial-by-the-Industrial Estate. This limits the characters even more, as they have no money or time for any moments of contemplative life, their every waking moment taken up with the daily round, dodging, diving, grafting and, oh yes, drinking tea and beer. This ensures the viewer never thinks to ask why the characters don't do something about their lives. The Soap inhabitants of Denial are nothing like the people who really live there but a parade of stock characters, who appear in every Soap, sometimes wearing a stethoscope, sometimes pulling a pint, sometimes teaching a class.

Because the Soap cannot countenance change, it is not drama. Drama is about change: characters develop through meeting or not the circumstances they find themselves in. The Soap therefore has to substitute conflict and confusion for drama (there's nothing wrong with either as plot devices - Romeo and Juliet has a plot based on the conflict between the Capulets and Montagues, but it's a love story). Writing conflict and confusion is a lot easier than writing drama: all you need are people shouting at each other because they thought that he was cheating on her with Sally Evans, when all he was doing was hiding her birthday present there. It's why Soaps are reassuringly unrealistic, as our daily lives are carefully organised to reduce the possibility of conflict and so little happens in them that there is very little room for confusion.

Soaps corrupt writers. A writer's job is drama, and there is no drama without change, development, a character's strengths holding them up through a crisis as their weaknesses threaten something fundamental about their existence. This can be done without guns, crossed messages, mis-communication and fist-fights: it can be done without conflict. Eric Rohmer's charming little ditties are drama on exactly this level.

Living With Yourself: Part Five

We had reached the bit where you were extolling the virtues of grinding it out, keeping a stiff upper lip and behaving like a professional when I was stuck in a job and life I didn't like. I should spare everyone my feelings and get out, leaving behind such a huge pink cloud of goodwill that people will wonder why I left.

That would be called “denial” and it is very definitely a Bad Thing.

You see, for those of you who haven't been there and don't know – it's not like having a headache or a cold or a cough. It's like having a permanently bad knee, or tinnitus, or air bubbles in your retina which cause blank patches, or an ache that won't go away because the bones didn't quite heal right. When something happens to you, gentle reader, you get upset, you get angry or down in the dumps: that's the emotional equivalent of a cold. You can “move on” from that – if you can find somewhere to go - or you can adjust, behave professionally, take it in your stride. What happened to us is for life. We can learn some tricks – they teach you to “manage” tinnitus, which means they can't cure it, and you can “manage” it, but it doesn't go away – we can manage our behaviour and reactions, but the underlying emotions are still there and if the trigger is too strong, blooey – we're off. Would you say to someone born with a dodgy heart “so you have a dodgy heart, get over it”? Maybe if you're that insensitive. What we have is like a dodgy heart – no, metaphorically, it is a dodgy heart. If you're a normal person, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if you do know you might not believe that your emotional stuff is as permanent as a physical condition, but it is. The deep emotional stuff is as debilitating, hampering, disabling, disadvantaging, irritating, upsetting and painful as any serious physical injury.

So when you say words to the effect of “grind it out”, “get over it”, “you need to move on”, ask yourself what you're really asking us to do. It's okay to ask that we stop moaning around you – if done with some firm kindness, that's not insensitive. Are you asking that? Or are you honestly suggesting that we leave behind emotions we can barely name caused by incidents we can't even remember in the same way you left behind the carpets when you moved house?

That's one of the things you don't get. We often don't know where it hurts, what hurts and what effect that hurt is having on us. Get an abscess on your foot and you will soon wind up with pains all through your back as you adjust how you walk and hold yourself. If you don't know what's happening, are you going to connect the neck pain with the foot problem? We know something wasn't right, but we don't know what because we don't know how it was supposed to be. That's another of the things you don't get. You can, in the end, look at your foot and you know you're not supposed to have an abscess there – we don't know what's right and wrong, what was us and what was them.

Does this stuff really last as long as this? We really can go into our late middle age with it? Doesn't it fade away? Like the colour of the spines of books exposed to sunlight? Wrong analogy. It's cracks in walls, too much sand in the cement, trees drying out the soil in your foundations; it's the way your face changes as you get older and you did nothing to make it look like that, it just happened; it's the way your body just decided it would not recover from that collision in the rugby match so quickly. The soul might be immortal, but it is not ageless. It wears and tears and cracks and you have to go round fixing it.

Call no-one normal until they are dead. And then call them lucky. Lucky that nothing happened in their whole lives that hit one of the weaknesses in their morale, identity, character or emotional make-up. Lucky that if it did, they had friends, relatives or colleagues who could help them, people to tell them how to handle it, that it isn't their fault, that, yes, actually that boss / girlfriend / boyfriend / relative / whoever is a Bad Person / degenerate addict / thief / psycho and you are best off away from them. What you don't get is that we never had anyone like that.

The question is: what can we change, what do we have to live with and what won't we give up?

Employment Update

The Manager called on Saturday morning (!) to tell me that I hadn't got any of the jobs I had applied for – which, given that he had told me that he would oppose me getting any of them, wasn't such a surprise. I agreed to dodge the process whereby I got the “at risk” letter and had to look for another job in the company, and go straight for a role a grade lower. (I keep the same money and conditions.) Which was what I was expecting (2:1 on; 2:1 against, compulsory redundancy).

Now what I have to do is focus on the positive side. I started the year assuming I would be out of work by now. I have a job. Now I can get on with the house, have a holiday, buy some toys... Work will still suck, but I can live with that if a chunk of the rest of my life is making progress.

The Metaphysics of Juries

I'm on Jury Service this week. The first trial was stopped short when the main witness for the prosecution – a twenty-year-old girl whose boyfriend, the Crown were about to allege, had put a knife in her back during a drunken argument – maintained in contradiction to her statement to the police that it was an accident. The Crown dropped the charges, though frankly I think they would have had a good run at it despite her testimony – and we returned a verdict of Not Guilty on the judge's direction. At least we were sworn in. The second case plead out at the last minute, so we never even entered the Court. The third one is on-going, so I can't comment.

The thing is this. Down in the waiting room, the usher calls out fifteen or sixteen names. You sing out when you hear yours and line up, to be taken to the Court. At this point, you are not a Jury, because there's fifteen of you and you haven't been sworn, but you are more than a bunch of guys following someone in a black cloak. You're a Jury-In-Waiting. Not a Jury, and yet one. In-Waiting, a sort of limbo, each juror in an incoherent state of being and not-being a juror, only fixed in one eigenstate or the other by being called by the Clerk and swearing-in. In a state of Waiting, ready to do what's needed, excluding all other things, but yet no acting either. It's an old phrase from a more expressive time.

It's my third time, but they changed the rules a couple of years ago. Once you were done after the third time. Now they can call you every two years. If they do call you, don't try to get out of it – do your duty. It's mostly sitting around, but juries are so important that every Labour and the odd Conservative government tries to get rid of them, or restrict the cases they can hear. When you speak as a Jury, no-one can ignore you, gainsay you or contradict you, you are forbidden by law from explaining your decision and they can't ask. Only God-like senior judges in courts of appeal can over-rule the twelve of you.