AHH, THE PUB QUIZ. The complimentary cocktail sausage and chips in a bowl (always, always get a seat near the dumb waiter. I cannot stress that enough). The weird, re-gifted spot prizes (Burberry aftershave, generally). The blurry, photocopied picture round (is that the guy from Buck Rogers, or Harrison Ford? You know what? It's actually Bill Gates. But why is he holding a light saber?)
Covert use of the mobile phone (last year’s Grand National winner? Horse+jockey pls). A hand protectively covering the answer to the capital of Mongolia (clue – it’s not Mongolia town). Sneaking a look at the people next door, completely misreading their wrong answer and assuming it’s right, or righter than yours. And of course, cursing at the sheet collectors.
You gotta love the pub quiz – best of all, they tend to be in aid of charidee. I have to confess that mass media has done its work and these days, for good causes to cast their spell upon me, they have to operate in stealth mode, with the most subtle sleight of hand. Her smile is winning, but I’ve been re-wired to step around the girl outside Waterstone’s with the Concern bucket. I switch away from the television appeal for donations to a corrective eye surgery fund for the blind in the Third World.
It’s hard to feel great when you do something as casual as step over a homeless person on the street and catch yourself feeling precisely nothing. But it’s an equally unconscious restoring of karmic values when you enjoy a night out in the pub and find yourself contributing in a tiny, indirect way to the welfare of others.
My internal wiring is stubborn, contrary and shot to hell. These days, I feel sympathy for those who don't want or need it, and none for those who do. The best example of this strange kink in my make up concerns the Everton midfielder Phil Neville. Every time I see him I am overcome with pity, and this is unfathomable. I'm a Liverpool fan and this man now captains the Everton side, having joined them from Manchester United where for years he played alongside his brother, the wretched Dot Cotton-lookalike, Gary. Les frèresNeville have frequently conspired to inflict spirit-crushing defeats upon my team, not through any meaningful personal contribution other than lumping the ball into the stands, but by wearing the same jersey.
Hellomagazine was famously granted a tour around Neville's nonsensical rococo pile in Cheshire, and the hyper-saturated gallery of pictures (monogrammed violet carpets, a fleet of horrid cars, stalactites hanging from the diningroom ceiling – yes, stalactites) betrayed little enough of the insecurity that I have chosen to project on to him. But it made me feel desperately sorry for him. I have watched in slack-jawed amazement as he viciously assaulted players from my team in a manner that would lead to criminal prosecution outside a pub, but something about his appearance makes me sad: a slightly hunched frame; a wounded look about the eyes; not to mention the fact that he was left out of World Cup squads while his more detestable brother got to play for England; a kind of haplessness that hints at a lifetime of relative inferiority. All of this contributes to my outpouring of charitable pity – as does the fact that I am insane.
Off the field of play and in the world of entertainment, there is Tom Cruise. Is it just me or is the thrice-married and multiply-offsprung billionaire actor-producer most convincing in his day-to-day portrayal of the Loneliest Man In The World? Watching a recent appearance by him on Jonathan Ross’s show and hearing him respond awkwardly to a straight-bat inquiry as to how he spends time alone (“I do aerobatics in my jet, I ride my motorbike really fast, I have yachts”), I was struck by how escapist all of this sounded.
Like the chat show host, I badly wanted to be reassured that on his day off, Cruise was content to lay on the couch in a worn Happy Mondays’ T-shirt, eating hummus and watching cooking shows. But no. He’s out straddling some expensive roaring engine and torpedoing himself out of the horrible present, which as anyone familiar with his oeuvre will tell you is, for him, pretty much a busman’s holiday.
Only someone with relatively little money and no understanding of its limitations would make the bogus assumption that someone who earns a fortune buys themselves bullet-proof contentment. Just because they are rich or famous doesn’t mean that billionaires don’t deserve sympathy. But with so many people so much more deserving of it, how can this spoiling of my sympathy vote ever be fixed?
Back at the quiz, it’s the picture round and I’m silently hating myself for general heartlessness. I am dimly aware of the cause we are supporting tonight, and as the seller walks around the room, I wave her over and buy some raffle tickets. Examining them in my hand, they’re just squares of coloured paper with wee numbers on them and I’m not feeling anything. The brain is a muscle and so too is the heart. Atrophy is atrophy – that’s the uncomfortable truth. If it is ever to come, right now I need a sign that I’m not withering away into an unfeeling husk of a man.
Then it does come, in the unlikely form of the stern, thin-lipped sheet-collector. Redemption hands us our page of pictures, those of famous faces to identify, and there they are, blurry enough but unmistakable. Picture one features Tom Cruise on a motorbike, a still image from the film Top Gun. And picture two is that of Everton's Phil Neville, lunging into a crude hack at the dancing feet of a far more skilful opponent. My heart swells with charity and at last I feel alive. I snatch the pen, greedily. Let's do it for a good cause.