I’ve always been proud of the way that I can hold myself in any social occasion whatever the cultural aspect. I could enjoy a night at the opera and pop into a working men’s club on the way home and have a pint of bitter and a pickled egg and not feel uncomfortable in either place.

Although I’m not a football fan I have developed a way to join in with conversations in a pub, should I ever find myself in a pub with a big screen on a Sunday afternoon, which hasn’t happened for a long time. All you have to do is remember the pearls of wisdom that comes from the pub gobshite and re-hash them the following week.

Last Sunday’s pub gobshite punditry:

“Why aren’t they playing Timpson? He’s the best upfront we’ve got; Johnson’s just a fucking plodder”.

Shame Johnson’s injured, he’s the best goalie since Timpson. Perkins can’t cope under pressure that’s why he let those two in.”

The following Sunday, should you inadvertently find yourself being asked for an opinion on ‘the match’ by the pub gobshite:

Gobshite: “What do you reckon mate? Last week’s match was shit!”
Me: “Fucking terrible, you can’t blame it all on Perkins though. Poor fucker lets the pressure get to him and he let in two easy goals.”
Gobshite: “Too fucking right, I’ve heard Johnson’s better and might be fit to start.”
Me: “I hope so, best fucking goalie in the league. Watching him in action takes me back to the days of Timpson.”

(Throw in a lot of swearing as these people tend to use ‘fuck’ as a comma rather than a full stop).

Culturally I am all over the place; musically I can be a bit of a snob although that flies in the face of my love of musicals. I don’t like a lot of television because most of it is aimed at idiots, but I have a strange affection for 1970s sitcoms. Comedy, drama, music, theatre, film, and literature all appeal to me in various forms, yet there is one thing I just cannot get on board with no matter how hard I have tried; art galleries. I like a good painting but I could walk around any art gallery in the world in less than an hour because I can judge immediately whether or not I like a painting simply based on the painting either being good or being rubbish, without having to stand looking at it for an hour pontificating on what the artist was trying to say. The thing I hate the most though is modern art, or any attempt to be ‘conceptual’. As much as I like Nottingham Contemporary as a place to watch live music, I have tried to use it as an art gallery and on both occasions it has left me cold. Worse still is the fact that people go and look at this stuff and pretend to understand it in order to impress other pretentious drips that might be in earshot. If one person had the wherewithal to loudly proclaim “this is all just bollocks really” then I believe that everyone would breathe a sigh of relief at not having to pretend anymore.

In order to satirise the art world, I once came up with the idea for an exhibition of my own, (another idea I recently found on a piece of paper in my box containing abandoned bits of paper) called ‘Art Is Whatever You Want Art To Be’. The idea was that there would be no paintings, just blank canvasses in frames and every piece was going to have a question mark on the little square underneath where the title and description goes. The advertising blurb was going to say something like “art can be what the eye dictates” or something equally as wanky and the newspaper advert was going to be a blank page with the address of the gallery underneath. I was going to employ an actor to play a cliché of a pretentious artist giving a talk imploring the visitors to imagine what each painting was; a bowl of fruit, a landscape, a nude, and at the launch I would have had waiters handing out empty glasses so that people could picture the drink they preferred.

To summarise, it was going to be a joke event that only the most head-up-arse art ponce would pretend to ‘get’. Nobody would like it, critics would slag it off mercilessly, and the art world would be destroyed forever. Such a ridiculous idea would never work which is presumably why it ended up in my box of abandoned ideas.

But was it such a stupid idea? Obviously not according to a report that I found online today in which an artist called Lana Newstrom has done almost exactly what I’ve just described in America. The truth is that Lana Newstrom is a made up name and the whole thing was a hoax designed to show that people who pretend to enjoy this kind of thing are just pillocks.

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