Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 38

Surely there was a time when having an ego was a bad thing? By ‘ego’, this book doesn’t mean ‘a sense of self-awareness’, that’s quite a useful thing, especially if you haven’t got any trousers on and you’re making your maiden speech to the House of Lords. No, the word ‘ego’ here ‘means massive and utterly unfounded belief that everything you say or do is incredibly interesting just because you are the person saying or doing it’.

You can’t open a newspaper these days without (see YOU CAN’T OPEN A NEWSPAPER THESE DAYS WITHOUT …) seeing some piece of print onanism where somebody whose views change with the temperature of their earwax is going on about something that a) they know nothing about, b) they care nothing about, and c) they probably wrote a column about last month which stated a completely opposite point of view. This wouldn’t be so bad, but they always have to drag everything back to themselves. ‘This new law will cause hardship for millions. I know, because I saw a tramp once.’ GO TO HELL!

And that’s before we get into the world of the fawning interview and its cousin, the celebrity autobiography. There is something about the sight – or maybe it’s the smell, a faint odour of musk and diamonds – of celebrities that makes intelligent people and journalists go all wobbly at the brain. Yes, they are prettier than us, and richer, and have our entire lifetime sex ration in one evening, but the only thing they have in common with everyone else is that when they open their mouths they’re no more or less interesting than the rest of us. And as they spend all their waking hours on telly, talking about themselves, chances are high that they ran out of interesting stuff to say a long, long, long time ago.