Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 8

Thankfully we no longer have ‘ladettes’ (did we ever, really? Were they just made up, those girls drinking pints of lager and pretending to enjoy table football?) but we still have lads. God, do we have lads. The male ability to not grow up is so remarkable and logic-defying that one day Richard Dawkins will hear of it and throw his arms up in the air saying, ‘All right! I give up! This is so mental that surely a higher power is behind it. Wow! There’s a Power Rangers movie!’

Lads as a concept is a broad church (or, as Richard Dawkins would say, a broad brick building with pictures of dead imaginary people in the windows). It developed from your wartime mockers, brave but normal blokes who sank a tin mug of char before having a go at Jerry. The naughtiest thing these lads ever did was go to a bint in Cairo and pretend to have it off to save face.

There are bonny lads and stable lads and jack the lads and all sorts of lads whom nowadays we would just call ‘teenagers’, except teenagers can’t clean a horse or make a fire or spell ‘ant’. There are lads who are your mates, like in a beer advert, who sit in pubs and thump one another on the shoulder and are secretly in love with each other but not in a gay way.

But generally, when we think of ‘lads’ these days we think as the pensioner coming home late at night does – of white youths (because these days ‘youths’ is a word reserved solely for Asian or Afro Caribbean lads, as though white kids were never really young) heading towards him in hooded tops, carrying cans of Stronge Brew and doing that weird and no-way gay thing where they keep whacking each other and laughing, and they walk with a strange bendy gait so their legs look like brackets with a drink problem, and they’re possibly harmless, but you’d better not stare at them, and while they’re probably quite nice really (although you don’t know it, three of them are at stage school), one of them could well be dangerously mental, so you step aside even though you’ve got the right of way.

Those lads.