On being a bit thick.....

It pains me to admit this, but I simply must get it off my chest -- I don't really understand politics. There, I've said it. This fact was never more explicit than last week when I spent several pleasurable hours curled up on my hideously tasteless but much loved chaise lounge, reading the late great Christopher Hitchens's Hitch-22 (an act which necessitated one-year-old spending an unhealthy amount of hours sat in front of Cbeebies, but hey, it's educational to watch a forty-year-old ex-drama student  -- dressed up in a costume made out of toilet rolls and cereal boxes -- pretending to be a robot. Isn't it?)

I realise that viewing my slim grasp on the political system through the prism of that of one the greatest intellectuals of our time is probably setting myself up for abject failure, and really I should be aiming for a more even contest with, say,  Jedward for example -- against whom I would surely have a fighting chance of outwitting (but not of out-twitting!)  -- but then I was never one to make things easy for myself.

I really need this book

I understand the basics of course; well sort of. There is an extreme left, and there is an extreme right -- both of which are a bit scary -- with degrees of leftiness and rightiness reducing as we approach the middle, where inevitably the party insipid enough to be voted into government resides -- well in our part of the world anyway (yes, yes, I realise that in other places the scary people seem to be quite popular, so popular in fact that some of them stay in government for oh, decades). And the fact that I still struggle to differentiate between my left and right doesn't much matter when we're talking about politics, it's only really relevant when Sat Nav is directing me to the nearest brewery.

Thicker than this

Hitchens writes eruditely about the political activism which dominated his life, and during the course of the book he describes himself by turns as Socialist, Trotskyist and Marxist, among others, making it necessary that I keep Wikipedia and dictionary.com open on the laptop beside me at all times in order to navigate my way through this fascinating and eloquent memoir. The whole enterprise, however, left me feeling thicker than Hugh Laurie's Prince Thickie in Blackadder the III.

So politics -- from the single transferable vote, to the IMF --  leave me mystified. This lead me to consider how many other topics have me stumbling about in the dark, and was dismayed to realise there was really rather a lot, some of which are detailed below -- although this list is by no means exhaustive. 

Take cars for example. I had a flat tyre the other day, and by unhappy chance my mobile phone battery was dead, meaning I couldn't phone DH to demand he do something about the situation. Disregarding a vague doubt about the wisdom of driving the car at all at this point, I opted to drive slowly from Darlington to Midland where I was relieved to spot a tyre yard.

- 'I have a flat tyre' I told a man wearing a boiler-suit, 'I need you to, to....' I struggled for the word.

- 'Fix it?' he asked slowly, bending his head slightly, as if talking to someone with special needs.

- 'Yes, fix it, thank you,!' I had to stop myself from clapping my hands with pleasure, 'can I sit in the car while you do it?'

Tqwenty minutes and $20 later, the problem was resolved -- a lesson in capitalism for the slow learner I suppose -- although he could have told me I needed to replace the entire car and I would have believed him, since anything involving mechanics leaves my brain in a permanent state of 'whev's' and is consigned to the dusty pile of 'stuff I don't need to know because I'm married to a man'. Although this system only works if I keep my phone charged, something which DH also generally takes responsibility for since plugs and cables confuse me too.

Another topic which leaves my brain in a stupefied state is the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, which I find as dull and difficult to follow as a talk on Japanese cinematography. In Japanese. And if I manage to stay awake all the way through, I'm likely to interject every twenty minutes or so with questions such as 'but I thought the guy with the beard was a goodie,' thus clearly demonstrating that not only do I have no understanding of the plot but can't even distinguish between the characters. The Harry Potter movies leave me in a similar state of confusion (I mean please, why doesn't 'he who cannot be named' aka Voldemort -- who is constantly named by the way -- just kill the annoying little specky bastard...why so many movies?). And as for the Matrix? Oh god let's not even go there.... although judging by the look of total confusion on Keanu Reeves face, I'm pretty sure he is as much in the dark as I am.

I once dated a bloke who immediately identified this doltish streak in me, and chose to exploit it for his own pleasure. An employee of the Department of Social Welfare, as it was then known, he told me that he worked in a particularly secretive and high security section of the department, and should I wish to phone him at work I would need to give a four digit code before being permitted to speak to him. Eagerly I wrote the number down on a slip of paper and tucked it into my purse.

The first time I phoned him at work I was met with a gruff voice -

- 'code please'

- 'oh, hang on' (digging in purse) 'OK, 7....4...8....3'

- 'Name please?'. I gave it.

- 'You are such a spaz!! Hahahahahhahaha!' a familiar voice cackled down the phone, 'you believe everything I say! mwahhahahhaha!'

To be fair, I could see the funny side, although the 'it's not you, it's me' speech he delivered a week later outside Trinity was less funny.

Yes my thickness is only outstripped by my gullibility and sometimes I truly believe my inner blonde is screaming to get out. Of course this won't stop me reading above my station in the vain hope that eventually some cleverness will rub off, and perhaps one day I might manage a foray beyond the first page of oh anything by James Joyce.