Strangerous Times!

So yestereve, I was over at the Bobbin, thieving their Wifis, (the Bobbin is a rather nice little rock bar where Old Rosie costs less than Strongbow and where the TVs are more likely to portray the All American Rejects than the Manchester Uniteds), just, as the old cliché goes, minding my own business.

And then this guy came up to me, really quite drunk, and demanded to use my laptop. Understandably I was all like, 'um... no?'

But then he explained himself, he said that he was some kind of Internetman, and that he ran some kind of Internets, and that he had just been scammed out of several hundred thousand pounds by some wily Nigerian. I pointed out to him that pretending to be scammed is actually a fairly common way of commencing a scam, so then he said that it would be alright if I did the typing-and-clicking and he'd tell me what to do. No harm in this, thought I, although he did distract me from some rather promising games of Scrabulous... So we went through the motions of checking his Internets, he rang his friend, I talked to his friend, passwords were exchanged, yadda yadda. At some point, he asked me whether I drank, and I said "yeh, Old Rosie if you're buying." He accused me of being cheeky, but I still maintain that was rather reasonable.

So then, then crisis was averted. He came back to my table and handed me a pint of Old Rosie. 'Result,' thought I. Then he started being all weird. He turned to me and started asking loads of vague, yet intimate, questions, like 'who are you?', and 'what do you not do?'.

Now, I'm not one of those people who views their life as being particularly purposeful. Maybe that's quite tragic? Personally, I find my lack of any long-term ambitions quite liberating - I take enough pleasure from having a simple lie-in on a Wednesday morning without having to feel the need to constantly achieve some kind of dream. Then the man, (who's name was Damon Wright, as, I have just realised, I am under no obligation to protect his anonymity), started getting really angry. He started ranting at me about how I have to justify my existance.

I said, "Of course I fucking don't. Not to anyone, especially not some random drunken twat in a pub."

Then he started pulling the post-colonial guilt card. He accused me of 'having paid for my clothes', and being a 'middle-class white boy'. Now. All in all, being a middle-class white boy is pretty beneficial, indeed, probably the only thing wrong with it is occassionally being called a 'middle-class white boy', because unlike other prejudicial abuse you can't simply reply 'yes I am, and proud of it!', without appearing like a complete and utter Tory. Like, if I had been someone of the negroid persuasion, and he had called me a 'middle-class black boy', I'd be quite able to express some righteous indignation. Alas, no, I was not stuck shouting at some drunken twat having to justify having ever taking part in an economic exchange, (with my 'bought and paid for' jeans), and, indeed, my life itself.

I gave him my all time favourite fact about the so-called evils of free trade, that today, after decades of globalised free trade, there are more obese people than starving people. He said, yeah, in the West. I said, no, that's a global average. He said, show me one fat person in a natural environment. I said, the concept of a 'natural environment' is bullshit, human beings are civilisation-builders and globalisation is much more concurrent with human nature than the prehistoric hunter gatherer lifestyle. He pointed out that Western society 'overproduces'. I said, how is 'overproduction' even possible in a civilisation that thrives on the production of surplus. He asked if I'd ever even read a newspaper. I told him to stop being a patronising cunt. He claimed that he wasn't. I told him to fuck off.

So on, and so on, eventually, it became evident that he wasn't going to fuck off. The onus, it seemed was on me to be the off-fucker. However, I was only a third of the way through my free pint, and to abandon my pint would support his claim that I was just another wasteful middle-class white boy, that, and my Northern memes simply would not permit the abandonement of property. Eventually, I ended up storming out anyway, with my pint in hand. I felt guilty for depriving the Bobbin, (an establishment I still do rather like), of one of their pint glasses, but meh, they have loads, and I needed one at home anyway.

On the way home, I decided that if I ever met the Nigerian who scammed that man out of his £165,000, I would shake his hand.