Not Entirely PC
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: We are all the victims of our ancestry.
_____________________________________________________________________
I am modestly competent with a personal computer and I am positively avuncular with police constables but I struggle with political correctness. I have no problem with the concept that all people are born equal and should be given equal chances in life but it is, surely, dangerously naïve to believe that all thirty-something’s are equal?
I would not feel altogether comfortable, I must admit, with my best friend wielding the scalpel on my bunions or taking the controls of my holiday flight. Politics might be an exceptional case. Instead of everyone on the voters roll being limited to one vote in elections we could draw a name out of the hat to represent the constituency. Not only would this guarantee that the sitting member lived in the area he or she represented, it would ensure sexual equality and virtually eliminate those scary people who believe they have a right to govern the rest of us.
It is, however, in the matter of gender that I really lose the thread of the PC argument. Watch a man in swimming trunks holding with fatherly pride his just-weaned baby to his bare chest and observe the dawning bewilderment when the infant discovers that the male nipple is purely decorative! It is no wonder that kids get complexes. Still, things may get better now they are teaching recreational sex in pre-school. Or is it Calculus in pre-school and sex in primary one?
I find it hard to keep up with all the improvements in education. We left primary school knowing how to read, write and do arithmetic but nowadays learning these skills has been deferred until post-sixteen colleges. Of course, we were rewarded for excellence by being made milk monitor or filling in the class register for the teacher: failure to learn had very different consequences – the Lochgelly!
Anyway, I digress. It is not only physical differences that distinguish men from women: our brains are wired differently. The modern notion that you should load the same software into the brains of both genders is certain to give some bizarre results.
I have a theory that it all happened when the present human design was being finalised about fifty thousand years ago. Men survived who were best at fighting or fleeing, keeping a wary eye out at all times for predators – especially other men! (The McPhersons developed a style of their own: we arrived late at Culloden.) Women had to be kept safe to tend the infants so they spent most of their time in the cave. The more active females were selected out as being unfit for purpose leaving those that enjoyed sitting around gossiping for hours on end to thrive.
Men found that they survived best if they used the cave only to rest, re-fuel and recreate; sitting where they were told and wiping their feet significantly improved their chances of finding a mate. Then, as now, the most successful males wiped their greasy hands in their hair making it sleek and shiny; this seems to be irresistible to the female of the species.
In the modern world the boundaries between the genders have become rather blurred but there is still one major activity where the differences between men and women are as clear now as they were in Neolithic times: shopping! Men shop from outside, women from within. Whether it is a corner shop or an emporium, the shop serves the same function as the cave. It is home to women but no more than a brief resting place for men between hunting trips
The optimum shopping experience for a man is to find the shop door open. This enables him to stand on the pavement and screw up his eyes to squint at the display inside. Next best is window shopping; if you watch carefully you will see that he tries to look beyond the goods actually displayed in the window. If you are to survive in the wild you must be on the alert for camouflaged traps!
Women, on the other hand, boldly enter the store looking at everything on display and touching more than half the stock. They have an unerring instinct for asking the assistant the price of items either just going on sale or just removed to make way for fresh stock. Goods already priced and hanging on racks seem much less alluring than bundles on the floor or in bins.
At this stage they have no intention of buying anything but they cause the maximum trouble for the staff. They prefer shopping in pairs since this allows them to make disparaging remarks directed at each other but loud enough to grate on the nerves of sorely-tried shop-keepers.
In inclement weather men generally go home or play golf but if they are with their wives they may be induced to enter a shop where they will stand looking embarrassed while their better halves finger garments in totally unsuitable colours and two sizes too small. In the charity shop where I work we provide a couple of chairs in the book department where attendant husbands can find sanctuary.
Department stores use psychologists to set up the in-store displays and ambience. One store in Grimsby has a wonderfully effective arrangement on the first floor. Gents’ clothing is across a main aisle from ladies lingerie. A visiting man has either to look at maxi bras and mini knickers, risking being publicly categorised as one of the ninety per cent of men fascinated by women’s undies, or he has to look at gents’ shirts, ties and natty suiting.
I don’t care anymore. I just stand looking at the ladies’ flimsies and accosting passers-by:
“Have you seen these thong knickers? There isn’t enough material in them to cover a plouk!”
It is at the moment of purchase that the sexual differences are most apparent.
He is there with a fixed purpose. His shoes – the only pair he owns – are falling to pieces so he goes and stands outside a shoe shop keeking round the displays to focus on the distant rack of brown brogues. He straightens, swiftly checks that there are no sabre-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths or golf partners in the immediate vicinity, then plunges into the store. Five minutes later he is back on the street with the new shoes safely boxed. He is still flushed from the encounter but consoles himself that it will be another five years before he has to face the trauma again.
She already knows what is available in every High Street shop and all adjacent shopping centres. She saunters from shop to shop fingering slacks and skirts if she is, for example, planning to buy a blouse. She knows from the start where she is going to make the purchase but she believes that her meandering trek will have deceived anyone tailing her. In a final effort to deflect suspicion, she will take into the changing room at least two items she wouldn’t be seen dead in.
Until the actual moment of purchase she will mentally catalogue her entire wardrobe to establish which items will ‘go with’ the intended new addition. As soon as she is out the shop displaying her carrier bag she begins to have second thoughts. The common fate of new garments is that they are worn once, not necessarily beyond the privacy of her own home, then consigned to the wardrobe for three or four years before being donated to a charity shop.
He celebrates the purchase of a new garment by never taking it off, she by never putting it on!
Men only wear ancillary garments like socks because they get them as presents at Christmas. Many wear undergarments but few of us have accepted the need to change them regularly. My father-in-law used to put on the clean vest and pants his wife left out but he kept on the dirty ones underneath because they were warm. There is a brief time in their teens when lads shower every day and change socks and y-fronts at least once a day but they soon grow out of it and wait, like the rest of us, to be bullied into personal hygiene by a concerned woman.
I was chatting about this with my mate George recently. He was just back from a second honeymoon in London to celebrate his silver wedding. When I said it sounded romantic he must have heard the scepticism in my voice because he told me the whole story.
His best friend from school and life-long golfing partner had just lost his wife in tragic circumstances: she ran off with someone from her Pilates class.
“I thought it was only women that went to these classes?” I queried.
“So it is,” George replied, gloomily.
Worried that he might run out of socks if his wife left him, George decided to make a romantic gesture. Now that their kids were living away from home returning only to scoff decent meals and borrow substantial sums of money, he proposed that a return to London where they had spent a giddy week twenty-five years before would keep his wife happily cooking and cleaning for another quarter of a century.
Then they had wandered the capital hand-in-hand going to theatres and museums, eating in bistros and smiling nervously at the window displays in Soho. They had also shopped. The proposed return met with immediate approval and George was surprised to find how much he enjoyed sitting in the evening with his wife planning the new trip and reminiscing over the old one. A few squeezes of the hand as they sat together on the settee encouraged George to try his luck in the bedroom where he met with much less resistance than he had when he last asked: ‘How about it, then, hen?’ about five years earlier.
His wife was a bit suspicious at first that he was trying to conceal an affair but she had heard of the fate of his golf partner so she guessed that was at the root of things. One night, after reaching satisfaction without hurting her gammy knee or stimulating a war dance on the lino to relieve the cramp in George’s calf, she mentioned that she was thinking of joining the Pilates class.
For the first time in more than twenty years, George tried for extra time. The attempt won him warmish approval even if the flesh refused to rise to the challenge. He was comforted when his wife reminded him that even international players could make a mess of a penalty shoot-out.
They spent their silver wedding anniversary drinking Asti Spumante in a hotel in London. They considered booking in to their honeymoon hotel but it had been refurbished pricing it beyond their means. They went to all their old haunts, often holding hands and reminding each other of how well life had treated them over the years.
The last full day was to be devoted to shopping. It was George’s special anniversary gift and his wife showed her appreciation by letting him stay outside while she looked her fill. Harrods was the highlight of the morning. They went in together so that George could find the toilets. He was a contented man as he stood for the mandatory minute while the message from his brain travelled to his sphincter. He admired the cleanliness of the urinals as he waited until he was sure that his bladder had properly resealed before he exited the store to stroll up and down the pavement.
The unseasonably good weather had brought out more pedestrians than George was used to so he found a niche beside a lamppost close to the store entrance. A waste bin attached to the post acted as a sort of breakwater so he was able to stand unjostled while he enjoyed the passing show.
He had been standing watching the passers-by for some time when he noticed a young woman – hardly more than a girl, really – who seemed to be on a regular patrol. She was dressed in a bright orange fun-fur, teetering along on five inch heels with a wee, nondescript dog trailing after her on a sequined lead. She would turn at Harrods door and then walk away out of George’s view reappearing after nearly ten minutes.
On her third or fourth circuit she looked over and caught George’s eye. He looked away immediately, flushing at the thought that she would think him a dirty old man. When he looked back she was cleaving her away towards him through the stream of strollers towing the wee dog. She smiled at George and he managed a tentative grin in return. In the time it took her to reach him his mind had run through several scenarios of which the most likely, he thought, was mistaken identity.
As she got nearer he saw that she was beautifully made up; she was slim with blond hair although he noticed that the roots needed a touch up. Altogether she looked quite classy, George thought, until she opened her mouth.
“Do you fancy a blow job or a quickie?” She spoke in a voice that was high pitched with an accent more Walthamstow than Westminster.
George was totally gob-smacked. He was utterly unprepared for the offer and he found that he could not process a thought much less compose a reasoned response. In his extremity he reverted to Scottishness:
“How much, for a, you know, a blow thing?”
“It’s been really dead all morning so I’ll go down on you for a hundred quid.”
Now George and his wife had been to Egypt a few times so he recognised an overture to barter when he heard it.
“Twenty-five pound, and that’s generous!”
Her smile faded and, without another word she turned and towed the dog back through the throng to return to her beat. George was still shaking and it was several minutes before his heart rate returned to normal. His face still felt a bit flushed when he spotted his wife waving to him from the shop door.
She had added a few pounds round her hips since their first visit to the capital and there were wrinkles around her eyes but his heart lifted with love and possessive pleasure as he watched her approach: she looked beautiful to him. She was waving a small Harrods bag and saying something to him that he could not make out.
“Aren’t I good? The whole of Harrods at my disposal and I only bought one wee thing for the kids.” She leaned forward to kiss his cheek and almost fell when he grabbed her, kissed her lips and gave her a bear hug.
She hugged him back and then, taking his arm, dragged him off along the track of the dog-walking blond. George was being complacently masculine while his wife was enthusing about the goods and bemoaning the prices in the great store when he caught sight of the blonde.
He turned his head to avoid eye contact but watched out of the corner of his eye until she was past. His heart sank when she veered in his direction to stand right in front of him. She looked at his wife from her sensible shoes, past her matronly hips to her burgeoning jowls and then she turned to George.
“See what you get for twenty-five quid!”
Swearwords: None.
Description: We are all the victims of our ancestry.
_____________________________________________________________________
I am modestly competent with a personal computer and I am positively avuncular with police constables but I struggle with political correctness. I have no problem with the concept that all people are born equal and should be given equal chances in life but it is, surely, dangerously naïve to believe that all thirty-something’s are equal?
I would not feel altogether comfortable, I must admit, with my best friend wielding the scalpel on my bunions or taking the controls of my holiday flight. Politics might be an exceptional case. Instead of everyone on the voters roll being limited to one vote in elections we could draw a name out of the hat to represent the constituency. Not only would this guarantee that the sitting member lived in the area he or she represented, it would ensure sexual equality and virtually eliminate those scary people who believe they have a right to govern the rest of us.
It is, however, in the matter of gender that I really lose the thread of the PC argument. Watch a man in swimming trunks holding with fatherly pride his just-weaned baby to his bare chest and observe the dawning bewilderment when the infant discovers that the male nipple is purely decorative! It is no wonder that kids get complexes. Still, things may get better now they are teaching recreational sex in pre-school. Or is it Calculus in pre-school and sex in primary one?
I find it hard to keep up with all the improvements in education. We left primary school knowing how to read, write and do arithmetic but nowadays learning these skills has been deferred until post-sixteen colleges. Of course, we were rewarded for excellence by being made milk monitor or filling in the class register for the teacher: failure to learn had very different consequences – the Lochgelly!
Anyway, I digress. It is not only physical differences that distinguish men from women: our brains are wired differently. The modern notion that you should load the same software into the brains of both genders is certain to give some bizarre results.
I have a theory that it all happened when the present human design was being finalised about fifty thousand years ago. Men survived who were best at fighting or fleeing, keeping a wary eye out at all times for predators – especially other men! (The McPhersons developed a style of their own: we arrived late at Culloden.) Women had to be kept safe to tend the infants so they spent most of their time in the cave. The more active females were selected out as being unfit for purpose leaving those that enjoyed sitting around gossiping for hours on end to thrive.
Men found that they survived best if they used the cave only to rest, re-fuel and recreate; sitting where they were told and wiping their feet significantly improved their chances of finding a mate. Then, as now, the most successful males wiped their greasy hands in their hair making it sleek and shiny; this seems to be irresistible to the female of the species.
In the modern world the boundaries between the genders have become rather blurred but there is still one major activity where the differences between men and women are as clear now as they were in Neolithic times: shopping! Men shop from outside, women from within. Whether it is a corner shop or an emporium, the shop serves the same function as the cave. It is home to women but no more than a brief resting place for men between hunting trips
The optimum shopping experience for a man is to find the shop door open. This enables him to stand on the pavement and screw up his eyes to squint at the display inside. Next best is window shopping; if you watch carefully you will see that he tries to look beyond the goods actually displayed in the window. If you are to survive in the wild you must be on the alert for camouflaged traps!
Women, on the other hand, boldly enter the store looking at everything on display and touching more than half the stock. They have an unerring instinct for asking the assistant the price of items either just going on sale or just removed to make way for fresh stock. Goods already priced and hanging on racks seem much less alluring than bundles on the floor or in bins.
At this stage they have no intention of buying anything but they cause the maximum trouble for the staff. They prefer shopping in pairs since this allows them to make disparaging remarks directed at each other but loud enough to grate on the nerves of sorely-tried shop-keepers.
In inclement weather men generally go home or play golf but if they are with their wives they may be induced to enter a shop where they will stand looking embarrassed while their better halves finger garments in totally unsuitable colours and two sizes too small. In the charity shop where I work we provide a couple of chairs in the book department where attendant husbands can find sanctuary.
Department stores use psychologists to set up the in-store displays and ambience. One store in Grimsby has a wonderfully effective arrangement on the first floor. Gents’ clothing is across a main aisle from ladies lingerie. A visiting man has either to look at maxi bras and mini knickers, risking being publicly categorised as one of the ninety per cent of men fascinated by women’s undies, or he has to look at gents’ shirts, ties and natty suiting.
I don’t care anymore. I just stand looking at the ladies’ flimsies and accosting passers-by:
“Have you seen these thong knickers? There isn’t enough material in them to cover a plouk!”
It is at the moment of purchase that the sexual differences are most apparent.
He is there with a fixed purpose. His shoes – the only pair he owns – are falling to pieces so he goes and stands outside a shoe shop keeking round the displays to focus on the distant rack of brown brogues. He straightens, swiftly checks that there are no sabre-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths or golf partners in the immediate vicinity, then plunges into the store. Five minutes later he is back on the street with the new shoes safely boxed. He is still flushed from the encounter but consoles himself that it will be another five years before he has to face the trauma again.
She already knows what is available in every High Street shop and all adjacent shopping centres. She saunters from shop to shop fingering slacks and skirts if she is, for example, planning to buy a blouse. She knows from the start where she is going to make the purchase but she believes that her meandering trek will have deceived anyone tailing her. In a final effort to deflect suspicion, she will take into the changing room at least two items she wouldn’t be seen dead in.
Until the actual moment of purchase she will mentally catalogue her entire wardrobe to establish which items will ‘go with’ the intended new addition. As soon as she is out the shop displaying her carrier bag she begins to have second thoughts. The common fate of new garments is that they are worn once, not necessarily beyond the privacy of her own home, then consigned to the wardrobe for three or four years before being donated to a charity shop.
He celebrates the purchase of a new garment by never taking it off, she by never putting it on!
Men only wear ancillary garments like socks because they get them as presents at Christmas. Many wear undergarments but few of us have accepted the need to change them regularly. My father-in-law used to put on the clean vest and pants his wife left out but he kept on the dirty ones underneath because they were warm. There is a brief time in their teens when lads shower every day and change socks and y-fronts at least once a day but they soon grow out of it and wait, like the rest of us, to be bullied into personal hygiene by a concerned woman.
I was chatting about this with my mate George recently. He was just back from a second honeymoon in London to celebrate his silver wedding. When I said it sounded romantic he must have heard the scepticism in my voice because he told me the whole story.
His best friend from school and life-long golfing partner had just lost his wife in tragic circumstances: she ran off with someone from her Pilates class.
“I thought it was only women that went to these classes?” I queried.
“So it is,” George replied, gloomily.
Worried that he might run out of socks if his wife left him, George decided to make a romantic gesture. Now that their kids were living away from home returning only to scoff decent meals and borrow substantial sums of money, he proposed that a return to London where they had spent a giddy week twenty-five years before would keep his wife happily cooking and cleaning for another quarter of a century.
Then they had wandered the capital hand-in-hand going to theatres and museums, eating in bistros and smiling nervously at the window displays in Soho. They had also shopped. The proposed return met with immediate approval and George was surprised to find how much he enjoyed sitting in the evening with his wife planning the new trip and reminiscing over the old one. A few squeezes of the hand as they sat together on the settee encouraged George to try his luck in the bedroom where he met with much less resistance than he had when he last asked: ‘How about it, then, hen?’ about five years earlier.
His wife was a bit suspicious at first that he was trying to conceal an affair but she had heard of the fate of his golf partner so she guessed that was at the root of things. One night, after reaching satisfaction without hurting her gammy knee or stimulating a war dance on the lino to relieve the cramp in George’s calf, she mentioned that she was thinking of joining the Pilates class.
For the first time in more than twenty years, George tried for extra time. The attempt won him warmish approval even if the flesh refused to rise to the challenge. He was comforted when his wife reminded him that even international players could make a mess of a penalty shoot-out.
They spent their silver wedding anniversary drinking Asti Spumante in a hotel in London. They considered booking in to their honeymoon hotel but it had been refurbished pricing it beyond their means. They went to all their old haunts, often holding hands and reminding each other of how well life had treated them over the years.
The last full day was to be devoted to shopping. It was George’s special anniversary gift and his wife showed her appreciation by letting him stay outside while she looked her fill. Harrods was the highlight of the morning. They went in together so that George could find the toilets. He was a contented man as he stood for the mandatory minute while the message from his brain travelled to his sphincter. He admired the cleanliness of the urinals as he waited until he was sure that his bladder had properly resealed before he exited the store to stroll up and down the pavement.
The unseasonably good weather had brought out more pedestrians than George was used to so he found a niche beside a lamppost close to the store entrance. A waste bin attached to the post acted as a sort of breakwater so he was able to stand unjostled while he enjoyed the passing show.
He had been standing watching the passers-by for some time when he noticed a young woman – hardly more than a girl, really – who seemed to be on a regular patrol. She was dressed in a bright orange fun-fur, teetering along on five inch heels with a wee, nondescript dog trailing after her on a sequined lead. She would turn at Harrods door and then walk away out of George’s view reappearing after nearly ten minutes.
On her third or fourth circuit she looked over and caught George’s eye. He looked away immediately, flushing at the thought that she would think him a dirty old man. When he looked back she was cleaving her away towards him through the stream of strollers towing the wee dog. She smiled at George and he managed a tentative grin in return. In the time it took her to reach him his mind had run through several scenarios of which the most likely, he thought, was mistaken identity.
As she got nearer he saw that she was beautifully made up; she was slim with blond hair although he noticed that the roots needed a touch up. Altogether she looked quite classy, George thought, until she opened her mouth.
“Do you fancy a blow job or a quickie?” She spoke in a voice that was high pitched with an accent more Walthamstow than Westminster.
George was totally gob-smacked. He was utterly unprepared for the offer and he found that he could not process a thought much less compose a reasoned response. In his extremity he reverted to Scottishness:
“How much, for a, you know, a blow thing?”
“It’s been really dead all morning so I’ll go down on you for a hundred quid.”
Now George and his wife had been to Egypt a few times so he recognised an overture to barter when he heard it.
“Twenty-five pound, and that’s generous!”
Her smile faded and, without another word she turned and towed the dog back through the throng to return to her beat. George was still shaking and it was several minutes before his heart rate returned to normal. His face still felt a bit flushed when he spotted his wife waving to him from the shop door.
She had added a few pounds round her hips since their first visit to the capital and there were wrinkles around her eyes but his heart lifted with love and possessive pleasure as he watched her approach: she looked beautiful to him. She was waving a small Harrods bag and saying something to him that he could not make out.
“Aren’t I good? The whole of Harrods at my disposal and I only bought one wee thing for the kids.” She leaned forward to kiss his cheek and almost fell when he grabbed her, kissed her lips and gave her a bear hug.
She hugged him back and then, taking his arm, dragged him off along the track of the dog-walking blond. George was being complacently masculine while his wife was enthusing about the goods and bemoaning the prices in the great store when he caught sight of the blonde.
He turned his head to avoid eye contact but watched out of the corner of his eye until she was past. His heart sank when she veered in his direction to stand right in front of him. She looked at his wife from her sensible shoes, past her matronly hips to her burgeoning jowls and then she turned to George.
“See what you get for twenty-five quid!”
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned four novels and is now trying his hand at short stories. His latest novel, The Island, is a McStorytellers publication.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned four novels and is now trying his hand at short stories. His latest novel, The Island, is a McStorytellers publication.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.