I succumbed to the pleasure of a local hostelry at the weekend, incidentally while the Six Nations Rugby was on. Calamitous mistake. Jam-packed full of halfwits who have never played rugby, who don’t understand the rules of rugby, and who use rugby as a misguided vehicle to attain social acceptance.

Incorrigible berks. The game is unintelligible wank.

What is it with grown men (and women) who scream at a screen at a televised sports event unfolding hundreds or even thousands of miles away? Particularly regarding a ‘world’ sport that’s only seriously played in about 10 countries? Like cricket, we invented these games and made the rules so pointless and convoluted that no serious nation would participate, and we could once again ‘rule the waves’.

In the main, our former dominions were the only ones who took part, and we would trounce them at will. And then, they ended up mastering what we pleased to call games (or even, ahem, sports), and they started a lengthy process of mercilessly dicking us into oblivion.

‘Come ON!’, they spat at the screen while some emaciated, spindle-legged trainee corpse seemed to burst his balls running towards a white line pained on some grass, carrying a large egg and being chased by a huffing-and-puffing gaggle of fat blokes. Ok, great to contribute to the stadium atmosphere if you’re there and if you think It might drive on the team. But you’re sitting in a pub, you palookas.

Nobody bats an eyelid though, but can these truly be adjudged credible behaviours? Mind you, it’s arguably not as egregious as lairy football fans in slim-fit tracksuits, ankle-socks and sliders standing maladroitly in bars in a steadfast mission via senselessly poor clausal structures and shithouse syntax to prove personal ‘hardness’. Jesus, even their wannabe wags wear those fluffy slider slippers that trigger your fashion gag reflex in millisecond. What nincompoops ‘the lads’ are.

But regarding the pub-centred ranting and hurrahing of course, this is neither genuine excitement nor enthusiasm. These asshats are performing, just like the mother in the supermarket who carries on with extended loving monologues to her infant. She’s talking to you, not the sprog she’s popped out.

She is gut-wrenchingly desperate for you to believe that she’s a good mother, so she can sup every last piece of super-mummy energy from the merest approving glance you might nonchalantly flick in her direction.

She craves reassurance on that one point, and that one point only: to shoot up with your admiration. She’d sacrifice her marriage, her house, everything, for our wholesale approval of her mother-love toolkit. But if we deem her to be a shit one, she’s done.

Her mother-in-law has already suggested that she’s not holding the baby right, and her husband has started to furtively dip into Pornhub in preference to tackling a winking eye that looks like a punched trifle. Without a constant buttress for her mental state, she’ll be wishing the midwife in the delivery suite had thrown the baby away and just given her the turd.

That’s why the performance in the Tesco aisle is vital.

The wingnuts in the pub are seeking your approbation too. They want you to associate them with rugby because they conflate rugby with toughness and ethics.

It’s James Bond by proxy.

Me? I’d rather just watch You Only Live Twice and slap my wife’s skimpily-pantied arse in order to feel the part, so to speak.

As if I would? I’m a pumping, Boss-wearing, Westie-walking, metrosexual hunk of post-mullet uptown funk, baby.

So, I won’t even need to hollow out a Japanese volcano, build a funky-ass monorail, and staff it with 500 oriental karateka to get the authentic buzz. I furthermore won’t be obliged to dress up as Osato and be shot by the missus in order to learn about the price of failure.

That is self-evident to anybody who realises that their once-in a-lifetime life has been characterised by the incineration of invaluable time playing out these tosspot charades.

Just do your own thing.

unsplash-logoLaura Smetsers