40) The joy of being better. (Than you.)

I can shuck an oyster. Can you? I’ll bet you can’t. Admittedly, I make that bet on the basis of nothing better than guesswork. But my completely uninformed guess is that very few people in the modern world know how to shuck an oyster. (I don’t count France in that. France is stuck in a time-warp. They shut the shops and go home for lunch, for goodness sake.) Certainly not more than one in a hundred of normal people would know how to shuck, maybe not more than one in a thousand. And I am extremely, inordinately, some might say obscenely, proud of possessing the ancient skill of the shucker. A skill that I’m betting  you don’t have. Shucking wise, I am superior to you. Does that statement of the obvious upset you?  I don’t see how it can’t. It must be axiomatic that if I am superior to you, you are inferior to me. Never a nice feeling but I can’t get full value for my superiority unless you have it, so I can’t say I’m sorry. Pretty chuffed actually.

I learned how to
shuck last week while on holiday in France. I have always loved the idea of
eating, or rather swallowing, oysters – they always had the whiff of decadence
and I found that very seductive. But profound wimpiness and decadence never
seemed compatible, and fear of the unspeakable consequences that I have always
understood follow from eating a dodgy oyster made my forays into huitreworld
quite rare.  

But now, for
whatever reason, possibly because it is just dawning on me that, as
a Freedom Pass holder, opportunities for decadence are rapidly
diminishing  - as opposed to opportunities for decay which are sharply rising - I have found the courage to take the oyster firmly by the shell.
At last my adoration of the oyster is being properly consummated and now I
can’t get enough of them; the sea-water taste, the extraordinary,
prehistoric, sculptural  display  on a plate - oyster shells really
are a thing of pearly wonder. And I love the ritual of  adding the lemon
juice or the Tabasco or that oniony vinagrettey stuff and the accompanying
brown and bread and butter.

Am I waxing a bit
too lyrical here for your plebby taste? Sounding like a bit of  a
poncey snob? What was that, you said? Not so much a poncey snob as an utter
knob? Oh, well, that’s even better than I‘d hoped for. Because just as I get a
glorious sense of superiority from being a shucker, so my love of the oyster
experience is inextricably bound up with the fact that I can have it and most
other people can’t.

Hard to credit
today, but in Victorian times, so they say,   oysters were the staple
diet of the London poor.  The Big Macs of their day.  Would I be
loving this oyster thing so much if that were still the case? I think not.

Exclusivity is a
great pleasure in itself. Much under-rated in my opinion. Or, to be more
accurate, the pleasure is much under admitted to. My being allowed to join would mean nothing
if you weren’t out there with your nose pressed forlornly against the window.
As I stroll smugly into Whites or the Reform Club or Grouchos or Soho House or
the British Legion, West Kilburn branch, isn’t  half the joy that I’m
wanted and you’re not? (Or rather would be,  in the unlikely event of any
of them accepting me as a member.)

It’s wonderful to
be a ‘have’ for all the material comforts it brings. But there is also the
great psychological comfort of knowing you’re not a have-not. In other words,
of feeling superior.  It’s not something we shuckers and swallowers experience
consciously on a moment by moment basis. But it’s there alright, underneath,
propping up our precarious sense of self worth.

I didn’t mention
the drinking fetish that goes along with the oysters. That could be a glass or
four of champagne or Chablis or whatever wine buffs insist is the right thing
to have with oysters. I know absolutely zip about the subtleties of the
fermented grape, so here I have to combine my oyster snobbery with the inverted snobbery
of knowing bugger-all about wine – and being feckin’ prahd of my ignorance.
Wine-lovers? Pah. Swirl, sniff, sip and all that bollocks. What a bunch of
effete, public school, up your own arse nonces they are. (Probably up someone
else’s arse too, ha, ha,ha, - wankerrr! ) This might seem a bit of a
contradiction, being both a snob and inverted snob at the same time, but
why not? Both positions involve feeling  superior to the other lot so it
all works for me.

It was my friend
John B. who taught me how to shuck - I was staying at his house near Perpignan.
(Not, you note, in common as muck Provence, mais beaucoup plus coupant bord.)

Frankly, I didn’t
much fancy the idea at first, since shucking involves forcing a knife into the
shell with one hand whilst holding it with the other. It wouldn’t take
much  of a miscue to skewer your holding hand and the consequences could
easily land you in A & E facing a Triage nurse trying to suppress a
snigger.  Inferiors, quite naturally, tend to take  pleasure in the
misfortunes of superiors particularly when they are self-inflicted in the act
of doing the very thing that makes them superior. It would be like getting
Repetitive Strain Injury from repeatedly ringing the bell to summon your
servants.

But I am very
glad I conquered my fears and, both metaphorically and literally, stepped up to
the plate. My life was transformed. From inferior non-shucker to superior
shucker in a few moments, gratifyingly proving that even in fairly extreme
post-youth one can learn new tricks. Possibly not as useful   as
learning how to administer CPR, a skill which offers the possibility of hero
status if only you can find someone whose life needs saving in a crowded public
space. But still I am thrilled with my new, improved levels of
self-satisfaction.

And in case
you are the one in a hundred or  thousand who does know how to shuck and
are consequently thinking that your level of iority is no infer than mine, I am
afraid I have some distressing news for you. Not only can I shuck an oyster but
I am also able to perform an even more arcane and possibly even more up-market
task. Yes, believe it or not, I can tie a bow tie. Properly.  And make a
damned good fist of it. Admit it – you are seriously impressed.

I  learned
how to do this a long time ago from  someone whose identity  has now
disappeared between the ever widening gaps in the floorboards of my memory.
Happily however, the art – and it is no less – of tying the bow has not left
me.

I reckon the odds
of the average living human  being able
to tie a bow tie are vanishingly small. One in two thousand perhaps, and
probably not even that. So do the maths.
Even taking the low end of my estimates of 100/1 for shucking and 2000/1 for
bow tying, when you combine them you get 200,000 to 1! Or, inverting those odds, that means that it is
200,000 to 1 on – ON! – that I am superior to you.

Oh I know what
you’re thinking - that the kind of people who can shuck an oyster are very
likely to come from the same social group  as the kind of people who can tie a bowtie
(sometimes referred to by demographics analysts as the Pretentious Twat Cohort),
so those odds must be lower than that.
But even reducing them by ten times, that’s still twenty thousand to
one. Odds of 20,000/1 on, that I am superior to you? That’s
good enough for me.

Now you might be
thinking that I’m just a smug tosser and you might  very well be right.
But consider: in the very act of so thinking, you are conceding that I have something to
be smug about. You have acknowledged my superiority.

Please do not feel too badly about
your inferiority. Yours is an honourable place in the scheme of things. As I
used to tell my daughter when, year after year, I trailed in last in the
father’s race on Sports Day: hold your head high. (As I would have mine
if  I only I could have stopped vomiting.) Without losers there can be no
winners.

It is not
given to all of us to be able to both shuck an oyster and tie a bow tie. And it
is only the fact that you can’t  that
makes me exceptional.  I am humbled by
the sacrifice you are making on my behalf.

That’s
me:  superior yet humble. What’s not to
like?