Written today and first published here
The man leaned back at the bar and continued:
“And as pop stars and other celebrities grow older many of them fall out of the public gaze ... indeed, some of them falling out of their own gaze! They forget they were once seen as super-human although they were never super-human in truth. They always felt human even in their hey-day; it’s just they forget often quite how super-human they might once have been – at least in the public’s gaze.”
At times, the man laughed at what he himself was saying. I offered a conversational prop for the continuation of what thoughts I simply knew he had yet to express:
“You mean the act of growing old itself and – without putting too fine a point of it – being forgotten other than by his or her own immediate circle? Indeed in many cases forgotten by everyone!”
“Yes, but think about it – in these pub quizzes, which I know you enjoy, can you imagine any such once famous people being faced with a question about themselves?”
It was my turn to laugh, as, after much thought, I replied:
“You mean something like the quizmaster asking ‘What Sixties pop star famously split his trousers when performing?’ and, after much thought, one of the elderly contestants in a quiz team suddenly whispers to his team colleagues: ‘Flipping heck, I think that must have been me!’ – and he writes ‘PJ Proby’ on the answer sheet...”
“Yes, exactly,” the man said. “There are even some examples when such people have completely forgotten their own past fame or any stage-name they might once have used and, in the example you quote, one of the other team members says ‘I think I know the answer: it's PJ Proby’ and the team-member who had once been PJ Proby himself slowly shakes his head, saying ‘I’m not sure’, but the significance of the answer fails completely to dawn on him when he, as the official team scribe, agrees to write the suggested answer on the answer sheet, with no real confidence that it is correct. The other team members admit to not knowing the answer at all but are quite happy with ‘PJ Proby’ being offered. They are of course delighted when this is announced as the correct answer and they win the whole evening’s quiz by that single point!”
“But what is the point? What is the point in what you say, I mean? It all sounds very sad to me. These once thrusting celebrities - now in their dotage - ending up in pub quizzes!”
The man looked quizzically at me. But he had no time to answer as the interval had come to an end. I went back from the bar to sit with my own team: leaving the man with his own quaint thoughts and no doubt even quainter team-mates.
“The next round is on famous writers,” announced the quizmaster. “Number one: Who wrote the 2003 book: ‘Weirdmonger’?”
If this were a round about famous writers, I thought, it seemed strange to ask questions about them. The answers would be too easy. But this one was difficult. Nobody on our team knew. Nobody in the whole pub quiz knew. Some guessed. I later surreptitiously picked out the answer sheets from the bins as I was curious about their guesses. Not one guess was the same as another. That seemed to prove something.
The quaint man I had been talking to during the interval waved to me at the pub door before he left. His team’s wastepaper bin, I later discovered, was full of indecipherable doodles. Not even a famous writer would have been able to fathom any sense in the doodles to create a neat ending from them. It was as if this story were destined to split open like a rotten pomegranate even before someone had started writing it.
Somewhere there is a place for us.
Indeed, our team had drawn for fourth place – which was much better than usual, indeed much better than we had expected at the beginning of the evening.
Fully satisfied, I left the pub with the rest of my happy team-mates, basking in a new glory that only pub quizzes could bestow.
