The truth about small humiliations

Take the shame.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that major misfortunes can be character building – ‘everything happens for a reason’ is possibly the most hokey phrase since ‘what’s for you won’t go by you’ – but maybe there is something to be said for suffering a small humiliation and coming out the other side. Discounting genuine trauma, an occasional knock to your ego can be useful, a valuable lesson and I cling on to that fact every time I find myself freshly mortified.

Whether it’s a cubicle door swinging open at a crucial straining moment¹, watching your girlfriend reach for the towel beside your bed and ask you why it’s so stiff², or opening your laptop to show a presentation to 200 people and realising you have an adult movie playing in your browser³, a wrench into humbling reality can armour us up against future devastation.

Can a two-star Goodreads review really hurt me more than stumbling across an email chain where a colleague has commented ‘Honestly? That article he wrote is pretty clichéd and basic!’ No, it cannot. In the spirit of owning your embarrassment, I present a roundup of just a tiny fraction of the small humiliations the universe has chucked at me over the years:

EAR PLUG

My most recent example: sitting in A&E at four o’clock in the morning in January with a silicone ear plug jammed into my ear canal. The sequence of events leading me there was so ordinary and stupid. Going to bed that night, I realised the ear plugs I wear to bed most nights – which have a handy loop on the outside for easy extraction – were packed away in the suitcase I’d been using for a weekend away. Instead of digging them out, I used an older pair of ear plugs – without said handy loop – and went to sleep. Cut to 3am, a searing pain that felt like my brain was caving in on itself, and a realisation that the ear plug had gone exploring, had taken a shine to my ear drum, and was now irretrievable without medical intervention.

Sitting in Urgent Care on Sunday night/Monday morning is one of life’s many levellers. Thankfully, it wasn’t busy, but one guy in handcuffs accompanied by two coppers made enough noise for 100 people. The ear plug nudged my ear drum every time I so much as blinked, and I was trying to sip water to abate my rising panic that my head would need to be surgically removed.

After an hour and a half of watching the prisoner pace the waiting area coming down off his drugs, threatening to ‘finish the job’ on his poor partner, and babbling about suing for police brutality, I’d have been quite happy for a stricken Airbus to plunge into my ribcage. All I could think about was the part in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 where the hapless teen has to sit in A&E with a model plane stuck to his nose because he’d decided to see what glue sniffing was like.

A kindly nurse called me into a room and looked at me as you might a simple child who has shat themselves on a fairground ride, then came at me with a large, terrifying implement which went SQUOOOOSH against my ear and sucked out the offending ear plug.

He dropped the slimy, silicone aggressor into my hand with a sigh and said I wasn’t to feel stupid, it happened all the time – albeit usually to small children, and with peas, or Lego.

He had it coming. [BBC]

BOOK CLUB

I was invited to a book club that had read my first novel The Last Romeo. This was very exciting for me because I was a new author and opportunities to discuss your work with readers are actually quite rare. I travelled to the bookshop where they met, and took my seat among the group as other members were arriving, assuming everyone had been alerted to my attendance. It became immediately clear that they hadn’t, when after some polite conversation about current popular novels, one reader began a spirited dragging of my book, quickly halted by the club leader.

I laughed it off – because it doesn’t matter, truly! – but the poor reader sat in catatonic mortification for the next two hours. I made light of it and encouraged the others to share their negatives to make the poor guy feel less uncomfortable. Unfortunately, they all got rather carried away, and dismantled every plot point and stylistic choice with the savage precision of coyotes tearing the flesh from a stricken chipmunk, and left my ego in ribbons.

‘Oh, and another thing,’ said one. ‘Why isn’t there more sex in it?’

Anyway, I wish them well.

GATE VAULT

A PE lesson was, for me, a skyscraper’s worth of Room 101s, a terror that followed me throughout my schooldays. I loathed PE, because I hate doing things I’m not good at, and before the days of ‘participation trophies’, as right-wing loons like to crow, sadistic PE teachers only liked pupils who were already demonstrated a flair at sport – you were usually taught rules, and technique, but if you lacked talent, or drive, there was no levelling up. What do you expect from a man well past thirty who wears shorts all day at work and craves the approval of brick-headed adolescents?

I have less than fond memories of Mr Brown trying to teach 11-year-old me how to do a gate vault while the rest of my class looked on in malevolent fascination. I didn't want to lunge over the metal bar; I liked being upright, feet planted on the ground, preferably leafing through a copy of Smash Hits while my pre-hormonal classmates got all this tiresome bonding out of their systems. Yet Mr Brown – who also wore bandanas – refused to let anyone else have a go until I cracked it, provoking jeers and groans from the lads waiting to show ‘Sir’ just how brilliant they were.

I am nothing if not wilful, however, and stood halfway up the huge, wooden apparatus, leaning defiantly on the bar, refusing to budge, until Mr Brown snapped, and bawled at me, and made me cry. Humiliating, yes, but I won: I still never did that gate vault.

‘Is that toilet paper stuck to the president’s leg or is he just… no, it’s toilet paper.’ [BBC]

TALK

I was invited by a teacher friend to speak to MA creative writing students at a university. I was totally gassed; it was my first serious, educational gig since being published, and I was being paid, and was promised a swanky dinner after.

Nobody turned up. Actually, one student did, so we went to the pub. My friend told me not to take it personally, that Thursday evenings were tricky as they had no classes on a Friday and the earlier in the week you hoof all your drugs, the better your Sunday looks. I shrugged it off as an isolated incident, and at least I still got paid.

Six years later, I was invited to do a similar talk, online this time, to creative writing students. Again, nobody turned up.

LABRADOODLE

My dad and his wife used to have a friendly labradoodle called Ruby who, if I do say so myself, adored me and would become very excited when I came to visit, once a twice a year. So excited, in fact, that one particular afternoon she charged at me and headbutted me in the scrotum. Painful enough, except… things didn't ‘feel right’ so I had to be driven to the small local hospital’s minor injuries unit and have my testicles pored over in a deathly quiet room – which also seemed to double up as an operating theatre – by two affable but direct Scottish nurses, Janice and Fiona, whose Saturday mornings were perhaps usually spent patching up adventurous toddlers or doling out Plan B to post-hookup teenagers.

‘The left one,’ I said, flat on my back, trousers off, balls to the air, ‘does it feel in the right position to you?’
‘My left or your left?’ said Fiona.
‘Mine.’
Janice had a quick fumble of the offending ball. ‘Hmmmm.’ Then Fiona took a turn. Safe to say, my John Thomas shrank a couple of kilometres back inside my body.
‘Thing is,’ said Janice. ‘I don’t know. We don’t have them, you see. I suppose it looks okay.’
Fiona held in a chuckle. ‘They’re all different, aren’t they?’ She also said something else that I won’t repeat here, as it falls firmly within TMI.

Discharged with weapons-grade painkillers, I spent the rest of the weekend in loose shorts and curling up in a ball whenever the dog approached. I saw my dad’s GP on Monday. After groping my tackle, he told me the left one was indeed knocked slightly out of kilter but would be fine. His prescription? Even better painkillers – and tight Speedos.

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1. As happened to a friend in an airport, as a group of horrified schoolchildren looked on.

2. As told to me by a woman I used to work with, and has haunted my nightmares ever since. ‘Don’t touch that,’ he said, apparently, ‘it’s my tag rag.’ 🤮

3. As witnessed by me (and 199 other people) as we waited for a different kind of show to start.