Not A Rant: My Real Pet Hate: Pet Hates
“Lying finds champions in those who recognise that without lies people would have no inner privacy, that life might be infected with boredom and despair, and much evil could result.”
A.C Grayling, The Meaning of Things, 2001
A week or so ago I flexed my somewhat flaccid blogging community muscle and submitted my ‘Pet Hate’ over at My Dog Hates Football. However, I have a confession to make … my submission was in fact a lie (And you know what? I’d do it all again). *GASP*
If I were to compile a complete list of my personal gripes, niggles, or petulant grumbles about football, the result would force the question: ‘Why do I actually like it at all?’ Every week it punches me in the face without so much as a sorry, but every week I dust myself down and prepare for more of the same.
As I’ve come to understand that intense antipathy, or ‘hatred’, is the externalisation of anxieties (at its root therefore, a weakness in the ‘hater’), I know now that what all ‘Pet Hates’ serve to do is remind me what a terrible human being I am. Which then, in turn reminds me that football has no redeemable features, and so rendering part of my life to this point a sham. My actual ‘Pet Hate’ then, would have to be ‘Pet Hates’ themselves.
Fortunately, in spite of all this, I have managed to reconcile myself to all of the above, so most of the time I just absolutely enjoy wallowing in each and every one of them, and sometimes I like to enjoy them while smoking a fag, just to be extra ‘orrible.
My submitted Pet Hate is here: #18 A commentator prefacing a statement with “Should have”. There are lots of other submissions by other bloggers there too, that you might like to read.
