Yelling
I think I’m turning into a bat. The metamorphosis is quite advanced. It’s rather worrying that I hang upside down daily, this due to my recent acquisition of a new piece of gym equipment. My last birthday included the number 6, and I’ve been getting promotional letters from the American Association for Retired People, which means that I can get great deals on dentures and cut price tickets for coach trips to the seaside. And so, in frantic search of youth, I bought something called an inverter. This strange piece of machinery looks quite like an instrument of torture, which is what it is. Clamped firmly into it, the machine flips me upside down, stretching out my vertebrae, and dumping every ounce of blood into my head. I look flushed crimson with embarrassment for hours. Extremely overweight people should not attempt this upside down move, as suffering concussion as a result of being slapped soundly in the head by your own belly is not fun. Kay also occasionally inverts daily, because the family that hangs upside down together stays together. It’s all very bat like.
But the main reason for my worry about turning into an eptesicus fuscus (the posh Latin name for a bat) is my discovery that bats spend their lives yelling. It’s how they do life. It’s all to do with their built in navigational system. I used to think of the diminutive bat being as blind, as, you guessed it, a bat. Extensive research (five minutes on the internet) reveals that this is just an urban myth, like the ridiculous notions that Elvis is alive and living in Birmingham, or that the overhead projector was a great invention. Bats actually have rather keen eyesight – but they do rely on something called echolocation in order to live. Echolocation enables a bat to emit high frequency sound waves that bounce off an object, such as a tasty mosquito, to produce a type of sound "echo" that returns to the bat's ears. In short, bats get through life by yelling. That’s how the little critter makes sense of his existence – by non-stop yelling, and by measuring the world’s response to his yells.
So bats spend all their lives yelling. They yell at each other, they yell at their lunch, they yell at the trees, they yell at their neighbours and they yell at their babies. They’re born yelling and they die yelling, and when they’re really on a roll, they can yell up to two hundred times a second. Most of their yelling is inaudible to the human ears, for which we must be grateful.
And this is where I come in.
I don’t actually yell much, at least out loud. But I have discovered that I can spend too much of my life yelling within and thus out of earshot of others. I can live with a simmering irritation, a silent shout that is the emotional equivalent of a kettle forever close to the boil. I allow my evening to be wrecked by that most British of traditions, bad service in restaurants, and instead of laughing at the Fawlty Towers ineptitude I quietly bristle. I wordlessly mutter about the price of petrol, find myself seething about the bunged up car park that is the M25, and tut-tut at the pathetic triviality of a culture that is even vaguely interested in the photos that people post of the breakfast on social media. I’m irritated by the worship song that insists that I declare that I’m mildly ecstatic during every waking moment because of Jesus, and nurse mildly violent thoughts about that strange person on the train who has a Barry Manilow ring tone on their phone. All these conspire to keep me yelling within; thus gratitude is replaced by an ongoing internal rant that simmers just beneath my skin.
And there are some people who take all this fuming to the next step, and spend every waking moment of their lives literally yelling. Complaining is their forte, they’re not happy unless they’re not happy, and they forever test others to see what reaction they can get to their yelling. Rage is what they do best, so each day is another series of encounters when they get on people’s nerves, wind them up and put them down.
What a life – seeing everything upside down, mostly in the dark, yelling, and usually parked very close to a pile of bat poo. Great for eptesicus fuscus.
Bad for homo sapiens.