SEE-THROUGH ELEPHANTS

Want to know what winds me right up?

Hmm. That is a broad category, I agree. It seems to contain everything from noisy-eating,  radio-DJs talking-utter-nonsense-to-fill-up-the-time, and passive-aggressive-kitchen-posters; to ice-cream-vans-that-don’t-finish-the-tune, kids playing Chopsticks on pianos, and of course... the use of multiple exclamation marks at the end of a sentence.

I’ll narrow it down.

Today, it’s see-through elephants.

Hands up if you were expecting that! Well who could blame you. I’m talking about elephants-in-the-room, of course, but... not your normal, bog-standard, solid, shadow-casting, bulky (yet wholly ignorable) elephants in the room! I mean the see-through ones.

A see-through elephant is one that’s been let in, and perhaps into all the rooms, but you’re never quite sure whether everyone else can see it. An opaque elephant, oh for sure, you can dance around that one; you can be diplomatic with a nudge and a wink, or some sly comment about tusks and trunks if you like! The rules are clear, the air is calm and everyone knows it. They’re just not going to mention it.

But with the transparent old stompers, with the see-through, bulbous masses of lumbering unmentionables, you can never be sure. And that winds me up.

The most common examples of see-through elephants I suppose, are things like someone being in the early stages of a pregnancy, or perhaps a person who’s got another job but it’s not common knowledge yet. They get clearer and less visible, when the news is gossipy - as though... I know this thing (or at least I think I know this thing), and you might know this thing too, but I don’t know whether you do know this thing, and if I ask you whether you know this thing, and this thing is definitely not mine to tell you, then you’ll make me tell you (because how could you not?), and I can’t. I just can’t.

See-through elephants are the most dangerous, I’d wager.

The last time I encountered one, it took all my deductive skill (admittedly that is not a lot) to calculate whether to risk exposing it. Thankfully, I got it right and it was okay.

“How did you get on chatting to [so-and-so]?” asked the other person in the room.

I raised an eyebrow, inquisitively.

“Oh... good...” I said, picking up half a signal of light refracting through ivory...

“Wait... do you... do you know?” I asked.

They confirmed that they did, smiling, at which point I lapsed into a ‘phew’ and the elephant sulked off, visible and suddenly discussable to everyone.

I don’t like it. I don’t like having to work out whether or not an elephant is there. And in Britain, our culture seems to squeeze those blighters in sometimes, in some sort of acrobatic avoidance of proper intimate and honest conversation... which, as any unwitting foreigner knows, makes us squirm like nails down a chalkboard.

There you go. That’s what winds me right up - see-through elephants. Maybe we should promote a society where it’s okay for everyone to talk to anyone... about anything.

Then again, I’m not sure I’d want to encourage those radio DJs, and I certainly don’t think I could live in a world that was full of them.