During the 1980s, you couldn’t go into a pub without seeing someone earnestly stacking 20 or 50 beer mats on the edge of the table, knocking them upwards with the back of his fingertips, catching them one-handed on the twirl, and expecting to be congratulated on this wonderful achievement.
But the really scary one – again from the 80s – was balancing a tower of 10 coins on your upraised elbow, and then whiplashing your arm forward and catching all the coins in your hand. I tried it as a student with a single coin, and with biblical force this coin struck someone 20 feet away on the forehead.
Well, ahead of the curve and effortlessly zeitgeisty and contemporary as ever, I have now got into the modern equivalent of this – the water bottle challenge. My 12-year-old introduced me to it: the WBC is sweeping the nation’s schools, to the horror of headteachers everywhere.
What you have to do is take a half-filled water bottle, and flip it in the air so that it somersaults and lands upright. On its base is all right, but you get much more respect from the water bottle challenge community if it lands on the smaller surface area of its lid. And if it splits and spills water all over your homework, that is a hilarious occupational hazard, eminently YouTube-able.
As crazes go, this is in fact less irritating than the beer mats and elbow coins of old. And both children and adults can join in.
Muggen off
Obsession with the Danish concept of hygge has become widespread. The word is almost impossible to pin down exactly. It means cosy, or nice: the feel of a favourite jumper or comfy chair, but overlaid with twee ideas of gathering around a lovely open fire in your knitwear: refuge from a bracing Danish winter of the sort that Scandi crime fans might more readily associate with a mangled corpse in the snow. Hygge has become a massive marketing concept.
My colleague Zoe Williams has commented on a book called The Book of Hygge which says hygge means that feeling we get “when we light a candle at our breakfast table” in the morning. Whaat? These ideas do not make me feel hygge.
In fact, I want to popularise an equally potent Danish word: muggen, meaning grumpy or cross or sour. Muggen is more common with me than hygge; muggen is waiting for the internet to stop buffering, muggen is your coffee shop giving you a latte in a pointlessly tall glass, which is red hot, with no handle. I’m so at home with muggen that it makes me feel hygge.
Woolly socialist
Jeremy Corbyn has got something right. While social media users are demanding that he answer the various robotic inanities being mouthed on the Conservative conference platform, or the prime minister’s risk-free denunciation of conveniently anonymous establishment types who are allegedly “sneering at patriotism”, Corbyn has chosen instead to go walking near Hadrian’s Wall with his wife Laura.
The Corbyns went into the Bardon Mill Village Store and Tea Room, cheerfully posed for photos, and Jeremy bought Laura an upcycled woolly wrap, made from recovered knitwear. What’s wrong with that?
It’s become commonplace to complain about politicians being a bunch of metropolitan navel-gazers, imprisoned in their Westminster world, obsessed with political gossip. Well, while the Conservatives are peevishly checking their smartphones in the bubble, Corbyn is strolling in Northumberland. I admire his sang-froid.
