The butcher

I know that you all wish you could be a brilliant professor like me, but it has its drawbacks. The biggest is dealing with ordinary people.

I will try to explain.

You know how you feel when you walk on the street, and you pass some crazy homeless person randomly barking? You may feel some pity, if they’re a safe distance away. Let’s assume they’re on the other side of a busy road, so there’s no chance that you’ll be accosted. Then you have the luxury of wondering just what it is like for them to be trapped in that life, unable to comprehend the world around them, beset by flashes of theories and conspiracies and prejudices and resentments, none of them coherent or sophisticated enough to make the slightest sense of the seeming chaos of a modern civilisation. It is easy to imagine how angry they must get at being unable to understand not only what is happening around them, but what is happening in their own misfiring minds, and what it is they want. Even when they do stumble on some clear desires, they have no clue how to make them happen, although that doesn’t stop them occasionally thinking that they know exactly what to do, and doing some bonkers thing that suddenly — and of course inexplicably — makes their life vastly much worse. When you see such a person you can’t help wishing that there was a way to make them better, to clear their minds and wire them properly and crank them up to see the world as it really is and make perfect sense of it and to act rationally and usefully, but you know that there probably isn’t. The best we can hope is for our society to look after them better. Or at least keep them out of sight.

And that is exactly how I think of people below the level of full professor.

(I’m sorry if that offends you. In an earlier attempt I tried to use the analogy of how much smarter you are than your dog, to which you instinctively attribute the full set of human emotions and thoughts and probably also philosophical and political opinions, even though the dog has a brain smaller than an apple and sometimes nibbles other dogs’ poo. I decided that was an even worse illustration of how I compare myself to ordinary people. After all, you probably like your dog.)

Nonetheless, I am condemned to occasionally interact with the hoi polloi.

Earlier this week I went to the butcher. Now, before you get all in a twist worrying that I am going to say cruel things about a simple butcher, let me make clear that I really like my butcher. For him I would go with the dog analogy. He has big sad eyes and lots of shaggy hair, and when he is carefully cutting a piece of meat off the bone and fully lost in concentration, his tongue hangs out. There are times (although this was not one of them) when I enjoy going to the butcher. For one thing, in the butcher’s shop there’s no danger I’ll meet any vegetarians.

It’s true that it’s hard to respect him as a sentient being. All he does all day is cut up pieces of meat! And he has so little grasp of basic economics that, although he procures and prepares by far the best meat in town, he charges some of the lowest prices. If it wasn’t against my own economic interest I might try to explain this to him, but I doubt it would do any good. He would mumble some gibberish platitudes about just doing it for the pleasure of a job well done or not wanting to do wrong by his loyal customers. I couldn’t handle that. The basic pleasantries we already exchange are bad enough.

Just as I’ve learned how to scratch a dog’s belly or throw some coins to a homeless person without looking at them, I know how ordinary person conversations go. The ritual is that you pretend to be interested in each other’s current quality of life, and the length and tone of your respective responses is proportional to how well you know each other. If we are only passing acquaintances, then everything is going well in only two words. If we are good buddies who have known each other for years, then I can deliver a long monologue about how my last grant was rejected and I was just given a new tedious administrative assignment and my PhD student has initiated a formal complaint against me and as of yesterday my postdoc has now made three assassination attempts.

Thus, our conversation was:

“You all right?”

“Yeah, good. You?”

“Can’t complain.”

This time, unfortunately, the butcher had more to say.

“You must be excited by the new discovery.”

Oh God. He sometimes tries to bond over science news. I have given up trying to play along. “What’s that?”

“They’ve found that new particle, haven’t they? You’ll have been following it closely?”

It must be another one of those ridiculous 2-sigma blips from the CERN clowns. Every few years someone trips over a cable and they bring the media team back out of hibernation to whip up a press release. I shouldn’t knock it — it works with the plebs.

We all have to do our bit for science outreach, so I said, “Oh yeah, it’s changed everything.” I knew that at this point he’d be suddenly worried that I was going to launch into ten minutes of techno-babble, so I put it in terms he could understand. “It’s keeping us very busy.”

“Yeah, a busy time for everyone,” he said, which a normal person would understand is meant to be the first in a lively exchange of vacuous statements, but I refused to play along and instead asked for some sausages.

Just then one of the senile regulars came in and started talking. I had witnessed this many times before. In a way it is a beautiful thing, because it’s sad to see how loopy these people are and at the same time wonderful how well the butcher kindly chatters with them like it’s the highlight of his week and effectively performs a fantastic community mental health service that the state can’t afford because the impoverished and mentally deficient are unable to form a solid voting bloc. In another way it is utterly terrifying, and I stood completely still and hoped I would be mistaken for another meat fridge.

“Have you got in the big order for my birthday party?”

“That was last week, wasn’t it?”

“Oh no no no! It’s this week. You haven’t gone and forgotten again, have you?”

The butcher picked up a random piece of paper from his counter. “Never fear! I’ve got it here! I’ll have it ready later. Are you sending in your son to pick it up?”

“That’s right! I’m sending Andy in to get it. You’re sure you’ll have it ready?”

“Two o’clock? Absolutely.”

“Good man. I’ll be seeing you, then. And it’s great news about that new particle, isn’t it?”

“They say it’s changed everything.”

“Thank God for that! I’ll be seeing you!”

Then he left, shambling, shabbily dressed, and I’m afraid to say, quite smelly. It wasn’t until well after he had gone and the smell had significantly declined that I relaxed and breathed easily. I felt a wave of gratitude to the butcher, both for being so kind to that crazy old man, and for keeping me out of it.

This is how the world is for us distinguished professors. We are surrounded by the unstable and unhinged masses, who although usually harmless can turn dangerous in an instant, and the only thing keeping us safe is the occasional guard dog.

I was so moved that I actually spoke. I said, “You handle him so well.”

“It’s nothing. I’ve known him for years. He used to be one of my best customers.”

“He wasn’t always like this?”

“Oh no. He used to be a science professor.”

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If you’re new to the Fictional Aether, head to the Table of Contents for everything, including all of the previous (and, eventually, future) adventures of our heroic Professor.