12 hours later and I'm still unclenching

I don’t know how long it lasted. It could have been 30 seconds, it could have been 30 minutes. I still don’t know because I can’t bring myself to go back and watch it again with a stopwatch.

We were going to try to avoid it, but I stupidly got ahead of myself and turned the TV on a few minutes early. Robbie Williams with his grey mullet and a glittery tracksuit, with Nicole Scherzinger and somebody else, no idea, were singing one of those wailing, over produced songs that pop has been so fond of for the last three decades. Then a Louis Vuitton trunk holding the trophy was wheeled onto the stage, sorry, pitch, and opened by… somebody. I will get back to the Louis Vuitton thing, but first I need to address the worst bit of the World Cup final, and I’m not even talking about the half-time show. Thank god the next World Cup will be in Iberia and Morocco, there will be none of that nonsense here. The only acceptable parts of it were the Muppets, obviously, and OG Ronaldo and Ronaldinho coming out with their nan who forgot to put her tracksuit bottoms on. No, the very worst of it was, as you already know, Tom Cruise on a little platform doing a speech about football.

My bumhole winced. My stomach turned upside down. I was shouting at the TV “make it stop, caralho!!!” and hanging onto Luís’ arm in case that helped, but he was just saying “é pá… é pá… é pá… que é isso?”. I wonder if Cruise announced to FIFA that he’d be appearing at the final, rather than waiting to be asked.

Which brings us to today’s word: CRINGE.

Cringe is very important in some parts of the anglophone world but, evidently, not all. For many of us, it’s a physical reaction, an experience, part of our very being.

Cringe comes from an Old English word meaning to yield, to bend…. and the sound of it does reflect the motion of one’s body folding into itself, retreating from horror. One can cringe in fear of some terrible monster standing in front of one, but to the British, a terrible monster is nothing compared to the second-hand embarrassment of somebody making an utter fool of himself.

It was rather enjoyable scanning the internet seconds after Cruise’s speech to see that every Briton everywhere in the world was cringing having just watched a man who was cute in the 80s, whose cult (I’m not naming them, they’re mental) has seemingly removed every vestige of self-awareness from him and has given him the idea that we all need to hear revolting purple prose about what football means to the world.

Second-hand embarrassment isn’t unique to the British, of course, but we do have the lowest tolerance for it, and why we have distilled the experience down into the one word. As far as other anglophones nations go, I’m fairly sure Australians and New Zealanders feel the cringe almost as strongly as the British, anglophone Canada to a lesser degree.

As far as non-anglophones, I can only speak on the Portuguese, and the Portuguese cringe tolerance is significantly higher than ours. Just watch any telenovela or awards ceremony or weekend afternoon “let’s look at sausages in this week’s town” show to understand that. When something is cringeworthy enough to be felt by the Portuguese, they are able to wave it off with “well, that’s embarrassing”. They don’t FEEL it for hours after, like I am, now, writing this. The expression vergonha alheia means second-hand embarrassment and it’s a VERY commonly used expression, but it’s not succinct enough, not visceral enough to match cringe.

There were plenty of Portuguese spectators shouting at the TV last night saying “what IS this shit?” and they might have believed that they were cringing, but they were not experiencing pure cringe, the kind that puckers your arse and shoots it northwards to your duodenum, sends your knees up into your chest, tightens your throat and makes you squeal “no, no, NO!!”

And Americans? They apparently have no cringe-o-meter at all. It was they who put that bloody nonsense on the telly, after all.

While we’re on words that I have to try to explain to Luís when I’m shouting at the telly in English, another very useful word is NAFF, which takes me back to the Louis Vuitton thing.

I have never understood the lure of wearable or carryable stuff with writing or logos on, and on “luxury” items even less so. They are just signalling to the world that the wearer regards these things as status symbols. WHICH IS RIDICULOUS. Ostentatious wealth is just tacky, and the status symbols the silly people so adore are so often uuuuuugly. The ugliest of all the nonsense luxury brands is the logo-infested Louis Vuitton. Uglier than a horse brass Hermès scarf, uglier than a Chanel suit, uglier than a Birkin, uglier than a squished Lamborghini, Louis Vuitton is brown, goes with absolutely nothing, and shouts “I’ve fallen for the high-end psyop!!”

Brown is a lovely colour when it’s a natural fibre, skin, hair, dead leaves, wood, leather, but surely nothing should be painted brown.

Wearing or using Louis Vuitton and its brown on brown logo-fest, which looks good next to not one single colour other than brown, cannot, therefore, be for its look or style, it can only be for its signalling to the world that you can afford (or pretend to afford, with knockoffs) such a disgustingly ugly thing, and doing such a thing is extremely NAFF… that is, tacky, piroso, cheap.

The World Cup trophy is already quite garish. To wheel it on in a Louis Vuitton trunk, looking all pleased with themselves was just… naff. What on earth did it have to do with anything other than saying “look, we can afford a Louis Vuitton trunk!! We have no taste!!”

Anyway, I’m off to see if I can reposition my bumhole.