First published in The Independent 11 June 2008
Goddamn it! Have I mentioned just how noisy Americans are? How noisy, sick and fat they are?
Maybe I mentioned in earlier columns how fat and sick they are but I don’t think I’ve mentioned – and correct me if I’m wrong here – just how noisy they are?
Let me clarify that: how noisy their womenfolk are. Sit within hearing distance of Americans - and generally one of the neighbouring 49 states is close enough - and it’s the women who do all the talking, if that’s the right word? Let’s try this: it’s the women to do all the chalk-scraping-on-a-boarding? Who do all the jet-engine-at-full-powering? It’s the women who make your teeth stand on end and your hair grate uncontrollably.
As a general rule, when American women talk they make a car-wrecking yard sound like the after-lunch sleep time at your local creche.
Doubt this: just the other day, I was on an Alaskan cruise shop that moseyed into this place called Glacier Bay. The ship stopped just off this amazing glacier and we watched in awe as it “calved” before our very eyes. Large chunks of blue ice, formed probably when our ancestors were just primordial slime, breaking free with a loud crack and then splashing into the freezing water below with a thunderous roar.
And you know what happened. While we were enjoying this amazing sight of nature’s power and beauty, these two American women who had been chatting at the ship’s starboard rail with us went back inside. And at that very moment, the glacier stopped calving!
True story. Okay maybe I made that up. But I am told that American homes, and especially their kitchens, have triple glazing just to be on the safe side. Now that’s is true. Almost. Sort of.
But back to American women doing all the talking. Maybe early in their marriages, American men speak. But clearly in their later years they have learnt their place. They know to remain mute while Mavis tells everyone around her – the ship’s other dining room passengers, the people below decks, the orca pod just visible on the horizon – how things have been since Norm retired all those years ago. How long ago is that now? My goodness me, I’d hate to think.
Since being abroad, I’ve developed this theory that if we could go forward 10,000 years, not that any of us would probably want to, we’d find that the American male will no longer exist.
And not just because the Y chromosome is in general decline anyway. No, my theory is that nature takes away what we don’t use regularly. And I reckon that if we could look at the American male of 10,2008AD, he’ll have no mouth.
And all because mother nature in her cruel yet understandable wisdom would decide that because the American male mouth was only being used three times a day and seeing there was another orifice to breath in and out of to survive, then she just phased it out.
It wouldn’t happen overnight, obviously, and the US male 8000 years from now will still have a small pinprick of a mouth, where liquified meatloaf will be able to be forced through a straw. But come 10,000 years hence, only males who can afford expensive, medically fitted feeding tubes that will take up all the available advertising space on TV will survive for a while. But infections and other problems will take them out too.
My only problem with this theory is this: will the American woman of 10,000 years from now still be talking as loudly and as long? Because most of their conversation seems to be about keeping their husbands in line and watching their manners, language, ways, dress, etc etc or what they used to do when they lived a worthwhile existence, will they stop talking as well ... and lose their mouths to mother nature’s ways.
In other words, can an American woman talking under water still be heard when her husband is six-feet under? You didn’t know this column could get so deeply philosophical, did you?
Could you even imagine a world without American women talking loudly and gratingly to and about their men. How the cruise ships and airport terminals and train club bars of this world would fall strangely silent.... except of course for the muted sounds of people from other countries talking about really interesting things.
Now some of you have probably guessed already that this column is a little over the top in its assessments of Americans.
And it is true that some American women don’t sound like a San Francisco Bay fog horn.
But you know what? It seems as if American women are programmed to output so many megadecibels of noise in their lifetimes. Which means that while there is the occasional, softer-spoken American woman, they seem to know instinctively that they’ve got to talk longer – if that’s at all possible – to get their quota spoken before they waddle off this mortal coil.
There was this beautiful young woman – well, she clearly thought she was – who talked virtually non stop on the nine-hour train trip from Niagara Falls to Manhattan the other day. As I said, she wasn’t talking like normal American folk so that even the engineers (we call them train drivers) at the front could share her life’s experience, but it was certainly laid out for all in her carriage to enjoy.
As soon as one friend dropped off the line – either through exhaustion or her phone battery running out – this woman would speed dial someone else and continue the monologue.
She seemed to have a lot of auditions lined up over the next few days, and the uncharitable among us might suggest each audition took exactly 30 minutes and money changed hands at the end of that time.
In those rare moments between talking non-stop on her mobile, she’d bring out her compact and add another layer of makeup to her beautiful yet somehow amazingly bland face.
• The writer tavelled to Glacier Bay and other Alaskan coldspots with Holland America lines one one of their lovely ships, but seeing he paid his own way, that’s the last time they’ll be mentioned.
