Is left the new right?

I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to normal, thank goodness,’ I ventured to the chap sitting alone at the next table. He was staring at the centimetre of lager remaining in the bottom of his glass. The cheapness of his clothes and the loneliness enveloping him like a caul was contradicted by his youthful glamour.

‘Normal?’ he said. ‘Normal doesn’t work. You can shove your old man’s normal up your backside.’ My sociable, celebrant spirit recoiled from the aggression. ‘I only meant that it was good to see the bars and shops open again,’ I said lamely. He reconsidered his anger and his contemptuous withdrawal from the world in the light of my humility, then reluctantly agreed with the smaller picture that it was indeed a blessed relief that the bars had reopened at last. The waitress placed a beer before me. I asked her if she wouldn’t mind bringing another for my friend here. When it came, he lifted it in my direction and said, ‘To you, Mr Normal.’

A not unfriendly silence elapsed between us, which I broke with: ‘So you don’t like normal then?’ He looked pityingly at me. ‘Of course I like normal. I like fake news. I like this turbo capitalism that is destroying the tundra, the rainforests and the oceans and makes a handful of people rich and everyone else poor. I like porn delivered to my hand-held device by 5G. I am very happy for you that you have an iPhone with a lithium-ion battery containing cobalt hand-mined by child labour in Congo. I like not having a job or money and eating shit and being infantilised by advertising and patronised and lied to by the media. What is not to like, Mr Normal? One day I hope to afford a pair of reality-augmenting glasses so that I can see it all better.’