I am fortunate enough to live with a flatmate who not only enjoys cooking, but does it well; and one of the innumerable pleasures of living with him is the fact that he is wont to make sausage sandwiches on occasion, most notably Saturday afternoons when I am ever so slightly hung over. He made sausage sandwiches tonight (although, of course, I am hardly likely to be hung over on a Tuesday) using some rather lovely pieces of pork obtained at a butcher’s (as opposed to obtained at Sainsbury’s).

‘What do you want on your sandwich?’ he asked at one point, extracting bread and butter from the cupboard.

‘Ah,’ said I; ‘I shall doctor mine.’ Two slices of bread I placed to one side of the plate; a small helping of brown sauce I placed to the other; the sausages I situated in between, next to my fork and knife.

‘What the hell is that? That’s not a sandwich. That’s heresy!’ exclaimed Flatmate, staring at my plate in horror. ‘You’re supposed to put the sauce and the sausages in between the slices of bread, not off to one side like that. You - you’re a sandwich Cathar, with your bread and filling duality!’

And so it was decided that we are perfectly suited to be flatmates, not simply because our sillinesses match, but because we both know what Cathars were. How could I do anything other than love humanity, when such a person as Flatmate exists?

Encomium, n. - glowing and warmly enthusiastic praise; also: an expression of this

‘I hate people.’
‘This makes me question my faith in humanity.’

I hear those two sentences a lot and, until recently, never had much cause to disagree with them. After all, people do terrible things - is this not so? They blow each other up, murder and beat and mistreat one another, insult and degrade those around them, drive like lunatics and walk slowly in front of each other on the pavements. The tiny things people do create enormous ill will.

Take, for example, the vagrant (I assume he is a vagrant) who stands at the traffic lights on the corner outside my friend’s flat block in south London. When the lights turn red, the vagrant wanders back and forth across the street in front of the stopped cars. Occasionally he relieves his bladder in front of them as well. My friend thinks he should be shot in the head for causing low-level unpleasantness to a vast number of people.

My first thought upon hearing this was, ‘What if he’s lovely to his mother?’ And I realised, quite suddenly, that I don’t hate people at all.

In the collective sense, maybe people are terrible creatures. Certainly, when one imagines the great, seething masses of humanity that inhabit the planet, the picture is not usually a pretty one. War, starvation, privation, corruption, exploitation, hatred, bigotry: these are all the products of humanity on a collective scale.

But ah! On an individual scale, people are lovely, are they not? The people one knows, the people one can envisage on an individual, rather than collective, basis: do we not feel the most profound sympathy? The most poignant empathy, even if we do not personally care for the individual in question?

I do. I didn’t use to think so, but I do. Remembering past reactions to things has brought it home: I can find something sympathetic in anyone. When America condemned the September 11th hijackers, I felt for them and pitied them. Where some revile George W. Bush, I praise him for being amusing. When my friend advocates shooting the vagrant in the head, I wonder if he might have interesting things to say.

And thus this blog. Other blogs whinge, bitch, moan, and complain about the state of the world, the state of the nation, or the state of people in general. I adore such blogs; they’re enormously entertaining. But, after wondering for ages what the hell I could possibly blog about, and what useful things I might have to add to the discourse of the universe, I think I might have come up with something pretty damned good: I like people. They fascinate, amuse, and move me. And that’s what I’m going to write about, although it’s possible that Rousseau said it better, long ago, in The Social Contract:

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.*

All the prophets are silent, the gods are all dead,
What we have now is reason and science instead,
And on man’s noble brow rest our hopes and our dreams,
So rejoice that his wisdom is all that it seems.