Isolation Diary — 3 — About a Man
I think I took the wrong message from ‘About a Boy’.
I think about it quite often. ‘About a Boy’ (and I have no idea why I’m putting it in inverted commas. I wanted to make it clear it was the title of a film and felt capitalising it wouldn’t do the job. I probably should put it in italics instead, but it’s too late now.) is a film starring Hugh Grant and a then very young and ugly Nicholas Hoult. Since then, Nicholas Hoult has grown to be a very attractive man but remained, in my opinion, quite a bad actor. He reminds me of Daniel Radcliffe, who is definitely quite a bad actor, but also someone who I really enjoy watching. With both Nicholas and Daniel you can really feel them acting. Particularly in dramatic scenes, you can see them really acting hard. Doing that thing that bad actors do where they sort of half laugh while saying a line, in a way that nobody in real life ever does but all of us bad actors do so very often when we try to act, badly.
Anyway, About a Boy (corrected it) is a film starring Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult in which Hugh Grant is a cool bachelor and Nicholas Hoult is an ugly little rat of a school boy who is getting bullied and somehow (I can’t remember how) becomes friends with Hugh Grant. Also Nicholas Hoult is having a bad time because his mum (Toni Collette, an absolutely brilliant actor if you ask me) is a vegan and also previously attempted suicide. The film is actually really good and is based on a book by Nick Hornby and I like it a lot. But there’s a scene where Hugh Grant, a very wealthy bachelor (wealthy because his dad wrote a Christmas song), breaks down his life into units of a time. Each unit of time, I think, is 45 minutes, and he says things like ‘having dinner in a fancy restaurant — 2 units’ and ‘having my hair carefully dishevelled — 1 unit’ and ‘recreation — 2 units’. Things like that.
The whole point of the film is that Hugh Grant is not happy. He’s rich and handsome and can do whatever he wants all the time, but by the end he is much happier because he’s going out with Rachel Weisz and Nicholas Hoult comes round a lot. He’s happier, because there are people taking up his time and telling him what to do with it. He can no longer spend 90 minutes playing pool (alone, weirdly) because he has to take Nicholas Hoult to a guitar lesson or something, and, really, that’s what life is all about.
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But I remember watching the montage of him getting a haircut and eating a dinner and playing solo pool for a weirdly long time, and thinking — that does actually look like a lot of fun. He can do whatever he wants all the time. He doesn’t go to work, he doesn’t seem to do washing up, I assume he has a cleaner. He can just float through life — and to me, as a teenager watching that film, I thought, ‘cool’.
I thought about it today because today was Saturday and I had nothing to do. I mean, nothing that I could do, even. I couldn’t leave the house. But I still had stuff I should do, and I guess that’s Hugh Grant’s point in the film. If you never have to do anything, everything you do is pointless. Today I should’ve written a lot, and I should’ve worked out and I should have done a lot more cleaning and packing than I did. But I didn’t, so I had this sense of guilt and shame and stifled panic in my chest from 2pm onwards. The horrible feeling of being alive and wasting it. And I guess that’s what Hugh Grant had. The feeling that he was wasting his life.
So I suppose what would be good is living a life where you had to do nothing, and enjoying it. That’s maybe the ideal existence. But as human beings we are forever damned to try and pretend that life has a meaning. Life doesn’t have a meaning, and really we should all just accept that and play pool forever, but playing pool forever means admitting that life has no meaning, and our brains can’t handle it.
I don’t really know what I’m saying. I wish we could all be Hugh Grant at the start of ‘About a Boy’ (went for both this time to be extra safe) but enjoy it. But also I’m glad we’re not, because what would be the point? There probably is far more reward in a life of responsibility and work and commitment and perseverance and family and love, rather than a life of infinite pool. It doesn’t mean anything, but when you’re pretending it does, it feels nice. I think? Right?
Anyway, today I achieved absolutely nothing. I literally cut my own hair, had a shower and watched football and that was essentially it. Goodbye.
