F You Very Much by Danny Wallace

Author:Danny Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

• • •

My wife woke up at three in the morning shaking with laughter.

“It’s just so unlike you,” she said. “‘Take your pints and fuck off!’”

She kept giggling then doing her new impression of me.

“Take your pints and fuck off!” she said, the bed now quaking.

Steve wrote an apology on his blog, but he never sent one to me. It turned out that once, a few years earlier, he’d written me a thank-you letter. He’d read one of my books while standing in a shop. (He didn’t buy it, but I’m willing to let that go.)

I felt terrible about what I did to Steve maybe three microseconds after I’d done it. I suggested to the people I was with that we move pubs, and that’s just what we did, squeezing past the actor outside still laughing with strangers.

But an hour later I felt great. I had exorcised something. I’d done the thing we all want to do when rudeness is left at our door like a dog turd in a brown paper bag. I had shoved it straight back through the owner’s letter box.

But I also feel like what happened was important. I met one of those people who do those things you read about. He was an actual person. And by doing that, I sort of feel like I’ve met them all now. Not the ones who send awful messages to grieving parents, or the ones who tell soldiers to burn in hell, or the ones who threaten someone with rape because they have the ludicrous idea that one of the country’s most celebrated literary icons might be a suitable candidate for inclusion on a banknote.

But the normal ones who make up the mass. The ones who find a voice online, but a voice that doesn’t match the one they use in the pub. Those who have helped create a New Rudeness that no one would ever have chosen and people are still finding a way to stop.

There will be those among you who say, “Yes, but what about freedom of speech?,” and that’s a good point, but it’s just one step away from thinking, “I’m only being honest” is a valid excuse for telling a kid at a bus stop she’s fat.

We must praise the internet for giving us the right of reply. Steve thought I was a dick, so he got in touch to tell me. I thought Steve was a dick, so I told him face-to-face—though that was marginally less comfortable for him, and you might argue that it was me who became the bully.

I’ve been in email contact with Steve a few times since that day in the pub. He seems all right. Perhaps it’s because we both now realize the other is an actual person. He told me he was genuinely horrified the day we met because he honestly didn’t think he was that person. He’s also read much of what you have just read. I told him I was writing it, and he said that was fine.

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