Cloth eared bint

This subject is a favourite bugbear of a friend of mine, and it has never been so apparent as it is for me now.

It is the startling inability of people to actually listen to others. I have been, for reasons I won’t go into too much detail about here (lest I begin an unseemly and undignified rant which is likely to run into several thousand words. See, I’ve started already!) made to realise the glaring truth of this statement over the past week or so.

Please forgive the following sub-Charlie Brooker phrasing, but it is incredible that there are certain situations and certain people where you may as well be repeatedly saying ‘wibble’ to a pile of breeze blocks as actually making intelligible speech with a cogent argument. Not that I actually do that very often, you understand.

I realise that there are often self-serving reasons for people not listening, that it is occasionally not advisable to remove the cloth from our ears. It can even be beneficial (as I'm sure some of my readers will confirm) to feign deafness on a selective basis. There is also of course the normal human condition of self-interest. Despite most of us being painfully shy, we are surprisingly arrogant when we have actually managed to strike up a conversation with someone else. We only endure the tedium of listening to others' woes/jokes/love lives/work gripes* so that we can get around to telling them about the much more interesting subject of our own.

But I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm referring to the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness of someone who refuses to listen. Your face may be blue, your sinews straining with the effort of getting across (I assure you) a perfectly reasonable and valid point, but still... nothing. There is only so much of this a man can take, let me tell you.

Frustration is not an adequate word to describe it. Fuck people and their fucking shit.

* Delete as necessary.