Unlike you chimps, I always do my own thing

Times

11-07-2025

No doubt you saw the story about the monkeys in Zambia who put blades of grass in their ears as a fashion thing. Chimps, I think they were. Yes, I know they're apes, not monkeys. But they're bloody monkeys. Like ponies are horses and whales are fish and tomatoes are vegetables. Up my end of the food chain, I'm not going to worry about offending no monkey.
It's not like I'm being racist. They're just monkeys. I am human, I am king, and chimpanzees are whatever I say they are. If they want to argue with me, they can evolve some more and come back to the table.
I say what I want, and I do what I want. I go my own way. I don't have to call chimps 'apes' just because everyone else does. Any more than I'm going to read Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry goddam Potter just because ten million other monkeys have. Everyone reading the same old rubbish just because it's popular is how you end up with The Salt Path.
And if I were an ape, let me tell you, I wouldn't be putting a blade of bloody grass in my ear just because Bonzo was doing it. I would have more dignity. Bonzo, after all, is also throwing his faeces around, eating bugs off his best mate's arse and frantically whacking off in public.
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But when the story broke about a chimp sticking a blade of grass in its ear at some nature reserve and then five others picking up the habit within weeks, people went wild. Not as wild as chimps, leaping around like idiots, spanking their own heads with their ridiculously long arms and screeching, with their lips peeled back round their ears, but very much the modern media equivalent.
'Primatologists believe it may say something profound about the origins of human culture,' wrote our science editor, and within minutes I was being asked on the radio what hilarious things I had done in my life just because everyone else was doing them.
None, I told them. I am not a monkey.
'Sure,' they said. 'But what crazy item of clothing did you wear in your teens just because it was all the rage?'
None, I said. I already told you, I'm not a monkey. I have never worn any item of clothing for any reason, at any age, except that it kept the rain off and didn't itch too much (I am also able to wear pants, in case you were wondering, after the Gregg Wallace revelations).
'Fashionable haircut?' They asked. Nope. Never had one of those. In fact, I grew a short beard in 1998 purely because no other man in England wore one at that time. People said, 'That's risky, girls don't like beards.' But I told them, 'Wrong, most girls don't like beards. But the small number who do will have no one to go to but me.'
It's not that I am a deliberate contrarian. I just do not believe that my fellow men make their best decisions as a group. If I did, I would have a tattoo, like everyone else. All these morons with their 'sleeves' and misspelt Sanskrit, their slag tags and their tramp stamps, they could no more explain why they got them than those chimpanzees could tell you why they put grass in their ears. But at least the chimps can take the grass out when they're bored with it. Even a monkey wouldn't stick it in so deep it stayed there forever.
By the same token, I don't read popular books or go to popular films or listen to popular music. Or any kind of music. Or dance. Because music and dance are grunting communal activities contrived to unite us at the lowest common denominator of the species. To turn us, in short, back into monkeys. Keep us in our place.
I've never been to a festival or even a so-called 'gig', because a place where everyone is on the same wavelength, marching to the same beat, gives me the willies. Same reason I've never been to a Nazi rally. Or on a march or any sort of protest. Yes, I can see that you've all got the protest grass in your monkey ears, but I'm fine as I am.
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I don't go to stand-up comedy either, because if everyone around me is laughing, I don't just laugh along like a chimpanzee, I look first for a weapon and then for the exit. Load of middle-class Norberts whooping like monkeys because Jack Whitehall is saying something hilariously true about the hummus aisle at Waitrose? That's a blade of grass that is not going in this earhole, no matter how many of you do it.
Did you vote for Brexit? Me neither. Nobody did. And yet everyone did. Because while individually we are a smart, perceptive species, collectively we are an idiot.
And my children don't put grass in their ears either, thank God. Do your kids have smartphones? Mine don't: 14 and 12 and they don't want them. Because they have looked around and seen what morons it has made of their peer group. They've seen the grass in the other monkeys' ears and said 'no thanks'.
Friends ask me, 'Don't you want your kids to be normal? Don't you want them to fit in?' And I reply: 'With whom? The other monkeys? The ones in evolutionary reverse? Er, no.'
I sometimes wonder where my reluctance to stick grass in my ear began. I wonder if it's because if you grow up short, Jewish, myopic and left-handed in a tall, gentile, right-handed, well-sighted world, you're already missing so many blades of grass there is no point trying to catch up.
The only blade of grass I ever did put in my ear was the booze blade. That did help me briefly get into the music/nightclub/social thing. Off my noodle on gin, I at least looked like I had grass in my ears. But that turned out not to be good for me in other ways.
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And then if you end up a writer, well, it's no good having the same blade of grass in the same ear as everyone else. No one will pay you for that. If you want to make the big bucks, you've got to have a huge, long, curly-wurly blade of bright blue neon sticking out of your ear, so that all the other monkeys shout, 'Hey, Bonzo, have you seen what Coren's got in his ear this week? It's massive! And blue! And completely wrong but funny and kind of compelling! That's the thing about Coren: he puts things in his ear that other people are afraid to put in their ears, that's why I buy The Times.'
But am I happy? I have looked down all my life on all you monkeys with grass in your ears, whooping and hollering and flinging your poo around, and been paid well to do it. But I do sometimes wonder if I might have had a better time just sticking a blade in my own lughole and getting on with it.
Listen to Giles discussing his columns on his podcast, Giles Coren Has No Idea