Charlie Brown, Everyman

I've just taken delivery of the book I referred to a couple of days ago: "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter, secondhand from WeBuyBooks for the princely sum of nine quid on eBay. Just a few pages into the preface, Hofstadter references a Peanuts cartoon, which is reproduced to illustrate the author's - rather hidden from view - down-to-earth approach to life, seemingly at odds with his rather more cerebral written output. However, the payoff frame of the cartoon itself, as always with Peanuts, made me chuckle. The fact is that when I was a teenager growing up in Birmingham, England, the Peanuts strip had a massive cult following amongst us: the square pegs and misfits who couldn't or simply wouldn't toe the line and conform, the shy, un-sporty kids appreciating the dynamic between Charlie's apparent ordinariness and his friends' assumed sophistication. 

At that age, Charlie occupied the [our] rôle of the reticent, slightly shy, square peg, surrounded by his sophisticated higher-flying peer group [even the beagle, Snoopy], somehow levelling out and grounding the pomposities of the others, by being pithier and more ordinary than all of them in the self-deprecating, innocent, but often knowing way that we identified with. Like Charlie, deadpan, often-times surreal humour was weaponised by us to make up for our social gaucheness. I realised a little later on in my life, just before leaving school, that a repressed square peg syndrome also applied to my parents, and by extension, to everyone's parents, probably, and that they too were young once, with the same dreams, aspirations and social hangups that we had, but which all had to be hidden under the blanket of 'adulthood' for survival's sake.

We were all sat around in the tiny living room of our terraced house in Winson Green one Sunday afternoon, back in the early 1970s, when my dad, who would have been in his mid-forties and that time a fairly buttoned up type of bloke, suddenly got up, left the room, and emerged in the back yard, where he proceeded to paint a giant flower on the brick wall of his workshop, totally unannounced and unheralded. He then came back into the living room, and sat back in his customary chair by the TV, saying nothing, as neither did any of us. I like to think he was just letting us all know the reality of life in a pithy, self-deprecating and very knowing way, all of his own. Wise, like Charlie: an extraordinary everyman.