Donald Clarke is always disappointed when a cult entertainment - poker, say - gets discovered by the undiscriminating masses
Despite the banning of online gambling in the US, the advance of poker as a mainstream pastime continues largely unabated. Late last year reports began reaching us that the craze might be petering out. Gift stores were, it was said, having to move their ostentatiously packaged sets of gaming chips towards the backs of their sales floors. Idiotic celebrity sheep were growing tired of pretending they could recognise an inside straight and were returning to less cerebral pursuits, such as cramming small pink dogs into smaller pink handbags.
Then it was announced that Paris Hilton, that late adopter of voguish enthusiasms, had become addicted to the game. Her representative denied that she had, as reported on naughty websites, lost her Bentley during an aggressive session of Texas hold 'em, but it was confirmed that the ever-friendly socialite did enjoy a nice hand now and then (of poker, that is). The diversion, once the preserve of men with cities for first names, remains a populist phenomenon. How upsetting.
For some years a group of friends and I have met regularly to exchange modestly sized stacks of cash while swearing, drinking, bickering and generally doing anything possible to appear less cosily middle class than we are. It's interesting how the simple act of slapping down five cards of the same suit can make a balding academic from Terenure appear, to himself at least, like a swarthy one-eyed Texan with the morals of a rattlesnake. For years poker was our thing. While contemporaries played stupid golf, or tended wretched gardens, we retained our edge by allowing a pack of cards to determine the destiny of terrifying two-figure sums.
Poker's rise in popularity has taken the edge off our pleasure. Suddenly, it looks as if we are the sort of fellows who allow intellectually unspectacular hotel heiresses to dictate how we spend our evenings.
That feeling of having something personal cruelly stolen from you by idiot celebrities or, worse, the brutish hoi polloi will, I suspect, be familiar to many readers. An example. In 1981 The Human League, hitherto an obscure cluster of Yorkshire electronica enthusiasts, scored a massive worldwide hit with Don't You Want Me.
Suddenly ordinary people, people unfamiliar with their austerely brilliant 1979 Dignity of Labour EP, were daring to ask if I had heard of this diverting new pop group. "I've been into them since they were on the Fast label," I fumed. "I have an original pressing of their austerely brilliant 1979 Dignity of Labour EP." Eventually, it was easier to push the League's records under the bed, refrain from attempts to explain their early history and leave them to the undiscriminating masses. By the end of the 1980s the mattress was sheltering discarded early records by Scritti Politti (once scratchy experimental Marxists), Adam and the Ants (daring punk pornographers) and Simple Minds (stern Kraftwerk devotees).
The need to like what only a huddle of cognoscenti like is something we are all supposed to grow out of when we leave university. Sure enough, I have met people who can play Norah Jones CDs without screwing their fat middle-aged faces into fists of feigned disgust. I have come across folk who, unlike me, do not feel constrained to restrict their reading of this month's modish novel - The Corrections, Cold Mountain, The Lovely Bones - to private places where no commuter can contemplate their apparent submission to fashion.
I have, however, been unable to shake that nagging disappointment when some cult entertainment, recently discovered by me, goes and gets itself discovered by everybody else. A couple of years ago, having been edged in the right direction by websites run by young people, I developed a passion for the camp, theatrical records of Antony and the Johnsons. This lasted until last Christmas, when Antony, originally a product of New York's gay cabaret scene, played a concert at Vicar Street in Dublin. The gig was excellent. But, my dear, the audience! The venue was packed with fortysomethings wearing nice corduroys and good shoes who refrained from elbowing you at the bar and washed their hands after going to the loo. Where were all the Bohemians? These people looked and acted like, well, me. Get under the bed, Antony, and take your Johnsons with you.
Last week Oliver Curry, an evolutionary theorist from the London School of Economics, proposed that, in 100,000 years or so, the human race may divide itself into two distinct species. There will, the doctor suggested, be one class of elegant human, with massive intellectual capacities, and another with a sloping brow, bad table manners and children named after soap stars. The change is, perhaps, already happening. Here we are, earthbound deities, with our carefully refined taste for obscure cultural oddities, such as the music of Clock DVA and the novels of BS Johnson. Meanwhile, down in the sewers, hirsute gargoyles rock their foul little bodies to Sting's lute record while feeding premasticated wads of Andy McNab paperbacks to their monstrous young.
Yes, I like that theory. But if it ever gains popular acceptance I may well retreat from it.