Open Writing

Many years ago, I opened a copy of ‘Punch’ in the doctor’s waiting room. It was an interesting issue that dealt with the birth of Queen Victoria, only she wasn’t a Queen when she was born, only a princess. As I was reading the delightful magazine, a strange thing happened. I laughed out loud at a cartoon that tickled my funny bone.

I was surprised, even shocked, at this uncharacteristic outburst, because, while I had always enjoyed humour immensely, and used it defensively from an early age, it had been a long time since I had actually expressed any audible outward expression at anything amusing.

My theory in this regard is that although I had begun life being tickled at the usual sort of nonsense that little boys think are hilarious, I grew to enjoy highly sophisticated performances from such noble comedians and comediennes as Laurel and Hardy, Old Mother Riley, George Formby, Will Hay, Elsie and Doris Waters, and the rest of British comedic royalty whose antics caused guffaws in the lowborn, and politely stifled titters in the gentry.

Thus, by a consistent process, my response to humour advanced from boyish exuberance and coarse laughter, to delight made evident by suppressed sniggers, eventually achieving maturity by inwardly appreciating the joke with no outward sign of my enjoyment, but rather with an endogenous grin. And that was that.

I had reached this settled stage as I waited at the doctor’s waiting room, admiring the blistering of the dark green paint, reading hundred years old magazines, pretending not to be bored with the company or impatient at the unendurable wait, and studiously avoiding eye contact with any of my fellow sufferers in the aimless way that is found only among the English.

Suddenly, my deliberate composure received a fatal blow as my eyes lit on a cartoon in which a man was speaking to his friend behind his wife’s armchair. The wife struggled to control miles and miles and miles of completed knitting, whilst beavering away, her knitting needles a blur, as she added row after row after row after row. The man is explaining to his friend, "It started out as a scarf, but ended up as an obsession!"

In less than a zagosecond, I was rocking helplessly on the moribund kitchen chair that well meaning – but completely daft – patients used to abandon in waiting rooms because they couldn’t find the town dump. Other patients moved slowly away from me, as if I had impetigo or something. Nothing had caused me so much uncontrolled merriment for years, and it was many more years - Ken Dodd at Huddersfield Town Hall - before I laughed aloud with such elongated, rip-snorting and full-blown chortling exuberance.

After the ‘Punch’ episode, the cartoon was forgotten, having swirled down into that area of human memory known as forgetfulness, and it stayed brass-bound and watertight for more than fifty years – until today.

But today, a television news channel carried a report of an animal rescue at the home of an elderly couple, whose dwelling is not too far from our happy home. As an animal lover, I was amazed at the size of the task the undertaking set for the Arizona Humane Society. An avid viewer of the Animal Planet channel, I have seen heroes from humane societies’ the length and breadth of this vast country intervene and rescue neglected and ill-used creatures of all kinds.

To date, the greatest number of animals I had seen taken from overwhelmed, or just plain daft, owners, was a haul of a hundred and twenty moggies, and at another time and place, the removal of some sixty or more dogs.

Now today’s haul beggars belief because of the number with which a home, and not a large home, was filled by an overstock of diverse fauna.

In all fairness, it was a kindness to remove the whole lot from what must have looked like the rabbit pens on Noah’s Ark after forty days and forty nights. But while there were no rabbits, what they lacked in Thumpers, they made up for with almost thirty parrots!

Perhaps you think I might have exaggerated when describing the crammed conditions, if all this old couple had were thirty richly plumes Amazons, but there is more to come.

They also had cats. Not quite the hundred-and-twenty as earlier reported elsewhere, but more than five dozen moggies leapt around the place, scaring the parrots, and getting under the feet of the frail seniors whose home had been let out to all creatures great and small.

A neighbour made the report to the humane society because of some odour that pervaded the neighbourhood. When investigators turned up at the home, they could not believe their eyes or their noses. Aside from the birds and cats, they also had a number of dogs.

I feel I should not test your credulity, dear reader, with the actual number of canines that these sweet people were harbouring too early in this report, but it was a struggle for the ancient pair to find room to live in their own home sweet home, and an even greater struggle to feed the whole menagerie, and as for disposal of animal evacuations, the mind actually boggles.

I will say that they had more than one hundred dogs. I will also say, that the ‘more’ is a rather difficult number to contemplate living in one home with the rest of the animals. You see, there were more than two hundred of them!

I still have not been able to sit down and be calm since I heard the report, because, frankly, it tests my grip on reality to accept the reportage as an accurate head count. However, it is time to put you out of your misery, and I might then, once I have shifted the burden from my mind to yours, be able to sit a spell and think of something else.

I shall soften the blow by telling that the total number of canines, was thirty score! Yes, I know, that’s six hundred dogs, most of them small types, all in reasonable health, and some giving birth to another score as the officers carried them out to take them back to their centre for assessment and, hopefully, adoption.

The man and wife rationalised that they had so many because they just couldn’t turn any strays away. I have to say, bless their good and gentle hearts. Yet I couldn’t help thinking, as the old cartoon rose, phoenix-like, to the surface of what remains of my mind, that, perhaps, it too "started out as a scarf … "


Copyright © 2008 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray/ [Various Stories]
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html [Story: "The Last of the Summer Fruit"]
http://bonzer.virage.net/?s=bray [Story: "In Death's Dark Vale"]
http://www.openwriting.com/archives/a_shout_from_the_attic/ [Autobiography - like me, a work in process!]