Open Writing

I sat at a table beneath a large sunshade umbrella on the footpath outside a local café. The coffee was stronger than usual, which is nice, but it wasn’t very hot, which is not nice. Pondering the passing parade, I thought about the funny appearance of some people.

Boys and youths wearing those ridiculous baggy, calf-length shorts that flap like skirts round their bony legs. Teenage girls with over-tight jeans low around their hips, excess portions of buttock spilling over in a less than charming manner.

Those men who, having very little hair left on their scalps, carefully brush the remaining strands across the gap and glue them down. The weather-beaten ladies who use enough facial make-up for a whole family of girls, hoping that it somehow makes them more attractive.

‘Funny appearance’? Funny ha ha and funny peculiar. And some of them no doubt had the same kind of thoughts about me. What sort of ridiculous old twit sits under a sunshade umbrella on the footpath, drinking coffee, on a Winter morning when the sun is cloud-hidden, the wind blowing, and the temperature is ten degrees (that’s about fifty in old-fashioned Fahrenheit)?

The passing parade? It marched inside my head. On a day like today, sensible people stay indoors. I was thinking about those I’ve seen over the years. And then I recalled a starchy cocktail party which I had to attend about thirty years ago. The boss, a publisher of the old school—he was interested in books—invited us all round to his rather sumptuous home for Christmas drinks and little nibbly things.

We were all on our best behaviour. We stood awkwardly round the room, or perched on the edges of chairs, pretending to be happy. Conversation was murmured, stilted and intermittent. At the office, I had something of a reputation for being a mimic, clown and all-purpose fool. One of the girls from Accounts, very bored, crept up to me and quietly pleaded, ‘Come on Brian, be funny’.

Alas, you can’t always ‘be funny’ at the drop of a hat. True, I could have started telling jokes or rambling into a shaggy dog story. But the occasion wasn’t quite right. Jokes are not always funny in themselves. The people who tell them are sometimes not funny. Humour is best when spontaneous. In some situations it can arise from or be an antidote for depression. It can be a way of coping with pain or oppression. At heart, it comes from and portrays the ridiculous.

Flacco (Paul Livingston) sometimes appears on TV in Australia. Helped by a bit of jiggery-pokery with the cameras, we once saw him in his flamboyant court jester’s outfit, sitting in a fish-tank, surrounded by goldfish. He proclaimed in his thick east European accent, ‘I am your fairy fishfather’.

Spike Milligan told the story of how he took his elderly grandmother to the seaside for her very first visit. They walked down to the water’s edge, where she stood for a long time gazing at the gently lapping tide. Eventually, she turned to him and asked, ‘Is that all it does?’

In the TV series Blackadder, there was an episode during which the team had to compile a dictionary, because they’d lost Dr Johnson’s manuscript. Laboriously working their way through the letters of the alphabet, they came to C. ‘What do we write for C?’ they asked. The always smelly, intellectually challenged, but ever helpful Baldric came up with a suggestion: ‘C, well, it’s that big blue thing that wobbles, isn’t it?’

Over fifty years ago, I lodged with a weather-beaten and time-worn elderly lady. Her moods varied from grim acceptance to resentful bitterness. For a start, she hated Africans: ‘If I had all the machine guns in the world, I’d shoot the bloody lot of them.’ I had my meals at another boarding house but when I was ill she let me join her for dinner. On one such occasion, when I was smiling through adversity (and pain), she slowly announced in a funereal tone, ‘Brian, there’s nothing in life like a sense of humour.’

Over half a century later, I still find that funny. In fact, it’s ridiculous.

© Copyright 2004, 2007 Brian Barratt