another blog in the wall....THE SUNDAY ITEMS: #8 PIECES OF EIGHT

PUNISMENT (sic)

On the first page of a novel (whose name I forget) by an author I can’t recall (though I have an image of him as a slender Angus Deayton-like figure, so we can rule out Clive James and Oprah), – anyway, there is, in the first paragraph, one of the best word-plays I can ever remember reading. I’m not going to call it a pun because puns for me connote the rather contrived, sneaky, self-regarding manipulation of similarities in sound or meaning beloved of my father’s generation, producing winces rather than laughter. No, the quotation in question is something else, a majestic sweep of the English language, causing it to turn a balletic somersault, landing unwaveringly on its feet, and skipping off the mat on tiptoe to the rapturous applause of the audience, knowing they are privileged to witness such virtuosity.

The author writes: “If Oxford is the City of Dreaming Spires, then for me Cambridge was the city of perspiring dreams”. Imagine the surge of excitement, joy even, as that equation was formed in his mind; the patience and frustration as he waited for an opportunity to use it; the realisation that he might have to write a whole novel after using it in the first page, just to see it in print. How many times did he read it back to himself, looking at it from every angle, passing it around his mouth like a good claret? I think he deserves every ounce of the self-congratulation he undoubtedly lavished on himself.

This kind of verbal gag is very situational: they need to be seen as spontaneous, of the moment, not rehearsed and produced as if just thought of. True confessions time: I once stored away a gag in the back of my mind for about 6 months, waiting for the right opportunity to use it. Eventually it came during a meal in a caravan on the Isle of Mull, with seals playing on the beach outside and a clear view of Iona – a suitably beautiful backdrop to the birth of my gag, after a long confinement: picking up a vegetable dish, I offered it to our guests with the words: “Would you like a few increments of celery” . OK, Oscar Wilde can take this level of competition without worrying, and you may be thinking “What kind of a geek would even remember something like that, let alone want to celebrate it, in public?”. My kind of a geek, I suppose.

In Psychology, nothing truly exists without a reference, and so those habits of thinking and belief make me apologise for providing no data on the book itself, or its author. Sorry. Memory loss, hair loss and just plain loss are the order of the day, so I’m writing now, while stocks last. Sic transit gloria mundi. (‘worldly things are fleeting’) or as we say here in Billericay, ‘the van’s broken down, Gloria’ll nip down and pick it up early next week’.

My personal favourite turned up in The Guardian, many years ago, in the sports pages. The writer described how the Scottish nation get very excited around the time of the World Cup and, when they've qualified, send their team off to the finals with a sincere and euphoric belief that they are actually going to win the thing: invariably they go out in the early stages to a team of paraplegic part-timers from Paraguay, This syndrome has been widely recognised as a clinical disorder and has been called 'Premature Jock Elation'.

It gets worse: Mahatma Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Last week I posted one on FB which I think merits a mention: under the heading 'The Holly and the Ivy', I suggested that there should a Jewish Christmas Carol called "The Chollah and the Oy veh'.

And finally, there was the person who sent twenty different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least ten of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did...

FEAR NOT (said he, for mighty dread had seized their troubled minds)

Driving down the M1, I listened to Gloria Steinem on Woman’s Hour. It was inspiring, not in a revelatory way because we are of the same generation, as are Greer, Dworkin, Angela Davis and all the other pioneers, and had a consciousness of feminist issues raised just by virtue of swimming with the tides of the 60s, or surfing them. Steinem always had a way with words and could have been a top political copy-writer, or advertising woman. This morning she said “Follow your fears: they are the way to growth”. I assume she meant follow them, throw them to the ground or trip them, and kick the living shit out of them. Then they are dead and you are free of them.

If I have one regret about my life it is that in childhood and adolescence I carried too much fear and anxiety. Some were conquered or simply passed; others instilled ways of thinking and feeling as habits, which ensured that they lasted way beyond their natural span. Steinem is essentially right, they are better confronted than buried, only to to do their mischief beneath the surface. To slay the dragon, be it air travel or public speaking or spiders or anything, takes courage: and the person who does so is far, far braver than the person who was not afraid of these things in the first place (though who is generally seen as the more courageous). Easy to say but hard to do. There’s no ‘how to’ manual, no Idiot’s Guide to Fearlessness. But I can say, however tritely, from my own experience, that the anticipation of the dreaded event is so much more frightening than the actuality. And if you can, rationally, realise that truth, you have taken the first step, because you have struck a blow against phobiaphobia, which is even more crippling than the original problem. The next step is to do that thing (whatever it is that you fear, Just Do It) whereupon you discover that indeed it is way less terrifying than you expected. That's the first course of bricks out of the wall. Persist, do it again, and the wall of fear starts to crumble, at a remarkable rate....

Who said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”? Well, allegedly it was Churchill quoting

F.D.Roosevelt, without attribution, apparently. On the button, whoever said it first.

QUOTE/UNQUOTE

Abraham Lincoln

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

KEY TO THE HIGHWAY

I recently lost my keys, including a car key/remote. I've managed with my malfunctioning spare key for a few weeks, but then it occurred to me that, given my propensity for losing things, sooner or later I would lose that and then I would be completely screwed. So I went to Spire in Kentish Town (BMW agents) yesterday to get a new key, forearmed only with the knowledge that they are 'expensive'. The nice man asked me for £139.40. When I regained consciousness, I put it to him that for that money I would expect to have a key with an onboard chip that sent a GPS location to the police whenever somebody of a different fingerprint picked it up, made decent espresso, and contained a memory stick with a playlist which included Dylan and the Bach cello suites. "Sadly not", he said, ''for those features you have to pay an extra £2.70, and I can see from your charity shop clothes you don't have that kind of money".

You may be thinking 'serves him right, shouldn't buy pricey German cars' which is fair enough, I can understand that and I'm suitably admonished and contrite. Until the nice man told me that the very same key for a Vauxhall Corsa is an eye-watering £175. Deutschland Uber Alles, as I always say.