36. Not Funny

I’m sitting in the passenger seat travelling south down the M6 toll road while Caroline drives.  It’s 9:15 on Saturday morning and as it costs £4.50 to use this bit of motorway, the road is fairly empty.  The speedometer needle is hovering on 120 mph. and the engine is purring quietly.  There is no tyre noise and I am listening to Capriccio Italien by Tchaikovsky, on Classic FM.  I can see for more than a mile ahead and there is only one vehicle in sight.  Despite the speed, I feel perfectly safe.

“According to the book, the top speed of this car is a hundred and fifty five,” I say.

“Don’t be silly,” says Caroline, “Even though it’s a toll road, there’s still a seventy miles an hour speed limit.” 

Then she glanced down at the speedometer.

********

On January 24^th in ‘Life’s Ironies’ I told you about a fabulous put-down I received from Sandra, the cashier in the Cayman bank I used.  Yesterday I received another, much better one.  It was superb and especially so because it was spontaneous.  It was not calculated to offend or upset me but it did and I’m still brooding on it.  

If there is such a thing as a ‘Put-Down Hall of Fame,’ then this should go straight in.  What makes it so brilliant is that my own wife said it and although it was deeply hurtful, it was said with sincerity and was not meant to upset me.  Indeed, remove two little words, just five letters, and it would have been a wonderful compliment.

We have been staying at Caroline’s parents’ house in Wilmslow, Cheshire.  Five years ago, just before we left for the Cayman Islands, we put three boxes of personal items into their loft for safe keeping.  Yesterday we were going through them and came across photographs taken during our holiday in Cyprus in 2002.

As you do, we were commenting on every photo - comments like, “Why did you wear that hat?” and “Do you remember how hot it was there?”

We came to one of me on the beach.  Caroline stared at it for several seconds.

“My God,” she said wistfully, “No wonder I used to fancy you.”

Take away, “used to,” and I’d have been flying down the M6!

********

We’ve been having dreadful problems with our Internet and telephone ever since we moved back into our house here in Winchmore Hill.  We decided to go with the package offered by Virgin but we have never been able to get a proper wireless connection.  We have been very lucky that our neighbours at number 27 have allowed us access via their wireless router.

Yesterday, we realised that we were not receiving incoming phone calls either.  Sandy rang me on my cell phone and told me that she had given up trying to reach us on our landline.  I phoned Virgin.

“Who have you been unable to receive calls from?” a nice young man from the call centre in Mumbai asked.

I thought for a moment.  “Well, David Cameron hasn’t rung today,” I said,  “but he’s probably been very busy with his new baby.  Neither has Naomi Campbell or Gandhi but he’s been dead for 60 years and so that probably explains why he hasn’t rung.”

Smart-arse remarks like that got me into trouble once in Cayman.

The “Strata” administer Prospect Reef, the complex of about 20 dwellings where we lived in Cayman.  Every homeowner pays a monthly Strata fee of $500 and this money is used to pay for the buildings’ insurance, the maintenance of the grounds and the upkeep of the swimming pool and the tennis court.  

Our Strata fee was one of the lowest on the island.  Most other Strata on the island employ a professional administrator.  We didn’t.  We did everything ourselves and my duty was to take the 25 cent coins from the washing machines in the communal laundry to the bank. 

The last time that I visited the bank was to deposit exactly $500 into the Strata account.  On the same visit I also put $5800 in cash into my personal account which I had received as payment for a car I sold. 

I had the kind of experience that just couldn’t happen in England.  I rather brought it upon myself I suppose and so I probably deserved the aggravation I received.

I had to stand in line for nearly 20 minutes until a clerk became available.  When I arrived in the bank I counted and saw that I was fourteenth in the line to be served.  There were no chairs.  I had to stand while I waited.  

There were eight booths to deal with customers but four were closed.  I suppose that as it was 12:45 the clerks were out for lunch!  

At last I approached the counter and lifted the extremely heavy bag on to the top and took the bags out, one at a time, counting them as I did.  “Five hundred dollars,” I said to the girl.  In the past, that would have been the end of the transaction.  She would have written out a receipt and off I’d go.  Not that day.

She took one bag containing 100, 25c pieces ($25), emptied them, spread them out, studied each one and then, counting them one at a time, put them back into the plastic bag that they had come from.  Then she took a second bag and repeated the process.  When she had investigated three bags I asked her what she was doing.  

“I’m checking the amount and looking for American quarters,” she said.  

“Why, are they valuable?“ I asked.  “The amounts have already been checked,” I said. “Why don’t you just weigh them?”

She ignored me and reached for the fourth bag.  I had already been standing for over 30 minutes by now, my knee was very painful and there were still 17 bags to go.

I’d had enough.  Time to bluff!

“I’m a mathematician,” I said, “and I can tell you that a 20% sample gives a result statistically significant to four decimal places.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Well, if four bags taken at random from the sample show no differential variation in the Gaussian context and content, you can be certain, to one part in ten thousand, that none of the others will either and if it does, it’s very easy to put right, simply by reversing the polarity of the terminal condenser.”

She looked at me blankly.

“That is if you accept the validity of Fermat’s last theorem, which I am sure you do,” I added helpfully.

She looked doubtful.  Then she gave me a look that was almost of pity and reached for the next bag.  Half an hour later she had finished and she handed me a receipt for CI$500.

All the time this had been going on I had been holding an envelope containing my $5800.  I put that on to the counter top.  The cashier was staring at her computer screen.  I took the money out of the envelope and it sat there - a beautiful thick pile of banknotes.

“I haven’t finished,” I said.  She looked up.  “I would like to deposit this please.”

“From where that come?” she asked.

“That envelope,” I answered, pointing at it.

“No.  Where from it come?”

“From my pocket,” I said, smiling brightly, trying to be helpful.

“Where you get the money from?” she said again, beginning to lose patience with me.

“Nowhere.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s just my money,” I said.

She just sat there and glared at me, stony faced.

“All right,” I said, “I robbed a bank a couple of months ago and this is what I haven’t managed to spend yet.”

Her glare became more intense and her face became even stonier.

“OK, sorry,” I said, realising that I might have gone a little too far, “I sold a car yesterday and this is the money I got for it.”

She picked up the pile of notes and walked to the back of the room where a man in a suit was sitting at a desk.  They entered into earnest conversation and every few seconds he looked over at me.  After a couple of minutes he got up and ushered me into a side room.

“From where this money is? He demanded.

“From the sale of a car,” I muttered meekly.

“Huh!  You say that now but earlier you say you rob a bank.  Which it is?”

I was getting pissed off.  “Guess,” I said.

“We not here for fun, you know.  We have work to do.”

“Do you want my money or not?” I asked him.

“What bank you rob?  You know we have you on CCTV here.”

“I am not a bank robber!”  I sighed.  “Look at me.  I can hardly walk.  I’ve got an arthritic knee and an artificial hip.  I was trying to be funny.  I’m sorry that it wasn’t funny but I was getting very fed up standing for an hour watching your clerk counting out five hundred dollars, twenty-five cents at a time.  I won’t do it again.  Promise.” 

“Hmmph,” he said.  “You not funny, man.”

Two days later that branch was held up and robbed.  

It wasn’t me!

35. Name Dropping

I was in the dry cleaners the other day and I heard the woman next to me tell the woman standing next to her that she used the same hairdresser as Melanie Sykes.  That meant nothing to me but it seemed to really impress the man behind the counter and the other woman.

When I got home, I looked up Ms Sykes on Google and discovered that she appears on television occasionally but is best known for appearing in an advertisement for beer.

I am not a name-dropper.  There are two reasons for this.  Firstly, I think that mentioning someone famous and trying to infer that he or she is, or was, somehow intimately connected to you is fairly pathetic and reflects poorly on your own self-worth.  
In fact, I was having a conversation on this very subject with Colin Firth only the other day.

Secondly, I never meet anyone well known.  My friend Ian, whom I mentioned in “Knock Knock” last week, once told me of a function that he attended at which he and Robin Day were the two least famous people present.   That is pretty sophisticated name-dropping.

I’ve seen two famous people in off licences.  In 1968, I stood next to Liberace at the counter of a Threshers store in The Kings Road, Chelsea and once, I had to wait for a long time to be served because Kingsley Amis took so long finding his chequebook in Unwins in High Barnet.

In 1964, when I was 17, I was on a train travelling from London to Oxford.  I was on my own in a compartment when the door opened and John Lennon came in.  He stood for a second or two, ignoring me, staring blankly at the seat opposite me and then, turned around and walked off without saying a word.

Aeroplanes seem to be good places to meet famous people.  David, with whom I was at school and have mentioned several times before, once sat next to Jackie Stewart on a flight from Geneva to Heathrow.  David tells me that, once he found out that David was a school teacher, education was the only topic of conversation throughout the flight.

Ten years ago, Willy, another old school friend, sat next to Claudia Schiffer for seven hours, on a flight from Barbados to Heathrow.  He found her charming and delightful but it was only as they walked out of the airport together and the photographers started shooting, that Willy found out who she was.

Caroline and I stood next to Michael Caine at the luggage carousel at Miami airport in May this year.  We had come from London on the same flight but his seat had probably cost several thousand pounds more than mine.  He picked up a suitcase and said,” No, that’s not mine,” and put it back down.  Not much of an anecdote, is it?

One Wednesday morning in March twenty years ago, Nigel, a friend from the cricket club, rang and asked me what I was doing that day.

“Going to work,” of course,” I said.  “Come to Ascot races instead,” he suggested.  “There’s a horse I'm following that's running.”

I didn’t need to think about it.  I hadn’t had any time off for more than ten years and in that time, I had covered the classes of numerous teachers who had phoned in “sick”.  To top it all, the government had recently introduced ‘Training Days’ that had replaced five holiday days.  I was really angry with that and felt quite resentful.  There had been no consultation.  Those days had just been taken.

“OK,” I said.  “I’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”

We had a good day at Ascot but at around midday, before the meeting started and while we were having lunch in a pub, in walked Rod Stewart with his entourage.

“Didn’t you used to teach him?” asked Nige.  “Go and say hello.”

I explained that I hadn’t taught him although he had attended the school where I taught.  He had left some five years before I arrived there.

At nine o’clock that evening on our way back to North London after a successful day at the races, we stopped at The Holly Bush pub in Hampstead.  I was standing at the bar when I heard a voice behind me.

“Hello, Terry.  Feeling better?”

It was the deputy headteacher from my school - the man whom I had phoned thirteen hours earlier to explain that severe flu-like symptoms would, regrettably, prevent me from coming in.

“Yes thanks,” I said picking up two pints from the bar top, “Just a cold, I think.  Not flu.”

Thinking that I’d carried that off rather well, I carried the drinks over to where Nige was sitting at a table.  I told him how well I had dealt with a potentially embarrassing and awkward situation.

“What did he say about that?” Nigel asked, looking at my chest.

“What?” I said.

“That,” he said, pointing at the bright purple Ascot “Grandstand Badge” hanging from the lapel of my overcoat.

There is, however, one name I can drop.  Not only did I meet this “Name” but I was with him and his almost equally famous wife for about eight hours and the day ended when he and I spent ten minutes or so together in the communal shower.

The “Name” has a brother, Chris, and Chris was a member of Finchley Cricket Club, the club that I played for.  I was Team Secretary at the time and my function was to make sure that everyone selected to play knew where and at what time he was playing.  I phoned Chris on Tuesday and told him that he was playing away at Ashford, Middlesex on the following Sunday afternoon.

At around eleven o'clock on Saturday evening before the game, Chris phoned me.  My heart sank.  We were already one short at Ashford and I assumed that he was crying off.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Are you serious?” I asked him. "Your brother wants to play?"

“Yeah, he fancies a game.”

“Well, we are one short but will he definitely turn up?”

“Course he’ll turn up.”

“I’m not sure," I said.  "Suppose he has to go to New York or somewhere?”

“Hang on, Terry.  I’ll check.”

“He’s worried you won’t turn up,” I heard him say.

I heard a very distinctive and immediately recognisable voice coming from some distance from the phone.  “I’ll be there.  Definite.”

“OK,” I said, thinking that I had been put in a very difficult position and it would all probably go horribly wrong, “Make sure that he realises what a mess we’ll be in if he lets us down.”

I arrived at Ashford Cricket Club’s car park at 1:25 pm.  Following me in was a silver-grey Ford Granada estate car that parked next to mine.  From out of the car came Chris’s parents, as well as his brother and sister-in-law with two small children.  I introduced myself and shook hands with them all.  Shortly afterwards, Chris and the rest of the team turned up.

Chris’s sister-in-law and the two children went to a quiet corner of the ground where she laid out a blanket and where they sat for the rest of the afternoon.  

Her blonde hair was plaited and she wore no makeup.  She didn’t look very much like the woman I had seen many times on television and in magazines.  She read a book, ignoring the cricket, while the children ran around doing what small kids do.

News of the celebrity player spread and by three o’clock there must have been more than three hundred spectators.  At around 7:20, the game ended.  Neither brother had distinguished himself but they had both seemed to enjoy it very much.

As is the custom, as soon as the game ended we all went straight to the bar.  Chris’s brother bought a jug of beer and generally joined in the post-match spirit.  I thought that paying his £3 match fee with a £20 note was a bit flash but nothing about his behaviour was in any way different from anyone else’s.  
His wife sat in a corner of the bar with the children sipping lemonade and reading them stories.

I went for a shower at about 9:30 pm and five minutes later, Chris’s brother joined me.  We chatted for ten minutes or so.

At 10:30 pm, it was time to leave.  I said goodbye to Mick, his wife Jerry, his friend Charlie who had turned up in a beautiful silver Lagonda during the afternoon and Mick’s brother, the Finchley member, Chris Jagger.

It’s a funny thing but nobody I have ever told this story to has ever asked me about Mick Jagger’s cricket.  All they ever ask about is the shower - and they never ask me what we talked about either!

Now, my meeting with Margaret Thatcher.

In the summer of 1987, there was a general election in Britain.  The MP for Finchley in North London was Margaret Thatcher and she was standing for re-election.  I suppose that she considered that she hadn't quite finished her life's work of destroying the trade unions and dismantling society.

As part of her campaign, her people decided that it would be a good idea if she visited her local cricket club one Saturday afternoon for a photo opportunity.

We were told that she was arriving at 2:30 p.m.  It rained on and off all morning and at 2:00 when the game was due to start, there was a constant and fairly heavy drizzle.  It was very overcast and cars driving along East End Road next to the ground had their headlights on.  We all sat in the bar waiting to see if the game was to be called off.  No one had changed into their cricket kit.

At 2.28 the lights of several TV crews illuminated the area outside the bar.  At 2:29 those crews came in, ignored us and trained their cameras on the door.  At 2:30 on the dot, the door swung open and in she came, smiling at us all.  She was greeted by the Club President who then introduced her to some of the Club dignitaries - not to me!

Dennis, her husband, had a half pint of bitter.  Mrs T had a cup of tea.  It was still raining.  I sat in a corner and glared at her.  She didn’t notice.  After five minutes, she put her cup down and announced, “Come on everyone.  Outside!”

And that’s what they did.  Out they all went into the pouring rain.  They stood on the sodden turf where she was given a cricket bat which she swung while smiling at the cameras.  Behind her, the Finchley members including several wives stood, simpering and smiling too.

All the Finchley members, except one: I stayed in the bar, shaking my head, watching the antics through the big, plate glass windows.  

After a minute or so, it got too wet, even for Mrs T.  I watched her walking briskly towards the door and I was mentally preparing myself for the perturbing sight of her security men striding back into the bar.

But no!  They held the door open for her and she came into the bar.  She entered a room with only one person in it and that person was me.  

As soon as she saw me, she put on her well-rehearsed, synthetic, artificial smile and began to walk across the twenty feet or so that separated us.  I continued to glare and stare. 

"That was fun," she said. 

I’d like to think that she was disconcerted by my lack of response and scowl but I don’t suppose that she was.  Nonetheless, for two or three seconds, I was alone in a room with Margaret Thatcher.

This is the ITV news report of Mrs Thatcher's visit to Finchley Cricket Club: 

34. Knock Knock

Caroline has been looking for a job.  She hasn’t worked since her contract with the Cayman Islands government ended on the last day of June.  For the last ten weeks, she’s brought in no money at all and we have been living off my meagre pension.

“I think I’ll have a gap year,” she announced a couple of months ago.

“Will you, buggery,” I said (I’m renowned for my repartee).

Today she was looking through the online adverts.  She was very quiet for a few minutes.

“Do you know what?” she said looking up at me for the first time in twenty minutes, 

“It’s the words ‘full time’ and ‘permanent’ that are putting me off.”

**************

One of our neighbours has a son called Charlie.  Charlie is 5 and yesterday he told me a joke.  It was more of a riddle than a joke but it resonated because it was exactly the same ‘joke’ that my Dad had told me some 58 years ago. 

“When is a door not a door?”.... pause…. 
“When it’s ajar.”

When Dad told it to me I didn’t get it.  I didn’t know what “ajar” meant and so it hardly seemed funny or clever.  I asked Charlie what “ajar” means and he didn’t know either because he could only tell me that it was something that jam comes in. 

Some months later, my Dad tried me with another one: “What’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison?”  Answer: “You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo

When I was about six he told me a rude joke.  It wasn’t a rude joke in the conventional way but it was bad enough to shock my aunt who was staying with us and I remember her crying out, “Ralph!  That’s too much!”  I found her reaction much funnier than the joke:

Three patient’s germs were eavesdropping in the doctor’s surgery and they heard the doctor ask the patient if he was regular.  “Oh yes, doctor.  Twenty past eight every morning.”  “OK,” said the doctor,  “I’m going to give you some penicillin.  That should make you better.”

The germs heard this and were very alarmed.  “I’m going to hide behind the liver,” said one.  “I’m going to go to hide in the heart,” said another.  “You two can hide where you like,” said the third, “but I’m going to catch the eight twenty in the morning.”

It was about this time that I first read ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’.  I remember enjoying it very much but there were two words that I had never come across before.  When Alice was talking to her kittens, Snowdrop and Kitty, she told them something and it seemed that they couldn’t “dennie” it and at some later point she was “mizzled” by something or other.

It was some years later that I realised that those two words were “deny” and “misled.”

On October 6th 1965, I first met Ian Sharp who, at around midnight on that memorable day – our second at Durham University - told me a joke as we stood side by side at the urinals at the bottom of E Stairs. 

Most people, meeting someone for the first time at that location might have  mumbled something like, “Hello,” but Sharpy, ignoring usual social conventions, launched straight into a joke.  He’s a natural storyteller who tells jokes very well and I found it very funny.  
A couple of months ago, I met a man at a party who told me exactly the same joke almost word for word except in his version, Keith Miller, the Australian test cricketer who had been in the RAAF was addressing a group of women on ANZAC Day.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that to my certain knowledge the joke was at least 45 years old.

This is it in summary:

It’s a ‘This is Your Life’ TV programme and one of the guests is recounting an aerial dogfight that the star guest had taken part in during the Battle of Britain.

“There were two fuckers above him,’ he said, “and another fucker below him.  He shot down one of the fuckers and then two more of the fuckers appeared from out of the sun.”

Eamonn Andrews, the host, was very embarrassed as this was live television.  He turned to the camera.  “I must explain that the aircraft that Squadron Leader Robins is referring to were, “Focke-Wulf”, a fighter plane used by the Germans.”

“No they weren’t,” protested the Squadron Leader, immediately and loudly.  “Those fuckers were Messerschmitts.”

Despite that rocky start, we are still friends.

I wonder if five particular children in Cayman will remember the first joke that they ever heard and that they heard it from me.  
I must preface this by telling you that although all Caymanians speak English as their first language, they use a different word order from other English speaking countries, especially when asking questions. I am no linguist but the word order sometimes seems French to me. 

For instance, every child who ever asked me how old I am (and most of them did) said, "What age have you?" When they asked me my name they said, "What your name is?" 

I was helping during a literacy lesson. The children were aged six and I was sitting at a table with five of them. They were bright kids who hadn't really needed assistance from me. They had all finished their task and so I decided to fill in the remaining time by introducing them to the knock-knock joke, the concept of which none of them had any idea.

I gave them a couple of examples. The first one was, of course,

"Knock knock"

'Who's there?"

"Amos"

"Amos who?”

"Amos quito."

They loved this one:

“Knock knock”

“Who’s there?”

“Lucy”

“Lucy who?”

“Lucy lastic makes your pants fall down.”

They didn’t get this:

“Knock knock”

“Who’s there?”

“Sam and Janet”

“Sam and Janet who?”

“Sam and Janet evening” (Sung to the tune of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’)

It fell flat even after I had sung them the punch line a couple of times. Either they didn’t think it was funny or were distressed by my singing.

After one or two more, they definitely knew what to expect and certainly understood the format. I began with the girl who was clearly the brightest in the group:

Me     “Knock knock”

Her    “Who's there?”

Me     “Boo”

Her    “Who Boo is?”

Me    “ Never mind, you plonker.”

Later, I asked if they could think of one to ask me.

Two of them immediately said they would. That really impressed me as I have never thought up an original knock knock joke in my life and here were two six year olds who had. “Go on then,” I said to a boy.

Him     “Knock knock”

Me      “Who's there?”

Him     “Picture”

Me      (after some thought and really, very impressed)   “Picture who?”

Him     “Picture frame”

The other boy said, "George" followed by, "Town" the capital of Cayman, which was a very good try.

Two of them knew what a buffalo is but none of them had ever heard of a bison and so they never got to hear me ask them the difference between them.