68. Bon Mots

I’ll bet that you have often thought of something clever or witty to say to someone, seconds, minutes or even days too late for it to have any relevance or impact.  How many times a week do you come up with a pithy or witty comment but long after the moment has passed?  

It happens to me all the time.  I am regularly thinking of the suitable rejoinder I could or should have used but never in time for it to make the required impact.

The French have a name for this.  They call it “L’esprit de l’escalier” which translates as “staircase wit”. In other words, it is something that you only think of on the way up the stairs to bed.

Of course, when I get home and enthral Caroline with the story of an interesting episode from my day, I alter the facts a little so that instead of the anecdote ending, “… so I nodded and walked away,” which is what really happened, I tell her that what I actually said was, “… yeah, and I’ve got a Morris Minor!”  

Oh, how she laughs and I’m sure that she thinks to herself, “How lucky I am to have such a clever, sharp and quick-witted husband.”

Yesterday, something happened that enabled me to get in my retort at exactly the right time.  It wasn’t exactly quick-witted or spontaneous as I had been brooding and planning for more than two hours before the opportunity arose to say what I did.  

I warn you now that you may think that I don’t come out of this in a very good light.  If you have never met me, you may have formed the impression that I might be a nice person.  I am afraid that you will see now that I'm not.

My liver doctor told me some months ago that I should take more exercise and he suggested that I join a gym.  I did and I hated it.  Unhappily, I am contractually locked into membership for a year and I have to continue paying the monthly subscription until next May but I’ve stopped going.

Instead, I have started having golf lessons. Tiger Woods and Rory Mcllroy both started their coaching at the age of 18 months.  I am 64!  

I was aware of the warning given by PG Wodehouse: 

Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious. 

I will continue for the foreseeable future though, because of something that was said by A.A. Milne:

Golf is the best game in the world at which to be bad.

I am not quite hopeless at golf but I’m certainly bad.  When I began and before I realised quite how bad I would be, I fantasised that I would be going round with respectable scores after a month or two and then would rapidly rise through the listings of a club to become a leading player within a couple of years.

After all, how difficult could it be?  I had spent over forty-five years whacking a cricket ball around and occasionally hitting it in the middle of the bat too.  

The cricket ball, weighing 5½ ounces, travelled towards me at speeds of between 50 and 90 miles an hour, was often swinging or swerving through the air.  Sometimes it was deceptively flighted.  When the ball hits the pitch, its onward path is not always entirely predictable either.  It can spin, veer either way, rear up or even keep unexpectedly low.  

Sometimes on a bad wicket (and I played on plenty of those) there was a real risk of injury.  12 players have died playing cricket since 1932.

No one has ever died from a golf injury but there nearly was a fatality in the spring of 1964.  The first time I ever hit a golf ball in anger was at Lowestoft golf club.  My friend, Richard Savage, was a member there and having been playing for a few years he was already a good golfer.  He suggested that I gave it a try and took me along to give it a go.

I teed up and whacked it as hard as I could but caught the ball with the toe of the club.  

Twenty feet away and at an angle of about 50° from us was a metal flagpole with the Club’s pennant fluttering proudly from it.  The ball hit the pole and rebounded back, head high and  right between us.  It came to rest some seventy yards behind the tee.  One of us could have been killed and so I nearly made history.

Unlike a cricket ball, a golf ball just sits there, motionless, looking up at you smirking and asking to be walloped.  How difficult could it be?  The short answer is, “Very.”  

As Caroline said to me two years ago after a disastrous attempt to cut my hair , “Cutting hair is a lot like golf – they’re both a lot more difficult than they look.”

My fantasies may not come to fruition for a reason other than my golfing ineptitude, however.  

I don’t think I like golf club members.  

Hang on, that’s not entirely true.  I have several friends who play golf and obviously as they are friends, I like them all – but they are men.  It’s the Lady Members with whom I think I would have a problem.  The ladies at this golf club all seem to be clones of the same prototype.

The first time I walked through the clubhouse on my way to the Pro’s shop for my first lesson, a woman stopped me.  

“Are you a member?” she demanded abruptly.

“No, I’m not,” I said and walked on.

Yesterday, on the same journey, I was intercepted twice and by two different women.

“Do you want something?” said the first one who was leaving the building by the door through which I was about to go in.

“No,” I said coldly and walked on past her.  Ten seconds later, as I left the building through the sliding glass door on the other side, yet another “lady” stopped me.

“Anything I can do for you?” she enquired.  I grunted negatively and walked on.  

My golf lesson went worse than usual.  I was inwardly fuming and instead of paying full attention to the advice I was being given by the Pro, I kept thinking of responses I could have come up with.  

We played a few holes and afterwards my legs were aching, my ankles were hurting and I was tired.  I sat on a chair on the terrace overlooking the first tee to rest before hobbling to my car.  

“Can I help you?”

Not again!  There she was.  Another stern-faced, middle-aged, sun-bronzed, grey-haired, heavily made-up, overweight, scowling harridan.  She was standing over me with that look that, after years of practice on her husband, was meant to intimidate.

I looked up at her and smiled amiably.  This was the moment I had been waiting for.  I couldn’t believe my luck.  Just when I had honed the perfect response, here she was – yet another interfering, officious busybody and she had walked right into my trap.

“No thank you my dear but perhaps I could help you.  Shall we see if we can find your Carer?” 

That is what I had planned to say, gently and with a look of genuine concern.  Except that’s not what happened and it’s not what I said.  

I really intended to.  It wasn’t that I chickened out.  She deserved it.  In fact, she probably deserved a lot more than that but maybe I felt sorry for her.  She obviously had nothing more interesting or fulfilling to do with her empty life than to wander about the terrace on a sunny afternoon searching for strangers to accost and harass.

“No thank you,” I said, “I’m just resting after a lesson.”

What a wimp I am. 

64. Categories

I’ve realised recently that, as far as I am concerned, there are only four broad types of people in the world: two kinds of women and two kinds of men.  I came across these startling insights in the space of two days, about women first and then about men.

Last Thursday, Caroline and I were with a female friend. She has been a friend of Caroline’s for twenty-five years and a friend of us both for about fifteen years.  I therefore know her very well and I like her very much.  When I describe her as a friend, she is, to me, a 5 on Wilton's Scale of Relationships.  As far as Caroline is concerned, she is a 6 or possibly the 7.

At one point in the evening she said something that could be taken in either one of two ways.  One way was the way that she intended it but the other way was the way in which I immediately interpreted it – rude, coarse and very smutty indeed.

I said nothing but I had a little private giggle.  I thought about the even ruder and smuttier ways of how what she had said could be developed and consequently I giggled some more and completely lost track of the conversation.  But I still said nothing.  Since then and after some thought, I have realised that there are some women, such as our companion that evening, with whom I never say anything smutty, make any kind of innuendo or say anything suggestive.

I began to list, mentally, all the women I know and put them into one of these two categories: those that I can be smutty with and those with who I’m not.  It was easy because there weren’t any that I wasn’t sure of.  A few minutes ago, I wrote out the two lists.  I read list A to Caroline.  She was in that list.

“What have those people got in common?” I asked her.

“They’re all women,” she said.

“Anything else?”

“No, nothing I can think of.  There’s a mix of ages and races.  Some have jobs.  Some don’t.”

I read her the other list.  “What about them?”

“No.  There’s nothing distinctive about them either.  Same sort of mix.”

She eventually more or less got it but only after I had pointed out that her sister and my two daughters were together in the list that she wasn’t in.  

What follows is, I’m afraid, a bit of an anti-climax.  I don’t have the answer.  It’s just that there are some women with whom I act and conduct myself quite differently from others and I suspect that that is true of the behaviour of all men.

On Friday evening we were in the company of a man who, for both Caroline and me, is a 4 or perhaps only a 3 on the scale.  We were with him really by accident, as I would certainly never suggest meeting him by design.

He told us all a story – an anecdote about his business dealings.  I can’t remember the details now because I stopped listening just after the scene of this “hilarious” episode in his life switched from New York to Zurich.

But I do remember the ‘punch line’: “As a result, I came out of it £30,000 on top.”

What an idiot!  All of my male friends – those who are 5s, 6s or 7 in the Scale - would only ever have told that story if the punch line had been: “As a result, I came out of it losing about thirty grand.”

So, the men of the world also fall into two broad categories:  those who are so far up their own arses that they can’t talk about themselves without showing off and the rest of us.  In other words, those who are self-aggrandising and those who are self-deprecating.

I think that there is something about self-deprecation that is very attractive and almost endearing.  I have just looked through the list of my rambles posted on this site over the last 18 months.  I reckon that out of the 65 posts there is only one in which I am the winner and that is when I managed to fool an eight-year-old boy into letting me have an attractive piece of rock for nothing when he was expecting to get at least $5.00 for it. (The Rock)

Caroline has suggested that the previous paragraph is in itself self-aggrandising but it isn’t as I am not suggesting for one moment that it is evidence that I am attractive or endearing but I do think it explains in some way why I have the male friends that I have.  As for the women that I am friendly with, I’ve absolutely no idea.  I like them all!

62. Oh dear!

I was in the Butcher’s shop across the road yesterday morning.  Unusually for a Wednesday there were quite a few people there.  I stood behind five others and waited.

Julian’s is more than just a Butcher’s shop.  It is a social centre too.  The postman stops off during his round and makes himself a cup of tea.  The milkman does the same thing as do several local tradesmen and I often meet my neighbours in there.

The reason that a queue had formed was that Julian was engaged in banter with them all.  Paul, one of his regular customers whom I see quite often was there and so was Steve, who runs a café on The Green.  Paul is always telling Julian and the other customers, stories, anecdotes and jokes. 

 “This is a good one,” Paul said.  He looked over his shoulder to see who else was in the shop.  I knew what was coming.  He was looking to see if there were any women there and so that meant that what followed would be a dirty story or a rude joke.

Seeing that the coast was clear, Paul began:

A man went into a bar.  “A pint of lager please.”

“Certainly sir,” said the barman.  “ What sort?”

“It doesn’t matter what sort,” said the man.  “Anything as long as it isn’t Stella.  I had ten pints of Stella last night.  I passed out and when I woke up I was fucking broke.”

“They're all about the same price sir,” said the barman.  Stella costs the same as Carlsberg and Heineken.” 

“No.  You don’t understand,” said the man.

”Broke’s the name of my dog!”

I thought that was pretty funny and so did everyone else.  Just then my phone rang and I stepped outside to answer it.  It was Caroline who was working in Camden.  She asked me to e-mail her a document from her laptop which she had left at home.   She said it was urgent and so I crossed the road, went back home and sent the e-mail.

Fifteen minutes later I went back to Julian’s.  This time only Steve was there.

“Listen to this, Tel” he said.  “This is a good one.”

“Is it one of Paul’s?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. 

A man went into a bar.  “A pint of lager please.”

“Steve,” I said.  “I think I’ve heard this.”  He ignored me.

“Certainly sir,” said the barman.  “ What sort?”

“It doesn’t matter what sort,” said the man.  “Anything as long as it isn’t Stella.  I had ten pints of Stella last night.  I passed out and when I woke up I was fucking broke.”

“They're all about the same price sir,” said the barman.  Stella costs the same as Carlsberg and Heineken.” 

“No.  You don’t understand,” said the man.

”Stella’s the name of my dog!”

I laughed politely.  “Yes.  Good one Steve.”

You will find my last regular posting on March 27th here: At the End of The day