Like beauty, humour is personal.
Not laughing, but nice ears!
The world is full of people who laugh at this woman or that man while I can’t and don’t and there it is. Some of them I can’t even bear to look at. And sometimes somebody who you usually don’t like says or does something so riotously funny that you fall about and suspend the negative for as long as the laugh lasts. Or something just happens and you grin and giggle.
Why am I writing about this ? Because I am suffering from an overdose of BNS (Bad News Syndrome).
Leaving war aside, the expensive ugly destructive universally concerning matters of the Ukraine and the Hamas/Israel conflict, through the last week media has offered me one worry after another.
There is rising suicide among the young – a gifted young man who sent revealing pictures via the internet, was threated with blackmail and killed himself, it now being the norm that the young swap naked or sexually explicit pictures of themselves and they may fall into the wrong hands. Just goes to prove how young the young are, that they think it will be all right. “Everybody does it” – and trust their machines.
I can’t dispose of the cutting, it haunts me – the pain, the waste, the comments of the obviously sensible experienced and much better informed than I am, authorities working in the field explaining that this is the norm. Like cement paving and plastic rubbish bags with much more painful fallout.
There is the young woman and her partner who have had four children taken into care and are being tried for the neglect leading to the death of the fifth. Whatever her family is about, why five children before we finally call a halt ? And no, I am not blaming the police. This is an anomaly of law. And social responsibility is taught by home first, school second.
Dogs starved, animals tormented, the elderly knocked off for no other reason than that they are there – the Princess of Wales beaten about the ears by ambivalence of the acceptable style or not of the Royal Family – and just in case you are still standing
a double dose of child abuse, one to the want for nothing son of a want for nothing family which was hardly a family at all, who suffered violent physical cruelty at a smart school and an in depth interview with survivors of sibling incest, underwritten by an editorial explaining why it’s important. And it is. But…
A person can only take so much. I remember reading that an actor I admired in old movies came from eleven generations of clowns. I thought he was a beautiful man, a very good actor and my imagination was caught by that background.
My early schooldays were difficult, I didn’t look or sound like “everybody else” but by the time I got to secondary school, I got a break. I made the disapproving laugh.
Of course it meant playing a part, a part for which I had to make up the lines – but I remember the laughter and that the laughter led to an accommodation – thought that’s not a word I knew then. Very few fools are foolish, most are wise and turn it. It’s hard to put on the page because so much of it depends on intonation. Which takes us to dumbshow, the face, the eyebrows -non verbal communication.
Two young people got on the bus yesterday, hallway through a run. The young man balanced against the clear plastic which marks off the area round the door and did some exercises which concluded with his bottom pushed up against the glass and I caught the eye of the woman opposite. She twigged, and looked away. He continued – and I looked her full in the face and raised my eyebrows and made some universal facial gesture. Her hand flew to her lips. The young runners got off thank heaven, we travelled two more stops and when I wenrt to get off, I looked down at her and said quietly” And you’re a very naughty girl. I knew exactly what you were thinking, it was in a balloon above your head … !” And she seized my hand, beamed and I got off the bus.
Annalog 