TEARS OF A CLOWN

I think I’ve mentioned before about how we should be very suspicious of the overtly sentimental. Images of brutal dictators sitting weeping buckets in the half darkness of their private cinemas only to emerge blinking into the harsh reality of daylight and consign countless innocents to the slaughter pepper their personal biographies and do little to humanise their wickedness.

I myself have something of a reputation (amongst certain individuals) for emotionlessness and my flint-like heart is much commented on by those whose expectations of me to react in one way to their manipulations are disappointed when I refuse to. I maintain that I have always had my suspicions of behaviour that is just what people expect you to do on the grounds that sickly, schmaltzy actions that are simply done because that is what you think you are supposed to be doing in whatever circumstances are more likely to be artificial than any genuine, if unexpected, response might be.

Maybe it was all those years hanging out with actors and their ability to switch emotions on and off at will that made me so cynical, but I suspect it might have had more to do with growing up in a family that had more than its fair share of “Bette Davis” hystericals manipulating situations to their own ends. I like to think that I’ve reached an age where I can refuse to be somebody’s puppet if I choose to, and sometimes the master puppeteers really don’t like it when you do that.

Naturally, if I was currently living under the jackboot of some other regime that’s precisely the sort of thing that would either get me into serious trouble or, more alarmingly, qualify me as being a candidate for higher offices that I like to think I would have enough integrity to refuse even if it meant a reversion to option one.

Strangely though, I am finding that as I get older it is becoming much more easy for me to become deeply moved by the simplest of things at the most unexpected moments. I never know whether this is a natural part of the aging process as you start to reflect upon lost opportunities and time slipping away from you, or whether it has more to do with years of suppression finally starting to seep out of me in cathartic, if not necessarily healthy ways, or maybe I’m just a wicked person with my own sentimentalist streak like all those other villains weeping in their lonely darkness, or perhaps I’m just a big softie who’s forgotten how to hide it quite so well as I used to.

Take, for example, a few incidents over a typical weekend. I’m browsing through the latest edition of the Radio Times, mulling over the viewing options for the coming week when I spot an article giving a little background on a forthcoming documentary about the victims of the most dreadful crimes. Two short pages telling the terrible story of a young nurse killed by her ex-boyfriend. By the end of those pages I’m blinking away the tears as the sheer tragedy of it all even though the story itself had seemingly passed me by at the time it had happened. Either that or I’m in a more “immune” state of mind when I’m trawling through the news because I expect it to be bad and so my sensitivity is suppressed, but when I come across these things unexpectedly they manage to trigger a more emotional reaction.

You see? I can analyse the emotion out of any of my own responses if I want to, but I realise that I’m probably wrong about that, because a story on the BBC website telling of a dreadful house fire found the tears pricking at the corner of the eyes and the throat tightening as I tried to swallow back the weeping under precisely the circumstances where I would claim certain immunity, so what do I know about these things? Maybe that kind of event strikes home more because of the familiarity of the circumstances. We can all live in fear of such horrors falling upon ourselves when we live in much the same kind of house in much the same kind of street, which is why it seems so much closer to home and our own suppressed fears.

Perhaps I’m just going through a particularly emotional phase because a snatch of Beethoven played during the “Horrible Histories” Prom on Saturday morning also caused a moment where there was “something in my eye” but then hearing some Beethoven often does that to me, so it’s rather hard to tell. Later on, a particularly noble act during the second test match at Trent Bridge found me feeling terribly moved by the possibilities offered by the better part of human behaviour, especially in these “win at all costs” times we seem to be living in. But then an item about some injured soldiers on “Top Gear” caused a great deal of lip wobbling, and you really know that you’re in trouble if you’re on the brink of weeping during “Top Gear”.

I don’t really understand any of it, of course. I recall John Peel regaling his listeners using a great deal more charm than I can ever summon up when he admitted to finding it easier and easier to burst into tears at the most unexpected moments as he got older, so maybe it’s not just me, although I’ve always rather suspected that those kinds of things only really happened if you had the kind of close family ties that I seem to have managed to avoid developing, or a particular sense of your own comparatively good luck in life which is again something that I feel somewhat detached from, although, obviously it is all too easy to forget how comparatively lucky I am when I start to fail to see the bigger picture and realise quite how much real suffering there is in the world that I remain insulated from.

Uh-oh… If I’m not careful, I’ll set myself off again…