WOO-HOO

Weekends come and weekends go, moving fast and moving slow…

Over the weekend I saw some things which were genuinely, genuinely funny and it made me realise just how dull I've become in both word and deed, and one of the reasons that my popularity in this life has waned in recent decades must have something to do with my own lack of amiability and humour. After all, people are drawn to the lighter, upbeat side of life in just the same way as my downbeat, lugubrious air repels them.

On yet another of those weekends which seemed more than a little obsessive about catching up on a bit of telly whilst trying to clear some space on the digital recording device in time for Christmas, I watched the results of some immensely funny writing and how the very best of it seems to appear utterly effortless despite the fact that you know that some poor hack had literally sweated blood in order to make it seem so…

I must, I decided, try to write something funny for my blog… but this isn't it.

To be honest, I'm not sure that I can find anything very funny any more which might be why we're struggling so at the moment. After all, given that I utterly failed to conjure up a festive tale for you this year, we are rather left with a big, deep and endlessly black void which needs filling because there really isn't anything happening that I can think of to talk about in December.

Over the weekend, given that I did also bite a bullet and venture outdoors for a while to pick up one or two nicknacks from a store or two, I also saw some enthusiasm being displayed of a kind that I myself can seldom muster when I went to buy a cup of coffee. Some gushing customers (and I do so LOATHE a public gush…) were so excited to find out that my coffee server was about to get hitched to his long-term partner and adopt a child having wanted to be a dad since he was eighteen years old.

I could have lived without the "if anyone was put upon this earth to be a dad it's you!" guff which followed but there you go. I am, after all, not one, it would seem, for public displays of such a sort and did my very best neither to respond or catch anyone's eye as I impatiently waited in line behind this chatty display.

"Very pleased for you. Now... where's my damned coffee…?" as I didn't say (despite thinking it very loudly and hearing it echo inside the cathedral of my mind…)

Still, on the following day which, being a weekend happened to be a Sunday, it also turned out that Monday was going to be "induction day" for another heavily pregnant friend of the Beloved, so that other people's acquisition of children seemed to be very much the topic of the weekend which, given the length of time I'm reliably informed it entails, was one upon which it had become apparent that I am now far too old to even consider adoption.

Ships have sailed and a lonely old age beckons me as I always expected it might...

"Woo-hoo!" I said (with far too little enthusiasm it seems) when I was told that this young lady's "due date" was almost upon us…

I actually thought at the time that I genuinely meant it, but...

You see, it not only matters that you do a "Woo-hoo" but it also matters quite what sort of "Woo-hoo" you do and the "Woo-hoo" I did do was not the right sort of "Woo-hoo" to do...

It matters that there was a right "how do you do" about the sort of "Woo-hoo" I did do, and the "Woo-hoo" you do matters because if you don't know the "Who-hoo to do" there'll be questions asked later about which Woo-hoo do you do...?

Well, I felt a right twit-twoo-hoo and, in the awkward silence which followed, I went off and got drawn into watching the remainder of the (now hysterical seeming) movie "Mission: Impossible" ("Run, tiny Tom... RUN!!!") which just happened to turn up on TV at that moment and, it soon transpired, was made when the internet was still a nipper and we still called the brand new, soon-to-be-opened channel tunnel the "Chunnel…"

I was most fascinated to spot that the name on an office door at one point was the same as I write on the monthly cheques for the milkman and I had visions of his double life as an international master spy, which reminded me of "Milchmann" in "Carry On Spying" which then reminded me that both the "milk bottle bombs" and the "acid-containing pen" (for "poison pen letters…") from that film both eventually turned up in the actual film series which they were supposed to be parodying...

So, just like that po-faced film franchise, perhaps things in Lesser Blogfordshire need to be, if not exactly wittier, then certainly just a tiny bit funnier…

After all, if those brave chaps producing "The Wipers Times" (another of our "catch up viewings" this weekend) were able to produce a certain amount of wit whilst suffering daily bombardment and being sent over the top at the Somme, it really ought not be beyond my abilities to add at least a touch of levity to my daily burblings every once in a while, giving my particular cushy lot in life, should it…?