Tag: Making jokes

Words

Quote George Orwell

The problem with words is that they do not always say, on paper, what you thought they said when you put them there.  A misplaced comma can turn a plea for peace into a declaration of war; a tribute can become a slight with nothing more than an inopportune underlining.  We are all guilty of ‘scanning’ documents, maybe actually reading just one word in three and assuming we understand the rest.  Perhaps no two readers assume the same.  Words can mean different things depending on the mood of the reader: it is possible to take offence at even the greatest of compliments if you really, really choose to try.  I spend huge chunks of my time excising paragraphs from whatever it may be I am working on because, on reading it back through, I discover that it does not appear to mean anything even remotely like I originally intended it to mean.  If only I could navigate my way around the bits that did not turn out to be funny so easily…

Try as you might, it is so difficult to take credit for a joke: they are never funny until someone has laughed at them and I know plenty of people who would attest that I have never written anything funny in my entire life.  I wrote a book once.  I thought it was very funny until someone who did not know me read it for the first time.  It was intended as a farce (an absurd comic creation) but she read it as a completely different kind of farce (an incredibly badly written attempt at a psychological thriller).  She had much advice on how to make it more ‘thrilling’, but as far as I can remember, had not bumped her head against even the most blunt of jokes on her way through.  Now, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time and I am incredibly inured to both criticism and rejection.  I take them both on a chin that now closely resembles Desperate Dan’s; I try to learn from the critiques, I try not to get too depressed by the rejections.  I eat lots of chocolate.

As well as a number of strangers, I did, of course, give the book to many people I knew, expecting them to be much kinder than they should be, and indeed they were.  They knew me, so they knew that it was intended to be funny and consequently, I suppose, they must have been on the look-out for jokes.  I’m pretty sure that most of them read it (at least one word in three) as they said they had, and I don’t recall any of them telling me how much of a thriller it was.  But one reader, out of many who did not know me, did not find it so; did not see that it was even intended to be so, and it left me facing just three possibilities: 1) they were expecting to read a thriller and so picked out the aspects of the plot (yes, there was one) that did have elements of Ian Rankin about them – they were meant to be absurd, but they were there, or 2) she had absolutely no sense of humour at all, or 3) it was just not funny.  I decided, not unreasonably, that it was the latter: that she was right, and I did no more with it than consign it to a file I keep on my computer that contains more misses than the average convent.  I am used to rewriting (and re-rewriting) but I could not find a way of rewriting a series of jokes that one reader at least deciphered as nothing more than sub-standard Dan Brown (if, indeed, such a thing is possible) so I shelved it and did other things instead (mope mostly).

At the start of this week, finding myself with a little time on my hands, I trawled my way through this ‘Heroic Failures’ file and I read the book again.  I am slightly ashamed to admit that it made me laugh.  It was not the stuff of Booker Prizes, but it never intended to be.  Once I’d started, I wanted to finish and I enjoyed the hours that it swallowed.  I didn’t at any point expect to be thrilled. 

I think, perhaps, I was reading the wrong words…

Wood Pigeon Days

Photo by Charlotte on Unsplash

There are good days and there are bad days and there are days in between.  On good days I tend to be a little more philosophical and inward-looking, on bad days I try to make jokes.  I have no idea why this should be, but it has always been this way.  On a good day I roll out of bed in the morning and head to the shower with a skip in my step and a song on my lips.  (If I’m honest, this is probably not true.  My knees are deeply intransigent and after a few night-time hours of non-weight bearing activities, they take much persuasion before they are prepared to get their shoulders back to the wheel, so, whatever my mood, the morning trip to the shower is always a painful, stiff-legged lope.  We’ll call it artistic licence.)  On a bad day, I confuse my morning tablets with my contact lenses, I get toothpaste in my eye and I wash my hair with shower descaler.  I write happy things, but just so that I balance my Ying and my Yang, I do so with a heavy heart.  It is how I maintain equilibrium.  It’s like packing an overloaded cargo ship with an additional consignment of helium balloons.  Like filling a Jumbo jet with a thousand balsa wood gliders, like believing that a ferry would be less inclined to sink if all the car tyres were fully inflated.

Bad days are the days when I set out to write jokes and when I hit the chocolate when I can’t.  I make no plans over what to do with whatever I scrawl when it is finished, because finishing it is all that matters and any focus beyond that is a waste of good eyes.  Bad days are not the days for revisiting something that could not be finished days ago – if I couldn’t finish it then, why should I be able to do so now?  Bad days are for starting afresh and finishing no matter how long it takes: of finding the jokes, even if I have to tie them down to make them sit still.  Bad days are magpie days.  It really doesn’t matter whether they appear in ones or twos, on bad days, not even the memory of Jenny Hanley can make me smile at magpies.  Magpies are creatures of dastardly monochrome perfection – like devils in pied plumage – flawlessly crafted to fulfil their diabolical purpose, devoid of mercy and morality.  Definitely not a bird you would invite into your home.

On good days I see buzzards circling on the thermals and kestrels hanging on the wind, their intent equally sinister, but their impression noble rather than evil.  I see robins and, occasionally, the wren that my mum always swore she would return as.  On good days writing is painless.  Words fall easily into place, but somehow they belong in somebody else’s book.  My own tome is not so smooth.  Run your fingers over it and you will feel the splinters.  On a good day, all I want to do is to write like I do on a bad day, but without the angst; without the beard trimmer and the whisky.

And then, increasingly, there are the ok days.  Ok days are not great, but nor are they awful.  They are porridge without blueberries, but with just enough honey to allow me to swallow it.  They are blended, not malt.  They are decent coffee: not great, but not godawful Starbucks.  On ok days there are no raptors, just wood pigeons walking, Charlie Chaplin-like, across the lawn and looking up at the bird table that does not allow them access.  They make me smile although I’m not sure why.  They are chased away by a single blackbird who hops up onto the shed roof and ‘chirps’ loudly at the cat on the opposite fence.  The cat bares his claws, but does not move because the bird has got his number and, if he’s honest, Kit-e-Kat is much easier to swallow anyway: much less beaky.  On ok days, life establishes a stability that just about allows everything else to get on with it.  Whatever ‘it’ is.

I’ve grown to quite like the ok days.  I have fewer edges on an ok day, but I can still find quiet corners if I search for them.  Some days I can stare out of this window and see nothing, on other days I see the vastness of the universe.  Mostly I see sparrows squabbling over peanuts and spiders hanging from the eaves.  I see oceans of emerald and jade, and I wonder how many shades of green there are.  How many shades can a human eye detect?*  I can see them all from my little window.  Every single one.  The ones with a name and the ones that lay between them.  Green takes the earth from birth to decay.  Green is the colour of being alive and being awake to it.

On an ok day, I roll out of bed with, if not exactly a song in my heart, then at least a note or two on my spleen.  I may not sing in the shower, but I don’t howl at the moon either.  On an ok day, I can be the kind of man that I would like to spend time with.  I am much easier to live with when I’m not swinging like a pendulum – although less efficient in a grandfather clock.  These in-between days are most of my life now.  I live more than function and I smile more than frown.  I feel as though it all makes sense from time to time – and me with it.  There are good days and there are bad days, but mostly there are wood pigeon days – and for most of those days, I am happy with that.

*I can’t find a definitive answer to this, but everyone seems to agree that we see more shades of green than any other colour – except for my brother who, amongst millions of others, is red/green colour blind and thence quite unable to decide whether a rose is the right way up or not.