HOW often I find rather serious moments painfully funny, especially at times when outright laughter would be inappropriate.
Journalists, in particular, store up memorable conversations for ribald repetition.
Once, interviewing a grieving son, I asked what his father’s last words were.
“Dad had no last words,” sniffed the sorrowing offspring. “My mother was there . . .”
I remember a colleague telephoning the headmaster of a local Catholic high school to be greeted with the reply: “Good morning, the head of John the Baptist speaking.”
And a woman reporter who blushed when, having asked a spritely pair of ninety-year-olds celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary if they had ever been bedridden, was told by the old lady: “Oh yes, quite often, but we both were much younger then!”
Golfers, of course, have lots to laugh about: it comes from spending too much time at the 19th. Big Ian Martin of Goswick delights in recounting his visit to a pub during a golf trip to Anstruther in Fife, where he noticed a series of small brass nameplates screwed into the bar.
“What must one do to earn one of these?” he asked the rather grumpy barmaid, thinking perhaps of a hole in one or an albatross.
“Die,” she replied, sourly.
Anyway, I’m delighted to report that even coroners have their favourite tales. Bringing in a suicide verdict, one chap explained tenderly to grieving relatives that the evidence showed the deceased had washed down a lethal handful of barbiturates with two cans of lager from a six-pack found beside the bed.
“Do you have any questions?” he intoned, sympathetically.
“Aye,” said the deceased man’s brother. “What happened to the other four lagers?”
I WILL tell you why senior planning judge Mr Justice Andrew Collins overruled Blyth Valley Council’s requirement that house builders discount 30% of their developments in order to supply homes at (locally) affordable prices.
It is because Mr Justice Collins is driven from his top value home in the comfortable SOUTH-EAST to sit in the High Court in big-spending LONDON and as a result has no real knowledge of the comparative peanuts ordinary folk in the NORTH-EAST earn.
We need homes affordable for locals as well as new arrivals, possibly to buy but preferably to provide rental accommodation
You begin to see why the Scots yearn for independence, don’t you?
EAT your hearts out Messrs Hann, Poole and Gutteridge! My fellow Journal columnists will turn green with envy this morning upon learning of my newly acquired celebrity status.
From the moment a Mr and Mrs Hardwick of Tweedmouth dropped in on our weekly coffee morning in Crookham village hall I became – admittedly in my own mind – a North Northumberland tourist attraction.
As big as Bamburgh Castle, as keenly sought as the wild beasts at Chillingham . . . that’s me.
Keen Journal readers, the Hardwicks had called in for a coffee in hopes of “bumping into Banksy”. Imagine!
But it gets better . . . my very own celebrity stalkers will meet me for a second time soon when I personally deliver the raffle prize they won. Joy, surely, will be unconfined.
All this is rather new to me. When I give my little local talks – donations always go to the Josie Grove Leukaemia Fund – I receive scant attention and am more likely to be accosted for news of that rampaging rooster Jock the Cock or the latest doings of The Byreman, which I supply somewhat grumpily.
I am now busy producing autographed photos of myself with neither cockerel nor Byreman in evidence.
Incidentally, reports reach me of an imposter who presents himself proudly to the gullible – particularly to groups of lady golfers – as “The Byreman”. Frankly, why anyone would wish to represent himself as that mutton-chopped, bibulous old Tory I fail to see, but there it is – you have been warned.
