Blogging, I mean.

I’ve been at it now for over two years - this railing and ranting lark - notched up twenty seven months of musing on a preposterous invisible wall.  I won’t even touch on the reasons for starting in the first place, or recall those early embarrassingly stiff, shy scrawls, or try to pin down when things changed direction, started to dance, then burst and ran screaming for the trees. I gave you the best (and worst) of me. Sob.

Haven’t I said it all now, though? - and in a variety of styles. Is there anything left to say?

This morning the answer was ‘Nope.’

My muse had gone, melted clear away. No point.

But come on. That’s hardly the attitude with which to start a New Year, is it?

2009. Let’s see.

Coo-eee! Inspiration! [knocks on forehead] I know you’re in there.  Come out, come out, wherever you are. [Knocks harder.] Ouch. That hurt.

Should I plunder the past? I’ve done a bit of that; it has limited general appeal. Parody the present? Done that too. Stick with one persona and keep on singing the same old song? (Condemned forever, like Jeff Beck, to endless renditions of ‘Hi, Ho, Silver Lining’.) How about I fall back on diarising? (Yesterday we opened Nancy’s box of things, today I spent 2 hours on the phone to a cancer patient.) You really don’t want to go there, do you?

If in doubt, just ramble.

You haven’t heard my views on fenceposts yet - or compulsory immunisation - or what creative things can be done with leftovers… no, wait… don’t go…

Something will turn up.

Besides, there doesn’t have to be a point.

Blogging, like real life, is an end in itself.

Just to prove how thoroughly I am clutching at straws today, here’s a new cast of potential characters: several generations of The Dogter’s Assistant, aka ‘The Beastie’, (as in ‘Fetch the Beastie!’) in all its headless, disembowelled and interchangeable guises. My favourite is the smile (once a bouncy ball with squeak) on the right hand end. How/why The Dogter left that face intact…

We had a dehumidifier. It worked hard, extracted bucket loads of water, lasted three years, then packed up.  The compressor was faulty. We took it to the tip and bought another one. (Riveting post this, I know, but when the local paper has resorted to printing items twice within the same edition - true - good material is clearly thin on the ground.)

A month after the guarantee expired - oh, the planned obsolescence of a consumer culture - this second dehumidifier began making a funny noise. The motor which drives the fan had stopped working. There was a smell.

The offending part:

J: If we’d kept the old one I could have harvested the motor but you made me chuck it out.

B: Yep. Who was to know? Where would we’ve stored it for the last three years?

J: In the shed.

B: There’s no room in the shed.

J: Well, anyway, I’m not buying another one. Not this time. I’m going to fix this one.

[Two hours of Googling later ...]

J: I found the part. Mail order.

B: Great. You think it’ll be the same - work the same?

J: Dunno. It’s a gamble. Worth a try?

The shiny new motor arrived. It was not exactly the same as the old one, but it fit, seemed to work. Dehumidifier No 2 was duly fixed at a fraction of the cost of replacement. Hurrah! The night-time breathing of a room full of sleepover teenagers was no longer going to entirely fog the upstairs windows as well as my peace of mind. I was impressed. Then J turned the dial.

How to describe the sound? Like a Boeing 707 preparing for take-off, on my landing, in my house.

Apparently - let me get this right - although the new part cost less than half the price of a whole new dehumidifier, and was the ‘most feeble’ motor J could find, it was more than twice as powerful as the old one.  Some ‘further modifications’ might be required …

I should say so.

You can’t bloody win, can you?

J: A Prius?

Jnr: What?

J: A Pious?

Jnr: What? Whatever. I reckon a Hummer. A pimped out Hummer. Desert camo.

J: Mmn.

Jnr: A Hummer. Definitely. [Pause.] With bullet proof windows.

Opposite our house lives a family of hoot owls. Each nightfall they call across from the coastal pines. Before long, the dark spaces in the garden echo with tu-whit tu-whoos.  These sounds mark them out as Tawny Owls which - for all their noise - are only the size of pigeons.

1.  Owls are one of the oldest known groups of non-Galloanserae landbirds; they have changed little in sixty million years. Look at that picture. With their weird feathery faces, heads which can turn 135 degrees in either direction, tiny beaks which open into vast maws, their peculiar digestive processes, they are a glimpse at an age-old lifeform. Like bees, owls are not quite of our time, they are strange airborne anomalies caught in an evolutionary updraught.

2. Occult associations are perhaps unsurprising; the strangeness of owls segues straight to folklore in the shape of the witch’s familiar.  Many ancient cultures, from the Rocky Mountains to the Welsh valleys, have held strange beliefs about owls. For the Romans, owls foretold doom and disaster:

….hearing the hoot of an owl indicated an imminent death, it is thought that the deaths of many famous Romans was predicted by the hoot of an owl, including Julius Caesar, Augustus and Agrippa.

Owls are also symbols of sexual betrayal. According to Owls Mythology and Folklore:

In Welsh mythology, Blodeuwedd, the Goddess of Betrayal, is associated with the owl. According to the story in The Mabinogion, Blodeuwedd was created from flowers by the magician Gwydion for the prince Llew Llaw Gyffes. She had an affair with Goronwy & they contrived to kill Llew. On his death, Llew was transformed into an eagle, but was healed & returned to human form by Gwydion. Llew returned to seek revenge, rather than killing Blodeuwedd, Gwydion turned her into a white owl, to haunt the night in loneliness & sorrow.

3. Of all the owls, the white Barn Owl is the most magnificent; its wing span can reach a metre. One lived in the Dutch barn near where I grew up. If I was given a lift home after dark, dropped at the main road, I had to pick my way down a rocky, unlit farm lane, past that barn. Struggling to keep my balance, fighting my fear of the dark, I’d quail to see, looming a few feet above me, an owl face, or a drift of white wing, floating like a ghost in the darkness.

4. Once, at twilight, I looked out of my window and saw the Barn Owl flying over the long field, beating the air with slow silent strokes. It sailed above the tips of the tall grass, listening for mice, tilted its face downwards and dived. Up jumped our silly cat. Aieeeee! But this was no Tweety Pie! Talons! Cartoon air brakes on! The owl backpeddled, the cat scrabbled, both creatures screeched with shock. There was no beautiful pea green boat.

5. Odd couple: a young woman called Carolyn, who had nurtured a love of owls since childhood, turned eighteen the year she met a man called Tom Screech. Marriage was destined. Shortly afterwards, Mr & Mrs Screech established The Screech Owl Sanctuary near Indian Queens.

The Screech Owl Sanctuary is a quirky little attraction, staffed and supported by real enthusiasts, charming, and well worth a visit. Tiggy’s tea room, named, of course, for a dear departed owl inhabitant, does a very fine cream tea.

6. Odder? When I was a child I had a keen interest in natural science. For a while, until it became evident that I was crap at maths, I wanted to be a paleontologist, or a vet. I practised my idea of scientific methodology - pulling apart and piecing together processes - on owl pellets. (I know this sounds disgusting, but owl pellets are rapidly regurgitated, actually quite dry, and more like little brillo pads packed with bones, than poo.) I’d collect the pellets, soak them in water, spread them on a tray and pick the bones out of the fluff. I’d try to put the tiny mice and vole carcasses back together from a diagram.

7. Oddest? A distant cousin has an aviary. He keeps an owl in it. He also happens to be a prison warden in a high security unit. I imagine him coming home after a hard day’s work. He’s done his time with predators of the human kind - with murderers, extortionists, rapists - so naturally he wants to kick back, indulge a hobby, spend time with a pet. He flicks on the radio, opens the fridge, reaches past the beers. Something in the yard hears these familiar homecoming sounds, and, just as the light pops on, begins keening to its keeper. The warden’s illuminated hand touches a stack of backlit translucent tupperware boxes, each one full of faint, identical dark shapes, frozen mouse corpses…

8. On a cheerier note, to whit this picture of a jolly owl, here is our 2008 Christmas tree.

(I found him, yesterday, marked down, at the Garden Centre.)

Happy Holidays Folks!

How could I forget the insane anarchy which was Jnr’s seventh birthday party at the local sports centre - twenty kids charged up on coca-cola and Haribo, screaming at the tops of their little voices whilst racing pedal cars around an echoing volleyball court like a hundred manic Mr MacHenrys, to the soundtrack of *Squirtle’s choice, Public Enemy - when we were gently advised not to play ‘musical chairs’, for reasons of health and safety. You don’t say.

I’m all in favour of protecting workers in the workplace, having grown up surrounded by tales of farmers gored and farm hands with arms torn off in agricultural machinery, but my jaw fell open when I was told that if I wanted the external walls of the house painted in spring, I could no longer rely on an odd-job bloke with a good ladder as previously but, because we have ‘raised gable ends’ (whatever they are) and the regulations have changed, I would have to hire scaffolding for a day; it’s health and safety.

Do you know how much scaffolding costs?  Somehow I think the place is destined to disappear under the slow accretion of green algae next year.

So, I was intrigued last week when Channel 4 screened Cutting Edge: The Fun Police, a programme about about health and safety inspectors. I watched idly, out of the corner of my eye (a dangerous place) at first, but a few minutes in and I was hooked; the inspectors were doing an experiment, on custard powder.

I’ve always been fascinated by custard powder, it’s **thixotropic - it runs, but you can snap it, it flows, but if you stab it with a spoon it goes rock hard - which is an interesting phenomenon to observe if making custard is the most exciting thing you’ve done all day - mmn, anyway - but I bet you didn’t know this: custard powder has coal flour in it, which is explosable.’

Fantastic. I watched as they duly exploded some under ‘controlled conditions’.

‘Did it work?’ the cameraman said.

‘There is no ‘work’, or ‘not work’,’ the dour Inspector replied, ‘there is only data.’

This programme was developing charm. I felt for Ed Friend, too, a health-and-safety consultant who seemed like a nice well-meaning chap, as he read from Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail rant against his profession. In one particularly sustained and vitriolic tirade, dear RLj describes the inspectors as akin to ‘Stasi’. Ed’s voice was full of wounded outrage.

So, the next day, when I listened to The Archers - okay, I confess, I do listen to The Archers from time to time - it may be deadly dull, but like hot water bottles, cocoa and cough medicine, it’s comforting; plus, I love to hate it - I had my health and safety head on.

Jill Archer got some ropey old outdoor lights from Mr Pullen at the recent swap sale. She’s donated them to brighten up the Village Hall for Christmas. Phil has checked them and claims they work, but they’ve already blown the fuse once and what with the Christmas panto coming up…

Commentators love to indulge in predictions at this time of year, so here is one of mine: Christmas Archers Special (look away now!) I predict - FIRE!

Imagine it: The string of Christmas lights flicker and fizz, sparks land on a bit of discarded crêpe paper and smoulder away whilst the panto cast are trying so hard to remember Linda’s instructions as well as their lines, and the audience are distracted by the scenery shaking in a strange way, that no-one notices the smell of smoke…

Clarrie the reluctant pantomime cow will be horribly scorched (’Oww, Eddie’); Brenda will be trapped inside and heroic Tom ‘meat products entrepreneur’ Archer will wade in courageously only to burst in the heat like one of his wretched boring sausages. Matt Crawford will stumble out like the sleazy coward he is, going up in a boozy haze like a purple flaming sambuca. The scenery will ignite and crash down to reveal - collective gasp - posh Alice Aldridge and Christopher Carter, the blacksmith, in a semi-naked stand-up clinch…

All that will be left will be Joe Grundy grunting at the smouldering heap which was to have been the Ambridge Christmas Panto, muttering in his lugubrious way,

‘Health and safety, see, I told ‘em, health and safety.’

Nah. It’ll never happen. Shame, though.

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* Squirtle: Jnr’s nickname when small. Squirtle is a Pokémon, a bipedal turtle with its most notable feature being the hard shell on its back. This shell forms and hardens on its back after birth. [Wikipedia] I.e. Cute, full of beans, but tough.

**Thixsotropic: the property exhibited by certain gels of becoming fluid when stirred or shaken and returning to the semisolid state upon standing. [Dictionary.com]

J is always on the lookout for novel records to dust off and take for a spin on it. The other day, in the charity shop, he spied an oddity in pristine condition, Bawdy Cockney Songs by Elsa Lanchester. Inspired by our recent Flanders and Swann ‘Pee, Po’ Youtube extravaganza, he had to give it a go and duly parted with his pound.

On Saturday night we unsleeved the rarity and had un poco musica.

The blurb describes Elsa Lanchester as ‘an unconventional beauty, dance teacher and performer’ born in 1902 in Lewisham, South London. Today, she’s more well known for another role entirely - she even has her own page on Cult Sirens - that of the ‘monster woman’ in the original 1935 version of Bride of Frankenstein. What surreal discography.

The track listing included: Please Sell No More Drink to My Father, a ditty in the style of Victorian Music Hall, the risque Lola’s Saucepan, a thinly euphemised exhortation to young women to protect their virginity, and my favourite, advice after my own heart, Never Go Walking Without Your Hat PIn.

As ever, the combination of instrument (Garrard), score (Bawdy Songs) and the unique flavour of the particular evening (performance) amounted to some fine fun, but…

As I whipped the hoover round today, I had second thoughts; lines from If You Can’t Get In the Corners came floating back like fragments from a bad dream:

inventions of the devil with their wheezing and their hum
give me a piece of cheesecloth
you can keep your vacc-u-um

you can put them devices you know where

a thing that sucks and blows
through a nozzle or a hoze
just ain’t for me

why get tangled in electric chords
and a bloomin’ billowin’ bag
when all you need’s a bit of spit, a finger, and a rag

Actually, you can see why someone gave that record away.

(Housework does that exact same thing to my hair.)

There is no easy way to introduce a subject like this gently: I’m an advocate of assisted death.

Perhaps because of my personal history - blogged last week - perhaps partly because of age - several of my fortywhatever friends are now beginning to experience the terminal decline of their own parents - or perhaps because it has recently become topical, this subject came over the wire as ready for some exploration.

In 1979, when my mother died, the treatment of terminally ill patients and the care of their relatives was primitive. As she approached the end of her life, my mother was given pain relief, but proper palliative care was still in its infancy and to put it bluntly, she suffered. As a lifelong atheist/Humanist, not tied to Christian ideas about sin and suffering, I know that if she had been able to choose, she would have chosen an assisted death in a heartbeat, but that option, then, was not only not available, it was in the realm of *science fiction, positively taboo.

Since then, there has been a gradual shift in the public perception of the concept of the individual choosing when to die which can be tracked partly by the language we have evolved to describe it. ‘Euthanasia’ - with it’s suggestion of chilly vet’s waiting rooms and soft-pillow murder - became ‘assisted suicide’ - still tainted with notions of illegality, sin, and squandered vigour, before transcending the emotive to become the currently accepted term, neutral, accurate - ‘assisted death’. According to a press release from the campaign pressure group Dignity in Dying,

‘Opinion polls consistently show that at least 80% of the UK population supports a change in the law on assisted dying.’

As recently as October, Britain watched multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy fight to clarify the law around assisted death. This was followed shortly afterwards by the sad story of paralysed ex-rugby player, 23 year old Daniel James, who travelled to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to put an end to a life which for Daniel had become unbearable, the youngest Briton so far to elect to do so. Most recently, 13 year old Hannah Jones’ bold decision to refuse a heart transplant galvanised the debate. Medical advances are bringing unprecedented pressure to bear on the issues surrounding quality of life at the end of life.

Dignity in Dying go on to state,

‘Although only a minority of terminally ill people would exercise the right to an assisted death, many will take comfort in having this choice. At Dignity in Dying we believe that assisted dying forms part of a wider debate around choice at the end of life.’

There is no getting away from it; death is the one universal human certainty. For a culture which considers itself humane and enlightened, which has at its disposal all the advantages of modern medicine and science, all the accumulated wisdom of centuries of philosophical and spiritual inquiry, to cross into the third millennium continuing to bumble towards this certainty still pretending it isn’t waiting for each and every one of us, is, it seems to me, a supreme collective failure of imagination. Sooner, or preferably later, death must be faced.

Some of us will have accidents, some of us will die as a result of ‘lifestyle’ choices, some of us will live to be very old and develop natural ‘complications’, some of us, the lucky few, will even die in our sleep, as my father did, and some of us, according to Cancer Research UK, ‘approximately 1 in 4 people’, will die from cancer. Whichever way, we are all going to die.

Surely, it would behove our culture to try to help us face the fact by enshrining an option for assisted death?

Hand in hand with the idea of assistance, as ‘Yea, though [we] walk through the valley of the shadow of death’‘, is the concept of the ‘good death’.

Increasingly, those who work with the sick and dying, those who counsel their loved ones, talk of living wills and the good death. In essence, this notion goes beyond the secular, scientific idea that death is simply a medical matter to be controlled by advanced palliative care, managed and endured; those who have been close to the dying know that some levels of pain simply cannot be ‘managed’, they are immune even to the most powerful opiates.

The concept of the ‘good death’ also swerves away from the passivity underpinning the major religions, that in relinquishing life, we must by definition relinquish all control and submit to - what? - the whim of a capricious god? - the falling out of good or bad luck? - the endurance of outcomes with stoicism and an eye on the ever-after?

Balanced against the harsh reality of death, the best guides, the hospice workers, the pastors, priests and social workers, be they religious, Humanist, or psycho-social practitioners, recognise that it is possible to offset an assisted process, the lighting of a path towards acceptance not only of mortality but of ‘biographical pain’ - not exactly secular ‘confessional’, but akin to it - a way of accepting  and letting go of the psychic pain you have carried, the pain that others have caused you, the pain you have caused others.

A ‘good death’ means providing an opportunity, however short, however premature, however difficult, for the dying and their friends and family to come to terms with the inevitable, the end of a life. It is a bold ideal, but one whose time has come.  Individually and collectively, religiously or with secular commitment, ideally, we would all do well to prepare for a good death, but to do it, we need the assistance of a three-fold, interdisciplinary approach, a supportive and humane medical, spiritual and legal framework.

Strangely, I find myself quoting from a paper [2005] by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,

‘The right to be spared avoidable pain is beyond debate - as is the right to say yes or no to certain treatments in the knowledge of factors such as these. But once that has mutated into a right to expect assistance in dying, the responsibility of others is involved, as is the whole question of what society is saying about life and its possible meanings. Legislation ignores these issues to its cost.’

It really is time our litigators caught up with the public mood, moved forward, and helped us plan for our time of greatest need by embracing the concept of assisted death and wrapping it securely in laws we can all depend on. Should I find myself, at some dim and, hopefully, distant point in the future, ill, vulnerable and disempowered, I can state for the record - assisted death - I’m counting on it.

I would like to end this post with a joke about a doctor, a priest and a lawyer, just to leaven things a little here, but I can’t for the life of me think of one…  Instead, I’ll draw your attention to this:

Next week, on 08-12-08, BBC One will be showing I’ll Die When I Choose, a thirty minute programme about politician and Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Margo Macdonald. According to the BBC synopsis: ‘in this deeply personal film, she uncovers the truth about assisted dying, meeting those with illnesses like hers who are desperate to die, and exploring how British law could be changed to allow them to choose when they can.’

And finally, as we face the final curtain on this subject, returning to the mention of *science fiction, I remembered this scene from the 1973 dystopian cult sci-fi film Soylent Green. In a famous scene, Edward G. Robinson’s character, Sol Roth, elderly and tired of all the greed and corruption around him, takes his life to its natural conclusion; he enters a pre-paid contract to die by the administration of a lethal drug at the hands of a pretty nurse. In his last moments the planet he is leaving behind, the evanescent beauty of having lived on it, are vividly recalled through images and music.

The introduction to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is not the music I would choose, but you’ll get the idea…

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Additional resources: mariecurie.org: End of Life: The Facts

Some of my favourite holidays have featured ferry rides: the Scottish Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Cyclades, Thailand. The closest I have ever come to a near death experience occurred on an illegal ‘ferry’ - travelling to an island off the coast of Malaysia in a badly stabilised converted fishing vessel crammed with young backpackers - in shark infested waters, in a tropical storm. *We really thought we were all going to die. A few years later a similar vessel went down in much the same circumstances with the loss of most on board. On the other hand, part of my honeymoon was celebrated on a ferry, from Plymouth to Santander. One day, I’d love to do the Hudson Bay area, ferry hopping.

Perhaps my fondness for ferries goes back to childhood. There are lots of them around here: the King Harry Ferry, the Bodinnick Ferry, the St Mawes/Falmouth Ferry, Torpoint.  I grew up in an area where the two largest centres of population were divided by an estuary and joined by ferries. Ferry journeys involve tide tables, timetables, waiting, huddling, the smell of the sea, the taste of salt, feeling the wind on your skin… that ferry rides are unpredictable adds to their appeal.

Until recently, though, I’d never taken the Cremyll Ferry.

It runs from Stonehouse in Plymouth (where a friend lives), across the Tamar river, to a ‘forgotten corner’ of Cornwall on the edge of the Mount Edgcumbe Estate.

Here’s the history:

….records of a crossing date back to the Norman Conquest, and Cornish mail flowed through here until 1794. The turn pike ran up the hill to Crafthole and on to Liskeard, and the toll house still stands beside the road, now, the Cremyll car park. The Edgcumbe family owned the ferry rights from 1493 until 1944, and built the Earl’s Waiting Room in the mid-19th century.

This quiet bay has witnessed Viking ships at anchor, the wrecking of the Catherine von Fleshier in 1786, and the embarkation of American troops for the D-Day invasion of 1944.

The Italianate Tower House which stood beside the boatyard was reduced to rubble by german bombers in March 1941, the same night that Mount Edgcumbe House went up in flames. Three residents died in the attack, including the ferry skipper and the engineer; after this the Millbrook Steamboat Company stepped in to help with the crossing.

On the other side, you can stroll through the grand estate grounds - where lady walkers might fancy themselves as characters in a Jane Austen novel - follow that with a cream tea in the charming Orangery -

before striking out for the wooded Rame peninsula - full of copper beech leaves at this time of year - past the fantastic Gothic folly on the point,

along the edge of the estuary beaches

to the picturesque twin villages of Cawsand and Kingsand, with pubs - for fortification - and a bus back to Cremyll for the return ferry ride.

A perfect winter day out.

Soundtrack? Cripple Creek Ferry by Neil Young, of course.

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* Ed: What is it with you? Always the sex and death thing…

(Christ! TFFT!)

Humour is a huge subject, probably too big to do anything like justice in an idle blog post - philosophers, academics, commentators and playwrights, have, after all, been trying to analyse humour for centuries and who am I to add my twopenn’orth? Well, I’ll tell you. You probably think I’m one of the serious sort and you’re not wrong, but I do strive for balance and what better reason to become familiar with the intricacies of comedy?

As a fortywhatever woman I’m sure I don’t need to provide an excuse for an opinionated rant, either, or give it any kind of context but just for once I’ll list my credentials for you.

Er… I’ve read The Name of the Rose? I really did LOL to Portnoy’s Complaint?

No. Seriously, I’ve been a fan of stand-up comedy ever since I was old enough to pay my own way in and I’ve seen a broad spread of acts over the years at pubs, clubs and festivals, ranging from the bland (sorry Lenny Henry), through Eighties political correctness (Jo Brand, Ben Elton etc.) via the downright offensive (Jerry Sadowitz, Bill Hicks, Ian Cognito) to the gentle faux air-heads like Eddie Izzard, Ross Noble and Alan Carr.  I’m even fairly up to date on the latest crop of  Noughties vicious irreverents - like Charlie Brooker and Jimmy Carr. I love L.D - oh yes - and - I taught Trevor Griffiths’ play, Comedians, for three years in a row to a bunch of 16-19 year old goths and emos. In Weston-super-Mare. What a hoot that was.

More than that though, if you’re a parent, to some extent you have to work through your philosophy on humour. It’s all about those magical, fluctuating but important phenomena psychologists call ‘boundaries’. The first time you laugh at baby’s farts you can set the tone. Likewise, the first time you see baby slip in a paddling pool or walk into a door, watch out, you could be on your way to creating the next ‘class clown’.

Take my family. No really, please, take my family… in our house we’ve been having an ongoing debate about slapstick versus *scatology. Living with two males, one a schoolboy, the other… where do you draw the line? How low do you go? Often, increasingly recently, I’m driven to flip-out over one joke too far, especially at mealtimes. Is it an age thing? A gender thing? Moreover, which wins, slapstick or scatology, which is ‘best’?

You see, as I said at the start, I’m not averse to the odd bit of slapstick, that shiver of schadenfreude which makes me, in the eyes of my family, a bit of a sadist. Scatology and slapstick have in common that they both tap into your ‘inner child’ - gawd ‘elp you if you haven’t got one - I just prefer other people’s pain to their poo, is all.

I want to tell you a story: I had a boyfriend once who was outraged by my preferences. Mind you, he was particularly accident prone. We lived together in an old cottage for a while. The toilet was downstairs at the end of a narrow, twisty and steep staircase. He had a weak bladder, so he kept a piss-pot under the bed which he would empty in the morning. He also happened to be taller than the door jamb.

One morning when he was in a rush for work, carrying his piss-pot and negotiating the turn in the stair well, he whacked his head on the door jamb, slipped down the stairs and sent the piss-pot up into the air. It didn’t end there. Whoosh! The piss-pot came down again. On top of him. I saw the whole thing.

I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t stop laughing, not for about an hour. I mean, I ran and got a cloth, ice, a clean shirt, you know, tried to help, tried to commiserate, but… I don’t think he ever quite forgave me.

Slap and scat.  Crossover comedy? Not quite poo, but win/win, nonetheless.

Anyhow, back to scatology. Perhaps rather than an age thing, it’s a ‘family culture’ thing? (See boundaries, above.)

My parents were post-Victorians. They liked Music Hall, and The Goons, and Monty Python, but not poo jokes. J’s parents are post-Edwardians. In some respects the Edwardian era was a response to the Victorian one, and scatological humour was popular at the time, apparently, precisely as an antidote to Victorian primness, which may explain a chaotic informal parlour game I have privately come to call ‘Pee, Po, Willy, Bum, Fart’ which in essence involves my in-laws showing off in front of the grandchildren at mealtimes…

[Oh. The Youtube intro to Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, with the soundtrack version of Flanders and Swan's Pee, Po, Belly, Bum, Drawers seems to have disappeared. Will search for a replacement...]

See. Culture clash. Whaddya do?

It does help these kinds of marital misunderstandings if you can at least trace them back to something. If I were to get all serious again, I’d look to Freud.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, to paraphrase a learned friend, ’scatological (or ‘excremental’) jokes are a like ‘obscene’ jokes in general.  Freud seems to believe obscene jokes are a deflection of a sexual urge - you joke about sex because you want to have it - often with the person you’re joking with - but you can’t directly say so.’  (Which is perhaps why I find my in-laws jokes so disturbing…)

How can jokes about poo be ’sexual’?

‘Well, they echo back to the excretory functions which are attached to the ‘erotogenic zones’ (oral, anal, phallic) which are sexualised (because sensualised) during childhood.  If you think about it, excretory and erotogenic impulses persist in some adult sexual preferences…’

Whoa. I’ll stop there.

For Freud, excremental humour is an expression of an impulse that is both sexual and infantile and so it is a manifestation of infantile sexuality - ergo poo jokes are childish. Genius.

I’m not sure where that leaves slapstick, but according to that well known philosophical barrel of laughs, Theodor Adorno: Schadenfreude is the: “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.‘

Appropriate! No harm done. So does that mean slapstick ‘trumps’ poo? I win?

Anyhow, on to higher things.

In the best comedy, though, the target of the humour, if not the comedian themselves, is diffuse, and the laugh which results from it comes at the expense of no-one in particular. There is no one single butt, just a we’re-all-in-it-together observation about the human condition in general, which alleviates (psychic) suffering and resonates with a laugh. Good comedians make this look easy, but it is actually much easier to crack a one-liner - linguistic trickery, it’s the way you tell ‘em - or to aim the joke at someone else.

Which brings me back to Russell Brand.

He’s clearly a clever chap, but his ‘brand’ of humour - increasingly popular, I know - leaves me cold. Instead of seeking to illuminate the human condition, he seems to set himself apart with sneers. I don’t get his appeal, not as current funny man-of-the-month, not as anti-establishment rebel without a cause (¿Que?) and certainly not as big-hair sex object. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to complain to Ofcom about his recent jape with Jonathan Ross, but I did think they acted like a pair of snickering schoolboys with their silly knock-and-run trick.

It was cheap and mean and sleazy.

But then, I’m not a big fan of the current fashion for ‘punk ‘em, prank ‘em and watch ‘em eat bugs’ either.

It strikes me that one of the dangers of the digital culture wherein every pratfall, blooper, faux-pas and drunken ramble can be captured, transcribed, blogged or posted on YouTube, is that stories like ‘Piss Pot’, above, could carry on haunting and humiliating the poor victim for years after the event.

Mmn. Perhaps if I’d had a camera phone back in 1996 I could’ve come away with the sofa and the stereo…

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*Scatology: n: obscenity, esp. words or humour referring to excrement.

Too long, this one. Sorry. Notes for something.

They had moved my mother into a side room. We hovered on the threshold; the moment I glanced in, my heart lurched. You know that expression? - ‘my heart leapt into my mouth’ - that’s how it felt.  The world tilted.

I was torn between two monumental, conflicting impulses: the urge to cry out, run forward and hold her hand, and the exact opposite, the rising compulsion to drop my coat, turn on my heel then and there, and run away as hard and fast as my young life would carry me.

My father and I just stood there. We did nothing; we were frozen. The room was bare, there was no locker, no cards, no colour, not even a faded bedspread. Everything was pale and bleached out. My mother’s skin was waxy, otherworldly. This was a dying room.

If I ran out into the night I could leave the feeling in that room, sense nothing but the hairs on my bare arms tingling with the shock of winter cold. If I blundered into danger in the darkness, hurt myself, drew blood, it would move the feeling somewhere else, into a knee or an elbow, make it physical, manageable, contained.

We hesitated. There weren’t even any chairs. Underneath the pervasive reek of hospital disinfectant, there was another smell, strong, sweet, familiar - unpleasant - someone has left some old flowers in here, I thought, looking for a vase, expecting to see fetid, slimy stems in dull water - they shouldn’t leave these things lying around to rot. The nurse should take them away. Nasty. I’d find them and take them out.

I stepped closer, looked again. There were no flowers.

My mother was lying on her back, both arms bandaged, attached to a drip. The restraints were gone. The room was filled with an unearthly sound, like snoring - she did snore sometimes in her sleep - but this was different - she was not asleep - her eyes were neither open or closed, her eyelids were slack, wavering inbetween. Behind them, her irises - they should have been clear blue - were the palest grey, bleached and clouded, like catatracts. She was hovering at the very edge of life, a ghost, trapped in a blind, insensible body.

The sickness had won. Her flesh was too raddled with sickness, pain and drugs to hold her fiery spirit any longer. One by one, her organs had packed up, abandoned the fight for life. The bright, fierce, funny woman who was my mother was gone.

My father led me away then. We left the sympathetic looks and the searing glare of tungsten lights and went quietly, out into the darkness, drove home in virtual silence, numb and frozen, entered a cold, empty house. I remember smoothing the tablecloth over the table with peculiar care, lining up the knives and forks with excessive ritual, as if trying to delay the last supper. I don’t know how I ate. Habit. Everything tasted dry, bland, like cotton wool.

Through this fog, a telephone rang. My mother’s life was over. Some other kind of life began.