Everything happens by happenstance… My mother re-meets my undead father

The long-nosed stranger of Strasburg in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Today’s blog is about how my mother met my father.

I have not read Laurence Sterne’s book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which was published 1759-1767. As I understand it, the book is supposed to be the autobiography of Tristram Shandy and it starts off with his birth but – in order to explain why that happened – he has to explain about his parents and the background to his birth to such an extent that, after nine volumes, he is way back before his birth and has never started his autobiography. That is what my English master told me at school.

The reason I cannot read Tristram Shandy is because, in 1991, I was hit by a truck while I was standing on a pavement and now I can write books on computer screens, but I cannot read books.

It would take too long to explain.

I was hit by a truck because, one Saturday in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, I was rushing to post a birthday card to someone I knew in Norwich, Norfolk. She was not a friend, just an acquaintance of an acquaintance whom I had met by accident a few years before.

My mother and my father went to the same school together in Whithorn, Wigtownshire, Scotland, but they had not really known each other then. They were in different classes. My mother lived in the small village of Garlieston. My father lived in the Isle of Whithorn (which, confusingly, is a totally different place to Whithorn).

My parents re-met by accident in their twenties in the 1940s

During the Second World War, my father was home on leave from the Royal Navy. He took a wrong bus and was walking down the main street in Whithorn. My mother was in the street with a friend who had gone into a jeweller’s shop. My mother looked up the street and was surprised to see my father walking towards her.

She was surprised because she had heard he had been killed.

“I thought you were dead,” she told him.

They got into a conversation.

“No, I wasn’t killed,” he told her.

A few weeks later my father, his sister and some other people went from the Isle of Whithorn to my mother’s village of Garlieston for a dance.

My mother’s family dog disappeared and she went off looking for it with my father.

The dog (a Jack Russell called Vick) eventually turned out to be asleep under the sink in the kitchen.

Me (aged 1) and my father near home in Campbeltown, Argyll

I think my parents married in 1948. It might have been 1946. I can’t be bothered to check. It does not matter. It is in the past. The past is only what people remember or what people claim in writing happened in the past. The past does not exist, even though everything is interconnected by happenstance.

In praise of the Daily Telegraph and Pear Shaped Comedy Club’s quirkiness

To start at the end of this blog and to reply to your reaction…

Look.

It’s my blog. I am allowed to witter.

So, for fans of Tristram Shandy…

Brian Damage and Krysstal’s weekly Pear Shaped comedy club has been running in London’s West End for eleven years. Brian and Krysstal promote it as “the second worst comedy club in London”. I prefer to call Pear Shaped the Daily Telegraph of British open spot comedy clubs.

Let me explain.

When I blogged about last weekend’s six-hour event celebrating the anarchic life of Ian Hinchliffe, I did not mention that I told ex-ICA Director of Live Arts Lois Keidan about my admiration for Bernard Manning as a comic, Margaret Thatcher as a Parliamentary debater and the Daily Telegraph as a newspaper. I do not think she was impressed with this triple whammy.

But – in addition to my love of quirky Daily Telegraph obituaries in their golden era under Hugh Massingberd and their sadly now-dropped legendary Page Three oddities – I think the Daily Telegraph is the only actual national NEWSpaper left. All the others are, in effect, magazines with ‘think’ pieces and additional background to yesterday’s TV news.

But the Daily Telegraph prints a high quantity of short news reports and (outside of election times) maintains an old-fashioned Fleet Street demarcation between News and Comment. The news reporting is, mostly, unbiased straight reportage; the comment is what non-Telegraph readers might expect.

They have also consistently displayed an admiration for rebels.

The Daily Telegraph – perhaps moreso the Sunday Telegraph – always showed an interest in and admiration for comedian Malcolm Hardee. They loved quirky MP Alan Clark, though they disapproved of his sexual amorality. The Daily Telegraph even surprisingly championed early Eminem. When the red-top tabloids were claiming his music and his act were the end of Western Civilization, the Daily Telegraph reviewed his first UK tour as being in the great tradition of British pantomime.

I once met a Daily Telegraph sub-editor at a party who hated working at the paper for exactly the same reason I loved reading it. People would yell across the room at him: “Give me a three-inch story!” not caring what the actual story was.

So the Daily Telegraph ended up with an amazing quantity of news stories, often not fully explained because they had been cut short.

I remember reading on a classic Page Three of the old Daily Telegraph, a brief court report about a man accused of scaring lady horse-riders by leaping out of hedges in country lanes dressed in a full frogman’s outfit, including flippers, goggles and breathing tube. That was, pretty much, the whole news item. If ever a story needed more background printed, this was it.

The Pear Shaped Comedy club is a bit like the Daily Telegraph in that it is an extraordinary hodge-podge of fascinating items apparently thrown together randomly but somehow holding together as a recognisable whole with its own personality. Quirky, eccentric and barely under control. Last night, in addition to the consistently good and massively under-praised Brian Damage & Krysstal themselves, the show included increasingly-highly-thought-of Stephen Carlin, rising new comics Laurence Tuck and Phillip Wragg and very new but intriguing Samantha Hannah.

And then there was long-time comic, club owner, compere, comedy craftsman and humour guru Ivor Dembina. He had come down to try out some new material as he is performing in four shows at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, including the fascinatingly unformatted Ivor’s Other Show. He told me:

“I might just invite on people I’ve met in the street. Anything that takes my fancy.” Then he added, “Do you want to come on it one afternoon, John? Can you do anything?”

“No,” Pear Shaped co-owner Vicky de Lacey correctly interrupted, “he can write but he can’t actually do anything.”

But that never stopped Little and Large, so I may yet appear on Ivor’s Other Show, perhaps as a human statue. There is, inevitably, a ‘living statue’ resource page on the internet.

We live in wonderful times.

I refer you to the start of this blog.