I Am Now Officially A Git

(That’s an Old Git, mostly.) I don’t want to jump on M C Ward’s bandwagon, or indeed to enter some inverted-snobbery, Four Yorkshiremen type of contest, again. But nothing is more inexorable than the march of time, and nothing also makes one so irredeemably a whinger. So here goes. As some of you may know I have a job in computing for an American company here in Romania’s Silicon Valley. I work with some top computer people, though this hasn’t become so apparent until now. At first they afforded me some respect: I’m a foreigner who's inexplicably come to live in their mud-encrusted country, I have Qualifications, and (for most of them) I Am Old Enough To Be Their Father. Not any more. The last of these supposed virtues is now showing through like a bony elbow in a granddad’s worn out cardigan. I can’t do the work even half as fast as these youngsters. I can’t remember things either. The time between them asking me a question and then looking silently yet meaningfully at each another (during which time I'm saying “errr... not sure... errr... that was 3 weeks ago now... could be anything”) has now dwindled from a just-possibly-respectful 10 seconds to less than 1.

Of course, an old person has experience and therefore some advantages, in theory. In my own pitiful case I might protest “Well, I can dance better than you – even your own national folk dancing!”. I might as well say “I can dribble down the front of my cardigan better than you” or “I can not quite make it to the toilet in time better than you”. My back-up position is to try to make 'em laugh, but that would be about as appropriate here as coming into work naked. I respect them. I might even like to adopt one or two of them. Or perhaps just pass round the office with a bag of Werther’s Originals from time to time. Dhuurgghhhh. Old Git.

Les Dawson: A Prophet Unhonoured

Recent scribblings on this blog and others have touched upon Les Dawson - though not in a “bad” way - and made me realise how much I miss the man. If you don’t know, Les was a very fat comedian from the North of England. Lugubrious (a word which may almost mean “very fat and from the North”) was a common description of him. When they could get him sober enough he stood on a stage and told jokes. (Though he also wrote novels, apparently, and was a fine connoisseur of language). He wasn’t considered exactly a modern comedian but I had a secret regard for him, based mainly on the fact that the worse his jokes were – and oh they could be bad – the funnier he was. I thought: anyone who can make me laugh by standing still on a stage telling crap jokes must be a genius. I think it was something to do with the pauses. But, and here’s the important issue now, I paid scant attention to the content of his humour, the staple of which was The Mother-In-Law Joke. Examples:

I wouldn’t say my mother-in-law was fat, but when she got run over the driver said although he had enough time to drive around her he didn't know if he had enough petrol.
I took my mother-in-law to Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, and one of the attendants said, “Keep her moving sir, we're stock-taking”.
My mother-in-law said “When you die I’m going to dance on your grave!”. “Good”, I said, “I’m being buried at sea!”

Is it coming back to you?? It’s relevant as I’ve had a bit of friction with my own mother-in-law, a fine woman with whom I usually get along famously. It’s all my fault. After all, she survived and kept a family clothed and fed through 30 years of Nicolae “The Genius of the Carpathians” Ceauşescu & co. And I’m just a ponce. I may technically be in the right - “blah..blah..blah” - but in all other respects... I’m still (comparatively) a ponce. I pledged not to wash my dirty laundry in public, but maybe I’d have been better prepared if I’d listened to Les. When I peered at him on the TV screen back in the 70s from under my Brian Connolly fringe his wisdom was wasted on me. In fact, I was the teenager that mothers of girlfriends warm to: nervous, vulnerable, but, crucially, giving off the slight suggestion that in another life I’d have found them as attractive as their spotty, specky daughters. The naivety of youth - I must have thought I could handle women. My mother-in-law and I have more than made up now, and our bond is all the stronger. As it turns out, Les was as inaccurate about my mother-in-law as he was, apparently, about his own. But in his stumbling way he felt burdened with a truth that he knew must be told - may his name be honoured!