not funny

Some days I don’t feel funny at all. Some weeks I don’t feel funny at all. If not feeling funny stretches out beyond a week, even my wife notices and says “You’re not funny,” although to be fair, she also says that when I think I am being funny.

At these times, I am stuck as far as ‘writing something to put on my blog’ goes. Because I like my blog to be a place where anyone who happens by can drop in, read, and smile, whether through amusement or pity, then leave, probably furtively or before they reach the end. I don’t want to add to the general air of anxiety that people may be trying to get through and cope with in their own real lives by doing anything overly serious. Or even approaching serious.

My fingers don’t even know where the serious words on this keyboard are.

I’m trying not to get as embroiled in being too sarcastic about things too, even though there are some juicy targets being presented as life proceeds to get more fucked and the machine continues to use us all. I do think I am naturally pre-disposed to sarcasm and pointing at the absurdity of life in general, but I have been trying to be more philosophical and stoic about things, and not get too drawn into the anger that modern life seems only too happy to generate all around us.

So mainly, my humour is made from poking fun at myself, or at least the quasi-fictional caricature of me as I exist on the blog. I don’t want to get sucked down the plughole in the bottom of the sink of misery created by modern life too much. There is already enough dirty water flowing down the pipes anyway.

I live in a part of the world that is beautifully peaceful — if the farmer’s tractors aren’t pulling various machines through the adjacent fields — and if they are, I can drive off and be on the clifftops in five minutes and hopefully the farmers aren’t doing the same thing in the fields that they look after up there.

I can try to find some world as it was, before the machine. Being at peace with the sounds of peregrines, gulls, seals and skylarks. Escaping the constant human hums, clangs, bangs, pings, diesel dins. The sheer constant cacophony of ‘civilisation’…

Or, as this coast is underneath the flight routes from London across the Atlantic and to Ireland and is regularly patrolled by the Coastguard… not.

It is very hard to find somewhere with only the sounds of nature to accompany you in the UK now.

How people manage to live in cities, I don’t know. Even a small village with a population just about approaching 50 is too noisy for me sometimes. The lane outside my house is normally very quiet. Maybe 20 vehicles a day pass by, more in lost tourist season, but at various times of year, the drone of the tractors back and forth with heavy machinery, or trailers attached, can be continuous for a couple of days as it’s time to do whatever they have to do with haymaking, ploughing and muckspreading etc.

But otherwise we are quietly situated about a kilometre from what I somewhat ironically call the beating heart of the village — a gathering of properties around the crossroads with another lane, one post box, and a red telephone box that no longer contains a telephone, but instead, by the efforts (not too strenuous for fear of heart attacks) of the village locals, now contains a defibrillator.

It obviously speaks to the local demographic that they got together and decided that we need an emergency defibrillator in the village, but I do hope that if it’s ever needed, the person who goes to get it doesn’t have to run too far…

But…

… you know, there are some things that you just get all riled by, and the calm waters of Zen-like cool are disturbed by people throwing old bicycles in the canal, causing ripples. Or great big sloshing waves, depending on the width and depth of the canal, the mass of the bicycle, and of course the maximum height, amount of acceleration due to gravity and actual terminal velocity the bicycle attains in the freefall part of its last journey.

Sorry, distracted in the detail of the metaphor there.

Anyway, at times you just have to chuck in your tuppence’s worth to make your own ripple, even if the readership of your blog is as quiet as the clifftops in a happy gap between helicopter and holiday jet flybys. I feel bad now. It’s not that funny and it’ll have been done before and I’m trying not to let it get in much. But…

OK.

Now, quiet please. I’m trying to be calm here.