We Are Not Amused - Let's Have A Laugh

The comment “We are not amused” is widely believed to have been said by Queen Victoria in response to an inappropriate joke or remark made by an equerry. I can’t help but wonder what the equerry actually said in front of the queen. If he was trying to make her laugh, perhaps he was shocked to discover it wasn’t acceptable. According to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Alice, her grandmother told her that she hadn’t said “We are not amused” at all. Alice and other young members of the royal family of the time loved Queen Victoria’s sense of fun, finding her jolly with a great sense of humour. She laughed a lot and was amused by many things, apparently. In her later years, she gave the impression of an austere woman with strict moral values. I expect that she held the moral high ground, but I think her facial expression after the death of Prince Albert showed her grief and huge sense of loss rather than austerity.

Laughing is good for us. Seeking amusement, we look for the comedy, the cheerful light-hearted recreations that will make us feel uplifted and happy. It is personal choice, we all have our favourites whether we are going out to be entertained or choosing what to have on TV. Sometimes, the really hilarious moments are self-made. This is definitely the case with my crazy family. Put me in the company of my wonderful niece and within seconds we will have sparked each other into squeals of laughter, usually about nothing, and I will be crying and rushing to the loo with comments about double strength Tena pads making me laugh even more. If her mother, my sister is with us, the hilarity is increased and the three of us are best left to it. We can’t help it. We still laugh at things that happened years ago. At my nephew’s wedding ceremony I broke the silence of a solemn moment with a very loud, giant snort. I will never live it down. I was trying not to cry and holding my breath then the snort just happened. The mirth has lasted far longer than his marriage did, sadly for him. My father had a ‘thing’ about curtains being closed correctly. Two curtains would have to meet exactly in the middle, the drapes had to be equal and the overlap had to be uniform all the way down. It didn’t matter who closed the curtains, he would have to give his finishing touch. Perfectionist. At his funeral service, my sister and I couldn’t look at each other as the curtains closed in front of his coffin. We were both thinking the same thing and finding amusement in the saddest of circumstances. It proved our resilience.

That is us. Amused and amusing at the same time, like lots of families. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a large family. I hope they laughed heartily at daft things and had silly moments like we do. I hope they broke the silence with a massive snort, or worse, and I hope, like us, they were amused more often than they were not.

I found this poem,

I’m not sure it it’s fact or rumour,
Queen Victoria lost her humour,
Deciding one day she refused
All attempts to be amused.

Some say it was indigestion,
Others claim that’s speculation.
I believe what’s widely known,
That she hurt her funny bone.

Phil Ward, 2012

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Cosmetic Surgery - Nipped and Tucked

I’m glad to be happy in my own skin. I’m fine with my appearance, it’s what you’d expect for a woman of my age carrying the experiences of my life. The lines on my face belong there, each one earned. My laughter lines, just like the old joke of ‘Nothing is that funny’, I can’t remember who said it. My body, larger than I would like, but I’ll just wear bigger clothes and enjoy my day; carries the scars of necessary surgery, some life-saving, but that’s all fine, too. It’s me. At the moment I really need my sister-in-law. She is a hair-stylist, miles away in Troon. No one else cuts my hair and for almost a year we haven’t been able to meet, so I keep pinning it up out of my way and waiting. When it gets on my nerves I’m all for fashioning my own pixie cut with the kitchen scissors. I won’t. It’s not just my hair, I love her to bits and miss her and the family very much and look forward to a trip to Scotland as soon as we’re allowed.

Appearance is a confidence thing.  Accepting how we look is important to our general well-being, so if something is not right to the point of causing embarrassment or unhappiness and cosmetic surgery can sort it out, that is the way to go.

My family moved about a lot during my childhood. Dad’s job took us to various pubs all over the North West, some short term, and I was used to being the new girl at school. It didn’t bother me too much, until we came to Blackpool in 1965, or thereabouts.  I stood with my teacher facing my new class as she introduced me.

“She’s goofy!” 

A rude boy sitting at the front made everyone laugh and made me very self-conscious for years. The teacher didn’t say anything to him, which I thought was unfortunate, but as time went on I learnt why he had to sit at the front. His appearance was not flawless, he had puffed out cheeks giving him a fat looking face, but he was witty and quite funny. We went to different high schools, but met again by chance many years later at a works ‘do’ where he was the DJ. The rude boy was now a pleasant man with a successful business in entertainment and it was nice to spend a few minutes catching up. I was sad to hear he’d passed away some time ago. He’ll never see the results of my extensive cosmetic dentistry – joke.

A recent photograph of a well-known model without her dental veneers on horrified me. It was just a photo and could have been touched up, but there she was, a mouthful of what looked like good, vital teeth, filed to points to accommodate her dazzling white plastic (acrylic, porcelain, gold-bonded) very expensive smile. Money talks. There isn’t a dentist I know who would risk his / her clinical integrity to perform such treatment on healthy teeth. I wonder how she’ll look at age seventy, eighty and beyond with the ‘Colgate ring of confidence’ or if what is left of each tooth lasts that long.

Lip-fillers and Botox treatment seem to be the fashion, resulting in mask-like faces with an expression of surprise and suckers for lips. I think it’s supposed to slow down the natural aging process, but who knows if it works forever? There’s nothing wrong with growing old gracefully.  A few ‘nipped and tucked’ celebrities out there will disagree with me.

Here’s Dr John Cooper Clarke:

Face Behind the Scream
This case appears to be urgent
Kindly pull the screen
Cosmetic surgeon
The son of Mr Sheen
Is jerry building versions
Of the face behind the scream

The girl who would be beauty queen
Tells the doctor of her dream
In which she reads a magazine
Wearing only cold cream
They call her the face behind the scream

The image he maintains
And the silence he observes
Says it’s worth a little pain
For the figure we both deserve
A cowboy by profession since the age of 17
Whose singular obsession is the face behind the scream

The girl who would be beauty queen
Tells the doctor of her dream
A soiree in the mezzanine
And castanets and tambourines
A careless word and ugly scenes

The doctor knows he’s made for good impressions on demand
The new nose in the neighbourhood was fashioned by these hands
He can do it blindfold, his instruments are clean
A snapshot in his mind holds the face behind the scream

The girl who would be beauty queen
Diamond rivets in her jeans
Wild and with-it even off screen

He then removes the bandage and the odd remaining scab
A flair for fancy language…
The gift of the gab
Hands you a sandwich and applies the vaseline
To show to best advantage the face behind the scream

The girl who would be beauty queen
Tells the doctor of her dream
In which she turns her money green
Finds herself in a funny scene
Cracks up like a shatterproof windscreen

Danke schoen ich liebe dich, I promise not to hurt
A telephone receiver clicks RED ALERT
Whatever you do don’t touch that switch, the doctor goes to work
With his bag of tricks in his limousine
Mugshots from magazines
Face creams and photofits
To fit the face that doesn’t fit
The face behind the scream

The girl who would be beauty queen
Surrounded by the regular team
Of photo brats and coma teens
In bowler hats and brilliantine
Or bold cravats of bottle green
Such a precious little dream
To be taken to extremes
How many times can you be 16
The call her the face behind the scream

Thanks for reading, stay safe and keep well, Pam x

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Deja Vu - Old School

We watched the film, ‘To Sir, With Love’ the other night. I recorded it from one of the classic movie channels a few weeks ago. I’d seen it a long time ago and couldn’t remember it properly, but snippets kept coming back to me.

“Do you know what,” I said to my husband who happily goes along with my indulgence in old films – or he suffers in silence – “this is like a modern version of ‘Spare the Rod’. Do you remember?”

I think there was a nod of agreement, but I stayed focussed on Sidney Poitier as his character, teacher Mark Thackeray displayed a smouldering, deep in thought expression. In a role reversal from his part some years earlier in The Blackboard Jungle, he was finding a way to ‘get through’ to his class. Déjà vu Max Bygraves in ‘Spare the Rod’.

Both films are set in London’s East End, depicting deprived areas with hard to reach, hard to teach adolescents. Their teachers are naïve young men, aiming to change the world, and change their careers using teaching as a stepping stone. No spoiler alerts here, I promise. ‘Spare the Rod’ is real and gritty compared to the more light-hearted ‘To Sir, With Love’. Roll out ‘Please, Sir!’ as the same mix successfully became a comedy.

 

  

There was nothing funny about having to visit high school when summoned by a teacher needing a chat about one of our teenagers. Sadly, this was a regular occurrence and I felt more dread than déjà vu. I was certain that I would die of embarrassment. I worked in a primary school at the time and I loved it, but felt like I was losing control of my own children. I’m happy to say that both are now lovely, well-behaved, responsible adults with children of their own and I am as proud of them as it’s possible to be. I hope I’m here with words of wisdom for them when my grandchildren reach their teens.

When I started high school at Palatine Secondary School, it was at what became known as ‘the old building’ on Bennett Avenue. A new school was being built on St Anne’s Road which eventually we would move to. I wasn’t happy, I was very miffed, if that’s a real word. I was clever, yet I’d failed my 11+ and couldn’t go to Collegiate Girls’ Grammar. I’m still ashamed. I grew to love Palatine and always felt more at home in the original school rather than the new one. The old school is now part of the Blackpool & Fylde College University Campus. It was certainly déjà vu to return fifty years after becoming a first former. I enrolled in an evening class. I was in one of my classrooms. Very little had changed, it might be the same sash window, the same brass-knobbed door and half-tiled wall, but tables replaced desks, blackboard had gone and the wood flooring, if it was still there, was hidden beneath carpet tiles. The long corridor on the ground floor was now divided by safety glass fire doors, and I couldn’t see through them from one end to the other but I did wander around on my break looking for the familiar. I could almost hear ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ coming from where the main hall used to be. I sensed a feeling of belonging.

     I borrowed this poem,

 

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and take care in these worrying times. Pam x

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This Road Less Travelled

Be yourself, like yourself, understand yourself. Let others like you, let other compliment you, don't worry if others don't understand you. 

I found it hard to write anything on this theme because of my own path, because of what I have put my poor mind through understanding my path. It was such a personal journey for me, realising and accepting that this is the road I should be on, even if it's a bit lonely. Eventually I found other travellers    that helped me, or just kept me company. 

So to express these feeling I have about the road I walk on that makes me happy, I wrote this poem.

I do hope it comes across.


This road less travelled

The motorway for all,
Is boot to bonnet deep,
With the proletariat sheep,
And the middle class a sleep.

Looking for the same thing,
That shows them as different fools,
But it's only money they loose,
Dangling from a conformists noose.

Bitterness chills the air with frost,
Occupying all surface exposed,
Yet a warmth inside me grows,
With ever single breath I blow.

Because I stroll this B road,
Nature trying to hide the way,
That I walk on every day,
No matter what the people say.

I'm happy on my own path,
With the under growth all levelled,
And the brambles all unravelled,
Walking on the road less travelled.

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The Etymology of I

By Maryam Piracha

I’m not sure how common this is, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve kept a mental running commentary of my life. In retrospect, that sounds a bit narcissistic, but as the youngest in a family of four sisters I considered this and my imagination my only forms of self-preservation. Writing was perhaps the next natural step in my “intellectual” progression. In quotes because I wonder if I’m deluding myself into believing I qualify as an intellectual at all. Are writers intellectuals because they read and write (let’s forget about the lives they’ve led)? But I digress.

I was asked to write a post on the theme ‘if I didn’t write’, which I find ironic in itself but let’s forget that for a moment. If I didn’t write – an interesting statement because it’s ‘didn’t’ rather than ‘couldn’t’, which implies there’s some choice in the matter. Writing isn’t a choice, of course – I think I can safely say that without threat or persecution. Can I list a set of things I’d do instead? God knows, I’ve tried them all in that brief moment when I thought I’d left my best work behind me only to realize I couldn’t stop. It was an unbreakable habit, a second skin.

I tried working in a startup company, as an online marketer who then segued into just a regular marketer and sometimes salesperson. I can’t sell anything to save my life, or at least, I couldn’t then. I relied too much on being behind the scenes, you see. The title of ‘Manager, Marketing & Sales’ only helped to reaffirm that I wasn’t cut from the same cloth of marketing management. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed most of it, to a point. I liked coming up with marketing ideas, assembling words together to encapsulate a product, its function in someone’s life and recruiting others like me. Perhaps if I wasn’t a writer I might’ve been a marketer in another life.

Or an editor, which I am now although most editing as any writer knows is a great deal of rewriting, and it’s a thankless, anonymous job especially in the newspaper business. Eventually, you cease thinking about yourself as an entity at all but rather as the opposing force to a writer, which gets complicated when you’re an aspiring author yourself. Things don’t get less complicated from here: I’ve served as the Editor-in-Chief of not one, but two literary journals. It seems I can’t get away from words. Perhaps this is what I’d do if I didn’t feel borderline orgasmic when I hit upon the right combination to express emotions, feelings and the right temperament of the characters that slip in and out of my consciousness on a daily basis.

If there’s anything I’ve been doing for roughly the same amount of time and dedication, it’s throwing actual stuff together and standing back to view the result. There’s something awesome about starting out with goo and ending up with a frosted cake. A little miracle. Yes, yes it’s all in the flour that serves as a raising agent but a girl can dream, right?

In all honesty, I don’t know who (or what) I’d be if I didn’t write. It’s been a part of my life for so long charting when it happened is about as painful as pulling one (or several) nails. But if I’m being very, very honest, if I didn’t I’d probably be lounging about somewhere, a couch potato enslaved to slovenliness and the whims of an indifferent remote control. Perhaps very deep down, I already am.

Or perhaps, that’s just the person.

Maryam Piracha graduated from Lancaster University with a Creative Writing MA in 2011. She writes short fiction, is hard at work at a novel hopefully to be completed later this year, and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Missing Slate, an international literary and art quarterly magazine. She previously served as the EiC of Papercuts, a South Asian magazine and is currently an editor at The Express Tribune, the South Asian partner to The New York Times.

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