Wednesday night’s workshop topic was ‘humour’ and the evening saw Sheila Grant hold court in her own inimitable style. She prefaced the evening by stating that humour was very much a subjective experience and this certainly did prove to be the case. She then provided the members of the group with various topics and invited them to ‘flowrite’ for five minutes on each subject. These topics included: Romance, Embarrassing Moments, Holidays From Hell and Family and Relatives.
The embarrassing moments quoted by the group included the instance of a pupil attending a religious class in a South African school who, when asked to describe the view that Jesus might have seen from his window opined that the presence of black people would be much in evidence, much to the discomfiture of the teaching staff who obviously thought of Jesus as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. (WASP)
The occasion when one of the members booked a holiday for two couples and requested adjacent rooms only to find, on their arrival, that the Maltese interpretation of adjacent rooms meant a single room divided by a curtain.
Building work carried out by inept relations much to the annoyance of the next-door neighbours.
The worker in the playgroup whose inability to match names to the well known faces of the children’s parents was the cause of much personal chagrin. Doesn’t that ring a bell?
Or the story of someone who had been confronted by a flasher in a public park and when asked to give details of the incident could only summon up the word ‘pink’ by way of description.
Another embarrassing moment concerned some indeterminate object that went down the cleavage of one of the group, but, as she herself was laughing like a drain whilst retelling this cringe-making tale it was rather difficult to determine the nature of the object that made its way down her ample décolletage.
The evening was a story-telling exercise and worked very well on that level and whilst the men of the group managed to plough a straight furrow and maintain a sense of propriety, I’m afraid to say that the other sex was found to be wanting in this matter as double and single entendres, innuendo and salacious allusion were very much the order of the day, i.e. Greyfriar’s Bobby! How to straddle a sheep etc.
But then – was it not ever thus?
Stewart Findlay