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Scenes from life....

Started by timebug, May 07, 2021, 09:11:57 AM

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timebug

Talking to a relative recently,and he recalled the time that three families (the mothers were three sisters) went camping in Wales. Uncle Ray,who was a Captain Mainwaring type, organised absolutely everything, including rest stops on the trip to Wales, how much time was (should!) be allowed for same; he organised it into more of a military exercise than a holiday. But come a meal time, of traditional 'camping food' ie,sausages,beans,bacon,eggs etc, we realised his planning had failed in one vital respect. No one had brought a tin opener, as everyone assumed that someone else would have done! Took me back to this passage from Jerome K Jeromes 'Three Men in A Boat' which cracked me up when I first read it (aged about twelve!) and still makes me laugh to this day:

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.
Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.
It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.
Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.
After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.

ASFTSN

QuoteThen George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness,

That's the main line I remember from TMIAB, hilarious stuff.

Thosworth

Can't not read it in the voice of Tim Curry

Echo Valley 2-6809

Quote from: ASFTSN on May 07, 2021, 11:22:34 AM
That's the main line I remember from TMIAB, hilarious stuff.

"... that he got frightened and threw away the mast" is what makes it for me.

I think I must be averaging at least one hangover every two weeks, and Jim Dixon waking up with a colossal one in 'Lucky Jim' is still relatable even 70 years later.
Quote from: Kingsley AmisDixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad.

So many great images in that, and you can see how his son tries to emulate the style.

AllisonSays

The 'he felt bad' at the end there is so good.