A Couple of Misunderstandings
February 23rd, 2012
As you can see from the date of my last one, I do find it extremely difficult to write blogs! I don’t see myself as an opinion setter, so I am not going to start boring you about what my thoughts are on world affairs or even what I’ve done over the past week if I’ve actually done nothing. But it’s all really a bit of a quandary because writers are encouraged to blog and get their name ‘out there’. So every week when the reminder comes up on my computer screen to get going and write one, I religiously sit down to do so, bringing up a blank page and thinking ‘hmm, now what shall I write about that will be of interest,’ and after about five minutes, when I get bored with looking at a blank page, I give up and get on with other things that I consider to be more worthwhile!
Anyway, seeing it’s the beginning of Lent, my penance for being such a bad blogger over the past year is to at least write something today, so here are two little stories for you.
Last week, I was in Cornwall with my brother and while I was there, news came through that his eldest daughter had been selected for junior pentathlon training by the UK governing body. My brother’s wife, Jess, received the email and said that there were triplets from Northern Ireland who had also been won places. Mark and Jess’s son, nine year-old Archie, who had been listening into the discussion about this great achievement, asked “How do you know they are triplets?”
“Because they’ve all got the same name,” Jess replied.
Archie looked completely baffled. “What? John, John and John?”
He’s a cracker is our Archie!
Mark also told me a great story about the marriage of Jess’s brother, Martin, to his wife Tamsin. At their wedding, the vicar, who had obviously done his research into their backgrounds, seemed more than pleased when he stood up to give his little talk to the new bride and groom, as it turned out to be filled with analogies that linked their two professions.
“We all know Martin to be a steeplejack,” he said. “His job is to climb chimneys, church spires and aerial masts, and we think of the Godly heights that he achieves on a daily basis. And then we have Tamsin, who, while not reaching quite such dizzying heights in physical terms, has her thespian training which sees her standing before us on a stage, projecting her voice with the words of playwrights from years gone by. We see her in the spotlight…”
As he droned on, Tamsin turned to Martin with a querying frown on her face. “What’s he on about?” she mouthed to her betrothed.
“…and when the curtain comes down on the final act,” the vicar continued, “And Tamsin steps forward…”
Tamsin did step forward at that precise moment and gave the vicar’s cassock a tug which had the desired effect of stopping him in mid-flow.
“I’m actually a theatre nurse,” she said.
And here endeth the vicar’s talk.
There you go. Does that count as a blog?