Comedy

I've just discovered that the Yanks think that the Brits are snobby about thier sense of humour. This had never occurred to me before. Hitherto, I had merely assumed our senses of humour are different, albeit overlapping in some respects. But no, apparently, when it comes to humour, we can be quite snobby.

This revelation happened after I recommended that a Yank friend of mine read the funniest blog on the web, but warned him that it might appeal to a Brit more than a Yank.

Euston Square, by the way.

I am stunned

Here are the first couple of paragraphs from the frontpage of the St Andrews Citizen today:

A group of students rescued after being cut off by the tide at the Eden Estuary last weekend have made a plea for more warning signs along the West Sands.

However, St Andrews Coastguards have pointed out that there is a fine line between keeping the public informed of danger and infringing on civil liberties.

I cannot remember the last time that I heard someone in authority suggest that a safety measure might be a bad idea because it might infringe civil liberties.

"People do also have a responsibility for their own safety. We have had a case where someone complained because we didn't have a sign up warning people that the tide came in and out twice in the day and other times when people have pulled up signs as they infringed their civil liberties."

Savour the moment. It will be a long time before it happens again.

Burn the witch

I took this picture a few hundred yards from my home in St Andrews. The cliff faces onto the North Sea. Along the top run the Scores which overlook St Andrews Bay. The water at the bottom of the cliff is known as Witches Lake. Early in the seventeenth century, if someone was suspected of practising witchcraft, she would have her thumbs and big toes tied together and she would be thrown off the cliff into Witches Lake. If she drowned, she was innocent and presumably her soul would ascend to Heaven. If she survived, she was a witch and she would be punished appropriately, usually by being burned at the stake. One year in the nineteenth century, following a storm, human bones were found washed up on a nearby beach.

Until today, I used to spend a few moments each day contragulating myself and my fellow Westerners that between then and now, our ancestors had had these wonderful ideas that became known as the Enlightenment, so that anyone who dares to be different, or questions the prevailing wisdom of the rest of society, can sleep soundly in his bed, secure in the knowledge that the idolator, the heretic and the blasphemer has a right to be that way and that if his hysterical neighbours choose to persecute him for his eccentricities, then it is his neighbours and not he who are the criminals and will receive the punishment of the law. So, every now and then I would find myself shaking my head in sadness at the occasional news story from the Middle East that some ayatollah has called on his followers to execute an author for writing a book, or that Danes are being threatened because a cartoonist has drawn a cartoon.

But occasionally one encounters something that shakes one's worldview to its very foundations. And so it is tonight that I come home from the pub, very slightly drunk, switch on the broadband and find that Natalie Solent, Natalie Solent, the very priestess of Enlightenment Blogging, the one who once complimented me on the soundness of my adherence to Enlightenment values, has deigned to commit the most unspeakable of heresies that a patriotic Briton could ever utter. Now I realise that the Muslims and our earlier ancestors had it right. If anyone would care to arrest this foul woman and bring her to St. Andrews, I will be first in the queue to push her into Witches Lake.

Your attempts to invoke the Gruneisen gambit will not work, Natalie.

Bethnal Green.

Get out of that one, if you can. I have you cornered.

Your move.

Footnote for pedants: I reserve the right to correct spelling and grammar mistakes once I have sobered up.

Footnote for the weak of faith: Of course Mornington Crescent has rules. I once spent an evening explaining them to my father. A cursory glance here should make them clear.

Footnote for ignorant Yanks: You're just not going to understand this. Get over it.

Footnote for fanatics: I reserve the right to delete this post on receipt of any death threats.