Happy Days!

by Pseud O'Nym

A robin has just landed on the garden table in front of me and you what that means boys and girls? Yes, a robin has landed on the table right in front of me…and now it’s gone. I know some people believe that robins have a deeper meaning than that, but then some people believe in a forthcoming zombie apocalypse.

Anyway, earlier on I was speaking to my partner and she let slip that she’d spent as much time cleaning the shopping, as actually doing the shopping. I don’t think meant cleaning in the Luc Besson way either. I mean she didn’t go into details, but I took it to mean that she’d wiped clean all the packaging, so as not to bring the virus into her house. I was conflicted by this news, because on the one hand it seems like a prudent precaution to take when you’ve got your 89-year-old mother staying with you. But on the other, if one thinks that a prudent thing to, at what point do things become imprudent?

I mean clothes, what do you do about clothes, inasmuch as do you have a set of clothes by the door that you put on when you go outside and take off when you get in? Shoes. Same thing, in fact this seems like a good idea anyway, because one doesn’t really think about shoes and what they might be bringing in with them. And that’s the worry, that the seemingly irrational suddenly becomes rational not because of the thing itself but the circumstance under which it’s performed and the sheer numbers of people doing it.

On a brighter note, we were shooting the breeze about something or other and one us said,” Oh happy days.” and she immediately referenced something about Samuel Beckett and something else French. I replied that I was thinking more of ‘The Fonz’ in ‘Happy Days’. This, she claimed, highlighted the difference between us. Rather magnanimously, I let this pass. Some moments later some crows were crowing loudly in my garden and she said it reminded her of ‘Jude the Obscure’. No, me neither! All I could think of was that scene in ‘Dumbo’ where the crows taunt him.

Same reaction.

I could have pointed out to her that yes, she has two M.A’s. but as I never tire of reminding her, these were in Drama and Filmmaking. Basically, jazz hands. Granted, she did her filmmaking M.A at the best film school in the country and admittedly her graduation film was shown on BBC4, but jazz hands nonetheless. She did hers full time and got grants, and could sign on in the holidays. Get this, one year when she was doing drama, she had a show at the Edinbrough Festival and wangled it so she could sign on up there! Whereas I have a B.A in politics, a proper subject, not some mickey-mouse, airy-fairy, fuckwiterry, which I did part-time, in the evenings after work.

To her credit, when I level these charges, that she did her M.A’s in jazz hands, she doesn’t deny them, she acknowledges I’m right.