Reading – Page 38 – Deborah Makarios

June 21, 2014

Until the Tears Ran Down My Face

There are tears drying on my face.
Before you leap in with your kind expressions of concern, allow me to reassure you: they are tears of laughter (the next best thing to tears of joy).

I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up it was a common pastime of an evening to lounge about in – well, the lounge, each reading our own books. Doesn’t sound very congenial to the outside view, perhaps, but the important element was that each reader would share the interesting or funny bits of their own book. (Readers of stark existentialist dread need not apply.)

Having grown in years and moved on from the home of my ancestors, I have maintained the tradition of reading out the funny bits to my husband.
Now, there are some people in this world who can read something screamingly hilarious with a straight face and not so much as a quiver of the voice. I salute them (except when they’re beating me at the dictionary game) but I will never be one of them.

Indeed, it is not unknown in my family of origin for the reader to have a few stabs at getting through the funny passage, repeatedly dissolve in laughter as they approach the really good bit, and eventually have the book prised from their quivering grasp because the rest of the family is now desperate to know how the sentence ends. I can even recall one occasion where nearly everyone in the family had had a go at the book before someone could be found capable of reading the whole passage in a passably intelligible voice.

Somehow a passage that will merely make you snort or chuckle when read to yourself is magnified in hilarity when sharing it with others. Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive…

What had me weeping with laughter (not to mention gurgling my words in a most unladylike manner) was an excerpt from Full Moon by my hero P.G. Wodehouse, which the cunning-as-serpents publishers inserted in the back of Carry On, Jeeves with no consideration as to whether readers of the second title would necessarily have access to the first, now tantalisingly dangled before them.
However.

The scene is Blandings Castle. Clarence, Earl of Emsworth, is having a peaceful listen to his prize pig’s breathing before bed when his brother-in-law Egbert pops up.

‘Ah, Egbert,’ he said, courteously uncoiling himself.
Going for a stroll to stretch his legs after his long journey, Colonel Wedge had supposed himself to be alone with Nature. The shock of discovering that what he had taken for a pile of old clothes was alive and a relation by marriage caused him to speak a little sharply.

And this is how the Colonel reports it to his wife:

“Where do you think I found him just now? Down at the pigsty. I noticed something hanging over the rail, and thought the pig man must have left his overalls there, and then it suddenly reared itself up like a cobra and said “Ah, Egbert.” Gave me a nasty shock. I nearly swallowed my cigar. Questioned as to what the deuce he thought he was playing at, he said he was listening to his pig.”
“Listening to his pig?”
“I assure you. And what, you will ask, was the pig doing? Singing? Reciting ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’? Nothing of the kind. Just breathing.”

When was the last time you laughed until the tears ran down your cheeks? If not Wodehouse, then who? All recommendations hailed with cries of delight!

May 31, 2014

The Awkward Conversations of Great Literature

Warning: potential spoilers lie ahead!

We can probably all remember Awkward Conversations we’ve been part of, but what about the ones we weren’t even there for? Conversations that technically never even happened, because they are fictional, but can make us squirm with sympathetic embarrassment nonetheless.

Mr Collins’ proposal to Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for example. We, like Miss Elizabeth, want to get the unpleasant necessity over with as quickly as possible, but he drones on and on, pontificating about his two favourite subjects, viz. Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr Collins.

A word of advice to any young lady readers: if you are proposed to by a man who mentions another woman more often during his proposal than he mentions you, refuse him. We know he doesn’t stand a chance with Lizzy, but he’s so certain of his own desirability he doesn’t even need her answer to start congratulating himself.
Full credit to David Bamber for truly conveying the depths of awfulness in this Pilbeam among parsons.

Agatha Christie’s Lady Bundle Brent, on receiving a similar proposal in The Seven Dials Mystery, opts to leg it out the window herself, not being burdened with a mother who will insist on her seeing it through. If anyone knows of a book in which the pompous proposer is defenestrated, please do let me know.

I’m currently half-way through Anna Karenina – for the first time – and I have already grimaced through some very awkward conversations. This one’s a prize-winner, though: Oblonsky comes to ask his brother-in-law (in town on business) to dinner.

It goes something like this:

Oblonsky: Come to dinner!
Karenin: I can’t.
Oblonsky: Why not?
Karenin: Because I am about to sever the ties between us by divorcing your sister, my wife.
Oblonsky: Oh! Well, come to dinner anyway…

What are your favourite Awkward Conversations? Tell all! Unless they’re in the second half of Anna Karenina, in which case please wait a few weeks before commenting…
Awkward silences also welcomed, although please include the context as well as the silence 🙂

May 10, 2014

I am the Chipmunk Queen!

Queen in exile, obviously, there being no chipmunks in New Zealand.

I had three of my wisdom teeth extracted on Thursday, and now sport a square, manly (if somewhat lopsided) jaw. I look “bloody, bold and resolute” – especially bloody, but let’s not go there.
I was expecting to have all four of my wisdom teeth out, but after the whole jaw x-ray (look! your spine on both sides of the screen!) the dentist decided one was too likely to pop into my sinus if messed with. And then apparently they’d have to cut my sinus open to get it out. No, thank you.

I’d never been sedated before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I remember chatting to the dentist after he’d put in the line for the intravenous sedation – mostly about blood pressure, as the monitor on my thumb was betraying my nervousness – and having great difficulty corralling my words into line when telling him about all the monitors I had stuck on me when I went to hospital.

According to the Caped Gooseberry, I got even more inarticulate and unintelligible after that – babbling was the word he used, as I recall – and when he left (no friends and family allowed in during the operation) I was beaming happily away in the chair. I have no memory of this. One can only presume I shut up long enough for the dentist to get the teeth out.

I was fully expecting to be foggy-brained when I came out from under the sedation, but to my surprise it was like flicking a switch: I knew where I was, what was going on – I even had a mutually intelligible conversation with the dentist, who insisted that I have a nap in the recovery room before being reunited with my husband (to ensure I slept instead of nattering).

To be honest, I didn’t think this was necessary, but to my surprise I found on rising that while my brain was working fine, my body was in overcooked spaghetti mode. The dentist and his assistant had to help me round the corner to the recovery room (reclining armchair and duvet) where after a brief spell of boredom I did actually fall asleep. When I woke, the dentist had returned with my Gooseberry, who took me home.

And that was it. Woozy, snoozy, and it was all over.

Of course, the biggest thing with wisdom teeth is the recuperation. I lie. That’s the second biggest thing. The biggest thing is, of course, my jaw.

Did I tell you they carved bits out of my jawbone? Apparently if your wisdom teeth don’t emerge from the jaw of their own accord, the dentist goes in after them and drags them out, kicking and screaming. (You never know. I’ll never know – I was out of it.) Two of mine had wedged themselves in sideways in a vain attempt to evade extraction – Action Dentist carved out the jaw to gain access and then took them apart where they lay. I have the pieces to prove it.

Recuperation seems to be mostly sleep, soft food and prescription medications. Soup, stewed apple, hummus, ice-cream, peanut butter, pills. Many many pills. Fortunately I have the use of the Caped Gooseberry’s brain to organize them, or I’d be taking the wrong ones at the right times. Or vice versa. Three sorts of painkiller (two in one pill) and an antibiotic. The round white ones (paracetamol 500mg with a kick of codeine) have to go in flat like coins in a slot because my mouth won’t open any further.

I think the worst of the swelling is past, thanks to the frozen-vegetable face-packs sandwiching my head on Thursday afternoon. I do detect some tendencies toward jowliness though – gravity at work, one presumes. Apparently the bruising doesn’t come in until about a week post-op, so hopefully I will be spared the indignity of being jowly and jaundiced-looking at the same time. The dentist has promised me that unlike this poor fellow, I will not have a black eye. Pays to go to a good dentist.

I’ve been passing the time in between my tortoise-paced meals by reading mystery novels – as is my wont. So far I’ve read four Agatha Christies (in the one I took to read in the waiting room, the dentist dunnit – glad I didn’t wait long enough to find this out), one of Laura Childs’ tea-shop mysteries, and a Miss Julia novel by Ann B. Ross.
This afternoon I intend to follow my other sick-leave tradition of curling up on the couch and watching the entire 1995 BBC Pride & Prejudice mini-series (all 5 1/2 hours). I may also knit.

What are your favourite things to do when recuperating? Had your wisdom teeth out? How’d it go?