Breaking wind is a fresh topic
10:50am Monday 24th March 2008
SOME people are natural silver lining seekers. Give them lemons and they'll make lemonade. Give them food poisoning and they'll make the cardboard vomit catchers doled out in hospital into jaunty little hats to amuse the other patients.
Two such silver lining seekers are my mum and her pal, Eunice.
No matter how dire the situation, those two will find the funny side.
Eunice is affectionately known as "the dolphin" at their health club because of her superhuman swimming skills - she happily knocks out a couple of hundred lengths before lunch.
My mum on the other hand is "the stone" because she regularly sinks like one while splashing round in circles (childhood polio left her with one strong leg and one weedy one) furiously flapping her waterwings.
Despite their disparate swimming skills, both thoroughly enjoy their twice weekly aqua-aerobic sessions. But not as much as the long leisurely chats they have in the sauna afterwards.
Every week sees a new hot topic emerge in the heated atmosphere. Last week, it was "the joys of breaking wind when you are a widow".
Now, losing your husband is not generally a laugh-a-minute subject, but these two can find the silver lining on even the darkest cloud.
It turns out that one of the very few positives of living alone is that they now feel free to let loose a good old knicker elastic twanger whenever they feel like it. It's a widow's privilege, they argue, and something that they and the rest of their bereaved friends feel entitled to enjoy whenever and wherever they see fit in the comfort of their own home (they don't do it outside of course, and never, ever in the health club pool).
I had no idea all this parping was going on behind closed doors.
Although it probably explains that earthquake we had recently.
It wasn't shifting tectonic plates, it was millions of widows all letting rip at the same time.
Another hitherto unknown fact that emerged from last week's heated sauna debate was that there is something of a sliding scale of relaxation when it comes to breaking wind after the death of a loved one.
While my mum is just a year on from losing my dad and still finds herself saying "excuse me" when the occasion arises, Eunice is a widow of three years standing and feels free to have a little chuckle and mutter an appreciative "blimey, that'll have blown the roof off next door's shed".
What you do when you've been a widow for ten years or more is not clear. But I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that rosy-cheeked old ladies are regularly taking off like rockets across the land.
- The young woman in the chocolate shop breathed an audible sigh of relief when I told her the names I wanted icing on to my Easter eggs. (I say eggs', but they were actually a traditional Easter football boot and fairy princess.) One three-letter name and one of four letters. No weird spellings and no blatantly made-up names. Apparently, the poor girl with the icing bag had been misspelling completely unspellable names all day and was glad of a bit of respite.
"How am I supposed to know that they spell Jade with a silent h' and a double e' at the end?" she asked quite reasonably.
I sympathised, but I'm afraid I couldn't resist a bit of devilment. Which is why I popped back the day after and bought choccy eggs for my good friends the Jolie-Pitts and their children Shiloh, Maddox, Zahara and Pax Thien.
I even picked up a small one for Halle Berry's new baby. Well, everyone knows how to spell Nahla Ariela, don't they?