For 21 years my bike has leant against the wall just inside the garage door. On Monday morning it was gone. Nicked. I loved that old Dawes Galaxy. But I couldn’t work myself up into a state about its theft. I tried anger, I tried indignation, but without success. Good luck to them, I thought. I might be a fool, but I try not to be a hypocrite as well.
Besides, I was elated and humbled that morning because the postman had delivered another packet of your jokes; the biggest yet, containing about 60 letters, emails and postcards; all of them miles too late, unfortunately, to be entered in the competition to win a party invitation. The party had been and gone, and in the minds of those who had any recollection of it, was already a distant memory.
I took the packet down to the town library and sat at the reading table with the usual collection of well-informed tramps who go there to peruse the broadsheets. Smiling to myself in happy anticipation, I pulled the first letter out of the packet. The joke went as follows: A guy phones his boss in the morning. ‘Sorry, Boss, I can’t come in to work today, I’m sick.’ ‘What! That’s the third time this month! How sick are you?’ ‘I’m in bed with my sister.’
Call me simple-minded, but I guffawed at that one, bike or no bike. (Thanks, Nick.) I laughed out loud at the next one, too. This one invited me to picture myself committing a vile, and in some US states still illegal, act with celebrity chef Delia Smith, and mopping up afterwards with one of her tea towels. (Thanks, Jon.) It is the sort of joke which most definitely is not fit for reprinting here.
Next out of the envelope came a puerile racist joke that I’d first heard in the school playground in about 1964, and was probably invented in about 1864. Appended to this were some very kind, perceptive and encouraging comments about the column. (Thanks, Grace.) She also wondered whether I ought to publish a compendium of all received jokes. It’s a super idea, Grace, but I don’t think I would find a willing printer or publisher is the answer to that. Plus I’d be taken in and held for questioning. Plus there’d probably be a fatwah issued. Plus I’d probably never work again.
Next was a joke from Michelle from London. Michelle’s bucked the trend by being neither offensive nor puerile. It can be done. ‘I was in the pub with my boyfriend last night,’ she wrote. ‘And I said, “I love you.” He said, “Is that you or the beer talking?” I replied, “It’s me talking to the beer.”’ This simple, true-to-life joke made me snort so loudly that one of the tramps peered over the top of his Financial Times and pulled an inquiring face. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m reading jokes.’ ‘Well, let’s hear one!’ said a stringy beard with snaggletooth, from behind the Daily Telegraph. I reached inside the envelope and pulled out a printed email. Then I nearly fell off my chair. It was an email from Taki. The High life correspondent was entering a competition to win an invitation to the Low life correspondent’s party with a favourite joke of his own. I read it out to them blind, as it were. It went like this:
A very rich oldie meets a very young hustler and soon they become engaged. The night before their wedding he says, ‘I have a confession to make. I only live for golf. I think golf, dream golf, see only golfing friends, and talk only of golf when I’m not playing. Take it or leave it.’
She answers, ‘You’ve been honest with me so I feel I should be honest with you. Before I met you I was a hooker.’ Pause. Then he says, ‘I knew that the moment I saw the way you swung the club the first day.’
Town libraries are noisy places these days. Somehow noisy libraries seem to be part of the democratising process. This one has a crèche in it, and people answer their mobile phones without embarrassment. Yet the tramps’ and my laughter was such that the raised, plucked eyebrows, then the eyes, of a librarian rose above a partition in the computer enclave.
In the afternoon, I went for a walk along the coast path, taking my packet of readers’ jokes with me. I thought I might stop a while on the beach and read a few more. A short distance along the path a bike was lying abandoned in some bushes. My bike. The chain was off, otherwise it was none the worse for its adventure. I was so very pleased to be reunited with my old friend that I must have minded more about it being half-inched than I’d been willing to acknowledge.
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