For some strange reason my friends find it difficult to take me seriously. If I try to tell them something serious - you can see the anticipation in their eyes as they wait for the punch line. I suppose it is the result of me pulling their legs over the years and inflicting on them some truly hideous jokes and puns.
I suppose I can trace it back to my youth and my first car. It was a beaten up rust bucket Datsun Cherry. It served me well for a few months but one day the gearbox "exploded" as I was driving over a bridge. The parts cascaded into the road and bounced through the bridge railings into the river below. I phoned a pal to come and rescue me because it was raining Datsun cogs.
My pal's parents ran a local pub which sold a real ale called Tates - renowned to be the strongest ale in the area. So strong that after drinking just a couple of pints, people had been known to forget how to find their way home.
I often wondered whether this was the origin of the saying "He who has a Tate's is lost".
One of the pub regulars was a Chinese called Wong Lee who worked for the Rife magazine and had a penchant for Tate's ale and the barmaid. Many a time his wife would phone concerned that her husband had not got home and they would send out the barmaid to look for him. I speculated that if she found him she was likely to say "Ah, sweet Mr Lee of Rife, at last I've found you".
I'm sitting here in our conservatory idly watching the birds on the feeders and reminiscing about my past life. I've done some crazy things in my time but they are now fond memories for an old pensioner. My wife has put up with my foibles with great stoicism.
For example - I have a musical bent and learned to play the Elizabethan lute - not very well - but well enough to be in demand by the village amateur dramatic society to appear as a minstrel in their Shakespeare productions. However, every time I was due to appear, my wife would get a terrible migraine which I put down to being just pre-minstrel tension.
The NHS tried their best, but failed to cure her migraines and she resorted to alternative medicine of various forms. I recall her going to an African doctor who gave her a strip of leather which was impregnated with some magical concoction. She was told that every time she felt the headache coming on she should chew on the strip of leather. It didn't work, but she persevered until it was consumed. I told her to phone him up and tell him that the thong was ended but the malady lingers on.
I must admit that my wife has always found my levity a bit wearing sometimes, and it has been known to cause an argument or two. However - we never really fall out - I always agree with her when I am in the wrong.
I bet you are wondering what I do when I am right - this question is purely academic because it hasn't happened yet.
Anyway - anything a husband says at the end of an argument is only the start of another one.
Our last little tiff was when she asked me to get a new bed - and I went out and got a water bed. She protested that that she had wanted a new-fangled foam mattress - so I filled it with beer.
I met and married my lovely wife a few years ago - I was a widower and she was a widow with a grown-up daughter. Later, my daft old father fell in love with my step-daughter and they got married.
That made my stepdaughter my stepmother and my father became my stepson. Also my wife became mother-in-law of her father-in-law.
The inevitable happened and the daughter of my wife - my stepmother - had a son. This boy was my half-brother because he was the son of my father, but he was also the grandson of my wife which made me the grandfather of my half-brother.
This was nothing - my wife and I then had a son. Now the half-sister of my son, my mother-in-law, is also the grandmother. This makes my father the brother-in-law of my child, whose stepsister is my father's wife. I am my stepmother's brother-in-law, my wife is her own child's aunt, my son is my father's nephew and to cap it all - I am my own grandfather.
I reckon that I might have some family problems……………..
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