Think I Need a Good Laugh!

I've been counting how long it is to our summer holidays. Saddo aren't I. It's just we've had no summer this year and gone straight to what feels like winter not autumn.

I need a good laugh and there hasn't been any good comedy on TV recently so I think it's time I read the David Niven autobiographies again. Each time I read them I laugh for ages at the antics he and his friends got up to. He was such a good writer.

Another author who makes me laugh is Bill Bryson. Well let's face it, he's got to have a good sense of humour hasn't he, he's chosen to live in England poor soul! They made him Chancellor of Durham University in 2005. Wonder if it was because he was so nice about Durham in Notes From a Small Island?

I remember reading one of his books in Malta's airport when we were standing in a massive long queue waiting to go through passport control. They officials seemed to have taken a very long coffee break. I was trying to keep my laugh in but eventually I started laughing out loud. It's always embarrassing when you do that, you feel such a loony. A German woman further up the queue smiled at me and gave me the thumbs up. Probably wished she had my book.

I have a friend who puts a long letter in with my Christmas card each year and when I read it I start laughing. She's brilliant, all she does it update us on their activities, nothing weird or outlandish, it's just her take on life. It's hilarious. The last one was about how they have bought a caravan to tow and her husband's obsession with buying an awning. She didn't want one as she's seen too many "awning antics" on their travels. Needless to say he got his way and the letter was full of the perils of awnings. I would never have believed anyone could write so humorously about this. She can literally write about anything and make you laugh.

I keep telling her she should write a book but she says she hasn't got time.

We met as mature students doing a degree at Sunderland in the 'eighties and she was great fun. We went on a field trip to what was then Yugoslavia in the Polytechnic's bus. Yes a bus, and we laughed all the way across Holland, Germany, Austria and into Yugoslavia. Our faces and stomachs ached from laughing all day and into the night. I think the young students thought they were travelling with a bunch of escapees from a lunatic asylum. We meet up on occasions and we always talk about the daft things that happened on that trip.

On the way across Germany we stayed at a strange hotel. Quite an ugly sixties concrete type of thing. The World Cup was on and I got fed up with watching it so I went to bed and missed all the fun. My friend stayed up chatting to some of the students at the bar. She had drunk quite a bit and was being chatted up by one of the male students on one side and on the other side of her was what she thought was a woman wearing a lot of make up. Suffice to say it was the "woman" who was eventually doing the chatting up and other things which I won't go into here. However my friend says due to the alcoholic haze she took ages to cotton on to it. The evils of drink!

My friend is convinced we were staying in a house of ill repute and it was full of transvestites and prostitutes. I have to say the women did look a very rough bunch the next morning at breakfast, I hadn't noticed that the night before.

Another time they decided to take us to view the fjord where The Vikings was filmed. Well it was supposed to be a geography trip after all. All went well until the driver, a German ex prisoner of war who never returned to Germany after the war (and that's another story), navigated the bus down a narrow road. He drove us into a campsite, a nudist campsite and couldn't reverse back out of it! The lecturers were shouting at the students and telling them not to laugh but it was hard not to. The funniest thing I saw was three nude men walking along carrying a canoe over their heads. I totally lost it at that point. We never got to see the fjord either!

I keep telling her we ought to get together and write a book about all these things before we forget them altogether.

I feel better already just thinking about that trip! Need to ring her to meet up soon for another laugh.