Reasons to Rise

(from 2015)

In addition to all the serious things of life, it is nice to have hobbies and interests – things that can get you up in the morning with a sort of spring in your arthritic step.

Over the years I have had many. I loved joining clubs and writing for them. I still do. But their activities all seem to fall into two extremes.

I was one of the earliest members of the Jerome K Jerome Society, which illustrates the two extremes quite well. On one hand there was deadly serious research on both the man and his late Victorian and Edwardian times, before it all got blown out of the water by the Great War of 1914. I was quite pleased over the years to have serious research published, which is still available in printed form. But on the other hand, there was the spectacle of grown men (company directors, bank managers, doctors, etc.) dressing up in white flannel trousers and straw boater hats, larking around splashing each other with water on the River Thames, trying to recreate Three Men in a Boat.

The same extremes feature in another of my clubs. The Laurel and Hardy club called itself The Sons of the Desert, based on a Masonic parody in the film of the same name. My interest in all things Laurel and Hardy went back to infancy. As a pre-teen, I used to be packed off to the British equivalent of the American Summer Camp each year – where we were “looked after” by bored, spaced out teachers earning an extra crust during the long summer vacation – a throwback to when children were needed to bring in the harvest. But they used to keep us quiet in the evenings (well, not exactly quiet, but at least attentive) showing Laurel and Hardy films. In retrospect, the main attraction was often seeing the 16mm projector break down, and sweat pouring down the teachers’ faces, as they tried not to use language their charges would have gleefully repeated.

Again, there were the two strands of interest. On the one hand, there was serious film scholarship – still finding extra footage after all these years, especially foreign language versions of their movies with new material; and I had a number of articles published in various obscure journals over the years to show my continuing obsession with the minutiae of trivia. But the other strand was the boozy get-togethers, with grown men of the middle-aged variety in costume shoving custard pies into each other’s faces. (Serious historian bit here – in over a hundred movies Laurel and Hardy only ever did one custard pie fight, and that was in The Battle of the Century – 1927 – but the concept has sort of stuck. A bit like the custard.)

Obviously – harrumph - you can guess which school I fell into. Although I confess, I used to do a passable impersonation of Stan Laurel. (Generally while public speaking...)

And just think - if I had been an Elvis fan I would have attended Elvis conventions, dressed in a Rhinestone cowboy romper suit, doing his portly Las Vegas days. (I still do the John Stewart parody “I Wanna Be Elvis” in folk clubs when good judgment deserts me). Actually in the music field, I was much more of a Gene Vincent man, and even if I say so myself, could do a mean impersonation. Before my orthodontist got to work, I sort of had the teeth for it.

Still, as noted at the start – apart from the actual serious things of life - it gives people that little extra to get up for in the morning. To quote from another John Stewart song:

To carve out a face on a mountain of stone,
Day after day, one man alone.
And it took twenty years just to get to his eyes
- But he's found him a reason to rise,
Finding the reasons to rise.

Reasons to rise. I used to think this was a reference to the presidents’ heads on Mount Rushmore, but it is actually about the Crazy Horse Memorial still being created in South Dakota.

Or to revert to a favorite Laurel and Hardy catch phrase (pinched from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado) – “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into...”