Your father smelt of elderberries

Every day, the world turns more and more into a sinister episode from a Monty Python film. There is a lot to both laugh and cry at right now.

Something to laugh about: Even Bob Dylan himself thinks it is ridiculous to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is refusing to answer the phone to the officials trying to organise the presentation, and they are very angry with him already. Serves them right!

Something to shed crocodile tears over: British Football hero, Garry Lineker, has been castigated by The Sun 'newspaper' for daring to suggest that the idea of checking the teeth of Syrian children immigrants to the U.K. to make sure they are not really adults in disguise was obscene. Being morally castigated by The Sun must be like being flogged with a wet lettuce. Someone pointed out that if a child of 14 has spent a year in a holding camp, risking his life every night to get to relatives already in the U.K., he quite often looks a lot older than his actual years.

Something else to laugh about: The French minister in charge of the Brexit negotiations has insisted that they should henceforth be carried out in the French language. Ooooooooooh! They should send Boris Johnson over. His French is excrable. I would happily sit up all night to watch the proceedings, just as Theresa May did the other day.

Something to cry about: The Polish fim director Andrzej Wajda has died. The reason for tears? As H.I. just pointed out, he was the last of the truly great film makers. 'Ashes and Diamonds', etc.

Ok, that's enough of the emotional roller-coaster.

I had thought about winding up Heron a little more this morning, but then I remembered an incident of a few years ago, right here in Bath.

Someone wrote in to our local 'newspaper' The Bath Chronical (AKA, 'The Chronic') with a letter to the editor, with what he thought was 'proof' that homosexuality was 'unatural'. Because the editor published it in full, I thought that the man who wrote it was having a laugh.

In it, he said that there had never, ever, been any homosexual behaviour observed in any part of the animal kingdom, proving that the innocent animals which God had seen fit to put on Earth for our pleasure or use (!) were entirely devoid of any gay tendencies at all.

I wrote a letter in reply, saying that if he had looked out of my kitchen window the day before yesterday, he would have seen two male dogs which disproved his theory. The editor loved it, and went on to publish quite a few more.

I became a little famous for a week or so, and I even got asked by a bank-teller who recognised my name if I was the person who wrote the letter about the dogs. When I confirmed this, she burst out laughing and said how much she and her colleagues were enjoying the exchange.

After a few more humiliating replies from me to the man who wrote back saying that I must have been mistaken about the sex of one of the dogs, it became obvious that the writer was a very old, very serious and possibly mentally unstable Christian living on his own, so I had a private word with the editor and we both agreed to end the joke.

You have to be a bit careful when having a laugh at someone else's expense.