This one came from very close to home. The tall child gently enquiring of Firstborn, his older sister, of her future plans having already padded her CV with prestigious, but poorly paid interships/fellowships and now commencing a Masters degree:
“Hannah, when you finish this course will you get a proper job?”
When I first told ‘Management’ that I had joined my work’s Yammer group on Women in Science and Engineering, her pithy comment was: “Does that mean you’ll now do your share of the ironing?” (thus putting the ‘ouch’ into touché!). Unfazed by such comments, I then Yammered to my colleagues about the way that bicycling had contributed to the emancipation of women. Susan B Anthony’s well-known quote from 1896 was my starting point …
“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood“.
… and this was followed by reference to a couple of articles on the MentalFloss and Grauniad websites (and there is a host of other web references that could be equally well cited).
Subsequently, and entirely by coincidence, the week after I Yammered about it an episode was screened of the TV series ‘In the Factory’ that was devoted to the manufacture of Brompton foldable bikes. In one of the show’s segments the historian Ruth Goodman presented how the bicycle had supported the emancipation of women. It was not as complete a treatment as the references above, but it did explain why specifically bicycling and not tricycling promoted the cause (apparently it was largely to do with the apparel required to ride the corresponding cycles)
“Anyway“, I hear you ask, “where is the quote that made you laugh?“. Well, I was quite tickled by the penultimate paragraph of the MentalFloss article that mentions Jacquie Phelan, a feminist mountain biker who founded WOMBATS, the Women’s Mountain Bike and Tea Society. And it is one of her quotes on the WOMBATS website that made me laugh. It chimes greatly with me and, I suspect, with Firstborn too:
“I never grew up, because grown-up has “groan” in it“.
Being an occasional pedant, this made me laugh:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
To.
To who?
To whom!
A cyclist’s re-working of the old “it’s easier to say sorry than to ask permission” gag:
“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me“. (Emo Philips).
… and no apologies for raiding my old Facebook postings to re-post this cartoon (one that, having failed to see its underlying message, my sister showed to a class of children. Bless!).
Occasionally you need to qualify a comment and, for the sake of her dignity, I need to qualify this one. My mum is 88 and sometimes what she means to say is not what she actually says. Put it down to the depredations of age …
An example from a recent trip to Newcastle springs to mind. What she meant to say was something like: “Two shandies and I’m three sheets to the wind”. So, what you really don’t expect your elderly mother to say to the assembled mourners towards the end of a funeral tea is: “Two shandies and I’m anyone’s!”.
As ‘Firstborn’ is one of the Instagram generation’s ‘selfie’ experts I can’t help feeling that this would be her approach to ‘helping police with their enquiries’ …
Postscript: Of course in real life she doesn’t sport sideburns and has neither a receding hairline nor tattooed biceps (much to her parent’s relief) and she can only dream of being 6′ 4″
Taken from a late great uncle’s booklet of quotes and press cuttings, this gem comes from a medical bulletin that described the ailment that caused French President Pompidou to miss a diplomatic dinner in April 1974:
“a benign lesion of vascular origin situated in the anal-rectal zone and intermittently hyperalgesiac“.
Piles!
The French named the famous Beaubourg building that he commissioned whilst President, the Centre Georges Pompidou in his honour; perhaps it should have been called Pompidou’s Pile!
Postscript: Pompidou died less than two weeks after this diagnosis, but not from piles; he was actually suffering from a form of lymphoma.
I have just re-read ‘Travels with Epicurus” in which the author, a 73-year-old Daniel Klein, travels to the Greek islands in his attempt to find the secret of growing old gracefully. Now, I’m not admitting to any self-interest as I think it may be more fun to grow old disgracefully rather than with grace alone (although if ‘Grace’ was of a like mind then that could be fun!).
Actually, I re-read only the first half because that was all I could cope with – I struggled with the second half on my original reading as it majored on philosophical bollocks and pretension at the expense of observation (and that, book club lovers, is my attempt at literary deconstruction). As an example of his pretension we find:
“Here in the Vlihos taverna, with people seated around me, I pull Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ out of my shoulder bag …”
Now, as someone whose knowledge of Heidegger stems entirely from Bruce’s Philosophers Song (“Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table …“) I’m in no position to tilt at Klein’s philosophical windmills other than to note in passing that ‘deconstruction’ (Jacques Derrida’s school of literary criticism) as attempted above, actually drew on the work of Heidegger among others. See, I too can scribe pretentiously, but maybe I should stick with a Tom Sharpe quote that made me laugh:
“His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.“
Not a quote, really, but Katherine Ryan retelling the funniest joke she’s ever heard:
Remember when your parents would say, “I’ll give you something to cry about” and you thought they were going to hit you but really, they were destroying the housing market?
And a perceptive description of Boris Johnson from Hadley Freeman in the Guardian:
Johnson is so calculating he has an abacus for a heart.
In a diatribe seemingly aimed at a former technical director at British Cycling, Marina Hyde writing in the Guardian appears to conflate the concept of the aggregate effects of marginal gains (in sporting performance) with the bullying and harassment of a number of female and disabled cyclists. I think she is wrong to do so because a bully is a bully and that is quite distinct from the marginal gains philosophy. One is not prerequisite to the other.
Despite her apparent confusion on the issue she does come up with a cracking quote (perhaps her ‘confusion’ was a deliberate ploy to enable her to frame the quote nicely):
“The real sadness, in the meantime, is that we have yet to see a long think-piece in which someone quantifies the ‘marginal gains’ of working for an obvious a**ehole”.
Experience from a period early in my career when I was managed by a complete sphincter tells me, in fact, there are no such gains in those circumstances.