Muddling through has always been my highest ambition

Sep 9 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT IS true that, amid all the bumps and balm of life, my highest admiration has been reserved for those, who have squeezed their souls to help us laugh along that auld parade of pantaloons, buffoonaries, fizzing dentures, pork-pie hats, sad eyes, skew-whiff wigs, slow smiles and frozen mirrors.

And, on opening your memory, you can see them in the reflection and hear them again, as they were – Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Tony Hancock, John Cleese, Joyce Grenfell, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Hattie Jacques, the Likely Lads, Steptoe and Son, and, of course, our own supreme Ken Dodd.

Their understanding of us stretches way beyond the reach of science.

Even more important are the names, known only to the few, of the men and women, who daily cheer us in factories and offices with mordant observations and their realisation that all authority is preposterous.

But there can be no doubt that the greatest comedian of them all is God.

I can see him now checking the bubbling potions in the eternal laboratory, stifling a chortle, as He designs man to be the hunter/ gatherer.

Then, with a sudden slurp from a tube to His left, out I pop – a man built for neither hunting nor gathering, though, if pressed, I would have dallied among the berries and roots in preference to stalking the sabre-toothed tiger.

In fact, there were occasions, in the days of ankle socks and sepia fields, when I carried my late mother’s bucket to the blackberry bushes of Birkenhead.

Such easy thoughts were smiling in my sleep the other night, when I was awakened by a prolonged yell from the other side of the bed.

“Saints preserve us,” called my wife, rather dramatically, I thought. “There is a fly in the room.”

“Ah yes,” said I, prising open my eyes in the dark, “I can hear his frantic buzzings between the curtains and the window pane.”

“Well, get rid of him,” said my wife.

“You’re supposed to be the man of the house!”

Although I detected rather too much emphasis on the “supposed to be”, I grasped the point.

We were back to the notion of the man as the hunter/ gatherer, the warrior and the protector. This was not a time for an appreciation of romantic poetry or daisy chains.

If a bull elephant had been raging through her underwear drawer at that moment, I would have been expected to spring into action, spear in hand. But it was worse than that.

My wife had been disturbed by a fly, as she lay, beautifully, on the plumped drifts of her altar-white pillow.

So I leapt from the bed, briefly allowing my arthritic groans and cracks to overwhelm the protestations of the invader, whom I ushered through the window and flight into the sun, slowly rising behind the river.

So it was with red-webbed eyes that I arrived at the chrome, glass and ivory splendour of the cafe to greet my friend, the Philosopher, who was already sitting before a steaming pot of coffee at our table, near the dip, where the band once played.

“History is not planned,” he said, while tilting the milk jug over his mug. “It is the only thing in life that is not planned.

“We must always remember that when assessing the great events. Muddling through is usually the best we can hope for.”

“You’re so right there,” I said. “Muddling through has always been my highest ambition. It saves you from disappointment. My old mother used to say: ‘You never know what is going to happen by the minute’. She was right.”

“Of course,” said the Philosopher, warming to his theme. “We have had it a lot easier than our parents’ generation. They had the two world wars, the Great Depression, revolutions and so on. They saw a lot in their lives and most of it wasn’t very nice.

“What have we had? TV, The Beatles, joining the Common Market, man on the moon, the European Capital of Culture.”

“We’ve had peace of a sort, or most of us have,” I said. “We’ve had softer lives, an opportunity to think – instead of all that hunting, gathering and fighting, but in some ways we have lacked purpose.”

Yes, we are always part of history, but now it is very personal.

I close my eyes to store memories of the little things in my brain, such as the kind manners of the waiter who served us at our favourite holiday cafe on the banks of an Italian lake.

But, in growing older, I realise that it was those wonderful comedians, whose understanding of mood told the lasting history of our times.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk