Gravity is a cruel mistress, as Greg Evigan once observed and it is one that blights the Herring family in a series of slapstick adventures. Whether it's my dad falling in the fish pond or my mum smashing snow globes over my grandma or my sister exploding glitter over my grandma, we have our fair share of dangerous and hilarious adventures. It's mainly good for me as these incidents provide the fuel for most of my comedy, to the extent that my family have begun to ask for royalties. Dream on.
Gravity causes much hilarity, but is dangerous as well and the humour of a fat woman falling out of a hammock (an incident that I have long championed as the funniest thing possible) is immediately dissipated if the fat woman cracks her head open and has her brain damaged. There's a thin line for the fat woman. One side is laughter, the other side horror (and also some laughter). Gravity will probably contribute to most of our deaths or at least to our last action. We all fall in the end.
Slapstick pervades our family's life so much that I am pretty sure I will go in an hilarious accident and I often wonder if the object of my destruction is already in my possession or if the person who will cause my death is known to me. When I nearly crashed my car, for example, my boxes of programmes and DVDs shifted in the back of the car, but if they had been sent shooting forwards by an impact I might have been killed by a box of SCOPE programmes. Which wouldn't be a very fair way to go. Yesterday when packing away my books the top shelf of the book case, which had the biggest books on it, gave way and tipped several massive hard backs on to my skull. These were books like the Beatles Anthology and the similar Monty Python retrospective, proper slabs falling from a height of over eight feet (though on to my head which was only a couple of feet lower). One of them impacted close to my temple and left me with a red mark and a small amount of pain, but had it hit me a few centimetres higher then it might have knocked me out and I could have gone down, cracking my head on the dining room table.... I would have been killed by Monty Python in a slapstick and slightly surreal way. Probably an apt expression of all that my life had been.
We were heading back to Cheddar to see my parents today and my fiancee's parents were also coming down to meet the inlaws for the first time. It was a situation ripe for comedy and with Herrings involved must also surely call for slapstick. My mum would be busy cleaning the house and my father would be doing his best not to make a mess, but then that was also the case when he managed to fall in the fishpond on a day when the house was clean and ready for visitors (my mum was reluctant to let her dripping and bleeding husband into the kitchen).
Today my dad had not quite managed anything of that magnitude, but he had managed to drop his bowl of porridge this morning when he was on the phone and covered the newly cleaned kitchen in porridge and glass and once again his own blood. But it happened far enough away from us arriving to be comfortably tidied up before the visitors got there. So I doubt I can write an ITV drama or Edinburgh show about it.
But which inanimate object, sitting innocently somewhere in your house or flat, or on the shelf of a shop waiting for you to pick it up, will be the one that contributes to your untimely demise or humiliation? Your murderer is sitting waiting for you and you have no idea.
