I saw someone else fall over today. I expect you would assume that seeing as I had experienced this myself yesterday and am aware of the pain and humiliation that I wouldn't now have found this amusing. But you are wrong, you idiot. I found it just as amusing as ever. I have learnt nothing. In fact maybe I found it a bit more amusing, because it was nice not to be the last person who recently fell over.
I was at an afternoon Christmas party and everyone had had a few drinks. A few of us had convened on the upstairs landing outside the toilet (all the best parties end up near a toilet) and were chatting merrily away. One of the women I was talking to was standing in the doorway of a bedroom, possibly a little merrily, holding on to the door frame and dancing around. She was showing off a little, possibly flirting with the handsome man on my right. She was trying to look all swishy and mysterious and cool. But as the saying goes swishyness comes before a fall. And the saying was not wrong.
She tried to execute too bold a move for her drunken body and ended up flying up in the air and then landing on her back with a dull thud.
It was a bad enough fall to worry for a second that she might have been seriously injured, but despite my own experience in this area I did not leap to her aid. I merely said, "Oh dear" and thought about laughing at the juxtaposition between being swishily cool and lying on your back on the floor.
"I'm all right," said the woman, writhing on the floor like an upturned beetle who has just done something a bit embarrassing. And the fact that her back had not been broken was a cue for me to be allowed to find the whole thing funny. The woman didn't find it funny. She felt embarrassed and humiliated, but to me that just made the whole incident more amusing. The others managed not to laugh and my girlfriend poked me to make me stop giggling, but that just made it funnier to me.
I know that I had not found my own private humiliation particularly chortle-worthy yesterday and this fall came in front of friends and acquaintances, and rather put a lid on the mild flirtation that had been going on, but I think had it been me I might have laughed at my own stupidity. This would have then made the whole thing a lot less funny. But she didn't laugg. And she had the audacity to look annoyed at me for laughing openly at her misfortune. And she wasn't even aware of the irony that I myself had had an embarrassing tumble just 24 hours before.
But as Samuel Beckett (the playwright not the quantum leaping one) sort of observed we are always looking for someone worse off than us to take the attention away from our own inadequacy.
She got up and brushed herself down. She wasn't even cut a bit and all her clothes were in one piece. She hadn't suffered.
My scabbing knee still throbbed.
