Here Comes the Fun E-Book

Ben Aitken

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'What Aitken writes about fun is worth reading' Mail on Sunday 'Irresistible' Christopher Somerville, author of The January Man and Walking the Bones of Britain 'A great book' Simon Rimmer, Sunday Brunch 'Aitken's writing is always a delight' Madeleine Bunting, author of The Seaside Are you getting enough? Bestselling travel writer Ben Aitken wasn't. Increasingly flat and decreasingly zen, Ben gave boredom the boot and stress the cold shoulder by embarking on a whimsical journey into the serious business of having a laugh. He did a pilgrimage in Spain, a summer camp in Kent, and a cruise of the Baltic with 2,000 grannies. And when he wasn't on the road, he searched for merriment at home: by giving bridge a go, volunteering a chance, and gardening a crack of the whip. By incorporating the thoughts of key thinkers and boffins, Here Comes the Fun offers a satisfying balance of the playful and the profound, the serious and the silly, the daft and the deep.

Leseprobe

Also by Ben Aitken

Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island

A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland

The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders

The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-005-6

ebook ISBN: 978-183773-007-0

Text copyright © 2023 Ben Aitken

The author has asserted his moral rights.

This is a work of nonfiction, but the names and some identifying details of characters have been changed throughout to respect the privacy of the individuals concerned.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Baskerville MT by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India.

Printed in the UK.

For Winnie Carter (1936–2023), who knew something about fun.

Contents

1Fun is a funny thing alright

2Silliness can go too far

3To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness

4Oh to possess once again that nine-year-old style!

5I can’t lose the sight of myself

6Never doubt yourself, people!

7A pair of trousers that I would instantly remove in the event of finding myself in them

8The gap between who we habitually are and who we actually are

9A perfect harmony of despair and delirium, all wrapped up in glee

10Fishing is essentially a satirical activity

11The psychic benefits of novelty

12The invisibility of what’s constant

13A chance to re-evaluate what we value

14A bearded man with an axe

15The spurious privilege of options

16An unfiltered version of everything you are

17I almost pull a neck muscle trying to seem happy

18The sort of person who embraces a sudden downpour

19It might be helpful to consider life as a pie

20Toward the foothills of euphoria

Acknowledgements

1

Fun is a funny thing alright

Wherein the author discovers his biological age, freaks out, goes cold water swimming, freaks out, joins a veterans’ football team and attends the birthday party of an8-year-old.

8 November, 2021

I’ve decided to spice up my fun life. Why? Because I recently did a sort of health and personality test online and scored 2.7 out of 10. The test found me to be somewhat guilt-laden, rather self-conscious, and likely to die from a heart-related issue. My ‘word cloud’ (if you can imagine such a thing) was dominated by two of the most sought-after adjectives in the dictionary: preoccupied and lacklustre. Apparently, my idea of a peak human experience is playing charades in a pub garden with a friend I haven’t seen for six years.

I’m not going to claim that my score on the test was a wake-up call, because it wasn’t. For one, the test was crude and simplistic, and for two, I was already fully awake to the fact that I wasn’t winning at life. I’m also not going to claim that prior to the test my personality was so rank and insipid that my own mother had filed for a divorce, because it wasn’t. I don’t want to turn this chronicle into a version of An Idiot Abroad, with me as Karl Pilkington and the realm of fun as the promised land to which I am congenitally ill-suited. That would be too easy a contrivance. Too obvious an exaggeration.

The truth is that I’m pretty average. Neither fun-starved nor fun-fat. Neither depressingly dull nor exceptionally jolly. Neither constantly pulling my hair out, nor meditating thrice daily. My motivation for embracing fun is neither especially existential nor deserving of tabloid news coverage. At no point in the immediate future am I likely to be the subject of an article with the headline ‘World’s Least Fun Person Found Loitering in Argos’.

If I’m none of those things, then what am I? Well, I’m just someone who fancied that they weren’t getting enough. Someone who realised (for the umpteenth time) that life isn’t a rehearsal. Someone who had a mild epiphany that the meaning of life isn’t craft lager and subscription TV. Someone who fancied a bit more laugh, and a bit less groan.

I’m also someone who, to get a handle on his subject and gain a useful sense of direction, conducted a comprehensive and statistically significant survey of 42 people and discovered that the big hit in their lives is swimming in freezing-cold water. (Closely followed by knitting.) As a result, there’s talk of me kicking off my fun era with a swim in the local pond. I’m against the idea on principle – the principle being my aversion to cold water. I don’t care what lies in store for me on the other side (uber endorphins, a superhuman sensation), if unbearable coldness lies between us. Start how you mean to carry on, they say. So I’ll start with knitting – if you don’t mind.1

9 November

I walk to the pond gingerly, not least because some of the potential side effects of cold water swimming don’t sound fun at all. Hypothermia. Hyperventilation. Cardiac arrest. Pulmonary collapse. Arterial explosion. Ocular combustion. I could go on making things up, but you get the point – it’s not for the fainthearted. Which means it’s not for me.

It may not be for me, but it certainly is for plenty of others, which is why I’m here – to investigate what floats other boats. Cold water swimming is having what you might call, perhaps inappropriately, a moment in the sun.

Leading up to today, I did a bit of homework – which is to say I watched a documentary. The documentary featured people like Peter, who, when asked to justify his lust for frigid torment, said something along the lines of: ‘It’s ace because a swim in the pond when it’s super cold just makes me forget everything for up to twelve hours.’ Call me precious, but I don’t want to forget everything for up to twelve hours. I don’t think that would be helpful. Another dipper featured in the documentary, meanwhile, said that the delightful thing about swimming in the pond was its knack of making the ghosts disappear. Call me impoverished, but I don’t have any ghosts. At least I don’t think I do.

Although the documentary did little to warm me up to cold water swimming, it did equip me with various ways of making the experience less likely to be fatal. A flask of tea should be sipped slowly for eleven years upon exiting the icy depths. At least sixteen layers should be put on within seconds of leaving the pond. Speed should be demonstrated immediately after leaving the water, to ensure the period of time between trauma and recovery is as short as possible. And exaggeration should be employed wherever possible.

When I reach the pond, there’s a guy in a kiosk taking payment, which is a bit like charging someone to stub their toe.

‘It’s my first time,’ I say.

‘Welcome,’ he says.

‘Bit nervous actually.’

‘You picked a special day – the water temperature is five degrees.’

‘Is that warm for this time of year?’

‘Er, no. It’s cold for this time of year.’

‘Which makes it special?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Any tips?’

‘Know where the exits are.’

I’ve never undressed so slowly. I had hoped to engage in a bit of changing-room banter with some of the regulars, so they might expand a little on the relationship between distress and entertainment, but there’s nobody around, which is ominous.

I’ve borrowed some aqua shoes – chiefly to avoid being barefoot on the icy, stone jetty that juts into the pond – but they’re several sizes too small, meaning that when I hurriedly tiptoe towards the water in my trunks, I must resemble the least aesthetically pleasing ballerina known to humankind.

When I reach the ladder, I actually manage to muster some nerve and display some sangfroid by climbing straight into the water without dicking about, i.e. without hopping from foot to foot, arms clasped around me, hoping something tragic or miraculous might occur that would result in me not having to proceed any further.

In the end it’s not too bad. Granted, upon entering the water I can’t breathe and inwardly swear about 42 times, but compared to the cold showers I’ve been taking in preparation for this moment, getting into the pond is somehow less disgustingly abrupt and shocking. I think it’s because in the pond you’re completely submerged, meaning the attack is spread out, rather than focused on your head or back or midriff. There’s a life lesson in that. I think.

I’m not saying it’s nice; by no stretch of the imagination is it nice; but what I am saying is that I’m able to spend 47 seconds in the pond approximating someone doing a version of the doggy paddle, without screaming wildly for assistance.

On second 48, I decide that that’s enough fun for one day. I return to the jetty a happy if slightly petrified person, then run back to the changing space as fast as I can without courting disaster. I dress exceptionally quickly, which brings to mind those lines of Shakespeare regarding schoolchildren going to school sluggishly and leaving it with haste. I enjoy sipping my tea wearing every jumper I own. I might even be smiling. Relief is fun. Survival is a hoot. I reckon I could do this again.

21 November

I’ve joined a gym. I know I should have waited until the new year like the rest of the world, but what can I say, I’m precocious. Anyway, the gym has this machine – perhaps yours has one too – that is designed to essentially scare the crap out of you. It’s called Boditrax. You basically take your socks off, step onto a set of scales fitted with a bunch of sensors, grab a pair of analytical handles, and then hope for the best. Twenty seconds later, the machine gives you about 45 readings, including visceral fat levels, Body Mass Index, bone density, muscle content and so on. When my results appear, they don’t make for easy reading. Apparently, I’m on the fringes of clinical obesity, am the proud owner of almost no core muscle, and have a biological age of 54, which is nearly twenty years my senior. I step off the scales feeling deflated about my rate of inflation.

Not that I expected much better, mind you. For the last twenty years – since I left school, really – my lifestyle has been sub-optimal. I routinely self-medicate with Guinness and cider. The only time I lift weights is when I’m unloading the dishwasher. And I get most of my aerobic exercise walking to Chicken Cottage. It has clearly taken its toll.

I leave the gym newly resolved: never to step on that bloody machine again.

4 December

One of the few things you can say with confidence about fun is that it’s subjective. In fact, it’s massively subjective. If you tell me that fun is six donuts in succession, at a particular café in Minneapolis, when a storm is raging outside, I’m not going to get above my station and tell you you’re wrong. While we might be able to agree on a set of potential characteristics for fun (energising, absorbing, not likely to result in trauma), we’d struggle to find even one activity or pastime that is consistently and invariably those things (or a combination thereof). We can say what things characterise fun, but not what things are fun.

When I did some research – that is, posted a tweet that garnered eleven replies – I learned that for Adrian from Wrexham fun is taking the bus with nothing on but a raincoat, and that for Caroline from Minnesota it’s tripping over. I repeat, tripping over. She absolutely loves it. Can’t get enough. It gets her chuckling. While Caroline concedes that it can’t easily be scheduled, and will sometimes leave her modestly injured, she also wonders if it’s these very characteristics that make the pastime so appealing to her.

When I spoke to some of the older people in my life about what they did for fun as kids, it kind of blew my mind. When my partner’s mum, Kim, was about eight or nine, she used to spend most of her leisure time pretending to be the Chelsea captain Ray Wilkins. According to Kim, she loved nothing more than pretending to be a famous footballer out on the town after three points on a Saturday. She used to dress up in the football kit and spend hours improvising dialogue befitting this scenario. Interesting.

While Kim was being Ray, my dad and his mates were either playing a game called Split the Kipper – which involved a sheath knife, another person’s legs, and a high degree of jeopardy – or a version of darts wherein the board would be substituted for whichever of his mates pulled the short straw and the oche situated no less than 30 metres from the target. It can surely be no coincidence that A&E admissions plummeted after the launch of the Nintendo Gameboy in 1989. So what if kids developed braindead personas if they got to stay in one piece?

At least my mum’s idea of fun wasn’t dangerous. ‘Knock, Knock, Ginger’ involves knocking on someone’s front door and then running away before the door is answered. My mum reckons she could have played this game for days on end if she’d been given half a chance. She reckons the feeling she got from confusing local homeowners was somehow good for the soul. Since she told me this, I’ve not been able to look at her the same way. Make no mistake, fun is a funny thing alright.

For the purposes of this book, I don’t think there’s much to be gained (or much fun to be had) in labouring to come up with a definition of fun. Instead of trying to pin fun down, I’d rather concentrate on dipping a toe in the stuff itself. (If this looks like a dereliction of duty, or like I’m prioritising play over work, then I’m guilty as charged.) If the stuff I dip a toe into happens to overlap with such things as amusement and merriment and enjoyment and diversion – so be it; we’ll roll with the punches.

For those of you who are desperate for a rule of thumb, however, who simply couldn’t carry on reading without one, let’s say that if it gives you a lift and stops you thinking about work, then there’s a good chance it’s fun; while if it doesn’t do either (like changing a nappy or sitting in traffic, or changing a nappy while sitting in traffic), then there’s a good chance it’s not. Now, where’s a kerb I can trip on?

21 December

I’ve joined a veterans’ football team. My partner Megan isn’t supportive at all. She doesn’t, for a start, like the idea of me being eligible. (You’ve got to be 35+) She asked me not to go. Looked on in despair when I bought the boots and shin pads. ‘My grandad plays walking football,’ she said. ‘Shall I see if they need anyone?’

I’ve not played football for 23 years, in which time my muscles and physique and general sporting ability have grown accustomed to televised drama and burritos. I enter the changing room and am hit by the smell of Deep Heat, which prompts a wave of bad nostalgia.

‘Where do you play?’ says a man wearing the glow of retirement (and very little else).

‘Nowhere.’

‘Nah, come on. Striker? Full-back?’

‘No, honestly mate. Nowhere.’

I don’t fit in the shirt, which is surely a portent. Problem is there’s only a small one spare, and I’ve got too much spare to be small, if you know what I mean. My warmup is off-the-scale self-conscious. I do some things I remember seeing others do years ago: high knees, star jumps, that sort of thing. The gaffer comes over and says that some of my teammates are genuine veterans. ‘One of these blokes fought in Vietnam. Another in the Falklands. If you don’t put your head in the way of things they’ll be on to you.’

After this attempt at encouragement, the gaffer then makes the mistake of confusing age with ability and puts me in the centre of midfield – the most dynamic position. After 47 seconds (which, coincidentally, was how much fun I had in the pond that time), I feel my right calf muscle creak. It’s not a snap, or a pull, but it’s something. A howl, maybe. A protest.

Then, ten minutes later, and not yet having touched the ball deliberately, it’s the groin. Another creak, another howl. When, just before halftime, I kick the ball awkwardly with my weaker left foot and half the nail on my big toe comes off, or very nearly comes off, I’m ready to throw in the towel and put football down as a failed experiment.

And yet despite the knocks and strains, and my gross incompetence, and the fact that I resemble a walrus in a crop top, I’m loving it. The steady adrenaline. The slight risk. The pleasant anarchy. The feeling of returning to childhood. The low-stakes camaraderie. The game.

Also pleasing is the halftime team talk, wherein our 69-year-old winger displays a knowledge of complicated footballing matters that was neither demonstrated nor hinted at during the first half. Andrew’s opinion (that we need to pass in triangles), sets off a flood of others, including the need to keep it simple (from James), the need to throw caution to the wind (from Mike), and the need to exploit their old boy at the back, who’s seen more general elections than Ricardo’s had hot dinners (from Ricardo). Each opinion is earnest and passionate, and paid absolutely no attention whatsoever.

My opinion – that I ought to be taken off – is also ignored. And so, for another 50 minutes that feels like a full calendar month, I waddle around like an awkward bollard. Until, that is, an unlikely ball is sent over the top and I’m clean through on goal, at which point, instead of dropping a shoulder or just putting my laces through it, I display all the composure of a rabbit in the headlights and just kick the ball tamely into the goalkeeper’s tummy. We lose 5–1.

I walk home with less a spring in my step (too injured for that), and more a spring in my mood.

25 December

In bed with the new variant of Covid. Generally speaking, novelty gets a good press. But the sobering truth is that not all novel things are equal. New shoes – great. New variant – less so. On a positive note, I do well for presents: an Allen key and a Waitrose voucher. God bless grandparents. They sure know how to keep your spirits up.

9 January

My year of making merry hasn’t exactly got off to a flier. First a near-death experience, second I join a veterans’ football team, and now an eighth birthday party. The birthday boy is William, my friend’s eldest. When said friend mentioned the party and I was like, ‘You know what? I might pop along to that – could be fun,’ his only response was to ask me very seriously if everything was okay.

When I arrive, the church hall is lit by revolving disco lights. A load of parents are lined up stiffly around the edge, while their kids are on the dance floor expressing themselves to ‘Get Lucky’ by Daft Punk. The DJ – DJ Anthony – is quite a funny bloke. His patter is operating on two levels – one to amuse and engage the kids, and one to stop the adults from imploding with boredom. During a lull in proceedings, the man next to me asks which one’s mine. In retrospect, my response – ‘None of them, actually. I just popped in for some fun’ – could have done more to put his mind at ease.

My mate Mark’s just been dragged up to the front by DJ Anthony and asked to show the kids some dance moves, which they have to copy, with the best copier getting a handful of sweets from DJ Anthony’s jar. Mark’s never been shy (which is a shame if you ask me), and doesn’t need to be asked twice. DJ Anthony drops Taylor Swift, and Mark’s off, out of the blocks with a parody of the Macarena. I’ve not seen him so animated since he won an award for best effort in geography. Next, Mark segues into a set of moves that suggest a ridiculous and sped-up version of tai chi. If he’s improvising, then the man’s a genius. If he’s not, then he’s got some questions to answer.

Personally, I’m thrilled when the ‘lawnmower’ comes out. It’s a move Mark would routinely perform on nightclub dancefloors in Portsmouth, back in his early twenties when he wasn’t a married accountant with two children. The ‘lawnmower’ basically involves pushing an invisible lawnmower around the dance floor in a jaunty fashion with an ecstatic look on your face. The sight of Mark bouncing around with his lawnmower with twenty-odd children doing likewise before him is at once heart-warming, oddly inspiring, and, yes, somehow fun. I’m not saying I could watch the spectacle forever, but I could happily manage another ten minutes.

When Mark is invited to step down so the kids can freestyle, not all of them are as unabashed and carefree as I thought they might be. It’s easy to think that kids don’t give a hoot about anything, that they’re essentially boisterous puppies with an insatiable thirst for play, but of the group before me only about half fit this description. About a quarter can’t look beyond all the pizza lying around (and probably have similar biological ages to me); a couple are clearly outlaws in the making because they’re only interested in trying to pilfer DJ Anthony’s sweet jar; and the rest look like – well, like I would on a dance floor, which is to say awkward and unsure and a trifle embarrassed.

But on the whole, there’s no denying that the kids are far more candid and exuberant than an equivalent group of adults would be. Which is for better and worse, of course. These kids might well be quick to boogie like there’s no tomorrow, but they are also quick to have a punch-up on the floor over a bit of cake whose ownership was claimed by the one and doubted by the other. So I’m not going to make your average eight-year-old my role model just yet, if it’s all the same to you. My inner child can stay inner for now.

There’s a slightly unsavoury episode at the end of the party, I’m afraid to say. When DJ Anthony calls it a day and the music dies down, I go over to the birthday boy to give him his present. No word of a lie, the ungrateful little sod gives it straight back to me. Really, the sooner these kids learn how to repress a few things the better.2

___________

1 At this stage, I need to tell you something. Because it’s kind of important, and it’s the kind of thing I’d be interested in knowing if I were reading this sort of book – that is, a stunt memoir wherein the author puts normal life on hold as if it were as easy as flicking a switch, in order to dedicate themselves to saying yes or living biblically or being scared every day or searching for people with the same name. Writing is my full-time job. I have no dependents. My income is much less than the national minimum wage, and I don’t have any assets or wealth to speak of. I’m delighted to say that I didn’t have to pay for the two-week cruise of the Baltic that I went on in the summer of 2022 (more of which anon). I’m less delighted to say that I did have to pay for more or less everything else, including the ecstatic dancing, which, at fifteen quid a pop, didn’t represent value for money. If you think the above attempt at transparency was unnecessary, don’t worry, it won’t happen again.

2 It wasn’t William.

2

Silliness can go too far

Wherein the author starts doing the crossword, considers the serious matter of being silly, plays cricket in a pub, stops doing the crossword and considers why fun is a virtue.

17 January

Initially, the idea was that this fun project would be sort of dual aspect. There would be the practical side – containing accounts of trampolining and fishing and so on – and there would be the theoretical side – containing all the interesting ideas other people have had on the matter of fun and merriment. I wanted to know how the concept of fun had evolved historically, and how it differed from culture to culture. (Did the ancient Egyptians ice skate, for example?) I wanted to know if fun could be pigeon-holed as the momentary release of certain chemicals (including serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline and endorphins) in response to certain experiences that are largely pointless and somewhat silly, like volleyball and karaoke. Basically, I wanted to get the low down on fun, and so I spent a couple of weeks at the library, where I read four books entirely and about 100 books in part. I learned that the ancient Egyptians didn’t ice skate. I learned that hippos do backflips. I learned that neoteny is the retention in adults of childlike traits, including an appetite for play. I learned that there’s a positive correlation between having fun and having a larger cerebellum (which raises the question of whether fun produces more brain, or more brain produces fun). I learned that for Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun, fun can be found at the confluence of play, connection and flow. I learned that it’s a good thing that notions of fun are inherently unstable, because in medieval Venice it was considered fun to shave off your hair and then headbutt a cat. I learned, through the work of Michael Foley, and in particular his book Isn’t This Fun?, that evidence of ritualistic fun involving dressing-up, dancing and getting pissed has been found in prehistoric art on every continent. I learned that far from being frivolous in the grand scheme of things, fun has served an evolutionary purpose, by encouraging us to innovate, socialise and get jiggy. I learned all this and then pressed stop. I pressed stop because if I didn’t I would have found myself down a rabbit hole with no choice but to continue burrowing southward until I emerged in New Zealand with a fully theoretical and completely impractical book on my hands. In summary: I did the homework and then left the work at home and went out looking for some action.

19 January

I meet a retired maths teacher at a greasy spoon in South London for a cryptic crossword induction. Jim is the goalkeeper of my football team, and reckons (unrealistically) that such puzzles are his chief means of diversion. We both arrived at the café with a copy of The Times under our wing, and after ordering two plates of saturated fat, we turn in sync to the crossword at the back. The idea is that Jim’s basically going to think aloud as he works through the crossword, and so doing introduce me to some of the tricks of the trade (anagram indicators, anagram fodder, coded directions) and inspire a lifelong love for the pastime. That’s the idea. Basically.

‘We’ll start with an easy one,’ says Jim.

‘Okay, hit me.’

‘2 down.’

‘With you so far.’

‘Determined late series of games at Wimbledon? (4,3).’

I stare at the clue for 30 seconds, then at my plum tomatoes and fried bread, then back at the clue, hoping that by shifting my focus in this way the clue will somehow unscramble itself.

‘Let’s break it down,’ says Jim.

‘Let’s.’

‘Determined is the concise clue, so the answer we’re after is a synonym for determined.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I’d hazard that “Series of games at Wimbledon” is “set”, and that “late” is probably “dead”, as in my late gerbil or wife.’

‘Gerbil or wife?’

‘Which gives us “dead set”, as in to be dead set against such-and-such, which of course is another way of saying determined. Shall we move on?’

‘How did you learn to do this?’

‘By doing this. So, now we’ve got the “d” from dead set, let’s have a look at 20 down. Righteous man’s best friend turned 50 on fourth of July. Five letters, the third of them being the “d”.’

‘Brown sauce?’

‘No, it doesn’t fit. I reckon it’s godly.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘Man’s best friend – dog – which when turned around gives us god. Do you follow?’

‘Entirely.’

‘And 50 is L in Roman numerals, of course.’

‘Are you gonna eat that, Jim?’

‘While fourth of July – meaning the fourth letter of July, I fancy – is “y”.’

‘Do you not you like black pudding or something?’

‘Which gives us godly. (Not especially, no.) And godly happens to be a synonym for righteous – or sort of, anyway. Help yourself.’

‘Nice one.’

‘Moving on. 25 across. Four letters beginning with “y”.’

‘Hit me.’

‘Elusive figure still leading India …’

‘Do you reckon I should have taken that chance on Saturday, Jim?’

‘Yeti.’

‘Rather fluffed my lines, didn’t I?’

‘Comic blunder turned opening into pancake …’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, Jim.’

‘Look, Ben. Shall we concentrate for a second? We haven’t got all day.’

‘Speak for yourself, mate.’

20 January

Being daft can be fun. Not always, not reliably, but it certainly has the potential. By way of example, I was in a shop this afternoon – of the bric-a-brac variety – and said to the lady minding the wares, ‘Do you know the problem with Russian dolls? They’re full of themselves.’ The lady appreciated the observation; indeed, it tickled her. I can’t say the observation was original – I got it off my dad, who doubtless got it off his – but what does that matter? If one effect of recycling pointless silliness is a chuckling vendor, I’m all for plagiarism.

Similarly, I asked a waiter the other day how their weekend was. They said they went back to Wolverhampton, where they had four birthday parties over the course of a few days. To which I said, ‘You’re ageing quickly, aren’t you?’ On that occasion, the recipient of my daftness just shook their head, dramatically unimpressed.

Silliness of this kind won’t always be welcomed, or provoke a titter, but that shouldn’t count against it. My dad, whenever ordering a soft drink in a pub, likes to say, ‘And I’d like some ice in that please. Fresh ice, mind. None of that frozen stuff.’ This little gag of his tends to go entirely unacknowledged, which doesn’t bother him, for it nevertheless serves a purpose – to act as a tiny reminder that life is essentially light, is basically daft, is inherently unserious, notwithstanding all its travails and gravitas and setbacks.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here. Maybe such drollery and daftness are too inconsequential and ordinary to warrant a mention here. Or maybe it’s exactly those properties – inconsequentiality and ordinariness – that qualifies silliness for serious consideration. What am I getting at? Be silly, I guess. Be daft. When you can, if you want. There’s no reason to, of course, and therefore every reason indeed.3

22 January

I have a game of cricket in a pub. Yep. That’s right. It seems like watering holes have gone full circle and are now, once again, as much about playing games as they are pouring drinks. Old-fashioned public houses would offer darts, billiards, skittles and so on. Then bars and gastropubs came along, and it was about nice décor and sophisticated ambience and oxtail bao buns and rhubarb gin. When this happened, the onus in terms of entertainment and amusement was shifted squarely onto the punter and the pinot noir, and if that combination didn’t work for you as a means of diversion then you were pretty much stuffed. Which I often was. There’s only so much fun I’m going to get out of three pints of Stella and my mate Chris telling me what a financial derivative is (again).

Anyway. Some pubs are reintroducing games. Are reincorporating play. Not in a tokenistic way – a dartboard in the corner, say – but in a major one. It’s not yet a trend or a movement as such, but there are now pubs and bars in the UK offering, as their unique selling point, golf, cricket, darts, table tennis and even kabaddi, an ancient Indian sport that involves being chased while breathing out constantly.

Sixes. That’s the name of the pub. It’s got everything you’d expect from a pub, plus half a dozen cricket ‘nets’ – or simulators. I’d spotted the pub online, and found the concept appealing, though I think it’s fair to say the company behind Sixes is probably stretching the truth a notch when it claims on its website that ‘nothing says freedom more than playing cricket in a pub’.

I meet some friends. We get some beers. We enter our details. And then I enter the net to face a pixelated spin bowler. It’s not much fun to begin with – I fail to make contact with the first six deliveries. But after I reacquaint myself with the small amount of hand-eye co-ordination I possess, and manage to clobber a couple – I start to get a bit of a kick out of it, which is to say my brain serves up a pint of endorphins and a shot of adrenaline, the potency of each amplified by the presence of an audience.

When it’s someone else’s turn to step up to the plate, I enjoy offering feedback on their efforts, and improvising a bit of pitch-side commentary – ‘The ageing Liverpudlian has caught that one nicely; his parents would be proud were they not otherwise engaged in Corfu’, and so on. If not quite an out-of-body experience, role-playing in this way certainly allows a certain escapism, a bit of selflessness, a touch of the old getting lost in the moment. (It would be odd if it materialises – over the course of my funathon – that peak emotional experiences essentially involve people not being who they are.)

The addition of a cricket experience to the traditional British boozer doesn’t please everyone. Megan, more accustomed to wielding a paintbrush than a cricket bat, takes no pleasure in being hit on the kneecap not once but twice. She describes her batting debut as stressful and unnecessary, though she does have the grace to admit that there might be a relationship between enjoyment and competence, i.e. without a sliver of the latter, one will struggle to gain a measure of the former.

The cricket also has a fracturing effect on the social experience as a whole. Just as you’re getting into a conversation with a mate about their Christmas or week at work, one of you is called into bat, or something happens in the net that takes your attention away from each other and pulls it towards a moment of calamity. It’s a bit like tenpin bowling, which always promises to be a heightened social experience but tends to end up being a slightly underwhelming and disjointed one.

On top of the social damage, by the time I’ve batted for the fifth time, the law of diminishing returns has well and truly set in and the cricket itself is starting to suffer. I guess that’s the thing with novel experiences – they don’t stay novel for long. Here’s a thought: activities that are truly our cup of tea remain satisfying and fun and engaging long after they ceased to be novel. Activities that aren’t truly our cup of tea, like playing cricket in a pub, tend to stop being so after roughly 45 minutes. Nonetheless, it’s good to give these things a shot, because if you don’t, you wouldn’t ever discover the things that bring you lasting joy.

After our net session is up, we retire to a table and do what you normally do in a pub – sit and talk about work. This is pleasant enough, but not helping things is the noise pollution of cricket balls being thwacked every few seconds. We could be in a warzone. We are all subconsciously on edge – a psychological state not thought to be conducive with fun. Hey-ho.

The pub offers membership, I’m intrigued to learn. For 50 quid a month you can play as much cricket as you want, Monday to Friday, 10am–4pm. The idea, I suppose, is for people that work at home to stop working at home and start working at the pub instead, where they’ll be at liberty to smack a few balls while on the phone to their line manager. I’m not going to become a member. I dipped a toe into pub cricket, and that will be the extent of my immersion.

23 January

If we accept that things that are funny are fleeting shards of fun, then we might accept that eavesdropping can be a supplier of such shards. Case in point: I was walking back from the shop this morning when I heard one person telling another person that ‘the thing about facts is – you have to take them with a pinch of salt’.

26 January

Having established what fun is (i.e. just about anything really), it might be worth establishing why exactly you should go after the stuff. For one, fun is much easier to target than happiness. It’s less nebulous and abstract. (Which isn’t to say it’s not nebulous and abstract, only that it’s less so.) For two, fun comes with a generous package of benefits: it is a reliable mood swinger; it is good at building bridges and fostering relationships; and it has been proven to reduce stress (and therefore the risk of a plethora of negative health outcomes). For three, fun is hardly a bitter pill to swallow. In fact, it’s a piece of cake to swallow. It’s not as if I’m saying: here’s a bunch of unequivocally positive outcomes, but what you have to do to get them is ruin your life. Instead, what I’m saying is: to stand a chance of winning all the aforementioned prizes – the well-being, the reduced stress, the social boost, the uptick in optimism – all you have to do is have more fun. As Catherine Price says in The Power of Fun, adding more fun to your life is like going on a diet that requires you to eat more of the foods that you love.

Having said all of the above, let’s not lose sight of the fact that fun is its own reward. Frankly, it shouldn’t matter what happens as a result – fun should still be pursued. Even if fun didn’t have the positive effects that it does, it’s got enough intrinsic appeal to make plenty of other sensations blush. The appeal of fun isn’t that it reduces the risk of coronary heart disease down the road. The appeal of fun is that it reduces the risk of you being bored and sluggish right now. The appeal of fun isn’t that it reduces the chances of you having a stroke in later life. The appeal of fun is that it energises, and engages, and exhilarates; that it injects a sense of lightness and levity into your Tuesday afternoon.

But even those things (energy, exhilaration, levity) are still too far down the road for my liking. Even those things are outcomes, are consequences. Such things may well be important elements of fun’s resumé, but the act of promoting them still feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Is the truth not that we have fun because we want to play pickleball? (Don’t ask me what pickleball is; I’ve just heard of it.) Is the truth not that we have fun because we want to take part in a cuddle puddle? (Asking for a friend.) Is the truth not that we have fun because we want to sit around a table and reflect with old friends? Because we want to sing? Because we want to dance? Because we want to perform? Because we want to create? You don’t invite someone to have fun, you invite them to a roller disco. You don’t put fun in the diary, you put shopping with your nan in the diary. Fun is an outcome, not an event. And the less we think about it, the better. (I am aware that by promoting less thought about fun I am undermining the already unstable foundations of this book.)

In short, fun has lots of benefits, short and long term. But try not to think about them too much. Instead, just do something and see what happens. Like the way a watched kettle never boils, if you keep too much of an eye on fun it’s liable to hide.

30 January

Second crossword session with Jim. Or should I say: Puzzling meeting plus homophone of gym (8, 7, 4, 3). First things first, Jim reminds me of the various tricks I was introduced to last week, and then, armed with these, I read through the clues.

The exercise is fruitless: I can’t even spot the tricks, to say nothing of solving them. I’m utterly blank. Clueless even, which is ironic given what I’m gaping at gormlessly. I can’t spot the indicators, the hazard lights, the coded instructions to reverse, to turn upside down, to get on my feet and do star jumps. None of it.

Jim’s got a few by now, needless to say, but is keeping schtum; he wants me to persist unassisted a while longer. I do so, and it isn’t fun, not for a second. Engaging? Sure. Testing? Certainly. But in terms of fun, I’ve had more brushing my teeth.

What it comes down to is that racking your brain without confidence and for no compelling reason isn’t inherently rewarding – no shot of dopamine or wave of endorphins is readily forthcoming. There’s definitely – I’m coming to see – a relationship between competence and fun that I’d be wise to pay attention to: namely that you will struggle to be amused and delighted by things you are utterly – and apparently unswervingly – crap at. We saw it with Meg playing cricket, and we’re seeing it now.

I throw in the towel (4, 2) after half an hour, and the pair of us resort to chitchat. I ask Jim what it was like being a maths teacher for umpteen years (good); what it was like growing up in Crewe (bad); and, finally, what it was like manning a picket line in the 80s (occasionally ugly). Jim’s stories – abbreviated here for the sake of concision – are more stimulating than the crossword by a factor of several thousand. When I share this opinion, Jim can’t believe what he’s hearing. For him the cryptic crossword is sacred, which means that what I’ve just said amounts to profanity.

‘I’m easily pleased, Jim.’

‘And you’re easily challenged ’n’ all. You need to show a bit more resilience.’

He persuades me to give it one more shot. Says there’s fun to be had, just not the low-hanging variety. We arrange to meet next week, same time, same place.4

___________

3 Silliness can go too far, however. A salutary lesson was offered by Salvador Dalí, who, in search of kicks, once delivered a lecture in a deep-sea diver’s suit, and almost suffocated.

4 I’m pleased to say that four days later Jim got Covid, and so couldn’t meet for round three. We are yet to reschedule.

3

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness

Wherein the author goes downhill, goes to a yoga class, abandons his phone and sings the praises of conversation.

5 February

Football. We’re away to Walton-on-Thames, which I’m told is a historically spicy fixture for the Comics.5 I get a lift to the match with the gaffer. I do my best to butter him up en route, but it’s no good – he sticks me on the bench. Says that since making my debut I haven’t exactly been on fire.

A funny thing happens prior to kick-off. In short, one of our players gets locked in the toilet. He arrived at the ground discreetly and somewhat late, entered the cricket pavilion (where we’d been invited to get changed), and headed straight for the loo. Just a minute later, and with kick-off imminent, the captain of the opposition locked up the pavilion, as per his routine.

It was only because one of our players (winger Darren) had to search for something in his kit bag a few minutes into the match (talent, perhaps) that he was in a position to spot his phone vibrating. It was Oggy, explaining his situation, which in short was that he’d turned up unnoticed and been locked in the bog. Were it not for Darren’s chance rummage, our Lithuanian talisman would have remained in captivity for the duration of the match. Perhaps Walton-on-Thames do this every home game? Pinpoint a potential playmaker and then trap them in a cubicle. Needless to say, the sight of Oggy emerging from the boggy is a pleasant one indeed.

Also pleasant is not being a substitute for long: someone gets injured within five minutes and I’m promptly summoned by the gaffer, albeit without enthusiasm. And he was right to be hesitant. My first contribution is to fall over attempting a backheel.

There’s a lovely moment just after the restart when a member of the opposition is sent off for dissent. The referee had adjudged the player in question to have been offside, an adjudgment the player in question evidently disagreed with, if his response – a set of menacing propositions regarding what he would like to do to the ref given half a chance – was anything to go by.

The infuriated striker is finally forced off the pitch and sent to the cricket pavilion to cool off. (There’s an awkward moment when he arrives at the pavilion, finds it locked, and has to march back for the keys.) He must cool off pretty quickly, because the hothead is back at the side of the pitch within a few minutes, bearing a cup of tea, a cigarillo and an infant aged roughly eighteen months. It must be the case that the infant was passed to the hothead while my attention was elsewhere, rather than discovered in the cricket pavilion by chance, which is how it appeared to me.

I’m pleased to say that, even with a babe in his arms, the dismissed striker spends the rest of the match hurling abuse at both the referee and his assistant – who by this point is yours truly. (I got injured ten minutes into the second half, and was asked to run the line.) The most memorable utterance bellowed in my direction goes something like this: ‘Get a pair of f**king glasses you potbellied tart.’ I shout back that I’m actually wearing contact lenses so that can’t be the issue, which seems to confound the gentleman sufficiently to take some of the heat out of the moment. For the next minute or so, limping up and down the side of the pitch, trying to stay in line with the last defender, I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve just been called and laughing, which suggests that on paper being gratuitously insulted can be a source of merriment.

When I get home, I show Megan some footage of the match that the assistant manager took and shared with the squad. She makes two remarks: ‘It’s like you’re playing in slow motion,’ is one, and ‘Can’t they get you a bigger shirt?’ is the other. Charming.

7 February