Hmm. Maybe I should make it into a motivational poster…

Good.

In the meantime I am writing “Laughter is the body’s rebellion against the mind.” on my work-desk white board. ~D. Bonta. Bad photo to follow.

Hi Lucy. Glad these resonate for all their silliness. And sure, assuming I can keep the series going for a while, I think there’s an excellent chance it’ll migrate into paper and ebook form.

Thanks, Clive. Fun story! (Glad I’m not that competitive, though. I don’t think highly competitive people really enjoy life very much.)

I think you might be right there. Whispering ‘you’re it’ to random strangers also has an appeal…

Can you do these as a book too?

Re flapping when falling. I’ve seen footage of people doing this, so it happens. But you still undercut the line with enough graveyard humour/irony to make it funny, and so it doesn’t stop one dead in one’s tracks.

Re suspending all rules. Our friend Clarissa is the daughter of the great British painter John Piper. She told us the other evening that when she was a girl the painter Ben Nicolson came to visit the family (so… two giants of post-war British art in the room together) and seeing a table-tennis set-up on the big kitchen table said ‘Let’s play!’. However he then proceeded to dismantle the set-up, replacing the net with a sheet of glass (there’s always sheet-glass to be found in a painter’s house) and listing a complicated, never-before-heard-of set of rules, in which the ball had to be made to bounce of the thin edge of the glass with each shot in order to count. The Pipers… avid enthusiasts of table-tennis and champion players… were roundly thrashed by a smug, well-practised Nicholson, a man who didn’t like to be beaten at anything by anyone, to the point that he simply loaded any die by reconstituting the rules to suit himself! Ho hum.

A great piece Dave. Really thought provoking. And funny!