Some things are funny for reasons I can’t explain.
Suddenly I’ll look at something in a slightly different way
and it will seem utterly hilarious. One day, Bahkti and I were
sitting in the bath and I spotted a bottle of dog shampoo. On the
label was a picture of a spaniel, one which did not look as if it
wanted to be bathed. It appeared to be mouthing the sound
waff, with the implicit meaning “don’t you
dare bring that shampoo toward me”. I
already had a private joke about spaniels (which I can’t
explain here, unfortunately) and suddenly they became the second
most miserable thing in the world.
Spaniels have now become a part of my ‘personal mythology’, if you want to think of it that way. Bahkti and I (and even a number of our friends) react to spaniels (‘waffs’ or ‘whaffs’ if you’re in the know) by putting our hands up to the sides of our heads, waggling them like the long, stupid ears of the silly mutts.
Our friend Jonathan (who was my Best Man) recorded a
number of doggy-related songs for us. The first two he gave
Bahkti as a birthday present and I think I enjoyed them more (in
fact, I know I did) as they were based on two of Bahkti’s
favourite songs: Whaff-whaff-whaff (based on John
Foxx’s Underpass) and He ist ein
Spaniel (based on Kraftwerk’s Das Modell).
Whaff-whaff-whaff begins with the inspired lyrics
“Spaniels in the doorway, spaniels in the park; listen,
can you hear them? Listen how they bark! Whaff whaff
whaff!”. This is why I have a picture of spaniels in a
doorway here…
Some of the other things that make me laugh are things I tease Bahkti about, which he claims (wrongly, of course) is being cruel. When we moved to Hitchin in 2004, we kept hearing a plaintive “eep” sound whenever we picked up the intercom for the flat. It was clearly a bird outside, making a truly monotonous call. He then idenitified the sound as being made by blackbirds, which run all over the hill opposite (“booncin’ and gannin’ ‘eep’”, according to him). He then developed an irrational hatred of ‘eeps’, much like my irrational hatred of spaniels. Then there are spiders…
