It’s a Little Bit Funny by Paul Kimm

That’s how my mum still says it. Her phrase for anything that’s either actually funny, just unusual, quite mundane, or even a slight bit different from how something might be otherwise. Every time I go back home to see her, and then my dad, I can pretty much guarantee she’ll say ‘it’s a little bit funny’ in regard to something or other, as she has done for years.

I’m close to fifty-eight years old now, and without failure, when I get back home, walking round the back, as it’s proper to enter through the kitchen in our house; the front door being for strangers only, that within minutes of greeting one another my mum will offer me a cup of tea. I’ve never drank the stuff, not as a kid, or now, it also being a joke for a Yorkshireman to not like tea, and perhaps that’s why, because I’m a genetically geographic anomaly on this particular dietary dislike, that even after close to six decades of not liking tea my own mother still asks if I’d like a cup. My reminder to her that I don’t drink it is followed by her ubiquitous ‘it’s a little bit funny how I can never remember that, isn’t it?’

On the one occasion I asked her how she and dad had met she said it again, ‘Well, it’s a little bit funny because…’, and then proceeded to tell me how he was still in the army at the time, stationed in a nearby town, at the well-known, somewhat notorious barracks there, since the squaddies had a bit of a local reputation for being not the most gentlemanly, and how she’d told herself, and promised her parents she’d not go out with one of them, but then his accent, blonde hair, and the look of Michael Caine about him, had swayed her, and he seemed nice enough, polite, caring, and so within not much time at all they were engaged, married, and then it wasn’t long after then that I came along.

Six months later, when we all moved to North Africa for my dad’s next posting, it was a little bit funny how much she didn’t like the heat, being sure so she was going to love it after so many meagre summers living on North East England’s coast, but the dryness of summer there almost stung your skin, actually caused pain, and it wasn’t until the Maghreb winter months that the temperatures could be enjoyed, and only then if there wasn’t a sandstorm, but still with nothing to do, no ice cream stands for a cooling treat, nowhere to have a drink except from your own kitchen, and no family around to help with me as a baby, and it was also a little bit funny how badly she missed her mum, knowing she was going to, but like the scorching heat, no idea it would hurt that much.

Her mother, my nana, who left us in her early sixties, a little more than decade after we came back from Libya, my mum herself not yet quite in her mid-thirties, and whilst I’m not sure she said it at the time, or during my nana’s remission, then subsequent return home, and certainly not during my nana’s quick and final surrender to the resurging cancer that soon claimed her, it wasn’t long after her passing that my mum said ‘it’s a little bit funny how the good ones go so young.’ This in itself a reference to her father, my granddad, the family despot who ruled over her, and her siblings’ upbringings, who they all couldn’t stand, and whose body, it was generally known, they would have preferred to have seen lowered in a coffin rather than their mother’s, but as my mum’s favourite phrase would suit, funnily enough ended up living on into his late nineties.

The phrase suited many an occasion. When I got into trouble with the police for fighting in my late teens, it was a little bit funny that I’d always been so quiet and shy at school and should end up being like that for a short while. When, a few years later I went to university, mainly because the eighties and nineties were dole-stricken years, and few job prospects existed for people like me, it was again a little bit funny that I hadn’t found a regular job instead, even though half my friends were in the same position, and it wasn’t an unusual position at all. It’s continued to be a little bit funny that on the back of my degree I moved abroad, and have stayed abroad for almost thirty years, my mum somehow believing that my two years in the misery of Libya, lost to toddler amnesia for me, might have ingrained an innate dislike of being outside England. And so on. For me, my brother and sister, other family members, the news, rising prices, changes in technology, new words that enter the English language, a new neighbour’s behaviour, the weather, new fashions, the things people say and do, the things you can’t’ say anymore, all continue to call for the words ‘it’s a little bit funny.’

And, my gregarious father, always joking, being loud, occasionally flying into a quick rage on the back of being in a great mood seconds before, this being how he’s always been, temper swings that can shock you, such as the time me and my brother, already adults, sitting at home doing nothing, had a call from my dad asking us to record his favourite programme, Star Trek, as he’d been asked to do overtime that day, and then on realising half an hour into the broadcast that we’d forgotten to press record on the VHS recorder, so rather than face his ire, we both went to the pub before he returned home, got pretty drunk, and even in the confidence of our alcohol-infused stupor sloped home scared of his reaction, to find our adult fear had amused him, he wasn’t angry and my mum said it had been a little bit funny how he’d laughed when she’d explained we’d fled to the sanctuary of our local to avoid him.

My dad, who around ten years ago, on the top landing of the house they’ve lived in since the 1970s, suddenly fell to the floor out of nowhere, hit his head on the corner of a side cabinet, and lay for several minutes on the carpet, unconscious, a suspected stroke sucking half of him into the floor, a half that wouldn’t be with him any longer when he got back up, this lost part of my dad comprising mostly of the bits of him that carried his personality, the remaining fifty-percent the stroke allowed him to walk away with mostly for the use of motor skills and slow speech, it not being for months after that the realisation settled in that most of the man we knew before had gone for good, no more jokes, no more short fuses, and it being a little bit funny how he’d driven us so crazy so often, and yet how much we wanted all of him back, not just the container for life he’d become.

Along with that came the absent mindedness, the leaving on of a gas hob, the wandering off for unannounced walks with the ensuing searching for him, the increasing incontinence, the inability to properly wash and clean himself, shave, put on socks, underwear and trousers, do up buttons, and his untouched meals he’d forget were in front of him, most of his food ending up cold sustenance as a result, and my sister telling me on our international calls, me in Europe, the Middle East, then Asia, how mum was struggling to cope, and even though my sister was also doing her best, it was becoming increasingly hard to manage, and how mum had said it was a little bit funny, but he might be better in a care home.

The initial visits to the home were met with his confusion and infrequent glimmers of his former moods, when upon leaving he’d become irate with her, and on one occasion attempted to throw a chair at the door she was leaving through, never having shown any violence other than verbal before, and so with his increasing difficulty in understanding why he was where he was, his belief being it was temporary when we all knew it wasn’t, but didn’t tell him that, meant my mum reduced her visits from twice-weekly, to weekly, fortnightly, and ultimately less than monthly, just in a bid to help him see, or at least absorb subconsciously that he lived in the care home now, which he has never completely got what’s left of his head around, and even in the irregular visits I manage home, through the stunted conversations we have about what he’s having for lunch that day, what he’s being watching on TV, how he’s getting on with everyone else there, he still, funnily enough, mentions that it’s all alright there, in the home, but he’ll be off back to ‘your mum’s soon’.

And now, with her own illness, not of the mind, but the body, an illness that prevents her leaving the house, and is something she won’t talk about when we call, diverting any conversations away from how she’s feeling to the mundanity of weather where I am, what’s new with me, sending her love to my wife, asking how the kids are, and when asked how she’s feeling saying she’ll have to get off soon, ending our telephone calls, and the only thing she’ll mention, and then not often, is that it’s a little bit funny how ‘your dad’ only lives a ten minute walk away, and she can’t go to see him anymore. In turn my sister has told me, he rarely mentions my mum anymore, spends more time in the care home’s TV room, speaks and engages less, and as my mum gets progressively sicker, with occasional hospital stays to temporarily halt certain ongoing, but incurable issues, he retreats more into himself, the remnants of his memories seem to fade more.

So, it is, and obviously isn’t, a little bit funny how my mum and dad live separately, don’t see or call one another, their respective illnesses, one of the head and one of the body, keep them apart, and also how, this being the hardest, that we don’t know when we’ll all last see each other, when that last ‘bye, take care, love you’ will occur, whether it be over the phone from thousands of miles away, or in person, but simply know that it is coming, and we won’t talk about it, and we won’t know which one is the last time, but we’ll let it be that, because that’s how we are, and perhaps we’ll even dare to say it’s a little bit funny.

Paul Kimm

Image: Gold Comedy and Tragedy masks from pixabay.com