The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

When I’m coping with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) I need a few things:
A study to work in (see yesterday)
Lots of light (this can be lightbox or, better still, nice bright days in which I can sit next to a window or go for a walk)
Chocolate (I try to ignore this need for the benefit of my arteries)
Not to be bothered with lots of people. I’m not exactly Ms Party Person at the best of times but I become positively (should that be negatively?) anti-social during the long, dark days of winter.
Approximately half as much sleep again as I need in the summer.
Funny books.

There aren’t a million funny books out there and I often find I’m re-reading old favourities – any of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, the Provincial Lady books of EM Dellafield and, more recently Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones.
And then there’s Bill Bryson.
BB needs a league all of his own when it comes to funnyness and I need to read his works with some care; tucking into a Bryson over breakfast and the lightbox can be a life-threatening endeavour as laugh coming up meets mouthful of tea going down resulting in tea where tea didn’t outghta be.

Currently, I’m reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid which is providing much anti-SAD therapy. On the back is a question quoted from The Evening Standard: ‘Is this the most cheerful book I’ve ever read?’ Well, if I’ve ever read a more cheerful, positive and self-deprecating account of growing up anywhere, ever, then I’m clearly losing my marbles because I have no recollection of it. The highest praise I can give TLATOTTK is that it is even funnier than Notes from a Small Island from which I swear I nearly died laughing at one point.

It’s not that the events Bill Bryson writes about are particularly funny – most are extremely mundane – as he points out growing up in 1950s Iowa meant a lot of time waiting for something – anything – to happen. No, it’s BB’s language which provides the amusement factor. Taking the page I’ve just put my bookmark in where he’s talking about toys of the 50s; Mr Potato Head is described as ‘majestically unamusing’, Slinky as ‘notable for its negative ecstasy’. Hyperbole is BB's literary device of choice and it is his love of overexaggeration which, for some reason, I find amusing in a way which everybody else in the family finds pitiably incomprehensible. It’s not that they don’t find the bits I read out (or attempt to read out, through face-crippling, breath-stealing mirth) amusing they just don’t find them that amusing. ‘Heh heh’ they snigger worriedly as I collapse in hysterics at the lastest sentence full of bons mots ‘Mmm, yes, quite funny.’
There is, clearly, no hope for them and I should just stop trying to turn them into heaps of Bryson-appreciating laugh-jelly. When I tell you that, for the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and The Bassist, there is nothing funnier than The Mighty Boosh, you may begin to understand. It’s not that I don’t think the lads who are TMB are clever and amusing, I just ‘heh heh’ to their surreality in much the same way as the UFF and the B react to Monsieur Bryson. Our senses of humour are generationally incompatible.

I’m only about a third of the way through TLATOTTK but already it’s provided me with more laughs than pretty much all the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months put together. Including one of Christmas 2007’s hits – 1001 ‘A Man Walked Into a Bar’ Jokes.

If you’re struggling with the season and the weather and are generally of the disposition to have your ribs tickled by verbal humour, I can’t recommend a dose of the underpants-over-trousers stuff from young Billy Bryson too highly.

Things that make me laugh

Do you ever read something which you find ludicrously funny but which seems to leave other people cold? Happens to me all the time. I could hardly get through Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island for laughing, and, even though other people thought it was amusing, nobody was incapacitated like me. PG Wodehouse has much the same effect, particularly the Jeeves and Wooster stories.

I have just discovered (almost a year late) that Louise Doughty (that's her in the photograph) has been writing a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph since last January. It’s called ‘A Writer’s Year’ and was clearly designed as a ‘this is how this writer does it’ column but Louise Doughty has sent herself up royally. I laughed so much last night that the Other Half, peering over her reading specs like some school marm (the only time she ever looks like one) asked to be let into the joke. Here’s the paragraph. I should have let the OH read it herself, too, because every time I tried to read it I cracked up again and had to wipe my eyes.

Louise is at a literary party and has already had a glass of wine or two…

Another friend was pleased that his writing residency at a university had been extended, because they gave him free use of an office and a whippet. I found myself nodding sagely in agreement, although it was some minutes before I realised he had said "equipment". At that point, I corked the bottle and shuffled off home.

A whippet! You see? Just cutting and pasting it has made me start laughing all over again! Why is it so funny? (As the OH asked, baffled as ever by my weird sense of humour.) I think it’s the total incongruity of imagining a whippet in an office – and a whippet, moreover, that one was given free use of… whatever that might look like.

Anyway. My own writing is not going so swimmingly. I spent most of yesterday doing research which, today, it looks as if I’m not going to use because I don’t think the chapter I had in mind is going to work. Was the research interesting? Yes, actually. It was about the Mabinogion – the cycle of Welsh legends which are the country’s greatest historical prose treasure, so it was quite nice to be reminded what they’re all about. If you’re remotely interested, Wikipedia is rather good on them, here.

I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to go into Christmas mired in a patch of ‘I’m not quite sure what comes next’-ness in the book, which is an uncomfortable place to be. Added to this, my reading matter at the moment is proving far too attractive and lunchtimes are extending from the half hour I normally allow them to over an hour.

Now finished Sarah Bower’s The Needle in the Blood – fantastic. If you’re remotely interested in historical fiction, or – frankly – even if you’re not and just like fiction about well-drawn characters, get somebody to buy it for you for Christmas. It’s fab. Definitely one of my top 5 books of the year. The others? Well, my current book-on-the-go (another, like TNITB, from the birthday haul) Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes has to be up there. I find all Jodi Picoult’s books pretty compulsive but this one – about a seventeen year old who shoots dead ten students at his High School and injures twice as many more – is COMPELLING. With a capital C and all the rest, as illustrated. I keep having to make cups of tea so I can read it while the kettle boils. How sad am I…?

Right, must go back and try and find my way into the next bit of my own book and stop thinking how effortless JP makes it look. Somebody please tell me she has to do more than one draught…