Dancing with their babies

Read with Parental Guidance

Repartee is an art of conversation that is quick, witty, and usually humorous, to establish it effectively is to leave such nuggets of memory that cannot be forgotten even as in your retelling of it, you might lose the effect it had at the point of your original hearing.

It is not essentially truth or fact, it could be an intelligent or mocking play on words, the knowledge of geography or any other thing is not particular when it is ideas set alight in directions that cannot predetermined. As for innuendo, there might be plenty of it, you take your rib-cracking laughs and your jaw-aching cackles to confession at a much later time.

In a conversation that might have been overheard, who can say who was involved? Selby and Niko have these exchanges all the time with one accusing the other of leading the other astray, the saint is further away from the sinner even as the former presents innocence better.

And so…

Selby: I trust he had a great experience in Kenya, I’m sure he has very interesting stories to tell you all about.

Niko: I don’t want to hear his stories. The thought is shocking enough. He won’t be able to complete confession in the allotted time.

Selby: [Much later, recalling the tail end of that conversation] I laughed when I read your response.

Niko: He was most likely at the receiving end of some Masai Mara.

Selby: They are probably still jumping in him. [If this needs explaining, you do not need to know.]

[Niko is in shock and laughter at the same time, every corruptly shocking interpretation of whatever he meant paints the situation in too vivid detail for polite conversation. Our friend has a reputation that would make pages on which it is written red with embarrassment and the ends curl almost in revulsion and indescribable glee.]

[At which time, Selby is half-weeping and Niko is proverbially rolling on the floor, and Selby is not done yet, he rues his big mouth, but you'll love his free expression, almost naïve and truly deadpan, like Rose Nylund from The Golden Girls.]

Selby: Did he have the whole dancing troupe?

[At which point, Niko had a picture of a line of men of enviable renown, starved of it and ready to find the totally ecstatic excitement of lascivious relief at the sight of a starfish with the unmistakable groans of the earth moving violently. No fault was left untouched; the rift cracked open to its fullest extent. It is East Africa, after all.]

Niko: You’ll have to ask him. [The stories Niko didn’t want to hear had already been told by Selby either like a witness of the event, or because Selby has had some experiences in the African bush that he has hinted at but never really told. Farm boys hosing down fires like the fire brigade.]

Is that, you wonder, a ticket to Seren-get-him?

Thought Picnic: And we all were not Will Smith at the Oscars

We all have opinions

I have read with interest the many fanciful and interesting ideas and notions of people who with the benefit of hindsight and the ample opportunity for reflection would have done something differently well away from the heat of the moment when presented with circumstances that demand immediate response for which limited restraint is possible.

It reminds me of many football fans who with the benefit of panoramic views of a stadium and sight of literally all angles come to the conclusion that a footballer who has through dint of hard work and recognition of coach and peers has earned their place by virtue of talent and ability to be in that team. We forget that the person is limited to their span of vision in that setting trying to assess and respond to situations happening to and around them to find advantage for themselves and the team whilst seeking to disadvantage the opposing players and still contribute to winning the match.

Rarely the real perspective

If a footballer had the range of vision of television camera or a spectator with the kind of full anticipation of the pace and the direction of the game, we probably would be watching a different kind of football. If anything, it shows how penalty kick deciders are more than just being able to kick a ball into the net at close range, the tension, the expectation, the anticipation, and most evidently luck plays increasingly important parts in a goal being scored or the ball being saved.

A recently globally televised altercation of a rather insensitive joke made in ribaldry, to shock and amuse was met with a necessary whilst unfortunate rebuke in defence of a spouse whose partner might have been urged by her apparent discomfiture to act quite decisively to put an end to such levity. You can make jokes of anything, and yet, courtesy demands that some courtesy, sensitivity, and understanding be paid to difficult situations or unfortunate infirmities, you do not have to disgusting.

That we blab from our armchairs

To make jokes at the expense of race, disability, or sexuality would be so readily frowned upon and excoriated with the heaping of opprobrium on the joker. That we would readily accept a joke at the expense of a person who has lost a particular expression of their personality and beauty due to a condition that cannot be arrested and managed is to lose a certain sense of perspective.

Now, this is not an excuse for violent retribution, but we should be careful that we do not from our suitable armchairs of comfort be so conveniently positioned for unencumbered postulation, ruling the world on our ample backsides with opinions of idealistic but usually impossible to live realities. How we all would have acted with wit, restraint and the wherewithal to cool our tempers in the heat of the moment, as we are the epitome of the best manners and perfection. You never have to walk a long hard mile in anyone's shoes when you're sitting down.