TAKING A BEARING
MEL BARTLETT: Phone a friend
Have you heard the one about the man who dialled 999 and demanded the police arrest his girlfriend’s cat because it had eaten his bacon? The one whose snowman melted? Or the one who complained a prostitute he’d booked wasn’t pretty enough?
Just in case you think I’m being sexist by singling out men, of course women can be just as daft. Domestic pets still feature, like the hamster that prompted one lady to call for an ambulance because it had bitten her finger, or the goldfish that “might be drowning.”
What set me off on my trawl through the shallow waters of human stupidity was enduring a day of VHF chatter on the Solent. The Coastguard handled the endless succession of “radio checks” with the ease that comes of much practice. I couldn’t help admiring the reply: “Ah yes, good morning again, sir! We are still receiving you loud and clear.” There was just enough emphasis on ‘again’ and ‘still’ to let a subtle reproach show through the veneer of professional courtesy.
But the one that almost made me fall off my seat was, “Yes sir, your signal is good but you are barely readable,” in reply to a caller who had a particularly rich, plummy voice, and for whom the sun had obviously been well over the yard-arm for quite some time. His voice, crackling over the airwaves, reminded me irresistibly of the famous BBC ‘wireless’ broadcast about a naval fleet review, made by a retired naval officer sometime in the 1930s. “The whole fleet is lit up,” he began.“i mean lit up by fairy lamps. It’s fantastic, it isn’t the fleet at all. It’s just… it’s fairyland, the whole fleet is in fairyland.” Listening to it on Youtube, it’s pretty obvious that it wasn’t just the fleet that was lit up and away with the fairies.
Meanwhile, I could still hear Coastie responding to the endless stream of “radio checks” and occasionally butting in to make a call of his own. In one, he asked rather plaintively whether anyone knew the name of the yacht aground on Hamble Spit.
Curiously, none of those people who had just tested their fully functioning radios seemed able to hear him – or if they could, they weren’t letting on.
Just because there’s a proword for a radio check, doesn’t mean you have to use it. It’s fine, if you have reason to think your radio might not work, or if you’ve just replaced an aerial or its cable. But you wouldn’t call the police just to ask if your phone is working, would you?