LAUGHING MATTERS

Our columnist gets a bad case of the giggles…

Rosie Green is having a giggle

YOU KNOW, MOST OF THE TIME YOU BEHAVE YOURSELF.

You are a mature, responsible, fully-fledged adult who rinses bowls before they go into the dishwasher (shoot me now) and only occasionally raids the kids’ piggy banks for emergency cash (I do leave an IOU).

Occasionally, though, your mature facade collapses and your basic 13-yearold self is revealed. This manifests in many ways (eating the icing first on fairy cakes; poking your toe into frozen puddles), but the most obvious? The uncontrollable giggles. I mean, who isn’t susceptible? The Queen, maybe? I’d love to know her tactic. ‘One thinks of Grandmama on the throne.’

It’s a stronger-willed, more neurologically-developed person than me who can maintain an interested, serious face when your child talks EXTENSIVELY about your anus, I mean Uranus, in their class assembly. Similarly, what could possibly be knicker-wettingly funny about a very chic older French lady in a posh interiors shop talking to you about curtain ‘cleats’, about how you want a nice ‘shiny cleat’ that will ‘give you pleasure for years to come’?

Those situations where you categorically CAN. NOT. LAUGH, when shoulder shaking, infectious giggles have to come out as suppressed snorts, are actually physically painful, right?

There are a few locations that exacerbate a giggling fit. The church is number one. There’s something about the solemnity of the place. A few years ago at a wedding, AM and I nearly lost control of all bodily function thanks to a very proper lady who was warbling loudly. She triggered uncontrollable mirth (and AM thinks possibly tinnitus), finally sending us over the edge with a booming delivery of ‘the purple headed mountain’ line in All Things Bright And Beautiful.

Which brings us to funerals. Obviously not funny. Well, apart from the time my friend and I spent 10 minutes at a crematorium getting more and more bemused until we realised we were at the wrong one. ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ we shamefully whispered as we shuffled out. Or when my cousin and I overheard an octogenarian at my granddad’s funeral ask my granny, ‘Where’s Ted? ‘Oh,’ said my granny. ‘Ted’s dead, dear, that’s why you’re here.’ I thought we were going to choke on the ham sandwiches. This is almost up there with my friend Sam bending over his granny’s grave to throw in a rose, only for his Prada sunglasses to fall off and end up down there too. He did what any decent person would do. Got on his knees and scrabbled about to retrieve them. Not a dry eye in the house.

School is another one (see assembly above). I went with my friend to our children’s school ‘concert’. Because of our late arrival (always), we had to sit in the front row, right in the headteacher’s eye line. Lots of well-known tunes were played according to the programme, but not one was actually recognisable. Our bottoms hung over the sides of the tiny seats (think hippos sitting on bar stools). There was yawning, ball scratching, eye rolling. And that was just the parents. Approximately halfway through, we realised that my friend’s son hadn’t played a note, but was just miming his way through entire songs. After that, there was some chat about a teacher ‘getting the horn’. I started convulsing, then, after what seemed like a lifetime, eventually got it together, only for my friend to lose it and re-infect me with the giggles.

But none of this compares to the time my friend’s very ladylike mother came round to retrieve her extendable table from our student house. As she and my mate Tom were carrying it out, he casually said to her, ‘Tuck your flaps in Mrs W.’

No. Words.

‘I’D LOVE TO KNOW THE QUEEN’S TACTIC’