Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'I'm afraid so.'
'Why have I got a luminous paperclip?'
'Ah, foie gras! Thank God.'
I'm not going to defend any of the 'jokes' in the crackers. Most sentient English folk read
them, groan and move on. But watching a clutch of French people cope with crackers while
already having been through a good portion of champagne, oysters, sweet white wine and a
full-bodied Burgundy is funny enough in itself.
'OK, OK, I 'ave one. Oo 'elps a rabbeet get dressed?' one of the throng asked to uninterested
silence.
'An idiot!' someone said after a while.
'Rabbeets don't wear the clothes! Is eet a reedle?' another said, a response that set off a flurry
of philosophical debate about what constitutes a riddle.
Then came the punch-line: 'An 'are-dresser. Sorry. A hare dresser.' Silence.
'I don't get it,' someone else said, and then came a number of explanations, all of them giving
the rather tired pun far more gravitas than it deserved. The French may love their slapstick
and puns of their own, but there is simply no room, it seems, for frivolity at the dinner table.
The French don't get sillier the more they drink, they get more earnest.
When at last it was explained that it is just a joke, a deliberately poor one as is traditional
in crackers, a few of them looked at me, clearly bridging the gap between a joke in a cracker
and my job as a stand-up comedian, holding me responsible for this nonsense and wondering
just how secure my children's future really is if it's built on this sort of flimsy, substandard
punnery.
Eventually, sated enough to render turkey and stuffing sandwiches unnecessary, we all re-
tired to the living room and flaked out like a pride of lions after a particularly good kill.
Natalie, having put my injured sweater in to soak earlier, emerged from the bathroom with it
miraculously restored to its former glory and I felt magnanimous or festive enough to allow
even the cats and dogs in to join us. Immediately Flame jumped on me and settled on to my
chest as he usually does, started doing that non-claw pawing that cats do, purring heavily and
then - as apparently male cats are wont to do - sprayed the foulest excretion this side of a
dirty protest in a Bangkok prison cell all over my bloody jumper!
Like I said, this family likes a performance at a gathering and they got a full five minutes
of juicy Anglo-Saxon of the kind that some people would happily pay for. Quite magnificent
swearing, to add to the already impressive effort I had made in the larder earlier.
It had been a long day and as Natalie and I put Maurice to bed the excitement he was still
feeling, as children do for the whole of the Christmas period, was still very much there. We
talked for a bit about his presents and what, inevitably, he wanted next year and he began to
drift off. I got up and went to switch his light off and then he said sleepily, 'Daddy, what's a
festive-feline-fuck-knuckle?'
