Meat and drink

[Joe Chi Minh]

There is a kind of laughter which is difficult to categorise. The delight is felt in a low-key kind of way, yet for all that, it can be intense. I think being “tickled” is probably the way we could describe it.

I felt “tickled pink” in this way fairly recently, when it suddenly occurred to me what an extraordinarily humble way God chose to communicate his own divine life to us in the form of the most basic food and drink. Never mind even that it’s residue “ends up in the sewer, as Jesus pointed out in one of his parables. And I thought it was just the sort of way my late brother would have gone about it, if he were God.

The Scots are a paradoxical lot. They can point to many achievements in the fields of engineering, medicine, philosophy, you name it, and since they not infrequently do, they also often sardonically utter the famous question, “Wha’s like us?!” So there are also a lot of Scots who are engagingly very modest in their manner, and I expect it was such a character who came up with that phrase.

I once read a hilarious anecdote in a newspaper by one of the Lisbon Lions which illustrates the point well. The Lisbon Lions were a Glasgow Celtic Football club team, almost all of whom grew up within a fifty mile radius. I believe some were ex-miners. Certainly Jock Stein was. Anyway, long story short, they were the first British team to win the European Cup, as the present Champions’ League was then called. Another Lisbon Lion wrote in another article that, as they were coming out of the tunnel, he saw the bronzed, athletic-seeming Italians (Inter Milan) who looked like film stars, then turned round and looked at the ginger-haired, white legs of his team mates, and wondered what they had let themselves in for!

Anyway, the LL have or at least used to have a reunion every year, and somehow one formal invitation obviously went astray in the post, and the man with the same name as the LL it was supposed to have been addressed to, turned up in his place. The players eventually realised what had happened, but none of them said a word about it to him throughout the whole evening. How much funnier and nicer that seems than letting on that they knew, and perhaps commenting on it! Looking back now, I think my brother must have inherited a lot of his character from our Scottish grandfather.

I’m even reminded of a corporal cook in one of the regiments I was in, who used to keep his stripes covered by rolling up his sleeve, and would quickly flash them for you to see as you passed by, presumably for fear we might be overwhelmed by the effulgence.

And for a while, the more I thought about Jesus kind of knocking on the door like an old friend, the more delightfully funny it seemed to me.