Your turn!

Picture the scene: Burns' Night (that's 25th January if you're not in the know about such things), massive "supper", the type that kicks off with the dramatic entrance of The Haggis, complete with bagpipes and ode praising its life-sustaining qualities, followed by its distribution to all present, and by some of us at least eating rather a lot of it. Just before you start to scream, might I add that there is such a thing as a vegetarian Haggis, they're delicious, and somebody had thoughtfully made sure that they were available on this particular night.

Now Burns' Night tends to follow a certain loosely-agreed "order of battle" which, after the main speeches about Poetry, Life, the Universe and Everything, the "Toast to the Lasses" and the ever-witty "Lasses' Riposte", can involve the rest of the evening's entertainment being put in the hands of the guests. Lunchista had a bit of a reputation for banter among this particular crowd, which was cheerfully invoked by the MC before I was invited to come up and get the evening's show off to a good start. No prior warning. For about a hundred people. Including the family.

Well what would you do, if this happened to you?

It wasn't until days later (it turned out to be an extremely good evening!) that it crossed my mind that the things that people have learned off by heart are in a way a resource, just like food or fuel. If you have them, you can provide for other people. A lot of us haven't bothered with this for centuries though, first because we could always look up poems in books, and later because we had the choice of switching music on, rather than having to go through all the hassle of playing it ourselves. It is also sadly true that commiting things like poems to memory, or learning to play musical instruments, both take up rather a lot of time: time which is in short supply when we are all frantically alternating between earning as much money as we can, and spending it in such a way as to impress the largest possible number of people.

But occasionally large amounts of sort-of-spare time get dumped on us without warning, for instance if we are lain off work, or go off the edge of the piste and break something. Many moons ago Lunchista got involved in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas(!) and it turned out that the chap who, for five years running, sang all the classic "patter" numbers (like "The Nightmare Song" and "Modern Major-General") only had to brush up lightly on his words, because he had used his time on an isolation ward during a Malaria scare several years previously to practise them to the point of perfection.

Even if you're not unlucky enough to be suspected of harbouring malaria, you might still be unlucky enough to have to commute, in which case some of the time might be salvageable for memorising poetry or sketches. The 60-minute train journey of my London to Brighton commute, it turns out, was used by some enterprising soul a few years after I left as a venue for her French conversation class.

Meanwhile the smaller Lunchistas, after all this, have been inspired to memorise a couple of items of choice: one of them can now sing all of The Galaxy Song, and the other is working on an anthology of terrible puns: perhaps this runs in the family!

Before I finish I might point out that here in the British Isles, it's us English who are the real slackers in the spontaneous home-made entertainment department. In Ireland, so I'm reliably informed, it's not unusual to come across an evening in a pub where all the "turns" are done by just anybody who feels like joining in. Scotland, as already mentioned, has Burns' Night and various other occasions, and I might add that my Burns' Night experience as described here took place in Wales. Yes, Wales, home of the Eisteddfod, and possibly even of Rugby songs.

Anyway, in the time it took me to get to the front of that room I remembered that there was a poem I had learned by heart decades ago, because it was funny and I happened to like it. So Silly Old Baboon (thank you Spike Milligan) kicked off the evening's entertainment, raising quite a few laughs into the bargain.