I WOULD like to say PG Wodehouse saved my life. That’s what Hugh Laurie said, in an article in The Daily Telegraph, and if I had to go through life exclusively repeating the published words of Hugh Laurie, I think I might die a happy man.
But as it happens PG Wodehouse didn’t save my life. He gave me instead a tolerable adolescence. That doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it, as saying he saved my life. You can’t imagine Hugh Laurie saying PG Wodehouse gave him a tolerable adolescence in an article in The Daily Telegraph. Who’d want to read that!
Perhaps I should say he gave me a more tolerable adolescence. Who knows but it might have been tolerable without him. People tolerate all sorts of things just fine on their own. Some people get little holes made in their ears just so that they can hang jewellery from them. Some people read The Daily Telegraph. People’s capacity for tolerating the intolerable is fan-diddly-tastic.
You know what else is fan-diddly-tastic? People’s capacity for talking. Talking is a way for people to share the little pictures in their heads with one another via the medium of sound, so that they don’t have to tolerate the little pictures on their own. All they need to do is make the right sounds and other people will see those pictures as clearly as if they were being broadcast over a 5G network. What nobody realised was that this meant they would have to tolerate other people’s thoughts too, and not just their own. Tough break!
One of the sounds that people make goes like this: adolescence. It means the period in a person’s life when we go from twelve-year-olds who don’t know anything about the world to eighteen-year-olds who don’t know anything about the world. Most people regard this very inconsequential period as just about the most important transformation in their lives. Fancy that.
When I was a twelve-year-old who didn’t know anything about the world, I loved it when other people put little pictures in my head through the medium of sound. I got little pictures from my parents, and from my grandparents, and from my teachers and from strangers on the street and from voices on the television. The only people I didn’t get so many little pictures from were other twelve-year-olds. At the time I thought this was fan-diddly-tastic but today I find it a little sad.
Sad is another sound that people use to create a little picture in other people’s’ minds. The picture is of a busy street full of people who don’t even notice you are there. And even if you scream right in the face of someone whom you recognise they’ll just carry on walking down the street as though you were never there at all. It is also raining, and you are lost, and everybody has a map and an umbrella except you. This is a very common picture.
The easiest time to get this picture in your head is right before going to bed. If you are an adolescent, or at least the kind of adolescent that I was, bed is a very lonely place. Nobody is addressing you via the medium of sound, and any little pictures you want to have inside your head you have to put there yourself.
Things are different when you are an adult. When you are an adult you can have as many other people in your bed as you like to put little pictures in your head, and the difficult thing is getting them all to shut up.
When I would lie I in bed I tended to put the wrong pictures inside my own head. They were like the pictures that come with the word sad, only worse. They were so much worse that they didn’t even have words associated with them at all, which meant I couldn’t get anybody else to help me tolerate them through the medium of sound. I had to tolerate them on my own. At least they were easier to tolerate than putting holes in my ears.
I discovered that reading before bed helped me put nicer pictures in my head. Reading is another thing people are fan-diddly-tastic at. Instead of making sounds to create little pictures in your head, you look at little pictures on a piece of paper. If that sounds like easy money, wait till you hear this. The little pictures you look at look nothing like the little pictures you get in your head. The little pictures for the word adolescence, for example, look like a toothbrush lying on its side with only two hairs left on it. And somehow people who see it get the picture of a twelve-year-old flashing into their minds as clearly as if it were being broadcast over a 5G network. Fancy that!
The nicest thing about reading is that the person who made the little pictures doesn’t have to be in the same room as you. They don’t even have to be in the same country or on the same planet. They can even be dead. Some of my favourite people who ever put pictures in my head had been dead for a very long time.
Hugh Laurie, who put pictures in the heads of readers of the The Daily Telegraph, is not dead. His life was saved by PG Wodehouse. Nobody saved PG Wodehouse’s life. At least, not when it mattered. He died in 1975. He was 93 years old, old enough to have put lots of little pictures into lots of people’s minds all over the world. He wrote 99 books and many many short stories. To many people, that might seem like enough little pictures for anybody. Not for me. I wonder how many people were sad to know that he would never put a new picture in their heads again when they found out he was dead. I know I was.
All through my adolescence I would read PG Wodehouse before going to bed. It was almost like he was broadcasting little pictures straight into my head over a 5G network. It was fan-diddly-tastic. It made my adolescence tolerable.
I’ve been thinking about PG Wodehouse a lot lately, because of the 99 books and many many short stories that he wrote in his 93 years as a talking, reading, life-saving human being, there are only two books I haven’t read. That means there will soon come a day when no more new pictures by PG Wodehouse will ever come into my head again. Tough break! It’s not as though my life needs saving, or I have holes in my ears, or read The Daily Telegraph. My life today is pretty easy to tolerate. I will be able to read those last two books and put them away without worrying about how to get to sleep anymore. Perhaps that will mean my adolescence is finally over. Perhaps I finally understand how the world works. To put the answer in little pictures designed to make you see different little pictures inside your head: fat chance.