Lynmouth Tales: 1 - The TV at Breakfast

As usual, we're almost the last to breakfast in the unnatural calm of a morning pub bar. There's a quiet hubbub of conversation as we locate a spare table and settle to check out the menu.

As we work through our meal, a middle-aged man suddenly stands to address us all. "Does anyone want the TV on?" he asks, his manner faux-apologetic.

It's a tone which suggests that he is speaking for all of us - that he's the agency of our collective exasperation at the muted sounds of BBC Breakfast quietly burbling from the corner.

Naturally no-one says anything.

Triumphantly the TV is turned off. As the man returns to his place, a cathedral-like hush descends over the breakfast room. All conversation ceases, the slightest word can now be overheard by all.

In a classier establishment we'd have breakfasted to Radio 3 - with greater immunity, no doubt.

---

This morning we were the last to come down and ended up on the table next to him. This was the table which everyone else had left vacant, the table which was too close to its neighbours. Its occupancy was the straw that broke this man's back.

He smiled at us - a fixed smile! - which was extended vaguely to the whole room.

"Does anyone want the TV on?"

He got up, mumbling quietly to himself about the irritations of background chat, and made his way to the corner of the room to turn the offending device off.

As he returned, Clare and myself started a (perhaps overloud) conversation about the merits of the recently-deceased Philip Roth, and whether he had had more success charting the niche of upper-middle-class American-Jewish male academics than Lee Child had had exploring the solitary vigilantism of hobo-class Jack Reacher.

I hope he was pleased at such an erudite conversation conducted eighteen inches from his ears but we'll never know, as he said not a word.

---

Yesterday, when semi-private conversation had still been possible, I was telling Clare about an amusing Tommy Cooper sketch I'd flicked through the other day on Yesterday.

Cooper is grandiloquently introducing a clown act. "First he'll do some sums, then he'll do a song and dance routine."

The camera pans to the blackboard to show the definite integral from 0 to 1 of 1/√(1 - x²).

While I'm thinking about line integrals and the quarter circumference of the unit circle, the clown emerges from behind the curtain, runs to the blackboard and in a split second chalks π/2, then rushes across to link arms with Cooper where they do the raucous song and dance routine.

And the credits roll.

Genius.