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I was glad that I came home last night as I got a full day with my family. I'd slept in the nursery overnight (and we're starting to debate whether we can leave our daughter to sleep unsupervised now) and got a reasonable rest. Phoebe really kicks her legs in her sleep which is difficult to sleep through, but she's got a lot of power in those little legs (though they're practically as long as mine as luckily she takes over her mother) and it's actually quite an impressive sight/sound. But we didn't actually get up until 7.30 which was a massive result.
After I'd managed to squeeze out another Metro column about my disastrous spa break, we went for a walk up to Holland Park to look at the Japanese garden. I was still pretty much running on fumes, but it was good to get some much needed exercise and fresh air. The gardens were pretty with a nice water feature and big coy carp pond. I had considered wheeling the pram out on to a little bridge made from paving stones, but was glad I hadn't. Although all the paving stones were connected I realised that with one bad steer the pram might end up in the water. As it was I had to negotiate my way round a couple of young women dressed as the characters from Frozen who had come here for a photoshoot. I presume they were two of the army of people who are able to make a living from attending children's parties and singing the songs (one of them was carrying a musical instrument in a case), but they were especially good lookalikes and their costumes were good. I thought they could probably make a reasonable living just standing by this pond and charging a fiver for parents to take a photo of them with their kid. At least one kid got a photo in the brief time we were there.
Maybe it's because we could only go on to the paving slab bridge one at a time (whilst the other looked after the pram) or maybe I've grown up, but even though we were close to a large amount of water it didn't even cross my mind to push my wife in (and I must really love or hate my daughter as my main instinct was to keep her out of the water at all times if possible). Perhaps the Universe decided to punish me for my absent-minded maturity because as we left there was a slap and a splash and I looked over to see a middle-aged woman up to her waist in the water with a man (presumably her husband) holding on to her, trying to haul her out. I didn't see how she fell in, perhaps she just lost her footing or failed to notice that the paving slabs were not in a straight line or perhaps the man now helping this woman out of the water had failed to resist the urge to push.
Having seen my dreams come true, albeit for a stranger, it didn't seem as funny as I had imagined it to be. The woman was shocked and embarrassed and I think had hurt herself a little bit (there had definitely been the slap of flesh against stone and she'd fallen into a rocky bit of water too) and her smart clothes were soaked through. Of course part of what was funny to me about the idea of pushing my wife into some water was how totally unfunny it would be: the anger, the inconvenience, the embarrassed faces of everyone around, the having to stop a great day out to go home and change, the fact she would probably consider divorcing me or at least the several weeks or months it would take for her to come round to forgiving me and even then knowing that she wouldn't have totally done so. It would be completely self-defeating and not funny and that's what made it funny. Even though someone falling into water is one of the funniest things that can ever happen, it's not actually funny at all. Which kind of makes it funnier. And much less funny.
But really seeing it happen (or at least the immediate aftermath) was less not funny than I thought it would be. Nobody laughed at all. Everyone was concerned for the lady's safety and a bit red-faced that she'd done something dumb. Not even her husband who knew her was laughing.
Maybe this is proof that jokes and reality are separate things. That things we can laugh at in fantasy are not funny in real life. That a joke and a real thing are often polar opposites, that we laugh at bad things as a protection against them and as a finger in their face, not because we hope they will come true. Perhaps because we hope they won't.
Actually I smirked a bit because the whole thing was so weird and embarrassing, so maybe jokes are made by evil shits who hate the world. But I was mainly amused by the reaction of everyone other than the woman, how they were trying to look concerned and sympathetic, whilst at the same time almost trying to pretend that they hadn't noticed. Unless she'd been pushed the woman had done something mildly dumb, but she'd paid for it in shame, bruises and maybe even a tiny bit of blood. It was sort of exactly what I had envisaged except that she was only cross with herself. If she'd been pushed then I suspect the reaction would have been quite different. There's only one way to find out.
