I volunteered to canoe with the boisterous boys. Rapscallions, they might have been called once. But harmless enough. Seven and half miles, three men in a boat, downstream, I grant you, but in the rain nevertheless. There’s something slightly contradictory about water sports in the rain but my philosophical murmurings were rather lost on my wet ten year-old wards. Let’s tell jokes instead, I ventured. Now, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Some might argue that suggesting to prepubescent boys that this was their chance to tell a non-parental adult some funnies, was a bad idea. They might be right. The first gag involved a discredited pop singer and children (no, not that one, the other one). The second, an old lady, a rottweiler and some unmentionable act. Both were slaughtered by a combination of incomprehension, explanation to peers, embarrassment and distracting paddling. Still, it did present me with a dilemma: frown, tut-tut and disapprove, laugh along and risk the wrath of their parents, or just plead ignorance. In the end it was easy - I’d already heard them and they weren’t funny the first time.
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