When I first started doing open mic nights, I had about five minutes of material. At a grassroots level, those gigs are horrendous – often in pubs where people didn’t come for the comedy, the microphone clicks on and everyone looks resentfully at fledgling comedians stumbling through their sets. The shows felt hellish to me then; but in lockdown, the memory of them feels like an impossible paradise. Now, I would kill to have somebody come up to me after a gig and tell me they enjoyed every act except me, just like the good old days.
An early joke in that five-minute set was about snow: “One of my favourite things to do when it snows is to go outside and pretend to passersby that I’m seeing it for the very first time.” It’s not the best, but it was one of the few gags in those early days that would always get a laugh, sometimes very quiet, but still infinitely better than silence. There were some days, though, desperately infrequent in England, when the joke would be elevated to legendary status, and that was when it was actually snowing. On those days, I would open my set with it: “Everyone enjoying the snow? One of my favourite things…”, and the audience would think I had done that joke specifically for today and give me a bigger laugh, not knowing I had cheated them. On snow days, I would get out of bed knowing I was going to have a gig that was indifferent rather than awful.
Similarly, when my wife and I were both teachers, if there was a possibility of a snow day we would go to bed excited. We would wake up early, look out of the window, and hug each other in unadulterated joy before heading back to bed. We loved our jobs but no day at work, no matter how rewarding, could match a surprise day off. The joy of this was only surpassed by the despair of seeing snow and then checking the school website, only to see the school was still open, and that we were about to tuck into a dangerous two-hour commute.
None of those joys, however, compared to the euphoria that the Ranganathan family experienced when it snowed during Lockdown 3: The Lockening. We had fallen to the depths of boredom, talking about our least favourite toothpaste flavours, when our youngest son pointed out of the window at the flakes falling. We excitedly gathered at the window to see what the snow might bring. Would it just be something new to talk about or, better yet, would it settle and give us something new to do? We jumped around, high-fiving each other, wondering if this might mean we could love one another again.
Sure enough, the snow settled, and we headed outside. The truth was, it hadn’t settled in any meaningful way that you could enjoy, but that didn’t matter – it was something new! We walked around and talked about how snowy it was, and how it was too tricky to make a snowman from it lying so thin on the ground, and then my wife and I talked about days in our past when it had snowed, and we all enjoyed the fact there was a new topic of conversation.
As we came in from the snow, readying ourselves to talk about toothpaste again, my wife pointed out that it was the first time our youngest had properly seen snow. It was the Circle Of Life.
