More complex anecdotes from my brother’s skiing holiday. He managed to annoy his instructor by getting into some mild difficulty on the chairlift. I am not quite sure how this happened but he placed himself so that the instructor ended up sitting on his lap and had to jump off the lift from a height. Apparently this had never happened to the ski instructor before in 20 years instructing. How empty his life must have been.
It appears that the ski instructor was a bit of a rough character and he started telling his class racist jokes. My brother said to me “I didn’t know where to look”. I was a bit surprised by this, because my brother is a bit of a lad and I would have thought that hearing racist jokes would have formed part of his past experience. But this is not all. My brother decided that something would have to be done and that night while buying drinks at the bar, he said to the ski instructor “You know man [favourite word of my brother’s – it works very well in a Cork accent], you can’t tell those racist jokes”. Gobsmacked, I asked “what did he say?” “Well” said my brother ” I thought he might be a bit annoyed but in fact he said – yeah, I suppose you’re right”. And that, apparently, was that. No more racist jokes for the week. I am quite proud of my laddish brother. Whereas I, bleeding heart liberal that I am, would have been appalled but never had the nerve to say anything.
on 21 February 2005 at 16:54
Re your sister: I worry less about her than I do Cher. With all her silicon bits, I wouldn’t think she would need anyone’s support.
Re your brother’s skilift incident: I tried that once with my English teacher. She saw right through it.
