Since it is Mother's Day in Thailand it seems an appropriate time to acknowledge the role played by mums, mae or, for North American friends, "moms". We must also not forget the madres, mamas and maters around the globe. For most of us, our mum is the best in the world, which is the way it should be. Mums are after all, quite useful. As someone once observed: "God couldn't be everywhere so he created mothers."
Mother's Day in the UK falls at a different time of the year, in March, the start of spring. I remember as a nipper being given a couple of shillings by my dad to go down the shops and buy some flowers for the lady of the house. I returned clutching a bunch of daffodils, despite our garden at the time already being full of "daffs". My mum didn't mind of course and reacted as if she had never seen such magnificent blooms before.
One year, my elder brother and I decided to pick our own flowers for mum and set forth on a bluebell expedition. I was too young for a bike and was perched on the handlebars of my brother's velocipede. We ventured into the Chilterns and near Henley-on-Thames found a wood with a lovely carpet of bluebells which we picked and stuffed in the saddlebag.
On the way back, going down a steep gravelly hill, we came a cropper, falling off in spectacular and painful fashion. The bike was so badly damaged we had to walk home.
When we arrived my mother almost fainted upon seeing the bloodied state of her two sons. After she patched us up, I extracted the sorry-looking flowers from the saddlebag, carried them into the kitchen saying meekly "We got you some bluebells mum." She shed a little tear.
As I got older, my Mother's Day gift graduated to cheap perfumes from Woolworths or Boots which were always greeted with great delight as if they were an exotic essence from Harrods.
The lonely cow
Since those early encounters with daffodils in the 1950s I've always had a soft spot for that particular flower, or dararat as it is known in Thailand.
Three years ago in Scotland on a trip to the Trossachs from Glasgow, I was delighted to see the road embankments were lined with thousands of wild daffodils. William Wordsworth would have been most impressed.
They still have an annual Daffodil Day in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", more commonly known as "the daffodils poem". There is a tale that Wordsworth originally penned the opening line as "I wandered lonely as a cow", but his sister Dorothy was horrified and told him to change it, which was perhaps a wise move.
Poets and planes
Wordsworth's poem also became the inspiration for an amusing Heineken beer ad on television, which depicted a poet struggling for inspiration, grappling with such lines as "I walked about a bit on my own", before downing a beer and coming up with ''lonely as a cloud'' as the voice-over informed us that "Heineken refreshes the poets other beers can't reach."
This was itself a rather clever play on the regular campaign by that company that their beer reaches the parts other beers can't reach.''
One of the more successful of these featured a sorry-looking Concorde jet with its famous nose drooping, suddenly having a very erect-looking snout and a smile after being tanked up on the aforementioned beer.
No joke
Back to mums. While mothers are much beloved, mothers-in-law evoke somewhat different emotions. It goes back a long time. When asked what he thought was an appropriate punishment for bigamy, 19th-century British statesman, Lord John Russell, responded dryly, "two mothers-in-law". This is possibly one of the first recorded mother-in-law jokes.
Such jokes, depicting mothers-in-law as overbearing and unattractive, have been politically incorrect for some time. Yet when I was a kid, just about every stand-up comedian on TV thrived on such jokes. Admittedly many of them were not very funny.
One of the best-known exponents of such jokes was the late English comedian Les Dawson and he took quite a bit of flak. In his excellent autobiography, A Clown Too Many, he describes one occasion when an old lady came up to him in the street and threatened to castrate him if he didn't stop telling mother-in-law jokes.
Faithful fan
The aforementioned lady was possibly upset by such an offering as: "The wife's mother said, 'When you're dead I'll dance on your grave'. I said, 'Good, I'm being buried at sea'. "
Curiously, one person who was not upset by the jokes was Dawson's own mother-in-law.
She used to crack up whenever he started telling them and clearly enjoyed the celebrity that went with being the mother-in-law of all mothers-in-law.
Funny old world isn't it?
The message is in the song
Fellow wrinklies may remember a hit song back in 1961 entitled Mother-in-Law, by a gentleman named Ernie K-Doe. The song didn't pull any punches, beginning "The worst person I know, mother-in-law" and included "if she'd leave us alone, we'd have a happy home." It even topped the US charts and can still be heard on YouTube.
Enough of that. To all you mums, moms, mothers-in-law and mae out there, Happy Mother's Day, and enjoy the perfume.
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