Dialogue: Ironically, it's the bubbles that hurt

By JOE BENNETT

Fate has, or is supposed to have, a habit of being ironic. Of course I don't mean ironic in the television news sense - "Cullen has been recalled for the game at Eden Park, ironically the ground on which he scored his first test try" - where ironically means nothing more than coincidentally, or, in fact, boringly.

No, instead, the irony of fate suggests that the gods have got stuff up their sleeve which they dish out with a nice sense of what will hurt us most. They particularly enjoy slapping us with misfortune when things look rosy, or afflicting us with troubles that point a moral lesson.

The implication is that the gods, fate, or whatever name you choose to give to the heavenly string-pullers, are spiteful pranksters.

Life isn't a string of random events but rather an orchestrated process of humiliation and the business of trudging through our 70 years or so is actually the grim business of watching that humiliation unfold.

Then when it's all over we can say of ourselves what cheery Thomas Hardy had to say of his hanged heroine, "The president of the Immortals ... had ended his sport with Tess".

So yesterday as an electrician and I set out together to visit a physiotherapist, the air was rich with irony, in that the electrician and I were both fit as fiddles and the physiotherapist was sick as a dog - by which I mean the sort of dog that's been skiing and buggered its knee.

That a physiotherapist should have buggered her knee is exactly the sort of irony that fate is supposed to delight in.

Personally I'm unwilling to concede that there's a spiteful headmaster in the sky who's bothered enough about me to organise a schedule of educational misfortune.

I am more disposed to favour another Hardyism which he, in turn, got from someone called Novalis. "Character," said Novalis, "is destiny," implying obviously that what we are dictates what we get.

Thus over the years as we painfully acquire self-knowledge, we get to make out the words of fate written in the sky, although in the end, I suppose, the self-knowledge theory amounts to much the same as the spiteful headmaster theory.

Most self-knowledge is unwelcome. We might just about recognise the things we're good at, but because we find them easy we don't value them. What we do value are the talents that others have and we don't - talents for mimicry or dancing or chess, which seem to be dispensed by gods whose greatest pleasure is the act of depriving us of those same talents.

Of course it isn't as grim as all that, but it's easier to paint it grim than to paint it happy. Most of us start with a sense, however erroneous, of having a full bank account and so as self-awareness gradually reduces that wealth to a negligible heap of copper coins, we are understandably more likely to be prone to gloom than to subscribe to the count-your-blessings school of horrible chintzy cheeriness.

By a tiny coincidence of fate (and definitely not an irony) the electrician was chewing bubble gum. It was bubble gum that gave me my first self-knowledge.

As a child I didn't mind bubble gum's sickening sweetness, nor it persistent elasticity, nor even its bad-false-limb colouring. What I did mind was that I couldn't blow bubbles with it. And that meant a lot.

It meant, to put it as emphatically as I can, that I wasn't the sort of child who blew bubbles. And how desperately I wanted to be one.

My mate Dave Collier blew bubbles. Those bubbles said everything about him that I admired. Bubble gum bubbles are such magnificent expressions of effrontery, of gall, of silent rudeness.

They are precisely what all children need to master to express themselves to censorious adults. Everything about them - their primal coarseness, the way they mimic a stuck-out tongue, the silent inflation, the spattering explosion - is right and true and insubordinate and rude and good.

And I couldn't blow them. They just weren't me. Only brave kids could blow bubbles and I was both too nice and too craven.

It's taken me years to come to terms with that knowledge. All of which I explained in the car to the electrician as we drove to the hospital. He heard me out with patient sweetness, and when I'd finished my lament he suggested that if I'd had my back towards him, he would have been able to hear me more clearly.

So much, then, for irony, self-knowledge, fate and so on. And he was probably right. But when we stopped to buy flowers and fruit for the injured physiotherapist, I couldn't help thinking that what we were buying were offerings to appease the fates.