A Story from my Mother

Here's a story from my mother.

She used to be in the Stoke-on-Trent Choral Society, and one year they did Bach's St Matthew Passion. There was a doctor on staff at the hospital (North Staffs Infirmary? – I have a very vague idea of the timelines of my mother's pre-me life) nicknamed "Deadly Earnest" who loved Bach – that might have been all he ever listened to. (He was from Leeds, my mother's from North Staffordshire, so you'll have to imagine the accents if you know them.) So she said to him,

"Are you going to come out and hear the St Matthew Passion, then?"

"Oh, I dunno. You'll prob'ly muck it up."

"Oh, go on!"

So he did come out and hear it, and afterwards she asked what he thought.

"Wunt bad."

High praise indeed.

I know that's not a funny story or anything. But my mother tells millions of these little, pointless but telling slice-of-life stories (most of them for the fourth or fifth time) and I've just been letting them wash over me all my life. But it's starting to set in that, like fossil fuels, my mother's stories are a non-renewable resource and I had better start saving them.