Whistle stop…

A recent outing to the shops brought CHRIS BENNETT rich rewards.

A SENSE of humour is a precious thing; and, as the Germans tell me, no laughing matter.

I am a regular, if not all that frequent, visitor to and customer of that most excellent refuge for troubled souls, ranging from schoolchildren to the elderly, from the desperate to be informed to the desperately over-informed - the bookshop in the Hibiscus Mall, a certain Ramsgate Stationers.

Of course the obvious place to find some humour, the laughter in other men’s eyes, is a bookshop. Not only humour, but wit. A lovely word that. Wit, related quite closely to the Afrikaans word ‘weet’, is fast becoming rather archaic.

This is not altogether surprising, considering that the faculty of wit is diminishing about as quickly as the ability to marshal thoughts and then write them down.

Given that these days most of the big bookshops, Exclusive Books and others of that ilk, are sausage machine repositories, I would place the Potts’ family’s extraordinary business in Margate in the top five in this country, notwithstanding their lack of an antiquarian section, something I can well understand.

It was Shakespeare who admonished pretension with the phrase "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit".

Wit is usually quite poignant and almost always intellectually delightful. Books on wit abound in all good bookshops, but wit does not abound in all good meetings of men, and more’s the pity.

The thin yet permeable membrane that separates wit from humour, while allowing them to embrace, is an elusive thing. On my most recent call at RS I was waiting to pay at the counter, occupied by the enchantingly disparate group of intelligent women who serve there and who suffer fools with a compassionate sigh, when my eye was drawn to a small, undecorated cardboard box, a little box that had been cut out from a bigger.

It contained a fine example of a policeman’s whistle; it also contained a cautionary tale: Please do not blow!

My eyes watered with sheer delight! Not only was this humour and wit in love, it was pure, joyful stimulation for the tired and fragile mind that was mine at that moment. It was so funny, to me, that I could not possibly have said anything to anyone - until now.

It occurs to me that the younger among you, in fact most of you, will be singularly unacquainted with the policeman’s whistle, so here is Wiki on the subject:

In England since the Metropolitan Police inception in 1829, officers have been issued with the "Metropolitan" whistle. Prior to this, police used hand rattles, with whistles only being used as musical instruments or toys. Both rattles and whistles were used to call for back-up in areas where neighbourhood beats overlapped, and following their success in London, the whistle was adopted by most counties in England.

J Stevens and Son and J Dixon and Sons (Dock Green?) made police whistles from around the 1840s; T Yates made Beaufort whistles for the Liverpool Police in the 1870s. The 1880s and 1890s saw police whistles made by W Dowler and Son, Hudsons, Barralls, and several other worthies.

Today, of course, all over the world, policemen all have walkie/talkies. And I don’t mean chicken feet and heads.

For the rest of the day I whistled a happy tune.