things move around

My favourite episode of the classic sitcom “Father Ted”, I think it’s from the third series, is “Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse”. Having lost the annual football game against the neighbouring parish, Ted’s forfeit is to kick the awe-inspiring Bishop Brennan up the arse. Dougal suggests that the best strategy for gettng away with this outrageous act is to kick Bishop Brennan up the arse, and then act completely normally, as if nothing had happened, in the hope that Bishop Brennan will be incapable of accepting the reality of his being kicked up the arse, and therefore convince himself that it never happened at all. Ted does this and amazingly manages to pull it off (for a while, anyway). There is a moment immediately having been kicked up the arse by Father Ted where you can see Bishop Brennan grappling with the sheer incongruity of what has seemingly happened; his face flickers from bewilderment, to anger, to humiliation, and veers between astonishment and apoplexy before circling back to abject epistemic doubt.

This morning my baby daughter was standing propped against the sofa, busily devouring the glossy magazine I’d managed to persuade her to accept in lieu of newsprint. Just as I was re-tying the cord on my dressing gown, she attempted a pirouette and fell flat on her back on the carpet. Evincing no disquiet, I righted her immediately and she resumed her activites, but just for a second there, while she lay on the floor wondering if it could really be true that she had fallen over and no-one had caught her, I saw Bishop Brennan in my daughter.