The Shape Of The Human Mind

Even if you are a feminist like me, you might find this joke funny.  Or maybe the joke is so lame you won't need an excuse for gagging on it.  But if you are a feminist, like me, but one who is particularly delicate or easily offended then kindly skip these first four paragraphs because what is written there is probably going to offend you.  Or do you enjoy being offended?  Some people do, you know.  They seem to get a special adrenaline rush almost akin to a little crack high when something or someone gets their panties in a bunch.  This is a joke of my own inventing and I have just done a Google search and it is not yet on the Internet and how could this be?  It is such an obvious joke, and neither that funny or original, that I'm sure someone would have made it public domain by now.  I still haven't checked the Urban Dictionary, so, I beg you excuse me for a moment...
     Well, I tried, I looked, I scrolled and by the time I got down to the section where it says "Has anyone every tried any weird sexual acts?" I narrowly resisted temptation and now here I'm back.  So after all this dithering and building of suspense and tension while popping another fresh strawberry into my mouth and looking out my window at a fabulous display of evening sunlight on the fresh sycamore leaves and red rhododendrons in the garden across the way, here is the joke, after this strawberry.  The last one on the plate.  I eat lots of strawberries these days.  Apparently they are even richer in vitamin C than oranges.
     So, here is the strawberry, oops, I mean hear is the joke, and never mind the Freudian spelling mistake but hear the joke, like, maybe read it aloud, and if you are one of those ultra-sensitive feminists and you absolutely love being offended then please start reading here because here it comes:

     What do you call a maternity home for Surrey girls?  A school of hard knock-ups!

     Are you back from the bathroom yet?  Now on with the topic de jour.  This long and rambling and excruciating build up is actually a segway into what I want to write about.  I used to, in my childhood, when we moved to that dreadful subdivision, Richmond Gardens, that I mentioned yesterday, go for long rambling evening walks in the neighbourhood.  I was still ten years old when I began to do this.  There wasn't much to do after dinner except homework and watch TV.  My bedtime had been extended to nine pm and Mom often wanted a fresh supply of cigarettes.  There was a corner store just outside the subdivision, a ten minute walk from our spanking new (well, three years old, already lived in) split level. 
     Now before you go apoplectic please bear in mind that we were in 1966 and outside of vague stories of the Boogey Man for frightening children into submission we generally weren't afraid of child molesters or worse in that gentler golden era.  And even though four years earlier they had already confirmed the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, almost everyone smoked, or lived with it, and didn't go ballistic the way I do now whenever subjected to second hand smoke from some bozo walking ahead on the sidewalk.
     Mom, out of gratitude and guilt would always budget in a reward for my efforts.  I could buy a chocolate bar.  She would also ask me to get some tomatoes, or lettuce or bread to help justify my excursion.
     I loved walking in this subdivision at night.  I was always alone and safe with my own thoughts and no one could yell at or hit me.  The streets were mostly crescents and cul de sacs that wound and curved and would begin and end at the same street just half a block away.  This was very different from the grid pattern I had previously lived in and this became for me an adventure.  I was exploring a labyrinth.  On clear nights I would watch the moon which seemed always to be travelling with me, in its various phases, shapes and sizes, watching over me, protecting me.
     When I was twelve I refused to buy my Mom any more cigarettes.  This was in August 1968, during the Soviet invasion of Prague.  That day, or maybe a day or two before I read about it in the newspaper on the front page.  I felt strangely moved by this.  Just four months before in the National Geographic I had read about the Prague Spring and Alexander Dubcek and so I experienced my first real awakening to the rest of the world.  I have never gone back to sleep.  My mother conceded reluctantly and never again asked me to buy cigarettes for her.  In 1991 she perished from lung cancer.
     I still enjoy walking on streets that wind and twist and seem to go nowhere, labyrinths made large.  It always feels as though I am remapping my brain when I walk on streets like this.  I think this is why in my travels I have always preferred cities with strangely arranged anarchic streets such as London or many other cities I visited in Europe and in Mexico City over places where everything is neatly laid out in a boring, predictable and impossible to get lost in grid pattern because that is not the shape of the human mind.