When I was a silly boy - my inability to stop laughing, no matter the situation

My main characteristic during mid-teens was perhaps the tendency to giggle, or more accurately laugh-hysterically - regardless of the situation... 

More accurately still; the more important it was that I did not laugh, then more likely it was that I would be uncontrollably afflicted. 

This got me into considerable trouble at high school. My kids accumulated only one detention between them in a combined 14 years - but I had so many lunchtime detentions that I lost count; and they were always* for laughing inappropriately and continuously - for example, into the Deputy Headmaster's face from point blank range. 

Another instance was when the Physics class was stood up silently because we had been rowdy, and the teacher said - "I don't want to hear a peep out of you for five minutes". 

At which point I and my small gang of similar characters (boys of "low moral fibre", as we were described in one of my school reports) instantly became rigid with expectation at what was inevitably just about to happen. 

There was a rigid, dense silence lasting for ten, twenty, maybe even thirty seconds - until the teacher turned away; at which point Trefor Roberts (it had to be him, of course) articulated in a high voice the quiet but distinct word: "Peep".   

That was it, that was more than enough. 

The whole place - or more exactly the half dozen silly boys with whom I associated - erupted into literally-uncontrollable laughter; which was effectively quelled in a few seconds by harsh threats from the teacher...

Quelled in everyone except me. 

I just could not stop laughing - whatever the threats from the teacher standing in front of me. 

So I was the only one who was punished.  

Clearly this problem was an attribute of adolescence, and it was prone to recur - with decreasing frequency - until I eventually left this behind. 

But it continued up to age 22; which was the last major incident. 

I was a medical student singing tenor in the (quite famous) Newcastle Bach Choir, sitting next to my best friend Jack - a music student. But most of the choir were proper grown-ups, some of rather advanced years - serious about their singing (and all much better at it than I was - I only scraped the audition because all choirs are chronically short of tenors). 

In one of the informal breaks that occur during choir rehearsals; Jack whispered a story about a famous string quartet who were playing a well known work by Mozart that ended with a resounding and long-sustained major chord in C-major; but the cellist suffered a momentary lapse of attention and accidentally ended by playing the note B, a semi-tone flat of the proper destination - creating a sudden and startling dissonance!

The cellist, who had reported the story, said that he was amazed and confused for a split second; before making the bold decision to hold onto the wrong note for a couple of beats, stunning the other players of the quartet into paralyzed panic... 

Before calmly sliding up a semi-tone to join his colleagues in the proper C-Major chord. 

In other words, the cellist made the snap choice to pretend he had meant to hit the dissonant note as part of the cadence. In the brief but vain hope that - by his behaving confidently - the audience would assume the weirdly dissonant cadence was part of the real music, as written by Mozart.  

This then began to strike the two of us as so funny that we could not stop laughing, more and more, until we were crying. 

All which meant the choir rehearsal could not proceed, and about seventy people were held-up by two giggling fools. 

After which I decided that maybe it was time for me to leave this choir, as being clearly unworthy. 

Such reflections were revived by re-reading Michael Green's excellent 1988 autobiography The Boy Who Shot Down An Airship. 

Green was a much loved English humorist whose The Art of Coarse Acting is a perennial favourite of amateur thespians. This was part of to a whole series of books of "Coarse" this and that - mostly sports and pastimes.  

By all accounts, including his own; Green was afflicted/ blessed by the kind of giggling silliness of my adolescence to a transcendental level and lasting well into middle age. 

A kind of feckless daftness repeatedly sabotaged his career as journalist and in the Army - but he eventually turned this to advantage as an author of many volumes of light humour.   

Strangely, even the expert professionals sometimes retain the mind-set of a Coarse practitioner - part of which is the unshakeable conviction that "nobody will notice " their mistakes. 

That quartet cellist - whatever his usual level of musical accomplishment - clearly had the heart of a Coarse Musician.  

**

*Once it was for being part of a fountain pen ink fight in the boy's toilet; which I had started. 

I had washed-out then re-filled a pen with water (well, more exactly it was then very diluted ink - it still retained a greyish hue) so that I could pretend to spray a friend on the face, and he would think from the feel of it that he was ink spattered, while the stuff could actually just wipe away (well... almost). 

However, this backfired, and he immediately retaliated by drawing his own pen, filled with real ink, and slashing it across in front of my face and white shirt, to mark them with a machine-gun trail of concentrated-ink splats.  

Naturally, this led to collateral damage among the other boys standing around, and they naturally retaliated; such that within seconds the everybody and the whole room was covered in black or blue spots. 

At which point, by some extraordinary chance (maybe we were making a lot of noise?) the Deputy Headmaster walked into this scene of chaos and carnage.  

Consequently we were (justly) punished by a lunchtime group detention devoted to cleansing the walls, ceiling, floors...

It was left up to our mothers to get the ink out of our clothes.