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Just appreciate the humour . . . Drive fast on a wet road, with no helmet, often with one hand only, the other hand is holding an umbrella against the wind. Anyway, with the rain in your face, you can’t really open your eyes, can you?

David Mungoshi Shelling The Nuts
Believe me, you can sometimes retrieve comic moments from among some of the most unlikely situations and places even. Many years ago, expatriate friends and colleagues of mine, a couple, at some obscure little government secondary school in a little mining town that could be as colourful and vibrant as they come, told me something that I still laugh about today.

The incident in question happened when the two were on attachment from college on a farm somewhere in the UK.

As things will sometimes go, there was a freak accident with a piece of the farm machinery, and the good lady was trapped under something heavy.

As she sat there groaning in pain, quite uncertain if she would have a leg to speak of afterwards, some concerned gentleman in typical English fashion came over to ask her if she would like a cup of tea. Comical under certain circumstances, but practical in others. They used to tell us in First Aid lessons at primary school (I wonder what happened to them?) that you could treat someone for shock at the scene of an accident by giving them a cup of tea.

Not so very long ago, someone told me about how as he lay on a stretcher, waiting for attention in a European hospital somewhere and the pain was making him want to cry, a medic leaned over calmly and innocently asked him how life was in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. The medic’s curiosity apparently overrode all else at that point in time.

A hospital can be like a railway station or airport in some respects. You meet so many different types of people who come for all sorts of reasons.

Some come by just to see what is going on while others have evangelical purposes, sometimes singing to the patients and praying for them as well.

These ladies of mercy are characterised by their beatific smiles and by their readiness to do all sorts of errands for bed-ridden patients.

I suppose we take these things for granted, but when you’re alone on your narrow hospital bed and you are doing your best to forget your predicament and somehow make the pain go away, you appreciate every little thing that can somehow help you make it through the day and more particularly through the night.

A gentleman with the mildest of personalities and a very pleasant smile was in a bed opposite mine when I happened to need medical attention on one particular occasion. The child in the man, to paraphrase John Lennon’s hit song, “Woman”, had taken over and he was a boy once again, curious and generally happy and laughing.

He never tired of introducing himself to anyone and everyone who came in at whatever time of day.

Even in the small hours of the morning you often heard him introduce himself: Hello, my name is Cedrick, (not his real name). Things are getting really exciting in here! Lucky him, I was in great pain and discomfort and there was certainly nothing exciting about anything. Well, unless of course you are able to appreciate my supremely existential moment when after days and days of constipation and stagnation in my bowels I was able at last to let go in a bedpan.

Aaah, that was good! The release was almost palpable I could have yelled out my joy. It is perhaps one of the most bizarre things to ever have to happen to anyone, stuffing yourself with goodies, but never emptying your bounty.

On another night in the same ward, the man in the bed next me, but to my right, did a few eccentric things. I sometimes wondered if he was a sleepwalker because once he strayed into my space just as I had begun to drift into a peaceful sleep induced by my analgesic and sat on me. I screamed at him and he vanished like an apparition. Later, I heard him say in his academic tone, “You in there, could we please have a bloody conversation, sometime?” He spoke with the measured elocution of a professor. Every word properly mouthed and sounded and every little point savoured and stretched. I went Nigerian on him and told him to stop the abomination and leave me alone. It worked!

Next time you are in hospital watch out for some of these moments and some of these wonderful characters! But that’s just one example of how you can sometimes witness humorous incidents in the most curious situations. Take this gem of an incident years ago at a teacher’s college. I was a green first year student and I was going into boarding school for the first time. So, as you can imagine, I took literally whatever the veterans of boarding school life uttered. These “celebs” later became good friends of mine. I suppose it had to happen.

After all we spent the next three years together as a small compact group in a Christian college where there were no rules except those of common sense. That’s what the principal always said. He was a white missionary in flowing white cassocks and was proud of the fact that he had been to Oxford. This reverend father was a veteran of the Second World War whose booming guns had damaged his hearing.

Anyway, the day after we arrived at this college we gathered around to listen to the life and times of Mark Anthony (his real first and middle name). He had been teaching for quite some time before deciding to seek professional training. As he was regaling us with his experiences and adventures from the “field”, a young-looking man in black shorts, a short-sleeved white shirt, sandals and glasses walked across to our group. He had short hair and large piercing eyes. He had a notepad and a pencil and began to scribble a few things as soon as he began talking to us, asking a few questions here and there about who we were and where we came from. When he got to Mark Anthony, the situation became dramatic.

“My boy,” flared the irate Mark Anthony, “I am Mark Anthony and I have been teaching for eleven years. Eleven years! Who are you to be asking me such elementary questions?”

The man in shorts and glasses ignored Mark Anthony. But, as they say, every dog has his day. Next morning, at the playing field ready to do a few fitness exercises with us with the bespectacled young man from the day before. We had all been deceived by his boyish looks. I doubt that the man ever had to shave in his life. It turned out that he was the Physical Education tutor and also lectured us in Shona and Geography. The incident from the day before was never mentioned, ever. Discipline can be effected in a variety of ways. Mark Anthony was never that loud or ebullient again.

And then we had the incident of the carelessly clownish Chifambausiku (his real middle name). Chifambausiku had a weird sense of humour and loved playing the occasional iconoclast. Remember this was a Christian college were we were training to go into vocations, not jobs. The sight or sound of drunken students was, therefore, quite out of place. You would have had to tell that to Chifambausiku, of course. He behaved as if he had come to college to be expelled!

One evening behind one of the male dormitories where we had a fire going and as we popped the corn (kukanga maputi), Chifambausiku, loud and drunken as a villager arrived with his out-of-tune guitar and promptly began to sing (off-key, of course) about his exploits and his drunkenness. Loudly, he called out the name of one of the college lecturers. He wanted him to come and see for himself just how “sloshed” he was. Nothing we said or did had the slightest effect on Chifambausiku. Eventually sleep got the better of him and he lay on the grass, mouth open, snoring like a lord drunk on ale.

This same evening was the same evening that another inebriated student wept and wailed because he could not understand any of the conversations around him. He wondered why we were talking in Dutch. None of us could speak Dutch.

I am convinced that there are many funny things that happen out there and that we can share them. Watch this space for more fun-giving narratives.

David Mungoshi, an applied linguist, is also a poet, short-story writer and novelist.