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The Right Idea
Roger Smith writes:
 John Crick had an irritating habit of prefixing his instructions
or questions with the word ‘right’ so that everything became,
“right, turn to page…” and, “right, what does the poet mean by…”
etc.
This was a new phenomenon to us and so we began to count how many
‘rights’ we had in a lesson. The trouble was, when we compared notes
afterwards our totals varied considerably. Then someone came up with
the idea that if we had on our desks a spare text book and turned a
page every time he said ‘right’, we would know for certain how many
there were.
 It
was a brilliant idea and so when the next lesson came round out came
a spare book and over went the pages every time we got a ‘right’.
The trouble was, that instead of this simplistic method being
discreetly employed by one or two in the class, a couple of dozen of
us took part. The ensuing rustle of pages all in unison forced him
to turn round from the blackboard, stop the lesson and ask, “what
the hell is going on?” We refined the method afterwards and the
total number of ‘rights’ were staggering.
He was more easy going than some and on one occasion he spent
quite some time telling us a joke. It was about a man who found an
animal and took it home only to find it growing bigger and bigger.
He mentioned it to a friend who told him it was a specie unknown to
science and so was called a ‘rary’. The beast continued to grow and
so the chap put it in his van, drove twenty miles and let it out
into the wild.
A week later it was back and even larger. He then put it in a
lorry and took it fifty miles before letting it out but it was back
a week later bigger still. He then hired a twenty ton tipper lorry,
travelled a hundred miles and tipped the beast over the cliffs into
the sea. As it hadn’t come back after three months, he phones his
friend to explain what he had to do to prevent it returning adding
that at least he had learned a valuable lesson from the experience.
When his friend asked what that lesson was, he replied that, “It’s a
long way to tip a rary”. When he smiled, the corner of his mouth
used to curl up and I can still see him smiling at the punch-line
now. But what a rotten joke!
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