One-Upmanship

(Sorry! It's  a repost from 6.4.2010)

I've had some thunks of late ... some disturbing ... some pleasant ... some you ain’t not never gonna hear about. But some thunks are stickier than others. Like one about all them folks whose lives appear to revolve around their medical conditions and complaints.

In my job it’s a regular thing to listen to horror stories about, for instance, operations and the scars they leave.

Never, however, have I been witness to a loud “keeping up with the Jones’s” argument about whose operation had been the most dramatic/horrific/traumatic such as was the case when I visited Burger King at Culverhouse Cross, Cardiff.

It went something like this;

Woman 1: “Scar? I’ve got wrinkles bigger than that”

Woman 2: “But you never saw the size of the swelling I got from the infection”

Woman 1: “Don’t talk to me about infections! I was in the Heath (hospital) for a month because of the infection they gave me”

Woman2: “They kept me in for six weeks with mine”

Woman1: “Yeah, but I had to go in for another two weeks ‘cos it flared up again”

I couldn’t help but think of Les Dawson and Roy Barrowclough (not the one-upmanship video I was looking for,but still funny) as I listened, nay, eavesdropped on their conversation. But it wasn't really the medical discussion that sticks in my mind, but rather the ‘one-upmanship’ which I found very amusing.

In recent months and years, I have observed, and probably even got myself caught up in, any amount of ‘one-upmanship’ contests. They range from the absurd to the sublime covering such subjects as garden furniture, children, PC’s, religion and ... dare I say it ... dogs.

And it is dogs which drag me into the depths of ‘one-upmanship’ competition. Alas, like many dog lovers, I am incredibly proud of my dogs; their gentleness, devotion and skills at such mundane things as ‘sit’ and 'down’. And to my shame, I have uttered those dreaded words “Ah, but my dogs can ...” a number of times.

Anyone else out there ever done it? Go one ... admit it!

We ALL do it cos they are family, after all.