Ian McMillan: Struck dumb when so much needs to be said

I can talk and I like to talk, indeed I’ve written in this column before about the need to talk to anybody and everybody as a little step towards making the world a bit better.

I can only think of a few occasions when I’ve been struck dumb, when my mouth has hung open and I’ve stood there like a Hallowe’en turnip.

One was a few years ago when I was doing a gig in Cambridge. I was telling the story of the local school I’d once visited where the teacher was called Mrs Daft.

I’d built a hilarious (though I say it myself) routine around her name and the audience was hooting and howling with laughter. Then a middle-aged woman in a sensible cardigan stood up and said: “Yes, it was me.” There she was: Mrs Daft in the flesh.

The audience went quiet and looked at me and looked at her and I had no response. It was like telling a joke in a bar about a man walking into a bar at the same time as a man walked into that bar.

Real life had intruded into art and I was as silent as the buttons on Mrs Daft’s cardigan, which stared at me accusingly. After all, I’d taken her name and made fun of it.

Another time I was silenced was only a couple of weeks back. I was asked to go along to the opening day celebrations of a new sheltered housing complex near where I live.

The idea was that the residents and I would gather in the lounge and, with the aid of my trusty flipchart, we’d make a poem together about the delights of the new place.

It was going well; we were creating a lovely (though I say it myself) poem and the lines were whizzing onto the paper. Suddenly I felt the flipchart shift; it was like that moment when the small boat lurches as it leaves the safety of the harbour.

The flipchart collapsed and it all happened in slow motion: the legs sliding away, the paper flapping like pants on a washing line, the thick felt-tip pens tumbling to the floor.

And the flipchart fell with a crash on a man sitting on the front row in his wheelchair. There was a terrible silence. I didn’t know what to say for ages, and then I said “I’m sorry” which echoed in the quiet room.

Later we all cheered up and the man in the wheelchair was okay but those moments of quiet were pretty horrible, I can tell you. When you’re a chap who makes his living through talking, to lose the power of speech, if only temporarily, is awful.

And then I was silenced last week, when the riots happened. Like most people, I watched them on the TV and listened to them on the radio and I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying.

I tried to think of reasons, of explanations, because there’s no point saying that there are no reasons, no explanations. I thought about the pressure of crowds, about the way that being at a football match can make me shout and cheer and sometimes get cross in a way that I wouldn’t normally do, and that’s simply because I’m carried away by the moment, and I reckon that it’s obvious that’s what happened with a lot of the looting: somehow moral compasses got shattered in the heat of the moment and trainers were grabbed off shelves by people who wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing. And that’s one of the reasons why mobs can be dangerous things.

I thought about the time when, as a young teenager, I wandered down Doncaster Road with my mates Mark and Graham and, for no reason at all, I picked up an empty lemonade bottle and hurled it across the road.

At the time I thought I was chucking it into a field but my aim was rubbish and my arm wasn’t very strong and it shattered against a wall and I was embarrassed and we ran off and the fact that, 40-odd years later, I still think about it reveals the kind of kid I was and kind of adult I’ve become. Somebody passing by would have called me a thug or a yob, and that makes me feel even worse.

In the end, then, we can’t be silent. I’ve been horrified as much by the reaction of those in power saying “Who are these people?” as by the people themselves who did the damage.

These people are part of the world, part of our society. Attempting to understand what happened doesn’t mean condoning it, trying to explain it doesn’t mean explaining it away. But I open my mouth and nothing comes out; there’s just an image of a bottle turning and turning in the light over Doncaster Road.