Cry Me A River

The week has passed tearily.

I blame the Ashes. There’s nothing like a lethal cocktail of sleep deprivation and impotent frustrated despair for inducing bouts of lachrymosity.

There is a syndrome, as followers of the Wittertainment podcast will know, called ARLS. It stands for Altitude-Related Lachrymosity Syndrome, and relates specifically to the phenomenon whereby people are more likely to cry at films when they’re 30,000 feet up in the air. Listeners write in with tales of unexpected and unwelcome sobbing brought on by the more tender moments of such classics as Police Academy 78 or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. It seems to be a worryingly widespread phenomenon.

I have a potent variant of this condition. I call it ERLS (Everything-Related Lachrymosity Syndrome).

It’s not the big things that set me off. Those things that deserve tears, those prominent and cruel inhumanities wrought by humankind on each other, on other species, on the planet – I absorb them with dry eyes. But they pile up inside me, ripe for tapping by the easy sentimentality of swelling strings, or a schmaltzy moment in a romcom, or four people holding up paddles with ’10’ written on them.

Yes. I know. I’m a silly, sentimental old sausage.

TV and film top the list of triggers. We’ve recently embarked, as part of the extra-curricular education of our son, on a complete rewatch of The West Wing, and in pretty much every episode there’s a moment that sets me off. Donna looks at Josh in that way she has? I’m gone. Jed Bartlet gives Charlie the knife? Done for. Mrs. Landingham…

Excuse me. I’ll be better in a moment.

The final episodes of M*A*S*H, Blackadder and Cheers, no matter how often I watch them, dissolve me. I am, when it comes to emotional televisual button-pushing, the cheapest of dates.

(Incidentally, when I finally get round to catching up with Detectorists, of which I’ve only so far watched three wonderful episodes from Season One, I have no doubt it will be added to the pantheon. Bear with me. I’m a slow catcher-upper.)

And then there’s West Side Story, E.T., Toy Story 3…

There I go again. Do bear with me.

How about music, I hear you cry exclaim?

Yes, music. You’d have thought that a professional musician would know better than to be swayed by its wiles. We know how it works, have spent our lives picking up it all apart and putting it back together again. Surely that erodes our susceptibility to its power?

You’d have thought.

But it’s insidious stuff. And if our responses to music feel like purely emotional ones, don’t underestimate its physical impact when experienced live. I’m much more likely to be set off while conducting the end of Mahler’s First Symphony – to take an entirely random example, during the conducting of which recently I maintained an entirely professional and detached attitude, oh yes I did and don’t let anyone tell you any different – than I am by listening to a recording of it, no matter how much I turn it up to 11.

Vibrate the air in a particular way, with a particular intensity and amplitude, immerse one silly, sentimental old sausage, and voila! It surges around me, seeps inside, accesses the lachrymal cortex (I’m sure there is in fact such a thing, by the way) and turns on the taps. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius (especially Sibelius)… I have my list – you will have yours. We are putty in their hands. These things are simultaneously personal and universal – therein lies their power. And music…well, music takes over where words leave off.

Books, interestingly, rarely do it. For all that a book’s effect can be immensely powerful, the manifestation of that effect is, for me at least, more subtle.

Perhaps it’s something to do with internalisation. The occasions when books or words make me cry are when I have to read them out loud – the words don’t form properly, they crack and come out all squeaky, if at all. How many times did I try to read the last pages of Winnie The Pooh to my son, and how many times did I stumble through them, cry-laughing as he looked at me with indulgent bewilderment at the ineffable silliness of parents? Those pages, so short and simple, with everything they say about friendship and loyalty and growing up and letting go, all compressed into a boy and his bear forever playing…

There I go again. Do please excuse me. Could you pass the tissues? No, the kingsize box, please.

And then there’s sport, that distillation of all human endeavour, with its crass juxtaposition of those twin imposters, Triumph and Despair.

What power, though, in those imposters. He/she did it! He/she didn’t do it! He/she might have done it, but came painfully close and is now carrying on to the bitter end even though all is agonisingly lost!

Derek Redmond springs to mind.

And there I go yet again. I’m so sorry.

But why am I apologising? I wouldn’t apologise for laughing, that equally valid and natural exhibition of human emotion, so why do I, even jokingly, apologise for crying? It’s time to end this nonsense. We’ve got better since the days of ‘stiff upper lip old chap, nothing that can’t be solved by a game of rugger, a cold shower and a damn good thrashing’, but there’s a long way to go yet.

I hold my hand up. I am a crier, and proud.

And yes, as hinted at above, nothing sets me off more than Strictly Come Dancing. God knows why. I can’t dance. I can’t even dad-dance. And yet…

I try not to be sucked in. I avoid all mention of ‘the journey’, roll a cynical eye at the wheeling out of doting partners and proud grandmas and touching back-stories.

But then they get on the dance floor on a Saturday evening, and I’m swept away. All it takes is Susan Calman getting an 8 from Craig and I’m blubbering like an idiot.

Perhaps it’s because it feels like there’s an honesty about Strictly that is lacking in other shows. Perhaps it’s because in a world of increasing darkness and threat we need the warmth and innocence of good old Saturday night entertainment more than ever.

Or perhaps I’m just a silly, sentimental old sausage.

---

Like this? Want more? Subscribe to my newsletter.