Cherry Lennox
/This Is So Silly
It’s regrettable to turn up at the wrong party and unfortunate if you kiss the wrong girl, but these things do happen and all you need to lightly pass them off is the right amount of aplomb. Aplomb is the ability to laugh lightly as the muscular bloke punches a hole in your head after catching you pinching his heart’s desire in a crowded discotheque. Then there’s that feeling of something quite silly happening to you as when you lean gracefully on the mantelpiece and the whole thing, including the marble clock, crashes into the fireplace.
Or like CHERRY LENNOX, university student, you can be strolling through the rural scene with your mind concentrating hard on your economics paper, and something really silly happens.
“Well, I mean,’’ said Cherry, “I wasn’t even doing anything and then swish, this twiggy thing sprang out and tried to use my skirt as an umbrella and it wasn’t even raining.”
“I didn’t know what to say except ‘oops’. I just felt silly. I mean, supposing it had been on the campus? I don’t know what I’d have done for aplomb, it’s not one of my subjects.”
“I fell over a skipping-rope once, but this is just too silly.”