Somehow, despite having had at least four colds in a row about a month ago and then finally recovering into a veritable whirlwind of slothful curmudgeonry, I am ill again. I would’ve thought that I’d had most of the germs by now and become immune to them, but no, apparently not. They just had to mutate into a new variety and come and inhabit me gleefully, as if I was a theme park, or Butlins-for-Germs. Hmph.

Anyway, today I was on my way to the supermarket at the end of my road, in my pyjamas, in order to obtain some sick-person’s food [fresh tagliatelle and freshly made pasta sauce in little tubs, which are Expensive and Cheating so being ill is my main excuse for ever eating them] when I heard some raucous singing from high up. It came from approximately the same position as some whistling I’d heard the day before, which had implanted ‘We’ll drink a drink, a drink / to Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink / The saviour of the human ra-ha-hace’ irrevocably in my brain for the rest of the afternoon. Foolishly, I looked up. And immediately the owner of the raucous singing, a luminously-vested builder, yelled, ‘Cheer up! It might never happen!’

We will pause in this scintillating story now, in order to discuss the immense awfulness of this phrase. I don’t know whether it is a localised English thing [does it even happen in the rest of the UK?] or whether it happens further afield as well, but here it is used regularly, usually to strangers, and is accepted as A Normal Thing To Say.

Actually – we will pause within this pause in order to diffuse any assumptions that receiving such a statement from a builder is better than The Usual Sexual Harassment. Firstly, I have walked past a lot of builders in my life, and never once have any of them commented on my physical appearance, either in a complimentary or offensive manner. Well, at least, they haven’t done it within earshot. I am wondering whether its occurrence is actually an urban myth, or so much of a stereotype that they teach new builders during their training that they must never do it , because it embarrasses everybody. Secondly, I was wearing pyjamas, a duffel coat, Timberland boots, a large green scarf and my knitted hat with earflaps. There was not much to sexually harass. Thirdly, despite the fact that I find strangers commenting on my physical appearance – in any way whatsoever – Highly Embarrassing*, I’m not sure whether it would have actually been more offensive if they’d yelled ‘Nice Tits!’ or something. Because ‘cheer up! It might never happen!’ is offensive to me in so many, many ways…

For completely obvious starters, it’s really rude to tell a complete stranger that they look miserable. It is even ruder, and hugely callous, to mock them for it – generally speaking, people look miserable because “it” has happened. I don’t know how many people on receiving end of this phrase ever turn around and yell back perfectly truthfully that the reason they look miserable is, for example, because someone they know has just died. I mean, people die quite often. I imagine that if someone did actually respond this way, the ‘cheer-up-it-might-never-happen’-er would be somewhat mortified and apologetic, unless they really were doing it maliciously. Admittedly, I was only looking miserable this time because a) I was ill and b) that’s just what my face does, but still. It could’ve been for any reason.

The thing is, these people who say this thing aren’t usually doing it to be rude or offensive or unkind. They’re doing it because they consider themselves to be Amusing Cheeky Chappies. And they are somehow conditioned into thinking that if someone looks sad, this is the appropriate response. But the thing is, it doesn’t actually make any sense.

Clichéd stock phrases irritate me, in general. They make me feel as if the entire world is a giant episode of Blind Date, in which we are all pretending to be making up the things we are saying as we go along, but have actually had them all scripted in a totally obvious and painfully embarrassing way beforehand. However, if they have some sort of historical meaning that can be explained by the user when questioned by someone who has no idea what they are talking about, I suppose they are not too bad. It’s when they have become normalised but are still nonsense and cannot be explained, yet people use them without thinking, that they really bug me. Imagine this:

Annoying Person: “Cheer up! It might never happen!”
Me: “What might never happen?”
Annoying Person: “Um. It. Might never happen.”
Me: “But what is ‘it’?”
Annoying Person: “The thing that you are looking so miserable about.”
Me: “How can you presume to know why I am looking miserable, and whether the cause of the misery is past, present or future?”
Annoying Person: “What? Bloody hell, it’s just, like, the thing you say when someone looks miserable. I mean, calm down…”

Another example of these weird phrases is ‘What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts’, sometimes abbreviated merely to ’swings and roundabouts’. It is often used in conversations with seemingly no connection to the subject matter, unless you know what it is supposed to mean. Apparently this phrase relates to such situations as paying less rent to live in a house further out of a town, but then having to pay more money in order to travel into the town [possibly in order to work and earn the money]. But it still makes no immediate sense. What does a person lose on swings? And what do they gain on roundabouts? I have lost things from my pockets while swinging on swings. I have gained a grazed knee falling off a roundabout, once when I was six. And at a remote farmhouse in Scotland, I was able to obtain a mobile phone signal for half a second by swinging very high on a swing suspended from a tree branch. They didn’t have a roundabout there, though.

Or: is it to do with going backwards and forwards on a swing, and rotating on a roundabout? You gain the forwards and backwards motion on the swing, yet lose the arguable advantage of also being able to rotate. On the roundabout, you can go in wonderful circles until dizzy, but will no more be able to go forwards and backwards and up and down in a lovely sweeping arc, as you did on the swing. Is this what it’s about? Am I close? Do people who actually use this phrase think about the meaning of what they are saying? I really, really hope so… But. Hmm.

Anyway, the next person who tells me to cheer up, and insist that I should do so because there is doubt as to whether the cause of my misery (which is so very definitely in the future) will actually occur, is going to receive the response ‘Swings and roundabouts’. They will be very, very baffled, because I will have used a familiar cliché completely inappropriately and it won’t make any sense at all. Ha.

*Apart from girls exchanging clothing-compliments as part of Female Bonding.