I love my work. I love taking people out around St Andrews, telling them some of the town's legends and folklore and making them jump with fright and shriek with laughter. Sometimes, however, the tables are turned and people on the tour will try to startle me. They very rarely succeed in that, but they nearly always succeed if they try to make me laugh. I must be the world's worst giggler.
Like a child on the tour a couple of years ago. She wore glasses and had her hair in pigtails. She looked vaguely familiar, but, it wasn't until the second stop on the tour that I realised why. Do you remember that Cadbury's ad with the children who wiggled their eyebrows in time to music? Well this child looked like the girl in that advertisement, but there was worse to come. Every single time I stopped to tell a story she positioned herself right in my eye-line and wiggled her eyebrows. She was good at it, too; she could keep those eyebrows going for three or four minutes at a stretch and by the last stop on the tour I was a basket case trying not to let her catch my eye. I defy anyone to imagine how hard I had to concentrate on what I was doing. I'm pretty sure that the people on that tour heard me collapse into gales of laughter as soon as they were out of sight.
Sometimes it's not the people on the tour who make me giggle. A year or so after I started leading the tours I was striding along North Street at the head of a group of people and a little boy was standing in front of the A-frame advertising Ziggy's Restaurant. It had a graphic of a guitar-playing rabbit that had obviously caught the boy's attention. He was minding his own business, hopping from foot to foot in the way that small children do, when he looked up, caught sight of a woman in a black and red mediaeval outfit, and fell straight over backwards in horror. Poor wee traumatised soul! He'll be in his teens by now...
The biggest laugh I got, however, was a few years ago when I was taking some journalists out on a familiarisation visit to the town. It was the second time that my then jumper-oot had worked on the tour. He made his grand entrance as the Beast, did what he had to, and then ran off. All well and good, but somehow he forgot that there was a dog-leg corner to the entrance to the area, and he ran straight into the wall.
Luckily, the mask he was wearing took the impact, but I heard him go "Oof" as he bounced back off the wall and I just couldn't hold in the laughter. Okay. That was an understatement. I laughed so hard that I couldn't see. I couldn't speak. I couldn't breathe. Then I realised that my jumper-oot had been out of sight of the tour when he head-butted the wall and I had to explain to these journalists why I was laughing like a loon and that made me laugh all the more.
Jamie turned out to be one of the best jumpers-oot I ever had, but that's one tour that neither of us will ever forget.
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