You know how poets and writers and people who produce television shows are always trying to convince us that our soulmates are people with whom we form this almost immediate psychic connection? Upon meeting your soulmate, a bell the size of Australia peals in the heavens, the clouds part and a rainbow appears, sometimes more than one. Unicorns and ferrets gambol in the fields, and there may, or may not, be trains thundering through tunnels. Sometimes, the trains don’t get to thunder through any tunnels till the second, or even in rare cases, the third date.
So when you meet your soulmate, according to the above scenario, you just know, unfathomably, that she (or he) is the one. You can start taking those long walks on the beach, or stroll through the rain, arms around each other, blithely ignoring the fact that one or both of you will probably come down with a cold that will develop into a long-term case of bronchitis. And that’s fine, if that’s the kind of thing you’re really looking for. I mean the long walks on the beach, not the bronchitis. However, I think that the key to finding your soulmate, the one who really truly gets you, at least seventy percent of the time anyway, is to find out if they can quote extensively from Monty Python.
See, that’s my soulmate, and she has an unerring sense of when a catchphrase is warranted, and even which particular catchphrase is appropriate. A real soulmate knows the proper time to use the phrase “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Or when to growl “…and don’t skimp on the pate!” A true aficionado can launch into a rousing rendition of the “The Lumberjack Song” in the sketchiest of circumstances. I mean, really, this is a little appreciated art since lumberjacks just don’t come up all that often in conversations nowadays.
So fellas, and gals, if you meet a potential significant other, and they can use any of the following phrases, in the correct circumstances, then you should snap them up before someone else comes along and steals them.
“He’s pining for the Fjords”
“I’m not dead yet!”
“Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Know what I mean?”
“Oh. Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I’m being repressed!”
And finally,
“The Larch”