Week 302: Talking to strangers
June 15, 2024
- More notes of absolutely zero consequence.
- Just noticed I flubbed the counting and so what I thought and announced was week 300 was actually week 299. Thank you to anyone that noticed but politely didn’t say anything. How does it feel to be my favourite? Pretty good I hope.
- Maybe like the bus rounding the corner just as you reach the stop
- Or like a cat deciding you are its favourite
- Or like catching your kid being nice to another child
- I went to StaffPlus this week. It was good. As with last year there were a lot of talks that I thought would be good to share with people I work with and, of course, a handful of talks that should have been blog posts.
- After the first day of the conference I had a rare and enjoyable pint with some colleagues and sensibly left at 9pm to get the train back to Brighton. Unfortunately there were some trespassers on the line and so we got stuck in Gatwick for a long time, an hour at least, with crowds of people in various degrees of inebriation being moved from one train to another and then another by bodiless voices.
- Eventually ended up on a train sat at a table seat next to a man wearing a style of glasses favoured, I noted in my head, by serial killers.
- He asked me what was going on, so I explained, and then he proceeded to tell me about some very delayed trains he’d been on, including one in the 1980’s in very heavy snow, and a two that had been delayed because somebody had jumped in front of them. He told me all of these stories in great detail. Then he started telling me the dimensions of his garage in feet, and how his vintage BMW is too long (but not too wide!) for the garage.
- At this point I thought it was time to steer the conversation a bit into some slightly more interesting territory, so I asked him what he had been doing in London that day.
- At which point he asked me if I had heard [a woman whose name I didn’t recognise], and opened his bag to pull out a lot of photos and clippings. The woman was a socialite murdered in the 1950’s that this chap had a fascination with. He told me they had made a film about her, and he usually carried DVDs of it around to give to people but he’d left them at home. He’d been on the train today to visit places of interest in the case. Among the photos and articles about this woman, there were photos of other people who had been murdered too
- I said… “So this is your hobby…?” and he said “no! this is a lifelong interest!”
- Anyway - that’s what you get for talking to strangers.