Chatty Man

This week has been a week for random conversations with people. It started on Wednesday when I boarded a train at Peterborough station. I sat at a table and before I’d had a chance to get comfortable the guy on the opposite side decided to spark up a conversation with me. He said that Peterborough was “a wild west town”. This was news to me. I’d not noticed anyone strolling through Cathedral Square on a horse wearing a cowboy hat and no wagons have been attacked by Red Indians lately. 

I glanced at the people across the carriage who I noticed were keeping their heads down. They’d obviously been on the train with him for a while and had heard quite enough for one day. I quickly established he was getting off at the next stop so decided that politeness was the best course of action and so I nodded and smiled. It turns out that he was an East Londoner, originally hailing from somewhere near Wapping “up the road from Murdoch”. 

He now lived in Stamford but found the place to be too much like “Midsomer Murders”. I guess this was an observation that there’s not a great deal of social diversity in Stamford when compared with the Old Kent Road rather than a confession to a series of grisly murders. He seemed surprised that strangers greeted each other in the street in Lincolnshire without there being the underlying threat of impending physical violence. From what I could make out he seemed to like it in Stamford but, after three years of “recharging the batteries” he was moving back to be within the sound of Bow bells. 

Apparently he “knows what’s what” in East London, although the picture he painted was less than rosy suggesting that all the urban areas of London were at war over immigration. He had apparently had an animated discussion about this with George Galloway when he turned up on my fellow passenger’s doorstep canvassing for votes. According to him he “told Galloway how it is” until “he got all intellectual with me”, so I guess that George wasn’t reprising his impersonation of a cat.

The chap got off at Stamford and we bade each other farewell. My new companion at the table from there on was an old lady with an impossibly large rucksack. Maybe she was the murderer and the rucksack contained the bodies, either way she wasn’t chatty at all.

That evening I was staying in a pub-come-hotel in rural Gloucestershire. After enjoying an evening meal there I decided to prop up the bar for a last pint of the evening and soak in the local atmosphere. Fast forward a couple of hours and that last pint had increased to a few last pints, one given to me on the house from the barman, Tom, and I was getting a guided tour of the pub and the cellar from the landlord, George. It turns out that it was a very old pub and was once used as a court house by Judge Jeffreys back in the 17^th century. I was even shown the tree from which the guilty were hung. 

I retired from the bar late that evening having met pretty much everyone in the pub. I’m not sure how that happened but all I can say is that you don’t get that sort of camaraderie in a Premier Inn, regardless of what Lenny Henry says.

On Saturday night I found myself on Twitter. I like Twitter. If you choose to you can end up in conversations with all manner of people. For instance that night I ended up having a brief Twitter chat with the guy who slapped a plate full of shaving foam into the craggy chops of Rupert Murdoch. I discovered that the perpetrator of this brief blast of social anarchy had not used the cheapest shaving foam money could buy. He used Nivea, as that was all he had in the house. I suggested that he was doing the octogenarian aussie a favour and that the aloe vera will in fact serve as a very able moisturiser and that perhaps Mr Murdoch senior should be thanking his assailant rather than pressing charges but unfortunately we both agreed that this may not be the water tight defence he was looking for.

So it turns out that I can have a random conversation anywhere really, propped at a bar, trapped on a train, or via the information superhighway after a few light ales. There’s no moral to this story. Just a sort of shrug of the shoulders and a comment of "it’s a funny old world”. 

I suppose it makes me wonder who I’ll meet this week although I think I’ll aim for less of the anarchists and more of the genial pub landlords dishing out free beer and local history lessons.  That way I stand more of a chance of finding out useful pub quiz information and less chance of being assassinated by Mi5.