a game where we make up the rules while we're searching for something to say....

I was catching up with friends over the weekend. The main event was watching the Wales v South Africa Rugby World Cup quarter final match at Twickenham on Saturday afternoon, but as ever with this sort of thing, it was at least as much about the time you spend with your friends as it was about a sporting event. On Friday night, we had planned to go to the Oxford beer festival, but the queue was a bit big, so ended up chewing the cud over a few beers in a pub… which was more than fine with me.

One of the people there was someone I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. We used to study History together at A-level, and for a while she went out with one of my best friends. We were friendly at school, but I wouldn’t say we were particularly close or that I even knew her that well (she was a girl, remember, and I was a seventeen year old without the faintest idea how to sustain a sensible conversation with a girl). She was in town because she’s just started a post-graduate course in English and History at Oxford University with a view to a PhD and a career change into curating, or somesuch and was matriculating on Saturday morning.

After twenty years, where do you start? Well, she’s got three kids with the youngest just starting school. She had a decent career in marketing, but fancied a change and is taking her chance as her youngest starts at school and gives her a bit more time for herself. She asked me what I did, and I had a moment’s pause before replying. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about what I do for a living by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just that it says so little about who I am or what I stand for, and I’d hate for anyone to think it was. I enjoy my work and I like the people I work with, but at the end of the day, it’s just a job. Some jobs are pretty easy to explain; my job isn’t… and as soon as I’ve said what I do, I usually get asked what that is, and find that I have to go into a little explanation about how it works. Whenever I do it, I can hear that polite interest being stretched, and even as I’m speaking, I realise that my job really isn’t a good way of understanding me at all.

I’m 41 years old. Why do I feel the pressure of a chance encounter like that to reflect on my life and convey in small-talk that I’ve somehow led a worthwhile life?

So how would I summarise my life in the twenty years since we last met at our mutual friend’s twenty-first birthday? Well, you can’t do it can you? You just can’t.

It was lovely to see her though, and she’s looking well. I think that my school was a very strange and difficult place to be a girl, and it was nice to be able to talk to her away from that bizarre and artificial environment and to reconnect, even just a little bit within the confines of a few hours of small-talk in the pub. We have history in common, the subject as well as our own pasts, and we talked happily for a little while about the concept of kingship in medieval England (kingship as a concept distinct from the physical body of the king).

It was good.

It’s funny how the seventeen year old me has never really left.

keep talkin' happy talk....

Since GJ moved desks a few weeks ago, I've had something of a change of scenery in the office.  Instead of a gobby Lancastrian with a kind of Tourettes for appalling puns, I'm sitting next to a lovely 23 year-old called Emma.

I used to like sitting next to GJ, and our conversations frequently ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous: our awful football teams, the Plantagenet dynasty, the glycemic index for a fat-free banana bread.... Emma, it's fair to say, has a somewhat different conversational range.

I'll give you an example from today:

Emma is a big David Beckham fan.  She's not into football, and given that he left Manchester United in 2003 and hasn't played for an English club since, she's frankly too young to have seen all that much of him as a player.  She just likes him.

Yeah.  I know.  WTF?

Anyway.  We were talking about the French Open tennis final this afternoon, and Emma piped up that she thought that David Beckham would be good at tennis.
"Really?  At a professional level?  He's 37 now, so I think his chance has probably gone."
"No, I just think he'd look good in tennis kit."
"Why?"
"I just do"
"How about other sports?"
"Rowing.  I'd like to see him rowing"
"What about diving.  A nice skimpy pair of speedos?"
"Oh no.  I wouldn't like that at all.  Tennis, I think.  Definitely tennis."
"Why?"
"I think I'd like to see him dressed all in white" (I'm assuming she never saw him playing for Real Madrid then.  Or England.)
"So it's about seeing him playing a sport where he was dressed all in white?"
"Yes."
"Cricket?"
"No"
"Croquet? Bowls?"

....and so on.

Our conversation ranged onto Euro 2012.  Emma, it seems, saw a news story about the English players on a cultural visit the other day.
"They all looked totally miserable.  Surely it wouldn't kill them to smile for the cameras?"
"They were at Auschwitz"
"Yeah.  So?"
"It was a Nazi death camp"
"Oh.  I thought it was one of those rescue camps."
A what?  Rescue camp? "No.  It's where hundreds of thousands of people were massacred by the Nazis during the Second World War.  Smiling is probably not the appropriate reaction"
"Oh.  Right.  No.  I suppose not."

Still.  David Beckham probably would look amazing in tennis gear, right?  Although, would Wimbledon approve of all those tattoos?  Maybe rowing would be the better option after all.

I don't mean to make fun.  She's genuinely lovely and it's good to have a change of conversational scenery every once in a while, no?