Hello stranger...

Well the cake went down a storm.  However, if I had a pound for every person who came up to me and said that the 'stomach should be bigger', or 'you've missed his bald spot off', or 'where are the wrinkles?' I would have been at least a tenner up when I left Binland yesterday.  

When I did eventually leave, no one had touched the cake.  I have a horrible feeling that I'm going to go into work this morning and find it on my desk with a view to it being shared out amongst all the staff.  I'm not saying it's big, but we could still be eating that at Christmas.  Perhaps I'll peel off the too thin/too hirsute/too cherubic figure and replace it with a snowman as we get nearer the festive season..

It was a lovely retirement party though, and the fact that almost a hundred ne'er do wells had tipped up for a free burger and a cup of tea was proof of how highly he is thought of.  I would imagine that when I leave Binland, it'll be a bag of crisps in the canteen with the people who might still be talking to me at that time.  

It's not that they don't like me (I hope) but simply because when anyone stops to have a word with me, they might as well write off the next hour, as I can talk for England.  If only 'Boring The Pants Off A Total Stranger' were an Olympic event.  Miss R and I would have sideboards festooned with cups and rosettes, and would be able to whip out our latest medals at every opportunity.

The husband is fond of saying that I can share a lift with a total stranger, and by the time we've reached the first floor, I have their complete life history.  I have to admit that this is probably not far from the truth.  There have been times when he has left me in one of those chairs at the bottom of the escalator in M&S, with the instructions of 'don't move' and 'don't bore anyone to death'.  Fast forward ten minutes (he was exchanging a jacket) and I'm swapping numbers with a lovely old chap called Bernard who used to live in Portsmouth and might just have known my mother.

In my defence, I just find people fascinating, and I like to find out things about them. And people love to tell you the strangest things, don't they?  Since I've got older, these seem to be mainly health related I'm sorry to say, but even that has it's pros, as it's comforting to know that there are other people out there who have had 'one of those things in the same place as yours'.  We're not so different after all I suppose.

I have a lovely pen friend called John who lives in Bristol who I happened to pick up in my car on the way into town a few years ago.  Don't worry, I wasn't being irresponsible picking up strange hitchhikers - he was eighty five years old and wouldn't have been able to catch me if I broke into a swift amble.  So by asking the right questions, we discovered that he had sort of lived in my house seventy years earlier and he had grainy photos of himself in my garden in a deckchair.

So never be afraid to chat to strangers...unless they're on a train wearing odd shoes and singing Chattanooga Choo Choo whilst eating a can of cold custard with chopsticks.

In which case, I feel a wide berth might be preferable...