Tag: No Context

Awaiting Reply

You know when I found that note last year – the one that told me I owed myself money – and I had no idea when I wrote it or why? I was reminded of that just a couple of weeks ago, when I started yet another new notebook. Not a personal one, like the one I’m scribbling the first draft of this post in, but a work one with its own pen secured at the side. Yes, its own pen! You know what that means – no more frantic searching when you need to jot down an email address or phone number. Let me tell you, an attached pen is very much a luxury in my line of work. We have a whole box of these books in our office, each with the incorrect branding on the front cover – so they’re just sitting there, empty and (as far as I’m concerned) fair game.

I wasted no time in claiming one for myself, and such is the fast pace of the university careers world that I had to rush it into action immediately. No date. No title. No context. Just a list, seven words long:

“Waiting/Awaiting reply/Approved/Not approved/Withdrawn”.

Nope, no idea. I’ll tell you one thing, though – looking at it reminds me of my online dating attempts!

Mason

A Restaurant In Athens

I think my latest snippet of overheard conversation is particularly appropriate to share if you’re in the UK at the moment. I was eating my lunch in the sunshine last week, and a couple of benches along, a lady was speaking on her mobile phone:

“Yesterday it was a restaurant in Athens, and today it’s a sandwich at work. All over, just like that. I haven’t even unpacked!”

She might not have been in Athens any more, but with the weather we’re having in Winchester right now, I’m not sure it’d be all that easy to tell the difference between them – right?

Mason

Watercress

You’ll know by now that I have something of a penchant for one-liners without context, so I thought I’d report that I overheard this just as I was leaving the office yesterday afternoon:

“Alresford is the watercress capital of the world!”

Believe it or not, I caught another reference to that very fact when I was volunteering a few hours later. They’ve got to seize these claims to fame where they can, I suppose!

Mason

You Owe Yourself £2.85

If the title of this post looks familiar to you, it’s because it’s already shown up on this blog once before, when I wrote it on a Post-It note a couple of months ago. I presented it entirely without context, and predicted that I’d soon forget what the hell I was talking about. Sure enough, I have – it’s just as well it clearly wasn’t anything important. I actually found the note in the corner of my desk the other day, and now it just amuses me as a completely random sentence. I thought of it again over the weekend, when I was crossing the cemetery that separates the University of Winchester from the city centre. Passing a couple coming the other way, I heard a guy say to his girlfriend:

“You see, Milton Keynes is a brilliant middle ground.”

As it turns out, that cemetery is awash with out-of-context lines. I overheard this one just this afternoon:

“A lot of Hampshire is very Austenesque.”

What makes something Austenesque, I wonder? I don’t exactly know, but I bet you wouldn’t hear that in many other graveyards.

Mason