Tag: Observations

Snack Time

I know Winchester and its residents can often be stereotyped as being pretty affluent – and, in some cases, a little bit posh – but I rarely expect to see said stereotype play out in front of my eyes. I certainly don’t tend to think I’ll see it when I’m shopping in Sainsbury’s. And yet I did, just the other day!

Picture the scene. A mother and her daughter, no older than 10, are making their way up the aisle ahead of me. It’s the weekend and there’s been a buzz right through the city centre all day, so the little girl is slightly hyperactive. She’s jumping and dancing around, she can’t stay still even for a second. To be honest, she’s exactly the kind of child I try to stay as far away as possible from in my chair. That’s because I’m moving with the constant fear that she’ll come barrelling into me at any moment, there’ll be lots of noise and tears, and the blame will land squarely at my feet – after all, there’s no way the little angel could have done anything wrong.

Thankfully, that doesn’t happen. Instead, the girl’s mother notices that she won’t settle down, and decides to resort to bribery. I remember Mum doing that a few times in my own childhood, and it always worked.

“Would you like a snack?”

There’s no response. The girl still isn’t listening.

“You should have a snack before bed, otherwise you won’t sleep.”

This time, the girl listens and stops dancing around. She considers the suggestion.

There’s a long pause. Then comes the clincher.

“How about an avocado?”

“Yeah!”

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

The Flowerpot

Of course, this isn’t really a flowerpot, it just looks a bit like one from the side. Actual flowerpots aren’t nearly as interesting as this one anyway, because this is full of baked goods – or it was, up until I scoffed them all just before this photo was taken last night. There was a mini biscuit, flapjack, scone (complete with cream and jam filling) and brownie, and I have the two ladies of the cloth handing them out to students to thank. As luck would have it, I’m still boyish enough to pass as a student, so they never suspected a thing. The treats came inside a paper bag that had “have a snack on St Paul’s” scrawled on it, and they’d thrown a little leaflet on top for good measure, in addition to a sachet of Galaxy hot chocolate. None of that changed much for me faith-wise, because I’m still firmly an agnostic, but you have to hand it to the Christians. They’ve always seemed to grasp that the way to my heart is through my stomach. Yesterday, when I needed a sugar hit and a nugget of motivation, I got both – and free of charge, too.

Maybe He does answer my prayers after all?

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