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At a party on Saturday night I bumped into a bloke I haven’t seen for a year or so. If I wasn’t actually happy to see him, I was at least ambivalent. It was good to know that he was still alive and not horribly disfigured or anything. He came over to where I was sitting, perched on a little stone wall around an ornamental fish pond, and we started chatting. At first I felt nothing but the mildly warm glow of familiarity, but I should have been warned by the fact that the people around me bolted, or became fascinated by the canapés, or spontaneously faked their own deaths to avoid him.
I discovered that his neighbour had once worked for my father, and that his housemate’s mother was about to undergo chemotherapy, and that he’d just taken a holiday on the east coast. Nothing particularly interesting, but all in all pretty harmless stuff. However, as the conversation progressed, it slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t actually saying anything, other than “uh-huh.”
It turned out that over the course of the last year or so, I’d completely forgotten just how skilfully this bloke manages to combine extreme dullness with conversational monopoly.
To make matters worse, I’m on a diet, and thus was not allowed the sweet, soothing comfort of booze in my hour of need. I had to content myself with a nearby bottle of Coke Zero, thus sustaining aspartame poisoning sufficient to kill me, and a caffeine buzz strong enough to bring me back to life again.
The thing about a boring conversation monopolist is that actually stopping their raging torrent is not an option, unless you’re iron-willed and disciplined enough to be horrendously rude. The best you can hope for is to channel the flow. At a certain point, I suddenly sensed that we’d reached the periphery of one of this bloke’s favourite topics. I looked him in the eye. We both knew what was to come. We stood, like 19th century explorers, before a vast prairie of tedium. Once we entered there was no guarantee that we would ever leave.
I realised I had to act, before we were lost forever in those endless, sun-baked, monotonous plains. Thinking fast, I interrupted his current monologue with a question about a different area of his life, cleverly worded, if I do say so myself, to seem like a logical extension of what he was saying.
He actually faltered, for the first time in twenty minutes. This from a bloke who had earlier had a coughing fit and still managed to keep talking throughout. The broad meadows of stupefying anecdotes lay before him, tantalisingly within reach, but he couldn’t just ignore the question, and after all, it still offered him an opportunity to talk about himself. He changed mental gears with an almost discernable crunch, and answered my question in such a way that it segued into a long, dull personal tale.
But I’d done it. I was still bored, but at least I would live to see another day. And a little while later I had my chance, as the host interrupted us with a platter of won tons, and I managed to feign diphtheria and make my escape.
I discovered that his neighbour had once worked for my father, and that his housemate’s mother was about to undergo chemotherapy, and that he’d just taken a holiday on the east coast. Nothing particularly interesting, but all in all pretty harmless stuff. However, as the conversation progressed, it slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t actually saying anything, other than “uh-huh.”
It turned out that over the course of the last year or so, I’d completely forgotten just how skilfully this bloke manages to combine extreme dullness with conversational monopoly.
To make matters worse, I’m on a diet, and thus was not allowed the sweet, soothing comfort of booze in my hour of need. I had to content myself with a nearby bottle of Coke Zero, thus sustaining aspartame poisoning sufficient to kill me, and a caffeine buzz strong enough to bring me back to life again.
The thing about a boring conversation monopolist is that actually stopping their raging torrent is not an option, unless you’re iron-willed and disciplined enough to be horrendously rude. The best you can hope for is to channel the flow. At a certain point, I suddenly sensed that we’d reached the periphery of one of this bloke’s favourite topics. I looked him in the eye. We both knew what was to come. We stood, like 19th century explorers, before a vast prairie of tedium. Once we entered there was no guarantee that we would ever leave.
I realised I had to act, before we were lost forever in those endless, sun-baked, monotonous plains. Thinking fast, I interrupted his current monologue with a question about a different area of his life, cleverly worded, if I do say so myself, to seem like a logical extension of what he was saying.
He actually faltered, for the first time in twenty minutes. This from a bloke who had earlier had a coughing fit and still managed to keep talking throughout. The broad meadows of stupefying anecdotes lay before him, tantalisingly within reach, but he couldn’t just ignore the question, and after all, it still offered him an opportunity to talk about himself. He changed mental gears with an almost discernable crunch, and answered my question in such a way that it segued into a long, dull personal tale.
But I’d done it. I was still bored, but at least I would live to see another day. And a little while later I had my chance, as the host interrupted us with a platter of won tons, and I managed to feign diphtheria and make my escape.
posted by Blandwagon at 12:27 AM
3 Comments:
I understand! Last week at the gym, as I was getting undressed to shower, a total stranger came up t me and began telling me their life story for no reason. I fled.
fled whilst still naked?
I completely agree with you. Some people just go on and on about the mindless minutia they’ve experienced that they think everyone else should hear about.
It’s like the time my wife and I were trying to plan a vacation and she wanted to just take off without a plan but I was interested in a pre-packaged itinerary. I mean what's the point of being treated like a sheep, I mean I'm fed up with going abroad and being treated like a sheep, what's the point of being carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their 'Sunday Mirrors', complaining about the tea, 'Oh they don't make it properly here do they not like at home' stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamari’s and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White's sun cream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they 'overdid it on the first day'!
And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney's Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there's a bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.
And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel, and one night they take you to a local restaurant with local color and coloring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keeps singing 'Torremolinos, Torremolinos' and complaining about the food - 'Oh! It's so greasy isn't it?' and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's 'Daily Express' and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.
And sending tinted postcards of places they don't know they haven't even visited, 'to all at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an "X". Wish you were here. food very greasy but we have managed to find this marvelous little place hidden away in the back streets. Where you can even get Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays "Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner"' and spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried Watney's sandwiches nd there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are vomiting and throwing up on the plastic flowers and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can pick you up on the tarmac at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of 'unforeseen difficulties'. i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at eight, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing Enterovioform tablets and queuing for the toilets and when you finally get to the hotel, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the bog and there's a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the rooms are double-booked and you can't sleep anyway... (props to Monty Python).
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