More stories of surprising meetings starts Pauline McGinley of Drummoyne, who says,“Last September I was in London visiting my daughter. We went for a canal walk and then stopped for lunch at a random local cafe. We gave our order to the waiter and immediately a young woman from the table beside us leaned over and said, ‘Hello Mrs McGinley. You taught me in year two. I just wanted to listen out for your Scottish accent to make sure it really was you’.”
“When walking along the street in Luxembourg City,” Bill Irvine of Goulburn says, “I received a phone call from an old friend from Gundagai. He’d just spotted us from the top deck of a city tour bus. Neither of us knew the other was in Luxembourg, but we got together for a very pleasant raclette dinner at my daughter’s apartment.”
Rosemary Towers of Kianga tells, “We were making our way to the Trevi Fountain one evening in Rome when suddenly we heard ‘Hey, Mr Towers!’ Sure enough, there was one of my husband’s ex-students happily greeting us with a distinctly Australian accented ‘Come stai.’” C8 would like to say, in another distinctly Australian way, “You wouldn’t read about it”, but you just have.
Trifling with spiders continues with Carole Baxter of Woodgate Beach (Qld), who admits (C8 Tuesday), “Yes, I have made trifle in parfait glasses on several occasions, but eons ago. It isn’t hard, but it is time-consuming, so don’t bother, stick with the large bowl.” Wise words, Carole.
On another subject, Julian Neylan of Dulwich Hill asks, “Ashes statisticians may pore over batting and bowling records, but what about the critical measure of surname syllables? For the second time this series, the addition of Potts to the Sydney Test, after Tongue’s inclusion in Adelaide, has taken the tally of English XI players with one-syllable surnames to eight. Maybe an Ashes record. What about the most singles by a single syllable surname batter? Twos by a two-syllable surname?”
To end with, Stewart Martin of Mangerton relates, “Leaving the supermarket with a Christmas load of groceries, I wondered about my car keys. To no avail, I searched the bags (twice) then went back to all the shops to see if anyone had handed in my keys. Perhaps I’d left them in the ignition? In the carpark, it was utter and abject despair because the car had been stolen. Only then did I remember that my partner had dropped me off.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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