The Wanderer Returns

My brain was addled.

Bonkers Breakfast TV was usually preceded by an hour or two of serious programming where one able person demonstrates that four giggling people on a sofa definitely aren't necessary for communicating news stories. Yet these programmes have their eccentricities too, it seems. The economic section, for example, is dominated by Skype interviews with expert contributers from around the globe. The combination of foreign accents, time delays in questions and answers (making frequent unintended interruptions inevitable) and the opaque nature of economic concepts themselves, makes viewing deliciously confusing. It's like having your brains scrambled in a loud fairground and then realising on the way home, that it was all probably pointless anyway.

And you're still skint.

So, for that reason, I later trundled off to the tearoom for a breather. After getting the flu in my favourite cafe (windows dripping with viral condensation and a resident coughing super spreader in one corner), I now frequent a hotel with socially distanced tables and comfy chairs. Otherwise, it's the same, because the whole world appears through its filter. The very essences of our peculiar human nature are exhibited daily for anybody who's interested.

Today was brilliant. An elderly group of dog walkers came in and their dogs assumed their usual positions on the table. The owners then barked ineffective instructions from the wings, and for a while only the presence of dog collars delineated which group was which. 

But then it was down to proper business......

One old lady started the discussion by exclaiming,

"Oh Fred, I only learnt the other day that your first wife died after surgery. How old was she?"

"Twenty-eight."

The pregnant pause which followed carried triplets. A deafening silence, previously unheard of in seventy years of perma-talk, filled the room. Even the reader of this little story waited to hear how they dealt with the guileless faux pas.

Well. Inevitably, perhaps, a distracting elaboration of group members' medical conditions ensued. Every wart considered, like joining the dots. This could have gone on all morning, of course, but quite unexpectedly a marvellous political analysis then took place.

Members agreed wholeheartedly that the government was trying to kill older people off in order to save on pensions!  The lack of funding for medical and social care, the closure of bank branches denying technophobic  pensioners their money, inflated food prices, and the hypothermic implications of fuel poverty, were all considered fiendish tactics to decimate the over 65's population!

Of course, this was risible, conspiratorial nonsense (ha ha)

Of course it was.

Er...

Well.

Wasn't it?