By: Blonde Two
After a little frosty sunset jaunt up to the Dartmoor Christmas Tree last night, Blonde One and I treated ourselves to dinner at the pub (complete with roaring wood burner).
Like all good Blondes, we were being a bit nosy and, as the other people in the room got up to go, we were listening to their conversation; which went a bit like this:
Man 2: Which is the quickest way out to the A38 from here?
Man 1: Well, you drive up the lane and … you know that tree?
Man 2: Yes (he clearly didn’t).
Man 1: Drive past up the lane, go round to the right, go round to the left down a tiny road, drive up over the moor and then down to the river, the road goes round to the right, don’t follow it, at the cross-roads go left … (the instructions went on like this for quite some time) …
Man 2: (Clearly bemused) That sounds like the way I came in.
Blonde Two: Snuffle, sniff, crunch, slurp.
Blonde One: Are you choking?
Blonde Two: Nearly, I’m trying very hard not to laugh!
We have no idea whether or not poor old Man 2 enjoyed his trip from Widecombe to, as far as we could tell, just about every bridge, hill and boundary stone on Dartmoor. He would have ended up in Ashburton we think, but not before he ran out of fuel!
Where I originate from we call it “wigging” – listening to other peoples’ conversations. I am not very good at it but my late wife was accomplished and she would relate all sorts of fascinating stuff to me afterwards.
Somewhere up the Welsh coast on my walk round Wales I demonstrated to myself my own shortcomings with this skill:
“…I had a cheese omelette in a café where I listened to two locals talking for twenty minutes in Welsh, but I thought I detected the occasional English phrases. I was curious and asked them politely about this mixing of the two tongues and they told me they had been speaking in English all the time!”
I remember a particular dinner with Mr B2 in North Wales where we hardly spoke because we felt so self conscious about not speaking Welsh!