A little bird told me....

I love hearing random snippets of other people's conversations and then trying to see whether some kind of story might emerge from them. I heard an absolute corker today. Listen to this:

"He never talks about his family, or anything personal. I mean, he never mentions a wife, or a girlfriend, or even things lower down the list that he could mention..."

What on earth was that all about? What do we learn about the subject of the conversation, and what does it tell us about the speaker? What do you suppose the speaker meant by "things lower down the list"? Is there some kind of prejudice being revealed here, or was the speaker simply referring to objects such as domestic pets, or dishwashers, or maybe just doing the ironing? Who knows? Later, whilst walking down a corridor, I heard an astonishing claim being made by someone talking with great authority to a colleague. I only heard a small part of this conversation which consisted of this:

"Well, you shouldn't have a banana every day anyway, but if you do... well, the best thing would be to have those really small ones..."

Make what you will of that one. I think I might have written before on here about the most astonishing snippet I once heard on a train. On that occasion, I was seriously tempted to stop, interrupt, and ask for an explanation of this particularly startling statement:

"Well of course as you know, I love history – but from 1603 to 1807 I know absolutely nothing at all."

I have long since tried to reconcile these two dates and work out what period in history they represent. Okay, so 1603 marked the end of the Tudor period when Elizabeth I died, but what happened in 1807 to mark the end of any identifiable period? I've Googled the year 1807, and the following results were thrown up:

1. Gunpowder-ship explodes in Leiden, Netherlands, 150 die
2. Napoleon convenes great Sanhedrin in Paris
3. London's Pall Mall is first street lit by gaslight
4. British squadron under Admiral Duckworth forces passage of Dardanelle
5. 1st performance of Ludwig von Beethoven's 4th Symphony in B
6. 1st railway passenger service began in England
7. British Parliament abolishes slave trade
8. Townsend Speakman first sells fruit-flavored carbonated drinks in Philadelphia
9. British board USS Chesapeake, a provocation leading to War of 1812
10. Lightning hits gunpowder warehouse in Luxembourg; 230 die
11. British troops lands at Ensenada, Argentina
12. France, Russia and Prussia sign Peace of Tilsit
13. Congress passes Embargo Act, to force peace between Britain and France

Perhaps point 7 (above) is something worthy of note, and it's interesting to see that there were two gunpowder explosions in the same year (points 1 & 10), but do these really stand out as a bookend of history, for which Good Queen Bess's death stands as the other? I don't think so. And why are the intervening years such a black hole for this young enthusiast of history on the train? What is so obscure about these years that they failed to hold the speaker's interest?

That's the beauty of eavesdropping – we hear such mouth-watering jewels of trivia that we can only be inspired about the complex tapestry of human thought and expression that leads, inevitably, to the foundations of fiction. Hurrah for a writer's life!