Wednesday, October 18, 2006

 

Oh for a re-wind button

It’s reassuring when you confess to a particularly neurotic habit or complex and someone says “oh yeah, I do that”. But one I rarely admit to because it sounds just too paranoid, is the pointless exercise of lying in bed and reliving a recent conversation that I’ve made a mess of. But it seems I’m not alone. I read recently that a newspaper columnist suffers from the same syndrome and she described her disastrous chance encounter with her boss at an opening of an exhibition when, with an orchard full of juicy fruit topics to choose from to impress or charm him, she picked the crab apple. She was mortified that she wasted her precious five minutes with the boss, not on the subject of work or his tennis injury, even though she played tennis and knew loads about it, but blurted out “have you ever heard of Wegener’s disease?”. But worse was that even noting his confusion and subsequent glazing over of his eyes, she simply couldn’t stop but became ever more determined to save the situation. But none of mine have been as hilariously awful as the conversation I had last week at the funeral parlour that dealt with Rob’s death. My daughter and I were chatting to the assistant who’d washed Rob’s hair and she told us how she’d got into the job and why she enjoyed it: “well the thing is, you can’t mess it up can you? I mean, nothing worse can happen to them can it?” My daughter and I looked at each and fell about laughing but, just like the journalist, the more the poor woman tried to dig herself out of the hole, the deeper she got. Now I’ve got enough of my own conversations to re-hash, so why am I still squirming with embarrassment at someone else’s?

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