Two chance encounters caused me some worry recently.
Last week, walking along an unfamiliar street, I saw a woman struggling with one of her rubbish bins. It was the yellow-lidded one – recyclables.
I crossed the road and, when she accepted my offer of help, I wheeled the bin out to the curb. I was not surprised she’d been having trouble. Her recycling was extraordinarily heavy, bottles probably.
That’s what usually tips mine over the acceptable scale and has me worrying that one day the mechanism on the truck will give up half way and the evidence of a fortnight’s modest tippling will be distributed loudly and in thousands of gleaming shards all over the meticulously shaved nature strips of the near neighbours.
She thanked me graciously and I said, ‘No worries’ and then added brilliantly, ‘Lovely day.’ She agreed. Like the Ancient Mariner who just could not shut up once he’d buttonholed the Wedding Guest, I said, ‘Yes, so much better than those forty degree days.’
‘Ah,’ she said, seeming suddenly galvanised, ‘but we haven’t had any of those.’
Until then she’d been politely affable, doing the right thing by the bloke who’d helped her with the bins, but suddenly there was a glint in her eye and a jutting set to the line of her jaw.
Call me paranoid if you like, but as I walked away, affecting a nonchalant strolling gait, I knew, I just knew, that she was a climate change denier and was daring me to argue the point. Had I hesitated one more moment, I would have been regaled with statistics about the mild coastal summer and other utterly benign climatological phenomena. Which is why, being convinced about climate change and taking a line from the Wedding Guest, I waved and left ‘like one that hath been stunned/And is of sense bereft’.
The second encounter was with an elderly pedestrian. As we drew closer to each other, I saw that, despite the early summer warmth, she was wearing a heavy coat, something like a Drizabone, with the hood bunched up around her neck. And she wasn’t out for a pleasant stroll. In one hand she carried a thick wooden stick; and in the other a flame-blackened saucepan which – as if to allay what must have been my increasingly obvious puzzlement – she placed on her head.
‘Have to visit Dorrie,’ she said, a bit short of breath. ‘Just a few doors down