No rules for stranger danger
I’VE just been in one of those embarrassing situations that usually occur in places like supermarkets, gastro pubs or on Northumberland street on a Saturday afternoon.
A couple who I didn’t immediately recognise stopped me and, in a mood of long-lost bonhomie, enquired how me and my lovely family were?
I hadn’t a Scooby Do who on earth they were. I couldn’t have picked them out of an identity parade at gunpoint!
I can speak about this with some authority – back in 1982, the police offered we skint students a fiver to take part in such a line-up. We were joined by a bunch of apprentices from Parsons or Davy Roll who were also keen to earn their fiver.
The accused, a real rat-boy toe-rag with a wedge haircut and wispy, bum-fluff ‘tache stood between the two groups of lads as the witnesses solemnly filed past. Givvower – what a farce! To his left, we students looked like applicants for Dexys Midnight Runners in our baggy pants, hairy jumpers, Lennon specs and fingerless gloves; while on his right stood the apprentices, who were entirely garbed in boiler suits and steel-cappers.
An Amazonian tribesman, who had never encountered modern civilisation and been plucked by helicopter from the rainforest, would have taken one look at the line-up and pointed the “job- dodger” out. “Aye, that’s him – it’s the no-mark in the ski-pattern jumper and cherry red Farrah’s – book him Danno”.
To return to the “Mexican stand-off”, where you encounter the couple who induce amnesia, this is one of those tense social situations they don’t really provide an etiquette book for (although realistically, even if such a publication did exist, most blokes would totally ignore it because reading any sort of instructions is a sign of immense weakness).
You stare at the beaming and expectant strangers, desperately hoping for a clue of some sort, a word, a flashback, music, a smell – anything!
Do you know them from St. Hilda’s Primary School? Your Saturday job in Geordie jeans (geet skin tight, white stitching, gerrin man!)? Frank’s heed-the-ball cousin’s house parties during Italia ’90?. Your platoon in the basic training depot?. Or even a mentallyblanked-out ex-girlfriend? Lord no! (by the way, why do lasses expect ex-boyfriends, when unexpectedly encountering you with your – total stranger – current bloke, to miraculously get on like a rugby old boys’ reunion tour? Give us a break ladies! Both lads are equally horrified, trying to squeeze out the instantly-implanted image of the other guy re-enacting Fifty shades of Grey with you.)
You revert to the time-honoured ploy of seeing how far you can get away with just using the pronouns “mate” and “pet” – feverishly hoping that they might refer to each other by their real names.
Just when you are giving up all hope and sweating like Mike Ashley in a triathlon, the man smiles and says; “It was great to meet you, Keith”.
Shocked, you splutter: “I’m not Keith, mate.”
“Sorry,” he retorts, “I thought you were somebody else.”
Smiling, you mutter: “Actually, mate, I am!”