Tuesday 12 July 2011

Fun hobbies for making friends

Hurrah, wifi at my Child Protection and Welfare Lead Officer Training Day. (And NSPCC: a 'short taxi ride' tends not to cost £12. Clearly your clients are regular visitors to the expenses teat).

I picked up a new hobby this morning. Choose a busy, early morning train. Say a 7.00 a.m. one from Birmingham to Leicester. Then systematically phone everybody in your contacts lists, in order, to 'see what they're doing'. Presumably the answer is 'eating breakfast' or 'shaving' or 'waking up'. Make sure that no sentence has any connection with the preceding or subsequent sentences. Speak progressively more loudly to drown out the rustling of newspapers and rustle of eyebrows being raised.

Gradually, a second leisure activity occurred to me. Sit opposite the telephonic maven. Take out a notebook. Write down random sentences while looking up at the conversationalist every thirty seconds or so. Take bets on whether this will make him/her self-conscious about discussing his/her entire life at full volume to 50 people. (Answer: no).

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