Consequences #9 — Graybo

“I hope it never hap­pens for real”.

I guess we’ve all said that about some­thing at some time — per­haps when watch­ing some dis­aster movie, or when read­ing an art­icle on the effects of chem­ical war­fare, or per­haps as we are run­ning down the stairs dur­ing a fire drill (“WALK! Don’t run, Mr Spen­cer! See me after class!” — God, I hated fire drills at school).

But as I grow stead­ily and inex­or­ably older, I’m increas­ingly find­ing that life is much more bizarre than any­thing that you rehearse, read about or see at the cinema. Not in a big let’s-slay-that-vampire-over-in-the-cemetery Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer kind of way, but in a more subtle and hard to describe way.

And the thing is, just occa­sion­ally, you wake up to how bizarre your own life is. It hap­pens to me at the most inop­por­tune moments:

• as I’m nail­ing up an illegal sign on the side of the A24 at 11 o’clock at night, in the com­pany of a slightly tipsy mid-forties woman that I only met three weeks before.
• as I’m walk­ing down the stairs to meet a woman with a broken foot and two poodles. At Luton rail­way sta­tion. For a date.
• as I try to walk through a bliz­zard on the Derby­shire Dales.
• as I’m sketched by an eld­erly itin­er­ant artist in a caf&eacute in Lis­bon, as the loc­als all look on, filled with mirth.
• as I shout at a Catalan bus driver my best attempt at the local form of “It was closed! Too windy!”, much to his bemuse­ment.
• as I stand up to give a lec­ture to 250 people in another coun­try, con­vinced (cor­rectly) that I’m totally unpre­pared.
• as I am inter­viewed for BBC Garden­ers’ World.
• as a beau­ti­ful naked blonde Nor­we­gian [deleted — it’s not my blog, so I shouldn’t really say that sort of stuff here], which is some­thing I’ve never seen done before or since.

And these are just some of the moments from my

I guess the per­ceived degree of bizar­re­ness of any incid­ent or action is entirely depend­ent on your own frame of ref­er­ence. Yet it is the bizarre, unex­pec­ted moments in life that are the ones we remem­ber. Those are the moments that help to define our lives, in small or big ways, and per­haps even define who we are.

It’s those bizarre moments — no mat­ter how sav­age and viol­ent or small and insig­ni­fic­ant — that leave me think­ing one thing; that ques­tion that has plagued man­kind since the begin­ning of thought …

How did I get here?