strangereality146

Lord Strange: 40 Benson & Hedges, please.

[Supermarket checkout girl, a freckled, gum-chewing minx with a pert little bottom on her, turns to the cigarette display and plucks 20 Benson and Hedges from the shelf; then waves its barcode at the scanner before Lord Strange can say - ]

Lord Strange: - 40, please.

Supermarket checkout girl: Oh, sorry.

[She returns the pack of 20 whence they came, and picks a pack of 40 from the lower shelf. She scans the pack of 40.]

Supermarket checkout girl: Sixteen pounds twenty-nine, please.

Lord Strange [puzzled]: Is that right? Did you remove the 20 first?

Supermarket checkout girl [correcting the error]: Oh. Right. Sorry.

Lord Strange [chuckling avuncularly]: It's okay.

When you don't speak to people, the most minor and fleeting of encounters take on an extraordinary significance. You can mull for days over the fine details of the briefest few words exchanged with anybody at all. You indulge in an activity peculiar to the lone individual in an otherwise societal milieu: you brood. You dissect, and analyse.

My taxi driver on Sunday morning, for example. I was working the night shift and finished at 8 a.m. My employer provides a free taxi home for those who work what it calls 'unsociable hours'. As an asocial loner by nature and inclination, all my hours are unsociable, but I must not digress. The routine goes that the taxi driver, who will have been booked up to 48 hours previously, calls you an hour before picking you up. This is to make sure that you're at work, and they won't be making a wasted journey.

Just after 7 a.m. I got the call. “Hello, Lord Strange?” said a voice. I confirmed that I was he. “I'm Gary,” said the voice. Gary went on: “I'll be driving you home at 8, okay?” I enthusiastically endorsed Gary's intentions, and then it was a matter of waiting for the clock to hit the top of the hour. Which it did soon enough.

Gary was waiting for me in his cab next to the bus stop, which is a short walk from the office. As I got nearer to his vehicle I noticed an odd thing: Gary was Asian. He was sitting in the driver's seat, wearing a big blue turban, and he had brown skin and everything. So the signs were unambiguous.

I have met many Asian people who have unofficially adopted an Anglicised version of their actual names for general day-to-day usage while out and about in the world. How many years of mispronunciations, whether inadvertent or maliciously deliberate, must a man named 'Gurdjwaral' have to go through, before deciding To hell with this, from now on I'm telling people my name's Gary?

It's an interesting question, and one that merits some kind of study, but not here. Not now.

I got into the cab and we drove off. It's always only about a 10-minute journey from the office to my house at that time – Sunday morning, no traffic, plain sailing all the way – and for once I felt well-disposed to Gary's inevitable taxi-driver conversational sallies. I usually decline to get involved in whatever line of chatter my taxi drivers want to start up – I tend to just sit there and grunt vaguely until they get the fucking message and shut up.

But this morning I was in a different mood. I was at the start of a few days' holiday. The sun was shining. There was a light mist in the air. The birds were singing their collective heads off, heralding spring. And Gary had turned out to be Asian. He was wearing a fascinating blue turban that scraped the car's ceiling. Perhaps it was a combination of demob-happy glee and costume-incongruity that tipped the scales. I just felt like yakking for a few minutes.

Taxi-drivers are skilled interrogators. They know where to take a line of conversation and how to pitch their remarks to yield the maximum amount of information. Within a few minutes I was sharing with Gary the joy of having a few days off work to do as I pleased. He flashed a big grin at me in the rearview mirror. “You can't beat it,” he said. “Got any plans?”

“Nope,” I said, “and that's the point. I intend to do nothing at all. Taking time off work to do things isn't taking time off.”

“I know what you're saying, mate, I know what you're saying.” Gary nodded, wafting an unsecured tuft of cloth at the top of his big blue turban (I could hardly take my eyes off it).

So we got to my house, and I leaned forward to open the door.

“Cheers, much appreciated,” I said, pressing the handle.

“No problem. Have a good holiday.”

I paused in my action and turned to look at Gary. He, meanwhile, had turned his neck to look at me.

“Oh, I intend to,” I said in a firm kind of way.

He laughed. “Nice one.”

I got out and slammed the door shut. Gary drove away. I went inside the house, and upstairs to bed.